Deadly Suspicions (Alexandra Best Investigations Book 3)

by Jean Saunders

  ‘Doesn’t that prove something?’ she said, adrenalin shooting through her again, reviving her.

  ‘Yes. Leave it alone, Alex.’

  She wouldn’t commit herself to any such demands. Instead she changed tactics swiftly. ‘When are you coming down here, Nick? I really miss you. After the homespun week I’ve just had, apart from my concern for my aunt, of course, I desperately need a bit of not-so-platonic company.’

  She was damn sure Uncle Bill wouldn’t have objected. Life went on, and in a farming community that was very much the way of things. She had heard his blunt philosophy often enough. You were born, you lived, and then you died. And if you didn’t make the most of the time the man upstairs gave you, you didn’t deserve to enter the pearly gates. Whether or not his views included making rampant love outside of wedlock, Alex didn’t choose to question.

  As she waited for Nick’s reply, she knew he wouldn’t have missed the fact that she didn’t promise him to leave the case alone. But hopefully he would overlook it. She also knew she was being blatantly provocative with her invitation, and if he didn’t respond, she’d start to think she was losing her touch.

  She heard his low sexy chuckle, and felt her nerves settle. ‘Thank God you’re back on form, babe. With any luck I’ll see you the weekend after next. There’s no chance before then, but keep the bed warm for me. Better still, keep it good and hot.’

  She was smiling as she hung up, but she sobered at once, remembering what he had told her. Keith Martin had been beaten up, and it was a sure bet it was somebody who was getting scared he’d start saying more than he should. But how did they know? Unless someone had been watching him — and her.

  It was a less than comfortable thought, and one that she didn’t want to dwell on. But she intended going to Bath tomorrow to find out just what else there was to know, and also to find out who had beaten him up. It was as well to know who they were both up against.

  *

  When she entered his hardware shop, she took one look at his bruised and battered face, the two black eyes and the broken nose, and gasped.

  ‘What do you want?’ he said stiffly through the painful working of his jaw. ‘I’ve got nothing more to say to you.’

  ‘Keith, I’m so sorry this happened. You look terrible, and why haven’t you closed the shop?’

  ‘I have to earn a living, don’t I?’ he said sullenly. ‘Now bugger off.’

  His eyes watered, and he involuntarily held his ribs. Whoever had beaten him up had done a bloody good job, but she sensed that by now he was angry rather than scared.

  ‘We never finished our conversation, did we? And I did save your life by getting an ambulance here for you, remember?’ She was relentless now. ‘You owe me for that, and you still need to rest, and I daresay you find it difficult to eat too. Look, close the shop and I’ll make you a hot drink, or some soup — or whatever you want — as long as it’s not pills. A couple of hours isn’t going to make or break you, is it?’

  She thought he was going to refuse, but then he shrugged and staggered across to the door, turned the Open sign to Closed on the window, and pulled down the blind.

  ‘I’ve chucked out the pills, if you must know,’ he said. ‘I’ve done with all that for good. And no tape recorder, mind.’

  Alex held her breath, wondering if this was an obscure way of telling her she was going to get at the truth at last. It took him a while to climb the stairs to his flat, holding his ribs all the way, but he finally eased himself into a chair and told her there were some tins of chicken soup in the cupboard. Once she had heated one up and served it to him, she had to wait while he painfully consumed it. It was like watching a child eat, Alex thought, in a fever of impatience.

  ‘All right, Keith, so let’s get down to it, shall we? I know you didn’t tell the police who had done this to you, but my guess is that it was one of the Wilkins’ brothers, right? I know they beat you up once before, and maybe you didn’t tell the police that at the time, either.’

  ‘Good guess,’ he grunted.

  ‘And the right one?’

  When he didn’t answer, she took it as a yes.

  ‘So what is it they don’t want anyone to know? Did they kill Steven Leng?’ she asked brutally.

