Chapter Twenty-Three
The policeman didn’t
arrest her. He didn’t even tell her off. Instead he took April to
the headmaster’s office and made her sit outside while he spoke to
Mr Sheldon. Whatever was said, Reece obviously managed to persuade
him that the fight was simply youthful high spirits between two
high-strung students and that he would take her home. There were
some advantages to being in mourning, she supposed. Besides, all
the fight had gone out of her. At this point she barely cared what
happened now, so she simply shrugged when DI Reece explained and
then led her down to his car. Why bother kicking and screaming?
April knew full well that even as they buckled up, Layla was
already spreading her version of events: that the awful new girl
had attacked her and threatened to kill her and now the police were
taking her away.
‘Good job I came in
to speak to you today,’ said Reece as he started the engine. ‘If
I’d left it until tomorrow, you might have strangled that girl.’
His tone was light, but April could tell he was
worried.
What the hell came over me? she wondered.
One minute we were talking, the next I was
trying to kill her.
‘So what was it all
about, April?’
April sighed. She was
sick of keeping things to herself, trying to remember what she was
or wasn’t supposed to know. It was too much of a tangle and she
suddenly felt very tired.
‘Layla - that’s the
girl you pulled me off- thinks I’m trying to steal her
boyfriend.’
‘And are
you?’
‘Not really. He hit
on me, but he didn’t mention that he had a
girlfriend.’
‘Ah.’ DI Reece
nodded. ‘I see.’
He backed the car up
and they slowly drove through the gates and up towards the
village.
‘I heard the coroner
released your dad’s body,’ said the policeman, glancing across at
her, ‘so I guess you’ll be glad to get the funeral over, to start
picking up the pieces?’
April just shrugged
again and looked out of the window.
‘But I don’t suppose
you actually want to go home right now, do you?’
April glanced at him.
‘I s’pose not.’
‘Well, how about I
treat you to lunch?’
April lifted her
hands in a gesture of complete indifference. ‘Whatever,’ she said.
Then, after a pause. ‘No McDonald’s, though.’
Reece laughed. ‘Okay,
no McDonald’s.’
He drove them out of
Highgate, past the big houses on Hampstead Lane and then Kenwood
House on the left. April had been wanting to see the big Georgian
stately home on the hill ever since Hugh Grant had his heart broken
there in Notting Hill, but somehow
since arriving in Highgate she’d never had the chance to go. Now
she thought about it, apart from the visits to her grandpa’s place,
she had hardly strayed from the village at all since they’d left
Edinburgh, as if Pond Square had a giant magnet hidden beneath it
and she had a metal plate in her head. That
would explain a lot, she thought ruefully. They were
approaching a bottleneck in the road - a strange white cottage
seemed to have been plonked in the middle of the street. To April’s
surprise Reece didn’t drive past; instead he turned off the road
and into a car park next to a large white building opposite the
cottage.
‘A pub?’ she said,
with a little too much eagerness in her voice.
Reece smiled. ‘I’m
getting you a Diet Coke, young lady. But they do make an amazing
goat’s cheese lasagne.’
The Spaniards Inn was
ancient and rambling, with low beams, dark wood panelling and
creaky floors. It even had a fire popping and crackling away
beneath a polished copper chimney breast. It was the sort of pub
American tourists believe lies at the end of every road in England.
As Reece went to the bar to order their food, April wandered over
to a chalkboard where someone had written up a few snippets of the
pub’s history. Apparently Charles Dickens, Lord Byron and the
highwayman Dick Turpin had all spent time drinking here. According
to the board, John Keats had composed ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in the
garden.
She heard a laugh
behind her. ‘It’s probably a lot of old tosh,’ said Reece, leading
April to an alcove and putting the promised Diet Coke in front of
her, ‘but it’s sort of nice to keep up the legends, isn’t
it?’
He settled into a
squashy leather chair next to a window which looked out towards the
strange white cottage in the middle of the road.
‘It reminds me of
that little white house by the cemetery gates,’ said April. ‘Is it
true you couldn’t get inside?’
Reece looked at her,
his eyebrows raised.
‘I went on a tour.
The guide told me.’
‘She’s right, as it
happens,’ said Reece, rubbing his chin. ‘It obviously hadn’t been
opened in years - door and windows painted shut, nothing inside -
so we figured we’d leave it as it was.’
April thought of the
tall man who had come out of the house - she was sure he had - and
the tour guide’s insistence that no one of that description worked
there. She wished she knew what it all meant, but there was so much
about this whole business that she couldn’t grasp. It was like
trying to juggle with one hand tied behind her back.
‘So what is it?’
asked April, nodding at the white house in the road.
