No One Will Hear

by Joel Hames

  “Not relevant to defence or prosecution.”

  PART 3: SONG

  20: Unwoven

  I STOOD BACK and watched as Brooks-Powell pounded on the door. There was a bell, an obvious bell sitting there clear as day just to the side, but Brooks-Powell was in the mood for pounding.

  He might, I had to concede, have a point.

  I’d called him straight back, as soon as I’d read those words. Not relevant to defence or prosecution. And shoved in the bottom of a file half a million pages long, hidden from everyone else involved in the case. Hidden from me.

  I was furious with Elizabeth. Brooks-Powell’s anger took an entirely different direction.

  “She knows,” he said. “She bloody knows!”

  “Who?”

  “Who? Lizzy bloody Maurier, of course. She knows about this. She’s known all along and she’s been deliberately keeping this from us. She’s got all those bloody boxes, all those bloody files, what have you seen, a tenth of them, a hundredth? She’s got all this. She knows.”

  “Slow down,” I replied. “The boxes are full of poems. It’s her mother who knew, not Lizzy. No doubt Elizabeth thought it was just a coincidence and didn’t want to muddy the waters, especially once we had Evans in Warrington on the day. But Lizzy?”

  “She knows. I’m telling you. I’m going round there.”

  And he’d hung up.

  I stood there, bewildered, for a moment, wondering what I should do next, and then I grabbed my coat and my keys and headed out the door. I typed a text for Claire as I jogged to the tube station, head bowed against the wind and rain. “Had to go out,” it said. “See you later.” I wiped a few drops from the screen and looked at what I’d written, and added a question mark at the end, which made it seem friendlier at the same time as asking another, more pertinent question, namely where the hell are you? I hit send as I sprinted down the escalator, just before my signal cut out. I didn’t know what Brooks-Powell was planning, but I had an idea I’d need to be there to soften it.

  I ran all the way from Notting Hill tube, and reached the corner of Lizzy’s road as Brooks-Powell was heading up the path to her front door. “Stop!” I shouted, and he looked up at me, shook his head, and started pounding. When I reached him twenty seconds later he was still pounding, no let-up, no break or diminution in the blows. I was glad I wasn’t that door. I was glad I was the right side of it. If Lizzy Maurier had any sense, she’d keep it shut.

  It seemed she had no sense, because as Brooks-Powell was drawing back his right fist for a renewal of the assault, the door opened, and there she was, arms folded, head to one side, the very picture of the wronged woman.

  “David,” she said, and he took a step back, suddenly deflated. “There’s a doorbell,” she continued, pointing at it, and then turned and walked back inside, leaving the door open. As Brooks-Powell started to follow I reached him and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Let me do the talking,” I said, quietly. He stopped and stared at me, and I could see the fight dying in his eyes. He nodded, and I followed him inside.

  The boxes had gone. The flat looked the better for it, but there was still an air of neglect that didn’t go with the cream walls and the shiny light fittings. Nothing I could see or smell, nothing I could put my finger on. Just an air. She led us through to the living room, pointed to the armchairs – there were two now, where there had just been one before, but with the boxes gone there was plenty of room – and sat down on the sofa, staring at us. No opening pleasantries. No offer of a drink. I sensed Brooks-Powell turning to look at me. It was time to begin.

  “Lizzy, we’ve found something that’s come as quite a surprise.”

  Brooks-Powell took a loud, long breath. No doubt he’d have opened with a more aggressive gambit. Lizzy carried on staring at me. I went on.

  “It turns out Trawden and Akadi knew one another. Before the whole Evans thing. Back in the eighties.”

  She shrugged, now, as if she didn’t know a thing about it and it wouldn’t have mattered if she had. I waited for her to say something, but all I got was the shrug. So I continued.

  “And more important, your mother knew about it. She knew all about it.”

  “And,” thundered Brooks-Powell, already forgetting it was me that was supposed to be doing the talking, “she didn’t tell anyone.”

