by Zoe Sharp
After a moment's hesitation, Gary nodded. When Marc put it like that it started to sound like a major fraud. I had no idea about the price of spirits. With the exception of the occasional whisky, I was more of a beer drinker myself. I liked the odd glass of wine, but hated the pretension that went with it.
I suddenly remembered the price of drinks in the club, when I'd been that first time with Clare. It wasn't so much that Gary was robbing Marc of vast amounts, but he must surely have been curtailing his profits by quite a chunk.
Marc slid off the desk, dismissing with a contemptuous glance the way Gary shrank back away from him. He moved over to the coffee machine, pouring two cups and handing one to me. When he spoke again his voice was deadly quiet.
“And did you really believe, with computerised tills which record every drink, that I wouldn't notice?” he asked. “That I wouldn't begin to wonder why the bar costs were higher here at the New Adelphi than at any other club I own? Why, miraculously, you didn't seem to be able to squeeze the standard twenty-eight shots out of a bottle that they manage everywhere else.”
The dismay flared in Gary's eyes. He had that trapped look, that look of someone who's slipped and slithered their way into deep trouble, rather than taking a calculated gamble. He knew that he was in way over his head, but there was still something that might drag him out of the slime again.
“He made me give him an alibi,” he said quickly. “Angelo, I mean. The night that girl was killed – Susie. Angelo knew what I was up to and he said if I didn't cover for him, he'd drop me in the shit.”
He looked from one of our faces to the other, opened his mouth to speak, then wisely realised that anything he said would probably make things worse. He shut it again.
Marc sat down in his leather chair behind the desk. With his dark colouring and clothing he looked like a Mafia don. “Just get out,” he said grimly. It sounded like as soon as Gary turned his back Marc was going to shoot him in it.
Gary got painfully to his feet. “A-am I sacked?”
Marc tilted his head on one side and considered him, like something he'd picked up on his shoe. “I don't think so,” he said, surprising both of us. “Not this time.” He stood abruptly. “But if you ever try stealing from me again, I'll finish you,” he said, his voice chillingly pleasant. “You won't work again.”
He could have just meant “in the licensing trade”, but the way he said it made it sound like Gary's lack of employment would be caused by his sudden inability to eat solid food.
Gary stumbled out of the office, pulling the door shut behind him. For a moment there was silence.
Without looking at Marc I asked, “So, how long have you known about Gary's little scheme?”
He smiled at me. “Right from the start,” he admitted.
“So why did you let him keep doing it – keep robbing you?”
“I’ve found staff are notorious for it,” he said, as though it was obvious, “but if they’re putting their energies into comparatively small-time stuff, like Gary was doing, at least they’re not ripping me off in any bigger way. I look upon it as an acceptable level of loss.”
“And what about this business of him giving Angelo an alibi for the night of Susie’s death. What on earth is that all about?”
I was about to ask more, but suddenly Marc’s body stiffened and he came out from behind the desk at a half-run, his eyes fixed on the other side of the room.
I snapped my gaze in that direction, just in time to see the door swinging ajar.
Marc reached it first, wrenched the door open wide, and we hit the corridor outside almost together.
It was empty.
“Shit!” Marc snarled. “There was somebody there!”
We charged down the short corridor, turned the corner and kept running. The noise of the music was getting louder with every step as we made the main body of the club.
The corridor brought us out onto the gallery area near the entrance, overlooking the lower dance floor. The place was already crammed. It was impossible to tell who had been lurking outside the office door.
Marc swore, slamming his clenched fist down onto the rail in frustration.
I scanned the room again. My eye was caught by a still figure among the swaying of the clubbers and I froze.
Angelo.
Over on the other side of the gallery, near the entrance, he was standing looking directly across at me. The swollen lip was distorting his mouth into a scornful Elvis-type sneer.
Or maybe that was just Angelo’s intended expression. That he knew I’d tried to trap him. And had failed.
