The Devil`s Feather

by Minette Walters

  “So your plan was to use the axe on the mastiffs?”

  “I didn’t have a plan. I just knew I had to do something.”

  He held my gaze for a moment then returned to the notes. “According to Dr. Coleman you screamed ‘bastard’ then ordered the dogs behind you and brought the axe down on Mr. MacKenzie’s right hand…the one that held the flick knife. Dr. Coleman’s impression was that you wanted to defend the dogs from further damage…not Mr. MacKenzie.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know what to say except that Peter’s investing me with a level of control that I didn’t have. It’s true I hit MacKenzie’s hand, but it was a complete fluke. If I repeated the action a thousand times, there’d be a thousand different outcomes. I can’t even use a hammer properly…so how on earth could I expect to hit what I was aiming at with an axe?”

  I could have proved the point better by telling him that my target had been MacKenzie’s head and I’d missed it by a yard, but that would have been a spectacular own goal since I was doing my best to persuade him that undue violence had never been part of my agenda. Or Jess’s. Or my father’s.

  “And where were the dogs when this happened, Ms. Burns?”

  “Milling around MacKenzie. It’s a miracle I didn’t hit one of them.”

  “Indeed,” he said with heavy irony. “Perhaps MacKenzie’s hand was protruding conveniently from the pack.” He didn’t seem to expect an answer because he went on: “I’m having trouble understanding how someone with a phobia of dogs had the courage to wade into the middle of a fight between grown mastiffs. At a rough guess their combined weight must have been in excess of six hundred pounds…and by your own admission you thought they were engaged in a feeding frenzy. What you did was either very brave or very stupid.”

  “Very stupid,” I assured him. “About as stupid as going back into the house in the first place…but you don’t think straight when you’re frightened.”

  More irony. “That’s certainly true of most people.” He smiled slightly. “Tell me why the dogs decided to draw back.”

  “I don’t know. I think the sound of the axe striking the stone might have startled them. Only the top half of the blade hit MacKenzie…the bottom half cracked one of the flags.”

  He consulted his notes. “At which point you decided to tie him up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even though he was wounded?”

  “Yes.”

  “Using his own duct tape…which meant you had to go back into the office?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn’t think to release Dr. Coleman and Ms. Derbyshire?”

  “I didn’t have time. I was frightened of leaving MacKenzie free even for the seconds it took me to run in and out of the office.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “Because I was sure he was only winded. His eyes were open…and he was groaning. He called me a bitch when I kicked the flick knife away.” Wearily, I massaged my temples with my fingertips. “I thought about bashing him on the head to knock him out, as a matter of fact, but I didn’t how much force would be needed. I was afraid of killing him by mistake.”

  “Mmm…Dr. Coleman mentions the groans. He says they stopped after you retrieved the tape. Did you decide to gag him as well, Ms. Burns?”

  “Does Peter say he was gagged?”

  He shook his head.

  I chose to take that as a firm negative. “He passed out when I bound his hands together. If I’d realized I’d broken his fingers, I might have been a bit more careful…but, at that stage, I didn’t even know I’d made contact with them. Wouldn’t you expect an axe to chop them off…instead of just mangling them?”

  “It depends when the axe was last sharpened.”

  “I know that now. I didn’t at the time.”

  “Wasn’t it obvious to you that he was incapacitated? He’d been savaged by a pack of dogs and attacked with an axe.”

  I took a few seconds to order my thoughts. “No, it wasn’t obvious at all. I agree he looked a bit of a mess because he had Bertie’s blood all over him, but I’d seen him in fights in Sierra Leone and I knew he could take punches. I’d have been mad to risk it.”

  The Inspector’s expression was sceptical. “Surely a more normal reaction would have been to get a doctor to him as fast as possible…particularly as there was one less than fifteen metres away?”

  “That’s effectively what I did,” I said mildly, “and Peter agreed I was right to tie him up first. None of the blood was MacKenzie’s. He had the broken fingers and some bruising on his arms where the dogs had held him through his shirt, but no puncture wounds.”

