Killing a Unicorn Read online

  ‘I didn’t like, ride down, exactly.’

  ‘Come on, Gary — what do mean, you didn’t exactly ride down?’

  ‘I walked, then. Cut down the side of the stream. We’re not supposed to go there, into the private bit of the gardens, we aren’t. But like, I reckoned I was doing it for her, warn’t I, so I was entitled. And it took me fifteen minutes of me own time, there and back, maybe a bit longer, so I didn’t think she’d have no grumbles.’

  ‘Fair enough. But why didn’t you ride down and deliver it on your way home?’

  “Cos it ain’t on my way home, is it? Ten minutes in it, that way round, and I knew I just had enough juice to get me down into Felsborough later on, didn’t I? Like I had a date, that night. No way I wanted to run out half-way there!’

  ‘No, that’s reasonable. So — fifteen minutes there and back. Means you got back here about ten to six to pick up your bike?’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said, looking again at his feet. The dark fuzz on top of his head was starting to grow out furry.

  ‘What else aren’t you telling me, Gary?’

  ‘Not that I met her on the path and done her in, if that’s what you think! I liked her, she was real nice to me, which is more’n you can say for some folks round here.’

  ‘Which folks in particular?’

  But for the moment Gary had said all he was saying. He had the mulish look which told her she’d get nothing more out of him for the moment. He was obviously in a panic at being spoken to by police and given his past record that wasn’t surprising — but what was it he was hiding?

  ‘Did you see anyone else while you were walking down there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you positive about that?’

  ‘I bloody said so, didn’t I?’

  ‘All right, Gary. All right for now,’ she’d said, and let him go.

  She closed her notebook now, stood up and, taking the same way he’d taken, went through the gate into the grounds around the house, noting that it was marked ‘No Entry, Private’ but that it wasn’t locked. Perhaps it was deemed unnecessary, now that the public gardens were temporarily closed.

  She bypassed the house, and walked straight down to the stream. The still unanswered question was, what was it that had happened between half-past two, when Bibi had rung Fran in a panic, and half-past five, when she’d written the note to Gary to deliver? Something that had removed those earlier fears?

  If so, her relief had been misplaced. At the end of that hot and sultry day, at about half-past six, Bibi had popped her head round the door at Membery and told the two old ladies she was going outside for a breath of air. At seven twenty, Fran had set out for Membery Place and found her dead in the waterfall pool.

  When Kate reached the place along the stream where the bank had been broken down and the murder had been assumed to have taken place, she sat down on the grassy edge, still trying to see some sort of pattern in the ideas that were forming in her mind, and though she didn’t know that she was a great deal further forward, she knew it was important that she should try.

  It had little to do with her own ambitions — she wasn’t ambitious in that way — but it had everything to do with her and Dave Crouch. Whether to offer him her ideas on a plate, or claim her rightful share of the kudos. He’d understand if she was right and give in, if not gracefully, in his own way. ‘One up to you,’ he’d say, as if they were on opposite sides, each needing to score, not seeing that it wasn’t like that. He was her partner in life, as well as at work, but she needed to step out of his shadow sometimes - for his sake, as well as hers. And yet … the sooner he notched up a few Brownie points and got back to his old job, the happier everyone would be — including Kate. OK, then, tread softly. Don’t poke the tiger with a stick.

  The water in the stream was cool and crystal clear, fast running, with purple loosestrife and red-stemmed balsam growing at the edge, and on the bed sharp flints and some of the larger rocks that she’d learned were called pudding stones — flinty pebbles embedded in a matrix, rather like fruit in a lump of plum pudding. The sun cast glittering reflections on the small, polished pebbles and gravel lying on the bottom. They looked like semi-precious stones, one in particular looked just like a tiger’s eye. She dipped her hand idly in the water and tried to pick it up but it wasn’t where she thought it lay. The water was very much deeper than it looked. Nothing was as it seemed, she thought, it was all an illusion. Those glittering diamond chips in the sand were only mica. The richly coloured stones would just be flat and dull if they were taken out of the water and dried.

  She gazed down, her thoughts wandering. The water eddied and swirled around the pebbles in a miniature whirlpool. She caught her breath. Suddenly alert, she got on to her hands and knees, and then lay flat on her stomach, the better to peer into the water. She stared, mesmerized. After a while, she scrambled to her feet and sat back on the bank, hugging her knees. There were grass stains on her new, light cotton trousers.

