Quick off the Mark

by Moody, Susan

  I felt we were (that’s me and the police!) near to a final breakthrough in the case. Just one more step, and we’d have the perpetrator. It wouldn’t help to keep on mulling all the facts over and over. I thought again of the wake organized for Milo. A good send off, taken all in all. The pieces read, touching on death and churchyards, yew trees and coffins, were mostly standard offerings on similar occasions. It was difficult to come up with a new take on someone dying. I was tired. A hot bath, a wee dram, a good book, an early night, and I’d be dead to the world within fifteen minutes.

  Later, nearly asleep, eyes glazing over, I picked up the book beside my bed and attempted to read it. I managed about a paragraph before falling at last into dream-filled slumber.

  Which is where the usefulness of dreams came in. I woke the next morning with a clear vision in my head of a small stone vault, roofed with lichened tiles of slate, decorated with carved panelling. There was an area in front of blueish gravel, and round pots on either side of the entrance containing small evergreen shrubs. And I knew exactly where it was.

  I felt around the gutter above the door and found the key. I’d been there on a couple of occasions with Tristan, wondering at the time at his display of family piety. I’d stepped inside, ducking my head beneath the stone lintel. Smelled the dust of ages, sensed the presence of ancient bones, of lives long ago ended. Felt the rising queasiness of claustrophobia and stumbled out into the free air, while Tristan remained inside for another ten or fifteen minutes. What had he been doing? I hoped to find at least part of the puzzle.

  The edifice was about the size of a small garden shed. I pushed at the little door which led down three or four steps to a larger area where small rectangular plaques were set into the walls. Some were metal, some stone, some even in wood. The only light came from the space above, but I could see each plaque was inscribed with the name of long-ago Huber-Drayton ancestors. I looked round the space. Then walked round all four walls, tapping at the plaques as I went. Several of them were slightly loose. With some difficulty, I prised one halfway open. Inside was a metal box containing God knew what relics of a once-human body. And a large black plastic sack. I reached in, tore at the plastic, caught a glimpse of thick packs of paper money.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  I whirled round, slamming the plaque shut. Dorcas stood there, snorting like a wild boar, not quite pawing the ground, but pretty close. ‘I’m … uh …’

  ‘Get out!’ She gestured at the steps. ‘Get out! How dare you trespass on private property like this!’

  ‘It’s me, Dorcas,’ I said, fairly sure she couldn’t actually make out who I was. ‘Alexandra Quick.’

  ‘Alexan … What are you doing here?’ she demanded. ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘Nothing. It was a trip down memory lane, that’s all.’ I wished I’d had time to inspect a couple more of the loosened memorial tablets.

  ‘I must ask you to leave immediately,’ Dorcas growled.

  Which I did.

  From my car, I called Fliss, told her what I’d discovered. ‘I’m betting there’s masses more cash hidden in that vault. Possibly millions. It might be worth taking a look for yourselves,’ I said.

  ‘I can’t see how it would help much. How we’d pin it on your Mr Huber, how we’d connect it to our other suspects.’ She paused. ‘It’s an ingenious hiding place, though. Unlikely to burn down. Not subject to wind or weather.’

  ‘Precisely. The loot could stay undisturbed for decades.’ I shuddered. ‘Oh boy, if ever there was dirty money …’

  ‘I’m not sure what grounds we’d have for inspecting the place. I’ll put it to Garside.’

  As soon as I got home, I ran up the stairs of my flat to the bedroom and picked up Chris Kearns’ book. I’d fallen asleep over it last night, but now I read the relevant page a great deal more closely.

  The night the police came to inform me of Eunice’s death, Kearns had written, was, without any question, the bitterest and bleakest moment of my life. I had fallen into a pit so black that I could see no way out. If you have never lost a child – and pray God you never do – you cannot begin to understand what it feels like. My heart was nothing but a shrivelled prune caught in the harsh mesh of my pain. My beloved daughter, my adored child, gone for ever, because of a small round pill. The knowledge that if she had been rushed to hospital, she could have been saved, might be living the happy, useful life that was intended for her, has been part of the horror. How can you adequately describe the pain of a child’s death? How can you say to people: ‘This is what it feels like’ and expect them to understand?

  I wept. I screamed. I pounded my hands raw against the walls. I vowed revenge on someone, anyone. The need to avenge her blazed like a white hot flame inside me, searing my soul. But whatever I did, nothing was going to bring Eunice back. And besides, who could I blame except Eunice herself?

  Was he telling the reader something more than merely a description of his agonized feelings at learning of his daughter’s death?

  I went round to the bookshop. Ordered a coffee. Laid out my suspicions in some detail. ‘What do you think?’ I said finally.

  ‘I think you’ve made a very convincing case against the man,’ Sam said. ‘And it’s a lot more sound than those damned Triads.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  At his trial, Kearns pleaded guilty to five counts of murder. He was quite open about it, pleading guilty, showing no remorse for the lives eliminated. He had planned it very carefully, taking his time, getting to know his victims first, their habits and routines, then waylaying them, overpowering them and killing them. He blamed Tristan first and foremost for supplying the Class A drugs at the college’s Christmas party where his daughter Zoe died, although evidence at her inquest revealed that despite his insistence that she had not touched a drug before, she had been a regular user for several years.

