A Deep Deceit

by Hilary Bonner

  ‘Right,’ said Carter. ‘Pack what you want, only be quick.’

  I nodded glumly.

  ‘I’ll close that trapdoor up for you,’ he added.

  I began to climb the stairs and could hear him in the kitchen dragging the ladder up from the cellar.

  Then his mobile telephone rang.

  ‘Right,’ he said. His favourite word, it seemed. I heard his footsteps clumping through the dining room. ‘Sorry, Mrs Peters, we’ve got to go right away,’ he shouted up the stairs. ‘Can’t wait for you to pack any more.’

  I had got as far as picking up a small bag and throwing my nightclothes into it. Obediently I trotted downstairs carrying just that. ‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

  Carter and WPC Braintree had gone into a huddle in a corner of the dining room. They ignored me at first.

  ‘Tell me, for goodness’ sake,’ I shouted. I knew that I sounded hysterical, I was beginning to feel hysterical.

  Carter turned to face me. ‘Mrs Peters, please . . . calm down.’

  ‘Just tell me what’s going on, then I’ll calm down.’

  Carter appeared to decide to take the route of least resistance. Something that came fairly naturally to him, I reckoned.

  ‘It’s your husband. A lorry driver reckons he picked him up and took him to Plymouth, just before we got the roadblocks set up. Must have moved damned fast. Trucker reported it to Plymouth nick when he heard the news and Carl’s description on the radio . . .’

  They drove me down the hill to Mariette’s house in Fore Street. All along the way I pleaded with them to take me to Plymouth.

  DC Carter had had about enough of me, I think. ‘What earthly good would that do?’

  ‘If Carl’s there I’d find him, I know I would,’ I said, although I knew I was being ridiculous.

  Brenda Powell was waiting for us. She must have been looking out of the window because she opened the front door as soon as our car drew to a halt outside her house. Why did I never seem to be allowed to make my own choices, I wondered, and was immediately ashamed of myself because both she and her daughter had been so kind to me.

  Carter did not budge from the driver’s seat when I got out of the car. Neither did he shut down the engine. Carol Braintree, who had been sitting in the back, quickly clambered out and installed herself in the front passenger seat as soon as I vacated it.

  ‘C’mon, my luvver,’ said Mariette’s mum. Then she stepped forward and wrapped her arms round me. Not for the first time I wondered what it must be like to have a mother like Brenda Powell. I had been loved, no question of that, but I was only just beginning to realise that both the people who had loved me so much, Gran and Carl, had also wanted to control me. Did Mrs Powell want to control her daughter, or even me? I didn’t think so. I was just finding any kind of concern for my well-being oppressive.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll look after her,’ Mrs Powell called after the two police officers, who seemed to consider their duty done as far as I was concerned, and had already roared off up the hill before Mariette’s mum and I had even begun to retreat inside the house.

  ‘Please let me know what happens,’ I shouted at the top of my voice. But I doubt they even heard me.

  When Mariette came home from the library I told her the whole sorry story. About Will. Everything. She listened carefully. ‘It doesn’t alter what Carl did to you in the end, though, or what he did in America, does it?’ she said eventually.

  ‘I s-suppose not,’ I agreed falteringly.

  ‘And now he’s done a runner,’ she added. ‘I think he’s barking, that’s what I think.’

  I didn’t know how to argue with that. Although in my heart it still didn’t add up, still didn’t equate with the Carl I knew.

  ‘Look, you’ve told me yourself it’s over with Carl,’ she went on. ‘What you need to do now is build yourself a new life.’

  ‘You can’t go back to that house until they catch the devil, that’s for certain,’ Mrs Powell volunteered.

  I would have laughed if I had had any sense of humour left. I was having difficulty regarding Carl as a fugitive at all, let alone as some kind of devil.

  Sometimes in the morning things seem better. The morning after Carl’s escape everything seemed worse.

  I had to face up to a few things. Carl was on the run. Maybe Mrs Powell was right, maybe he was a devil, perhaps in a way every bit as much of a monster as Robert Foster. And maybe I had to accept that before I could move forward, which I had to do somehow or other.