‘That’s the old
gatehouse where travellers had to pay a toll to use the road, and
it’s where Dick Turpin is supposed to have spotted his
victims.’
‘I bet you’d like to
have caught him, wouldn’t you?’
‘No need,’ said
Reece. ‘Contrary to popular belief, Dick Turpin was caught and
hanged by a member of his own gang. But no, I’m not sure I’d like
to be involved with that sort of thing. I’m more a rehabilitation
than a hanging kind of guy.’
April sucked her Coke
through the straw and looked at Reece. She wasn’t so sure what kind
of guy he was or what he was after, but she was glad to be out of
school, and out of the house - and to be treated like an adult.
Well, without the vodka, admittedly, but it was much better than
the tea in the police station. Even so, she knew Reece hadn’t
brought her here for her sparkling conversation - this was an
interrogation with beer mats.
‘So do you think it’s
a good idea to bring a sixteen-year-old girl to a pub?’ said April.
‘Is this standard interview technique?’
‘It’s not really a
standard case, April,’ said Reece, his expression serious. ‘There’s
far too much about it that’s confusing. I was hoping you might be
able to shed a little light on a few things and—’ he indicated the
empty bar ‘—I figured we might be free from eavesdroppers
here.’
‘You think there
might be people listening in at the police station?’
Reece smiled. ‘You’re
a sharp girl, April, but don’t go creating too many conspiracies
where there are none. Leave that to your friend Caro.’
It was April’s turn
to smile. ‘Ah, you spoke to her?’
Reece rolled his
eyes. ‘Is there anything she doesn’t think is linked to a shadowy
global conspiracy?’
‘Not much. Did she
give you any ideas?’
Reece paused before
answering. ‘It’s funny,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Sometimes we get a
bit blinkered in the way we investigate things, when we should
think a little more laterally.’
‘What do you
mean?’
‘Well, most crimes
are pretty straightforward, especially violent crimes. Someone gets
angry and hits someone else, then leaves a trail of blood back to
their car. You’d be surprised how often it happens. That’s why we
have a better success rate solving murders than other
crimes.’
April looked away,
trying to concentrate on a picture on the wall as she felt her eyes
becoming watery.
‘I’m sorry,’ said
Reece softly. ‘I often forget how hard it can be to talk about.
It’s my day job, I’m afraid. I assume everyone wants to talk about
murder.’
‘No, it’s not that,’
said April, blinking hard. ‘I just can’t think of my dad as a
“murder”. It just seems so weird, so wrong, really.’
‘I understand. But we
do need to talk about it, if you can. I think it’s the only way
we’re going to catch whoever did this.’ He looked at her
meaningfully. ‘Listen, April, I’ll lay my cards on the table. We
don’t have the hard evidence to back this up yet, but I’m convinced
that the three murders - Alix Graves, Isabelle Davis and your dad -
are all linked. You’ve been close to two of them and in my world …
well, let’s just say I don’t believe in coincidences. So I think
you may be the key to this case, whether you know it or
not.’
April glanced at
Reece. What was he saying?
‘When you say you
don’t have the evidence, don’t you have any leads? Like
fingerprints and stuff?’
He looked a little
embarrassed. ‘No. Nothing. Which is why it’s so odd. You see these
TV shows about highly intelligent serial killers who plan their
crimes in detail, but in my experience that just doesn’t happen.
There’s always evidence, witnesses, something.’
‘But not this
time?’
‘You, April, are the
closest thing we have. I’ll be honest, it’s as if the killer was
invisible. They got in and out without being seen on CCTV or by
passers-by and they didn’t leave the slightest trace behind,
despite the destruction.’
April didn’t want to
think about the ‘destruction’. She didn’t want to think about
someone coming into their house and attacking her dad, she didn’t
want to think about how he crawled to the phone leaving a smeared
trail of his blood behind him. She didn’t want any of it to have
happened. But it had.
‘We have to get him,’
she said fiercely. ‘We have to catch this killer.’
‘We will,’ said
Reece, meeting her gaze steadily. ‘We always do.’
Their food arrived
and they ate in silence for a few minutes. April still didn’t know
what to make of the detective. He wasn’t like the hard-bitten,
hard-drinking cynics you saw in TV dramas. He was drinking
Appletiser, for a start. And the goat’s cheese lasagne was indeed
delicious. Maybe he felt sorry for her, or thought she needed a
friendly ear. More likely it was simply work for him: get the
daughter off-guard and maybe she’ll tell you something useful.
April didn’t mind that, especially if it got her free pasta. She
would have been glad to help; she just didn’t know what she could
tell him.
