Denial of Murder

by Peter Turnbull

  Thursday

  EIGHT

  Harry Vicary pyramided his hands under his chin with his elbows resting on his desktop. ‘Are you sure you’re better alone? You’re taking quite a chance. The investigation is reaching a critical stage and if Pestilence Smith is silencing people … well then, you could be putting yourself at considerable risk.’

  ‘I think I’ll be safe, sir.’ Penny Yewdall sat back in the chair in front of Vicary’s desk. ‘I sensed that she and I developed a rapport, and I feel that two officers might be a trifle intimidating for her and counter-productive. If we need to take a statement we can always do that at a later date.’

  ‘Very well.’ Vicary nodded and then rested his palms on his desktop. ‘But you know the rule, Penny – let me know where you are at all times.’

  ‘Of course, sir,’ Yewdall stood, ‘of course.’

  Just an hour later Penny Yewdall was sitting in Lysandra Smith’s council flat. ‘You can call it feminine intuition,’ she said. ‘It came to me yesterday evening; it was early doors … I was out jogging, I leaned forward to tie a shoelace and I suddenly realized it, what I felt was as certain as a religious conviction.’

  ‘Yes, I have heard of that.’ Lysandra Smith calmly rolled a cigarette. ‘I have heard how it can be the case that the act of leaning forward, as when you are bending down to pick something up, or in your case, tying a shoelace, can make you realize something which is totally unconnected with whatever it is that you are doing. I can’t say that I have experienced it myself but I have heard more than once that that can indeed be the case.’ She lit the cigarette with her yellow disposable lighter and once again cupped her hand round the end of the cigarette, as if protecting it from a breeze. ‘So what is it that you have realized? It has to be important otherwise you would not be here.’

  ‘I have realized that you did not tell me everything,’ Penny Yewdall replied. ‘I have realized that there is a lot more to your story.’

  ‘You think so?’ Lysandra Smith smiled briefly. She then inhaled and exhaled slowly through her nostrils. ‘That’s quite a safe thing to say … not committing yourself … very cautious of you. It’s like you are tiptoeing through a minefield.’

  ‘I cannot lead you …’ Penny Yewdall cast her eyes round the flat and found it as she remembered from her previous visit. ‘I can’t put words into your mouth.’ She paused and then pointed to the ceiling. ‘Is Pancras at home?’

  ‘No.’ Lysandra Smith shook her head. ‘He went out early, about ten o’clock which is quite early for him, very early; in fact, unusually early. He wouldn’t tell me where he was going or what he was going to do though I doubt that he will be helping an old lady across the road and he certainly was not going to go to school.’

  ‘Worrying …?’ Yewdall commented.

  ‘I’ve got past the worrying stage,’ Lysandra Smith sighed, ‘long past it. He’ll be out crooking somewhere or planning a job with his cronies. He’s anxious to build up his street cred. He’s fifteen and all he wants to do is be a career criminal like his father and his grandfather.’ Lysandra Smith took another deep drag on the cigarette.

  ‘It must upset you?’ Yewdall observed.

  ‘Worry … upset … it does both … but by the Ancient of Days what can I do?’ Lysandra Smith looked at the carpet at her feet. ‘You have seen for yourself how big he is. I can hardly pinch him by the earlobe and lead him to school when he can walk into a pub and get served beer. He can walk twenty miles without getting tired … I can’t reason with him … no chance of me ever doing that.’ She scratched her head. ‘I mean, you know, to be fair on him, I can see his point in a way … look at this, a cramped little council high-rise flat and then he compares this to my father’s mansion up in Southgate and he thinks “who says crime doesn’t pay”? But no … he’s not in the house, there’s just you and me … just the two of us.’

  Penny Yewdall smiled. ‘So we can talk, you and me, woman to woman?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lysandra Smith nodded but persistently avoided eye contact, ‘we can talk woman to woman.’

