‘How are you feeling?’ Jane asked, knowing it was an inane question.
‘Sore but good,’ Claudette said with a slow blink. ‘It’ll take time to heal, I’m sure, but the main thing is I can . . . I will.’ Jane wondered whether she meant medical healing or something more profound, given her recent brushes with death – or more to the point, her ex-husband and a squad car driven by Lockyer.
‘I hope you don’t think us rude,’ Maureen said, pulling her husband away from the fire and manhandling him into a Barbour and a multi-coloured scarf, ‘but we promised some old friends of ours in the village that we’d pop over to say a Christmas prayer with them, and—’
‘Have a glass of mulled wine, I hope,’ Anthony Jones said, giving Jane a wink. People’s resilience to tragedy never failed to amaze her.
‘Now, Claud, we won’t be long,’ Maureen said, ‘and you have the number. If it weren’t so slippy out there, I’d say to come along. Gilly Henderson was only saying to me yesterday that it’s been an age since they’ve seen you.’
‘I’m happy here,’ Claudette said. ‘Aaron can bank the fire up before he and Megan set off. You go. I’ll be fine.’
Jane stood to make her own excuses as well. She hadn’t drunk her tea, but the scalding hot china had warmed her hands up. ‘Oh no, no,’ Maureen said, coming over to her and all but pushing her back into the rocking chair. ‘Now, I didn’t want that. See, Tony, I told you, she’d feel obliged to go if we went.’
‘It’s fine,’ Jane said, making a move to stand again but finding herself blocked.
‘Please, please,’ Maureen said. ‘At least finish your tea and visit with Claudette and the others.’ She threw an absent hand in Aaron and Megan’s direction. Aaron flashed Jane a wry smile.
‘OK,’ she said, resigned to drink her tea. Her parents would be fine in the pub. Her dad would be delighted. Celia Bennett didn’t agree with public drinking as a rule. Maureen Jones continued to coo and chatter as she bundled her husband out of the room, closing the lounge door behind them.
‘Sorry about Mum,’ Aaron said. ‘She’s a stickler for being a good host.’
‘If only it were her house,’ Claudette said, making a face that was a combination of a sneer and a smirk.
‘My head is banging,’ Megan said, dropping her forehead onto Aaron’s shoulder.
He stroked her hair as he stood up, settling her back on the sofa. ‘Someone had a heavy night last night,’ he whispered to Jane.
‘It was someone’s turn,’ Megan said, turning her face in to a cushion.
‘Touché.’ Aaron went to the door. ‘I’ll just get you some painkillers. Are you all right for a sec, boss?’
Jane realized he was talking to her. She was still waiting for her tea to cool down from nuclear to something palatable. ‘Sure, sure,’ she said. ‘I’m fine.’ She held up her mug and gestured to the fire as if to demonstrate her point. Aaron shut the door, and she heard his footsteps as he climbed the stairs. She racked her brains for something to say, but drew a blank. What could she say to two people who were not only on opposite sides of the room, but in polar opposite situations? Megan was at the start of a new relationship, full of excitement, love and plans for the future. On the flip side, Claudette had just discovered that her relationship, though in the past, had been a lie. That the man she had been married to, that she had still trusted, was a killer. She had been left broken in every sense of the word. What could Jane say to her apart from empty platitudes? With a sigh she looked up, hoping something interesting yet sensitive would come to her.
She needn’t have worried. Both women were asleep; or at least it appeared that way. Megan’s face was still buried in the pillow, her chest moving slowly up and down as she breathed. Claudette’s head rested on the back of the chair, her eyes closed, her mouth hanging open just enough for Jane to think she had dozed off. She blew on her tea and took a tentative sip.
As the hot liquid touched her lips she remembered something Lockyer had said to her about the day Steph was attacked in her hospital room. It couldn’t have worked out better if he had planned it. They now knew the ‘he’ was Hamilton. Jane took a slow breath in through her nose and closed her eyes. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, she thought. She let herself relax so the tangled thoughts in her mind could unwind themselves. The first was of Cassie. When Aaron’s sister had heard someone behind her on the road she had, being so close to home, called her brother for help. Aaron had Megan with him, so it followed she would call her father. So instead of an anonymous response officer tearing up to Nether Stowey to rescue Cassie, it had been Lockyer. And in his absence, Hamilton had walked into Musgrove Park Hospital unchallenged to finish what he had started in Shervage Wood with Steph.