  ‘Good God, no!’ She had shocked him into a reaction now, his eyes as wide as they could go, considering the swelling that had reduced them to little more than slits. ‘They weren’t killers. None of us were. We were kids —’

  ‘Kids can kill. It’s not an exclusive adult activity.’

  ‘We were just having a lark and it all went wrong,’ he said, in a panic now. ‘Why must you rake it all up again? I want to forget it.’

  ‘Mrs Leng didn’t, though. It broke her heart, not knowing what had become of Steven. Can you imagine how that felt, Keith? The awfulness of not knowing? Not having the finality of burying her son, and always wondering, always imagining she could see him, in shops, on TV, always searching —’

  ‘Shut up! Don’t keep on about it!’

  ‘Tell me what happened then. What really happened. You do know, don’t you? Or do you want to live in fear for the rest of your life because of a stupid pact some schoolboys made years ago? That’s not being very adult, is it? What happened to John Barnett, Keith?’ she said, changing direction.

  She saw him flinch. ‘He was in a motorbike accident.’

  ‘Do you believe it was an accident? Or was he too anxious about keeping quiet, the same as you’ve been all this time?’

  ‘If he was, look what happened to him!’ he lashed out. ‘Do you think I want to risk that?’

  ‘So you’d rather live in fear for the rest of your life, and risk the beatings from the likes of Cliff and Dave, would you?’

  She was being a bitch of an interrogator and she knew it, and it wasn’t fair when the poor guy was hurting and vulnerable. But if she didn’t strike now, she knew it would be too late. One way or another.

  ‘John had got unnerved about the whole thing and was threatening to go to the police, and Lennie tried to stop him. He was well in with this cult thing by then, and had got friendly with a guy called Patrick who was also involved in it. John called me one night and said this Patrick had put the wind up him, though he’d tried to brazen it out and said he’d tell if he wanted to. John said he was evil and warned me to watch out for him. He never got in touch with me though.’

  He swallowed. ‘Next thing I knew I got an anonymous phone call to say John had been pushed off the road on his motorbike and been killed. That was all, but I knew it was a threat to me, and I’ve kept my mouth shut ever since.’

  Patrick ... Alex knew there was something she should remember about the name, but for the moment it eluded her. And anyway, she was too near the brink of the truth to waste time on it for now. She spoke softly now.

  ‘So what did happen to Steven, Keith? Your friend, remember?’

  ‘I don’t know, and that’s the truth. But we’d discovered this well, see?’

  It took a moment for her to register what he meant.

  ‘Well? As in wishing-well, you mean?’

  ‘No. Just an old well right behind the hut. There was no water in it and it was overgrown with weeds. But the druggies used to stash their stuff there, and we knew that. We sometimes helped ourselves, just for a lark.’

  ‘Some lark,’ Alex said. ‘Didn’t you ever stop to think how stupid that was?’

  He had clearly given up pretending that he never took it, she noted. She had honoured his request not to have her tape recorder switched on, but she had a good memory and she was already halfway to the site in her mind. As he glowered at her, looking more like a gargoyle than ever with his battered face and piggy eyes now, she pressed on.

  ‘So in your opinion, Keith, as a concerned friend, do you think it possible that Steven ended up down the well?’ Most of him, she added silently.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s possible, I suppose. The thing is, after the explosion the whole area wa
s flattened and nobody ever mentioned a well in the reports. There was no way the druggies were going to complain about their stuff, and we weren’t telling, either, or we’d be implicated in it, wouldn’t we?’

  ‘So you preferred to go off on your camping trip and forget all about your friend, did you?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that! I told you we thought he’d just gone home. It was only weeks later that we started putting two and two together, especially when his hand was found,’ he said with a shudder, his breathing becoming rattled.

  Alex saw him flex his jaw painfully, and he looked truly ghastly now. But she hadn’t quite finished with him yet.

  ‘You do know you’ve been withholding evidence, don’t you, Keith? All of you. If you knew of the existence of this well, you should have told the police, and they would have found Steven’s body right away —’

  ‘I never said it was there, and you don’t know it for certain.’

