The House on Downshire Hill

by Guy Fraser-Sampson

  “I think she’ll be okay, guv. She sounded quite calm; not as twitchy as she was yesterday.”

  “I think it’s right that it should be just you and Karen who see her,” Collison said. “You’ve clearly built up some sort of rapport with her and we don’t want to do anything which might alarm her. But I think we need to plan this interview very carefully. Let’s draft a list of the points we need to raise and then you can use that as a checklist tomorrow morning.”

  He pulled a pad towards himself and started jotting items down as they occurred to him.

  “Feel free to throw out your own suggestions, anyone, but it seems to me we need the following. First and most importantly, exactly what did her mother tell her before she died? Exactly what did she see and how was she able to see it? It was night, remember. Was there a full moon? Was a light on, or was a torch being used? We need to know.”

  “It’s a long shot,” Metcalfe interjected, “but we should also ask if she has any idea at all who our victim might be. If she didn’t, then it’s unlikely the brother did either.”

  “Yes, and what about the brother?” Collison enquired. “Did they come back from Canada together? If so, where is he now and how can we get in touch with him? And what’s he been doing all this time? He must be in his mid-30s by now. Does he have a job? Has he been in any trouble with the police?”

  “I’ve got an enquiry out to the police in Canada,” Willis commented. “I’m waiting to hear back from them.”

  “Good. Now, what else? Exactly what can she remember about the disappearance from Wentworth House? Whose idea was it? And why did they just up sticks and leave at a moment’s notice, for goodness sake? If the mother has only told them the truth recently, then what did she tell them at the time?”

  His pen paused as he glanced around the room for inspiration.

  “Anything else?”

  “It would be good to see if she can remember anything about her brother’s time at school. In particular, can she corroborate anything we were told by Colin McKenzie?” Desai suggested.

  “Yes, good, thank you, Priya. I’d be very interested to know that myself.”

  “There’s something else,” Willis said, “something quite fundamental I think. What can she tell us about the man we know as Conrad Taylor? Why should somebody who seems to have been a normal law abiding person suddenly murder a helpless girl? It doesn’t make sense. But if anyone can tell us, then she should be able to. After all, the father /daughter relationship is a very special one.”

  CHAPTER 22

  “Now then, Elizabeth,” Desai said, “why don’t you start by telling us about how you, your mother, and your brother came to leave Wentworth House?”

  Elizabeth Schneider gazed at the blinking light on the tape recorder. It seemed to unnerve her somehow. Desai smiled and nodded encouragement.

  “Well, at the time we didn’t know anything about it – John and me that is – it was only later when we found out, much later.”

  “What can you remember about that time?”

  Elizabeth stared blankly straight ahead, as if reliving the events in question.

  “Mum came into my bedroom during the night. She was trying to be quiet but she woke me up as she opened the door. I said “what’s wrong?” or something like that. She knelt down beside my bed and told me that we needed to pack very quietly when we got up in the morning, just a few things which we could carry on a bag, and that we were going away on an adventure.”

  “Didn’t that seem a bit strange? Coming out of the blue like that?”

  “Yeah, of course it did. I asked what was going on but she just repeated that we needed to get away. You have to understand that she was always a bit strange, my mum. She’d often come out with stuff like that, needing to get away and so forth. I think the truth is that she and my dad hadn’t had much of a marriage for quite a long time. They slept in separate rooms, you know. I guess I just went back to sleep and assumed that by the morning she’d have forgotten all about it. She often used to wander around the house talking to herself. My mates at school used to think she was really peculiar.”

  “But she didn’t – forget about it I mean?”

  “No. She came back into the room once it was light and went mental that I hadn’t packed anything. She started throwing things in a bag for me and kept saying that we needed to get away. But she was speaking very quietly, and when I asked her why, she said she didn’t want dad to hear. So I said “isn’t dad coming with us?” or something like that, and she said no, he was staying but we had to go right away without saying goodbye to him.”

  “And again, didn’t that seem a bit strange?”

  “Yeah, in fact I tried to sneak along the landing to his room but she saw me and belted me round the ear. I’ll never forget the look on her face that morning. She was like a wild animal that’s being hunted. She hissed in my ear that if I wasn’t ready to go in 10 minutes she’d drag me out of the house in just what I was wearing, and with an empty bag if necessary. Then she pretty much threw me back into my room, and went off to get John.”

  “So presumably she’d had the same conversation with him already?”

  “Yeah, and it was strange because normally they’d be going at each other hammer and tongs, but that morning he was real quiet. He just looked at me and told me to do what mum said. I found out later that he thought dad had died during the night and that mum was trying to get us all out of the house without knowing about it.”

  “So you all just left – just like that?”

