Deadly Suspicions (Alexandra Best Investigations Book 3)

by Jean Saunders

  He was already outside his shop when she got there, standing nervously as if he had been waiting hours for a bus that never came. She was glad she had made him nervous. Nervous people usually said more than they realized, and she fully intended getting every bit of their conversation on tape.

  ‘So where do you want to go, Keith?’ she said easily, as if this was just an ordinary date. ‘This is on me, remember, so it’s your choice.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not a fancy eater,’ he said humbly.

  Good God, thought Alex, it wasn’t going to be the local fish and chip shop, was it? She was hardly going to get him paralytic there.

  ‘There’s a little restaurant out on the Bristol road that’s quite nice, so I’ve heard,’ he went on. ‘I’ve never been there, so maybe that’s not the right place. There’s also a Berni Inn —’

  ‘Let’s find the little restaurant,’ Alex said firmly. ‘Just point me in the right direction and leave the rest to me. I’m Audrey, by the way. Audrey Barnes.’

  She knew they were going to look like an unlikely couple. She was a head taller than he was, and she couldn’t help thinking of Grace’s hubby, who was also humble and weedy, and if she stopped to think about it, it didn’t do her image any good to be seen in such company. Nick would say so, anyway. So it was just as well he couldn’t see her now.

  She was being bloody sexist and mean about the guy, who was probably as self-contained as she was in his own way (Nick’s words again, she noted) but he hardly said a word all the way to the restaurant apart from giving directions. When they arrived, Alex asked for a secluded alcove table, and didn’t miss the waitress’s raised eyebrows.

  Which of them is the pimp? was the question Alex read in her mind, and she stared unblinkingly back at her until she gave a small shrug and showed them to their table. Keith stared at the menu as if he had never seen one before.

  ‘Don’t worry about prices,’ Alex told him. ‘Just choose whatever you want and I’ll pick the wine —’

  ‘Oh, I hardly ever drink —’

  ‘Neither do I, especially when I’m driving,’ she said, mentally crossing her fingers. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll see that your honour is intact.’

  The joke fell on concrete ears. He was twenty-six going on forty. Alex had the feeling this was going to be a pretty heavy evening if she didn’t get him loosened up. And she had better remember her own words — she had to drive back to Bristol that night, so it had to be Keith’s wine-glass that was being kept topped up, not hers.

  By the time they had got through the first course of melon and raspberry coulis, and started on the peppered steak (good for the thirst) with all the trimmings and a few extras besides, she had ensured that he had drunk nearly three glasses to her one. He wasn’t used to it, and the waitress clearly thought she was plying him with wine for her own dubious ends. Some chance! It was a shame to get him so pie-eyed and he’d have a hell of a head in the morning, but it was in the cause of research, and Alex was determined to get as much out of him as she could before he went into a stupor. By morning, it was doubtful if he’d remember anything he told her.

  As yet, it wasn’t very much. Yes, of course he remembered the camping trip that the six friends had arranged. Yes, of course he knew that Steven hadn’t gone with them after all, but that wasn’t surprising.

  ‘Why do you say that, Keith?’ Alex said.

  He scowled, becoming more morose as the wine took effect, and more than ready to complain in his whining voice.

  ‘We all thought he wouldn’t come. His mother didn’t want him to, and he was under her thumb, as well as his father’s. I didn’t know them — I told you that, didn’t I? But Steven was always going on about them and saying he’d go off to India if Lennie would go with him. They were a daft pair, always making plans that we all laughed at.’

  ‘Perhaps he did go to India, then,’ Alex said, knowing that he didn’t.

  ‘No he didn’t. Nor did Lennie. They just liked to talk big, and some of that stuff they took didn’t help, either.’

  ‘What stuff? Drugs, was it?’

  ‘Not the bad stuff. Just pot, mostly, and a bit of speed, but it made them boastful and stupid.’

  ‘A lot of people think pot should be legalized, don’t they? That it’s no more harmful than tobacco —’ Alex said conversationally.

