by Ann Cleeves
Vera stopped again and listened. Voices. Indistinct and too far away for her to make out the speakers. At this distance they were more like whispers. Lovers’ caresses. At first she wondered if the sound was just caused by the wind in the branches.
She didn’t move. She wished she knew where Joe was. She didn’t want him stumbling along the road, all heavy boots and shouting. This was a delicate situation. She thought again that Lizzie was like an unexploded bomb. A sudden movement or a loud noise might set her off. Vera took her phone from her pocket and switched it to silent. Then she tapped out a text to Joe: Lizzie in Gilswick Hall close to the moth traps. Approach carefully. No fuss. No noise. She hit ‘Send’ and the message disappeared silently into the ether. Vera listened again, but the conversation under the trees seemed to have stopped.
She was a heavy woman, but years of acting as Hector’s lookout had made her quiet on her feet. The damp undergrowth cushioned her tread. Still the violet lights of the traps seemed to dance in the distance. She walked, but she didn’t seem to come any closer. Then suddenly she could see them in a clearing ahead of her and the voices had started again. Intense. Two figures were standing just beyond the traps. They were of a similar height. Both dressed in waterproofs and boots. Dark shadows in the fading light and impossible to identify. Vera slid behind the wide trunk of a beech and listened.
‘It’s up to you.’ A woman’s voice. Apparently reasonable. Persuasive and clear. Loud enough so that Vera could hear. ‘Your choice. You can afford it. Who need ever know?’
Silence.
Vera felt the rough bark of the tree against her back even through her coat. She didn’t dare move to see the figures more clearly. She didn’t need to look.
‘You don’t understand.’ The shadow was bulky, bull-headed, thick-necked.
‘Just give me the money and I’ll be away. You’ll never see me again.’ Her voice was still reasonable, but Vera could tell that the speaker was losing patience now. There was a scuffle and a little scream. At that moment the security lights at the big house went on. The timer must have been triggered and the whole grounds were flooded with a white light.
As if lit by a spotlight and like a character in a Victorian melodrama, Nigel Lucas stood at the centre of the clearing. He had one arm round Lizzie Redhead’s throat and the other was raised to strike. He had a Stanley knife in his hand; Vera thought he must have grabbed it from Lizzie just before the lights came on. Everything seemed to happen very slowly. Vera came out from behind the tree, but she was too far away to stop the attack and Lucas seemed so angry that he appeared not to hear her yelling. It was like a nightmare; she was running, but seemed rooted to the ground. Tied down. Impotent. She knew she wouldn’t get there in time. She imagined the conversation with Sam and Annie: I’m really sorry. There was nothing we could do. The parents’ pale faces and their staring reproach.
Then, still as if in slow motion, another figure appeared. A dark shadow silhouetted against the bright security light. It took Vera a moment to recognize Holly. Lucas released Lizzie and lunged at the newcomer; the thin blade of the knife reflected the light and then disappeared, buried into Holly’s clothing. Or into her body. Someone was screaming, and it took Vera a moment to realize the sound came from her own voice. Panic pushed her on. She’d almost reached the group, when Holly kicked out with her feet. Lucas fell to the ground, his face in the sodden leaves, and Holly was sitting on top of him, twisting the knife from his grip. Lizzie Redhead started running away through the trees.
‘Stop her!’ Holly’s face was white in the unnatural light. Vera looked for blood, but saw none.
‘Never mind Lizzie bloody Redhead. Joe’ll get her. Did he hit you?’
Holly seemed not to hear. Am I really here? Vera thought. Or am I some sort of ghost? Invisible and completely powerless. Can they all manage fine without me?
She helped Holly pull Lucas to his feet.
‘I’m fine,’ Holly said. ‘A scratch.’
Lucas looked up at Vera. Even with his face smeared with mud, he managed to turn on the automatic smile. There was still the need to be believed. ‘Inspector, please don’t be misled. Did you see what happened? These young women assaulted me.’
‘Is that what happened when you were a prison officer?’ Vera was still panting after the run, still shaking with anxiety, and she couldn’t stop herself. ‘All those lads you abused in the detention centre. Had they assaulted you too?’
