‘Hi, it’s Delva.’ Megan let out an audible sigh of relief. ‘I’ve got something important to tell you. Can you ring me back when you get this?’
Half an hour later, Delva was sitting at the kitchen table, a mug of tea in her hand. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t explain over the phone,’ she said. ‘It’s the sort of thing I felt I had to tell you face-to-face.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘I met up with Natalie and Tim earlier. I wanted to know how the meeting with Tim’s dad had gone. Evidently he’s on the pensions committee and has access to records of every former member of the force who’s drawn a pension in the past forty years. If Ronald Smith had ever been a policeman his name would have been on file. There were a few Ron Smiths, but no one with the middle name Aaron.’
‘So that’s it, then.’ Megan pursed her lips. ‘That knocks the Birmingham Six revenge theory on the head, doesn’t it?’
‘Well, yes, it does.’ Delva took a deep breath. ‘But there’s something else.’ She looked away from Megan, her eyes fixed on the carpet. ‘It’s about Dominic Wilde,’ she said. ‘I thought you ought to know.’ The words filled Megan with a horrible sense of foreboding. Less than an hour ago she’d been imagining this man sharing her life. Whatever Delva was about to say, it wasn’t going to be good: it was going to blow that fantasy right out of the water. ‘Before he went to prison Dom spent time in the SAS,’ Delva went on. ‘Tim’s dad said that when he came out of the forces he became one of the most feared men in Birmingham’s criminal underworld – a man not to be messed with – not averse to enforcing respect through extreme physical violence.’
Megan swallowed hard, struggling to rein in her emotions. ‘But that was then,’ she said. ‘He’s held his hands up to the murder he committed. He’s a different man now.’
‘But it wasn’t just one murder Meg – not according to Tim’s father. He reckoned Dom was responsible for a number of gangland killings that were never solved. None of them involved weapons: in each case the killer used his bare hands. All the victims died of a broken neck – a classic unarmed combat technique. At the time the police suspected it was Dom Wilde but there were never any witnesses or forensic evidence.’
Megan stared at Delva. In her mind she was dissecting all that Dom had ever said about himself. Had she totally misjudged him? Had her overwhelming desire to believe in his redemption blinded her to the reality that he could have played some part in Carl’s death?
‘Meg, are you alright?’
‘Yes… I… I’m…’ Megan shot to her feet, clapping her hand over her mouth. She raced upstairs and flung open the bathroom door. There wasn’t time to close it: she only hoped Delva wouldn’t hear as she kneeled over the toilet, retching.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, when she came back downstairs. ‘It’s just that I haven’t eaten yet today. Things have been a bit traumatic.’ She told Delva about the dead mole; about her fears that someone from the hall of residence had followed her home.
‘God, Meg, that’s bloody scary,’ Delva said, her braids quivering as she shook her head. ‘You should have told me on the phone; the last you needed was me coming round banging on about Dominic Wilde.’
‘No, I’m glad you told me, honestly.’ Megan sat down a little unsteadily on the sofa. Her legs felt like jelly and her stomach muscles ached like hell. ‘I needed to know. I’ve been relying on him for information and if he’s not to be trusted, well…’ She bit her lip, not trusting herself to say any more.
‘Well, you’re not staying here on your own tonight, that’s for sure,’ Delva said, rising to her feet. ‘I’m going to take you to the supermarket, stock up on a load of goodies and cook you something special. We’ll call round at mine on the way home and get my stuff. I’m on a late shift tomorrow so I can stay till you leave for work, okay?’
‘Delva, you don’t have to…’
‘Yes, I do,’ Delva interrupted. ‘I know you’d do the same for me.’
Megan nodded limply. She felt as if she’d been kicked all over.
It was a strange evening. Delva insisted on unplugging the phone and switching off Megan’s mobile as well as her own. They ate beef stir-fry and fresh mango with Greek yoghurt, washed down with a bottle of Australian Shiraz. With the television tuned to Paramount Comedy, they watched back-to-back episodes of Monty Python until Megan dozed off on the sofa and eventually crawled up the stairs to bed, lulled by the sound of Delva’s gentle snoring coming through the open door of the spare room.
