I weighed the options. She wasn’t much of a fighter and one good crack with the wire-cutters would sort her out, but if I did that Fairfax would surely move to help her, and what I needed was time, because Polly must have called the police and they must be coming.
‘You can’t get away with it,’ I said to Fairfax. ‘How can you blame it on Jack? You own this place –’
‘Jack’s my friend. He knew it was here. He could have furnished and equipped it, couldn’t he? Nobody can trace it back to me, I promise you. Do you want me to tell you all about it?’
He was prepared to talk. Probably I should keep him talking, until the police came. But his self-satisfied tone annoyed me. More than annoyed me, I realized. I was angry, furiously angry, at what he had done to Nick, to the murdered girls.
‘You’ll want me to tell you all about it,’ he said again.
‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m not interested. Save it for the police psychiatrist.’
A flicker of doubt crossed his face, then it settled back to complacency. ‘You’ll want to know how I found the girls, of course, specially since I gave you a clue, and you didn’t get it. I’ll tell you the clue again, then see if you can work it out . . .’
He seemed pleased with his kid’s game, and he was standing still. So far, so good. I glanced at Sam, who’d settled down to listening, no longer poised to jump, and Nick, who was in exactly the same position, and Jack Hobbs who had shifted a bit and was quietly groaning. Then I felt a wave of anger, but not mine. Where from? Sam? Was there someone else in the room?
Fairfax was talking on. ‘Listen now, concentrate, here’s the clue. My job. I’m a civil servant. And I’ll give you another clue. I work in the Passport Office.’
‘Rich,’ said Sam. Her voice had an attention-claiming, warning note, like a child’s while it tugged at a parent’s sleeve.
‘What is it?’ he said.
‘They might be coming. Soon.’
‘Who?’ he said impatiently.
‘The police, maybe. Someone. She came, didn’t she?’ – pointing at me – ‘And she spoke to someone on the phone. We’d be in trouble, wouldn’t we? I don’t want to be in trouble.’
She was, sensibly, telling him to get on with it, and he wasn’t happy with her intervention. ‘Leave it to me,’ he snapped. ‘I know what’s best.’
‘But Rich—’
‘I’m talking to Alex. Passport Office, you see? Height, address, photograph. I’ve always had very high standards in women.’
‘Rich—’
‘Yes, Sam, women like you. I like women like you,’ he said soothingly.
She flashed him a white-toothed smile, but it had the mechanical emptiness of a lighthouse beam. ‘I’m glad you like me,’ she said, ‘but shouldn’t we—’
‘Quiet,’ he snapped. ‘I’m in charge.’
He clearly wasn’t. I’ve never known anyone who really was in charge having to state it. This man has a reality problem, I thought. He had to know best, he wouldn’t accept evidence. Maybe that was how the killing had started. When the girls, normal girls he met socially who’d reached his ‘high standards’ of looks, hadn’t responded to him as he wanted, he’d created his own world down here and brought strangers to a place where he made all the rules. He had fantasies but he wasn’t effective. Or maybe –
‘Rich,’ said Sam, more urgently this time, ‘I really think –’
‘Quiet, Sam,’ said Fairfax. ‘I don’t want to hear from you again, do you understand?’
‘Yes, Rich,’ she said, sulky-meek, shuffling her feet and hanging her head.
‘Alex wants to know,’ he went on explaining to her. ‘Alex wants to know and I think it’s fair to tell her . . . You’ll want to know why we kept Nick,’ he said to me.
‘No I don’t,’ I said, feeling the wave of anger again, trying to trace it to source. Not Fairfax, not Sam, not me – who? Where?
‘She wasn’t frightened,’ said Sam. ‘Rich didn’t like it because she wasn’t frightened. He likes people to respect him, don’t you, Rich?’
There was an element of needle in this, I was pleased to hear. They weren’t arguing exactly, but they weren’t singing the same song either, and she wasn’t obeying his direct order to shut up.
‘It’s time,’ said Fairfax. He sounded different: purposeful, not gloating. He was looking up, over my head.
