“I’ve already said I didn’t. There was a bottle of Domestos beside the lavatory in the bathroom. Look”—I paused, wondering if it was wise to continue—“you must see how ridiculous this line of questioning is.” What the hell! I was exhausted. “Peter wasn’t away more than twenty minutes…and the police and ambulance arrived shortly after he returned. How could Jess and I kill MacKenzie and get rid of his body in that short time?”
“You couldn’t.”
“Then why keep implying we were in some sort of conspiracy? Has Jess told you a different story?”
“No. Her account matches yours. MacKenzie was still tied up when she went for a bath, and she only learnt he’d gone when Dr. Coleman started shouting in the hall.”
19
POOR PETER. He became intimately acquainted with panic that night. His first idea when he found the front door wide open, and no MacKenzie on the floor, was that he was about to be jumped again. His second was that Jess and I were probably dead. His third—not very sensible in view of the first two, as they suggested MacKenzie was hovering around with the axe—was to start hollering for us.
His voice was high-pitched and uneven, and I heard it in the kitchen. “Connie! Jess! Where are you? Are you all right?”
I called back that I was in the kitchen, but when it became obvious that he hadn’t heard me, I dried my hands and went down the corridor. Peter described me as behaving “with extraordinary calm.” Indeed, I was so relaxed that when I urged him “to get a grip,” he came to the strange decision that Jess and I had moved MacKenzie somewhere else.
“But you hadn’t?”
“Of course not. Peter told me to leave him where he was until the ambulance arrived. How could we have moved him, anyway, without releasing his feet? We couldn’t have carried him.”
“Two of you might have been able to.”
“Where to?” I asked reasonably. “You’ve searched the house three times, and he’s not here. And you’ve tracked every one of our footprints.”
“Those we can find. Blood dries quicker than you think, Ms. Burns. We’ve found your outward tracks through the kitchen when you went for Ms. Derbyshire’s clothes, but there’s nothing to show you returned.”
“Except that I must have done since she was wearing them by the time the first police car arrived.”
I think he found my composure as frustrating as Peter had done. They both felt that hand-wringing and breast-beating suited the mood better than hard-headed analysis. Peter lost it completely in the middle of the hall when he asked me what I’d done with MacKenzie. He even accused Jess and me of “doing something awful” since MacKenzie couldn’t have freed himself without assistance.
“And did you, Ms. Burns?”
“No.”
“Then how did he free himself?”
“I don’t know. At a guess, he used Jess’s Leatherman. She said he took it off her. If it was in his trouser pocket, he might have been able to move his arms enough to wriggle it out.”
“Hard to pull out a blade with broken fingers.”
“He had quite an incentive,” I said dryly. “He was about to be arrested.”
Bagley studied me for a moment. “Why weren’t you as worried as Dr. Coleman when you saw that MacKenzie was missing? He could have been anywhere…upstairs with Ms. Derbyshire for example.”
“Jess arrived on the landing about the same time as I came into the hall…and Peter’s voice was so far up the register that most of what he said was incomprehensible. I’m not sure I even realized MacKenzie was missing until Peter started to calm down…and then we heard the sirens. It was all very quick.”
“You’re an observant woman, Ms. Burns. You must have noticed the floor was empty.”
“I was looking at Peter.”
But Bagley couldn’t accept that. “As soon as you realized Dr. Coleman was frightened, you’d have checked on MacKenzie as a matter of priority.”
I shrugged. “This would be a lot easier if Peter hadn’t given you such an inflated opinion of me. You seem to think I have an immediate grasp of what’s going on in any situation. Well, I don’t. I may have seen Bertie out of the corner of my eye—a shape—and assumed it was MacKenzie…although I don’t remember doing it, and I don’t remember thinking about it.” I tugged a cigarette out of my pocket and lit it with relief. “Just out of interest, why isn’t Peter being put through the third degree? He’s far more likely to have freed MacKenzie than Jess or I.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because he was worried about MacKenzie’s hands. Perhaps he decided to loosen the duct tape when he came back in.”
“I don’t think so.”