The next morning Delva went to the car with her and sat in it as she started the engine. It seemed fine but Delva insisted on searching all round it before she would let her drive off. ‘Call me when you get to Balsall Gate, won’t you?’ she said. ‘Let me know everything’s okay.’
‘I will,’ Megan nodded.
‘I’ll get Tim and Natalie to pull up the court files this morning – try and get a bit more background on Carl Kelly and Patrick Ryan and any third man that might have appeared with them. And while they’re doing that I’ll find out exactly where you go to get a well-hung mole round these parts!’ She gave Megan a wry grin and waved as the car pulled away. It had been good, having Delva to stay. Megan had always prided herself on her independence, on her ability to deal with unpleasant things on her own. But yesterday had served up a double whammy. She felt more vulnerable than she had ever felt in her life.
When she arrived at the prison she was greeted by Al, the prison officer with the ferrety eyes. “Greeted” was not the right word. He looked her up and down like a piece of meat and kept her waiting while he went through all the checks – something that hadn’t happened since her first visit to the jail. It was a complete waste of time and she was sure he was doing it just to wind her up. While she stood there another officer appeared, one she hadn’t seen before.
‘Want a bacon sandwich, Al? ‘ he called. ‘I’m just on my way to the kitchen.’
‘Oh yeah,’ Al shouted back.
‘You want sauce on it?’
‘Yes, please. Brown. Did you get that? Brown.’ He glanced at Megan as he repeated the word. She knew exactly what this was: a blatant reference to heroin. He knew perfectly well that she was aware of the smuggling going on in this place. He had as good as told her he was one of the main culprits. He also knew that the governor wasn’t prepared to do a damned thing about it.
With a sneer, he unlocked the gate and let her through. Suddenly it struck her that he could be the one trying to scare her off. That he had put that thing in her exhaust pipe. The thought of him lurking outside her house while she was asleep made her stomach lurch.
By the time she reached the room where Dominic was waiting her face was so taut that it was impossible for him not to notice that something was seriously wrong.
‘Megan, what’s the matter? What’s happened?’ He jumped out of his seat.
‘I need to sit down,’ she said, avoiding his eyes. She sank into the chair, grabbing the arms to stop her hands from trembling. ‘I can’t wrap this up in any soft words,’ she began. ‘I’ve heard things about you, Dom: things that you’ve never told me. Terrible things.’ A crushing silence descended on the room. Still she couldn’t look at him. She stared at the floor, willing him to say something in his defence.
At last he spoke. ‘Meg, I’m not going to insult you by trying to deny anything. I don’t know what you’ve heard, or where it came from, but whatever it is, it’s probably true.’
She dug her nails into the palms of her hands. She wanted to scream at him, make him feel her anguish. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Her voice was low but full of venom. ‘You made out that the murder you committed was a one-off; something done in the heat of the moment. But there were others, weren’t there? Murders you planned in cold blood.’
‘Megan, look at me, please,’ he implored.
She glanced up and saw that there were tears in his eyes. Determinedly, she turned her face away. If he thought he was going to soften her up with a
trick like that he was on a hiding to nothing.
‘What difference would it have made?’ His voice was barely more than a whisper. ‘That person no longer exists, Meg, haven’t I proved that to you? Don’t you realise that if I was still that man I could have had a far easier time in a place like this?’
She pursed her lips. There was no denying that. ‘But why didn’t you tell me?’ She raised her head, looking straight at him for the first time since she had entered the room. ‘Can’t you see that finding it out from someone else has shaken my confidence in you? Shaken it to the core.’