‘So what do you
think? You must have some sort of theory?’
Reece gave her a
half-smile. ‘I’d rather hear what you think.’
April paused before
she spoke. ‘My dad is - was - a really nice man. I mean, of course
you’d expect me to say that, but he was. My mum was always giving
him a hard time and he put up with it, he didn’t get angry. They’d
shout at each other, but he was … calm, I suppose. Which is the
reason I can’t understand why someone would hate him enough to do
that to him.’
She stopped and took
a sip of her drink, trying to swallow whatever had got stuck in her
throat all of a sudden. She put down her knife and fork and pushed
the plate away.
‘Sorry.’
‘It’s fine,’ said the
detective. ‘Actually, that’s what I’ve been thinking all this time:
why? The most obvious idea is someone who has suffered because of
something he wrote. An investigative reporter of his standing is
always going to make enemies, but to be frank, retaliation almost
never happens. You hear of journalists being killed in war zones,
but not at home. Funnily enough, criminals can be quite moral about
that sort of thing - they don’t usually bear grudges against people
who catch them fair and square. But then … perhaps if he was
getting too close to someone or something, it’s possible they would
take action to shut him up.’
‘But you don’t think
that.’
Reece pointed at her
with his fork. ‘I said you were a sharp girl. Well, it’s still the
most likely motive as nothing was taken from the house as far as we
could tell, although you saw the state of the place and it’s
difficult to be sure. But we’ve been through all his notes and his
computer and there’s nothing there to suggest any ongoing
investigation of that kind. In fact, there was nothing much there
of any use, but I’d like you to have a look at something anyway. It
might jog a memory.’
He opened his
briefcase and pulled out a laptop, opening it on the table. As they
waited for it to boot up, April thought about what Reece had
said.
‘So if you didn’t
find anything in the computer or at the house, maybe they did take
something?’
‘Yes, but again I
come back to why?’ said Reece. ‘If it was me and I wanted to get at
whatever information your dad had, I’d break in while he was out,
steal his computer and make it look like a burglary.’
‘So you think they
planned to kill him?’
‘Sorry, April, I
don’t want to worry you any more, but that seems the most likely
conclusion. We just haven’t got a clue why.’
He pulled the
computer towards him and started opening files. ‘Now, these are all
the files we copied from your dad’s computer,’ said Reece,
swivelling the screen around to show her. ‘On the left-hand side is
a rough draft of a story your dad was working on for the paper.
It’s about the Isabelle Davis murder, all the background to the
case and the history of the murder site, Highgate Cemetery and so
on. On the other side, I’ve opened a file your dad wrote a few
weeks ago. It’s a book proposal he was sending to his publisher. It
was all about historic murders and violence in London, with
particular reference to this area. Have a quick look: the
similarities are superficial, but they are there.’
Nervously, April
scrolled down. Reece was right: the similarities were there if you
looked for them, but sitting side by side like this, they did look
rather shaky. On the one hand, the Isabelle Davis murder seemed
straightforward - a young girl out on her own in a city, who
tragically fell prey to a random killer. But when you compared it
to William Dunne’s research for his book, particularly the
Whitechapel murders of 1888, it suddenly didn’t look so random:
Jack the Ripper’s first victims would have appeared to be senseless
and unconnected tragedies as well. There were other strong themes
running through both stories: the cemetery, the sudden apparently
random upsurge in violence, even the idea of a unifying conspiracy
behind it all. But as Reece had said, it wasn’t hard evidence, far
from it. In fact, it all looked a bit silly.
‘Now, I’m not
suggesting for a moment that this case has links to Jack the Ripper
or, God forbid, vampires or disease or whatever else your dad was
writing about,’ said Reece, ‘but I have to consider all the
possibilities, however strange they first appear. My job involves
looking for patterns, hoping those patterns will eventually make a
picture. But at the same time I have to ask: how can any of this be
worth killing over?’
April’s eye had been
caught by one phrase on the screen and she frowned.
‘You said earlier,’
she began, ‘that the only people capable of planning a murder like
this are serial killers. There have been three murders in one
village - couldn’t that possibly be the work of a serial
killer?’
Reece looked grim.
‘Serial killers are incredibly rare in this country and they
usually stick to the same type of victim: the Yorkshire Ripper,
Fred West, Harold Shipman, they all did the same thing over and
over again until they were caught.’
‘But is this like
that? Come on, Mr Reece, you’ve got to tell me.’
The detective looked
at her for a while. ‘There are similarities in the murders, yes.
They all died from similar wounds to the throat, they all had
strong links to the local area, the killings all took place either
in or within a stone’s throw of the cemetery. But beyond that, it
falls apart. Different times of day, indoors and outdoors, male and
female victims - it doesn’t have the usual patterns we associate
with a serial killer.’