I absorbed as much nicotine in one shot as I could, then blew the smoke in Bagley’s direction. “Is that a bloke thing, Inspector? The fact that you’re willing to believe a man, but not a woman?”
He took it in good part. “Ms. Derbyshire heard Dr. Coleman’s car come back. She says there was a few seconds’ time lapse between that and his shouting. I haven’t ruled out that he did what you suggest but it seems unlikely. He didn’t have a knife on him when we searched him, and he’d have needed one to cut through the duct tape.”
“Perhaps MacKenzie took it off him.”
“Did Dr. Coleman look as if he’d been in a fight?”
“No…but if he had any sense he’d have relinquished the knife and run out the front door before he got slashed with it.”
“Leaving MacKenzie to collect his bag and disappear through the office window? Is that what you’re saying happened?”
“Why not? It’s what you’re suggesting Jess and I did, isn’t it?”
“We think he left through the front door…and, from the impressions on the floor, he appears to have been on bare feet.” Bagley smiled slightly. “We have a lot of bare feet, Ms. Burns. It’s quite confusing.”
“All different sizes…and with different toeprints.”
“Prints don’t register well on stone. There was a lot of skating done through the blood. It’s hard to say who went where when.”
“Only in the hall. Have you found MacKenzie’s prints anywhere else?”
He wasn’t going to answer my questions. “One line we’re pursuing is that he managed to ease his shoes off in order to slip out of the duct tape round his ankles. You told us you wrapped the tape round the bottom of his trousers. Do you recall how many turns you made and whether he was wearing socks?”
I thought back. “Not really. About four, perhaps. I just wound it till it seemed tight enough. I don’t remember seeing socks.”
“What sort of trousers were they?”
“Denims.”
“Do you remember Dr. Coleman undoing the fly to help him breathe?”
I nodded.
“So all MacKenzie had to do was slide out of the trousers to free himself?”
I saw criticism immediately. “I’m damned if I’ll take the blame for that,” I said indignantly. “It wasn’t me who unbuttoned his stupid trousers. Blame Peter. He could have worked it out just as well as I could.”
“I’m not blaming you, Ms. Burns, I’m pointing out what might have happened. Did you bind his hands in the same way? Was the duct tape over his cuffs or against his skin?”
I was very tempted to say it was over his cuffs but it wouldn’t have been true. “Against his skin. The cuffs were rolled back.”
He’d obviously been told the same by Peter because he nodded. “He had more opportunities once his feet were free, of course. Do you remember what happened to the flick knife?”
“I kicked it away from him. As far as I remember, it went under the stairs.”
“We haven’t found it.”
I shrugged, suspecting another trap. By his twisted logic, victims were probably required to retrieve all pieces of evidence and line them up for inspection when the police arrived.
“A flick knife would have been easier to manipulate than Ms. Derbyshire’s Leatherman…but, in either event,
he seems to have taken them with him. We haven’t found the Leatherman either.”
I drew in a lungful of smoke. “Why didn’t you tell me this at the beginning? Why accuse me of murder if you’ve known all along how he freed himself?”
“No one’s accusing you of murder, Ms. Burns.”
“Well, it feels like it,” I said. “The only difference between you and one of Mugabe’s henchman is that I still have some fingernails left.”
He lost patience with me. “Interviewing witnesses is a necessary part of any criminal inquiry, and it’s not police policy to exempt women. I agree it can be a stressful experience…however, given your views, I’m surprised you feel unequal to it.”
I grinned. “Ouch!”
He took an irritated breath. “Did you or Ms. Derbyshire move MacKenzie’s canvas bag from the office to the hall, Ms. Burns?”
“My bag,” I corrected. “He stole it from me in Baghdad.”
“Did you move it?”
“Yes. I handed it to Jess on my way to collect her clothes so that she could check the pockets. He’d put her knickers in the flap, but I thought he might have taken her bra as well. He was that kind of pervert.”
“Do you remember what she did with it?”
“I think she left it on the chair.”
“Did either of you take anything out of it?”
