by M B Vincent
‘How’re you doing?’ Jess sat on the side of the bed. ‘I hear they’re keeping you in for observation. You were out cold for fifteen minutes or so.’
‘I can never thank you enough for what you did.’ Helena tried to sit up a little more.
‘Stay, stay. No need to thank me.’
‘But you saved my life. You risked your own.’
‘You can do the same for me sometime.’ Jess heard herself. This was no time for flippancy. She shut her mouth and let the woman thank her. At length.
‘Three lives lost,’ said Helena, finally. Her lips thinned to nothing. Her nostrils flared.
Jess recognised a kindred soul; Helena didn’t want to cry in front of her. ‘Neil got away. Just vanished in the scrum.’ For once his cellophane demeanour had worked in his favour.
‘He’s not dangerous without her.’
Theresa had become an evil too fearsome to name. Jess hoped Karen Knott triple-checked the lock on the holding cell. ‘Neil was a mash-up of victim and perpetrator,’ said Jess.
‘Poor confused man-child,’ murmured Helena.
Jess thought of the clues nobody had picked up on. The antihistamines at Neil’s godforsaken house; the wheezing monster on the hill had suffered from hay fever, not asthma. The reinternment of his grandparents beneath the kitchen floor. The pristine workshop. All there in plain sight, for the world to see. People in pain, thought Jess, are the most dangerous of all. ‘Did you wonder,’ said Jess, ‘why I turned up at your house last night?’
Helena didn’t meet her eye. ‘Are you going to tell me?’
‘I had no idea you were in danger. It was serendipity that I got there so soon after Theresa and Neil dragged you away. I knew it had to be them who’d taken you. I knew they were killers.’
Helena fiddled with the neck of her NHS gown.
‘Still no questions, Helena? Like how did I know Theresa and Neil abducted you? Here’s another one – how did I know where they’d taken you?’
‘Jess, it’s so late. Or is it early?’ Helena managed a tired laugh. ‘I need to rest, and so do you.’
‘This needs to be said, Helena.’ The room grew smaller. Dawn is a time for secrets. ‘It wasn’t a random attack. Your murder was going to be different to the others. Theresa was taking revenge on you.’
‘On me? Our paths never crossed.’
‘Just once they did, Helena. You murdered the love of her life.’
It was a statement, not a question, but Helena nodded. Her face found a paler colour, somehow.
‘I went to your house to encourage you to confess to the murder of Gavin Blake.’
A comment of Iris’s had set dominoes falling. They clicked and they clacked until the last one down had sparked a revelation.
Losing a loved one without a gentle goodbye haunts one forever.
Jess set off carefully down a thorny path. ‘I remember you dropping Becky off at Gavin’s party that afternoon.’ Seven-year-old Jess had been hopping about in the hallway, looking for the loo, when Mrs Blake opened the door to Helena and her daughter, Becky. ‘Becky was upset.’
‘I never used to tell her off,’ said Helena. She’d given up trying to look innocent. She surrendered to the memory. ‘Never needed to. But I was tetchy that day, and Becky was moody. I’d had a huge row with my husband.’ She glanced at Jess. ‘Out of Becky’s earshot, of course.’
That ‘of course’ was a sticking plaster, thought Jess. Helena would never know if her daughter heard the shouting or not.
‘It was one thing after another, when usually we were so calm. She didn’t want to wear her yellow cossie. She didn’t want her hair combed.’
‘Sounds run-of-the-mill to me,’ said Jess. ‘I used to hide under my bed when I saw my mum get out the hairbrush.’
‘I snapped at her,’ said Helena. Abrupt. As if confessing to, well, murder. She put her face in her hands. Her voice was muffled. ‘I pulled her hair while I did her plaits and . . . I was glad.’
When Helena couldn’t go on, Jess digressed a little. ‘I was three years above Becky at school. I remember a teacher, Miss Lee, asked Becky’s class to draw their hero, and the paintings were put up in the assembly hall. There was a Postman Pat and a Spider-Man or two.’ She drew down Helena’s fingers from her wet face. ‘Becky drew you.’
The other children noticed how close Becky was to her mother. Jess had asked Harriet, ‘Why can’t you arrange my dinner in a smiley face like Becky’s mummy does?’ Harriet had suggested that perhaps Jess should go and live with this Becky’s mummy if she was so wonderful.
