by Bowes, K T
“He didn’t!” Jayden interjected crossly. “I don’t know who you’ve been talking to but they’ve got a few facts wrong. Cecil held himself with complete dignity. It was his son, Martin, who...”
“Who what?”
Chris Lambert was sharp and too late, Jayden realised how once again she had been played. “It doesn’t matter,” she tried, “Martin didn’t kill the vicar. He doesn’t have it in him!”
“What did he say, Miss Mitchell?”
Jayden shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “Cecil was quite shaken and Martin was in the process of helping him out through the doors. He leaned into the vicar and said, ‘You’re going to get what’s coming to you.’ Then they left. I followed them out and helped Martin get his father into the front seat of his car. Cecil looked sick. But I promise you, Martin didn’t do it.”
Her voice sounded plaintive even to herself and it was unattractive and subordinate. Guilt accompanied a wave of sickness at the thought that she had exonerated Cecil and incriminated his son. “Look,” she tried, her voice forcibly calm and placatory, “I spoke to Martin just after Christmas. He told me that it was all fine; his father had asked him just to let it go. Martin and his wife are members of a lovely little parish church out at Stow and Cecil had been there with them and loved it. It was fine; they were all moving on with their lives.”
“The person I spoke to mentioned that the Macdonalds had a key to the church so that Mrs Macdonald could come and practice. What do you know about that?”
Jayden felt violently ill, to the point where she thought she might have to excuse herself and bolt for the ladies’ toilet. In her head she could still hear the beautiful cresting waves of music, rising and falling in the cavernous church. Despite telling the detective previously that she and Cam rarely ventured into the main church, Jayden had forgotten the stolen moments of peace that she had enjoyed of an afternoon, stealing into the back pews to hear Beryl practice. She had been very gifted, crafting the music with angelically inspired digits and bringing Jayden much needed peace with every crashing or caressing note. “I don’t know,” her voice faltered. “Maybe Cecil gave the key back. How can they prove it now? He would have given it to McLean.”
Chapter 18
“Ah fiancé,” Raff’s words stunned Jayden as Ed led her into the kitchen. Raff’s brother had opened the front door with a gentle smile that made her heart flip over in her chest; his dark hair tousled from a recent shower. He had answered her knock so quickly that he had to have been on his way out of the front door, possibly delaying his exit in order to escort Jayden upstairs.
As Raff uttered his unfortunate greeting, Jayden felt Ed’s eyes flick towards her. She stole a look sideways at him and saw the expression of disappointment and betrayal stamped across his face and knew that he was replaying what she had said the other night - that she had only recently been considering a relationship. He had got it wrong. It wasn’t Raff who caused her heart to thud erratically when she saw him - and it wasn’t Raff whose dark hair and Italian good looks she sought out with her searching eyes at church. He’s married! She corrected herself again immediately for the twentieth time that day.
Raff came over and kissed her lovingly on the cheek. Jayden forced down the irritation which rose unbidden as he put an arm possessively around her, banging her cast in the process. She hissed and pulled herself free. “Ed told me about that,” Raff said, eyeing it curiously. “Can I sign my name on it?”
Jayden shook her head. Nobody was going to write anything on it. She hated seeing them that way, looking as offensive as a graffitied wall. The fleeting thought came to her that it wouldn’t have killed him to have popped to see her, or to return her handbag. “I came to pick my handbag up,” she said politely, but her tone was stilted and awkward. Ed seemed to have regained some of his composure and looked around the room.
“Did you leave it here? I haven’t noticed it.”
He cast around the work surfaces and under the table. Raff looked shifty.
“I know I left it here,” Jayden pushed. “I need my work keys out of it. The cops are getting a warrant to look at my counselling notes.”
“I know where it is,” Raff stated, smiling as he went past her and thumped upstairs to the floor above. He returned from his bedroom holding her bag aloft, its dark leather strap bouncing insouciantly against his thigh.
“Why was it up there?” Jayden asked, feeling Ed’s eyes boring into her. The atmosphere in the room had plummeted from welcoming to suspicious and something else that her alert senses failed to read.
