The Needle House

by Robin Leslie Roughley

  'Did she apologise for what had happened?'

  'Actually, she did but then again people will say anything when they're close to death.'

  Another rusty gear clanged in her head, he winked at her as if he could see exactly what she was thinking.

  'No, Jenna, I didn't kill her, I could have done, I won't lie to you I wanted to, but there was no need, the cancer was seeing to that.'

  'You make it sound as if you were glad she was dying.'

  'I was glad to find her alive; it gave her the chance to unburden herself.'

  'About what?'

  'Lift up your arms.'

  'What?'

  'Your arms, Jenna, hold them up.'

  'Why?' she could see his face ripple and change, his eyes began to cloud, his lips compressed into a thin line.

  'I won't hurt you.'

  It felt as if she had heavy weights attached to the end of her arms, when they were outstretched she could feel the vibration in her shoulders, she could see her hands shaking. A second later, he stretched over the seat and grabbed her wrist, when his right hand came into view and she saw the blade she tried frantically to pull her hand away and found that she couldn't, his grip tightened. She screwed her eyes closed, before she could open her mouth to scream she felt the pressure around her wrist vanish. When she looked, he was back in his seat there was no sign of the knife, the dog slid across the seat and licked his hand.

  'Better?'

  She looked at the red marks on her wrist, could feel the tingle in her fingers. 'Thank you.'

  'Now where was I… ah yes, Mother. You see after a while she started to talk about my old man, something she had hardly ever done before. However, some of the things she said didn't add up, when I was a child she had always insisted that he had been the one who ran out on us but now she started to change her story. I'd always thought he had been a labourer now she said he was a landowner, all very confusing.'

  'Maybe she was the one who was confused, I mean, if she was ill…'

  'She started to talk about Sam Wickham, the man I had always presumed was my father, it turns out he hadn't simply done a runner – he'd gone missing,' he moved in his seat and lit another smoke. 'Of course, I didn't just take her word for it, I spent a day at the library, going through the files, believe it or not she was telling the truth.'

  'What else did she say?'

  He looked at her and smiled. 'Interested now, aren't you?'

  'I still don't see what any of this has to do with my family,' she lied.

  'Come on, Jenna, I think you know bits and pieces…'

  'I don't know anything.'

  He pulled hard on the cigarette, peering at her through a cloud of smoke. 'Bear in mind if you choose to lie then I have no further use for you.'

  She swallowed and rubbed her hands together, desperately trying to get some feeling back into her fingers. 'I…'

  'Then she started to talk about the Radfields. I didn't have a clue who they were, after all why would I? By this time, the cancer was really starting to take hold, sometimes I would visit, and she wouldn't have a clue who I was, other times she would see me as a child. Although, there were the odd occasion when she was lucid, and everything was clear in her mind. People get like that when they're being eaten alive. I can remember when I was in the forces we had a padre, he served with us in Bosnia, offered spiritual guidance,' he pulled hard on the cigarette. 'It takes a special kind of person to listen to a soldier talk about how he shot a ten-year-old girl by mistake and then offer solace and compassion. The only vice he had was smoking, it must have been all the stress, but he had one after another, you never saw him without a cigarette in his hand. I suppose it was inevitable, in the end he got lung cancer. I went to see him a couple of days before he died, he was busy calling all the other residents ''cunts'' called the nurses ''whores''. I could see the disgust on their faces, but you see they didn't know the real man, they only saw what the cancer had done to him, extremes, see?'

  She nodded, she understood and hated herself for it, how was this happening, this man had broken into her home, smashed her in the side of the head and trussed her hands before bungling her into the back of the van. He was responsible for the violent death of three people and yet she was beginning to sympathise with him, understand him, Jenna dug her nails into her forearms in an effort to bring her back to reality.

  'One day she told me that Wickham wasn't my father,' he clicked his fingers to emphasise the point. 'Just like that. I didn't believe her at first, she kept talking about Malcolm Radfield, calling him all the names under the sun,' he paused and licked his lips, 'she claimed he raped her.'

