The Dead Lie Down: A Novel

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘He looked Gemma and Stephen up on the internet and found what he expected to find,’ Mary tells Waterhouse. ‘Their attack on Ruth, all that. But the name Gemma Crowther kept coming up in another context too—on Quaker websites. That’s how he found out which meeting she went to. He started going too. He wanted to find out if she was the same Gemma Crowther who’d nearly killed his girlfriend.’

  ‘Told you all this at gunpoint, did he?’

  ‘He didn’t have to say anything he didn’t want to. Neither do I. I’m telling you because I want to, no other reason.’ Mary’s voice is full of scorn.

  ‘Did he find out, then?’ Waterhouse asks. ‘That she was the same Gemma Crowther?’

  ‘Not at first. Not until she mentioned that she used to live near Lincoln. Then he knew. He asked her why she moved to London. That was the test: to see if she’d changed. If she had, he said, she’d have told him the truth: what she’d done to Ruth, and that she was sorry, that she was a different person now. At the very least she’d have mentioned having been in prison, even if she didn’t say what for. But she didn’t. She lied—made up some story about wanting a change of scene and career. He knew she was a fake when she told him that.’ Mary laughs. ‘She was a healer, did you know that? What a fucking hypocrite! No loss to the world, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Why did Aidan give Gemma Crowther your painting?’ Waterhouse asks.

  Silence. Or else they’re talking but I can’t hear them any more. When I hear Mary’s voice, I’m relieved. ‘He said they deserved each other. Gemma and the picture.’ She’s crying. ‘As if a painting’s a moral agent, as if it can deserve anything. Monday night was going to be the last time he saw her—he told me. He wanted nothing more to do with her, or me. He was going to leave Abberton with her because it seemed appropriate, he said. And then he’d be rid of us both for ever, me and her.’

  ‘Makes sense,’ says Waterhouse. ‘That’s why you made him lock Abberton in the boot of his car before forcing him at gunpoint to drive here. It wasn’t only about framing him for Gemma’s murder, was it? It was symbolic. You wanted to show him he couldn’t shake you off so easily.’

  He’s right, isn’t he Mary? You wanted the police to find something of Aidan’s and something of yours together: his car, your painting.

  Aidan knew he couldn’t shake you off. That was one lesson you didn’t have to teach him. It’s why he went to the police and confessed, as soon as he saw I was planning to involve them. Thinking about it, I’m sure he followed me that day. I told him I was going to the dentist, but I’m a poor liar. He was right not to trust me. He’d confided in me and I betrayed him. Not straight away, but eventually, when the uncertainty became too much for me. He’d been convinced I would, ever since our night in London—it was only a matter of time. And when the time came, he was ready with his official confession. It was the only way he could keep control of the situation.

  He as good as sent the police straight to your house, Mary, to see if you’d tell them. If you were going to ruin his life again, he wanted you to get it over with. He was trying to force your hand. You could easily have told Waterhouse or Charlie Zailer the truth: that your name used to be Martha Wyers, that Mary Trelease was the name of a woman Aidan had killed. You could have told them about the painting in his exhibition, The Murder of Mary Trelease.

  What was in that picture, Mary? I know you remember. How annoyed you must have been when you found out from your private detective about Mary Trelease’s death. You’d had, in that painting, evidence of Aidan’s crime—had it and destroyed it. How good was it, as proof? What story did the picture tell? I’m surprised you didn’t have a stab at recreating it yourself, since by that point you’d started your new life as a painter. You must have remembered it detail for detail. Did you do a sketch of it and put it somewhere safe, so that you wouldn’t forget what you’d seen and what you knew?

  No answers come. No one can hear the questions going round in my head.

  What was in the picture, Aidan? Nothing obvious. You’d only have risked calling it The Murder of Mary Trelease if it wasn’t too much of a giveaway. It can’t have been a painting of you strangling her in which you were recognisable as the killer—people like Jan Garner and Saul Hansard would have asked questions. So what was it?

  You told the police you’d killed Mary, told them how and where you did it. But the woman you described was Martha—the woman you knew they’d find alive at 15 Megson Crescent. That was the point where you can’t have been sure. It was a gamble: either she’d tell them everything, produce whatever proof she had, or she wouldn’t. She’d say nothing. And the police would dismiss your story as the ravings of a deranged man, a man who could look them in the eye and insist that he’s murdered somebody who isn’t dead. You wanted them to think you were crazy. You didn’t want to go to prison.