I looked up too, as Sam skittered round me and ran down the room to Fairfax. No red light had flashed, but the trapdoor was open and someone was hurtling down the steps – Polly! She landed in a heap at the bottom and scrabbled to get up, one arm clearly useless – broken? ‘Omigod,’ she squealed, then ‘look out Alex, he’s coming. Look out!’
Russell Jacobs was on the steps, standing still and assessing the situation. He was even bigger than I remembered and his ugly awkwardness had crystallized into pure menace.
‘Is it time?’ said Fairfax.
‘Time, yeah,’ echoed Jacobs, but now his echo was an order. He was the boss, I should go for him, but Polly was there and could delay him and Fairfax must be eliminated.
‘Look out,’ squawked Polly again but even before she’d spoken, urgency kicked in. I saw Fairfax heading towards the work corner with its shining ranks of tools, presumably to use on us, and I concentrated everything in me on the back of his head. Fear fuelled me down the room, the wire-cutters clutched in my hand. As he reached up for an axe, I swung at him, twice, three times. He crumpled at the first blow. After that, I was hitting a body, unconscious or perhaps dead, but I didn’t care.
Then Sam was on me, clutching and screaming. I shoved her off with a punch meanly aimed straight at one of her nipples; her hysterical screaming changed to a screech of pain and she crawled under the operating table and curled up like a foetus.
‘No no no!’ shouted Polly. I turned to see Jacobs, knife in hand, just about to reach Nick. Polly was sprawled on the floor, her good arm scrabbling for something in her jeans pocket, pulling it out. She hurled herself towards Jacobs, fingers working at the small gleaming object she held in her hand. He checked and stumbled, but then kicked Polly away and kept on going, towards Nick.
Before I could move to her defence, the room was filled with howling.
I knew it was Nick who got up and grabbed Jacobs by the throat and threw him out of the cage room, knife spinning uselessly away, and followed him and seized his hair with her left hand and jammed the thumb and two fingers of her right hand into his eyes and kept jabbing into the bloody pulp, howling all the while, but Nick didn’t look like Nick, she looked possessed, demonic. I wanted to stop her before she tore his face off – not for his sake – but I was frozen by the horror of the sight, which I wanted to stop watching, and by the terrible noises filling the room. Sam’s screeches, Nick’s howl, and louder than either, Jacobs’s bellows of agony and rage.
It was Polly who moved first and stopped it. She scrambled up and threw her functional arm around Nick and pulled her, still howling, away.
After a moment Nick stopped struggling and fell silent. She looked with disgust at the blood and pulp on her right hand, and began wiping it on her jeans. I forced myself to focus on Nick and Polly, because what I’d already seen of Jacobs’s ruined face was going to be hard enough to forget, but his bellows were increasing in volume and turning into tortured wails which blended with another, familiar, approaching wail. Police sirens.
Sam heard them. She crawled out from under the table, stepped over Fairfax’s immobile body without glancing down at it, and said to everyone and no one, ‘It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t do it. It’s not fair.’
‘When the police come, don’t say anything,’ I said.
‘But it wasn’t –’ she began, and I cut across her.
‘You’re in shock. Don’t say anything,’ I repeated. Much as I loathed the girl, her mother was my client, after all.
Then the police came.
Chapter Thirty-Four
They were uniformed police, ordi
nary patrol coppers, well out of their depth. They stepped down into Fairfax’s factory basement and at first stared, bemused, at the carnage it contained.
The older one was a heavy-set beef-faced East Ender in his forties who looked as if he supported the local football team, devoted much of his off-duty time to home improvements and believed that the country was going to the dogs. His eager-to-please twentyish constable looked as if he spent his time trying to prove to the older one that he wasn’t one of the dogs the country was going to.
The East Ender phoned for ambulances. Sam approached the young constable, crying. He still looked bemused, but with a trace of ‘Poor little thing’ sympathy, and took her name and address.
Russell Jacobs had stopped howling. I kept my eyes averted from him but hoped he’d fainted. I went up to Nick and patted her on the shoulder ‘Sorry I took so long to find you,’ I said.
‘’Sall right,’ she said. ‘I was stupid to get caught.’
That was a handsome admission from Nick, who never apologized. I’d been afraid she might have been traumatized, might have lapsed back into her elective silence. I’d been wrong.