  She looked up; he had flicked the wipers back on, the view through the window was nothing but blackness.

  'I can never remember my mother crying about anything, but she did then.'

  'I'm sorry,' she said automatically.

  He looked at her in surprise, his eyes narrowed for a moment and then he nodded. 'I appreciate that, Jenna, I really do. According to her when she told Sam what had happened he stormed off.'

  'And disappeared?'

  'You're either very perceptive,' he paused, 'or you've heard this tale before?'

  'I haven't, I promise,' she replied hurriedly, afraid to say the wrong thing in case his eyes flared in the darkness.

  He blew more smoke out through the window. 'Of course, I can't be sure where he went, but I know where I would have gone.'

  'So, Malcolm Radfield was your father?' she grasped at the words and pushed them to the front of her mind.

  'The day after she told me all this she died, so you see my mother never actually said 'Radfield is your father,' but what conclusion would you have reached?'

  'I would have believed her, I mean, if Radfield raped her…'

  'It's not an easy thing to come to terms with, finding out you're the product of rape. Of course, it would explain why my mother had never really shown me any affection; after all I would have been a constant reminder of what had been done to her.'

  She tried to block it out, but his words seeped into her brain, she could see him as a young child having to fend for himself, wondering why his mother would disappear for days and weeks on end. Living alone on a canal barge, no food or wood for the burner, no neighbours to call in and check that he was OK. Sitting alone in the dark, as the water around you froze to a ghost white sheet.

  'You can understand how angry, it made me?'

  His voice brought her out of the stupor. 'Ye…yes.'

  'He had to be made to pay.'

  'You killed Malcolm Radfield?' her voice cracked as the enormity of her position reasserted itself. She could sympathise all she wanted but when the time came, he would slaughter her without compunction.

  He ran a hand across his stubble. 'We had quite the conversation, me and his Lordship.'

  She shifted in an effort to ease the ache in her legs. 'Did he admit to what he'd done?'

  'Are you cold?'

  'A little,' she admitted.

  He tossed a heavy tartan throw into the back; Jenna snatched it up and wrapped it around her shoulders, for a few seconds she shook uncontrollably, her arms and legs vibrating beneath the cover as her body tried to generate heat.

  'He denied it, I…'

  'But he would, I mean, if people had found out it would have ruined him.'

  He smiled at her and shook his head. 'Don't be naive, Jenna, people like Radfield don't concern themselves with trivialities like that.'

  'But…'

  'He tried to say it was consensual, said it was she who made the first move,' he turned the key and the engine rumbled into life then he flicked the heater on before turning back to her. 'You know something, when you're in the army, in a war zone, you soon learn that people lie, it's the default mode of the human race and the only way to get to the truth is by threatening violence.'

  She pulled the blanket even tighter around her, dreading what he was going to say next.

  'Eventually I p
ersuaded him that clearing his conscience would be beneficial, in the end he admitted the sex part, which was cathartic for him. But you see the really interesting thing was, he still denied being my father…'

  'Well, he would…'

  He held up a hand and Jenna snapped her mouth closed. 'It's one thing to deny something when you don't feel threatened, to stick to your story when someone is forcing the twin barrels of a twelve bore into your mouth, well that's another thing entirely.'

  'You…'

  'When I asked him if Sam Wickham had been to see him, he spilled it all out without further prompting from me,' she found herself drawn into the rhythm of his speech. It was bizarre, one minute he sounded as if he were giving evidence in a courtroom, choosing his words carefully to avoid any confusion, the next she could hear the latent hatred in his voice. 'He said when Wickham turned up he was drunk, banging on the door at midnight, demanding to know what had happened. Even as Radfield was telling me, you could see the disbelief in his eyes, hear it in his voice. What right did this low-life scum have to turn up and demand an explanation from a peer of the realm? You see it's ingrained in people like him, they get used to not having to explain their actions, especially to someone like Wickham. He was a commoner who lived on a tatty old barge, with no money, no voice, a piece of shit,' he dragged a hand through his unruly hair, a savage swipe that left it sticking up in all directions.