With a final, arrogant glare, he turned away, disappearing into the crowd.
I realised I was grasping the railing so hard my knuckles were showing white through the skin. When I unclenched them, I was annoyed to find my hands were wavering.
I’d made my move and, with a shiver of foreboding, I knew the next one was probably down to Angelo.
All I could do was wait for it to happen.
***
I left soon after that. There wasn't much point in staying, and neither Marc nor I had the stomach for going on with it.
I rode the bike home through the gloomy streets, feeling as though I was permanently living my life in semi-darkness. I hate the winter, with its slow mornings and quickened afternoons. It doesn't matter how much they fiddle with the clocks, there just isn't enough light to fill a day.
I pulled the bike off the road onto its usual slab of concrete and killed the motor. I was bone tired, and not really concentrating, which was pretty dumb, when I come to think about it now.
I pulled my helmet off, set the bike securely on its side-stand, and climbed off trying to ignore the protesting of my muscles. It wasn't until I was crouched by the rear wheel, and was halfway through threading the roller-chain round the swinging arm that I heard it.
Slowly – too slowly – it seemed, I realised that I could hear someone breathing. And it wasn't me.
I got to my feet gradually, tense, started to turn. There was movement in the shadows, close to the wall of the building. My heartrate stepped up, but I wasn't prepared for the sheer intensity of the emotion that rose up when the figure of a man emerged fully into the light.
“Hello Charlie,” Tristram said.
Twenty-one
A sense of pure panic assaulted me, ripping and tearing. Oh God, I couldn't see his hands. What did he have in his hands? I stumbled back against the bike, nearly rocking it off its stand. Where was the knife?
With something like a moan, I reached down and grabbed one end of the unfastened roller-chain, yanking it out of the spokes of the rear wheel like a whip. It wasn't the most wieldy weapon, but it was hard and heavy, and it was all I'd got. It would have to do.
For a moment, Tris stood and watched me in a kind of suspended hush. It was cold enough to be able to see his breath. Then he did the most extraordinary thing. Possibly the last thing I was expecting him to do.
His face crumpled, his shoulders began to shake, and he burst into helpless, racking floods of tears.
My first instinct was to offer comfort, but it didn't last long enough to translate into movement. I hardly needed to remind myself that Tris had stalked, and raped, and murdered. He was not the gentle man I thought I knew. He was a stranger. A monster. Maybe this was the ploy he'd used to get Joy to drop her guard. How he'd lured Susie to her death.
“Tris,” I said carefully, loud enough to be heard over his wretched sobbing. “What are you doing here?”
He looked up at me for a second, too distressed to speak. He cut a desolate figure, with his ragged haircut and old-fashioned parka. Slowly, his tears subsided into a soft gulping. He lifted his hands to wipe his nose and eyes. Hands, I noted with relief, that were empty.
“I came to s-say I'm s-sorry,” he said at last. “The police released me. You can call them if you like,” he added, reading my mind. “I'm not on the run or anything stupid like that.”
“Why di
d they let you go?”
“Because I didn't do it,” he said simply. He shrugged at my doubtful silence, as if he hadn't really expected me to believe him, and I was surprised to find how much that hurt. “They have a certain amount of forensic evidence, so I understand. I gave them sample of everything they could possibly wish for,” he shuddered delicately at the memory, “and it didn't match. So, they let me go.”
I took a little while to digest the information. Tris wasn't the rapist. A sense of utter relief washed over me, but was short-lived in its duration.
“So what on earth were you doing skulking around the grounds in a balaclava?” I demanded.
Tris gave me a sad smile, and stuffed his hands into the front pockets of his coat. “Making the most stupid and ridiculous mistake of my entire life,” he said, heartfelt.
I recognised the truth of that, felt some of the tension unwinding out of my shoulders. “You'd better come up and tell me about it,” I said.
