He was being stupid.
He knew that he was being stupid, but he had followed it through this far and he was stubbornly determined to finish the job for himself.
He climbed out of the car and shut its door softly. He reached a hand into his jacket pocket and turned on the compact dictation machine he had bought that afternoon in town. He'd taken it home and tested it, by hanging his jacket on the door and standing a short distance away, talking nonsense. The result had been muffled, but he thought it would work.
There was more to it than simply 'finishing the job', though. The real reason was more vague. It was the reason he'd gone to confront Andrew Gayle on his home territory in the Gryphon, the reason he had been unable to explain to Karen. It was all about taking risks, testing himself, pushing back that limit. Others used alcohol or nicotine, and a smaller number used drugs to get them by.
But Nick's addiction was different: Nick was hooked on adrenalin.
His real reason for being here, walking towards Ronnie Deller's chalet as he was now doing, was that in Nick's mind Ronnie was still the old unbeatable scrapper. The boy who was never defeated.
He was an Everest for Nick to climb, a fast car for him to push to its limit.
Tonight, Nick was going to go down there and challenge Ronnie Deller. Tonight he was going to exorcise another old Bathside ghost.
Tonight, Ronnie Deller was going to lose.
"What are you doing here, then?" Ronnie was looking up at him, through the gap between the chalets. "I thought we'd said all we had to say." He'd been drinking, already, and it had made him aggressive.
Nick felt the rush of adrenalin swamping his body. He went down the steps and stood facing Ronnie on the beach.
"I want to know why you had to do what you did," said Nick. This showdown had been a long time coming, but he was as ready for it now as he ever would be.
Ronnie stared back at him, a bottle of beer in his hand. He said nothing.
"I want to know why it mattered so much that Jerry knew," said Nick. "Did she threaten to tell us about it? Was that what worried you?"
"'Knew'?" said Ronnie, finally, still staring at Nick. "What you on about?"
"About you and Matthew," said Nick softly. "She saw you together, didn't she? The two of you. Down on your hands and knees, were you? Did that make it right for you to smash her skull in?"
Ronnie was still staring. For a moment, Nick thought he was about to speak, then suddenly Ronnie raised the bottle over his head and threw himself at Nick's chest.
Nick grunted with the impact, and tipped back on one bent leg, using Ronnie's momentum to turn him and throw him to the ground.
The bolt of pain in his chest hit him, then, slightly delayed. He made himself turn, tense his body, ready for another attack. He'd expected it to come to this in the end, but he'd hoped Ronnie would say something first—even something small—that would betray his guilt.
Ronnie surged to his feet, the bottle lost somewhere in the gravel. He charged again and Nick caught him and swung him back up against the mud bank between the chalets.
Ronnie reached down into the shadows and came up with a short plank of wood.
"That's how it was, eh?" said Nick. "Pick up the nearest solid object, did you?" Nick struggled to hide his pain: win the psychological battle and the rest was easy.
Ronnie charged, swinging his club wildly, sharp edge first. Nick deflected it with his forearm, ducking down, striking Ronnie hard in the chest with his shoulder.
From the ground, Ronnie looked up, suddenly aware of the sound of cars from the car park, and then he was on his feet again, attacking.
Nick went down with him this time, because if he didn't he was sure Ronnie would keep picking himself up and charging, again and again: underneath it all, he was still the same old Ronnie Deller.
He ended up on top, pinning down Ronnie's arms as he kicked and bucked beneath him.
Torches picked them out on the beach and heavy boots thudded down the steps and across the mud and gravel to where they lay. Uniformed men dragged Nick off and held both him and Ronnie until DI Langley appeared, followed closely by his sidekick, Cooper.
Langley nodded at the men holding Nick and they released him. Together, they watched Ronnie being dragged, struggling, up the steps to a waiting car. Soon, his protests could be heard no more and the car started up and drove away up the lane.
Chapter 22
DI Langley turned to Nick.
"That was one of the stupidest, most ignorant, bloody-minded stunts I've ever seen anybody trying to pull," he said. "I should bang you up for wasting police time."
Nick shrugged. "That wouldn't look so good, would it?" he said.
Langley glared at him. "Next time, son, just leave it to the professionals. Right?"
Nick nodded. He pulled the dictation machine from his pocket. "I wanted to get him to say something."
"And did he?"
Nick shook his head.
"We'd never have been able to use it, anyway," said Langley. "Don't worry. He'll talk. He'll say something eventually that he realises is a mistake and then it'll all come tumbling out. What are you going to do now?"
"I thought I'd hang around," said Nick. "Sort myself out, you know? Maybe you don't. Is that okay?"
Langley shrugged. "Whatever," he said. "Whatever. Just keep out of the way, all right? And tomorrow, first thing, I want you down at the station to make a statement."
Nick nodded, and Langley wandered off. He'd expected far worse than that, but even when Nick, himself, had been under suspicion, he had sensed that Langley was the first to start believing him. Maybe a kind of grudging mutual respect had grown between them.
