The Anna McColl Mysteries Box Set 2

by Penny Kline

  I followed him into the street. ‘You know who it is, the person James suspects of killing his father?’

  ‘I’d have thought you’d have found out for yourself by now. Providing everyone with a bit of psychotherapy is a novel way of investigating their darkest thoughts, I‘ll give you that, but how d’you know if people are telling you the truth? Even psychoanalysts must get lied to.’ He ran a finger across the palm of his hand, as if he was measuring his life line. ‘The female of the species,’ he said slowly, ‘isn’t that what they say? Always deadlier than the male.’

  For a moment I thought he was talking about me, then I realized it was more likely he was referring to the person responsible for Tom Luckham’s death. Before I could ask what he meant he had answered the question himself. I had to strain to hear what he was saying, above the noise of an ambulance.

  ‘One gives, the other takes, but let me give. You died, you had to die, so I could live.’

  The first poem in the book Livvy had shown me at Miller’s Cottage. ‘James has a copy of Livvy’s poems?’

  Buzz laughed. ‘Hasn’t everyone? Look, if you want to know more you’ll have to talk to him yourself. If it wasn’t for Sally he’d have left home long ago. He crashes out here when things get too heavy. Have you any idea what it’s like spending half your time searching the house for bottles? She even had one hanging out of the bathroom window on a piece of string.’

  ‘Please,’ I had one last try. ‘If you've any idea where I might find James.’

  ‘Try the hostel.’

  ‘Where Clare Kilpatrick lives?’ But already he was halfway across the street, dodging between the double stream of traffic. When he reached the other side he paused, raising his hand in a brief wave, but without bothering to turn round. A moment later he had disappeared down the road that leads through to the Entertainment Centre.

  *

  Wesley Young was working in the front garden. For someone who claimed to know nothing about flowers, he had produced a pretty impressive display, even though they were mostly the standard petunias and busy Lizzies that can be bought in bulk from any garden centre.

  ‘Hallo,’ I walked across to join him. ‘Not in the shop today?’

  ‘Half-day closing.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ I had forgotten how some of the shops, away from the city centre, still closed on Thursday afternoons. ‘I’m looking for James Luckham. You haven’t seen him?’

  He yawned. ‘You’ve only just missed him. Called round to see if Clare needed any help. She was off sick yesterday with a migraine, still feels a bit groggy.’

  ‘He’s with Clare now?’

  He yawned again, shaking his head, and my frustration started to get the better of me.

  ‘You don’t know where he went?’

  ‘Afraid not. Important is it? Not his mother, I hope.’

  There was no time to ask what he meant. Was Erica’s drinking common knowledge? ‘No, nothing like that, so you’ve no idea where he’s likely to be?’

  As I was leaving Wesley called me back. ‘Only an idea, but he could’ve gone to Seeker Gorge’

  ‘Why would he do that.’

  He took a tissue from his trouser pocket and wiped his nose. ‘Think I must be allergic to the pollen. He goes to the gorge quite often, hopes it’ll help him work out what happened to his father that day. Can’t leave it alone, but who can blame him. Anyway, I expect he’ll call round here later on. Give him a message if I see him, shall I? Tell him you wanted a word.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  Seeker Gorge. It was a long shot but at the very least I would see for myself the place where Tom Luckham’s body had been found. Not the exact place — I had no idea where that had been — but the steep, rocky gorge that Howard had described, a place I had passed several times, but never actually stopped off to explore. There was nothing dangerous about it, that’s what Buzz had said. Tom Luckham was a bastard but his death was inexplicable.

  It was just after six. I crossed the Suspension Bridge, turned left down Rownham Hill, then under the flyover, following the signs to Taunton, the airport and the A38. I was thinking about Livvy. She was depressed, angry, hysterical, but was she capable of murder? Snatches of the poem, with the pin men frieze, came back into my head. Suck the blood, warm and soft, between the lips, in hungry sips. Falling, hard, a seeping wound, thrusting in, a loving sin. They were hardly memorable lines, but I had remembered them, rehearsing them in my head, wondering if the sheet of paper in the bound volume was Livvy’s way of confessing, a sick woman who wanted someone to take responsibility for what she had done. Did James know something about Livvy and if so why had he kept it to himself since January?

