‘We’re very nearly finished here,’ said Charlie, coming back. The constable gestured towards the letter on the desk, and he read through it, concentrating. ‘Yes, that will be all right,’ he said. ‘I’m going to ask you some questions and it may take us some time. Is there anyone you could ask to come here and take care of your daughters when they come home from school?’
‘Oh, Angela does that. But you could phone Northern TV and get them to ask Liza Croome to come over.’
The five minutes in the unmarked car left Bill feeling gutted and unable to think things through. He had seen the neighbours lingering in their front gardens or behind their windows. Unmarked cars didn’t fool them. He sat, his brain apparently quiescent, non-functioning, grappling with none of the terrible decisions facing him. When they got to Millgarth Charlie handed him over to a uniformed constable and told him they’d be ready to question him ‘in an hour or so’s time’. He was led away to a stark, square box with a bunk and nothing else in it. Bill looked around him at the bare cream walls and wondered why they were not scrawled with the hopeless appeals of people shut up here, waiting for questioning.
The shirt. That was the vital thing. The fact that traces of petrol would be on the wrong shirt, and no traces would be on the one that should bear them, was crushing. He had held the petrol can in the way he felt sure it would have been held – hidden by the mac, leaving traces on it, and also on the shirt. The wrong shirt because it was two days later than the fire. That in itself would surely lead the policeman to the right conclusion.
Then there was the mobile phone, the third mobile. Probably Debbie’s, though Rosie had one too. It was the one that had the recording of the pizza takeaway on it – the one that was played to form a background to the voice of his eldest. It was unmistakably the pizza joint they patronised, fifteen minutes’ walk away from Bridge Street. Bill had recognised the voice of one of the regular customers, giving his order, his unchanging order of ‘one Margherita, one pepperoni and one chicken and prawn’. It was a genial chap called Stan Outhwaite. Bill had talked to him often while they both waited for their orders to be ready. But the fire was on the Monday, and Stan (unchanging in everything) only came to the pizzeria on a Saturday.
Which was when he had been recorded. When he heard the unmistakable voice and the unmistakable order, Bill, in the little car park near the Red Deer, had been puzzled, disturbed. It was only a couple of days after the fire, when he and his eldest and favourite daughter had been discussing the death over breakfast, that Angela had looked at him searchingly, with that disturbing look of childish innocence she still had, and said ‘I met him, you know. After school one day, when I was in Briggate, on the way to Marks and Spencer’s. She introduced him to me. She said: “This is my new bloke. We’re going to get married and look after you lot. You need a strong bloke in your lives. Hamish will teach you all he knows”. And they both went off laughing – loud and horrible. He was a horrible man. He disgusted me.’ That was when Bill had gone to the wardrobe and smelt her blouse. That was the day when he’d taken her school coat out to Bramley Fall Woods and set fire to it. That was when he carried a can of petrol under his mac to take on himself the burden of guilt. He thought it was the least he could do.
But he hadn’t thought it through. He’d thought that any old shirt would do to wear, but because he’d been filming it had to be the one from Northern TV wardrobe department. It worked both ways: that shirt, if his confession was true, should have been stained, and wasn’t. The old shirt he had worn shouldn’t have been stained, and was.
He thought about his attempt to take on himself the guilt as a reparation to his daughters for the awful childhood they had had. And in particular to Angela, who had had all the burdens of motherhood at a time when she was still only a child herself. The other girls had accepted Bet as she was or seemed, had even found her rather fun. Rosie had told him that. Only Angie had taken Bet for what she really was: a moral leper who blighted everything and everyone she touched. Angie saw that, allied with Hamish, she would have infected the whole brood.
He worried about Angie. He felt uneasily that she was already corrupted.
She had written to the police, days before the murder, to connect it quite falsely with the natural death of Vernon Watts. She had recorded the scene at the takeaway the previous Saturday knowing from Bill’s schedule that he was filming on Monday, and knowing if he had evening filming he would ring her afterwards if he went, as he always did after a long day’s filming, for a drink.
It was the forethought, the amount of planning, that worried Bill. He would have been much happier if the murder had been the result of an adolescent explosion of rage, of an outburst of indignation at the adult responsibilities that she had had to shoulder, as a result of Bet’s self-absorption. The degree of planning, the cold preparation, suggested in the girl a deep infection, a corruption planted and nourished by her resentment of her place in the family as the bearer of burdens and the foreseer of harm and ills.
