Hold Back the Night

by Hold Back the Night (retail) (e

  When I had set myself, I told the family what had happened the night before, once I’d got back into London. What I had to recount was pretty gruesome, especially concerning the stage show, and I could see Mrs Bradley worrying that Emma should be hearing it all. I didn’t have any qualms about it, so I pretended not to notice Mrs Bradley’s concern. When I began to describe what had happened to the young girl at the Merlin’s Cave, Mr Bradley went grey.

  ‘And that,’ he said, ‘that happened to Lucy? They drugged her, and then—’

  ‘No,’ I answered. ‘No they didn’t.’ I paused and let out a breath. ‘I’m afraid that Lucy was a part of it, but not as a victim.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘When your daughter came to London’, I said, ‘she had very few contacts. But she was resourceful. She knew she was attractive, and she had money from her account. She probably found a cheap B&B, and then hit the club scene. She knew she could make men pay for her drinks, give her somewhere to sleep, do anything she wanted them to really. And then she met the boy, the one we were looking for, Finch. He was getting girls for Curtis’s club, and he probably tried to get Lucy, but she was too clever for him. Rather than get drugged up and raped she joined him. She helped him find the girls, and then get them whacked on drugs, Roofies, they’re called, the date-rape—’

  ‘No!’ Mr Bradley made to stand up.

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid. Yes. There’s no doubt about it. Curtis has made a confession, and so have two of the people he worked with. They all said Lucy helped them. She showed them she was just as good at luring girls to Curtis’s clubs as Finch was, and they started to pay her good money, and gave her a place to live. And in the meantime the boy was falling in love with her.’

  ‘I can’t believe Lucy would—’

  ‘Your daughter was no angel, Mr Bradley. She did a lot of things you didn’t know about, like most teenage girls I suppose. But Lucy went a lot further. Your wife knows what I mean.’

  I turned to Mrs Bradley and reached for the folder beside me. I passed the folder to her and Emma sat up. I sat back as Mrs Bradley opened the folder, but as soon as she saw what it contained she closed it up.

  ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘From your office,’ I said. ‘I came back to your house after you left, and broke in.’

  ‘How dare you?!’

  Her husband held his hand out, and then stood up out of his chair.

  ‘You don’t want to see this, James.’

  ‘Your wife’s right,’ I said, but it didn’t stop the man grabbing the folder from his wife’s hand. I wanted to warn him. ‘It’s a porn shot,’ I said. ‘It’s about five or six months old, semi-professional quality, taken just before Lucy sat her A levels, from the date on the bottom. At a little studio in Arundel. It’s quite hardcore I’m afraid.’

  James Bradley had opened the folder and was now looking at the photograph, going through something I had often imagined and hoped to hell I never had to experience. Looking at your little girl with her legs in the air. I didn’t envy him.

  ‘She was part of it,’ I said.

  Bradley let the photograph fall onto the low table. He looked at me, hard.

  ‘OK. OK. But she was tricked, tricked into it. She didn’t know what was going on there, not really. And then that little bastard killed her, left her in the garbage. Was it because she wouldn’t let him have her? Or she finished with him? Maybe she even threatened to go to the police. To be honest I don’t care. When the detective called this morning I almost laughed. Is that bad, to be glad that little shit’s dead? Is that—?’

  I interrupted him. ‘No, Mr Bradley,’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t be glad. But not out of any moral sense. It’s just that Lee Finch didn’t kill your daughter. It wasn’t him. He did a lot of things to a lot of girls but none of them to Lucy.’

  Bradley stopped. He looked at me as though I were mad, then shook his head. The photograph of Lucy was lying face up on the table. Mrs Bradley picked it up and folded it in two. I turned to her.

  ‘I wondered for a long time yesterday why you didn’t just burn that, Mrs Bradley,’ I said. ‘But then I realized there’d be no point. Lucy had plenty more spare if you had. Did she threaten to show them to your husband?’

  Mrs Bradley paused, then crossed her legs. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you knew how much it would hurt him. Lucy probably said she was going to get them published, didn’t she, or at least show the neighbours?’