She was aware of footsteps to her right and saw Joe Ashworth making his way from the drive. He had grabbed Lizzie by the arm and was pulling her after him.
‘Read him his rights and get back up, then take him to the station, Holly.’ Vera felt suddenly very tired. ‘Joe, get Lizzie to her parents. They’re in Gilswick. If not there, then back at the house. I’m going back to Valley Farm to tell this man’s wife that her husband’s a triple-murderer.’ She thought it was the least she could do.
Chapter Forty-Six
Vera found Lorraine in her studio at the back of the house. She was working at an easel and an anglepoise lamp shone straight onto the painting. Lorraine looked up as Vera walked in. ‘Is it over?’
‘Did you know?’ Vera sat on a wooden rocking chair with a patchwork cushion.
‘I didn’t know. I didn’t want to know. I think I guessed. Then I told myself I was being paranoid and tried to forget about it. What reason could Nigel have for killing two strangers?’ She paused. ‘I wondered if the cancer had spread to my brain, eating away at it, making me imagine things. If I was going quietly mad. It’s been a horrible week.’
‘You’re one of the sanest people I know. When did you suspect?’
‘Friday afternoon, just before the party. Not that Nige was the killer then, but that something was wrong. He’d been in town shopping, stocking up on drinks and snacks.’
‘He showed us the receipt,’ Vera said.
‘He seemed to be away a long time. And when he came back he changed and put all his clothes in the washing machine. He’s pretty domesticated, but that seemed odd.’ She turned away from the painting and wiped her brush on an oily rag. ‘And he seemed very wired and hyper, insisting on dragging me down to The Lamb for a drink.’
Vera didn’t speak and Lorraine continued.
‘Also I knew there was something in his past, something that he wanted to forget. He refused to tell me about it. Once there was the start of a news item, and he switched off the television before I could see what it was about. “Why can’t they leave all that alone, after all this time?” he said. “What good does it do now?” He wasn’t himself for days.’
‘He’d worked as a senior prison officer,’ Vera said. ‘Before he set up his own security company. One reason why the business did so well. He had contacts. People trusted him, just at a time when a number of the prison functions were being put out to private tender.’
There was a noise in the next-door garden. Janet O’Kane locking the hens in for the night.
‘I knew he’d worked in the prison service,’ Lorraine said. ‘He never liked to talk about it. I thought it was a kind of snobbishness. He wanted people to think of him as a successful businessman.’
‘He worked in a detention centre for young offenders in Staffordshire. Shirley Hewarth was a recently qualified probation officer based in the same institution. It took us a while to make the connection. Perhaps we didn’t really know what we were looking for and we got distracted by other things.’
‘What could possibly have happened there to make Nigel kill three people?’
Vera was surprised by how calm Lorraine seemed. Her interest in the story was almost academic. Perhaps she had her own death on her mind.
‘It was a different time,’ Vera said. Though perhaps not so different. ‘The Home Office thought the answer to youth crime was a short, sharp shock. Military – everything done on the run. No excuses and no compassion.’
‘Like a US boot-camp.’
‘Maybe. A few of the officer
s took the idea too far. Even enjoyed the cruelty, perhaps. The power. There was abuse. Some lads tried to break their own limbs to get invalided out.’ Like soldiers in the First World War, though surely the regime can’t have been that horrific. ‘Many of them lived with the effect of their sentence for years. There’ve been some recent court cases, lawyers representing the kids and demanding justice, a public inquiry. The inmates were young. Some boys only fourteen and fifteen. Lots of them were screwed up and disturbed.’
‘So that was the news report Nigel turned off.’ Lorraine stretched. She seemed uncomfortable and rubbed her back.
‘One of the lads was from a well-to-do family. A bit of a tearaway who’d got involved with drugs. Name of Simon Randle.’
‘A relative of the Carswells’ house-sitter.’
‘An older brother. He never got over the experience. Went off to Oxford, but then committed suicide halfway through his first year. The parents never told Patrick that Simon had been inside, but he must have found out about it somehow. Got obsessed and started digging into the past to find out what had happened. Resented the fact that his parents hadn’t told him the whole story about his brother. He was a bright boy and he knew about research.’