  He’d managed to keep his voice down to a moderate roar, which was an improvement, but I shot him a warning look, anyway, and he gave a brief nod of acknowledgement.

  “There’s a photo,” I said, “of Trawden and Akadi, together, in a pub in 1981. Your mother’s written on it, says it’s not relevant to the case. But even if it wasn’t relevant, doesn’t it strike you as odd that she never told anyone?”

  Lizzy nodded. Her arms were still folded, a barrier across her chest. Her jaw was set. But there was something else in her eyes. A weakening. I pressed on, knowing what I was about to say would be difficult to hear, but knowing at the same time that it had to be said.

  “Lizzy, this is important. Your mother was murdered. They haven’t caught the killer. If you knew about this, if there’s anything else you know, you’ve got to tell us. You’ve got to.”

  Still she sat in silence. I turned to Brooks-Powell; he looked at me, a question on his face. Is it time?

  It was time. It was time to wheel out the big guns. I nodded.

  “Come on, Lizzy,” he said. “Talk to us. It’s not like someone’s cut out your tongue, too.”

  She gasped – the first sound she’d made since she let us in. She gasped, and shook her head, and Brooks-Powell, encouraged by the response, carried on.

  “Or maybe they have. I mean, look at you. I remember you, ten, fifteen years ago, you were full of life. Bursting with it. And look at you now, for Christ’s sake. Why are you protecting her? She gagged you and shoved you in a box your whole life, and even now she’s dead you won’t climb out. But you can, Lizzy.”

  She was still shaking her head, but there were no tears. I’d been expecting tears. Instead, there was something else, a loosening of that jaw, a sense almost of relief. Of release.

  And Brooks-Powell, having gone in for the kill, was playing it more sensibly and gently than I’d have given him credit for. He’d got to his feet and walked towards her and extended a hand, and now he was kneeling down in front of her speaking so quietly I could hardly hear the words.

  “Climb out, Lizzy. I know it’s hard. But you can, and you must. Climb out.”

  And to my amazement, she took his hand, and as he rose slowly to his feet, she rose too, until they were both standing. She turned to look at me. Now the tears were coming.

  “I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “I should have said something. I should have told someone. But I couldn’t. Don’t you see?”

  I sensed Brooks-Powell about to argue the point, and jumped in before he could.

  “Yes. Of course I can see, Lizzy. Of course we can see. But now you can. You can tell us. You can tell us everything.”

  She nodded. She sat back on the sofa. Brooks-Powell returned to his chair. And the tale began to unspin.

  “Yes,” she said. “There was something. She’d always been interested in that case, but in the last few months it was like an obsession. She called me every day, and she’d pretend to be calling about something else, but at some point she’d always mention Trawden. She’d sat on something for decades – I suppose it was this picture, I didn’t know about it, truly, but I knew she was keeping a secret somewhere. She even told me as much, said there was a fact that she should probably have disclosed, but it wasn’t relevant, and she still believed that. And,” she turned to me, frowning, “and she’s right, isn’t she? I mean, whatever else we know, we know that Evans killed that girl. He was there, on the day. We know it.”

  I nodded. I’d known it for years. I’d been certain of it, however much I despised Trawden, however haunted I was by those faces at the trial, however uncomfortable I felt. I’d known it.
<
br />   Only now, I wasn’t so sure I knew it any more.

  “There was this man, Shapiro, I think he was called, she kept saying maybe Shapiro was right. She tried to speak to Trawden, but he wouldn’t make himself available, and in the end he moved his affairs to some other firm. That only made her more determined. She managed to speak to Akadi, and she claimed he’d lied to her the same way he always lied, but she’d found something anyway.”

  “What? What did she find?”

  Brooks-Powell was sitting up, unable to contain himself.

  “Connor,” she said, and I felt my heart miss a beat. “There was a man called Connor. When Akadi and Evans were in Pentonville, they shared a cell.”

  Brooks-Powell and I looked at one another, his frown echoing my own.

  “We know that,” I said, and she shook her head.

  “No, you don’t understand. They shared a cell with Connor.”