He went and stood by the fire, burning down now with nobody to feed it. Gingerly, he stretched, flinching at a stabbing pain from his chest. His eyebrow was bleeding again, too, he realised, so he pressed a handkerchief against it to stem the flow. He wasn't looking forward to how he would feel in the morning.
The place was busy for a long time, with men combing the ground and searching Ronnie's open chalet. But the area had already been searched two weeks before and no new crime had been committed here. Eventually, the last of the cars drove away up the lane, leaving the cabin locked up and dark.
Nick wandered westward along the shore, mulling over the mad rush of events, finally feeling that it was straight in his mind and that he could start to move on, think about the future.
He reached a fallen tree and scrambled over its horizontal trunk, crunching down onto the beach on the other side. At last, he thought, it was over.
And then Matthew Wyse stepped out ahead of him, a double barrelled shotgun aimed at Nick's chest.
It took a few seconds for his brain to process what he saw before him. It didn't fit. He looked at Matthew and at the gun.
And then, slowly, it did begin to fit.
~
"Very clever," said Matthew. "Very clever indeed. Except you were entirely wrong in your conclusions."
"Why?" said Nick. His thoughts had been thrown into total confusion. If Wyse had said, Because my mother's a pink elephant, he would probably have believed him.
He fought it. Tried to focus. "Why did you kill her?" he asked again. "Why?"
Matthew Wyse stared back at him in the dim light of the foreshore. "Does that matter?" he asked.
"Was it the threat of exposure? Your affair with Ronnie ... was she going to tell people? Did that bother you?" He knew he had to get Matthew talking, keep it going for as long as possible—go past the moment for action and steal some of his impetus.
Matthew gave a sharp laugh. "That would hardly be a surprise to some of my friends," he said. "That it was with Ronnie, perhaps, but it didn't matter to me. Anyway, it was no great affair—Jerry was wrong about that—that was only the second time, and believe me: by then the poor boy had lost some of his initial appeal. The hunt was over, you see: I'd had him by then and he no longer presented such an enormous challenge. Is that th
e best you can do?"
"But Jerry was upset by it," said Nick. Yet she had come to the party, so she had clearly got over it. He didn't understand. "She mentioned it to someone."
Matthew nodded. "She took it all wrong. She thought it was important, I suppose. I think she felt betrayed, in a way. Not so much by me as by Ronnie. It upset her, yes."
"But why kill her?"
"Can't you see?" Matthew was getting exasperated. "She said that it was too much for her. She told me she was going to leave me. I drove down to London and her words kept going through my mind. I realised that she was serious this time and so as soon as I had checked in at the motel I drove straight back here to reason with her.
"I arrived at the top car park. Went out into the lane. And I heard voices from the woods. Jerry's voice, and yours. I approached you through the woods and heard a sharp exchange of words, then you came blundering along the path so that you almost barged right into me.
"I realised then that when she had said she was leaving, it might be more than I had thought: you, her old flame, were back in town. You had come back for my Jerry."
The sudden rush of images and sensations of that night was vivid for Nick. Her hands on his chest, her face tilted up towards him. Take me with you, Nicky.
Had she really meant it? She'd been teasing him, he had thought. Had she really been crying out for his help?
"So you smashed her skull in," said Nick, harshly, trying to provoke some kind of response.
Matthew simply shrugged, in control and clearly getting a kick from the sense of power the gun gave him. "It wasn't like that," he said. "I listened to her laughing and I couldn't understand why. I went to her, through the woods. I was going to persuade her to stay with me." His voice had become quiet now. "She didn't say a thing. She took a single look at me and turned away and in that instant I knew that it was all over: she had made her decision. I felt powerless."
"So..."
Matthew nodded. "It was an act of great beauty," he said, and Nick felt a deep chill. "A single, swift movement. I killed her because I love her. You have to see that."
"And she was going to leave you," finished Nick. "So why all this, then? The gun. The little soirée with Ronnie, who you admit you found boring."
"He drove me here so that I could kill him," said Matthew. "Of course, he wasn't aware of the arrangement. Eventually, even the Ronnies of this world might have worked out what had happened on that night. I can't afford that chance.
"We were interrupted by your arrival and I hid in the trees. Ronnie didn't want you to see me here: you were right about his terrible fear that our little secret would become known."
Now Nick's brain was working. "You came in his car so that you could drive it away again and dump it somewhere, didn't you?"
"The railway station at Colchester, I thought," said Matthew. "If I could weight his body so that it would sink when I dropped it from his boat, it would appear that he had simply run away and vanished. He needed a lot of persuading to come out here. In the end I had to blackmail him, a little." He smiled. "I even had the hammer I used in Suffolk," he said. "I'm going to bury it on the beach, where it can easily be discovered. Even the police would eventually put it all together."
"'Going to'?" asked Nick, losing track again.
"Oh, of course," said Matthew. "You, my friend, will fit into my little scenario just as easily as Ronnie."
"What'll you do when Ronnie works it out, now?" said Nick, playing for time. "When he tells the police that it was you all along?"