‘If I’d told you all that at the beginning, don’t you think you’d have run a mile? Would you really have wanted to make a friend of a violent psychopath?’ With a heavy sigh he bent his head, shaking it slowly. ‘I don’t think you realise how much it means to me, having someone like you to…’ the words died as he checked himself. Megan watched him in silence, tortured by the way she felt; wanting to reach out to him but refusing to let herself do it. After what seemed like an eternity he raised his head, his deep grey eyes searching hers. ‘I just couldn’t face the prospect of you not coming to see me any more.’
She gazed back at him, fighting to keep control. ‘Dom, don’t you understand? I sought you out to help with my research because I thought I could trust you. The reason we got on so well was that, unlike most people in this place, I felt you were being completely open with me. How do you think that makes me feel, after what I’ve just heard?’
‘Okay,’ he said softly. ‘No more holding back. You’ve heard about the violence. Well, there’s something else about my past that I’m ashamed of. It was the reason my girlfriend left me; the reason I haven’t seen my daughter since the day she was born.’ He took a breath and she dug her nails into her palms, wondering what was coming. ‘I treated women with contempt, Meg,’ he went on. ‘I couldn’t be faithful to anyone. I had a different girl every week – even when my girlfriend was pregnant. I was with someone else the night she went into labour. Her mother came looking for me and someone in the pub sent her to this girl’s house. So that was it. The day our daughter was born was the day she kicked me out, and that was a brave thing to do, given my reputation.’ He clasped his hands together in his lap, clenching and unclenching them, as if he was afraid of their power. ‘So that’s the man they put away, Meg: a ruthless, selfish, womanising waste of space. You know everything now and I don’t suppose you’ll want anything more to do with me.’
For a moment she said nothing. She was trying to take it in. It was hard to imagine the caring, gentle man she had come to know doing the things he had just described. To mask her shock at his revelation, she slipped into her psychologist’s persona. ‘Why do you think you were like that, Dom? What made you so promiscuous?’
‘Oh, I could trot out all kinds of excuses,’ he said. ‘The SAS is a good one: makes you cut yourself off from your emotions; turns you into some kind of sex-starved robot who’ll shag anything in a skirt as long as there’s no commitment required.’ He shrugged. ‘There are no excuses, though. Not really. It’s just the way I was then. If I hadn’t ended up in here I’m pretty certain I’d be dead by now. It sounds mad, I know, but prison probably saved my life.’
She stared at him intently. In her experience men who habitually broke the rules were the hardest to rehabilitate. And here was a man who had confessed to not one but two of the worst patterns of behaviour – one at the extreme end of the criminal scale and the other, although anti-social rather than illegal, demonstrating a total lack of empathy and self-control. Could she really believe that such a man could change so completely? It flew in the face of all she had learned in the prison system. Was Dom Wilde’s gentle, caring persona just a sham?
Chapter 19
Ronnie Burns was watching CCTV footage with one of the Strangeways warders – the one who had been on duty in the visiting room the last time Rebecca Jordan had come to see Patrick Ryan.
‘That’s her.’ The man leaned across the desk, pointing a stubby finger at the grainy black and white image. ‘Bit of a stunner, she was. I remember thinking: how’s a dope like Ryan got himself a bird like that?’
‘Hmm.’ Ronnie clicked the tape to a halt, freezing the woman’s head. ‘Very long hair. Can’t see much of her face, can you? It looks very light. Was she blonde?’
‘She was,’ the warder replied. ‘Don’t suppose she was a natural, though.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Well, if you look closely you can see she’s got very dark eyebrows. Can I forward the tape a bit?’ He pressed ‘play’. The woman lurched back to life. Her hair shrouded her face as she walked through the prison gate, but as she handed over her bag, she flicked her head. He stopped the tape. ‘There… see?’
Ronnie nodded, moving closer to the screen. She pressed ‘rewind’ and watched the sequence again. ‘I think we need to talk to his cell mates, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Find out what they know about this girl.’
Dominic Wilde unclasped his hands and laid them on his knees. ‘I’m sorry, Meg.’ He slid one hand forward an inch, then pulled it back. ‘I should have told you everything at the start.’