‘I dumped her at the party like a package.’
Jess didn’t remember it that way, and said so. Iris had been on the money; Helena’s recollection was poisoned with guilt.
‘All afternoon I missed her little face. I planned our evening, how I’d make it up to her. I went to pick her up at three. That’s what it said on the invite. Three.’ Helena faltered again. ‘I could have stayed when I dropped her off,’ she said. The words were thick in her mouth. ‘Gavin’s mother asked did I want to hang about and have “wineypoos” with the other mums. I didn’t fit in with her and her friends. They weren’t my type. So I left Becky there and went home.’
Jess could hardly bear to listen. Expecting wet hair and a party bag, Helena had returned to an oddly febrile atmosphere. An ambulance. The awed, not-quite-comprehending quiet of the children gathered together like lambs by a clutch of adults. A mummified shape in a blanket being brought out through the sliding glass door of the pool house. The kernel of the bad dream already knitting itself together in Jess’s young head. She’d drowned many times over in her childhood bed. Its return had been a bony finger prodding her to remember. ‘You never got to say goodbye.’
‘With sickness I would have had a grace period. A chance to hold her little body to me. Tell her I loved her.’ Helena tried to describe the scope of her pain. She stuttered, made half sentences. Her arms were suddenly empty, she said. Becky’s room became a museum. All the little shepherd’s pies – with extra vegetables smuggled into the recipe – sat uneaten in the freezer.
Gathering herself, Helena said, ‘It was hard to make sense of Becky’s death. I needed, desperately, to know what happened. The Blakes . . .’ After decades, it still stung. She closed her eyes. ‘They wouldn’t take my calls. I hammered on their door. Nothing. Other parents told me they’d drank heavily at the party, that the teenaged boy hired to keep watch on the pool was nowhere to be seen, that the kids jumped in and out unsupervised. I didn’t want to blame them, Jess. It was about knowing. It was about Becky. About her death having meaning.’
‘I heard they did all they could to avoid responsibility.’
‘The inquest was obscene.’ The word didn’t suit Helena. ‘They wriggled and told half-truths. She sobbed. As if she was the one who . . .’ Another pause. ‘I listened to Gavin’s mother say how nobody would ever understand the toll it had taken on her. As if I should apologise for my daughter’s rudeness in dying in their pool.’
‘They broke your heart twice over.’
Helena stared. ‘No, Jess. There was nothing left to break. I saw my girl reduced to a debating topic. Nobody mentioned the gap in her teeth, or the way her hair, this bit,’ Helena patted the top of her head, ‘would never lie flat.’
The silence allowed both women to take a deep breath.
‘The verdict was misadventure. The Blakes opened champagne outside the court.’
Jess imagined the solid hate that began to calcify inside Helena as she heard the corks pop.
‘I watched Gavin grow from a boy to a teen to a man. I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was growing up instead of my Becky. Yet her death didn’t touch him or his family.’ Helena turned an urgent face to Jess. ‘Am I wrong about that? Did my grief colour my judgement?’
Jess considered. This was a time for truth, after all, and she said, finally, ‘You’re not entirely wrong. Gavin never spoke about the drowning. He was shallow
, unthinking, spoiled.’ Speaking ill of the dead left a bad taste in Jess’s mouth. ‘That doesn’t mean the tragedy didn’t affect the family, though.’
‘He was wasting a life that Becky would have grabbed with both hands.’ Helena seethed, two livid points of red on her cheeks. ‘That stupid band. His witless songs. Drugs. Going around as if he was a celebrity.’ Her hands went to her face again. ‘I do hear myself, Jess. I know how I sound. It wasn’t Gavin’s fault. He was seven when it happened. He was as innocent as Becky.’
‘Grief does horrible things to people. My sister-in-law asked me where all your love could have gone when it didn’t have Becky.’
‘Tell her when it has nowhere to settle, it turns into rage. I couldn’t even look at my husband. I saw Becky in his face. Then I had to watch him leave and remarry, and replace our daughter with twin boys.’ Helena steeled herself, sitting taller in her papery gown. ‘Killing Gavin wasn’t about Gavin. It was about his parents. To put them through what I went through.’