  “Did Ms. Derbyshire ever tell you that’s how she trained her dogs? To terrify and restrain rather than inflict damage?”

  “No. All she ever said was that I had no reason to fear them, but she didn’t specify why.” I produced my most ingenuous smile. “If she had done, I’d have known MacKenzie wasn’t in any danger from them.”

  “But you knew MacKenzie had a flick knife, so you knew the dogs were in danger from him. Presumably you also knew how angry the death of one of her mastiffs would make Ms. Derbyshire?”

  “Not really,” I said apologetically. “I’m not a doggy person.”

  His scepticism grew. “Why did you release Ms. Derbyshire before Dr. Coleman?”

  “Because she was the most vulnerable. If she’d lost concentration she’d have fallen on the nails.”

  “Then why didn’t you release Dr. Coleman directly afterwards?” He consulted the notes again. “He says you and Ms. Derbyshire left the room and it was several minutes before you came back again…which contradicts your earlier assertion that you took Dr. Coleman to Mr. MacKenzie as fast as you could.”

  I sighed. “Only if you accept Peter’s estimate of how long anything took…but I honestly believe he’s given you some very exaggerated timings. You said he thought it was half an hour between him leaving the kitchen and my appearing in the office doorway, yet my estimate would be more like fifteen minutes. And as for the dogfight, there’s no way it lasted the five minutes Peter’s claiming. More like sixty seconds. In five minutes, MacKenzie could have killed every one of them.”

  “Dr. Coleman’s used to emergencies, Ms. Burns. It’s his job. Why should his timings have been any less accurate than yours?”

  “Because I have more experience of frightening situations. You learn very quickly in a war zone that everything becomes inflated…ten minutes under mortar bombardment seems like ten hours…a hundred-strong mob with machetes looks more like five hundred.” I leaned my elbows on the table. “I left Peter just long enough to see Jess to the top of the stairs—one minute max. She was very shaken and she didn’t know what MacKenzie had done with her clothes—so I told her to put on something of mine till we found them. Then I went back down and released Peter.”

  The Inspector nodded as if he could accept that. “These being the clothes that were dropped outside the office window?”

  “Yes. Jess thinks he did it to confuse the dogs in case they picked up his scent where he came in.”

  “You should have left them there for the police to examine, Ms. Burns.”

  “I couldn’t. Jess had nothing else to wear. Everything of mine was too long, and she needed her boots.”

  Another nod. “Was Ms. Derbyshire in the hall when Dr. Coleman examined Mr. MacKenzie?”

  “No, she was still upstairs.”

  “Where were the dogs?”

  “With Jess. She wanted to check them over for stab wounds.”

  “Excluding”—he checked his notes—“Bertie. He was already dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who decided he was dead, Ms. Burns? You? Or Ms. Derbyshire?”

  In view of the doubt I’d thrown on Peter’s ability to estimate time, I suspected a neat little trap. “You only had to look at him,” I said flatly, “or smell him. His sphincter muscle had relaxed and the contents of his rectum were on the floor. I’m sure in other circu
mstances Jess would have tried for a pulse, but she was more concerned about the others. They were covered in blood as well.”

  “What did you do while Dr. Coleman examined Mr. MacKenzie?”

  “Watched.”

  I left out that Peter’s self-control deserted him and he swore like a trooper for a good minute after I removed his gag. At that stage he didn’t know who to blame for his perceived shortcomings. MacKenzie for humbling him? Me for being strong? Jess for taking most of the punishment? Himself for being frightened? His devastation increased when he saw Bertie, as if Bertie had somehow been sacrificed on the altar of his cowardice. Of course these “shortcomings” were his own creation—much as mine had been—for neither Jess nor I saw him in such terms.

  Nevertheless, the result of this orgy of self-flagellation was that he set out to paint me and Jess in glowing colours. I became the iron lady who took control and exercised it—Peter even used the word “revenge” after describing what he’d seen on the DVD, claiming anything I did to MacKenzie was “reasonable.” Jess became the martyr figure who refused to give in to exhaustion or threats, and retained an icy composure even after the death of one of her dogs.