  His face darkened. ‘Oh yeah? Well, my dad smoked sixty a day for years and they said his lungs were as black as soot when he died of lung cancer, so don’t talk to me about tobacco, or drugs.’

  ‘You never took any, then. Pot, I mean. Not like the others.’

  ‘No I never did. I wasn’t so stupid. Of course, that wasn’t how they saw it. They said I was a pansy and Cliff and Dave beat me up once when I threatened to tell what I knew —’

  Resentment oozed out of him now, but Alex knew she had to go carefully. His thin voice throbbed with anger, and although they were in the alcove, other people were glancing their way. The last thing she could afford was to have a confession here and now, and for him to start shouting or blubbering, whichever way the mood took him.

  ‘I think I should get you home, Keith. Black coffee sounds like a good idea to me, and if you’d be kind enough to offer me a cup before I drive back to Bristol, I’d be grateful. It’s the least you can do after this lovely meal, isn’t it?’

  He could hardly say no, even though she guessed he didn’t want her in his flat above the shop. Or anywhere else in his life. She was a threat to whatever he had managed to blot out of the events of ten years ago.

  But she wasn’t letting go of him now. She had hooked him on her line and she was ready to pull him in.

  ‘All right,’ he said grudgingly. ‘But I don’t usually have people in my flat, so I’d rather you didn’t stay too long.’

  ‘Of course not,’ she said, giving him a sweet smile. ‘We wouldn’t want people to think the worst of us, would we?’

  He looked at her blankly as she handed her credit card to the waitress, and couldn’t resist giving her a sly wink at the same time. It would probably make her day, Alex thought, to wonder if the woman with the startling red hair and green eyes was really making a play for the drip in the glasses, and hoping that he was well-heeled — and man enough — to make it worth her while.

  Alex mentally cringed at the thought. It was a pretty safe bet that Keith was definitely not a ladies’ man, and it was possibly something else the others in the group had taunted him about — especially those thuggish Wilkins brothers. She wondered how he had got caught up with them in the first place. But she wouldn’t ask. That wasn’t the object of the exercise, and he was almost out on his feet by the time she got him into her car.

  ‘You’re not going to throw up, are you?’ she said sharply. ‘If so, I’d rather you did it outside the car and not in it.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ he growled. ‘I just want to get home. I told you I didn’t drink. I’ll be better inside my own four walls.’

  ‘Right then,’ Alex said brightly. ‘Home it is, and I’ll be quite happy to make the coffee while we talk.’

  ‘There’s nothing to talk about,’ he grunted.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s sometimes easier to talk to a stranger about something that’s been worrying you for a very long time, than to have to tell close friends?’

  ‘There’s nothing worrying me. Well, not really.’

  She had to concentrate on the traffic going into the city then, but she knew the signs. He was ready to open up, seeing her as some kind of mother confessor now, and she didn’t intend leaving him until she had got the truth out of him.

  *

  His flat was as she had imagined it, as cold and boringly neutral as its owner. No creature comforts here then. The furniture was worn, and she guessed it had belonged to his parents. Predictably, there was no sign of a young woman’s hand anywhere. He pointed out the kitchen while he found some aspirin and turned on the gas fire, and she made the coffee quickly, feeling as if she wer
e in a morgue.

  ‘Now then,’ she said finally, when the flat had thawed out a bit, though she still had her hands around her mug to warm them up. ‘Why don’t you unburden yourself to me about that day in the woods, Keith? You and the others were larking about, weren’t you, and letting off fireworks? And then you were going to go on your camping trip. Isn’t that right? And it’s still worrying you not to be able to talk about it to anybody. Right?’

  She kept his mind busy with questions, and although her tape recorder was switched on, she thought he was too fuddled to notice it. But hopefully, not too fuddled to remember things.

  ‘Why do you want to know? We’ve been through it all before. The questions always worried me. I don’t like questions.’

  He was becoming petulant, and Alex softened her voice.

  ‘It’s only for Mrs Leng’s peace of mind, Keith —’

  ‘You said she was dead!’

  He wasn’t that fuddled then.

