She looked behind her again and this time she saw Kerry. He was in the car park, looking left and right. She ducked down behind the wall that separated the pub from the street, then raised her head in time to see him run round the back of the Swan. She knew he’d be back soon, having failed to find her there.
With no time to think, Charlie abandoned her wailing car and ran across the car park, up the front steps of the pub and back inside, clutching the files tight so that nothing fell out. He wouldn’t look inside. Knowing what she’d done, he wouldn’t think she’d be stupid enough to come back.
Charlie ran up the stairs to the ladies’, pushed a couple of indignant drunk teenagers out of her way, and locked herself in a cubicle.
She didn’t open the files straight away. She was too busy breathing, which felt like something she hadn’t done for a while. She could still hear the sodding car. Once her head had stopped throbbing and she could see an immobile, much-graffitied toilet cubicle rather than one that pulsated and warped in front of her eyes, she was ready to read what she’d taken from Kerry’s briefcase.
There was a file on Aidan Seed and one on Ruth Bussey. Ruth’s told Charlie nothing much that she didn’t already know: evangelical Christian parents, garden design business, three BALI awards. Most of the information Kerry had gathered had to do with Gemma Crowther and Stephen Elton. There was a lot about the court case. Charlie imagined how he must have congratulated himself on sniffing out that juicy morsel.
She opened the other file. Here were things she didn’t know about Aidan Seed: details of his education, his father’s death from lung cancer. She skimmed the pages, looking for anything that stood out. Aidan’s mother’s cancer—also in the lungs. His stepfather . . .
Charlie cried out in shock. Aidan Seed’s stepfather. This was it. She pulled her phone out of her bag and rang Simon. Voicemail. Shit. Where was he? He never ignored his phone; he was too neurotic. To him, each missed call was an opportunity for ever lost. It was one of the things Charlie took the piss out of him for, along with getting more calls from his mother than from anyone else.
Someone flushed the toilet in the next cubicle. Charlie waited until the gurgling of the cistern had stopped, then rang Simon again. This time she left a message. ‘Seed’s stepfather—his name’s Len Smith. He’s in an open prison, Long Leighton in Wiltshire, serving a life sentence for a murder he committed in 1982. He strangled a woman.’ Kerry had written nothing in his report about whether the woman was naked or in bed when she died, but Charlie knew. She did a quick calculation in her head. Aidan Seed had been thirty-two when The Times feature was published in 1999, which made him . . . fifteen in 1982.
‘Smith murdered his partner in their home,’ she told Simon. ‘I don’t need to tell you the address: 15 Megson Crescent. They lived there with Smith’s three stepkids, Aidan and his brother and sister.’ In case Simon was as full of disbelief as she was, Charlie added, ‘I’m not making this up. Aidan lived in that house until he left home. The woman Len Smith’s inside for killing—her name was Mary Trelease.’
There were photocopies of photographs from newspapers: grainy, but distinct enough for Charlie to be able to see that the Mary Trelease Len Smith had killed looked nothing like the Mary Trelease Charlie had met. Met in the same house the first Mary Trelease had lived and died in. She held the clearest of the pictures close to her face. She’d seen this woman before, but where? It wasn’t possible. The first Mary Trelease had been dead for twenty-six years. Smith was seventy-eight now, Kerry had noted. He’d been denied parole on several occasions.
Charlie was about to put her phone back in her bag when she noticed a small envelope symbol on its screen. A message. How long had it been there? How long since she’d checked? She pressed ‘1’ to play it, expecting to hear Simon’s voice, and heard, with a jolt of surprise, Ruth Bussey’s instead.
25
Wednesday 5 March 2008
‘Wait here,’ I tell the driver, halfway out of the cab as it draws to a slow halt outside Garstead Cottage. ‘Keep the engine on.’ I run past the cardboard cow with the yellow earring and pound on the cottage’s back door. Mary’s ‘Survivor’ song is playing. She opens the door and squints at me, as if I’m a bright light and she’s been in the dark for a long time. She wasn’t expecting me back. ‘You’ve got to get out of here,’ I tell her. ‘No time to explain. The taxi’s outside. Go somewhere, anywhere. Go to Martha’s mother’s house.’