  It left Bagley with the impression of two tough and determined women who, for different reasons, had wanted MacKenzie dead. An impression not helped by the various weapons hidden around the house, particularly Jess’s baseball bats and my carving knives. To Peter’s credit, he tried to set the record straight as soon as he realized the damage he’d done, but by then it was too late. If both Ms. Burns and Ms. Derbyshire were subject to panic attacks and agoraphobia, Bagley asked, why had we shown no evidence of it that night?

  “You watched,” he echoed now. “Yet I understand Dr. Coleman asked you to call the police and an ambulance. Why didn’t you do that?”

  “The landline wasn’t working.”

  “But you knew your mobile worked in the attic.”

  “I didn’t think it was a good idea to leave Peter alone with MacKenzie.” I rested my forehead on my hands and stared at the table. “Look, what I’m going to say isn’t very kind, but it is true. Peter was petrified from beginning to end of the whole thing. I didn’t blame him—I don’t blame him now—but I guarantee MacKenzie would have freed himself somehow if I hadn’t stayed.”

  “How?”

  I dropped my hands into my lap. “Probably by pretending to be more injured than he was. Peter was uncomfortable about the way I’d bound his hands behind his back, particularly when he realized the fingers were broken. He wanted me to retie them at the front while MacKenzie was still unconscious.”

  “But you refused. Why?”

  “Because I wasn’t as convinced as Peter that he was unconscious.”

  “You think a doctor would make a mistake about something like that?”

  I shrugged. “It’s hardly difficult to fake but, in any case, it wasn’t a risk worth taking. I couldn’t see Peter leaping to my rescue if MacKenzie decided to grab me round the throat and throttle me. There’d have been a lot of hand-flapping and not much action. He made a hell of a fuss about getting Bertie’s blood on his trousers.”

  It wasn’t a very fair description of Peter but it seemed to strike a chord with the Inspector. “Dr. Coleman certainly seems to have found the experience more”—he searched for the appropriate phrase—“soul-destroying than you and Ms. Derbyshire.”

  “You don’t know much about women then,” I said flatly. “If it’ll bring an end to this, I’ll happily burst into tears and throw hysterics. Is that what you want me to do? It’s easily done…almost as easy as MacKenzie pretending to be unconscious.”

  A gleam of humour appeared in his eyes. “I’d rather you told me why you persuaded Dr. Coleman to go back to his own house and call the emergency services from there. That puzzles me.”

  “It didn’t happen like that,” I demurred. “It was Peter’s idea…I merely agreed it was sensible.”

  The Inspector consulted his notes. “Dr. Coleman has the roles reversed, Ms. Burns. I quote: ‘When I told Connie we needed the police and an ambulance as a matter of priority, she pointed out that MacKenzie had cut the telephone line. She said the only option was for me to go home and call from there. I agreed.’ ”

  “I honestly don’t recall it that way…but does it matter?”

  He frowned. “Of course it matters. There were five working mobiles in the house, yours, Dr. Coleman’s and Ms. Derbyshire’s…plus Mr. MacKenzie’s and your father’s. We’ve already established there’s a perfectly good signal in the attic, so why not send Dr. Coleman upstairs? Why tell him going home was the only option?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t remember doing that…but, even if I did, how does it make me the bad guy? Peter knew about the signal in the attic. He could have thought it through just as well as I could. It wasn’t a normal situation…we weren’t exactly sitting around, discussing the best way to proceed, you know. We were both shaking like leaves…and all I recall is jumping at the first suggestion that was going to bring us some help.”

  “In fact Dr. Coleman expressed surprise when we told him it was possible to use a mobile at Barton House.”

  “Then he’s two-faced,” I said crossly. “He knew all about the pyramid Jess built in the back bedroom so that I could use my laptop when I first arrived. You can ask my landlady. It was Peter who told her about it when I asked permission to install broadband.”

  The Inspector steepled his hands in front of his mouth and studied me reflectively for several seconds. “He recalls that now,” he agreed, “but not at the time. And you didn’t remind him.”