Jess understood the motive. She understood the timing; the Rustic Ripper murders were the perfect cover to bereave the Blakes and get away with it. The how was more tricky. ‘How did you manage the murder on your own? You’re so petite.’
‘You know those urban myths about mothers lifting parked cars when their child is trapped? They’re not myths. I read about a woman who faced down a polar bear. Some lady in Texas bit off a dog’s ear to get it away from her toddler. The truth?’ Helena shrugged. ‘It was easy.’
She followed Gavin after the Baldur gig at the Druid’s Head. ‘To your house, Jess.’ A vigil in her car was rewarded with Gavin dawdling out some hours later. ‘I jumped out, opened the bonnet, peered into it. Gavin wandered over. Still tipsy. Post-coital smugness on his face. Asked me if I’d broken down.’
‘Surely he recognised you?’
‘Not a flicker. I relied on his self-absorption and he didn’t let me down.’ Gavin hadn’t seen the tragic mother. He saw a middle-aged woman, unfuckable and therefore unworthy of his interest. ‘He didn’t even notice I was wearing a workman’s boiler suit. I burnt that later, in the spa incinerator.’
The car was easily mended and Gavin accepted her offer of a lift.
‘He made it easy for me by falling fast asleep in the passenger seat. Didn’t even need to use the sedatives I’d had such trouble getting hold of. I parked up in the churchyard and popped on my latex gloves.’ Helena looked at her hands. ‘The same ones I use for colonic irrigation.’
Nice, thought Jess.
‘He didn’t know a thing.’ Helena was firm; this sounded important. ‘Never opened his eyes.’ She’d practised stabbing, she told Jess, with a Waitrose chicken. ‘It wasn’t the same.’
‘You put him on St Agatha’s crucifix because you couldn’t build a cross yourself.’
‘I can’t even hang a picture, never mind make a cross. It took hours to manoeuvre his dead weight up there. It felt so blasphemous, posing him over Jesus like that.’ Helena described the macabre dance. Pressed indecently close to the cadaver. Huffing and panting. ‘I kind of propped him against Our Lord, then wound the rope around his neck, pulled it tight, then held on to him while I reached out to lasso his hands. It was touch-and-go, but I had to finish what I started.’
‘And the eyes?’
‘That was the worst part.’ Helena surprised Jess by imitating the schlurp! the eyes made as they popped out. ‘I almost threw up, but I held it in. The DNA would have implicated me.’
‘How did you know about the eyes in the first place? Eden was rabid about keeping details from the public.’
‘I have Paul Chappell to thank for that.’ Helena, who’d lived alone, carefully tidy and self-sufficient since Becky’s drowning, had stuck a toe in the dating waters. ‘A silly website matched me with the editor of the Echo. I had lunch with him two days after the first murder.’
Jess imagined the scene. Paul Chappell must’ve thought all his birthdays had come at once. A comb-over and a terrible suit sitting at a bistro table with a fragrant, carefully accessorised beautician.
‘Paul’s a lovely chap, but we had nothing in common. I could tell he’d made an effort, poor man.’ In a last-ditch effort to impress, Paul had boasted that he knew ‘official secrets’ about the case on everybody’s lips. ‘He reckoned there’d be more murders. I was only politely interested, but he told me about the eyes. The engraved box. Something clicked. An idea. How I could use this for cover and finally put into practice the fantasy that had been sustaining me for years.’
Jess imagined the making of excuses, the lunch cut short. Paul deflated and alone and paying the bill.
‘Trying to decide which symbol to use flummoxed me. What do I know about pagan whatnots? I just used the first emblem I saw. A plain little circle.’
They said it together.
‘Dry-clean only.’
Jess saw that symbol every single day on her clothes and yet hadn’t made the connection.
‘That looked vaguely supernatural. So I just carried on, you know, carving them. No steam iron. Dry-clean on low heat. Do not wring.’
‘Did it help? Did killing Gavin ease your pain?’
‘Not even a little bit.’ Helena tipped her head back. Jess saw her eyes fill with tears she wouldn’t allow to fall. ‘It was cruel. He was their only child. You should have let Theresa crucify me.’
‘Never. Becky would never have forgiven me.’
‘Do you think,’ said Helena, ‘that you’d be friends?’