‘But it was a bloody stupid message you sent. Clever-clever. How’d you know I’d even get to hear Russell Jacobs talk?’
‘I didn’t, but I thought it’d help if you did. He’s the scary one.’
‘Not any longer,’ I said. We both looked at him and looked away.
‘I didn’t know what Sam could work out and what she couldn’t,’ said Nick, justifying herself. ‘Sometimes she was half-witted, but other times – I couldn’t say anything obvious at all.’
‘It was a brilliant message,’ said Polly soothingly.
Nick looked at her. ‘Don’t just stand there,’ she said to me, bossily. ‘I need water. Get me some.’
I went to the bathroom to fetch her water. When I came back, she’d moved Polly over to the work area and was splinting her forearm with knives and torn towels. Polly looked very white and once her arm was in a sling Nick sat her on the floor with her head between her knees and hugged her. ‘You did good,’ she said. ‘Yuck Polly, you stink though.’ She gulped down the water I’d brought. I sniffed and for the first time noticed a miasma of pungent, expensive perfume. Nick smiled. ‘Yeah, she sprayed his face, held him up for a moment, gave me time.’
‘Shouldn’t we do something to help him?’ I said. Jacobs had started moaning again.
Nick smiled again, without amusement. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said.
While the older policeman listened to Polly’s account of why she had dialled 999 and the younger one checked the casualties I took Nick aside. ‘Did Jack Hobbs have anything to do with it?’
‘Who?’ she said blankly. I pointed him out, realizing, worried, that he’d been unconscious for some time now.
‘Nah. It was three of them. That shit –’ she pointed to Jacobs and my eyes didn’t follow her finger – ‘the posh blond git and the tasty little robot.’
‘Bourbaki,’ I said.
‘You don’t want to hear what they did to those girls.’
‘But Sam wasn’t involved in that, was she? Did she even know about it?’
Nick shrugged. ‘I didn’t hear them talk about it in front of her, if that’s what you mean, and I never knew what she understood and didn’t understand about anything. She just liked attention and flattery and control. Fairfax was all over her. And she sucked up to him by jerking me around, and she enjoyed that plenty, trust me. You must do what Rich says, Nick, Rich isn’t pleased with you, Nick, that’s why he’s punishing you. Yuck.’
‘But maybe Fairfax was all over her because she was due to be the next victim.’
‘Could be. Or could be she was his dream woman, so he didn’t have to get rid of her. But Russell would have. Very practical, our Russell. Don’t you worry about him. He deserves what I gave him, and more.’
‘I’m not worried about Russell, but about you,’ I said gently. She was shaking, with fear or anger or reaction, I didn’t know.
I squeezed her arm and she pulled it away.‘You can stop worrying. I’m a public benefactor, acting in self-defence. He was going to kill me. Listen, did you take the phone off charge? I forgot it. I was pissed off at Laverne. I’m really sorry about that.’
I passed her the phone. ‘It’s working fine,’ I said.
The older policeman called Andy Cairncross, at my suggestion. When he got through, he said ‘Sergeant Cairncross says he knows all about you,’ his tone of voice suggesting Cairncross wasn’t pleased with me.
I had tangible evidence of this when Cairncross arrived at the same time as the third ambulance crew. By that time Jacobs and Hobbs had gone in the first ambulance, Fairfax, still unconscious, and Sam, claiming to have broken ribs, in the second. Cairncross wouldn’t allow me to go to the hospital with Nick and Polly but sent me back with the patrol officers to Notting Hill police station, where I was put into an interview room, by myself, and ignored.
I supposed someone would come and take a statement, eventually. Very eventually. I was the least of their concerns, a very minor player. The SOCO people would be swarming all over Fairfax’s basement, senior officers on the Killer investigation would be pouring into Hammersmith Hospital to talk to Fairfax and Jacobs and Sam and Jack Hobbs, if he was conscious yet. I hoped he was and that he’d make a full recovery. But most of all the detectives must be drooling over Nick, alive and intelligent and a witness, especially since her captors had obviously talked openly in front of her. And since none of the police yet knew that I’d been the one who found Fishburn’s body I’d be lucky if they took my state ment by Christmas.