  I passed a church, some obscure denomination, with this month’s improving message pasted on a board — CARPENTER FROM NAZARETH NEEDS JOINERS — and wondered what a theologian like Stephen Bryce would have made of it. Then I wondered if he had spoken the truth about his reason for resigning from his parish. Ros had never hinted that there had been anything else, apart from Stephen’s loss of faith, but was it just possible something had happened that he had managed to keep from her? Or something they both knew about but wanted to keep from me? Something connected with Tom Luckham?

  It was Stephen who had started me off, thinking Luckham had not died from natural causes. As far as Stephen was concerned, however urgent the phone call to the house had been, Tom would still have looked after his health meticulously.

  According to Buzz, he and James were aware of my interest in the ‘accident’. Motive and opportunity. All along I had been assuming the person who stole my bag and used my video membership card was the same woman who had tried to pull Sally into her car, but there were other explanations. I had been wrong about the sender of the cassette, and the theft of the bag could have been simply a random event, unconnected with anything else that had been going on. Or had someone been trying to warn me off, someone who feared that my interest in the Luckham family would lead to a new investigation into what had happened at Seeker Gorge? Any number of people might have had the opportunity to kill Tom Luckham, but who was it who had the motive?

  I passed a large comprehensive, closed for the summer holidays, and it reminded me how Sally must have walked home from her private school, the day the attempted abduction took place, aware that when she reached home she was likely to find her mother slumped in a chair, or still in bed. Women with a drink problem elicited very little compassion, whereas tranquillizer addicts — and in my opinion the problem of weaning someone off sedatives had been wildly exaggerated — were the subject of sympathetic articles and television programmes by the score. It was true that pills had to be obtained on a prescription — and were therefore seen as ‘medicine’ — but in other ways was there really that much difference? I wondered if Erica’s doctor knew about the state she was in. Had all his attention been focused on her husband’s diabetes, with Erica being written off as a neurotic, attention-seeking female?

  Driving automatically, with only half my brain watching the route, I almost missed the turning off the A38. In front of me a slow-moving cattle truck had pulled into the hedge to allow a bus to pass. Even after it moved on I had to endure a frustrating fifteen minutes before I could turn right towards the Chew Valley lakes and the Mendips.

  The air was very warm and still, and winding down the windows made little difference. My brain was buzzing with half-remembered snatches of conversation. Fay Somers describing how James had gone with Clare to collect Cain from the nursery. Sally, with a paper napkin pressed against her mouth. They’re going to get the person who killed Daddy. But often it was the things people failed to mention that were the most important. Remarks that had seemed significant could have been intended to divert my attention away from the truth.

  A small red car was following about a hundred yards behind. It kept the same distance and when I slowed down it slowed down too. All of a sudden it was overtaken by a learner driver on a motor cycle, who roared u
p behind me, then swerved out at a dangerously high speed and shot away into the distance. I turned a corner, pulled up on the grass verge, and waited for the red Peugeot, but there was no sign of it: either it had stopped or the driver had pulled into the Forestry Commission car park.

  On my right a boggy area, covered in tall reeds, gave way to higher ground, rough moorland, broken up by low stone walls, many of which had gaps that no one had bothered to repair. A short distance ahead a flock of sheep had started squeezing through an open gate, pushing against each other so that one or two appeared to have been lifted off their feet. I slowed down to a crawl and a moment later a farmer on a tractor turned into the road, with his dog seated beside him, moving its head in all directions, watching as a second, younger dog rounded up the sheep. Another couple of miles and I would have reached my destination. Seeker Gorge, a small, steep valley that had been created when pressures from inside the earth had moved great masses of rock, and a strip of something much harder than the surrounding limestone, had formed an impermeable floor so that a stream ran over the surface, rather than sinking through. Geology was one of Howard’s interests, along with old churches and country houses, and he seemed to know the place quite well. During the past few weeks, any mention of Tom Luckham’s death had been easily brushed aside in favour of a description of how archaeologists had found tools in the gorge belonging to Neolithic Man, and how the remains of bears and wolves had been identified.