“You must have left it there after I proposed to you.”
Raff winked and gave Jayden a sultry look. The tension snapped with an almost audible ping and Ed jumped back into full control of his body. With an embarrassed wave of his hand, he smiled formally at Jayden and left the room, clearly giving them their privacy. Jayden looked at the back of his head wistfully as it bobbed quickly down the staircase and wondered what Raff was playing at.
“I’ve bought a ring,” he said with childish excitement, reaching into the cupboard above the hob. He looked smartly dressed in suit pants and a white shirt. Jayden looked at him incredulously. He was showing all the signs of psychological disturbance, or a person who had missed their Bi-polar medication. He turned to her with the ecstatic face of a five-year-old, holding out a blue velvet box like it was his best picture, produced entirely for her with coloured crayons and finger paints.
“I...Raff...I...” she held her hand up, knowing as she did that it was pointless.
“I know you said you’d think about it,” he crooned, coming across to her. Jayden was aware that she had said nothing of the kind. He continued, unperturbed, “I know that we’d be good together. The thing with Peter was just an interlude. That life isn’t right for me. It’s you I want.”
He tried to kiss Jayden’s open mouth and even the thought of it suddenly made her feel ill, as she caught sight of the naked desire in his eyes. But it was manufactured, unreal and pretence made the denial rawer. She was not what he wanted and never would be. But for Jayden, it was as though her heart had fixed itself to Ed and it would perceive anything else as adulterous. “No!” she pushed at his chest with both hands, her broken elbow jarring and smarting with the effort and force. Dreadful memories flashed across her vision and Raff’s overwhelming personality made her feel as trapped as Wes’ physicality had all those years ago. Panic welled up inside Jayden, spurred on by a sudden lack of control over her situation. I have to be in control, I have to be in control...the tape in Jayden’s rational mind screamed out at her and she reacted, kicking Raff hard in the shins. The waiting spirit of Fear cackled gleefully and settled comfortably once again on her upturned face.
She had not yet taken off her boots and the impact was painful, dropping the man’s glossy head forwards as Jayden swung her handbag strap and clouted him full in the face with the body of it. The velvet box flew gracefully across the room, landing on the other side of the table and with a second’s worth of guilt, Jayden fled yet again, clattering down the stairs and out of the front door.
This time she used the back streets of Lincoln, running headlong down Michaelgate, Hungate and doubling back on herself through Motherby Lane before the High Street took her home. It was perilously steep and treacherous, but she managed somehow, arriving at her front door with her frightened breath coming in heaves and her legs trembling underneath her. Two men covertly watched her struggle with the front door key from around her neck, seeing her bend almost double to fit it into the lock without taking it off its string. One sat calmly on a bench and the other observed from further up the high street, puffing slightly from his exertion and the concern which writhed in the pit of his stomach for her.
Once inside, Jayden slammed the door on the world and went upstairs to her sanctuary, to lick her emotional wounds and wonder how the men in her circles always seemed to be her undoing.
It was only later, with a glass of wine valian
tly in her good hand that she dared to open her handbag, finding her mobile phone without charge and her keys isolated in the bottom. The bunch looked to be intact, the filing cabinet key looking tiny against the office Yale and the front door mortise to the counselling suite’s badly fitting front doors. It wasn’t a particularly big bunch, hanging from a ladybird key ring that her mother had bought her when she visited Aberystwyth last. It was probably that fact that alerted Jayden to the different look and feel about them, which on further examination, showed that the front door key to her flat was definitely missing.
Chapter 19
Jayden hardly slept. Knowing that someone else had a key to her safe house was utterly petrifying. The demons fluttered around the flat, determined to regain their foothold in Jayden’s life. But she was not alone in the spiritual realm and other divine spirits went into battle on her behalf as she lay sleepless in her bed.