  You regretted telling me you’d killed Mary Trelease as soon as the words were out and you saw the horror on my face. But you couldn’t take it back, not something as big as that. You couldn’t say you were joking. I wouldn’t have believed you. I could see the state you were in. Your only hope was to turn your confession into one you knew could be disproved—disproved by the existence of a woman calling herself Mary Trelease.

  As much as you wanted to protect yourself, you also wanted to confess. And you did: finally, you went to the police and told the truth. Even when you had to lie, when you had to withhold so much of the story that you ended up telling a different story altogether, you were still able to say the main thing that was true: that you’d killed Mary Trelease, that you’d strangled her in bed, in that room. It must have felt good to say it, after so many years of guilt and silence. Unburdening yourself, but with a safety net in place to give the lie to your confession—the presence of a real live Mary in the house where you told the police they’d find her body.

  She didn’t tell them what she knew. That would have meant handing control over to them, and there was no way she’d do that. You saw she hadn’t done it—no detectives came back to you to ask about the other Mary Trelease, the real one. But it still wasn’t over. Martha Wyers wasn’t going to disappear; you knew how doggedly clingy she was, how determined she was to latch on to your life as if it was rightfully hers. She was still there, at 15 Megson Crescent. She still knew what you’d done. It would never have been over, not unless you’d killed her, and you couldn’t do that. You weren’t a killer. I don’t know why you killed a woman years ago, but I know you’re not a killer.

  ‘Me, frame Aidan? He’s a murderer—a cold, calculating murderer. He strangled a woman—he told you so himself and you were too stupid to listen.’

  Martha’s right: you wanted to know if Gemma Crowther was sorry for what she’d done to me, if she’d changed. You can’t change unless you face up to what you’ve done. That’s what you tried to do in London, at the Drummond Hotel. Maybe you’d have succeeded if I’d given you the support you needed instead of letting you down.

  You wanted Gemma to show you she’d changed so that you could believe that sort of change was possible. If she could redeem herself, so could you. You must have wondered about Martha, too. Yes. That’s why you told her about Gemma, about wanting to see if she regretted what she’d done. Did you hope Martha would apologise for the terrible thing she’d done to you, even while she had a gun pointed at your face? Yes. I know the way a victim’s mind works, being one myself. You can accept that someone has damaged you beyond repair, and maybe that they will again. What you can’t accept is a total absence of regret.

  Martha didn’t say she was sorry. Of course she didn’t. Did you know then that you were better than her? Or did you start to wonder if anyone, any human being, was any good at all? Maybe you were as bad as Martha and Gemma—a killer who hadn’t had the guts to face up to his crime, who’d let someone else take the blame. Did you say whatever you needed to say after that to make Martha shoot you? Was it a relief when she did?

  ‘Which woman did Aidan kill?’
Waterhouse’s voice swims under the surface of my consciousness. ‘Mary? You said he killed a woman. Which woman?’

  ‘Me! He killed me!’

  ‘Simon!’ A third voice. Not mine. A woman’s. I have to open my eyes again. When I do, I see Waterhouse turning, Charlie Zailer at the window, Mary lunging for the gun. No . . .

  She’s got them both now, the gun and the hammer, one in each hand. There’s something wrong with the way she’s holding the hammer.

  ‘Bussey’s alive, Seed’s dead,’ Waterhouse says.

  I breathe in, breathe out. I think to myself that I ought to stop if I want to die. Suicide: a sin. Does it count if all you do is stop breathing, when breathing’s so hard? If there’s a God, does he have a view on that?

  ‘Aidan’s not dead,’ Mary says quickly. ‘If he were dead, I’d be dead, and I’m not.’

  ‘Put the gun and hammer down, Mary,’ Charlie Zailer says. ‘There’s an ambulance outside. This has to stop now.’

  ‘Aidan’s not dead! Check.’

  I hear movement; then, a few seconds later: ‘She’s right. There’s still a pulse.’