  There was something in that. I couldn’t put my finger on it, I couldn’t figure out why it was important, but it was. I knew it was.

  Brooks-Powell didn’t feel the same way.

  “So what?” he said. “I’m sure they shared cells with plenty of people.”

  Lizzy shook her head, again. “No they didn’t. Not Akadi and Evans. Two to a cell, back then. First Connor and Evans, then Evans and Akadi. Except for one fortnight in the middle, right around the time Evans made his confession, when all three of them were in together. Overcrowding, apparently, but it didn’t last long. Connor attacked Akadi, Connor got kicked out of the cell, and after that it was just Akadi and Evans, right up to the day Evans died.”

  Brooks-Powell was still frowning. I wasn’t. I was starting to inch my way towards the light.

  “And what, Connor knew something, from his time in the cell with them? He knew something that might have contradicted Akadi’s version of the confession?”

  She nodded. “Something like that. We never knew. Mother never knew. She thought she’d tracked him down, and I have a feeling she was supposed to be meeting him the night she died, but I don’t know, I don’t know anything, it’s all so confused, it was never meant to be like this, she can’t be dead.”

  The tears were coming, again, thick and fast. I stood and walked over to her, put a hand on her shoulder, and she turned and looked up at me and gave me a desperate, meaningless smile.

  “But it’s not real, is it, Sam? I mean, I know he’s an odd man, Trawden. Maybe even a dangerous man. I know he’s a liar. But he didn’t kill that girl. Evans killed that girl. You proved it.”

  I nodded, again, even though the uncertainty had grabbed itself a solid foothold and was starting to gain ground. Evans had been there. Evans was a killer, proven and convicted. That wasn’t enough, not by itself. But there was more. There was the forensic evidence – I’d hardly glanced at the forensic evidence, it was all academic by that point, I doubt anyone had examined it very thoroughly, because putting Evans on the scene was enough to do the job.

  “He’s not a murderer, Sam,” she was saying. “I’m sure of it. He’s clever but there’s something wonderful about him, too. Mother never saw that. But there is.”

  Wonderful? I wanted to explore that further, because wonderful was the last word I’d have used to describe Trawden, even with his strange ability to be a different person for every audience, but Brooks-Powell was focussed on the more mundane details.

  “She thought she’d tracked him down, you said. Do you know how?”

  She shook her head, frowned, and then nodded. “Wait here,” she said, and stumbled out of the room. We heard the sound of something tearing from elsewhere in the flat – that little study, from my recollection of the layout – and a moment later she was back with a piece of paper in her hand. She stood there, unsure which of us to give it to, and Brooks-Powell answered for her by taking it from her and bringing it over to me.

  “Search,” it said. Elizabeth’s handwriting, again. “Connor Trawden Akadi Evans Grimshaw.”

  I was trying to figure out what it meant, but Brooks-Powell was one step ahead of me.

  “Where’s your computer?” he asked, and Lizzy led us up the corridor to the study. The boxes were gone from here, too, and I wondered what she’d done with them. She hadn’t sold them, that much was certain; there wouldn’t have been more than half a dozen buyers in the country. Maybe she’d pulped them, fulfilled her mother’s wish, fulfilled her own promise fifteen years too late. Brooks-Powell sat at the desk and typed in the words, and a bunch of random pages – just lists of names, really – came up. But at the top of the list, not random at all, was something I recognised.

  “Hit that one,” I said, pointing at it.

  It was the blog, the fan page, the website I couldn’t quite describe. White text on black background, bare factual account of the murder and the trial and the appeal and the release. Little detail of any note. And, I realised, as I scanned the few short paragraphs again, no mention anywhere of the word “Connor”.

  “It’s not here,” I said, disappointed, but Brooks-Powell shook his head.

  “Has to be here. It was the number one hit. That’s a bunch of names we’ve fed in, there are hundreds of directories that’ll have them all, so why does this one come up first?”

  “But the name’s not there.”