Because her mistress couldn’t settle, neither could Nahla. She slunk around the flat, bouncing Jayden out of bed and then getting underfoot. She tried to convince her mistress that she was starving hungry by running over to the fridge, staring hopefully and winding her way back again, snaking her tail round Jayden’s bare legs like silk caresses. Jayden fixed a fleece around her shoulders and stepped outside onto the roof garden around five in the morning, so that the cat could go outside and annoy the city night creatures for sustenance. “Find your own breakfast, girl,” Jayden muttered into the darkness.
She stayed outside until her fingers and toes were almost frozen, enjoying the way that the bitter air iced the pain in her bones and stopped the agonising pounding emanating from inside the cast. The nurse in Emergency had said that it would throb, but knowing that fact didn’t lessen the pain it caused when it did.
Jayden leaned her forehead against the balcony rail and let her brain run through its list of fears, tired of battling with her mind for it to be still. Her primary concern was the whereabouts of her front door key. Nick’s presence had rattled her understandably and he was an unlikely murderer for the vicar, but even less likely pilferer of her door key. It seemed that he’d had little opportunity to do either. Raff had been weird about her handbag, but distracted by the bizarre family unit which he was happily constructing in his head. It seemed unlikely that he had her door key. Jayden cringed as she thought about his happiness over the ring he bought her, the excitement leaking out of his face and his sparkling eyes catching up with the guilt she felt at her treatment of him. Perhaps without meaning to, Jayden had led him on. Like Wes. No! Not like Wes! Jayden chastised herself heavily. It was a familiar route filled with glass shards of blame underfoot and she had no intention of going there. Not today.
Ed could have easily killed the vicar. He had motive and opportunity, yet her mind was an unwilling participant in the reasoning process for that scenario, rejecting every related spark of thought and Jayden gave up even considering it with any seriousness. He wouldn’t be a killer because she didn’t want him to be. It was that simple. Brian was clearly inept, which put him handily outside the realms of suspicion. He had suffered under McLean for years and baulked at action through his own impotence. Surely if he were going to kill the vicar for ill-treatment, he would have done it aeons ago.
Cecil and Martin Macdonald were obviously in the frame, by dint of a possibility that they still owned a key to the church. But as Jayden considered it against the backdrop of what she knew about either of them, the idea grew more ludicrous. She realised sadly that they were only suspects because she had made them such and Guilt swooped down and knotted its ugly fingers through her hair as it settled its greasy rump on the crown of Jayden’s head. She let her forehead sink onto her good arm along the balcony rail and listened to her cat make short work of killing a couple of mice in the guttering above her flat. The irritating voice in her head reminded her that Ed was the most likely person with both motive and opportunity. Not wanting to think about that particular possibility, Jayden went back indoors and tried to block out the voice.
A familiar sound captured Jayden’s attention around six in the morning. It was a tiny noise, just the scraping of a metal key in the lock, but it caused her heart to stop for a second and then resume thudding in an adrenaline fuelled thump. She was slumped on the sofa in the living room area, swaddled in a blanket watching breakfast television begin to start. The delighted faces of the presenters masked tiredness, family problems and personal issues under the layers of makeup and bonhomie.
Jayden muted the TV and listened again at the top of the stairs which led down to the street, trying to discern the tiny sound through the swishing of the blood in her ears. The door handle tipped as the person pushed against the jamb. Whoever it was had successfully unlocked it, but failed to take account of the bolts at the top and bottom that kept it closed against them. On an impulse, Jayden hurried quietly up the spiral stairs, wrenching open the sliding doors of her bedroom and scuttling out onto the roof garden in her bare feet. The front wall of the balcony was slightly back from the edge of the roof below. It had apparently been part of the planning regulations so as not to spoil the upwards view from the ancient street. Jayden reached over, banging her cast against the rail at the top and peering into the dark, lamp-lit street below while her bare toes stuck to the frozen surface beneath them.
Her view began about six feet into the street; the rest impeded by window sills and the set-back nature of the balcony. Further up the street someone was running and she could hear the steady slap of their training shoes. Frantic now she peered into the gloom, feeling vulnerable and fighting the urge to run down and out into the street to satiate her curiosity.