‘So how are you going
to stop him?’
‘Not me, April, us,’
said Reece. ‘I can’t do this on my own - I need your help. I need
to know what you know. I need to see what you saw, and that’s why
we’re having this conversation. Take, for example, that night in
Swain’s Lane - are you sure you didn’t see anyone else
there?’
If Reece was watching
her face, he may have detected a slight twitch in her expression.
If he had, it would have looked like a flicker of fear; fear of the
killer, fear for herself, fear that he might strike again. It was
all those things, but in reality, April was afraid for Gabriel.
April had been there, yes, but she had seen so little. Whereas
Gabriel had stayed inside the gates with the killer. He could have
seen the killer, which would make him a target. But … Oh no. April had a sudden and terrible thought,
something she hadn’t considered before, and felt as if someone had
punched her in the stomach.
‘Oh God,’ she
whispered to herself, bending forwards hugging her
middle.
‘April? Are you
okay?’
‘I feel a bit ill,’
she muttered and, pushing her chair back, ran for the toilet.
Safely inside, she bent over the sink, dry-heaving. Why hadn’t she
seen it before? God, I’m such an idiot!
It was so obvious. Gabriel Swift had been screwing with her head
from the start. Yes, he’d behaved strangely - at school, in Swain’s
Lane, even the night of the party - but eventually he’d allayed her
suspicions about his presence in the cemetery the night of
Isabelle’s murder. But what if it was all a big fat lie? What if
Gabriel had killed Isabelle and then killed
her father?
She looked up at
herself in the mirror. The look of fear was definitely there now.
Because it made sense. Why had she assumed there was anyone else
lurking in the bushes when she had gone to help the fox? Yes, she’d
seen those sinister eyes in the undergrowth, but that could have
been Gabriel. It had all happened so fast, she wasn’t sure of
anything any more. And that would explain the rest, too. He had
waited to see if she would pass his name to the police and when she
hadn’t, he had found her at the party and - Oh
no! Had he taken her into the cemetery that night to kill
her? She ran through it all in her head. Think, dammit, think! He
had stood behind her in the Circle of Lebanon and she had thought
he was going to kiss her, but maybe he’d had other plans. Had she
spoilt them by turning around? And then she had mentioned her dad
and he had rushed her out of there. He must have realised that her
dad was on to something and decided to wait. Had she led her
father’s killer straight to him?
She shook her head.
It was all too much. Her breathing was coming in sobs now and her
heart was hammering. How could I have been so
blind?
And then he had lured
her out of the house in middle of the night, asking her to go for a
walk down to the Heath. What if I had
gone? And then the final piece of the jigsaw dropped in.
Gabriel would have seen that she wasn’t in Philosophy class that
morning, he would have known Mr Sheldon would keep her back after
school. In fact, she had seen him there, watching the road to make
sure. Igave him the opportunity to kill my
dad!
She jumped as she
heard hammering on the door.
‘April? Are you okay
in there? Listen, I’m coming in,’ said Reece, opening the door a
crack and peering around. April grabbed a handful of paper towels
and wiped her face hurriedly. She couldn’t tell Reece about
Gabriel, not now. No, she needed evidence first, real
evidence.
‘I’m okay, I’m fine,’
she said quickly. ‘Maybe it was the lasagne.’
‘It wasn’t me talking
about that night in Swain’s Lane—’
‘No, no, just a
stomach bug, I should think. There’s always something nasty going
around.’
Reece looked at her
long and hard. Then he just nodded. ‘You’re right about that,’ he
said. ‘Come on, I’d better get you home.’
The house was quiet
when she got in.
‘Mum?’
April walked into the
kitchen. Her mother’s coat and bag were there, plus an empty wine
glass with lipstick on the rim.
‘Mum? Are you
here?’
She tiptoed up the
creaky stairs and along the corridor, opening her parents’ bedroom
door a crack to peek through. As she had expected, April found her
mother sprawled out face down on the bedspread, ‘star-shaped’ as
Fiona used to say. It wasn’t much of a surprise; April had
suspected that Silvia’s long days in bed were due to a combination
of wine and sleeping pills. She couldn’t really blame her, there
were times when April would rather blot it all out too; but not
now. Now April wanted to be wide awake. She didn’t want
distractions, she didn’t want to be cocooned from the pain, she
wanted to face it all head-on, because more than anything she
wanted to know the truth, however hard it was to bear. Gabriel as
the killer - could it really be true? It made her physically ill to
think about it, but it was time to stop thinking and start acting.