  Mariette’s mother walked with me to Rose Cottage so that I could pick up some things, which I had not been given time to do the previous day. I didn’t really want to go. The cottage was beginning to represent too many bad things. My life there with Carl just seemed like a lie now. And it was also where Will Jones had confessed that he too had deceived me.

  Rob Partridge was no longer propping up the wall on the corner to Rose Lane, but another officer – one I didn’t recognise, just as conspicuously obvious in spite of his unremarkable casual clothing – was on duty.

  He stepped forward as we were unlocking the door and I had to explain who we were and what we were doing there.

  He glanced into the cottage over my shoulder. You could feel the silent emptiness of the place. ‘I’ll be right outside if you want me,’ he said.

  I thanked him, but I could not imagine what Brenda Powell or I could possibly want him for.

  There was a coldness about the cottage that I had not noticed before. Also the way that Carl and I had lived – turning the upstairs room into a bed-sitting room because of the view, lighting the dingy dining room only with candles so that you could not see the ugliness of it, shutting ourselves off, except in the most superficial ways, from the outside world – now seemed like an absurdity.

  I climbed the stairs with reluctance and began to sort out enough clothes to keep me going for as long as Mariette and her mother would have me. Downstairs I could hear Mrs Powell bustling about. She had volunteered to clear the fridge and make sure nothing perishable was left in the kitchen. I didn’t care, really, but she was that sort of person. I could hear her muttering to herself.

  After a bit she called out to me. ‘Suzanne, will you come down and give me a hand with this flagstone out yer. One of us is going to fall down that hole in a minute.’

  I thought for a moment whether there was anything else I wanted to retrieve from the cellar before we sealed it up, but I knew there wasn’t. In any case, I really didn’t want to go down there again. Together we tried to manoeuvre the stone until Brenda Powell gave a little cry and stood up straight clutching her back.

  ‘Don’t hurt yourself,’ I said. ‘Let me try on my own. I know there’s an easy way to do this. I’ve seen Carl do it often enough.’

  He used to pivot the stone on a raised bit of the uneven floor and just use the crowbar to ease it back into place. I imitated what I had seen him do so many times and with surprising smoothness the flagstone slotted snugly back into the black hole, which was all you could see of the cellar below. I unrolled the vinyl floor covering over it and stood up to await further instructions. I still wasn’t capable of doing much thinking for myself.

  ‘Something else we won’t fall over now,’ said Mariette’s mum.

  Only when the cottage was ‘in apple pie order’ – her words not mine – did she consent to leave.

  Apart from the fact that the Powell home was so small – although I had insisted that I take the sofa bed in the front room this time – there were a number of other reasons why I couldn’t stay with Mariette and her mother for ever. Some of them were completely selfish. It was wrong to be irritated by Mrs Powell, because she was a kind woman. Nonetheless I reckoned she would drive me quite barking if I spent too much time with her.

  Mrs Powell and Mariette were probably right, though. My life at Rose Cottage was over. I still didn’t really feel in danger from Carl, but neither did I think that the cottage could ever be my home again
. I needed to work, to earn money, to discover whether I was even employable, in any capacity.

  My most immediate concern, however, was to find out what had happened to Carl. He hadn’t returned to Rose Cottage, so where had he gone?

  Back at the Powell house I paced the floors waiting for news. Several times I called Penzance police station, but DC Carter was never available. Eventually, I think maybe because those answering the phone became so fed up with me, I was given the detective’s mobile phone number.

  He didn’t seem all that overjoyed to hear from me but at least he answered my questions. He was, it transpired, still in Plymouth. ‘We’re pretty sure it was Carl here,’ he said. ‘The lorry driver couldn’t identify him for certain from the photograph we showed him because he said the man he picked up was wearing an anorak-type jacket with a hood, which he kept over his head all the time, and didn’t seem to want to look at him. But that was the kind of coat Carl had on when he was taken to Penzance and there’s been a robbery here in Plymouth . . .’