‘Cecily?’ She looks down at her bare feet, doesn’t move. She’s wearing torn jeans and a black shirt with paint on it. I want to grab her, pull her outside and out of the way. ‘What’s going on?’ she asks.
I’m going to have to tell her something. ‘I rang the police in Lincoln. Two of the gardens I designed have been vandalised—turf torn up, plants pulled out of the earth. One last summer and one in the early hours of Tuesday morning.’ Not more than six hours after Gemma Crowther was murdered.
Mary’s eyes widen. ‘Cherub Cottage?’
‘No. Two of the three I won awards for.’ I can’t understand it, not really, and I don’t want to try. For someone to attack something as beautiful and natural as a garden, something so irreplaceable—it’s beyond my comprehension. The owners will replant and reseed, but it won’t be the same. No two gardens are ever the same.
I can’t let the sadness in, not now, when I need to stay alert.
Mary grips the door frame. ‘He did it to you as well.’
‘Look, there’s no time. He’s coming here. Go.’
‘I’m not leaving you to—’
‘You have to! I can’t explain now. You have to trust me, like I trusted you. Give me your mobile number—I’ll ring you as soon as I can.’
‘I need a few minutes,’ Mary says, disappearing inside.
The seconds drag. The taxi-driver turns off his engine and I gesture at him to switch it back on.
When Mary comes outside she’s got shoes on, a jacket and a khaki hold-all. ‘Mobile number’s on the kitchen table, with the phone. Here are the keys.’ She puts them in my hand. ‘Ring me.’ She’s fumbling in her bag, moving too slowly. I want to scream at her to hurry. ‘Why don’t you come with me?’ she says. We could both—’
‘I can’t. Go to your parents’ house and—’
‘My parents?’ She blinks at me in the darkness.
‘Go to my house.’ I pull my keys out of my bag and throw them at her. ‘Ring the police, ask them to wait with you.’
At last she gets into the taxi. ‘Ring me,’ she says before closing the door. ‘Take care of yourself.’
I watch as the cab turns and drives down the long path, over the discreet speed bumps that look like small hillocks in the concrete, and out through the school gates. Once it’s gone, I run back to the cottage. Mary left the door open. The music’s still playing. I run to the dining room and turn the door handle, but nothing happens. I turn it the other way. Nothing. Locked. I reach above the door frame for the key, but there’s nothing there. Frantically, I sweep my fingers all the way along the tiny ledge. The key’s gone.
I run back to the kitchen, where I’ve seen other keys hanging from small hooks on the underside of a wooden cabinet. Yes—five metal hooks, screwed into the wood. More than five keys. I try them one by one, sprinting between the two rooms, but none of them’s the right one. I’m going to have to smash the window.
I run past the kitchen table, where Mary has painted her mobile number in blue on the wood; there’s a thin blue-tipped brush next to the cordless phone. Outside, there’s no one around. I can see lights in some of the windows of the main school building in the distance, the one with the square tower, but they seem a million miles away.
At the back of Garstead Cottage it’s darker than at the front, without the lights on either side of the path. There’s a window that must belong to the dining room—it’s the only one that’s the right size. I bend to pick up a large stone from the ground and find myself rearing back. I can’t pick up a sto
ne and throw it. I can’t. What else can I use? My shoes aren’t heavy enough, nor is anything in my bag.
The bikes at the front. I sprint round the side of the house and find, near the bikes, something even better: a metal tyre pump. I grab it and run back to the dining room window.
I’m about to smash the glass when the music stops. I hesitate, listening to the intense silence all around me. Less than five seconds later, the noise starts up again: the same song, endlessly repeating. ‘Help!’ I scream into the empty, muffling air around me. ‘Somebody help me!’ Nothing.
I drive the bicycle pump into the windowpane, putting all my weight behind it. The glass smashes. Most of it falls into the room. I use the pump to scrape away the jagged pieces still sticking out of the frame. Then I climb in through the window and push the heavy floor-length curtains aside. The air in the room is full of what I think at first are small, coloured feathers, floating, but they’re not. They’re pieces of canvas, lifted from the top of the pile by the gust of wind that’s blown in through the smashed window. There it is in front of me, an enormous, flaking, shedding growth that looks as if it’s sprouted from the floor: the mountain of destroyed paintings. And the paint that’s been thrown over it, pooled on the floor . . . I bend, touch a puddle of blue with my fingers: it’s still wet. More paint, even since I left. I bring my fingers to my nose and sniff.