He looked pathetically grateful to be invited in, but even so, as I finished securing the bike, I made sure I turned my back on him as little as I could get away with. He seemed to understand my circumspect behaviour, not following me too closely up the wooden staircase, and standing well to one side while I unlocked my front door.
In the flat, I switched on the lights, and noticed for the first time how pale he was, with the exception of his nose, which had bloomed in the sudden warmth. He made no move to take his coat off, and he was shivering.
“How long have you been waiting?”
“I don't know,” he said. “They let me go late this afternoon, and I went straight to see Ailsa. Then I came here. Four, five hours. Something like that.”
He hadn't, I deduced, spent long with his wife. “How has she taken all this?” I asked.
“Badly, as you'd expect. In fact, when I arrived she and the girls were busily throwing all my stuff onto a mammoth bonfire in the garden. My books mostly.” His voice was neutral, but he was struggling not to cry again.
I thought of all those poetry first editions, and my heart went out to him. Ailsa had a huge capacity for compassion, but I could also well believe that she had an equally elephantine memory when it came to being wronged. And Tris had wronged her, of that there was no doubt.
I made him coffee, sat him down on my sofa, and gradually, in fits and starts, he told me all about it.
“I was eight years old when my father died,” he began. “He was a wonderful man, but he had very set ideas about the role of women. He would never have approved of my mother having a job, but charity work was all right. So, she got herself involved with battered wives, and when he died she turned her whole life over to the cause. My life, too.”
He stuck his nose into his coffee, took a slurp, then went back to thawing his hands out round the mug. “I suppose I was spoilt as a child,” he went on. “I was the only one, the centre of attention, but after my father died the house was suddenly constantly full of children who all needed my mother's attention much more urgently than I did. I grew up on the sidelines, ignored.”
It sounded almost petulant when he said it, but I could still appreciate the sense of desolation he must have felt. There are more ways to abandon your children than to leave them wrapped in a blanket on someone else's doorstep.
“There's never any peace in the house,” he said. He stopped, sighed, and searched for a better way to explain. “You have a baby of your own, and for the first year or so you expect sleepless nights, and constant crying, but they grow out of it.” He looked at me, and I saw the pain in his face. “There have been babies crying in that house for nearly thirty years. I just wanted a little peace.”
Understanding arrived slowly, like a murky sunrise. “So you thought you'd frighten them away,” I said, taking a sip of my own coffee.
Tris ducked his head, and an ugly red stain crept up the side of his neck. “When Susie Hollins was – killed, we realised that both she and that other girl had been at the Lodge at one point or another. Some of the girls made the obvious connection, and they started to get nervous. Two of them left that night, you know.”
I nodded, but I remembered Nina's paralysing fear and had to bite down on my anger. “Didn't you know how much you'd terrify them, doing what you did?”
He shifted in his seat, awkward. “I suppose so, but it just seemed the easiest way. I knew Ailsa would never be persuaded to just close the place down. She'd see it as betraying the girls, throwing them out on the streets. But, if they left of their own accord, and the house was empty, then she might think differently.” He gave me another forlorn smile. “I never meant to hurt anyone.”
“But it was you we saw, running away that night Joy was murdered, wasn't it?” I said. I have a clear memory for shapes and faces. The way someone moves is as distinctive as a signature. The masked figure who had shoved Victoria aside that night had been the same we'd captured. I would have staked my life on it.
“I found her,” he admitted, swallowing back the tears again. “I was trying to help her when that girl saw me and started screaming. I-I panicked. I knew I couldn't explain what I was doing there, so I just ran. I'm so sorry.”
I didn't say anything to that. Joy's injuries had not been survivable, no matter how quickly we'd sent for the paramedics. I didn't think Tris's actions – or lack of them – had contributed to her death, but I couldn’t find it in me to offer words of consolation, even so.
“So it wasn’t you who rang to threaten me that night?” I asked.
He shook his head straight away. “No, of course not. I never meant anyone any harm, Charlie,” he said, trying not to plead. “You have to believe that.”