Bill shook his head. Angie had always been the one to fix her eyes on the middle distance, to foresee possible danger-points and harms. Why should he diagnose corruption? She had always done what she needed to do to protect the younger ones. This was exactly of a piece with all her behaviour in recent days. From the moment she had seen Bet and Hamish together she had been nerved up to take preventative measures, spurred on by Bet’s threat that Hamish would teach the girls ‘all he knew’. She had only been doing what experience taught her to do.
Bill squared his shoulders. He needed to take detailed account of his current situation. The early KO – represented in his mind by the cessation of police interest in him and his family – was not going to happen. That also took care of Position Two, the late KO – the possibility that Peace was going to let investigations slide even if he had a strong suspicion who the murderer was. Inspector Peace, Bill thought, was a specimen of true and long lasting tenacity. But there was still a hope that he could hold the line at Position Three: a hope that Peace, for all his suspicions, would compromise, possibly on orders from on high, by taking him up on his own confession of guilt. It had always been in his mind as something he would perhaps be forced to make to protect Angie. He had done what he could to make this position credible. He had held with his bare hands the can of petrol they had always kept in the garage, had held it against his mac and shirt. The wrong shirt… But then perhaps if he talked to Liza he could persuade her to say…
No. He could not involve anyone else in the terrible mess that Angie’s actions had landed them all in. If he confessed, he wanted to be believed, not found Not Guilty, with all the consequences for Angie that would bring.
He was getting up to do the only thing that varied the monotony of sitting on the bed – walking round the room – when the door was unlocked and Peace came in.
‘Oh, at last,’ said Bill. ‘I don’t see what is taking so long. I’m quite ready now to confess.’
‘Really?’ said Peace, raising his eloquent eyebrows. ‘Tell me, is this by previous agreement with your daughter Angela?’
‘No! Of course not! Why do you ask that?’
‘Because your daughter Angela has just come into the station to confess.’
It was what Bill feared most. His eyes filled with tears.
‘Don’t believe her! It’s just Angela – she’s like that: takes the responsibility for everything. She’s trying to save me.’
‘We’ve just had a preliminary talk,’ said Charlie, not sitting down but looking Bill straight in the eye, ‘and she’s told me all the details and how I can acquire concrete evidence for the trial: petrol stains on her school blouse and the coat – the coat that you took away and burnt – the fact of the mobile phone with the recording from the pizza takeaway to use to convince you that’s where she was on the night – and so on.’
‘This is all nonsense. Silly play-acting.’
But he looked down at the floor, which had nothing to it to deserve
looking at.
‘Is it play-acting? I’ve already established by watching the rushes at Northern TV that your shirt that had the traces of petrol on it was not the one you were wearing that night. If I were to arrest you on the basis of a confession you made now, I’d have to release you in a couple of days because the evidence would prove to be phoney. I’d have to arrest your daughter, because her evidence would prove to be the real McCoy. I think you should sit down, sir.’
Looking dazed, Bill Garrett sat down on the bed. Suddenly he said:
‘They were worthless, you know – totally worthless. Two of the most contemptible people on this earth. No one will miss or regret them.’
‘But did you know Sylvia Cardew?’
‘No. I was thinking of—’
‘Of your wife, of course. You could be right about her and Fawley, but in the Police we’re a bit like the Church. No one is beyond redemption. So a real little Hitler is as important to us as a Mother Teresa. What you should be doing, sir, is not burdening us with an impossible confession. You should be thinking how to get your daughter through this.’
‘But…what can I do? She’ll be sent away – to some sort of juvenile jail I suppose.’
‘I imagine so. If the evidence holds up. They’re not all terrible places. Most of them are better than the jails. She can get an education there, helped by you from the outside, and perhaps by her school, if they will cooperate. Then there’s her defence. You’ll have to emphasise her motherly role in the household, the negligence of her real mother, the fake engagement that was devised to drive you and the girls mad with fear…’
Charlie sat down on the other end of the bed. They were no longer policeman and suspect or policeman and witness. They were, against all regulations, father and father.
If you enjoyed this, you might like
to read other titles by Robert Barnard.
Read on to find out more…
Sheer Torture
It can be a bit of an embarrassment when your old man is done in. Particularly when you are a rising inspector with CID, and hated his guts. Particularly when your old man was at the time subjecting himself to a do-it-yourself version of a Spanish Inquisition torture. And wearing spangled tights. What it meant was that Perry Trethowan had to go back to the home of his ancestors and do a bit of semi-official sleuthing. Reluctantly, Perry goes with fear and trembling into the lions’ den, and finds that his worst forebodings are mere shadows of the grisly reality.