  Relief washes through me. There’s an ambulance outside, Aidan. Just hold on a little bit longer.

  ‘Stay away from me!’ Mary growls like an animal. She’s behind Waterhouse, pressing the gun against his head. Her hand is shaking, her finger wobbling the trigger. ‘I’ll kill him if you come any closer.’

  ‘That’s my fiancé you’ve got there,’ says Charlie. ‘Did you know that? Remember, we talked about him? You wondered why I wouldn’t choose to paint him, if I had to paint somebody.’

  ‘I don’t care who he is. Stop where you are, or I’ll shoot him. I mean it!’

  ‘I love him. We’re supposed to be getting married, even though everyone we know thinks it’s a really bad idea.’

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘It isn’t a bad idea, though, because I can’t be happy unless I’m with Simon. And after what I’ve been through, I think I deserve to be happy. You know all about what happened to me, right? You told me you did. I’m just like you, Martha. My life was in pieces, all because of a man . . .’

  ‘Don’t call me that!’

  ‘. . . but I was lucky enough to find a way out of my despair. I’ve got a chance to be happy now, and . . . well, the thing is, Simon and I haven’t actually been happy together yet, even though we’ve known each other for years. All we’ve done is waste time.’

  Mary swings the gun round, points it at Charlie. The hammer falls from her left hand. That’s right: she broke her fingers.

  ‘Put the gun down, Mary,’ says Waterhouse.

  ‘Keep quiet!’ Her voice is shaking so much, I barely recognise the words. ‘Or I’ll shoot you so you die, like Gemma. Not like these two. I never wanted to kill them. Ruth’s my friend.’

  ‘You didn’t want to kill Aidan?’ Charlie says. ‘You shot him in the chest.’

  ‘I shot him in the shoulder. I . . . I meant to aim higher. I didn’t want to shoot him at all, but he wouldn’t . . .’

  ‘Wouldn’t what?’

  ‘He wouldn’t admit that he loves me.’

  I hear a series of noises that are painful to listen to: shrill one minute, rasping the next. Can they all be coming from Mary? They don’t sound human.

  ‘The medics need to come in here and help Aidan and Ruth,’ says Charlie gently. ‘You’re going to let them do that, aren’t you, Martha?’

  ‘Martha’s dead!’

  ‘You said you didn’t want to kill them . . .’

  ‘If I do what you’re asking, what will happen to me?’

  ‘Prison. You know that. You’re not stupid. You’ll be able to paint there, though. Or write, if you want to. I’ll make sure of that. I’ll look after you, but first you’ve got to put the gun down.’

  ‘What about my paintings, the ones in my house? What will happen to them?’

  There’s a pause. It seems to last a long time.

  ‘Nothing. They’ll be waiting for you when you get out. And you will get out. You’ve got to trust—’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly. With extenuating circumstances taken into account, perhaps five years.’

  ‘You’re lying!’ Mary waves the gun in the air as if she can’t decide who to aim for. ‘Five years for a murder and two attempted murders? That’s too little. How long? Tell me the truth.’

  ‘You’ll be allowed to keep some of your paintings with you on the inside,’ says Charlie. I hear fear in her voice for the first time. ‘I’ll do everything I can to make sure—’

  ‘I wouldn’t be able to take them all with me, would I? All my pictures?’

  ‘Hand the gun to me and I’ll make sure they go with you, every single one of them.’

  ‘You’ve seen how many there are.’ Mary’s voice shakes. ‘They won’t fit in a prison cell. I can’t not have them with me.’

  ‘There are prisons that have other kinds of accommodation, not only cells. Women’s prisons especially. Some prisoners have their own rooms, or they share with one other person, but the rooms are a decent size.’

  ‘Sounds like a Villiers dorm.’

  ‘It’s true, Mary,’ says Waterhouse. ‘We’ll make sure you have the space you need for your paintings.’

  ‘You’re lying, both of you,’ she says, sounding calmer. ‘That’s okay. I won’t hold it against you.’ She lifts the gun, holds it to the side of her own head. When she speaks again, I can hear that she’s smiling, even though her face is turned away from me. ‘Now, Martha,’ she says. ‘No mistakes this time.’

  ‘No!’ Charlie screams.

  ‘I think yes,’ says Mary, and pulls the trigger.