She bit her lip, wishing he wouldn’t look at her like that. It made her feel like a hunter confronted by a wounded animal; made her feel as if she was the one that was in the wrong. Taking a deep breath, she folded her arms across her chest. ‘Yes. You should have. But we all want to be liked, I suppose. That I can understand.’ She was aware that she was trying to rationalise it all, trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. ‘I suppose you needn’t have told me the other stuff – about your girlfriend and the baby. It took some guts to admit to that.’
He studied his hands, saying nothing, as if he was too ashamed to acknowledge this.
‘What happened to her after she left you? Do you know?’
He shook his head. ‘Not really. I heard on the grapevine that she went on the game. There was a really evil bastard called Leroy Spinks pimping girls in Birmingham at the time. I think she was probably one of his girls. I was in and out of prison then, but once, when I was out, I went round the streets asking after her. Spinks came after me; chased me down the road with a bloody great machete.’
‘So you didn’t find her.’
He shook his head. ‘Like I said, I was in and out of jail. By the time I got another chance to ask around no one had seen hide nor hair of her.’
‘You must have been worried about Elysha.’
‘I was, yeah. I didn’t know what had happened to her: whether she was still with her mum, whether she’d been taken into care, or what. It was such a relief when the chaplain found her name on the electoral roll.’ He looked at her for a long moment. ‘Can we start again, Meg? If you still want to, I mean.’
‘Well,’ she said, her voice as neutral as she could make it. ‘I think we both want to get to the bottom of what happened to Carl, don’t we? There are things I need to ask you. Things I didn’t realise were important until I went to Strangeways. Will you help me?’
He nodded, lowering his lids so that she was unable to catch the expression in his eyes. She wondered if he had any inkling of the feelings she was battling to conceal. She started telling him what had happened in Manchester, forcing herself into professional mode as she described the subsequent visit to Linden House. She watched his face change when she told him about Jodie Shepherd being in a coma.
‘That’s some scam,’ he said, sucking air between his teeth.
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘It’s very devious and very clever. I have no idea who’s behind it, but at the moment all I have to go on is the appearance of the girls who visited the two men. I don’t even know at this stage if it’s one girl or two. So I need you to tell me everything you can remember about the one that came to see Carl. I’m going to ask for CCTV footage, obviously, but if you saw her close up, there might be things you noticed that the cameras might miss.
‘Well,’ he said, rubbing his finger
s along his jawbone, ‘She was young. A lot younger than him. She looked no more than early twenties. She had long, black hair – very straight, sort of Cleopatra-ish, if you know what I mean – and her eyes were dark too. Can’t remember what colour, though.’
‘Could the hair have been a wig, do you think?’
‘I suppose so, yes.’
‘What about her height? Was she tall? Short?’
‘About average, I think. Hard to tell, really, ’cos I only saw her sitting down.’
‘Anything else about her? Anything unusual, I mean? Tattoos, that kind of thing?’
He screwed up his eyes, remembering. ‘Not really, no. She never came dressed tartily, like some of the women do. Always covered herself up. So she could have had a tattoo but I never spotted one.’
‘I’d better get hold of the CCTV footage and see her for myself, I think.’ Her fingers went involuntarily to the ruby stud she was wearing in her nose. She rubbed it distractedly, thinking about the lengths this woman had gone to, the risks she must have taken, to get inside this place with her deadly cargo. ‘I only wish I had a clearer idea of a possible motive for all this.’ She fell silent for a moment. ‘Dom, before this morning, before all…’ she faltered, unable to spell it out a second time. ‘We’d been working well as a team, hadn’t we?’
‘Yes.’ He gave her a nervous smile. ‘We made good team mates.’
‘There’s something else I want to ask you about but I need you to promise me it won’t go any further.’
He bit on his knuckles. ‘Meg, I’ve let you down once already, I swear I’ll never do that again.’
The Killer Inside Page 15