  “Then I can only apologize for a blonde moment,” I said sarcastically. “Has Peter apologized for a senior moment? It all happened very fast. As soon as he made up his mind to go, he ran for the door.” I folded my hands on the table. “I wish I could make you understand how disorientated we all were…but maybe you’ve never had a psychopath break into your house and take you prisoner.”

  He didn’t rise to that bait either. “So what happened next? When did Ms. Derbyshire join you in the hall?”

  “Almost immediately. She heard Peter’s car on the gravel and came down to find out what was happening.”

  “Were the dogs with her?”

  “No. She left them in the bedroom…she was worried they’d start sniffing around Bertie.”

  “What was she wearing?”

  “My dressing-gown. It was too long for her and trailed across the floor. She knelt down to stroke the dog, and—” I sighed. “It all got very messy.”

  “What was on her feet?”

  “Nothing. None of my shoes fit her. Which is why she asked me to find her boots.”

  “But you weren’t wearing shoes either.”

  “No, I took them off before I went into the hall. I didn’t want MacKenzie to hear me coming.”

  Bagley nodded. “What made you look for Ms. Derbyshire’s clothes outside the office window?”

  “Because they weren’t in the office. MacKenzie had kept her knickers—he’d put them in the bag—but there was no sign of anything else. Then Jess told me she’d heard the window open and close after he put her on the footstool…so I raised the sash and spotted them immediately.”

  “And you went through the kitchen to retrieve them?”

  “You know I did. You found my bloody footprints.”

  “Mmm. And during the time it took for you to go outside and return, Ms. Derbyshire was alone with Mr. MacKenzie?”

  “Yes,” I said wearily. “We’ve been over this twice already. I ran—you can measure my strides—and when I returned, the only thing that was different was that Jess was sitting in the armchair under the stairs. If you spray it with Luminol I’m sure you’ll get a reaction from the bloodstains on my dressing-gown.”

  “You’re very knowledgable about crime scenes, Ms. Burns.”

  “I’ve covered a fair number of trials over the years. It’s amazing how much information you pick up from ho
urs of police evidence. You should try it yourself some time.”

  It was impossible to provoke him to anything other than displays of polite scepticism, except when it came to MacKenzie’s disappearance. On that subject, his disbelief was total. Yet again, he took me through the sequence of events.

  “You say MacKenzie was lying on his side and you could see the duct tape was still firmly in place.”

  “Yes.”

  “You then handed Ms. Derbyshire her clothes and suggested she have a bath to wash off Bertie’s blood because it was clearly distressing her. She went directly upstairs, and shortly afterwards you heard the water running.”

  “Right.”

  “You were also distressed by the dog’s blood, so you chose to wash in the kitchen sink before changing into a skirt and T-shirt that were waiting to be ironed in the scullery. And to avoid the blood setting on your stained clothes, you left them soaking in a bleach solution in the sink…because they were ‘whiteish’ and made out of cotton.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you expect it to work?”

  “Not really, but it seemed worth a try. My wardrobe’s hardly bursting, and it was only dog’s blood. The pathologists will prove me right. I’m sure I’ve read somewhere that DNA is still recoverable after a garment’s been washed.”

  “Except we’re not talking about washing, Ms. Burns, we’re talking about bleaching…and all the literature says bleach destroys DNA.”

  “Really?” I murmured. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Why did Ms. Derbyshire do the same thing? Why did she leave your dressing-gown in a bleach solution in the bath? Was it your suggestion? Did you take the bleach to her after you’d finished in the kitchen?”

  I dropped my chin onto my clasped hands. “It’s ‘No’ to the last two questions, and ‘That’s what women do’ to the first two. Every woman in the world has a problem with bloodstains on her clothes. You should watch African girls spending hours at the rivers, hammering away with stones to get rid of them. We’re all programmed to do the same thing…never mind our cultures. Do you have a wife? Ask her.”

  “Did you take the bleach upstairs, Ms. Burns?” he repeated.