  28

  12/3/08

  ‘The CPS won’t touch it with a bargepole unless we can do better than this,’ said Proust. His ‘World’s Greatest Grandad’ mug lay on its side. He rolled it back and forth on his desk, smacking the handle against the wood every few seconds. ‘It doesn’t help that Aidan Seed’s in the habit of confessing to killings that never took place. He still hasn’t offered a satisfactory explanation for why he did that—why tell us he’d killed one woman when in fact he’d killed someone altogether different?’

  ‘He’s still in bad shape, sir,’ said Charlie. ‘Ruth Bussey’s explained it in Seed’s presence. I was there. I saw him confirm her explanation as best he could. Seed regretted having told Bussey he’d killed Trelease. He got cold feet about facing up to the truth after all these years, and by that time he knew Martha Wyers was calling herself Mary Trelease, so he decided to turn what he’d originally intended to be the beginning of his true confession—“I killed Mary Trelease”—into an easily disprovable false one.’ Charlie shrugged. ‘I know you don’t like it, but it does make sense, sir.’

  ‘If that’s your opinion, Sergeant Zailer, then you have my condolences.’

  ‘We’ve been through this,’ said Simon impatiently.

  ‘Not everyone’s mind works in exactly the same way yours does, sir.’

  Proust gave Charlie the look he reserved for despicable traitors.

  ‘Even if we accept Bussey and Seed’s explanation and a revised confession from Seed, it’s going to be an uphill struggle if Len Smith sticks to his story,’ said Sam Kombothekra.

  ‘The CPS don’t do uphill struggles, sergeant. You know that as well as I do. They prefer gentle strolls down country lanes.’

  Sam nodded unhappily. ‘In their eyes, Smith’s a killer, yes, but he’s not a liar.’

  ‘He isn’t a killer,’ said Simon. He wasn’t interested in other people’s eyes and the things they saw that weren’t there. After last week he was less interested than he’d been before. Most people were idiots, even those whose rank and years of experience might suggest otherwise. Coral Milward had been so determined to nail Stephen Elton for Gemma Crowther’s murder that she’d wasted God knows how much time trying to break down what she’d called Elton’s ‘suspiciously solid�
� alibi. It was solid because he’d been telling the truth.

  Elton, Simon had heard from Colin Sellers, was a habitual user of prostitutes, both male and female. (‘No droughts for him, lucky sod. World’s his oyster—both hemispheres.’) After helping to clear up at Friends House on the night Gemma was murdered, he’d paid a visit to one of his regulars, a sixteen-year-old called Sharda who shared a bedsit in Seven Sisters with three other illegal immigrant sex workers. Elton’s alibi was also his motive: Gemma Crowther had known about his habit and regularly threatened to expose it to their Quaker friends if he didn’t follow her orders to the letter. Effectively, he was her domestic slave. Elton had been foolish enough to admit to Milward that he’d frequently fantasised about killing Gemma, and only didn’t because he loved her. ‘You’ve got to admit, though, that’s a good reason,’ Sellers had remarked this morning to Simon, entirely without irony.

  Mary Trelease hadn’t been interviewed at all, despite a long and elaborate description she’d given Ruth Bussey of an encounter with a detective from London. All lies. Dunning had called at 15 Megson Crescent several times and got no response. When he finally got round to entering the premises by force, Trelease and Ruth Bussey had already left for Garstead Cottage. Simon had found this out from DC Kevin Prothero, the newest member of Milward’s team, the one to whom she’d assigned the task of dealing with some of the more awkward loose ends. Two of these were Simon and Charlie.

  Milward had spoken to Simon once since last Wednesday, on the telephone. Without apologising, she’d explained how wedded she’d been at first to Stephen Elton in the role of chief suspect, and given Simon her reasons, in the manner of someone who’d forgotten she’d been proved wrong. Her ‘thank you’ had been distant and non-specific. Simon would have preferred one that came firmly attached to a mention of he and Charlie having risked their lives and put Milward’s case to bed for her in the process.

  ‘Look at what we know,’ said Proust. ‘Smith’s been in trouble with the law for most of his life. An alcoholic, a wife-beater, a gambler. Seed’s got a clean slate.’