by Darren Wills
She had a smug grin on her face, while Leoni just looked at the floor. “No rethink needed, sonny. You attacked me in the marital home. I defended myself with the only weapon at hand, this kitchen knife. Here it is, ready and waiting.” She reached and selected what was our biggest and sharpest kitchen knife, which obviously had been placed next to the mobile phone. She’d put a lot of thought into this final encounter.
“So you can’t shoot me, then. If you use that gun, your plan’s gone.”
“What? That gun? Do you mean the gun that’s registered in your name, used by a woman being abused and ill-treated, a woman with a mental illness. It’s a tough one, I admit, but I bet I can pull it off. Of course, Leoni here has seen everything. She’s seen how you paw me, how you become aggressive at the drop of a hat. She was even in the house when you raped me and took advantage, so I think there are enough circumstances to make things a bit grey and doubtful.”
I realized how hopeless the situation was. Then I had an impulse. It was no more than a subconscious instinct, and there was a distinct lack of evidence, but… “Laura’s still alive, isn’t she? You never killed her. That’s why you’re not telling me she’s dead.”
Caroline rolled her eyes, giving a false expression of sympathy. “Oh, hun. She’s dead, very dead. It wasn’t very nice, but she went to her maker all right. She’ll bore him to tears.”
“And George and Lillian? That was you.”
“Not just me, but I did have a hand in it. Well somebody had to lure them out late at night.” She gestured behind her. “Leoni’s brother is quite a character, isn’t he love? He quite likes heroin. In fact, he’s very partial to it, so I bought him quite a lot. Oh, and thanks for the cash I withdrew using that new credit card you helped me get. I got him sorted.”
“While I slept.”
“Yes, that’s the beauty of my old friend Temazepam. Guaranteed sleep. Never let me prepare you a drink in future.” She laughed like a witch.
“Why kill them? They did nothing.”
“Nothing.” Her mouth become a massive sneer. “Those baby thieves gave your bitch the life I should have had. They did everything. Left me and my mother to die in that horrible house. I was born with nobody to help. Luckily, Judy was able to make a phone call or we wouldn’t have this pleasure.”
A look of finality came over Caroline’s face and she turned to Leoni. “I need to kill this fucker now, so things are going to get messy. Might be best if you go to Costa, Starbucks or somewhere, after I’ve finished things here. In fact, go to Subway, and get me a sandwich.”
“What sandwich?”
“BLT. Don’t you know me?”
“There’s no need for this to end like this.” I felt like crying, but I had to stay strong.
“Shut up.”
She stood in front of me and had the kitchen knife gripped with a real intensity, a twisted expression on her face.
I had to take a chance. I was probably going to die from a bullet but I had to do something. I found myself suddenly possessed by a combination of adrenaline, desperation and anger. I just had to find something deep inside me now. I twisted my body and sent my foot into the air, reaching out. It was freakish, and a throwback to the karate days of my early twenties but I managed to catch the bitch fully and with a decent impact in the side of the head with the heel of my shoe. She reeled from the blow but still had the knife in her hand.
I sprang up, knowing this was totally do or die. I sent a fierce punch that caught her in the temple. There were two of them, however, and, the next thing I knew, there was an explosion as Leoni fired, missing me.
With Caroline knocked down, I leapt across and grabbed hold of Leoni’s arm causing her to drop the gun. I grabbed it and had it reassuringly in my hand. She backed away, realizing the tide was now turning. I quickly backed away too, so I had the two of them directly in front of me.
Caroline began to raise herself in front of me, so I pulled the trigger. Being unfamiliar with firearms of any description, the jolt of the weapon took me by surprise. A mark of red on the wall revealed that I had missed Caroline and caught Leoni.
At this point Leoni, squealing from her new pain, slipped out of the room, and I heard her move clumsily down the stairs.
Up here, I carried on the conflict, this time pushing Caroline to the ground with my free hand and considering my next move. Today was the first time I had ever hit a woman, but it felt so right.
“I’m going to phone the police.”
“No you’re not.”
Suddenly, with surprising speed and a frightening degree of purpose, she was up against me and in my face, trying to wrestle the gun from my hand. She was showing strength as her nails dug into my wrist and her face was manically creased with determination as she tried, with bared teeth, to get close enough to my face to bite into it. I was struggling to hold on to the gun and attack her with my elbow simultaneously. This had become a wrestling match with the highest of stakes.
There was another gunshot. I wasn’t feeling pain, although I wondered for a moment if this was a death where the victim doesn’t feel pain.
Then I could see in Caroline’s eyes that life was now seeping from her, that her strength was departing.
I snatched the gun away from her grip and she tumbled to the floor, the blood forming a large patch in the middle of her top. “Seems you’re no longer in a position to dictate.”