  ‘Yes.’ Mrs Bradley’s mouth hardly moved. ‘It was in June. I yelled at her for not studying one day, and she told me she didn’t need A levels for what she wanted to do. That’s when she went upstairs and came down with that. She gave that to me, I didn’t find it. Can you believe it, showing your mother something…like that? She laughed when I looked at it. She’d had some boyfriend take it, she said. I’d threatened to stop her allowance if she didn’t start behaving differently, but she said that if I did she’d have to earn money that way, and what would Daddy think?’

  ’And what did you say to her?’

  ‘I told her she was a slut.’

  ‘Victoria!’

  James Bradley had stood up again. I realized that it was the first time I’d ever heard his wife’s name. He moved towards her but she didn’t look at him.

  ‘I thought she was a slut. And she was.’

  ‘Stop it. Lucy’s dead—’

  ‘No, you stop it.’ Now she did turn. ‘Look what she’s done. Oh, so she’s dead, what does that change? She was a horrible child. She always was. What sort of person bribes her mother like that? What sort of person lures young girls to be raped? Your lovely little angel, all alone in her tree house for a cloud? Well?! Well?! What sort of person does that, James?! Tell me!’

  Bradley turned his head away.

  ‘And how did it make you feel, Mrs Bradley?’ Her eyes levelled on mine. ‘Do you want me to guess? Shall I?’ I took a sip of coffee. ‘You probably wished she was dead,’ I said. ‘Didn’t you?’

  Both Victoria and James Bradley were looking at me. There was silence in the room. Bradley stepped back from his wife, his mouth opening. He was about to protest when I saw him deciding not to. He was waiting.

  ‘Both Inspector Clay and I wondered about you, Mrs Bradley,’ I said. ‘From the off.’ I stepped back and leant on the stool again. ‘The problem was that the doorman had sworn that you hadn’t left the building that night, so the police crossed you out. But I did a little experiment. The last time I was here I put the door on the latch. The back door. Later, that night, I waited until someone used the car park and I strolled into the compound. Then I sat, for an hour or so, outside. At about two a.m. I came in through the back door, which no one had fixed. I walked behind the security booth, got in the lift and rode all the way up here. Nobody saw me. When I went out I walked up to the desk and the guy hardly noticed me, he was ploughing through a John Grisham. I asked him if he had seen anyone come in in the last ten minutes and he said no. There was no one. So you could have snuck out. You could have done it and not been spotted coming back in, either.’

  ‘How would I have known how to find her?’

  ‘You could have found her ages ago.’ I shrugged. ‘A resourceful woman like you. Employing me would have been a good way of pretending you had no idea where she was. You could have guessed that she would hang out in Camden. You could have found her, and you certainly had a motive to kill her. Get her out of your hair once and for all. Young Ian Williams, your gardener, heard you two fighting all the time, he wasn’t fazed in the least when I suggested to him that you had done it. I don’t say you necessarily planned it, though you could have, but there’s one thing I do know. I know what she made you feel like and you do too, don’t you? You know how you felt.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘And how was that, Mrs Bradley? How did she make you feel?’

  ‘I hated her,’ the woman said, slowly and deliberately. ‘I used to think sometimes of the o
ther children she stopped me from having, and then I’d look at her. At who she was. And I hated her.’

  Mrs Bradley was poised and still. When she’d finished speaking the room was almost completely quiet. The only noise was that of weeping, coming from the French window. The Bradleys’ daughter had moved over there, and was standing in the doorway with her back to us.

  ‘You hated her. And how does that make you feel?’ I asked. The girl made no response.

  ‘Lucy,’ I said.

  No one said anything.

  ‘Lucy,’ I said again. And then again. Bradley looked at me.

  ‘Why do you keep saying that?’ He took a step forward but I didn’t take my eyes off the girl.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I say it?’ I asked her. ‘Lucy. That’s your name, isn’t it?’

  * * *

  What took place after that seemed to do so in slow motion, an unreal haze.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Emma, say something.’ Mrs Bradley stood up off the sofa and turned to her daughter. The girl didn’t move.