  “Oh, it’s there,” he said, turning to me with a sly grin that reminded me of the Brooks-Powell I’d known back at Mauriers. But now that grin was working with me, not against. “It’s there. Probably in the metadata. We can find it, if you give me a little time.”

  “The what?” I asked, but he’d turned back to the screen already, tapping away, looking up, shaking his head, tapping away again, repeating the whole process. I glanced behind me, but Lizzy was nowhere to be seen. I hoped she was OK.

  “Got it,” said Brooks-Powell, finally, turning back to me with triumph written all over his face. “You know what happens when you highlight text on a web page, just select it to copy and paste or whatever?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It changes colour.”

  “Precisely. And the easiest way to hide a word? Write it in the same colour as the background. So all I have to do is highlight the whole page, and – voila!”

  I looked at the screen. He’d selected the complete text, every paragraph, and all the blank space above and below it. The text was now blue, the background was white, and the blank space wasn’t blank any more.

  Every single gap in the original text was filled. Every spare line contained the same word, over and over again. The breaks between the paragraphs teemed with it, even the breaks between individual words, in a font so tiny you could hardly read it. But it was there. Over and over and over.

  The word was “Connor”.

  “This can’t be a coincidence,” said Brooks-Powell, and I found myself nodding. Someone had put that word there deliberately. Someone who knew what Connor knew, or knew that Connor knew something. Perhaps Connor himself.

  “We’ve got to find out who runs this site,” I said, and he turned back to the screen and started typing again.

  “Got it,” he said, a moment later. “Used ICANN.”

  I wondered whether it was worth asking who or what ICANN was, and decided it probably wasn’t. Instead, I waited.

  “Bollocks,” he said, with feeling. “Look. Bloody corporate address. PO Box. It’s held by a company and they’re not telling who’s behind that company. They’re not supposed to do that.”

  “OK,” I said. “It’s not what we were hoping for. But it’s a start.”

  “How?”

  “Leave it with me.”

  He nodded. We left the study, wondering where Lizzy had got to, but we didn’t have to wonder for long. The quiet sobs coming from the bedroom were clue enough.

  “So I’ve done it,” she said, as we came in. She was lying on the bed, her arms outstretched either side of her, the tears flowing freely down her face.

  She was naked.

  “I’ve broken the sil
ence,” she continued, as Brooks-Powell and I stared, speechless. “I’ve climbed out of the box. I’ve shed my old skin.” She gestured at her body. “Are you happy now? Think I’ll be happy now?”

  I could sense Brooks-Powell preparing to say something, and held up a hand to stop him. Lizzy wasn’t finished.

  “Tereu, Tereu,” she said. I remembered this. The wicked king. The rapist. Brooks-Powell knew all this already. He’d probably sucked it in with his mother’s milk.

  “She cut out my tongue. But she didn’t bake me. That’s something, isn’t it? She didn’t bake me in a pie.”

  It might have been a question, but she wasn’t expecting an answer, because she went right on.

  “Did I weave a tapestry of my own? Can I weave a tapestry now? Do tongues grow back? Is it too late to sing?”

  She stopped, now, and looked up at us – until that moment she’d been addressing the walls.

  “It’s OK,” she said. I thought she might be right. The tears had dried up and there was something close to a smile on her face. “It’s OK. It really is.”

  “We can’t leave you like this,” I said, and she shook her head, the smile broadening enough to fool anyone that didn’t know her and most that did. It didn’t fool me. She might be on the way, but she wasn’t there yet.

  “It’s OK,” she repeated. “I’m not right. I’ve got problems. Look at me.” She gestured at herself, at her naked body, and laughed. “Oh, I’ve got problems alright. But they’re problems I know how to handle. I’ve handled them most of my life. I’m probably better equipped to do it now than I’ve ever been. And I’ve got the grief circle to help, if I need to.”

  I tensed, expecting a snort or a muttered expletive from Brooks-Powell, but to my relief, he managed to hold his tongue.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  As we let the front door fall shut behind us, my phone rang. Detective Inspector Martins. She wasn’t happy, but I doubted happy was a state she was familiar with.