  ‘So she is, but I feel obliged to finish my report and then it will be filed away and that will be that. You keep proper books, don’t you? Being a businessman yourself?’ Appeal to his pride ...

  ‘Of course. But I wish all this Steven business would go away. I didn’t want to get those letters — raking it all up again —’

  ‘What letters were those?’

  ‘Anonymous, warning me not to speak to anybody about it. I hadn’t thought about it in years, and then suddenly it all got raked up again.’

  ‘Did the letters have a postmark on them, Keith?’

  Exeter, for instance?

  He was close to tears now, his face pastier than ever, his eyes like marbles behind the rimless glasses, his voice jerky with panic. ‘I never looked. I threw them away. It just made me sick, having to remember any of it. I mean, we weren’t doing any harm. It was all a lark. Well, that’s how it started, anyway.’

  ‘And how did it end?’ Alex said softly, feeling her heart thud at the thought that at last she could be on the brink of finding out exactly what had gone on in the woods that day.

  ‘With the explosion,’ he whispered, so quietly that she could barely hear him. The heat from the gas fire was soporific now, and without asking, she bent down and turned it down a fraction.

  When she turned back to him she could see that he was away somewhere in a world of his own. A nightmare place that was somewhere in an old tumbledown hut in the woods where druggies and winos hung out, and a few members of a weird cult called the Followers may have tried to persuade some gullible kids that theirs was a good road to travel. Several of them had wild ideas about going to India and finding themselves, and a couple more would have scoffed and goaded the weakest link of them all to join in the fun.

  ‘Did they persuade you to take any drugs that night, Keith?’

  He gave a gigantic shudder. ‘I never do. I always promised my parents I’d never do anything like that,’ he said, his voice shrill now. ‘But they made me. Forced me. Shoved it down my throat when I’d already had a few drinks — I told you I don’t like strong drink, didn’t I — and I’d lost my glasses in the grass, so I couldn’t see properly.’

  ‘Whose idea was it to take the fireworks to the woods and set fire to the old hut then?’

  He swallowed. ‘I don’t remember. I think it was Cliff Wilkins. He hated the winos, even though they’d gone long before, but he said they’d left such a stink in the hut it was time to get rid of it. So the idea was just to set it alight and watch it burn. Then we were going to get out of there as fast as we could and go camping. Everybody thought we’d already gone on our trip, anyway.’

  Alex resisted the urge to ask what kind of ‘trip’ he was referring to.

  ‘So there was definitely nobody in the hut at the time?’

  He shook his head violently, and then held it tightly as the headache kicked in. He’d have a hell of a hangover in the morning, Alex thought, with a touch of remorse, but you had to use whatever methods were available to you.

  ‘So what happened to Steven? How did his hand come to be discovered a few weeks later by his father walking his dog?’

  She punched the question at him, hoping to get a blundering response. It wasn’t quite the one she had in mind. Keith suddenly retched, then clamped his hands to his mouth and rushed off to the bathroom to be violently sick. He tottered back ten minutes later, by which time Alex had switched off her tape recorder, and was preparing to switch it on again.

  ‘You’re not taping all this, are you?’ he said, a mite sharper than before, his eyes full of new suspicion now. ‘You’re not the police, are you, because I’m not saying another thing if you are. This is harassment —’

  ‘Keith, I’m not the police, I promise you. Look, I’ll turn it off, OK?’

  She made a great pretence of doing so, hoping the double click wouldn’t alert him to the fact that she’d simply turned it off and back on again.

  ‘That’s all right then. God, my throat’s sore,’ he said next in an aggrieved tone, and she sensed that he couldn’t concentrate on anything for too long.

  ‘You were going to tell me about the discovery of Steven’s hand. And what was this explosion you mentioned? Were the two things connected?’

  He looked suddenly terrified as if memory was glazing his mind as well as his eyes. They had a distinctly glassy look now, Alex thought uneasily. As if ...

  ‘We didn’t know, see? How the fuck were we supposed to know?’

  The expletive shocked Alex as much as it shocked him. From the way his face was instantly flooded with colour she was quite sure he didn’t normally use it.