  Tom Luckham’s car had been left in one of the lay-bys, designed as a passing place. Maybe he had thought few cars were likely to come along the single track road in mid-January, and as it turned out, if his car had not been spotted, it was likely he could have lain at the bottom of the gorge for days, or even weeks.

  Parking my car well off the road, I started walking back towards the path that led down through the trees. In January the whole place would have looked quite different. The elms and oaks would have shed their leaves and the steep track might well have been wet with mud. Just now it was bone dry and very slippery. Every so often I lost my footing and had to grab hold of a branch or a thick fern. I was descending fast but I could see the high rocks on the opposite side, although it was impossible to tell where the path led up to the top. Everything, apart from the ferns, looked parched.

  I thought about Livvy and her crazy poems. Was it guilt, remorse, that had caused her to cut her arm with a razor blade? Was something in her crying out to be punished, but if that was the case, why not just admit what she had done? My brain conjured up an image of her phoning Tom Luckham early in the morning, persuading him to accompany her to the gorge, then confessing her love for him and expecting it to be reciprocated. How would he have reacted? With kindness, sensitivity, or would he have told her not to be such a silly little fool?

  The path had flattened out, then, almost immediately, it started to climb. There was a short cut, but only a fool would have tried to use it. A broad band of small, loose stones, like an enormous children’s slide, stretched from where I was standing right up to the rocks at the topmost point, but there was nothing to hold on to, no ferns or tree roots, whereas the path ahead of me was narrow, and winding, but had trees and bushes on either side.

  No one was about, but Howard had said the place was often deserted. Tourists were more interested in visiting Cheddar Gorge or Wookey Hole. Seeker had no giftshops or cafés, just a network of paths, some of them partially overgrown, and a steep climb for anyone prepared to make it, that looked as if it would provide a fairly spectacular view from the top. I was concentrating on keeping a foothold, but the thoughts that had been going round in my mind kept returning. Descriptions of Tom Luckham that made him out to be some kind of superman had always had the effect of making me think he was too good to be true. When Marion Young suggested he suffered from bouts of depression, I had jumped at the idea as an alternative explanation for what seemed to be a compulsive wish to help other people. Filling every moment of his day was an escape, but every so often the depression overwhelmed him. He had talked about it to Tricia Young. Why? Because they were both diabetic? But the girl had still been at school and was surely not the best person to understand the anguished soul-searching of a middle-aged man, who felt he had failed as an artist.

  The rocks that marked the top of the gorge were now in sight. I was out of breath and my feet had started to hurt. Tricia Young. There was something about the suicide of someone so young that produced feelings of anger and regret, even in people who barely knew the victim. Surely something could have been done to stop it. However bad the person had felt, was there no one who could convince her that in a week, a month, things would look different? Three A’s at A level, but she had only managed two B’s and a C. Only two B’s and a C. It was a perfectly good result but not in her terms.

  I had reached the top. As I rounded a couple of bushes I took an involuntary step backwards. There was no real danger, not where I was standing, but if I moved any further forward I would be very near the edge. Below me was the stony slide, and from high up it looked even steeper. In the distance I could see Wells Cathedral, and beyond that the unmistakable outline of Glastonbury Tor. Shading my eyes against the evening sun, I turned to see if it was possible to spot the coastline, Clevedon, or Weston, and it was then that I heard the first sounds. Someone was crunching up the path. At first I thought I had imagined it, but when I listened carefully there was no doubt they were human footsteps. What of it? I was visiting the place. Why not somebody else? Maybe there were people who came here regularly, to watch birds or study the plants. There could even be people employed to make sure the paths were safe, or to cut back some of the undergrowth.