  ‘Good … because you see, Lysandra,’ Yewdall explained, ‘that what I realized the instant that I leaned forward to tie my shoelace yesterday evening is that a fifteen-year-old girl does not run away with her French teacher … or with any teacher really. I mean, she might carry on a secret liaison with one of her teachers and that happens all too often and is usually kept discreet but it takes more than that, much more, to make her run away with one of her school teachers if it is kept secret. So, one woman to another, am I correct? You were not going somewhere with Gordon Cogan. It is more the case that you were going away from … running away from … something. Was it the case that he was in fact rescuing you …?’

  Silence. A car’s horn was heard from the street below. An aircraft flew low overhead on its final approach to Heathrow Airport. Lysandra Smith breathed deeply and continued to avoid eye contact with Penny Yewdall. Yewdall thought she looked uncomfortable and knew then that she had touched a raw nerve.

  ‘Yes …?’ Penny Yewdall pressed. ‘Look, Lysandra, I have been a police officer long enough to say that I am very angry with myself, furious in fact, for not seeing it in you sooner … the unfulfilled potential … the lack of self-worth, the petty crime … the inappropriate partner … the plunge from grace. So am I right that you were running away from something horrible at home in your father’s house in Southgate?’

  ‘Yes … yes … yes …’ Lysandra Smith hissed her reply but still avoided eye contact. ‘Yes, you are right, Penny. How right you are … all right, you are correct, Gordon was taking me from something but he didn’t know it, I never told him. He was in love with me … but I allowed him to take me away. I was willing to go with him in order to escape.’

  ‘That’s interesting,’ Penny Yewdall replied softly, ‘that is a point that I was unsure of. I didn’t know whether or not he was motivated by the need to rescue you or whether he was motivated by passion alone.’

  ‘Passion alone,’ Lysandra Smith confirmed. ‘As I said, I told him nothing. It was passion for me as well but with escape thrown into the pot.’

  ‘From?’ Yewdall asked quietly.

  ‘Sexual abuse … what else? You hear about it all the time these days but back then it was unheard of – it was especially unheard of in posh areas like Southgate and it didn’t happen to posh girls who go to expensive schools, and good girls don’t rat on their fathers, do they?’

  ‘Are you prepared to make a statement?’ Yewdall asked. ‘We can still prefer charges despite the time lapse.’

  ‘No!’ Lysandra Smith shook her head vigorously. ‘Believe me … look around me … what I have isn’t much, but I’m not ready for clay, not just yet. I want to live a bit longer yet, if that’s all right with you.’

  ‘You’re saying that your father, Tony Smith, will murder you if you talk?’ Penny Yewdall gasped. ‘Surely not … you’re his daughter.’

  ‘I know he will … believe me. If he thinks that anyone is going to give evidence that will put him behind bars he’ll murder them, I know him … and that includes me … if … if … he’s feeling lenient, and it’s a huge if … if he’s feeling lenient he’ll give me a slap, as a warning … as a shot across my bows.’

  ‘You mean the sort of slap that will have you in hospital for a few weeks with your arms and legs in plaster?’ Yewdall replied. ‘That sort of slap?’

  ‘Yes … that sort of slap and not just my arms and legs in plaster but my ribcage as well, that’s the sort of monster he is. He’s just not a human being. But most likely he’ll have me iced.’ Lysandra Smith dogged her cigarette in the Bass Charrington ashtray. ‘I can tell you what happened but I won’t be making or signing any statement. Not ever.’

  ‘Understood.’ Penny Yewdall nodded in agreement. ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Where to start …’ Lysandra Smith reached for her pouch of tobacco and began to roll another cigarette. ‘It started when I was about eig
ht years old …’

  ‘Oh …’ Penny Yewdall groaned, ‘that’s young.’

  ‘Young enough but at first it was just photographs, like I was his wood nymph … little naked elf-like me in the woods during summertime, usually the summer, but he was also fond of a winter backdrop. That didn’t do me any harm … not physical harm, anyway. I would jump out of my clothes and then jump back into them again thirty seconds later.’

  ‘Did your mother know about it?’ Yewdall asked.

  ‘Oh, yes, but she was terrified of him; she couldn’t stand up to him and protect me.’ Lysandra Smith lit her roll-up cigarette. ‘I don’t blame her. I don’t blame her at all.’