Before Jane could go further another memory dropped into the mix, drawing her focus. Hamilton’s obsession with Walford. Jane could feel the heat of the fire warming the leg of her trousers. If her mind wasn’t racing, she might be inclined to doze off, too. They had reams of paperwork at Express Park showing Hamilton’s life’s work. Every detail had been researched and documented. But to have Walford on paper hadn’t been enough. The women Hamilton had targeted and killed, Pippa aside, all had similarities to Jane Walford – problems with drink, promiscuity and the like. As DCC and an upstanding member of the local community, Hamilton would have had the inside track. He would have had access to, and been able to identify and single out, women who fitted his purpose – who shared lifestyle traits with Walford’s dead wife. The woman he, and now Hamilton, despised.
So now the question. If it was Jane that Walford hated – if it was Jane that he killed – why was Hamilton calling his victims ‘Annie’? According to Stephanie Lacey, he had shouted the name over and over. It hadn’t made sense to Jane before and now, still, it didn’t sit right in her gut. She could hear Aaron moving around upstairs, the floorboards creaking above her head.
‘The keys,’ she said aloud without thinking. She covered her mouth, but neither of the slumbering women flinched. She took another sip of her tea, using its warmth as grease to the wheels in her brain.
Outside the flat in Holford they had found a set of keys that opened the flat and the garage. Jane and the rest of the response officers had assumed they belonged to Townsend; that they had fallen out of his coat pocket when Lockyer had slammed into him. But now Jane knew better. The keys must have belonged to Hamilton. And so another question: why did he have them on him?
She remembered a game Peter had played when he was younger. It was like dot to dot, but rather than the traditional drawing game – where the child would make a line from one dot to the next, following a sequence of numbers until a picture was revealed – Jane’s father would knock tacks into a piece of plywood and give Peter one of his grandmother’s balls of wool. Peter would then wind the piece of coloured yarn round one tack before moving on to the next and the next. The result was a three-dimensional image. Jane’s thoughts felt like those tacks. Apart they meant nothing, but when bound together by a common factor, she would be able to see the image as a whole. If only she could find her common factor, her wool, then she could finish the picture.
Aaron pulled the box right out from under the bed. He didn’t know what had made him look here, but something – a memory from childhood, a game he and Pip had played – had sparked an idea in his head. He hadn’t been able to think about anything else. The floorboards were loose and noisy. He didn’t want them to hear him. He didn’t want them to know he was in here. The paracetamol he was supposed to be getting for Megan was in the bathroom. He dropped to his knees and opened the lid a fraction, and then all of the way, holding his breath as the hinges creaked. He remembered the treasure hunts Cassie used to set up for him and Pip. The prize would be sweets, a toy, or sometimes even money. At Christmas she went the extra mile and each clue had its own small gift or treat. But it had been the puzzle that he and Pip loved – the challenge.
He held the letter he had found stuffed down the side
of Pip’s mattress. The paper was crumpled and torn. Aaron flattened it on his palm as he read and re-read the note; or would you call it a love letter? He looked in the box and pushed aside a knitted scarf, and what smelled like a packet of joss sticks. Pippa’s bedroom had reeked of jasmine for about two years during her grunge phase. His fingers touched on and then pulled out a bundle of letters bound together with a fat elastic band. He could see even at a quick glance that the handwriting was the same on each: a loopy, exaggerated scrawl. He would recognize it anywhere. A sound made him stop. He held his breath, straining to locate the origin of the noise. There was a dull thud, followed by a juddering. He let out his breath and relaxed. It was only the heating kicking in. The boiler was ancient.