  He came out into the open and I felt my throat constrict. In spite of it being such a warm evening he was wearing a dark jacket and thick grey trousers. He had a heavy stick in one hand.

  ‘You were expecting me,’ he said. ‘You saw my car.’

  An image flashed through my mind. Pam with her watering can. The woman who had moved into the house across the road. An expert in ‘genius’, who believed high achievement was simply the result of having encouraging parents. Encouraging parents. It was one of those moments when you realize that what feels like a revelation is really something that has been going round in your brain for days. I had allowed myself to be persuaded that Livvy Pope was the killer. I should have used my own judgement, thought things out properly. Now it was too late.

  ‘You were in the red Peugeot?’ I said, my voice sounding thin but surprisingly steady.

  ‘The van’s off the road. Bloke I do business with lent me one of his.’ He was breathing hard, his chest rising and falling beneath his brown checked shirt. ‘Tricia loved it here. The first time we brought her she couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. Of course we never came up this far, not until she was older. You need proper shoes.’ He glanced at mine. ‘Those aren’t strong enough.’

  ‘You told me James might have come here.’

  He gave a sad little smile. His white, silky hair was moving up and down, lifted by the breeze at the top of the gorge. ‘Marion did what she could to warn you — the bag, the video, explaining about Clare — but still you kept asking questions, stirring up trouble. Stephen knows nothing. He only kept in touch with you in the hope you’d persuade Ros to go back to him.’

  ‘It was Marion who stole my bag?’

  ‘She thought there might be notes, files, something that would tell her what was going on in your head, then when she couldn’t find anything —’

  ‘She used my video card. When she asked me round to the house it was because she wanted to find out how much I knew. What did you mean “explain about Clare”?' I was playing for time, keeping my eyes focused on Wesley, but also searching for a way to escape.

  ‘Clare told you she’d seen me in Tom’s car.’

  ‘No, no that’s not right. She thought it was a woman, a woman wearing a head scarf.’

  He didn’t believe me. ‘That’s what she told St
ephen, but when she was talking to you … I could see from your face … you knew Marion had sent that letter.’

  ‘To Clare?’ The more he said the better. Keep him talking, try to establish a relationship, but didn’t we have some kind of relationship already? To someone in Wesley’s state of mind anything that had taken place between us before would be irrelevant. Then I remembered how Wesley himself had dropped the first hint about Livvy. That Pope woman thought he (Tom Luckham) could walk on water. The slide projector. He had used it to lure me to the shop …

  ‘Clare knew,’ he said. ‘She told you the letter had come from a woman.’

  ‘I thought she meant Erica.’

  ‘Erica.’ He stared at me as if he thought I was mad. ‘For Marion’s sake. I did it for Marion. Why should he go on living when Tricia was dead? And the others. All the others. He used people to make himself feel important, to inherit the kingdom of heaven.’

  ‘So you brought him here,’ I said. It was a statement, not a question. ‘And pushed him over the edge.’

  He smiled to himself, then the smile vanished and was replaced by an angry clenching of the jaw. ‘I phoned from a call box and said Marion had gone missing. You see, his being Tom I knew he’d come straightaway. It was still dark, too early for his insulin but he brought everything he needed, and his breakfast of course in a special container like a kid’s lunch box. We drove round for a bit, then I suggested Marion might have gone to the gorge, the place Tricia loved best.’

  ‘But really she was still at home.’

  ‘She’d have made a lovely nurse,’ he said softly. ‘What’s wrong with being a nurse? Oh, but Tom could never leave well alone. You can do better than that, Tricia, you could be a doctor, I know you could.’

  It was very quiet. If I shouted it was just possible I would be heard by someone in the farm I could see in the distance. Just possible, but not at all likely, and what effect would it have on Wesley?