  I felt the by now all too familiar tightening of my stomach muscles. ‘But, but, you haven’t caught him then, you don’t know for sure . . .’

  ‘We haven’t caught him, that’s right enough.’

  ‘And the robbery? Why do you think it was Carl?’ A terrible thought occurred to me. ‘Nobody was hurt, were they?’

  ‘No, not unless you count the old lady he half frightened to death pushing past her, in such a hurry to get away. She’s our witness. Same thing. Man with his anorak hood over his head. Right height and build.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘That and what was taken,’ replied DC Carter tetchily.

  I waited.

  ‘The robbery was in one of those luxury blocks of flats up on the Hoe . . . some cash, jewellery, a few easy to sell knick-knacks – and a passport.’

  Carter paused triumphantly.

  I could see what he was driving at. Carl needed money and the means to get away. He needed a passport. The police had his old out-of-date American one. If he had a new one in either of his names, I had never seen it. I didn’t think Carl was likely to be the only person in Devon or Cornwall who might have a use for someone else’s passport, but I supposed the circumstantial evidence did point to him.

  ‘And the timing,’ DC Carter continued. ‘The timing’s spot on. The robbery happened about two hours after the lorry driver reckoned he dropped him off. Carl would have had just one aim once he’d got out of Cornwall – money and the means to get abroad if he wanted to.’

  ‘But how could he get away with someone else’s passport, what good would that do?’

  ‘Flown out of Heathrow lately?’

  That was a laugh. I had never been out of the country.

  Carter didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Half the time they don’t even ask you to open up a British passport any more. But I doubt he’d risk that. Across to Europe from any channel port would be a better bet. More often than not the checks are little more than a joke. And your man’s an expert, too, don’t forget.’

  I was startled. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Done it before, hasn’t he? Came to the UK from the States and built himself a whole new identity. Stayed hidden all that time, too. Might have got away with it for ever if it hadn’t been for you and those threats. Knows what he’s about, doesn’t he?’

  I was deeply depressed when I hung up the phone. It wasn’t just DC Carter who regarded Carl as a common criminal – or maybe an uncommon one; they seemed to think of him capable of a kind of cunning I had never seen in him – I supposed every police officer involved did now.

  I wondered where Carl would go. It seemed increasingly unlikely that he would return to St Ives. If he really was planning to leave the country would he go back to America?

  I assumed not. After all, he was wanted on a manslaughter charge there. Out of the frying pan into the fire, surely. Although I remembered what DC Carter had said about the urge to return – ‘birds always come home to roost’.

  During the next couple of weeks I began to feel anger more than anything else. And I didn’t know what to do at all. Mariette suggested I gave notice on Rose Cottage. At least that would save some cash and I wasn’t going back was I?

  She and a friend with a transit van – Mariette seemed to have a supply of very useful friends – moved my belongings out of the cottage, including my bike, which had been carefully mothballed at one end of Carl’s studio, the steeply sloping, sometimes almost vertical streets of St Ives being ill suited to cycling. And it was arranged for me to store the stuff in another useful friend’s garage until I had sorted myself out. Although I wondered sometimes if I would ever sort myself out.

  I really did go through a very angry period again. I was quite ruthless with Carl’s possessions. I threw away his Leonard Cohen records. All of them. I can’t believe now that I did that. The records went off in the Penwith District Council dustcart. I was quite convinced that I would never want to hear Leonard Cohen sing again.

  I gathered up all Carl’s paintings that were around the place, not just the ones that had been in the cellar but also the various ones we had hung on the cottage walls in better days, and asked Mariette if she would take them around to Will Jones’s gallery. At the last moment I kept back only one, Pumpkin Soup. In spite of everything I just could not quite bring myself to part with it.

  Mariette knew well enough why I didn’t want to take the paintings round to the Logan Gallery myself, but I was beginning to understand money a little and its importance. I thought Will would take them. He almost wouldn’t dare not to, I reckoned, although the fact that I had seen him walk past Mariette’s house many more times than could be just chance made me nervous.