Aaron repositioned himself as his legs went to sleep and slid out one, then two of the letters from the bunch. He took them out of their respective envelopes and held a page in each hand. looking from one to the other and back again as he read. He frowned. Again, the handwriting he knew, but the names meant nothing to him. He couldn’t work out if the letters had been sent and returned, or received and kept. Neither scenario made much sense. He turned over the letter in his right hand and saw a poem, maybe six or seven lines, written small in black ink.
We make our bed where her body was found
We lay our heads on the blood-soaked ground
You are the wind in the trees that gave me breath
I am the roots in the ground, the hands of death
Together we smite them, forever we’re bound
I am at peace now, she makes no sound
She makes no sound
Cassie had always said that Pippa was the quickest. She was born first, she walked first, she spoke first – she even died first. And now Aaron knew why. He felt his breath catch in his throat. Part of him wanted to close the lid and push the box back under the bed, leave the room, retrieve the paracetamol for Megan and forget what he knew – go on with his life in ignorant bliss – but he couldn’t. He felt a hand on his shoulder, but he didn’t turn. There was no one there. It was Pippa. She was here. A tear ran down Aaron’s cheek. She was telling him to finish what she had started.
Jane bent forward and put her mug down on the hearth. She took out her mobile and tapped out a message to Abbott, and then, as backup, to Barney. The answer to all of her questions was simple. She just had to change her point of view.
She had assumed that, like Townsend, Hamilton had parked his car some way away and trudged across snow-covered fields in order to get to and escape from Hunter’s Moon without being detected. Townsend had parked at the back of the house to expedite his arrival for non-nefarious reasons; but what about Hamilton? And why would Hamilton call his victims Annie and not Jane?
Steph and Claudette both said they had been called Annie when they were attacked. But Hamilton didn’t attack Claudette – Townsend did. But Townsend wasn’t obsessed with Walford, with his legacy. Townsend was Hamilton’s fall guy. So why attack Claudette, why call her Annie?
The simple answer was – he hadn’t. And if he hadn’t, then why would Claudette say he had? How would she even know to use that name? Again, the answer was simple. Because Hamilton had told her. And where was the car? There wasn’t one. Hamilton had been there all the time.
She heard Maureen Jones’s words: Gilly Henderson was only saying to me yesterday that it’s been an age since they’ve seen you. Jane had thought it strange at the time, given she knew Claudette was meant to have been to the Hendersons’ Christmas drinks with her sister and husband last week, the same afternoon Cassie was chased through the back lanes of Nether Stowey, the same afternoon Steph was attacked, for the second time. But Claudette hadn’t been at the Hendersons’ sipping mulled wine. She had volunteered Cassie to walk the neighbour’s dog, and then Claudette had followed her, stalked her and made sure she was scared, scared enough to call in the cavalry – to lure Lockyer away from the real victim. Stephanie Lacey.
And the keys to the flat out in Holford – Hamilton hadn’t dropped them. He wasn’t the one wrestling with Townsend when Lockyer turned up and knocked them both flying. The keys had come from Claudette’s pocket, not Townsend’s. And the reason Claudette was at the flat? Not for Barbara and Allison. No. They were no doubt a lie, a quick fix to an awkward problem when, as luck would have it, Jane and Barney had turned up and disturbed Claudette and Hamilton doing – whatever their twisted minds desired.
Hamilton had been right. Lockyer had done them both a huge favour when he had turned up and killed Townsend. Hamilton had spoken to Claudette in hospital, and no doubt between them they had come up with an iron-clad story, one that would prove beyond doubt that Townsend was the Hill Killer. Using the name ‘Annie’ was the clincher – but, as it happened, also their undoing. Jane opened her eyes, unsure how long she had been sitting there. Claudette was looking at her, her head tipped to one side. ‘Are you all right, detective?’
Before Jane could answer, Aaron came into the room. He was holding a bundle of letters in his hand. They appeared numerous and well worn, colourful drawings of hearts and flowers on the envelopes that held them. ‘Who’s Annie?’ he said, looking at his aunt, the papers trembling in his shaking hand.