She needed to work out why Gabriel had killed her father: did he
know something about him? Had Gabriel come here looking for
something? Perhaps something her father had uncovered? Either way,
she needed evidence to back up her growing suspicions. And where
better to start looking than right here? The
scene of the crime, her mind taunted her. The place where he died.
‘Oh shut up,’ she
whispered and walked back down the stairs, grasped the handle of
the study door and pushed. And there was … nothing. April let her
breath out slowly as she sat down on the corner of the desk. Aside
from the conspicuous absence of the rug that had covered most of
the floor, you wouldn’t have known anything had happened here. That
was precisely what was making her knees feel weak; in removing
signs of the struggle, they had also removed all traces of her
father. The study was neat and tidy, even the chair had been placed
carefully back under the desk. She looked in the drawers: empty.
There wasn’t even a coffee cup or a half-read newspaper to show
that anyone had ever been here. She ran a hand over the wooden
surface of the desk, trying to feel some trace of him, some warmth
left by his fingertips.
‘I miss you, Dad,’
she whispered, ‘I miss you so much.’
She didn’t know she
was crying until she saw the tears drop onto the leather seat. It
came over her in an unbidden wave, swallowing her up. ‘Why did you
leave us?’ she moaned, gulping in air. She had lost the one strong,
reliable thing in her life and he had been taken from her by the
only other man she’d ever felt anything for. It was horrible.
Horrible.
‘It’s not fair, it’s
not fair …’ She fell to her knees, almost hugging the chair. She
wanted to be strong and full of purpose, but she was just a little
girl and she didn’t know what to do. ‘What do I do?’ she whispered.
‘You always knew what to do.’ She stayed like that, her back bent,
head twisted to the side, letting it all flow out, and after a
while the storm of tears passed; her breathing slowed and her body
stopped shaking. So wrapped up in her grief had she been that she
hadn’t realised what she was looking at. Under the desk, at the
back, she could see a tiny bit of sky blue. Frowning, she crawled
further into the knee well for a closer look. There was a narrow
gap in the woodwork between the back panel of the desk and the
drawers and something was jammed in between them. She felt around
with her fingers but it wouldn’t budge. She shuffled back out and
found a pencil in a pot on a shelf, then ducked back down. Using
the pencil to wiggle the object, she slowly worked it out. Her
heart leapt: it was the notebook she had pilfered from this very
desk the night of Isabelle’s death.
Eagerly, she sat back
in the chair and flicked through the book. This is it, she thought, this
is what I need. Her heart was racing now. The last time she
had leafed through the book she had been annoyed by her dad’s
spidery handwriting and opaque references, but now they looked like
lifelines, bright breadcrumbs to lead her along the
path.
‘1674—1886?’ read one
entry; ‘Churchyard Bottom/Coldfall Woods’ read another. At the top
of another page was what looked like a book title: Infernal Wickedness, Kingsley-Davis, 1903, with the
note ‘nests?’
Her eyes opened wide.
Nests! That was one of the words on the
Post-it she’d thrown at him that last morning. Her fingers
tightened on the pages, almost frightened the notebook would fly
away. This was exactly what she needed; if not a road map, exactly,
then at least a handful of possible places where she could follow
in her father’s footsteps. Of course, she knew she should probably
go straight after Gabriel, but that could be dangerous to say the
least and, besides, he was hardly going to break down and confess
without some evidence to confront him with. No, this book was a
sign. It was a piece of her father. It had his thoughts and his
passion caught for ever between its covers. And he had obviously
hidden it. Had he wanted her to find it here? She clasped it to her
chest and whispered, ‘Thanks, Dad.’
‘April?’
She froze.
Oh God, Mum’s awake, she thought,
jumping out of the chair and stuffing the notebook into her
pocket.
‘April? Is that
you?’
Silvia was calling
from the top of the stairs, her voice thick with sleep. April
silently closed the study door and padded to the foot of the
stairs.
‘Hi, Mum,’ she
said.
‘What are you doing
down there?’ said her mother grumpily. ‘I thought I heard a
burglar.’
‘Just going out,’ she
said, taking her coat from the end of the banister and pulling it
on. ‘You want anything?’
‘Where are you
going?’
April thought for a
moment. ‘The bookshop. I need to do some research. Homework,’ she
added quickly.
Silvia scratched her
messy hair. ‘God, you’re just like your father,’ she said groggily.
‘Be back for supper, I’ll order pizza or something.’
April had almost made
it to the door before her mother called her back.
‘Oh, and darling?
Could you pick me up some more wine? Say it’s for me, they know me
at the off-licence.’
I bet they do, thought April.