by Jo Bannister
“None of this proves Shad killed her, you know,” Marsh said gently.
“I know,” said Rosie. “I just wish I could find something that proved he didn’t. Or that someone else had a reason to.”
Warning bells rang in Harry Marsh’s head. “Ms Holland, that’s my job, not yours. Don’t get involved. You’ll only get in my way and if by any chance you were successful you’d put yourself in danger. Leave it alone. I’ll get to the truth.”
“I suppose so.”
He’d had more ringing endorsements. “Suppose?”
She forced a smile. “I mean, of course you will. I’ll let you get on with it.”
But from the way she reversed out of his office, Detective Superintendent Marsh was almost certain she had her fingers crossed behind her back.
Chapter Twelve
“I need to talk to Debbie Burgess,” Rosie said thoughtfully. “If anybody knows what Jackie was working on, she does.”
“Where does she live?” asked Prufrock.
“I don’t know. She went to university in Nottingham but that doesn’t mean she lived there.”
“The university admissions office would have a home address for her. Though they mightn’t give it to you.”
“I’ll ask them nicely.” She meant, I’ll lie.
She didn’t ask for the admissions office, she asked for one of the media studies lecturers.
“It’s Rosie Holland here, at the Skipley Chronicle.” Prufrock nodded approvingly: the truth so far. “I’ve done something stupid and I’m hoping you can help. We had a graduate of yours looking for a position here. We want to offer her the job but I’ve lost her address. Debbie Burgess. You don’t know where she lives?”
There was a pause as the man at the other end thought. “They were a local family. West Bridgford, I think; yes, Dootheboys Avenue. I don’t know if they’re still there.”
“I don’t suppose you know her father’s name?” The initial would make the phone number easier to find.
There was a pause, not long but still slightly longer than it took either to say no or to give it. “Roy. I’m not likely to forget that, am I?”
“I suppose not,” said Rosie, though she had no idea what he was talking about. “Roy Burgess?”
“Well, I don’t expect it made the same impression in Birmingham that it did here.”
“No,” agreed Rosie. “What didn’t?”
“That business with Debbie and her father. Oh God,” he groaned then, “maybe I shouldn’t be telling you. If she wanted you to know she’d have told you herself.”
“Oh, she did,” lied Rosie gamely. “About her father. I thought you meant … something else.” She was making this up as she went along, hoping the man would keep talking long enough to start making sense.
“I suppose there’s no point being coy about it after you’ve been in court. You should know that nobody here considered Debbie to blame.”
Rosie shook her head vigorously. “Here, either.”
“Good. Whatever actually happened, she was the victim.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“I’m glad she’s finally got a job. I had a lot of time for Debbie, I always thought she’d make a good reporter. It was a great pity all that came up in the middle of her studies.”
“Yes, indeed.”
“Give her my regards. Tell her to drop in sometime.”
“I will,” nodded Rosie.
“Will you?” asked Prufrock when, with a sigh of relief, she put the phone down.
“And have to repeat that pack of lies? Of course not.” She told him what had passed between them. “Now – what do you suppose it was all about?”
“A court case,” reflected Prufrock. “Something involving Debbie Burgess and her father. And nobody at the university thought Debbie was to blame.”
“I wonder who they blamed instead.”
When Prufrock looked at her he could almost see the cogs and wheels spinning behind her eyes, the machinery of intellect in full production. “Rosie? What are you thinking?”
“So far as anybody knows, Debbie Burgess was Jackie Pickering’s closest friend. They did the same course at university, afterwards Jackie tried to get her a job. But something happened to Debbie during those three years that the people at PVF called a mental illness, that her lecturer said resulted in a court case, that involved her father and that people didn’t think was her fault. So maybe they thought it was his.”
“Perhaps they did. How does that help?”