  ‘You met Emma at the tube. Didn’t you? Didn’t you, Lucy?’ Still the girl was motionless. ‘You phoned Emma and told her to meet you. She was so glad to hear from you and she went. You took her back to the house you were staying at, and you told her that she had no idea what it was like being you. Being the second best, having a mother who hated you. You said the two of you should swap, for a week maybe, see what it was like. That’s what happened, isn’t it? She loved you, Emma did, she wanted to be your friend. So she agreed. You cut her hair, and bleached it. You told her you’d both go home, and then she’d know what a bitch her mother really was, by the way she treated her, thinking she was you. Tell me if I’ve got anything wrong.’

  No one said anything. The girl in the window was still turned away from me.

  ‘You did a spot of cleaning that night, dusting the surfaces so that only one set of girl’s prints would be found in the house. Didn’t you? It was why the house looked so clean. You told Emma that you had to go out, and you left her at the house, telling her to wait for you. Then you went to York’s and later you got Finch to drop you off at home. But before Finch left you went down on him, didn’t you? In the car, probably, with Natalie watching. Then you ran inside and you killed her. You hit your sister on the back of the head with a hammer, and then suffocated her, while Finch was taking Natalie to Curtis’s club. You put his sperm on her, knowing that he’d go away for it—’

  ‘Get out. Now. This is the most—’

  Bradley was shouting but his wife cut him dead. ‘Shut up, James. Shut up. Go on. Go on.’

  The girl still hadn’t flinched. I took a breath. ‘Finch didn’t come back for an hour at the very least, so you had plenty of time. You killed her. Then you stripped her – you had to get her out of her own clothes. Then you dragged her downstairs. You weren’t able to look at her face though, were you, which is why you covered it up. Then you dumped her out the back. You had gloves on by this point, long elegant satin ones, which I thought looked naff earlier on, but which meant that you didn’t leave prints in the house or on the car or anywhere. Emma’s prints were already on the car from earlier.’ I didn’t take a sip of coffee for dramatic effect. My mouth was dry. I set the cup back down on the counter.

  ‘When you were finished, you came back here. It’s not that long a walk. You may even have had your mother’s car. You snuck in past the guard, which you must have done any number of times before, after a night out. Then you had to deal with your hair. When I first saw you, in Camden the time I wasn’t even looking, I thought your hair was shorter than Emma’s. It was how I could tell you apart. But it wasn’t – it only seemed like that, because of the bunches you had it in. It was clever of you. When you’d crept back in here you spent the next hour dyeing your hair black, and then you were Emma. It still hasn’t been that long, I bet if we tested your hair, Lucy, it would have black dye on it. You killed your sister, didn’t you? You killed her because you wanted her life. Her grades, her university place. Everything.’

  Nothing happened for a second. Nobody moved.

  ‘That wasn’t what I wanted.’ Lucy’s voice was ten years old. She turned round to her mother, staring at her, her eyes open, her hands in front of her.

  ‘I wanted you to love me. I wanted you to love me like you loved her. I love you. I wanted you to love me. These last few days, you’ve loved me, you have. You’ve held me. And touched me. And kissed me. You never did. It’s been…the best time in my life. You came in my room and slept with me. I…You never ever loved me.’

  Mr Bradley couldn’t move. His face was a maze of confusion as he realized that Lucy was still alive. His favourite daughter. The scream that came out of his wife’s mouth sounded like everything she had ever felt. Nothing could have stopped her rushing towards Lucy. She ran over the sofa as if it weren’t there. She reached her daughter and forced her backwards. Lucy didn’t resist, she tried to hold onto her mother, to bury her head into her chest. But Mrs Bradley pried her arms free and lashed at her, trying to get at her eyes, forcing her backwards towards the bank of roses. James Bradley was closer than I was. He was through the windows after them, trying to pull his wife and daughter apart. But he was a small man, totally blown away by what was happening. Lucy was being forced back towards the balcony, into the wooden trellis. Her mother was trying to throttle her, her nails deep into her daughter’s throat. Lucy was choking, she was kicking at her, trying to get free.