This isn’t the sort of paint anyone would use for pictures; the smell’s too strong, too chemical. I look over at the dining table. The tins of paint, the same ones I saw last time I was in here, with Mary, are round and wide. Dulux. For painting walls, not pictures. For disguising a worse smell underneath. It didn’t occur to me before. None of the walls in Garstead Cottage are this shade of blue. Or yellow, or green. Or red.
My heart pounding, I bend to touch a pool of red. The texture is different. I smell my fingers and cry out. Blood.
I dive into the pile and start to tear at it, pushing its mass to one side, shovelling fragments aside with my arms, tunnelling my way in. I burrow down, spitting pieces of canvas out of my mouth as I go. Every few seconds I lift my face to breathe. I keep delving and pushing until I hit something hard and cold, something I know can’t be a painting, or part of a frame.
I close my hand around it and pull it out: a hammer. On its silver-coloured head, I can see where the blood has dried in smears. I throw it across the room, hating the feel of it against my skin, and carry on digging, combing with my fingers. I’ve got to be right. I’ve got to be . . .
I’m touching a hand.
A painted smile, a fingernail, a patch of grey-blue sky.
I saw a fingernail when Mary first brought me in here. I thought it was a cutting from a painting, but it wasn’t. It was real.
I sweep wildly with my arms, attacking what’s left of the canvas mountain until it breaks up, falls away to one side or the other, and I see him. ‘Aidan!’ I sob. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
His eyes are half closed. There’s a square of shiny brown tape over his mouth. I yank it off, hoping he’ll move or make a sound. Nothing. I’m terrified to look at his still, white face, in case it stays still for too long. He was alive last night, earlier today. The cows, mooing in the fields outside . . . I thought one of them sounded as if it was in pain. The low groan I thought came from Mary . . . It was Aidan I heard, Aidan moaning in agony, his life spilling away in blood that I mistook for red paint on the cream carpet. Why didn’t I see? Why didn’t I know?
Beneath his right shoulder there’s a dark hole in his shirt. Its edge is black, as if the fabric’s been burned. Shot—he’s been shot. His mouth is slack, open, and I can see something inside it, something flesh-coloured, too big to be his tongue. I touch it, then, as gently as I can, I pull it out. It’s a peach-coloured bath sponge, similar to the one Gemma used to gag me. She also used parcel tape to keep my mouth closed and the sponge in place. The exactness of the recreation paralyses me for a moment as ice-cold terror floods my body. I thought that once I had the truth, the fear would end, but it hasn’t. It’s worse.
Aidan didn’t destroy my gardens, or Mary’s pictures. She lied. She told me there were eighteen paintings in her exhibition that never was, the one Aidan invented. Did she forget she’d said that, when she showed me the sales list from Aidan’s TiqTaq show? It wasn’t the real list, it was one she’d written out herself. I recognised her ‘M’ from her signature on Abberton. Eighteen pictures in Aidan’s exhibition, eighteen empty frames on his walls, each one a tribute to a painting that had been viciously dismembered.
She switched places with him in her story, reversed their roles. Made him the destroyer, herself the victim.
I lied too. Did Mary believe me, that I wanted her to leave Garstead Cottage for her own safety? Was I convincing?
Panting hard, I drop the sponge and wipe my hand on my trousers until the skin smarts.
I must call an ambulance. Not the police—the police are for when it’s too late and it isn’t, it can’t be. I run to the door, forgetting it’s locked and I have no key. When it won’t open, I head for the window instead, skidding on the feathery mess that’s all over the floor, ready to throw myself out onto the grass.
‘Hello, Ruth,’ says a tremulous, distorted voice from outside, and I scream, as if the night itself has spoken to me.
A form appears from the blackness, moving closer. A thin, lined face that sags under the weight of its triumphant smile, like someone trying to hold aloft a trophy that’s too heavy. Mary. Wearing an expression of such manic, barely controlled elation that it makes me scream again, even before I see the gun that’s in her hand.