“Maybe it doesn’t,” admitted Rosie. “Unless Jackie blamed him too. Let’s face it, doing research for a programme like You’ve Been Had gave her the opportunity to settle an old score if she had a mind to. Maybe, whatever he did or didn’t do, Jackie blamed him for Debbie’s illness and saw a chance to pay him back. Maybe Roy Burgess is the bastard on the phone pad.”
Prufrock stared at her askance. “It’s a shot in the dark,” he said diplomatically.
“Of course it is. I don’t care whether he’s the bastard or not, as long as Shad isn’t. The only reason anyone has to suspect Shad, apart from him finding the body, is that Jackie just might have been researching him, on the sly, for that accursed programme. Well, she just might have been researching Roy Burgess as well. It’s neither more nor less likely.”
“There’s no reason to suppose he was even in Skipley.”
“Until someone asks, there’s no reason to suppose he wasn’t.”
Prufrock frowned. He knew Rosie quite well enough now to know that insouciance on her part was always an act. “You can’t ask him anything,” he said pointedly. “If you want to know, tell Mr Marsh about it – he’ll make inquiries.”
“I’ll think about it,” promised Rosie, which reassured him hardly at all.
“Got you, you bastard!”
Harry Marsh was still pondering that over lunch – a sandwich at his desk. There was something about it that bothered him, that wasn’t right. It was too … personal. She wasn’t referring to someone she was researching but to a quarry she’d been stalking. Someone who’d given her trouble, who’d given her the slip a time or two before finally succumbing.
Why should she feel that way about Shad Lucas? There was no evidence they’d even met. But perhaps that wasn’t it. Perhaps that note of triumph came not from any baggage with him but from her situation at work. Marta Frank had considered fishing for Lucas, dismissed him as too difficult to land safely. If Jackie had seen a way, baited her hook and, at last, over the phone, persuaded him to bite, then ‘Got you, you bastard!’ was an understandable reaction.
But if Jackie had phoned him on Wednesday, hours before the blow to his head, why didn’t Lucas remember? Well, because head injuries are like that – you forget the wife and kids but recognise the cat. There’s no logic to it. He still didn’t remember much that happened on Wednesday. Marsh knew he’d been at the Thurleys’ until five because they said so.
So if she had spoken to him, it had to have been after five fifteen. He couldn’t have been home before that. She’d called him, asked for a meeting – on God knows what pretext – and one of them had nominated the station later that evening. Why? If Shad was willing to see her, why not at home? If Jackie was worried about going to his flat, why go to the railway yards after dark?
But wait. Jackie left the office at five on the night she died; DS Burton had established that when he was mapping out her movements. If she’d called Shad later than that it had been from somewhere else – so what was the note doing on her desk?
So it wasn’t Shad she called but someone else. Someone who had a reason to kill her? Someone she had reason to consider a bastard. But the same question applied: why agree to meet someone like that in such risky circumstances?
Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe she’d met her killer somewhere that seemed safe; only one way or another he’d got the better of her and taken her to the sidings. That suggested the same kind of premeditation as the knife. He may not have gone to the meeti
ng determined on killing her, but he was ready to if the need and the occasion arose.
‘Got you, you bastard!’ She knew something about him. Had they had dealings before? Certainly she knew something to his discredit. But she had to meet him. She needed something only he could give her.
Money? Was she blackmailing him? If the victim had been someone else, that was a line Marsh would have pursued. But Jackie Pickering had a different agenda: she had her whole career to get on track. A good story would have been worth more to her than a suitcase full of unmarked notes.
A good story about whom? Marsh scowled into his mug. How long is a piece of string? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? The question was meaningless. If Shad Lucas didn’t kill Jackie Pickering, whoever did had been clever enough – or lucky enough – that his connection to her had not yet emerged. That was mainly her fault: in her wariness to keep her big story secret she’d been her killer’s best ally. But something had led her to him, and it could lead the police to him too. There was a trail somewhere, if Marsh could pick it up.
The phone went.
“It’s Andrew Cunningham, Harry.”