Or midnight, anyway.
I looked at my watch. Eight o’clock. Only two hours since Polly and I had set off to the industrial estate. It had seemed much, much longer and I wondered how long Nick’s seventy-two hours of captivity had felt.
Then I stopped thinking about it, because it upset me and didn’t help her. I fiddled with the knobs on the big old rusty radiator, trying to coax it into giving me enough heat to take the arctic chill out of the air. When that failed, I kicked the radiator until it clanked into a semblance of life. Then I made myself as comfortable as the upright chair allowed, tried not to think about how much I wanted a cup of coffee, reflected that, though it said INTERVIEW ROOM on the door, the dump I was in reminded me of an ill-equipped broom cupboard, propped my feet on the scarred wooden table, and rang my office. I hoped Lil was still manning GHQ: I had work to do.
She answered on the second ring, and I talked over her anxious questions, reassuring her that Nick was safe and mostly unharmed, though I wondered as I said it how true that was, remembering the wreck of her scalp and what she’d done to Jacobs. I told Lil what I needed: for her to give me the Eyres’s telephone number from the files, and then bring me my notebook. Further chat could wait till she came. I knew Lil wanted to pick over what had happened, and I’d have to go along, but not till Pauline Eyre knew the mess her daughter was in. Pauline was still my client however much her fault it was for conspiring in the family sickness, whatever Sam had done. Fairfax hadn’t created Sam, he’d merely adapted her. Her desire for attention and control, no matter what it cost anyone else, had curdled in a pot cooked by both Eyres. Dr Eyre because that was how he functioned, and Pauline because she hadn’t stopped him. And she’d suspected something about Sam. What’d she said about her, in my office? Something about she has her own ways.
The Eyres’s number rang and rang. Finally he answered. ‘Dr Eyre? Alex Tanner I need to speak to your wife, urgently. Is she there?’
‘I’m not accepting calls from you, Miss Tanner Not now, or at any other time. We can manage perfectly well without your rude and amateurish assistance—’
‘Dr Eyre, your daughter is currently in hospital, shortly to be charged with a serious crime. Do you or do you not want your wife to know the details? Sam needs a lawyer, urgently.’
I heard Pauline Eyre’s voice protesting in th
e background, then she was on the line. ‘Miss Tanner?’
‘I have bad news, I’m afraid.’
Her response was bizarre, but it betrayed what I had suspected. Instead of asking what had happened to Sam or if she was all right, she said, ‘What has she done?’
For a moment, the words hung and crackled on the line. I didn’t want to receive them: she wanted to swallow them back. Then she said, lamely, ‘Has she been in an accident?’
I told her what I knew. She didn’t waste time discussing it. She was repeating the name of the hospital when her husband took over. ‘My wife is distraught,’ he snapped. ‘Distraught as a result of your exaggeration and interference, as a result of your intrusive trouble-making—’
I punched the end-call button before he could get further into his blame-shifting stride. I blew on my chilly fingers and watched my breath curl up and dissipate in the freezing air, and wondered what Pauline had expected, and how much she’d known, and exactly why Sam had been educated at home, and what that education had been.
The conversation, and the thought of Sam herself, left me with a bitter taste. I realized that all my muscles were knotted up. It was as if I’d been holding myself tense for hours, not knowing that I was doing it. I rolled my head around, slowly, and did some stretches. That was better.
But not completely better. My body was more relaxed but my mind kept going back to the bright light-flooded basement room, the brutality of Nick’s imprisonment, and the stains on the tiled floor around the work table. I kept pushing the pictures away. Evil doesn’t interest me and I can never understand why people find it so enthralling and gobble up books and films about it, and manage to be so continually surprised when it erupts in real life. Surely anyone who’s been to school must know how vile children can be. Some of them never grow out of it, that’s all. The police would sort out what they’d done and the courts would sentence them and then the shrinks would get on to it and try to explain why they’d done what they’d done, which is much easier of course in retrospect. What they never explained was why other children with as near as dammit the same influences had grown up to be criminals of a different type, or not to be criminals at all.
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