In The Eye Of The Hurricane
I woke up feeling hangover groggy and in the strangest of surroundings until my consciousness properly returned along with my memory of the previous night. I sat up on the half-hearted attempt at a bed, on a white tiled floor, like a half-completed chessboard on which I was the only piece. The cell was immaculately clean, surrounded by whitewashed walls. I hadn’t slept well. The mattress had the same consistency as cardboard, with the room possessed by a devilish smell of bleach, that probably emanated from the seatless toilet in the corner of the room. Looking ahead of me, my eyes met a dark green door with a small rectangle at head height that I had seen on countless police shows on TV, for my jailers to peer through and check that I hadn’t topped myself. And why would I do that?
Frustration had now taken full control of my existence. I was in a cleft stick for the killing and all my attempts to tell my story had met with total disbelief. I had kept asking myself through the night whether I would have believed it or not if I had been investigating and I kept returning to the same negative answer. It was pretty incriminating as far as the basic details I was giving were concerned, but surely they could see the truth in my face. After all, I had never been a convincing liar anyway.
I don’t know when the interrogation had finished. I think I had become that shattered at the end that I was uttering gobbledygook. Two uniformed officers had brought me down here to this crappy little room on what I imagined was the ground floor, since there was a window with some light coming in, disturbing the dimness, and I could hear voices not so far away, the sounds of people not in my kind of predicament.
My only consolation was that the twisted Caroline was dead. My struggle went on, however.
* * *
They had listened to all of my story. Throughout most of it, they had made little response to my claims, other than Hawksworth persistently making notes and writing what looked like question marks after things I was saying. Taylor offered the full range of sarcastic and doubtful verbal responses, including “Do you expect us to believe that?” or “This is fantasy!” The tone was constantly one of irritation and impatience on their part, as if they were expecting a full and frank confession, with everything I said assisting them in their desire to consign me to the case closed section. Last night, however, I had had some fight in me and had tried to argue the truths and get them to consider the things I was telling them.
“You need to investigate the killing of George and Lillian Stewart.
She was behind that.”
“Who was behind that?”
“Caroline. Who else? She organized their murders.”
“There is no Caroline. That’s your fantasy. Who is this Caroline, anyway, a lost woman from your past, an old babysitter from your childhood?”
“As I’ve already told you, Caroline’s the daughter of Judy Lawrence. She’s in an old people’s home in Chesterfield. You go there and check it out.”
“No mate, not worth it. It doesn’t really matter if she was visiting somebody in a home, or whether she was some long-lost daughter going under a different name, probably for reasons of secrecy. In fact, you were probably the cause of that secrecy, for all we know. You shot your wife.”
“I killed a monster.”
“So the woman you brutally murdered was a brutal murderer herself. Now what are the chances of that? That must be a hundred to one. Well worth a flutter.”
“She was after the inheritance.”
“And is that your motive then? To be rolling in it? I understand that couple were pretty well-off. Anybody benefitting from their deaths would be sitting pretty. Was that why you did it?”
“Once again, I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it.” I felt my cheeks reddening and my fists were tightly clenched.
“Don’t get angry, My Walker. That won’t help. It’s probably your temper that’s got you into this mess.”
The bespectacled Hawksworth came in at this point. “Why don’t you drop the angry weird twin angle, Dominic? Just admit to us here and now that you killed her because you were angry. It happens. We all get angry sometimes, especially with our wives. I get angry with mine every day. Difficult thing, this marriage lark.”
I stayed silent, so Taylor continued. “Did you have her followed because you suspected she was having an affair? Did James Clover discover something you aren’t telling us? Was that why you killed her?”
“Ask him. Try to find him. He’s vanished.”
“How can he have vanished? People don’t just vanish. Did you do something to him too? Bearer of bad news and all that?”
“No, I didn’t. If you were able to find him, if Jamie’s still alive, he would definitely confirm some of my story.”
Taylor leaned back and opened his arms. “To be honest, he’s not even been reported to us as missing, but we will get somebody to call on him in due course.”
“I reported him missing.”
“You did. And did you do that to cover your tracks?”
“No. I did it because he’s my best friend and I was worried about him. Caroline killed him.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because she told me. Just before I killed her.”
“Well, that admission is good, Mr. Walker, because we’re just waiting on a couple of bits and bobs then we’re going to no doubt be charging you with murder. You need to prepare for that. Time to come clean, but in the meantime, we’re remanding you downstairs for the night. Do you want to make a phone call? A solicitor, perhaps?”
“Not yet, but I would like a conversation with my sister.”
* * *
I was just staring into space. This marked the end of something, but was it the end of everything? I had always scoffed at, scorned or failed to understand people who took their own lives, but here was I in a situation on this planet where nothing counted anymore. Everything I had cared about was now removed from my life: my wife, my parents, my job and even my best friend. There didn’t seem to be anyway out of this. It appeared that, unless there was some miracle and Jamie turned up, with Caroline having lied to hurt me and he having had some kind of funny turn, I would be found guilty. I would face the intolerable prospect of too many years in prison. At the end of that, if I survived, which I didn’t think was likely, as I knew I was way too soft, I would emerge into a world that would be utterly strange and alienating. It would have no relevance to me and nothing and nobody in it to make my life worth living. Against this depressing backdrop, suicide wasn’t that preposterous an idea. If done the right way, it would be a swift and hopefully painless conclusion.