"I will brazen it out, of course. It would be his unsavoury word against my own. What would he tell them? That I killed my own wife because she caught me making love to Ronnie? Can you picture Ronnie telling anybody that, in the full knowledge that it would be all across the papers for months to come? Even if he did... My alibis have already stood up to police scrutiny once. I have the support of both my own and Jerry's family, bless them. If it came to my word against Ronnie's, I am entirely confident of the outcome."
"What about the second murder, then? Suzanne Carter, wasn't it?"
Matthew shifted uneasily on his feet. "You can work it out," he said. "I wanted to lay a false trail. Give the police something new to play with. I wanted a murder weapon with which to frame my good friend, Ronald Deller. You're not that stupid, Redpath."
Nick stared at him, suddenly seeing it all slot into place at last. "You enjoyed it, didn't you? You killed Jerry for the reasons you've explained, but as a by-product, you discovered that you actually enjoyed the killing!"
He remembered that second press conference now. Matthew making his plea for assistance. At the time Nick had thought he was simply a grief-stricken husband, struggling to contain an understandable rage within a shell of cold dignity.
But no: the man he had seen performing at that press conference had been excited.
He'd been forced to relive the events of that night and it had reminded him of the thrill of it all, the buzz.
"You got a real kick out of it, didn't you? It's a power thing, am I right? Did it give you a hard-on? Was it that kind of thrill? So you had to do it again, kidding yourself that you had a real, practical reason. Did you want to rape Suzy Carter? Is that the next step? Now you want to do it to me, don't you? Are you going to play around with me afterwards?"
He was pushing him as hard as he could. Now Matthew tucked the stock of the shotgun into his shoulder and took aim. "This really is getting tiresome," he said, as if discussing a tax return.
"Look," said Nick, gleefully. "You're enjoying it. You've even got a hard-on!"
Matthew couldn't help himself.
He looked down and in that instant, Nick threw himself, knocking the barrel of the gun skywards with his shoulder.
There was a loud explosion by his ear, which left his whole head ringing. When he looked up, he saw the gun lying nearby, Matthew Wyse scrambling across the beach towards it.
Nick took two huge strides and stamped on the barrel of the shotgun, just before his opponent reached it.
Matthew looked up and Nick kicked him hard in the face. So hard his body was lifted from the ground.
He slumped back against the fallen tree. Nick, about to follow up his kick, caught himself.
Matthew Wyse had stopped moving.
Cautiously, Nick approached him and checked to see that he was still breathing.
~
He had to get going, make a move, do something. He knew that was what he had to do.
Instead, he sat for a little longer at the wheel of his old VW Golf, struggling to pull himself together.
It had been hard work, dragging Matthew Wyse back along the foreshore. At every hump and hollow, Wyse had released a soft grunt or groan, and Nick had thought he was about to come round, start it all up again. But he had remained unconscious all the way.
He had tied him up with a length of washing line he had noticed before, hanging from a hook on one of the A-frames. To tell the truth, Wyse had been too big to fit in the boot of the car, but Nick had made him fit, nonetheless.
And now he had to get moving. He slapped his face sharply to clear his head. Once, twice. It hurt but it seemed to work.
He set off up Strand Lane, with the estuary behind him. His headlights picked out the sudden white flashes of moths, bats, flies. Trees leaned over the track from either side, forming the skeleton of a living tunnel.
He found himself thinking of Karen, the defences she put up. He realised he'd been unfair to her: blaming it all on her past, her failure to put her marriage behind her. He hadn't given a moment's thought to how she must feel about him: the way he must have seemed obsessed by his own past, his own unresolved memories. Foolishly, he had thought the barriers had all been hers.
Eventually, he came to the level crossing. No trains. He turned right at the T-Junction, forgetting the public telephone he had found in Crooked Elms.
The lone light bulb had gone dead and not been replaced. The place was deserted. He p
ulled into the car park of the Plough so that his headlights illuminated the old red telephone box.
He didn't know how he was going to explain it all to Langley.
He reached into his jacket pocket, felt the reassuring solidity of the tape machine. Maybe he should just let Wyse do the talking.
Carefully, he eased himself out of the car.
About the author
Kaitlin Queen is the adult fiction pen-name of a best-selling children's author. Kaitlin also writes for national newspapers and websites. Born in Essex, she moved to Northumberland when she was ten and has lived there ever since. This is her first crime novel for an adult audience.
Of her first venture into adult fiction, Kaitlin says: "I've wanted to move into adult fiction for a while, but I wanted to keep it distinct from my earlier work, hence all the cloak-and-dagger business with the pen-name. Taking on a new persona for this was surprisingly fun, freeing me up to write a very different kind of story: a love story, a crime puzzle, and a novel deeply embedded in the history of a place I love dearly. It also made me start thinking about approaching the publishing of the novel in new and different ways: why not publish it as an ebook original, through a writers' collective just like the new infinity plus imprint Keith kept telling me about? His persistence paid off, and the book is now available. It's strange to be starting a new writing career in such a radically different manner, and I'll watch with interest to see how my novel is received."
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