  “Yeah, that’s about it. I can remember walking up the path and looking back at the house over my shoulder, but then mum grabbed me and pulled me through the gate. We went up the road – past this police station of course – and down to Belsize Park tube station.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “I don’t remember exactly. It was somewhere in West London: Hammersmith maybe? Mum checked us into a little hotel and told us to stay there while she went off to make some calls. John and I watched telly for a few hours and then when she came back she told us we were going off on a trip to a cousin of hers who lived in Canada. By this time John had told me he thought dad was dead. Naturally, I was upset, but when mum asked what was wrong with me he shook his head at me behind her back and I just said nothing was wrong.”

  “And did you go to Canada straightaway?”

  “Yeah, we went to the airport and got on a plane and that was it. Next thing I knew we were in Canada. We landed in Toronto but it turned out aunt Molly lived in a place called London. Funny that, we thought.”

  “So your mother had taken your passports with her when you all left the house?”

  “Yeah, though to be honest I’m not sure I had a passport of my own that stage; I might just have been on mum’s.”

  “So you all made a new life in Canada?”

  “Yeah. We went to school there, and then to college. John dropped out of college almost at once and went off to work in a garage, but he kept getting into trouble and never held onto a job for very long. Eventually he found a job in a hardware store. It was being run by a widow whose husband had just died, and she needed a man to do all the heavy lifting. I think she was sweet on John. I used to joke that he was … you know, having sex with her.”

  “And you think he was – really?”

  She shrugged.

  “Who knows? Probably, yeah. He’s obsessed with sex, you know. Oh, I know all men are, but I mean really, really obsessed. I can’t imagine him ever saying no.”

  “Now you told us earlier that your mother died quite recently, but that before she did so she told you something about the night you left home. Could you tell us about that again, for the tape?”

  “Mum died about a year ago. She’d been ill for some time. Finally they told her it was cancer and there was nothing they could do. So she had about three months at the end when she knew she was dying. I’d gone through college and qualified as a nurse and I was working at the local hosp
ital, but once she had her diagnosis I gave up work and stayed at home to look after her. There was one afternoon when John was there too, and she said she had something to tell us; something important.”

  She stopped and took a sip of water. Again, Desai nodded encouragingly.

  “She just came straight out with it. She said that night she’d been looking out of her bedroom window. There was bright moonlight and she could clearly see someone digging in the back garden of the house next door. Obviously she thought this was a bit funny, someone digging in the garden at 1 o’clock in the morning. So she looked a bit more closely and realised it was dad. Then she saw him put the shovel down, turn around, and pick up a body.”

  “Was she absolutely sure that’s what it was?”

  “I asked her that as well. She said yes, she was absolutely certain it was a body. She could see the legs hanging down from dad’s arms. Bare legs, she said, and very pale in the moonlight. He put it in the hole he had dug and started filling in the earth on top of it. She waited for him to come in and go to bed. Then, once she heard him start snoring, she came to our rooms and told us we had to leave.”

  “And how did you take the news? You must have been deeply shocked.”

  “John was really quiet and just went out of the room. Then I heard the front door close as he left the house. I didn’t know what to think. I wanted to be glad that dad was alive after all, or at least that he might still be alive. But then there was what mum had said she saw, which meant he was a murderer. Nothing seemed to make sense. It still doesn’t.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “Nothing at first. I decided to concentrate on looking after mum in her final weeks. I tried to talk to John about it, but he was just really strange and silent. Then, once mum had gone, we decided that we’d both come to England and see if we could find dad. Confront him, John said. Me, I wasn’t so sure. After all, we hadn’t seen him for 20 years. Suppose he didn’t want to see us? Suppose he just wouldn’t talk to us? What were we going to do then? Come to you guys with some stupid story about something our mum said she’d seen 20 years ago?”

  “But you did come?”

  “Yes. It took time. We didn’t have any money, John or me, so we had to wait for the lawyer to settle mum’s affairs. There wasn’t much money left over after all his fees, but it was enough. It gave us the few thousand dollars we needed to buy plane tickets and book somewhere to stay for a while.”

  “How did you end up having Canadian passports by the way?”

  “I’m not sure, though I expect the lawyer could explain it. There was some sort of rule that if you’d lived in Canada with relatives for a certain number of years you were eligible for citizenship. Mum arranged it all. It was never really an issue actually, because we’d neither of us ever wanted to travel before.”

  “So you came here together? What happened then?”

  “I was getting more and more nervous, to be honest. I really wasn’t sure that I wanted to see dad again. I mean, how can you see your father for the first time in decades and ask him straight out if it’s true he’s a murderer? But John went over to the house to have it out with him. He went a couple of times and banged on the door but couldn’t get any answer. The second time, he went next door and spoke to one of the neighbours. This guy told him that dad still lived there. So John said he’d go back again, but he never did.”

  “Why was that?”

  “John is what they call bipolar. Sometimes he’s very up, but a lot of the time he’s very down, and those times are pretty bad. He usually just lies in bed facing the wall and won’t talk to anybody. This would have been a week or two after we arrived in Britain, and John had run out of his medication. I went to a big chemist near Marble Arch and tried to explain what I needed, but they said we had to see a doctor and get a prescription. That was a problem, of course, because we weren’t registered with a doctor here. It took me a few weeks to sort the problem out. It was only a couple of days ago that I finally managed to get a doctor to come and see him and prescribe what he wanted.”