  I made it out onto the patio but I was too late. In his efforts to prise the two women apart James Bradley got caught between them and was thrust back against the flimsy trellis of roses, which gave way beneath his weight. He went over the balcony backwards, landing on the concrete five storeys below. When I got through the French windows, and looked over the edge, a thousand red rose petals like weightless drops of blood were rocking on the breathless air, floating down towards him.

  Chapter Thirty

  There were a few things that had made me think of it. The first inkling I had was when her mother had said she’d gone down to Sussex. It didn’t seem like something Emma would have done, leaving her father and mother. Then, when she was asleep, sunbathing. I’d noticed something; a faint mark that I only realized later was the place where Lucy’s belly had been pierced. I was pretty sure that Emma wouldn’t have had that, though Lucy could have got one later to cover the mark. It was lucky that I’d found her asleep. Following that, at my flat, I’d mentioned seeing Emma at Camden, looking for her sister. Lucy hadn’t acted surprised, having assumed that I’d spoken to Emma, but Emma would have been surprised, and maybe asked why I hadn’t stopped my bike to speak to her. It was then that I first had the thought, a real suspicion.

  After that, in the dental surgery that I broke into at the Bradleys’ home, I was unable to find dental records for either of the girls. Lucy must have trashed them, knowing that they could be checked. That made me almost sure, but when I’d looked over the porn shot with Carl’s eyeglass, and saw that yes, Lucy had definitely had a belly ring, I knew what had happened.

  And really, it wasn’t such a bad plan. The two girls were exactly alike. At various times all throughout her life Lucy had pretended to be Emma, so she wouldn’t get into trouble for things. Lucy knew her sister, she knew how to act like her, and any inconsistencies could be put down to having had a sister murdered. She would have been given a lot of latitude, would perhaps have been able to behave in all sorts of ways that would have been put down to bereavement. Later, when she’d taken up her college place she could have relaxed, loosened up a little, met new friends. She was a clever girl and probably would have got by at Oxford. She may well have stayed being Emma for ever, coming home at weekends to be spoiled by her mother. As long as she never let her father look inside her mouth ever again, she was safe. I was convinced that if she was careful her mother would never have guessed, she would never have let the thought anywhere near her. When I think of how Lucy had looked, her head i
n her mother’s lap, I almost wish I hadn’t upset the apple cart.

  When I think of James Bradley I do wish it. But as Clay said, surprising Lucy with it was the only way. There was no proof, and no way of proving it. She had to confess. DNA tests wouldn’t have worked, because there were no definite samples to cross-reference. The same with fingerprints; Lucy had wiped the bedrooms in Ravensey as well as those in Camden. In Camden this was assumed to have been done by the killer, after the murder. In Ravensey no one bothered to check until afterwards – why should they? – and even afterwards it wouldn’t have been seen as strange not to find any prints because the Bradleys’ had a daily. Even the tree house was clean, except for my prints. Any other prints that wouldn’t be too old were in areas both of the girls had used.

  If Lucy had denied the accusation then that would have been the end of it, in terms of the law if not Emma’s friends, who probably could have caught her out if they’d known to try. I wanted to take her into Calshot Street, and try to force it out of her, but Clay was right; in a police station she would have been on her guard. But not there, not in the family apartment, not after I’d practically accused her mother of killing her daughter, and her mother had effectively told Lucy that she hated her. She had always suspected it, but hearing her mother actually say it was too much for Lucy to bear. Lucy had come out with it and Clay was right. What happened to Bradley couldn’t have been foreseen by anyone.

  When Lucy was taken into the station she was in shock and had to be removed to hospital. She kept screaming, and scratching at her eyes, as if, like Natalie, she was seeing something, an image she wanted to erase. I thought it might be the body of her sister, left in the garbage, which I can’t help seeing myself from time to time. But I decided it wasn’t. It was her father, the only person who had truly loved her. Knowing that it was all because of her that he was dead.