Lengthy concentration had let cobwebs gather in Marsh’s eyes. He blinked them clear. “Andrew, yes.” Then, because he could think of only one reason for Cunningham to call him, his voice dropped an octave and he said it again with a quite different inflection. “Yes?”
“I think you should come round here.”
The hairs on the back of Harry Marsh’s neck stood up. “Is Shad Lucas with you?”
“Yes.”
“Has he remembered something?”
“I think you should come round.”
The piebald Land Rover was parked on the raked gravel in front of Cunningham’s house. If he’d been their gardener the Cunninghams would have made Shad park it out of sight round the back. The idea that a patient might turn up in such a thing had clearly never occurred to them.
Dr Cunningham met Detective Superintendent Marsh and Detective Sergeant Burton at the door before they could ring the bell. “Come inside. Thanks for coming so quickly.”
“It is a murder investigation,” Marsh reminded him, a shade stiffly. “There aren’t many things that take priority.”
Cunningham nodded, without comment. “Two things I should make clear. I called you because Shad asked me to. And I can’t vouch for the truth of what he says. If you want my opinion, it’s that he believes the story he’s about to tell you. But there’s nothing I can test or measure to prove it, no litmus paper I can stick on his tongue that’ll turn black if he’s telling fibs or remembering wrong. I’m not suggesting that is the case, just reminding you that psychiatrists get lied to quite as much as policemen. We too develop an instinct for spotting it, but we too can be wrong. I want you to be aware of that before you start interviewing him.”
“All right, Andrew,” said Marsh flatly, “I’ll try to remember that sometimes people tell porkies. Can I see him now?”
There remained a faint ambivalence in Cunningham’s expression. But he led the policemen through the office where he and Marsh had drunk elderflower wine to a small room off it. A study or den perhaps, it had been built without windows and was presently lit by a low-powered, reddish bulb in the desk lamp. The walls were lined with books, there was a leather armchair behind a table and another in the corner of the room which was currently occupied.
Shad Lucas didn’t get up when Marsh went in. He remained sitting in the deep shadows, his face, half-hidden, cradled in one hand, his elbow on the arm of his chair.
“Shad,” said Marsh, by way of acknowledgement. A fractional nod was all the reply he got.
He tried again. “Doctor Cunningham tells me you’ve made some progress at remembering what happened. On Wednesday night.” As if they might have been talking about something else.
There was a long pause. Then Shad’s voice came out of the shadows, low and breathy like something that had been lost. “I remember what happened to her. I saw what happened.”
Doctor Cunningham had returned to his chair behind the table. There was a set of library steps of the sort that convert to a stool; Marsh moved them a little closer to Shad and quietly sat down. “Tell me about it.”
He began where he’d begun before. “She was so scared. It wasn’t what she expected. She thought she was in control of the situation. She’d worked through every move in her head, everything she would say, everything he could say or do. She thought she’d covered all the bases. She thought she had him in a corner, that he’d no choice left now but to do as she wanted. She thought she’d won.
“But it was a trap. She wasn’t hunting him any longer, he was hunting her. He knew what she could do to him, what she meant to do, that she’d destroy him. He couldn’t survive what she meant to do to him. He’d do anything to avoid it: anything. If he could have talked some sense into her … He didn’t want to kill her. But mostly he wanted to be safe.”
He was hardly making sense at all. He was talking about things he had no way of knowing – at least, things no eyewitness could have known. They were into that fuzzy area again, where Shad Lucas could be at once more helpful and less credible than the average witness. But Marsh was reluctant to stop and quiz him for fear he’d lose his way entirely. Also, he wasn’t sure yet what he was hearing: a memory that had been lost, a memory that had been suppressed, an honest confusion of truths, half-truths and fantasy, or a downright lie. It seemed better to let him talk and go back to clarify the details later.