  'So, what did he say had happened?'

  'He tried to say that he'd thrown Wickham off his property, but I could tell he was lying. Sam Wickham spent his life getting work wherever he could, doing all the donkey work for people like Radfield, building stone walls, working out in the fields in all weathers, hard graft, Jenna.'

  'I know.'

  He smiled, a wolf's grin. 'I suppose you do. I knew that Radfield wouldn't have been able to 'throw' him from his land, the only heavy lifting his lordship did, was picking up his glass of whisky and his Cuban cigars.'

  'So, what happened?'

  'Malcolm Radfield shot him, he said Wickham had him by the throat and I could see the remembered terror in his eyes, he was a weak, spineless bastard. Wickham said he was going to the police, as he was walking down the drive Radfield shot him in the back of the head.'

  'Oh Jesus.'

  'He said he put the body in the old workings of a tin mine, you see there'd been an accident a couple of weeks earlier…

  'Two men died.'

  He paused a vague look of satisfaction in his eyes. 'See, Jenna, you do know things.'

  'I…'

  'It's all right; none of this is your doing.'

  'I remembered reading about it,' she explained hurriedly.

  He tossed the cigarette out of the window. 'I'm sure you did.'

  He doesn't believe me; he's picking my brains trying to find out how much I know. But eventually she knew that the big knife would reappear and this time it wouldn't be to help her. 'It's the truth, I was doing some research into my family history, and I remembered seeing it on one of the microfiche files that they have in the library.'

  He carried on as if he hadn't heard a word she'd said. 'Radfield knew that he was going to have the mine capped, so it was the ideal place to hide the body,' he paused, 'the trouble is somebody saw him.'

  Jenna clamped her mouth closed.

  'Bear in mind, Jenna, all this information came from a man who knew I wasn't fucking about. I told him about living on the barge, how hard it had been for me, but he wasn't interested,' he paused, 'but he listened when I told him how I gutted the boy.'

  Jenna felt the bile rise in her throat; she gripped the blanket and pulled it up to her mouth.

  'He listened when I told him of the others I'd killed, the girl in Bosnia, the ones I gunned down on active duty.'

  'Please, I don't want to hear this.'

  He leaned over the back of the seat. 'I know all about how you got the farm, Jenna, I know about the blackmail. Radfield said six months after he killed Sam, he started to see Emma Wickham in the village and guess who she was with?'

  'Please don't,' she begged, her world splintering around her, the rusty gears were oiled and in full motion, her mind full of images that rattled through her brain like a freight train. She joined the dots; at last, she could see the bigger picture. When she vomited it spilled from her screaming mouth, splattering on the floor of the van, human remains.

  95

  Lasser was hunched at the base of the oak; collar turned up, hair wet through, trying his best to avoid the heavy drizzle that fell from the blackened sky. He could just make out the shape of the barge about twenty feet away, in the distance he could see the flashing red lights of the television mast that stood on top of the moors.

  When his phone began to flash, he flipped it open. 'Sir.'

  Simms sounded tired, deflated. 'No luck, Sergeant, the house in Southport was empty.'

  'Shit.'

  'Precisely.'

  'So, they didn't find anything?'

  'I've just come off the phone to the man who led the raid; he said the house was spotless, according to him it didn't look lived in.'

  'Then where is he?' Lasser fumbled for his cigarettes, two left, he pushed the pack back into his pocket.

  'We have people checking out the camp in Cumbria but to be honest I'm not hopeful.'

  Lasser shivered as the rain began to soak through his so-called waterproof jacket. 'It's as if he was expecting this, he knew sooner or later we'd find out who he is and…'

  'Regarding that, he's served all over the world, if there was a shit-hole hotspot then he's been there, fighting the good fight.'