  Goodness knows how he knew I was living there, but it wouldn’t have been difficult in St Ives, of course. Mrs Jackson could have told him, or almost anybody popping into the gallery. And it was the second time I had taken refuge with Mariette and her mother.

  Sixteen days after Carl’s disappearance I received a phone call at Mariette’s house from Detective Sergeant Julie Perry. She was back in St Ives at last and wanted to see me. ‘I’ll call round if you like,’ she said. ‘I’ve got some news for you.’

  The stomach muscles knotted again. ‘C-Carl,’ I stammered.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Nothing on him. Something different – and well, it’s a bit of good news, really.’

  She rang off, leaving me wondering what on earth she could be going on about.

  I watched for her out of the window and rushed to open the door when a little under an hour later, I saw her approaching.

  I led her into the little front room.

  ‘I’m sorry I left you in the lurch. I didn’t have any choice,’ she said.

  ‘I had DC Carter,’ I remarked expressionlessly.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, equally expressionlessly.

  ‘Anyway, I don’t suppose it made any difference in the long run. It just felt as if I didn’t know what was going on, that’s all. Still feels a bit like that, really . . .’

  She nodded. ‘I’ll try to help now I’m back; I did know more about the case than anyone else. But first of all, the news. It seems your husband left you rather a lot of money.’

  I was bewildered. In my mind Carl was still my husband. What did she mean, ‘left’ me money? He didn’t have any, as far as I knew. And he wasn’t dead. Then, like a flash, it hit me. My husband. Robert Foster.

  ‘Good God,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe,’ said DS Perry. ‘I’ve never been too sure myself.’

  Preoccupied as I was, I couldn’t help smiling.

  I hadn’t even invited her to sit down – well, it wasn’t my house. She did so anyway, on the sofa by the window, which also served as my bed. I sat in an easy chair opposite, and looked at her expectantly.

  ‘There’s a solicitor in Hounslow wants to get in touch with you,’ she went on. ‘Apparently you’re the sole beneficiary of your husband’s will.’
r />   ‘Good God,’ I said again.

  This time she just carried on as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘The solicitor’s only just found out you’re alive. In the nick of time, I understand. After seven years you could have been declared legally dead. When they were making enquiries after you told us you’d killed Robert Foster the Met contacted what was left of Foster’s family, just a cousin, I think, and he wasn’t exactly delighted to hear about your resurrection. He was next in line, you see. Apparently made some enquiries about the seven-year limit in such a way that the solicitor’s suspicions were aroused. He started digging, and contacted the police. I wasn’t quite sure where they should write to you. So I thought I’d pop round. Here’s his address and phone number.’

  She passed me a piece of paper. James Fisher, Fisher, Hall and Partners, High Street, Hounslow. As I studied it I began to think about Robert and what assets he might have had. We had lived in a manse owned by the chapel and I couldn’t imagine he had been paid very much. Surely he couldn’t have left a lot. Yet as I pondered I remembered Gran’s money. I didn’t think she would have had much in the bank either, but she had owned her own home. That must have been worth a bit.

  ‘Do you know how much?’ I asked.

  ‘They didn’t confide. Let’s hope it’s enough to help you build a new life.’

  I nodded. ‘Thanks. I’ll call him.’

  ‘Do that.’

  Money had never meant a great deal to me before and of course I had never handled it, but I was changing. I appreciated instantly the difference this legacy could make to the new life everyone seemed determined that I should build.

  Meanwhile, though, the old life still loomed pretty large. ‘I wish I knew what had happened to Carl and where he is now.’

  ‘Ray Carter is quite convinced he’s done a runner back home to the US. Certainly we’ve not had a sniff of him since that Plymouth business. He’s just disappeared. Maybe Ray’s right.’ Julie Perry paused. ‘For once.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘He told me his theory about birds coming home to roost and all that. But Carl is wanted on a more serious charge there than he is here. Manslaughter, for goodness’ sake. He killed his daughter.’