When Jess thought of Becky, it was of a cipher; the name equalled death. It was time to lie. And lie well. ‘I know we would.’
Jess held Helena. Daylight had claimed the room. This moment was over. ‘There’s somebody here to see you.’
Helena settled her hair. Sat back. Laced her fingers in her lap.
Jess let Eden in and left them to it.
Out in the corridor her legs wobbled. Her wrist itched. Tears threatened.
Lift doors opened. Rupert stepped out.
‘Drive you home, miss?’
I don’t want to be bad.
Chapter 35
TOWARDS AN ENDING
Saturday 4 June
A kitchen should be busy. It’s the engine of the house. In Harriet’s day – her name was already a byword for an era, like the Georgians, or the Tudors – Harebell House’s kitchen had whirred and ticked.
Today, it approached Harrietian standards.
Bogna was making sausages. Jess couldn’t bear to look. Moose patiently pimped his cracked tennis ball to Kuzbari, who was accepting a coffee from the Judge. Josh was whistling cheerfully to himself, sitting back and manspreading on a wooden chair. Iris smoked in the doorway. Liminal. Hecate-like.
There was no curfew on the soft evening drifting through the garden beyond the windows. No eyes were being gouged out. No crucifixes sprouted in the green green grass of home.
Jess stroked the grain of the table and listened to Kuzbari as he leant against a cabinet.
‘Now that it’s finally happening, things are moving fast.’ When the Judge had asked Jess to help with his cufflinks, he’d been on his way to talk to some old friends at the Foreign Office. ‘If all goes well, my mother will be here, safe and sound, by the end of next week.’ This prospect had worked like a facelift on Kuzbari. His skin shone. A burdened, sad look that Jess had thought inherent was gone from his eyes.
Bogna budged both men out of her way and piled a string of fat bangers into a plastic bucket. She waved a sausage in the Judge’s direction. ‘He pulls strings, isn’t it?’ She loved to show off her slang. ‘All these high-up men. Old boys’ network. Nudge nudge wank wank.’
‘However you managed it, whatever strings you pulled, James,’ said Kuzbari, ‘Shokram, my friend. Shokram from the bottom of my heart.’
Gratitude made her father fidget, so Jess said, ‘I can’t wait to meet your mum.’
‘She is . . . interesting,’ said Mr Kuzbari.
Th
e diplomacy made Jess even more keen. ‘And your wife? Will she come and join you at some point?’
‘We’ll see.’ More careful diplomacy.
The pointed look Bogna threw Jess over the sausages was ignored. The pharmacist’s looks and demeanour had been commented on by the housekeeper. More than once.
Almost tripping over Moose’s ball, Kuzbari approached Jess. ‘May I?’ He flourished a pen.
She held up her left forearm, its plaster sleeve already dingy. Jess angled it so he couldn’t read Mary’s ‘Get well soon you old slag!!!’ He signed with a flourish below the neat ‘Rupert J. Lawson QC’.
‘We’ll miss you, Jess,’ said Kuzbari, dotting the i.
‘You won’t,’ said Jess. ‘Your mother will keep you busy.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Don’t ask!’ advised Bogna. ‘Some mad little plan in that big brain, eh?’ She tapped Jess on the fringe with a sausage.
‘I have to set my life going again. Like a gold watch,’ said Jess.
Iris regarded Jess through a haze of violet smoke. ‘Wherever you go, Jess, you take yourself with you.’
‘I haven’t thanked you for helping me discover that Helena murdered Gavin.’
‘Little old me?’ drawled Iris. She was wearing a linen shift that would look like a bin bag on Jess.
‘You and Susannah. Comments you made about love and loss. I must thank her too.’
‘Don’t expect her to understand what you mean. Mark my words, as James would say, the next drama in this family is that marriage.’
‘I won’t be around to watch,’ said Jess. While there was a puzzle to solve, she’d been useful. ‘I can’t stand by and watch the triumphant return of Pan. They’re saying he won’t even do jail time for the drugs.’
‘The papers,’ said the Judge, ‘are calling him a martyr for the way the police fingered him for the murders.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about Pan,’ said Iris. ‘A prominent member of the Women’s Institute owns Pitt’s Field. She’ll have him evicted and the rest of the WI will run him out of town. They’re more ruthless than the SS.’