  ‘I took my time over Huber,’ he told the courtroom in a final statement, ‘as I held him particularly responsible not only for my daughter’s death but for the ruin of many other young people. He was a liar and a cheat. I felt very strongly that with his upbringing, and all the social and financial advantages he enjoyed, he should be punished as severely as possible.’ He cleared his throat.

  ‘Kevin Fuller was different. He had assured the university authorities that, as one of the principal party organizers, he would be keeping a careful eye on the students attending. The threat of drugs at this kind of gathering is always going to be a matter of concern. The same went for Milo Stanton.’

  He had looked around the court. It was very obvious that he saw this as a final appearance in front of his public. ‘I was sorry,’ he said. ‘From all reports, Fuller was a good man. But he reneged on his promises when he not only tolerated drugs on the premises in the first place but also allowed my daughter to consume the Ecstasy tablet which eventually was the cause of her death. As for Milo … I loved the man. So did Zoe. She would have trusted him to see that she came to no harm. And with what result?’

  The spectators in the gallery listened to his testimony with disbelief. The man had clearly been driven out of his mind by grief, and seemed unable to see how irrational his arguments were.

  ‘As for the boyfriend, Swift, I had no prior knowledge of him, but how could he have let a girl who was clearly suffering from the effects of an illegal substance just leave, late on a dark winter night in December? How could he do that?’

  The judge pointed out at this juncture that the court had heard that Ned Swift and Zoe Kearns had only been out together a couple of times and that in the opinion of other students, it was only because kind-hearted Ned had felt sorry for her, had referred to her as a serious oddball without any friends.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Kearns had replied. ‘Zoe was a warm and loveable girl, with many friends and a great future ahead.’

  His fifth and last victim had been Dibdin, the taxi-driver. In the course of his research, he had noticed that the
old boy would come out on cold mornings and start his taxi up, leave it in front of his house to warm up the engine before driving off to start his day’s work. Zoe had climbed into his cab after running out of the party venue and as far as the police could conjecture, had thrown up on the back seat, at which point the cantankerous old fellow had turned her out into the street, not caring how she would get home. When he’d driven off, some scumbag had emerged from the shadows, dragged her into an alleyway, raped her and then strangled her. In revenge, Kearns had simply waited one morning until Dibdin came out of his house and climbed into his taxi, then shot him, and made a quick getaway. It might have remained an unsolved killing if Kearns hadn’t eventually confessed.

  ‘You almost felt sorry for Kearns,’ I told Sam later.

  ‘Not really,’ Sam said. ‘He was playing to the gallery – quite literally.’

  ‘I know, but even so …’

  ‘I thought he was an arrogant, narcissistic sod with a pronounced God-complex, who felt that the world owed him,’ Sam said firmly. He cut me another slice of the walnut-and-Stilton quiche he had brought with him. ‘I can’t say your friend Tristan will be much missed, but four other more or less innocent people died for his daughter, three at least of them with far more potential than she would ever have. I hope he doesn’t forget that when they lock him up for good.’

  Which they never did. Kearns evaded justice by hanging himself in his cell, knotting together his shirt-sleeves to produce a makeshift noose. He hadn’t been put on suicide watch, mostly because of his cocky attitude. He seemed to be convinced that he had the sympathy of the court, that the judge and jury would find his actions no more than any reasonable parent might have committed.

  A week later, my parents telephoned to say that Dorcas Huber-Drayton was in hospital and not expected to survive. Apparently she had suffered a heart attack and fallen into the blazing bonfire she was tending in her garden, ending up with third-degree burns over half her body.

  ‘I didn’t even know she had a heart,’ Dimsie commented. ‘Poor old girl.’

  Sam and I were sitting with her in Dorcas’s drawing room, drinking a glass of white wine. It was a gloomy day, with the sun bursting through scudding cloud to illumine the garden and the churchyard next to it.

  ‘The revelations about Tristan can’t have made her very happy.’

  ‘Well, they wouldn’t, would they?’ Dimsie stared gloomily round the room. ‘I suppose all this is mine now. And I so don’t want it.’

  ‘I’m still not clear why she had lit a bonfire in the first place,’ I said. ‘I’d have thought that was Gibson’s job.’

  ‘Yes. Except it wasn’t garden rubbish that she was disposing of.’ Dimsie held out her glass with something – actually, a lot – of her mother’s imperiousness, and waited while Sam refilled it for her.

  ‘It was money, wasn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘How the hell did you know that?’

  ‘Just a lucky guess.’ I was fairly sure that having seen me in the Huber-Drayton vault, Dorcas had gone back into it as soon as I’d left, and discovered – if she hadn’t already been aware – the huge amounts of money stashed there by her son. She’d removed it, before the police could do so, and then burned it when the revelations about Tristan had begun to emerge.

  Now Sam and I sat close together on my own sofa. ‘Are you really going to go to New Zealand?’ I said. There was a crumb of Stilton on the edge of his mouth and I reached up to dab it away.

  ‘Would you miss me if I did?’ he asked.

  I thought about it. ‘Actually, yes,’ I said eventually.

  He put an arm round my shoulders. ‘Is that all?’

  Curved in his embrace, I looked up at him. He was a lovely man. ‘I’d miss you more than I can possibly say,’ I said. And I meant it.