I asked him if he had anywhere to spend the night, but I confess I was relieved when he said that a friend out in Quernmore had offered use of a sofabed.
I called Tris a taxi. He wouldn’t stay inside until it arrived, saying he preferred to wait in the street. I let him out in silence, unable to condemn or condone.
At the top of the stairs he turned back, and his voice when he spoke held the plaintive note of the eight-year-old boy he’d once been. “They took away my home, Charlie,” he said. “I just wanted it back.”
After he’d gone, I sat for a long time on one of the flat slate window ledges, hugging my knees to my chin, and staring out through the darkened glass without seeing anything beyond my own reflection.
So, Tris wasn’t the cruel murderer I’d been so quick to believe he was. The relief was tangible, like a taste in the back of my throat. I was just disappointed in myself that I hadn’t wondered more, doubted more. It didn’t matter that the evidence against him had seemed so overwhelming.
I’d spent some time sitting there, in silent contemplation, before it registered with a creeping chill that this hadn’t solved any of my problems. Far from it.
If anything, it had made them worse.
***
The next morning I woke up instantly panicky, heart screaming into the red line like a two-stroke motor with its throttle jammed wide open. When I opened my eyes I found I was already tensed upright in bed, shivering from the chill of the cold air on my sweating skin.
For a moment I froze, uncertain whether I'd really heard the noise that roused me, or if it was part of some instantly forgotten dream. I scrambled out of bed on legs that weren't quite steady, pulling on a towelling robe, and padded through to the lounge.
There was an untidy sprawl of mail across the doormat. I thought I heard footsteps retreating down the stairs, and when I crossed quickly to the window I saw the postman emerge from the doorway below. The sudden surge of relief left me feeling limp.
I went to pick up the mail, but my hand stilled. For a moment I couldn't escape the memory of those tumbled letters in Terry's hallway. The way they'd spilled down over his corpse. They might even have been delivered by the same postman.
I took a deep breath and gathered the mail quickly, almost trying not to look at the mat for fear that I'd see an in
ert trainer-clad foot at the end of rumpled jeans. I didn't, of course, but what I did see turned out to be much more frightening.
A plain white envelope.
It had obviously been hand delivered, pushed furtively under the door rather than dropped through the letterbox, because one corner had slipped under the doormat itself. I'd already got it in my hand before it dawned on me what it might contain.
I carried the letter over to the coffee table very carefully, at arm's length, as if it might explode at any moment. Placing it down gently, I went and fetched a pair of the thin latex gloves I normally use for cleaning the bike.
I checked with my fingertips for lumps, bumps or wires, then opened the letter with great delicacy, as you would if you were handling some long-buried ancient parchment. If this was a begging letter from some local charity, or a note from my landlord, I was going to feel the biggest fool going.
Inside was a single sheet of A4 paper, good quality laid stuff, folded with origami precision. I eased it flat, trying not to touch more than the edges. In the centre were two brief lines of bold type.
YOU WANT TO PLAY?
GAME ON
I put the letter down onto the table slowly, my mind numb. I didn't realise I'd got my hands to my face until the rubbery smell of the gloves started making me feel sick. Maybe I would have felt that way in any case.
So, the killer possibly suspected that the police were keeping an eye on my phone. Maybe he'd been watching this place the day that Superintendent MacMillan called round. Maybe he just knew the score because he'd done this sort of thing before. So, he'd decided to pay me a visit.
The sudden thought that the man who'd viciously raped and murdered Susie Hollins and Joy had been right up to my front door while I slept was too much. I lurched for the loo, and spent some time there, not exactly engaged in thoughtful meditation.
When I straightened up and studied my reflection in the mirror over the sink, a haunted face met my gaze. My skin looked white and stretched tight over my bones, emphasising the last vestiges of the bruising round my cheekbone. My eyes seemed sunk back into their darkened sockets, like a heroin-chic model. There was no getting away from it. I looked like shit.