  “So John never went back to the house after that last time when he saw the neighbour?”

  “No, not so far as I know. That’s when he got bad, like I said.”

  “So you know where he is now?”

  “Sure I do. He’s back at the hotel where we’ve been living. To tell the truth, I’ve been at my wits end these last few days. You see, our money’s about to run out. I guess we can’t get jobs here without British papers and so far as the law is concerned we seem to be Canadian now.”

  “Elizabeth, we really need to see John and ask him some questions. Is he well enough to be interviewed, do you think?”

  “I really don’t know. He’s been very bad this time, what with being without his pills and everything. What do you need to ask him about? Can’t you ask me instead?”

  “We are very grateful for any help you can give us about anything at all, but we will need to speak to John as well, if only to corroborate what you’re saying.”

  “I’d really rather not involve him if at all possible. He doesn’t like the police and he can get very aggressive. If you don’t really understand him, the way he thinks, you might get the wrong impression.”

  “Does that mean he’s been in trouble with the police – perhaps back in Canada?”

  “Yeah, and not just in Canada. There was something that happened before we left here.”

  “Yes, I think we know about that, although we’d be very interested to hear your take on it.”

  “It was just some stupid dare between him and some of his mates at school. They had to run out into the street when a woman was passing, touch her up, and then run off again. It was all supposed to be just a bit of fun. But some of the women overreacted and went to the police. Of course the police had to be seen to do something, so they turned up in the school and started making trouble for John. In the end nothing happened, he was in the clear.”

  “Just so you know,” Desai said, struggling to keep her voice calm, “some of those women were very badly affected by what your brother did to them. Also, he wasn’t cleared. I’m afraid that some of my colleagues back then messed up the ID parade so they couldn’t proceed against John. But what he did was completely unacceptable, and I have to say I’m surprised that you, as a woman, should treat it so flippantly.”

  Willis frowned; that had been clumsy. She saw a look of shock and then anger flit across Elizabeth Schneider’s face. Fearing that she might simply get up and leave, Willis glanced meaningfully at Desai and cut in quickly.

  “Elizabeth, I apologise for asking you this out of the blue, but have you ever heard of a girl called Susan Barnard?”

  She stared at Willis.

  “Sue? Christ, that’s all a very long time ago. What’s she got to do with any of this?”

  “So you do know her? Or at least, used to?”

  “Yes of course. We used to go to the same school. Why?”

  Willis and Desai looked at each other and then back at Elizabeth.

  “Susan Barnard was reported missing by her mother at much the same time as the three of you left Wentworth House,” Willis informed her. “The same day, in fact.”

  She stared at them blankly.

  “Missing?”

  “Yes, and she’s never been found.”

  Again she stared, as though struggling to comprehend what they were telling her.

  “Elizabeth,” Desai asked, “did John know Susan too?”

  “Yes, of course he did,” she said faintly. “She was his girlfriend.”

  CHAPTER 23

  “So what can you tell us about Susan Barnard?” Desai asked after a significant pause.

  “Not a lot really. We weren’t in the same form you see, not even in the same year. She was older than me. She went round with two or three girls who used to go and mess about with John and his mates after school.”

  “Yes, we’ve heard a little about that, but why don’t you tell us wha
tever you can remember?”

  She shrugged.

  “There’s not much to tell. It was just silly kid’s stuff really. John was bigger than most of the guys at school; stronger too. So the boys used to be a bit scared of him and either avoided him altogether or tried to be big mates with him. As for the girls, most of them fancied him, though they pretended they didn’t. After school John and some of the others from his class used to hang around behind the shops in Belsize Park. Some of the girls used to go home that way. They didn’t have to, they could have got the bus from out on the main road. So if they went that way it was because they chose to. They wanted to mess around with the boys.”

  “What you mean by ‘mess around’ exactly?”

  “Well I don’t know for sure because I never went that way myself, but nothing very much I expect. I used to hear some of the girls talking about it, and it sounded like the boys would sort of block their way and the girls would have to kiss them to get past. We were pretty innocent back then, you know. Things were different. Most of us had no real idea what sex was.”

  “But what about John? Was he innocent too?”

  “It was always difficult to tell with him because he was always telling stories and you never knew whether to believe him or not. For example, he used to call Sue his girlfriend, but I’m not sure anything actually … happened between them, know what I mean?”

  “Are you sure about that? We have a witness who used to watch what went on in that service road and he seemed to think that John knew exactly what he was doing. In his words, John used to have his hands all over the girls.”

  “Oh, he used to feel them up, yes. But all the boys did. Sooner or later they’d all put their hand up your skirt if they got a chance. But Susan was different, I think. A lot of the girls used to talk about her. They used to say she was a tease and a bit of a tart, always leading the boys on.”

  “We understand that John used to protect Susan from the other boys, wouldn’t let any of them touch her, that sort of thing.”