‘She is,’ Jane said, getting to her feet. ‘Hamilton wasn’t calling Stephanie Lacey “Annie” that night, was he?’ Claudette seemed to shrink in her seat as Jane approached her. ‘He was calling out for Annie . . . he was calling out for you. You were there.’ A vein in Claudette’s temple began to pulse as Jane spoke.
‘You . . . you killed Pip, didn’t you?’ Aaron said, the colour all but drained from his face.
Claudette was shaking her head, her cheeks flushed. ‘It wasn’t supposed to . . . I never meant for it to happen like that. She just . . . he said we had to, that we had no choice. I couldn’t stop him.’ Her voice was thick with emotion. Her eyes were dry and cold.
‘You were there when she . . . when they all . . . ?’ Aaron’s legs seemed to buckle and he collapsed onto the sofa. Megan’s head slid off the cushion as she was jolted out of sleep.
‘Aaron, what’s the . . . ?’ But she didn’t finish, her words silenced, it seemed, by the icy chill that had changed a cosy cottage lounge into a soulless shell.
Jane shook her head and sighed. ‘You’re a country girl,’ she said to Claudette, ‘so I guess you know better than most that it’s always better to hunt in pairs. That way there’s always someone to watch your back. Isn’t that right, Claudette . . . or do you prefer Annie?’
WALFORD
1789
You are pathetic, she had said, pushing past him. I can’t look at you. You make me sick. You are not a man. You are not a man. And I need a man.
John Walford lay down on the cot in the jailhouse and closed his eyes. Her final words had lost their venom. He had stilled her poisonous tongue forever.
He knew he would hang the moment he picked up that fence post, but the knowledge hadn’t stayed his hand. Perhaps he had known before they left the house that night and took the walk over the Quantocks, the night heavy and close. His mind kept taking him back there. He kept seeing her face as her life drained away. Seeing her die had been life enough for him. Jane was right when she said he wasn’t a man. He hadn’t been a man until the day he killed her – she had paid his passage to manhood with her life. He folded his arms behind his head.
After he was hanged they planned to display his body in a gibbet at the edge of Quantock Common, but he wasn’t afraid. He would never fear the hills. Shervage Wood belonged to him. He had been making charcoal there his whole life, and his father before him, and his father before that. The Walford men and the woods were one, and it felt good and right that soon his ashes would feed the very trees that had sheltered him as a boy. He only hoped his body would nourish the saplings and give them the strength to grow. He smiled. If his bones, blood and flesh fed the trees, then surely he would live on in them? Perhaps in another time, another boy would come to make himself a man at th
e edge of Dead Woman’s Ditch. He laughed aloud, spit flying out of his mouth and landing on his cheeks. He hadn’t realized the irony of the name until now. ‘They’ll remember me,’ he said to the empty cell. The Dead Woman of the ditch would become his dead woman. Her death would be a tale whispered at night by fathers to their daughters and husbands to their wives.
Keep your petticoats close, my dear. For if you let another man lift them, then Walford will come for you. The woods will come alive with him: the trunks his legs, the boughs his body and the branches his arms reaching out for you. And if he catches you . . . he’ll slit your throat from ear to ear, and no more bastards will you be able to bear.
Cursed or blessed, the land would forever be his.
Let his name keep them frightened in their beds.
Let his name live on.
HISTORICAL NOTE
John Walford, 1765–89
John Walford was a collier by trade, collecting and burning wood in a turf-covered pit until the process resulted in charcoal, which he would then sell. The pit could be alight for almost a week and couldn’t be left unattended, so it’s said that he would be alone for days on end with only a makeshift shelter and rations of bread and cheese to sustain him.
When he was still a young man he met and fell in love with Ann Rice, the daughter of a local miller. They were soon engaged to be married, although there are accounts that suggest Walford’s mother was against the match.
While he was betrothed to Ann, John began an affair with Jane Shorney. She was the daughter of another collier. Jane fell pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy, John, in 1785. John was duly arrested because they were unwed. He had two choices: marry Jane, or pay for the child. Reports suggest that his mother stepped in at this point and agreed to pay for the upbringing of her grandson. John’s relationship with Ann Rice subsequently failed – some say because of pressure from his mother to break off the engagement.
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