“I can’t speak for Jess, but I didn’t.” I stubbed out my cigarette. “I should have done. My father’s binoculars and mobile were in it. Why do you ask?”
“Just tying up loose ends.” He saw my frown. “The SOCOs found your imprints on the office floor, but none that matched those by the front door. We wondered why, since you and Dr. Coleman both said the bag was by the desk.”
He was very thorough, I thought. “Have you found the bag? Why did you think we might have removed something?”
“It was a hope, Ms. Burns. If you’d kept something of MacKenzie’s we’d have a better chance of extracting some DNA.”
“Oh, I see.”
“We have foot- and fingerprints but nothing else. There might have been saliva traces on your father’s mobile or an eyelash on the binoculars, although the most likely source would have been your clothes, since you came into contact with him when you tied him up. If Ms. Derbyshire’s dogs had drawn blood or the axe had broken his skin—” he shrugged.
“What about Jess’s clothes or Peter’s clothes?”
He shook his head. “If you’d left Ms. Derbyshire’s untouched, we might have found a rogue hair, but there was too much moving and handling…and Dr. Coleman lost anything on his way back to his house.”
“Do you need DNA evidence if you have his fingerprints? Peter and I can both identify him.”
Bagley smiled rather grimly. “It depends if he’s recognizable when we find him, Ms. Burns.”
CHAOS FOLLOWED hard on the arrival of the police and the ambulance. I remember the terrible clamour as the sirens wailed into the drive, and the ensuing confusion as Peter tried to explain that the “patient” had vanished. We all had different priorities. Mine was to find out what had happened to my parents, Jess’s was her dogs, and the police wanted a clear picture of events before they did anything at all.
In the first instance, they wanted to know whose blood was all over the floor and why it had been trodden in so freely, and they weren’t prepared to accept that it had all come from Bertie. Neither could I when I looked at it through the objective eyes of startled newcomers. What the dogs hadn’t flicked around in the immediate aftermath of Bertie’s death, Peter, Jess and I had tracked across the flagstones in our movements to and fro. It looked like a bloodbath and felt like a bloodbath, and the police chose to view it as one until tests proved different.
We learnt later that Bertie suffered massive haemorrhaging from his carotid artery where MacKenzie had slashed the flick knife across one side of his throat. Jess’s grief was that he didn’t die immediately but continued to pump blood until his heart gave up. Mine was that I hadn’t used the axe sooner to split MacKenzie’s head open. In the great scheme of things, Bertie’s contribution to life, liberty and happiness so outweighed MacKenzie’s that there was no contest between which of them deserved to live and which deserved to die.
Much to Jess’s and my annoyance, we were relegated to second place behind Peter. While he was invited into the dusty dining-room to give the first account of what had happened, we were instructed to wait in the kitchen under the eagle eyes of a WPC. By that time, several more police cars had arrived and the house and garden were being scoured for MacKenzie. I kept trying to raise the issue of my parents but no one wanted to hear. “One thing at a time,” I was told. In the end Jess threatened to punch the WPC if she didn’t whip up some action, and instructions were finally given to alert the Metropolitan police.
Inspector Bagley was curious about why I hadn’t used my mobile to contact my parents myself. If they were such a priority, he argued, I’d have headed for the attic as soon as Peter left the house. “You could have phoned Alan Collins,” he pointed out. “He knew the history, and he was already in contact with the Met.”
I did understand his dilemma. An obsessive need to clean seemed a poor excuse when the lives of well-loved parents were at stake. Predictably, we disagreed about how long Jess and I had been alone with MacKenzie—the Inspector favoured forty minutes (Peter’s assessment), while I favoured twenty. We compromised on thirty when police records showed that the time lapse between Peter’s 999 call and the arrival of the first police car was just over twenty-three minutes, allowing seven minutes for Peter to drive home from Barton House. But, in the Inspector’s view, even thirty minutes suggested I hadn’t accounted for all my actions.
“That’s a mighty lot of washing, Ms. Burns, and it doesn’t explain why you only remembered your parents when we arrived. You admit you saw your father’s binoculars in the bag. Why didn’t they prompt you to contact him?”