A dark head appeared in the middle of the street moving north and a body clad in fluro running gear. She recognised the male, but in the poor visibility could not distinguish which of the Abbadeli brothers it was. Her heart filled with misgiving and misery. It was logical. One of them must have taken her key. Jayden went back inside and closed the doors into her room. Nahla was delighted with the short interlude as she had managed to catch a mouse and was in the process of scoffing it on the bathroom floor. Jayden sighed and went to clear the mess up, mistrust filling her momentarily tender heart and sealing it over with spiritual concrete.
Lily McGowan fought against the filling of the hard-won cracks as the higher power shook its head and refused to be beaten.
Chapter 20
“Absolutely no way! I don’t have time today.” Jayden backed towards her office door. She never counselled rape victims. Rita had told her repeatedly that she should, believing that she was truly ready. Despite having passed her degree with flying colours, the scenarios relating to sexual abuse had been the hardest to deal with and Jayden had employed a very effective mask to protect herself from feeling emotions that threatened her equilibrium. She had done multiple hours of supervised counselling as part of her qualification, keeping it all at arm’s length through an act of pure will and fooling herself that it was all ‘pretend’ for the benefit of her degree. It had kept her sane and allowed her to fly under Rita’s capable radar and hopefully the poor women and girls she had encountered had not been cheated by Jayden’s detachment.
But she hadn’t been quite as clever as she had thought and the whole thing caught her up twice without warning during her course, biting her hard when she felt least able to cope. A couple of times in her final year, Jayden had crashed spectacularly and needed to take sick leave. She knew inwardly that it wasn’t a great way to deal with things but despite years of head knowledge and watching existences changed through exposure of the demons in peoples’ lives, Jayden would have to face something insurmountable in order to recover fully from her ordeal. She knew in her heart that it wasn’t possible. It would kill her for sure.
Jayden had been taught that sexual trauma was like a bag of frozen peas. Snap frozen on the day that they were picked; the peas could be pulled out of the freezer years later and have kept their freshness. That was how it was for a rape victim.
Noises, smells, words, voices, even another person’s physical appearance could pull the peas from the freezer of their mind and the experience would be just as fresh, equally as painful, undimmed by the passage of time or the dulling of the original physical trauma. Inwardly, that was what Jayden was afraid of, that someone else’s misery would have the potential to yank her back in time, force her again to face the nightmares and the flashbacks. Each time she thought that she had dealt with it all, back it would come. She had stopped counting how often she had faced her own demons, knowing only that she couldn’t cope with another visit into her past.
There had, fortunately, been only a few abuse cases in the past five years of working at the centre and those, Jayden had been able to sidestep neatly, brushing off the guilt and justifying her selfishness as Cam dealt with them or referred them on. But today was not Jayden’s lucky day and Sal greeted her with a look of urgency as her snowy boots landed on the mat just inside the front door.
“I’ve moved your first appointment. I hope you won’t be cross, but I really need you to see this young girl. It’s urgent. They don’t want Cam; they want you.” Sal’s jaw flexed, the line of bone and teeth showing underneath the skin of her slender face as she contemplated the counsellor.
“I can’t. Not today.” Nobody else in the tiny practice was aware of anything relating to Jayden’s past because she kept it so effectively to herself, allowing only what she wished to project to be at the forefront of her image. But she was aware that the high colour induced by the bracing winter walk to work had drained from her face almost instantaneously and her shoulders had visibly sagged. Jayden felt brittle and two-dimensional, as though the smallest puff of wind would blow her away. With everything in her being, she wished for that breeze and the escape it promised.
Ed appeared in the reception with an A4 piece of paper. He looked fresh and clean, his olive skin glowing healthily against the sombreness of his clothing. Jayden fought the urge to run to him, remembering his safe, strong arms around her. But the picture was quickly overwritten by the memory of the figure running back up the High Street in the dark. Disappointment coursed through her; a familiar betrayal reflex and she considered quitting right now and just not returning.