‘He came to the valley because he’d tracked Nigel down?’ Lorraine got to her feet and went to a small fridge in the corner of the room. She took out a bottle of wine and found two glasses and a corkscrew on a shelf. ‘Will you do the honours, Inspector? I don’t have the strength in my arms any more. Some days I can’t hold a paintbrush.’
Vera opened the bottle and poured two glasses. ‘Nigel was the officer that Simon Randle hated most.’
‘I can’t imagine Nigel as a sadist.’ Lorraine looked up at Vera. ‘Are you sure about all this?’
‘Perhaps it wasn’t about being a sadist,’ Vera said, ‘but about not wanting to stand out from the crowd. Obeying orders. Doing what was expected. Being good at his job. He’d have been a young man then.’
Lorraine gave a little smile. ‘That does sound more like Nigel.’
‘It was premeditated.’ Vera couldn’t quite give Lucas an easy ride, even to please Lorraine. ‘He killed Randle with a spade stolen from the O’Kanes’ house and he scattered a few of John’s sweet wrappers on his way. Laying a false trail. He’d have been happy for someone else to be convicted.’
‘I suppose he was desperate.’
Vera thought this was a surreal conversation. She was chatting quite calmly to a woman who was about to die, about a man who’d killed three people.
‘He must have felt trapped,’ Lorraine went on. ‘He wanted so much to be respectable and to make me proud. He’d just become a magistrate and thought that would be the opportunity he needed to meet the right sort of people.’ She drank half the glass in one go. ‘I love it here. It’s my idea of paradise. I wouldn’t have wanted to move away.’
‘Another of the lads in the centre was a local lad called Jason Crow. He was there a few years after Randle.’ Vera kept her voice even. The woman deserved information. It was quite dark outside now and the whole room was lit by the single spot from the anglepoise lamp. ‘Builder and businessman. Lover of Lizzie Redhead, before she went wild and ended up in prison.’
‘So Lizzie knew about Nigel?’
‘Jason recognized him when they negotiated the work on your house. He must have told Lizzie.’ Vera paused. ‘Jason survived the experience of the detention centre very well. Says it was the making of him. It didn’t stop him offending, but he was never convicted again. But Lizzie remembered the stories he’d told about the abuse there. And Jason still had nightmares about it. When we arrested Nigel this evening, she was trying to blackmail him.’
Lorraine reached out and topped up her glass, waved the bottle at Vera, who shook her head. ‘What about the older man? Martin Benton. Was he in the detention centre too?’
‘No. Martin was a computer geek. A bit sad. Patrick Randle was employing him to dig around in the old Home Office files and find out what the government knew about the regime at the centre. He was planning a big story in the press about his brother’s suicide. Martin and Patrick had come across each other because they shared a passion for moths. Not exactly a coincidence, but a weird connection that threw us for a bit.’ Vera thought how thrilled Martin must have been. His first job as a self-employed computer consultant and Patrick had asked him to be an ethical hacker. It would be the most exciting thing he’d ever done in his life. He’d told his friend Frank that the work was secret, and that Frank would be proud of him.
‘And the woman? The social worker?’
‘As I told you, she worked in the same detention centre. Benton must have come across her name when he was digging around in the records. He admired her and was grateful to her because she gave him work, but he passed on her name to Randle and they corresponded. She’d always felt guilty about her time at the detention centre, the fact that she hadn’t done anything to stop what was happening. It was what drove her to work for practically nothing at the charity for offenders. I think she suspected that Nigel was involved in the murder and confronted him.’ Vera knew this was all guesswork. She hoped Nigel would be filling in the gaps to Joe and Holly now. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this,’ she said. ‘The CPS would go ape if they found out. But I thought you should know.’
‘Don’t worry, Inspector. I won’t be around when this comes to court. The CPS need never know.’
‘Aye, well, that’s what I thought.’ Vera shut her eyes for a moment and then she drained her glass. ‘Are you okay on your own?’
‘When will I be able to see Nigel?’
‘Not tonight. Tomorrow maybe.’