26
5/3/08
Kate Kombothekra had the car keys ready when she opened her front door. ‘Here you go,’ she said, thrusting them at Charlie.
‘You sure this is okay? I don’t know when I’ll be able to bring it back.’
‘It’s fine. The boys and I’ll walk to school tomorrow. It’ll do us good, though don’t tell Sam I said that. When he said it to me I nearly throttled him. One thing: if you could avoid smoking in it . . .’
‘Do my best,’ Charlie shouted over her shoulder.
As she slammed the driver door, she heard Kate yell, ‘Or at least open the . . .’ Charlie beeped the horn. Steering with one hand, she pulled her phone out of her handbag on the passenger seat and pressed redial. ‘Villiers,’ said the voice that answered after three rings. ‘Claire Draisey speaking.’
‘Hello, it’s me again, Charlie Zailer. Any luck?’
‘I’m afraid not. There’s been some kind of emergency here, and the deputy head’s in a meeting. I’ve rung round everyone I can think of, and no one’s seen hair nor hide of a Simon Waterhouse. Are you sure he’s here?’
‘Not absolutely. It’s where he said he was going, that’s all I know.’ Charlie had rung the school when she couldn’t reach Simon on his mobile, and got a recorded message, tacked on to the end of which was an emergency out-of-hours number—Claire Draisey’s, as it turned out. Draisey had told her few mobile phones could get reception in Villiers’ grounds, which made Charlie all the more inclined to think that was where Simon was.
‘Look, I’m going to have to free up this line,’ said Draisey, sighing. ‘You’re from the Culver Valley, did you say?’
‘That’s right. So’s DC Waterhouse.’
‘Right. Then you’re nothing to do with the London police.’
‘London police?’ A burst of adrenalin set off Charlie’s internal antennae.
‘Yes. A colleague said they’re on their way here. Look, I don’t know much more than you do at this stage. A group of our girls went on a trip to the Globe Theatre tonight to see Julius Caesar. I’ve just checked the car park, and the minibus isn’t back yet, which it certainly ought to be, and we’re all rather anxious in case . . .’
‘I wouldn’t waste your time if this wasn’t important,’ said Charlie. ‘Are you sure you’ve checked everywhere?’
‘No, I haven’
t,’ said Draisey bluntly. ‘I didn’t say I had. I’ve spoken to those members of house staff that I could get hold of, and that’s all I can do, I’m afraid. I’m not traipsing round the grounds at this time of night looking for your missing colleague. Do you have any idea of the size of our empire?’ The last word was loaded with sarcasm. ‘It’d take me most of the night.’
‘What about Garstead Cottage?’ Charlie asked.
‘What about it?’ Draisey said curtly. ‘It’s rented to a private tenant who I’m not about to disturb. Now, if you’ll—’
‘Wait,’ said Charlie. ‘I got a message to ring somebody—someone I think might be in trouble. When I rang her back on the number she gave me, I got through to a taxi-driver: Michael Durtnell, his name is. He works for a firm called N & E Cars.’
‘Newsham and Earle,’ said Draisey. ‘That’s our taxi firm—the one the school uses.’
‘Right.’ Charlie let out the breath she’d been holding. Progress. ‘He said he’d left Garstead Cottage twice today, each time with a different woman passenger. Both women then decided they didn’t want to go anywhere, and asked him to take them back to Garstead Cottage. He said both were behaving strangely. I think one of those women is the person who phoned me. DC Waterhouse might already be—’
‘Sergeant Zailer, if I could stop you for a moment?’ Draisey sounded exhausted, her voice fainter than it had been previously. ‘I should have realised when you said you were from Culver Valley Police. I don’t suppose I’m thinking straight, with the minibus missing and rumours of London coppers beating a path to our door. I know for a fact that the current resident of Garstead Cottage has a friend staying with her at the moment—a female friend.’
It had to be Ruth Bussey.
‘I also know, as perhaps you don’t, that she’s in the habit of pestering the local police, summoning them when there’s absolutely no need and generally making their lives a misery. Sounds like tonight she’s decided it’s your turn. She has another house in your neck of the woods, I believe.’
The Dead Lie Down: A Novel Page 43