  ‘How were you supposed to know what, Keith? Take your time. Take some deep breaths —’

  But he was too wound up to stop now. ‘They had calor gas bottles inside, for cooking, see? For heating as well, I suppose. We didn’t know that. How could we have known that? We were only there for a lark. We didn’t know, we didn’t know! We never looked around that much, and there were always old blankets and cardboard boxes and a lot of junk chucked about all over the place. It was a dump and it should have been condemned years ago. We were just helping it on its way.’

  He was snivelling loudly now, his hands and arms making jerky movements, his eyes rolling in their sockets as if he was reliving every moment of that terrible day when the boys had probably all been high on drugs, however harmless they thought them, and everything was being viewed through a kaleidoscopic haze.

  ‘So there was an explosion?’ Alex persisted, when he swallowed convulsively several times, and she thought another trip to the bathroom might be in order. Another trip ...

  ‘Keith, did you take anything when you were in the bathroom?’

  Oh, please tell me you didn’t.

  ‘It went up like an atomic bomb,’ he slurred. ‘And we all ran like hell. We met up ages later, crouching in the woods and listening to the fire engines. We couldn’t find Steven, but we thought he’d gone home, knowing his dad would give him hell, him being a fireman and all. We eventually got to our camping ground, and we made a pact to say nothing — ever — and we swore on each others’ lives that it had to stay our secret, no matter what. Lennie insisted on it. He threatened us if we didn’t stick to it —’ he swallowed hard again as if his throat was closing up.

  ‘Lennie? Not Cliff or David Wilkins? Not John Barnett?’ She raked up the names from her memory. Gentle, peace-loving Lennie?

  ‘He got involved with these people, and he said they had the power to do for us, whatever that meant. He was soft on the outside, with his music and all that stuff, but on the inside he was as hard as a rock. He scared me.’

  He began shouting, belligerent with another swift change of mood. ‘Why the fuck did you have to come here and stir it all up again? And I know who you are now! Somebody sent me a cutting from the Bristol paper with one of those stupid letters in it, and I’ve been puzzling over the name you signed in the restaurant. You’re not Audrey somebody, are you? You’re that private eye
woman. Give me that tape recorder, you bitch.’

  He lunged towards her, his eyes murderous, half-standing as he did so, but it was obvious that his legs were more like jelly than flesh and bone, and he keeled over on to the floor, panting like a fish out of water. Alex rolled him over quickly, and saw that his eyes were wide open, staring unseeingly. They were hugely dilated, and she knew the signs when she saw them. She rushed to the bathroom and saw the open medicine cabinet and the bottle of amphetamines spilled on the windowsill, even as she was dialling 999 on her mobile phone.

  ‘Ambulance, as quick as you can,’ she rapped out. ‘It looks like an overdose. Amphetamines and drink. I don’t know how many.’

  She gave the address of the flat and switched off without giving her name. She went back to Keith and tried to lift him on to the sofa again. He was surprisingly heavy for such a weed. Dead people usually were. Not that he was dead. Oh God, please don’t let him be dead.

  It wasn’t her fault that he’d taken the pills, but it was down to her that he’d drunk so much wine when he wasn’t used to it. Guilt made her rougher with him than she intended as she hauled him to his feet, put her arms around him and began walking him around the room. Dragging him was more like it, but she knew she had to try to wake him up and to get him as sensible as possible before the ambulance came. It was hard going. He much preferred to be out of it, and she only got a few incoherent words out of him now and then. But at least it was something.

  She could imagine the headlines ... ‘Private Investigator accused in sordid drugs death’. The newspapers would have a field day. She might even be done for involuntary manslaughter.

  She despised herself for thinking what all this was going to do to her reputation if it came out that way. But if it did, she knew she might as well pack up and take up knitting instead. The police would be ruthless with her, and so would Nick.

  She continued dragging Keith around, shouting at him to wake up and mentally begging him not to die. That certainly hadn’t been her intention when she came here to question him. How could she have known that he had a drug habit, when he’d been so adamant that he hated anything to do with drugs? But that’s what druggies did.