Lorraine looked up. ‘He did all this for me, you know. He’d have toughed out the press and the lawyers, if he was still on his own. He was trying to protect me from the publicity. It wasn’t just his own reputation that mattered to him.’
Vera nodded. She thought that was probably true. Nigel believed in himself as a good husband and protector.
‘I might go and see Janet,’ Lorraine said. ‘She’s a good friend. I can’t face Annie and Sam.’
‘I’ll walk round with you.’ Vera followed Lorraine down the stairs and out into the darkness. The sky was clear in patches and there was a faint moon and a smattering of stars. She stood by the Land Rover while Lorraine tapped at her neighbour’s door. She watched the women embrace, backlit by the house, and then she climbed into the vehicle and drove away from the valley. It occurred to her as she passed the big house that she’d have nobody to comfort her in a tragedy. She thought it was probably simpler that way, and besides she’d never been able to cope with sympathy.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Holly found herself in Vera’s house in the hills for the second time during the investigation. Outside it was completely dark and the lights in the village below were hidden by the drizzle. Vera had conjured a meal out of nothing. Lamb stew and home-made bread. ‘Joanna seems to know when I’m busy. She’s a good neighbour and she looks after me.’ Holly had given up red meat years ago, but the smell was so delicious that she took a bowl. Vera poked at the fire. They sat with their food on their knees, the hunks of bread on a plate on the floor between them.
‘I never liked Lucas.’ Vera had dribbled lamb fat down the front of her jersey. She sounded smug. ‘Never trusted him.’
‘He wasn’t a bad man, though. Not at the start.’ Holly thought Lucas hadn’t ever been a villain like Jason Crow. After all, Lucas hadn’t been the person to decide that young scrotes needed a brutal regime to sort them out. That had been dreamed up by the politicians, and journalists weren’t threatening the Home Secretary of the time with exposure and legal action. The newspapers had gone for the easy targets, the men and women doing their jobs. ‘Not until Patrick Randle started hassling him.’
‘Just following orders, do you think?’ Vera kept her voice amused, but her eyes were sharp. ‘Not his responsibility if a few lads were so screwed up by their time
inside that they went on to commit suicide, become alcoholic or violent themselves?’
‘Not unless he crossed the line.’ Holly supposed she should let this go, but she was tired of Vera’s bullying.
‘Ah, that line . . .’ Vera leaned back in her chair with her eyes half-closed. ‘If only we knew exactly where it was.’
There was a moment of silence so that Holly wondered if Vera had fallen asleep. The big woman roused herself to set her bowl on a table behind her and continued talking. ‘In terms of this investigation, it doesn’t matter what really happened all those years ago. What matters is that Patrick Randle believed that Nigel Lucas had caused his brother’s suicide and wanted the world to know what had gone on in the detention centre. And Lucas made up his mind to stop him going public.’ She looked at Holly. ‘That was premeditated murder – the worst crime there is. So do I personally think Nigel Lucas was capable of beating up the lads in his care? Tormenting them until he drove them mad? Yes, I do.’
Joe shifted uncomfortably. He’d never been much good at confrontation. ‘Talk us through the details,’ he said. ‘Tell us what happened.’
Vera beamed at him. She knew he was distracting them. ‘Aye, why not? If we go all philosophical you’ll be here all night, and I need my beauty sleep. Though maybe we should get Holly to tell it. She got to the answer before the rest of us.’ The comment was barbed, so Holly squirmed in her seat and expected a lecture on following direct orders. But Vera sat up straight in her chair and began her lecture. Holly found herself impressed by the crisp delivery and by Vera’s sharp mind.
‘Patrick came across details of his brother’s suicide, and the fact that Simon had been inside. That caused a breakdown of communication with his mother, Alicia – Patrick resented the fact that she’d kept the whole thing from him. He tracked down Shirley Hewarth and Nigel Lucas. Shirley had been Simon’s welfare officer, and Nigel the prison officer in charge of Simon’s wing. Shirley had obviously been distressed by her ex-client’s suicide and must have discussed the case at home. If you remember, Jack Hewarth thought Randle’s name was familiar.’