  ‘I see,’ Yewdall replied.

  ‘And she’s dead now … she’s been gone a good few years … cancer took her, but she didn’t fight it; in fact, she ignored the symptoms until it was too late. I think that she had just lost the will to live. That’s what I feel, looking back.’ Lysandra Smith shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘I have come across that attitude … I mean, losing the will to live,’ Penny Yewdall replied.

  ‘In your own family?’ Lysandra Smith made sudden eye contact with Yewdall.

  ‘No … my parents are both alive, retired to the coast but both still with us … thankfully … both still going strong.’

  ‘What is your accent, Penny?’ Lysandra Smith asked. ‘I can’t place it.’

  ‘Staffordshire … I grew up in the potteries.’ Yewdall smiled. ‘My accent and the Birmingham accent were once voted the least pleasant accents in the UK.’

  ‘The potteries?’ Smith smiled. ‘The five towns?’

  ‘There are six actually but yes, that is the potteries … the belief that there are five towns comes from the novel Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett.’

  ‘I’ll remember that. But me,’ Lysandra Smith forced a smile, ‘I’ve never been north of London … mind you, I got to Ireland once.’

  Yewdall smiled broadly. She enjoyed Lysandra Smith’s dry humour. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘so I believe … all the way to Galway, in fact.’

  ‘Yeah … next step America … if you can discount the Aran Islands.’ She took a deep breath. ‘So anyway, it escalated … what my father did to me, I mean … that escalated, as it would do, from photographing me naked indoors and out of doors, to touching, to highly inappropriate touching. He touched me and he made me touch him. He taught me how to touch him. It got to be a way of life and I grew up thinking it was normal and that it was happening to all the other girls at our school. When I saw girls get into their father’s car at the end of the school day and be driven away I thought where are you going to stop for half an hour on your way home? Where’s your daddy’s favourite parking place?’

  ‘Your father had one?’ Yewdall asked.

  ‘A supermarket car park,’ Smith replied.

  ‘A public car park?’ Yewdall commented.

  ‘It was a huge car park and he parked at the far side, well away from the supermarket and under some trees. No one else parked there unless it was mega busy and at four p.m. on a weekday the car park was always practically empty,’ Lysandra Smith explained. ‘To an onlooker he looked like a geezer sitting alone in the car in the driver’s seat … like he was waiting for his wife to push the shopping trolley to the car.’

  ‘But in fact?’ Yewdall asked.

  ‘But in fact,’ Lysandra Smith drew heavily on the cigarette, ‘I was kneeling between his legs in the footwell pleasuring him with my hand or my mouth depending on how the fancy took him.’

  ‘And your mother knew all this?’

  ‘Oh, I reckon so, she wasn’t naïve … she certainly knew the gist if not the details and the extent. She held my hand when my father took my virginity.’

  ‘Oh …’ Yewdall groaned, ‘I am so sorry.’

  Lysandra Smith shrugged her shoulders. ‘That was my mother, it is just the way she was. She was also Irish, you see, like my father. They’re both from Connemara. In rural Ireland it used to be the way of it that the youngest girl would take her mother’s place in the marriage bed. It kept the man at home and that kept the money coming in. It happens less now … much less because children are learning to speak out and television dramas and films are exposing the practice. People are learning that it’s wrong … but … well … when money’s tight and I go on the street I get to talking to the Irish girls and they tell me it still happens … and not just in Ireland, but in rural communities all over the UK. But because of her background my mother never questioned it when it happened in suburban Southgate and I never knew any difference. I sensed rather than knew it wasn’t right but there seemed no escape.’

  ‘Again,’ Yewdall said softly, ‘I am so very sorry.’