His suspicion wasn’t helped by the fact that I didn’t tell him DI Alan Collins of the Greater Manchester Police had a file on MacKenzie. Alan only entered the equation when he contacted Dorset police himself at lunchtime on Sunday, after hearing via the Met in London that my father had been rushed to hospital at three o’clock in the morning after being found, brutally attacked, in his sitting-room. With no details of what had happened at Barton House, the Met simply informed Alan that Keith MacKenzie was a suspect in the assault, and the request to check the flat had come from Dorset police.
In the belief that MacKenzie would head straight for me, but unable to warn me because he didn’t have my address or number, he rang Dorset’s Winfrith headquarters. What he told them subsequently of my history with MacKenzie, which was a great deal more detailed than anything I’d said, persuaded Bagley that I was not only well-practised at withholding information but also made a habit of it.
“Why didn’t you tell me that you failed to report this man to the Iraqi authorities, Ms. Burns? Or that it’s only in the last two weeks that you’ve divulged any information at all about your captivity?”
I toyed with saying, “You didn’t ask,” but decided he wasn’t in the mood for flippancy. “There hasn’t been time. I’ve tried to fill in some of the gaps, but most of your questioning has been about what happened here.” I looked him straight in the eyes. “I suppose I could have insisted on talking about Baghdad, but wouldn’t that have made you more suspicious?”
His eyes didn’t drop, but a perplexed frown puckered his forehead. “I can’t make you out at all,” he said. “From Dr. Coleman’s description of the video, you suffered the most appalling abuse at this man’s hands…Alan Collins says you were so frightened of him you wouldn’t divulge his identity and went into hiding…Ms. Derbyshire says you haven’t eaten or been out for a week…your parents are in hospital…MacKenzie’s still free…yet you’re sitting here in front of me as cool as a cucumber.”
“Is that a question?”
He smiled in spite of himself
. “Yes. Why are you so calm?”
“I’m not sure a man would understand.”
“Try me.”
“In the first place, my parents aren’t dead,” I said.
There was no mystery about how they both ended up at the flat as MacKenzie’s prisoners. My father did exactly as Jess described, set out to lure MacKenzie into a trap, using himself as bait. Afterwards, he was given the same lecture I received about vigilantism and revenge but, as Dad took most of the punishment, no charges were brought despite question marks over his purchase of wood and nails on Friday morning.
He wasn’t very forthcoming about the details of his plan—claiming only that his intention was to confine MacKenzie and call the police—and denied knowledge or responsibility for the homemade “stingers” that ended up in Barton House. Of course Jess and I did, too, which left MacKenzie as the guilty party. I told Alan privately that my father had made them, and MacKenzie had brought them to Barton House; but, with the law as it was, none of us was going to admit to it publicly.
Initially, my father had some difficulty agreeing with Met detectives that his idea of an ambush was ill-considered and naïve, but under pressure from my mother he ate humble pie. Perhaps it was a mercy he could only nod his agreement, because the air would have turned blue if he’d been able to speak. The only detail he genuinely conceded was that, had he entered the flat accompanied by a police officer, MacKenzie wouldn’t have taken him prisoner so easily.
It’s unclear how long MacKenzie had been there—several hours if his intensive search of the place was anything to go by—but my father had no inkling of danger when he let himself in on the Friday evening. The last thing he remembered was stooping to collect the post; the next, waking up trussed and helpless in the sitting-room. He’s even less communicative about this experience than he is about Mugabe’s thugs, but when he reached hospital sixty hours later, he had five fractured ribs, a dislocated jaw and so many bruises his skin was a uniform purple.
My mother says he refused to tell MacKenzie anything and would probably have allowed himself to be punched and kicked to death if she hadn’t decided to go back to the flat herself on Saturday afternoon. “I knew something was wrong,” she said. “I tried phoning him at the flat and on his mobile, but both went straight to voice messaging. Then I called you and the same thing happened.” She smiled rather ruefully. “I could have murdered you that morning, Connie. I was so worried.”
The Devil`s Feather Page 26