  'What about a car?'

  'A dark-blue Land Rover but he could have ditched that by now. We've got road blocks set up on the three main routes that lead out of the area but to be honest, Sergeant, if he wanted to he could probably have gone via another route.'

  'I don't think he's interested in leaving the area.'

  'It would be the sensible thing to do.' Simms said.

  'I realize that, but I think the link with the Fotheringay family will keep him close.'

  'But he has the girl, if he wants to make them suffer then it's mission accomplished.'

  Lasser shivered as the rain intensified. 'I think he's taken her to find out how much she knows about what went on between the Radfields and her family.'

  'Guesswork, we have to have more to go on than bloody guesswork.'

  Sod it, Lasser pulled out the penultimate cigarette and lit it, drawing the smoke deep before blowing it out with a sigh, might as well throw the ball back into his court. 'So, what do you want me to do?'

  'Do you think he'll put in an appearance at the boat?'

  'No, I think he knows we're onto him…'

  'How do you come to that conclusion?'

  Lasser thought for a couple of seconds before answering. 'I think he's been watching us all along, in my opinion that's why he killed Kitts, he was keeping tabs on the farmhouse when the old guy showed up. It's the same with Hopkins he could have killed Cathy Harper, but he didn't, he singled Hopkins out. By rights he should have been miles away from the needle house, he knew we would be crawling all over those woods, but he knows he can avoid being seen, after all it's what he's been trained to do.'

  'So, you're saying he knows we've been on the boat?'

  'I think he does, he's moored it in the only stretch of water that isn't lined with trees, and it's in a gap between the valleys with easy access from the road…'

  'That way he can keep an eye on it from a distance.' Simms's voice began to come back to life.

  'I think he takes the time to check before he does anything.'

  'A cautious man.'

  Lasser cupped the cigarette, trying to keep it away from the persistent downpour. 'Unfortunately, yes.'

  'Right, Sergeant, we know he has the girl and we can only presume that when she tells him what she knows, which could be absolutely nothing, then he'll kill her.'

  'I agree.'

&n
bsp; 'Question is what will he do then?'

  'He'll probably want to pay the rest of the family a visit, especially Ronnie…'

  'You still think he could be the father?'

  'Jenna won't be able to help him on that score, but to be honest I don't think it matters.'

  'Why do you say that?'

  Lasser heard his phone bleep; someone had sent him a message. 'Well, we don't know if Malcolm Radfield actually topped himself…'

  'The pathologist said he did, don't you think we have enough on our plate without conjuring up another victim?'

  'Well, either Ashley or his father must have pointed him towards the Fotheringay family, I can't see of any other way he could have made the link.'

  Another heavy sigh floated down the phone. 'Right, get over there, if they're holding anything back I want to know what it is.'

  'I've already tried…'

  'Well, try again!'

  Lasser winced and moved the phone away from his ear, the bastard nearly perforated his eardrum. 'OK, no problem.'

  'Tell them that if they don't cooperate, I'll drag them in for questioning.'

  'But…'

  'Don't argue with me, you said yourself you thought the mother knew more than she was letting on.'

  'That was before her daughter went missing…'

  'I don't care, if they're holding out then I want to know why.'

  Lasser grimaced, he could see where Simms was coming from but the only one who could clear any of this up was Ronnie: he was the one with the answers, the one with the key, the one at death's door.

  'OK, I'll get straight over there.'

  The phone went dead, Lasser shivered and pushed himself away from the tree, the mobile beeped again, he pulled out the phone; it was from Fossey, two words, 'Ronnie's awake.'

  96

  Fossey had gone back into the house to find Susan standing in the corner, peering through the window into the blackness beyond. David was perched on the sofa, head in hands, the sense of despair buoyant in the air between them. 'Look, Sue, you go, I'll wait here.'