“They met on the station because she thought it was safe. There were plenty of people around, even at that time. She wasn’t sure how he’d react when she told him what she had on him: shout, call her names, slap her face, just turn and walk away. She knew what she had to say would rock his world. But she thought she’d have the advantage of surprise, hadn’t realised he already knew. He knew who she’d been talking to and the questions she’d been asking. He wasn’t there to give her an interview: he was there to buy her silence, one way or another.
“She told him what she’d found out and what she was going to do with it. She had the whole damn programme mapped out – who’d come on and talk about him, what they’d say. She was pleased with herself; despite all the difficulties, she’d achieved what she’d set out to. She didn’t think there was anything he could do now to stop her.
“But while they were talking, arguing rather, they were walking, and she was too wound up to take much notice of where. By the time she realised they’d gone beyond the end of the platform and were walking beside the tracks there was no one close enough to see she was in trouble. He grabbed her arm and dragged her deeper into the dark. When they came to the last wagon on the track, he threw her inside.”
The silence stretched so long then that Marsh began to think he’d finished. But he hadn’t, he was just looking for the courage to continue.
“She still thought she could talk her way out. Even then she couldn’t believe he meant to harm her. In spite of what she’d done, what she knew, what she’d tried to do to him. She thought he might threaten her. She thought that if she went along, pretended she was too scared to go any further with it, he’d let her go and she could get her own back later. When she saw … when she saw …”
His voice had fallen to a whisper, grown so thin that any pressure on him now would have ripped great holes in it.
Harry Marsh hunched forward, peering at the young man’s face, ashy-pale in the shadows, the sunken eyes burning as if in the grip of fever. Marsh thought fleetingly, is this what it’s like, being him? Is this what his gift means to him? The privilege of feeling other people’s fear as if it were his own, other people’s pain? How can he live like that? How can he stay sane?
Is he, in fact, sane?
He said softly, “What did she see, Shad?”
Shad sucked an unsteady breath through his teeth. “The knife. He had a knife. When she saw that, she knew she wasn’t going to talk her way out of anything.
The fear … It was like a tidal wave. I couldn’t breathe for it.
“For a moment she froze. I thought, Move, oh Christ Jesus, move! – if you don’t move you’re going to die here! And after a second she did. She threw herself at him, tried to force her way past him; thought if she could catch him off balance, if she could just make the doorway, she might lose him in the dark. But he was ready for her. He moved the same time she did, brought the knife up between them. She ran herself on to it.
“It wasn’t so much pain then as the shock. Her eyes were like saucers; her lips moved but there were no words, just a little spit. Then she was falling. The fear, the terrible fear, swelled out once, and then her thoughts began drawing inwards. Like water going down a plughole, spiralling tighter and tighter, and the darkness crowding in. The last of her consciousness faded and she was gone.”
Marsh went on staring at him, amazed and aghast, long after the words had dried up. He had no idea how he was going to make a case of this, but perhaps that wasn’t necessary. Perhaps, when he knew who was responsible, he could bring his case another way. He found his own voice, and was not surprised at the gravel in it. “You felt her die. You saw her die? You saw who killed her. Describe him, Shad. The man with the knife. Who is he? Where do I find him?”
In the dark of his corner, his eyes still shaded by his hand, Shad blinked. He looked puzzled, like a man roused from a trance. “What? I … I’m sorry, I’m not making it very clear. I didn’t see anyone.”
Marsh was confused utterly. It was as if he’d been reading this and turned over two pages at once. He stared at Shad, at Doctor Cunningham behind his desk, at Sergeant Burton who replied with a little puzzled shrug of his own. “But you said … You said you saw what happened.”
Shad nodded slowly. He rubbed the side of his hand across his brow. “Yes. Oh yes. Of course I saw what happened. I was there – right there. There was no one else. My prints on the knife, her blood on my shirt – the explanation’s obvious. So bloody obvious I never thought …”
He straightened in the chair, levered himself up on his strong arms and stood, still in the shadows, swaying slightly. “Call off the manhunt, Superintendent, you have your killer. I swear to you, I didn’t know before today. But I know now. It was me.”