  Glory be, Dave Crouch, I think I’ve found your murder weapon.

  Chapter Fifteen

  When the service was over, Fran, with Jilly and Jonathan, came out of the church by the side door so as to dodge the TV cameras. Jonathan rushed off to his rehearsal in London and the other two walked in the direction of Membery, although the usual mandatory Sunday lunch of Alyssa’s overcooked roast beef and two veg, where everybody met, had been abandoned today by tacit consent.

  Jilly touched Fran’s arm. ‘How about walking over to the pub at Endbury for a drink and a snack, maybe? Anything’s better than this awful waiting.’ She sounded on edge, and waited nervously for Fran’s reply. ‘What do you think?’

  Fran hesitated. The erstwhile White Horse, now facetiously renamed the Rat and Radish, and suffering under equally dire assaults on its decor, was a place Fran would normally have avoided like the plague, the in place at the moment, popular with Felsborough’s G & T brigade, many of whom she met daily on the station platform, most of whom were scarcely able to wait to board the train before pulling out their laptops and checking in with the office on their mobile phones — and none of whom she wished to meet in the present circumstances. It was a tiny, stone-floored inn with low beams and small-paned windows, and today it would be packed, smoky and noisy. Still, with luck, they might find a seat in the garden and getting there would mean a walk through the forest where it was cool and quiet, an opportunity to talk on neutral ground, which she felt might be Jilly’s reason for suggesting it.

  She smiled and said, ‘Yes, OK. I’m on if you are.’

  But they were nearly there before Jilly came to the point. ‘Let’s sit down here for a minute, Fran. I expect you’ve guessed why I asked you to come.’

  ‘Not really.’ It wasn’t altogether a lie. She wasn’t absolutely sure. They sat on the fallen trunk of a beech which had been uprooted in the storms of the previous winter, its exposed roots sticking up nakedly in the air, its bark already gathering moss and lichens.

  ‘Yesterday, in the music room … you heard, didn’t you?’

  Fran saw that she couldn’t evade what was coming, but wished she could. ‘When you were singing that song?’ she prevaricated.’”Tell me the truth about love”? Where have I heard it before? It’s been haunting me ever since.’

  ‘It’s one of Britten’s cabaret songs. But that’s not important - I want to explain.’

  ‘You don’t have to explain anything. I was eavesdropping, though I didn’t mean to. It’s really none of my business.’ Never mind that she’d spent most of the evening speculating on just what it was she’d overheard.

  ‘I’d like you to know — please. I want to tell you everything.’ Fran saw that Jilly was determined to go ahead with her explanations, so she made no further protests. Breathing deeply in an effort to control a voice that had grown dangerously shaky, Jilly sat with her hands either side, pressed into the trunk of the tree, as if she needed its support. ‘I know it’s not fair to put this on your
shoulders but oh! I just have to tell somebody or I’ll go mad. Jonathan and I — we’ve gone round this in circles and we just get nowhere. And I know you can be trusted.’

  ‘It’s something to do with Bibi?’

  ‘Well, yes, though it wasn’t, not until she came here.’ She flushed angrily. ‘Jonathan — well, he let something slip … you know what Bibi was like when she was being all feminine and sympathetic … when really, she was just so manipulative.’

  ‘Yes, she was.’ Fran saw how true this was now, though she’d taken some time to realize and admit it. She’d been blind to a lot of things about Bibi.

  Jilly began to pleat the material of her dress with nervous fingers, the same one she’d worn yesterday, its kingfisher colours a bright splash under the dark canopy of the trees. But she wasn’t wearing her contact lenses today and looked solemn as an owl behind her large specs. She had quite lost that glow which had lit her up when she and Jonathan had been singing and playing together.

  ‘Go on,’ Fran prompted, wondering what she was going to hear, not wanting to, and very much afraid that she wasn’t going to like it.

  Jilly swallowed hard, licked her lips. ‘It was something that happened when Jonathan was a student in Cambridge, just after he’d taken his music degree, in fact, and they were all ready for leaving. On the last night, a group of them went out to celebrate and well — it all got rather out of hand … you know he never drinks much. He really can’t take it.’

  ‘But he did get drunk that night?’

  ‘Not really drunk, but enough to make him realize he was well over his limit. The party was breaking up, anyway, so he said goodnight and went to walk home. It was a long way but he thought it might sober him up.’