  ‘So that was what I was running from, and when you leaned forward to tie your shoelace your sudden rush of woman’s intuition was spot on.’ Lysandra Smith once again looked down at the carpet as she spoke. ‘So that was what I was experiencing, a neat, well-scrubbed schoolgirl, smart in her school uniform, doing my homework and then servicing my father when he came into my room at night. If I didn’t do it on the way home then I’d do it at home. So when Gordon offered me emotionally driven sex … as an expression of mutual love … and he offered companionship and a way out of London, well, then of course I accepted. That’s why I ran away with him, and you see, Penny, that explains my father’s anger towards Gordon. It wasn’t the anger of a father towards the man that abducted and raped his daughter; it was the anger of one man towards another man who had stolen his sexual plaything. Nobody steals from Tony “the Pestilence” Smith. So when I returned home, after my parents had convinced the authorities that I’d be safe, my father said … “we’d better give you something to make sure you don’t run away again”, and that was Pancras.’

  ‘Oh …’ Yewdall groaned, ‘this just keeps getting worse … you mean that Pancras …’

  ‘Yes. Pancras is my son,’ Lysandra Smith spoke firmly and clearly, ‘and he’s also my brother. My father is Pancras’s grandfather, and he’s also Pancras’s father.’

  ‘Does Pancras know?’ Yewdall asked.

  ‘No.’ Smith shook her head. ‘No … and he must never, ever find out.’

  ‘The birth certificate,’ Yewdall queried, ‘what does it say on the birth certificate?’

  ‘Father unknown.’ Lysandra Smith inhaled and then exhaled as she spoke. ‘He’ll find out that Elliot Reiss is not his real father soon enough but he must never know who is actually his blood father … never. It will destroy him. He’ll ask me and I don’t know what I am going to tell him.’

  ‘I see,’ Yewdall replied calmly. ‘Well, we won’t tell him.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Smith forced a smile.

  ‘But it might come out,’ Yewdall advised, ‘you have to be prepared for that.’

  ‘I know,’ Smith replied. ‘I’m so dreading that it might happen. The resemblance between them is very strong, they do look like father and son … but my father always says it’s the family genes, it’s because he’s Pancras’s grandfather and so far Pancras has believed that to be the case,’ Smith glanced up at the ceiling, ‘but … what’s that saying? “The truth will out”. I am so dreading the truth coming out, so, so dreading it.’

  ‘Do you know what happened between Gordon Cogan and the girl he was convicted of murdering?’ Yewdall asked.

  ‘No … sorry …’ Lysandra Smith once again looked at the carpet, ‘I don’t. Like I said, Gordon decided that we had no future as a couple once he’d lost everything and I never saw him again after that … but Gordon strangle someone …? No … never, not Gordon, not ever, ever, ever … not in a million years, even when he was in the drink. When he was half cut he just got more affable, not violent. I don’t have any proof but I just know whoever it was that strangled that poor girl wasn’t Gordon Cogan. What was her name?’

  ‘Janet Frost,’ Penny Yewdall said. ‘Her name was Janet Frost.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lysandra Smith smiled,
‘yes, that’s it. But I tell you; whoever it was that strangled her, it wasn’t Gordon Cogan.’

  ‘What was your father’s reaction to Gordon Cogan’s conviction for Janet Frost’s murder?’ Yewdall asked. ‘Do you recall?’

  ‘I recall it very well. Like it was yesterday.’ Lysandra Smith flicked the ash from her roll-up cigarette into the ashtray. ‘He was well pleased. He was very well pleased; he said, “At least he’s going down for a decent old time now, the little toe-rag … no Father Christmas for a judge this time, not for him”.’

  ‘Do you know if your father had any involvement with the murder of Janet Frost?’ Yewdall asked. ‘I am just fishing, you understand.’

  Lysandra Smith glanced at Penny Yewdall and as she did so her face paled. ‘I never knew of any involvement but I was kept well out of the loop,’ she replied softly. ‘Why? Do you think … he might have had some part in it? Frankly I wouldn’t put it past him.’

  ‘As I say,’ Yewdall said, ‘just curious.’

  ‘I see. Well, as I said, he seemed pleased when Gordon was sent down but he is capable of fitting someone up, well capable … But after the trial he just seemed to go about running his empire and he never mentioned Gordon again,’ Lysandra Smith explained. ‘He lost all interest in me as soon as I fell pregnant with Pancras but he kept me in the house until it was too late for me to have a termination … he did that.’