The Mistress of Alderley
Actress Caroline Fawley is thoroughly enjoying life. Her wealthy lover, supermarket owner Marius Fleetwood, has set her up in a grand house in the Yorkshire village of Marsham. Caroline’s frequent television work has made her something of a celebrity in the village. Everything about her life seems perfect and she has taken to her new role as ‘the mistress of Alderley’ with relish. But Caroline’s idyllic life is shattered when a young man looking remarkably like Marius unexpectedly appears on her doorstep. Within weeks Marius has gone missing and a body turns up…
A Cry from the Dark
Bettina Whitelaw is a grand dame of the English literary scene. Approaching eighty, with a beautiful flat in Holland Park and a comfortable income, her life is not dissimilar to that of her wealthy, elegant neighbours. But her background most certainly is. Brought up in Bundaroo, a small town in the Australian outback, Bettina’s childhood was dominated by the relentlessly blazing sun, the long daily walk to school, and the simmering animosities of smalltown life. As she embarks upon the painful process of writing her memoirs, images from her childhood begin to re-surface. And when her former housekeeper is the victim of a violent attack, Bettina begins to realise that she herself is in serious danger – a danger that has its roots in a small, dusty outback town…
The Graveyard Position
After a twenty-year absence, Merlyn Cantelo returns to Leeds to attend his late aunt Clarissa’s funeral. Far from being welcomed back into the fold of his large and quarrelsome family, he is viewed by many with suspicion and distrust. The teenage Merlyn only fled his home at the vehement insistence of his sometimes clairvoyant aunt, who foresaw for him a life blighted by violence and death. Moreover, the root of this danger supposedly lies within the family. To discover whether his aunt’s fears were justified, Merlyn must come to terms with his tragic past and delve into the murky history of the Cantelo family.
Dying Flames
One evening, Graham Broadbent, a successful novelist, is surprised to find a pretty blonde nineteen-year-old on his doorstep. ‘Hello Dad,’ are her first words. To his knowledge, Graham has no children and he is certain that he can’t be the girl’s father; he knows he should simply send her away, yet against his better judgement he decides to help the girl. As he becomes ever more embroiled in Christa’s life, Graham is forced to take a trip down memory lane. And when the girl’s mother is found strangled, Graham knows he must look into the dying flames of the past to find her killer.
A Fall from Grace
When Detective Charlie Peace attains the rank of inspector he decides to move his family to the sleepy town of Slepton Edge. Charlie’s father-in-law agrees to provide financial support, but on condition that he lives near them. With a heavy heart, Charlie accepts the offer, hoping that the cosy village atmosphere will warm his somewhat frosty family. But all is not as it seems in Slepton Edge; the strange behaviour of the local children and a mysterious death soon disturb the village calm, and the network of neighbourhood gossip becomes both Charlie’s ally and his enemy, as he seeks to uncover secrets buried deep within the tightly knit community.
Last Post
When May McNabb died, she left a hole in the lives of many people, but particularly in that of her daughter Eve, who’s left to take care of her last wishes and to sort through her possessions. Lying innocently among the condolence cards and bills on May’s doormat, Eve finds a letter with the potential to unravel everything she thought she knew about her mother. As she reads its contents, Eve comes to realise there was a part of May’s life she didn’t know at all – a part that held a secret which would have shocked her family and the close-knit community she lived in if it had ever become known.
About the Author
ROBERT BARNARD was born in Essex. He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and after completing his degree he taught English at universities in Australia and Norway, where he completed his doctorate on Dickens. He returned to England to become a full-time writer and now lives in Leeds with his wife Louise, cat Durdles and dog Peggotty. The couple has recently published a Brontë encyclopaedia. In his spare time he enjoys opera, crosswords and walking the dog. In 2003 Robert Barnard was the recipient of the prestigious CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger, an award in recognition of a lifetime’s achievement in crime writing. In 2006 he was awarded the CWA prize for the best short story of the year.
Also by Robert Barnard
Sheer Torture
The Mistress of Alderley
A Cry from the Dark
The Graveyard Position
Dying Flames
A Fall from Grace
Last Post
The Killings on Jubilee Terrace
A Stranger in the Family
A Mansion and its Murder
Rogue’s Gallery (short story collection)
Copyright
Allison & Busby Limited
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Hardback published in Great Britain in 2009.
Paperback edition published in 2010.
This ebook edition first published in 2012.
Copyright © 2009 by ROBERT BARNARD
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be r
eproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library.
ISBN 978–0–7490–1118–5
Killings on Jubilee Terrace Page 20