While I was floating in this whirlpool of despair, there was the sound of a key in the lock and the door was opened. Kate was suddenly in front of me. I stood up and we hugged, without any words, and it seemed ironic now that she, my long-estranged sister, was the only remaining person of any importance in my life but I still had not even considered her as a reason to go on living.
“How are you, Dominic?” She was in her uniform, so I presumed she had used her role as an officer to gain access to me.
“I’m not good, Kate. I think I’m in a lot of trouble.”
“What happened?”
“I killed a woman, Kate. The evil bitch was pretending to be my wife, but she killed Laura.”
“How do you know she killed Laura?”
“She, Caroline, Laura’s twin, showed me footage of her, in a chair, strapped down and dying.” Something was starting to crystallize in my head, something not quite tangible, still in the form of a haze.
“Dom. I have to say this to you. Nobody outside this room believes your story.”
“Don’t you believe me?”
“I have no say in anything. You can’t win in court with the story you’re telling. Your solicitor will tell you that, when you eventually decide to employ one. Why don’t you just tell the police what really happened? Let your brief argue for a reduced sentence on account of a confession. It sounds to me like you aren’t a well man, and a judge might take that into consideration when you’re sentenced. They often do.”
I stood there staring at her, knowing then why she was here. It wasn’t because I had asked for her at all, nothing to do with the devoted sister thing, but because they were using her to extract a confession from me. Bastards.
“Fucking Hell, Kate.” I was angry now. “You’ve not been much of a sister to me over the years and here you are now, stabbing me in the back.”
“I’m not stabbing you in the back, Dom. I just think it will save you unnecessary suffering and you’ll get a worse sentence for not admitting it.”
“But it’s not the truth. But what could I expect from you, really?”
I could see regret suddenly lining her face, as if she placed more store on our desire to rekindle our relationship, however much it was threatened currently. Perhaps I was being harsh.
“It just makes me think…” I stopped. The haze had cleared somewhat inside my head. My mind had involuntarily gone back to the tracking of Caroline, then back further to documents, to undiscovered surprises. A thought now gripped me. “Kate, I will do what you say, but I want you to do one thing for me. One last thing.”
“Just say it, Dom. I want to help you with this. I don’t want us falling out. Not now.”
“This is going to seem weird, and you need to take somebody with you because there’s a psycho called Leoni still at large. I’ll tell you about her. I want you to go to Wolstenholme Street, Chesterfield, check it out for me. I wasn’t able to. Somewhere on that road is a house or flat or building, a number in the thirties, I think. I’m not saying there will be anything there, but I think you’ll find out something if you investigate there. Documents for that house, number 34, I think, were in our papers and Caroline, I mean Laura, if you like, was there on the day she died. Just do this one thing for me. You might not find anything, but it’s a no-lose situation.”
“But is there really a point to me doing that, Dom?”
“I hope so. Promise me you’ll go there, Kate.”
“I’ll go there.” I could see doubt in her face, where I needed certainty.
“On our Mother’s grave.”
Kate looked reluctant.
“On our Mother’s grave, Kate, then I know you’ll do it. I want you to check that house out like you’re suspicious. No other attitude will do.”
“OK, then,” she replied, with irritation and doubt clear on her face. “I’ll do it. I’ll be back later today. But you must accept what is to be after I’ve done this. Follow legal advice in court.”
“I will. Promise.” For the first time in thirty years, I was going to say a prayer. This was such a long shot. The thing was, Laura had not been dead on that phone footage. I suddenly had the notion, that perhaps for some reason, one that could only be understood by someone with an equally twisted mind, she had wanted to keep Laura alive and suffering for a while, and perhaps had not actually got around to killing her. Of course, a visit by proxy toWolstenholme Street was a bit of a long shot, but right now a long shot was all I had. Kate, even with her doubtful loyalty, was the only one who might possibly help me and I was praying that she would honour that promise and check out the house.
* * *
Hours passed. There was that prevailing sense of nothingness that dragged like a dull ache and was sending me crazy, as again I heard a key turn in the lock. Kate! Two uniformed officers came into the room and one of them placed a pair of handcuffs on me before I was escorted out.
“Have you heard from my sister?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. We’re just escorting you upstairs.”
I was led into a room identical to, if not the same, as the one I had been interrogated in.
Taylor and Hawksworth were already seated, awaiting my arrival. I sat down.
“Morning, Dominic. I’m formally charging you with the murder of Laura Walker. You don’t have to say anything but anything you do say will be written down and may be used in evidence against you.”
He said a few other things, but I was numb with dizziness. I had been a law-abiding citizen all of my life and here I was being formally charged with murder. They told me that I was now to be transferred to Leeds Prison, where I would be remanded until arraignment and my eventual trial. Everything had become a blur. It had been stupid pinning my hopes on Kate, with that utterly groundless idea, as if Laura wasn’t dead and buried somewhere, probably with Jamie as a permanent companion. I allowed myself an ironic grin. Laying alongside Laura. He would have laughed wickedly at that idea.