  ‘But it’s highly likely, isn’t it?’

  He didn’t answer, and she knew it had to be right. But for one simple piece of information about a dry, overgrown well close to an old hut, this whole case would have been solved ten years ago. And Jane Leng wouldn’t have gone to her grave never knowing what had happened to her son.

  ‘I’m sorry, Keith,’ she said, ‘but I have to let the police know what you’ve told me. I imagine that an ordnance survey map of the area would show the existence of a well, but without your disclosure of it at the time, there would have been no reason for anyone to check on such a thing, would there?’

  Appalled, she saw that he was crying now. With a temperament like his, he must have been going through hell all these years, and those so-called friends of his had attributed to it with their adolescent pact.

  ‘Will you be all right?’ she said, more gently. ‘If you’d like me to stay for a while —’

  ‘I want you to go, you bitch! I never want to see you again,’ he raged, awash with humiliation at being seen like this.

  ‘All right, and I’m sure someone will be contacting you soon. When they do, just tell them what you’ve told me, Keith, as calmly as possible —’

  ‘Get out!’ he screamed.

  She obeyed hastily, aware that she was leaving him practically dissolving in his own misery and pain. She let herself out of the shop and walked quickly around the corner of the road to where she had cautiously left her car, rather than park it right outside. She was filled with pity for him, but she couldn’t deny that it was pity marred by contempt.

  She sank into the driving seat of her car, far more shaken than she had expected. It had all been so simple — if it was true. And she had no reason to think that it wasn’t. She collated the facts in her mind. It was feasible enough, what with the fireworks and the huge explosion from the calor gas bottles. The boys had been hyperactive and hallucinated at the time, and probably none of them knew exactly where the others were.

  Steven could easily have gone back inside the hut for something, or been near enough to the well to have been caught in the blast, blowing him to bits, and sending his hand hurtling through the air to some unknown destination until it was found weeks later, while the rest of him was disintegrating inside the collapsed well ...

  Then the vigorous attentions of the fire brigade had put paid to whatever other evidence there was, in a frantic need to quench the inferno before the whole wooded area became a forest fire in the tinder-dry air.

  It was all feasible, however bizarre it seemed, and Alex found herself breathing erratically at the thought of just what those stupid kids had done in trying to cover up their involvement with dubious characters.

  She started up her car, her eyes blurring with the horror of it all, and narrowly missed colliding with another car coming the other way. She hardly registered it. She knew she had to get back to Bristol and report her discussion with Keith Martin to DI Gregory. It was no longer her case. There was too much involved now, and if it was a criminal affair, then it was one that the police had to sort out.

  She was nearly home before something triggered in her mind something she should have registered at once, if she hadn’t been so intent on pushing Keith to the limit to answer her questions. She was remembering it clearly now. A guy called Patrick had been involved with the Followers and with Lennie, and John Barnett had called Keith and told him a guy called Patrick had warned him to keep his mouth shut. But John hadn’t. And then John was killed.

  And Patrick was one of the aliases of Philip Cordell.

  Chapter 19

  Alex felt too agitated to go straight home. Once she reached Bristol she drove to the Downs and parked her car overlooking the suspension bridge and the dizzying drop to the river, from where Bob Leng had thrown himself. She sat there for more than an hour while she decided what to do next. In her heart she knew, but she was still reluctant to give up everything.

  But in the end, she knew she had to do it. She drove slowly down the winding streets to the local nick and asked to see DI Gregory, and after he had kept her waiting a good half hour while she fumed, she related everything Keith Martin had told her in a torrent of words.

  He sat with folded arms, looking at her as if she was an imbecile, and she had to admit she wasn’t at her coolest.

  ‘Do you really think we didn’t scour the area for every bit of evidence at the time, young woman? Do you think we were unaware of the locale and even the old mine workings in that part of Somerset?’

  ‘Old mine workings?’ This was news to her.

  ‘Forget it. They were abandoned or filled in years ago. All played out —’

  ‘But what about an old well? If it had been somewhere in the vicinity of old mine workings, then maybe it would have collapsed even farther than was believed, taking Steven Leng with it. Did you know of this well’s existence, Mr Gregory? I never saw any mention of it in the newspaper archives.’

  She knew she was skating on thin ice. Coppers didn’t like their research questioned, and in particular they didn’t like young and headstrong female private investigators casting doubt on their results.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quickly as she saw his eyes flash. ‘But it seems to me that this was an easy thing to have overlooked, and if Keith Martin hadn’t mentioned it none of us would ever have known.’

  She let him off the hook, since it didn’t matter to her either way who got the credit for this now. She just wanted the whole thing over and done with, and to get on with her life.

  Finally he nodded. ‘All right, Miss Best, we’ll look into it. I require you to make a statement about what you’ve just told us, and I shall need confirmation from Keith Martin himself, of course. And after that I insist — insist, do you hear? — that you leave everything to us. Is that completely understood?’

  ‘Of course. And don’t forget Patrick’s part in all this. Patrick Walters,’ she emphasized.

  She wanted him to register the name, but she didn’t dare say in her statement that she suspected that Patrick Walters and Philip Cordell, respected Head of Sports at St Joseph’s College, were one and the same. If she did, he would want to know how she knew that, and she couldn’t drop Nick in it.

  The police were jealous of guarding their sources, and she got too many privileges as it was, through Nick. But if Gregory was as astute as she thought, he’d start looking him up in police files and discover it for himself.

  She left his office, feeling suddenly weak at the knees. It had been quite a time, what with the long drive back from Yorkshire after Uncle Bill’s funeral, then hearing the news of Keith’s beating and confronting him on his home territory. It was only when she was breathing heavily in the cold February air that she realized she was shaking and that it was hours since she’d had anything to eat. She had skipped lunch, and food must be her next priority.

  ‘Miss Best! Just a minute, please.’

  She heard her name being called as she was unlocking her car. A police constable was running after her.

  ‘What is
it?’

  ‘DI Gregory wants another word with you.’

  Oh God, what now? Home and food had never seemed so attractive, but in the words of Rumpole of the Bailey, it was a case of she who must be obeyed, only in this case it was he. And she knew better than to ignore it.

  Gregory was replacing the phone, when she returned to his office. His face was grimmer than before when he turned to her.

  ‘That was the Bath police. A neighbour reported hearing a shot from Martin’s hardware shop some time ago. They discovered that Keith Martin has been shot through the head at close range.’

  She wasn’t dumb enough to ask whether he was dead, just dumb enough to lose the faculty of speech for the moment. But her imagination wasn’t so dumb. Being shot through the head wasn’t the clean and tidy method of death as depicted in TV dramas, when the camera conveniently veered out of range for viewers’ sensitivities. Being shot through the head at close range meant blood and brains being splattered over walls and floors and ceilings and anyone who happened to be standing near enough to catch the full disgusting blast ...

  ‘Miss Best, are you all right?’

  She heard his voice as if through a haze, and then it rasped: ‘Catch her, Constable. And then fetch a glass of water.’

  She struggled to keep control of her senses, and sat down heavily on a chair, embarrassed and ashamed at such a show of weakness. She wouldn’t pass out like some Victorian maiden in a novel about to swoon at the thought of a man ... except that in this case it wasn’t a lover, but a corpse, and one that she had seen alive and well, give or take some hideous bruises, several hours ago.

  ‘Well? What have you got to say about this?’ Gregory snapped at her, when she had recovered.

  ‘You don’t think I pulled the trigger, do you? I’d say you were a pretty good alibi, Mr Gregory.’

  He wasn’t, of course. The timing was wrong.

  ‘No, I don’t think you did it,’ he was angry now. ‘But in view of this happening and what you’ve already told us, I do think it’s high time the rest of that infantile group was interviewed further and the investigation reopened. And by us. Do I make myself clear?’