  Well, yes, it was possible to imagine Jonathan, even then, having the self-control to walk out of a student celebration. Not many young people you could say that about, but Jonathan, yes. He was born taking himself seriously, Fran thought wryly.

  ‘When he got outside it was pouring with rain — a really wild night. There was someone else out there in the car park that he hardly knew, in fact they’d met for the first time that night, a medical student. He was opening his car door and shouted to Jonathan, offering him a lift. When Jon got to the car, he realized the other guy — his name was Malcolm Farrant — was plastered — so he suggested he should drive. Farrant said OK and they set off. It wasn’t long before Jonathan realized he was in no condition to drive, either, not in that weather, the car was all over the place and he could scarcely see through the windscreen. Luckily, the roads were deserted on such a wild night. Well, you can guess what happened …’

  ‘An accident?’

  ‘Yes, the car slewed off the road into a ditch. Farrant came off worse. He hadn’t fastened his seat belt and he’d banged his head on the windscreen and was out cold. There was a lot of blood and Jonathan panicked. He was a bit groggy himself, though more shaken than anything. His seat belt had saved him. He got himself out of the car and ran to find a telephone box — but first he pulled Farrant across into the driving seat.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t you see, if it was discovered he’d been the driver he could be prosecuted for dangerous driving. Even manslaughter, if Farrant was dead, which he thought he might be. The beginning and end of a promising career.’

  Blighted before it had begun, the one thing that mattered to Jonathan above all else, and always had done. My God. ‘And then?’

  ‘He found a telephone and got the ambulance to come.’

  ‘And I suppose he faded from the scene afterwards.’

  Jilly looked up quickly. ‘Well, yes, but he’d done all he could, hadn’t he?’

  ‘And the other guy — Farrant? Did he die?’

  ‘No, his head injury was fairly superficial, after all. He was fined three or four hundred pounds, that was all. But the police weren’t satisfied, they suspected there’d been another person in the car, one who’d been driving — the one who’d called 999. Farrant’s injuries, you see, weren’t consistent with his having been in the driving seat when the car crashed. But they never found it was Jonathan — no reason why they should, after all — he and Farrant were strangers, no one had seen him get into Farrant’s car, and he left Cambridge for ever the next day.’

  ‘Didn’t Farrant tell the police there was someone else with him?’

  ‘Apparently he was so out of his skull he didn’t even remember the accident, never mind giving anyone a lift. It wasn’t just booze he’d taken that night.’

  ‘Lucky for Jonathan.’

  ‘Fran, he was young, he was shocked, he just did the first thing that came to him! He got the ambulance, after all, he didn’t just leave him, as he might have done! It wouldn’t have made any difference if he’d stayed.’

  ‘Except he’d have been the one who took the blame, especially if Farrant had died.’

  She didn’t know what else to say. Jonathan, the responsible, dependable one. The one with integrity. He’d always been more law-abiding, more respectful of authority, than anyone else she knew. She just couldn’t believe that he, of all people, had simply walked away like that, until she thought of the reasons why he had, and then she could. Oh yes, if it had looked like interfering with his career, he would have done anything. But whichever way you looked at it, it wasn’t a very elevating story.

  ‘How did Bibi come into this?’

  ‘Oh, it was shortly after she came to live here. Everyone else had gone to bed, and she persuaded Jonathan to let her read the tarot cards for him, just for a laugh. But after a while, it became serious, she swore she could read all the signs that there was something hanging over him that had happened to him in his past. She told him he’d never be free until he unburdened himself of what it was that was troubling him — or words to that effect, you know how she talked. I really don’t know how she managed to persuade him to tell, but in the end — well, the upshot was, he confessed the whole thing to her. One of those confidences you make on the spur of the moment and regret ever after. But she had an uncanny knack of being around when people were ready to talk, didn’t she? All that wide-eyed sympathy and understanding. But rather than sort of exorcizing it, as she’d suggested, it made things worse — not that she knew, though there was that, but the fact that after all these years of saying nothing, he’d let the cat out of the bag.’

  ‘Was she blackmailing him?’

  ‘It was more subtle than that. She just found ways, every time they met, of letting him know she hadn’t forgotten. He swears she didn’t want anything from him — she just wanted him to know that she knew. Which meant that he’d never be allowed to forget. It was a kind of power, I suppose. Didn’t you ever feel it, Fran, that dark streak in her?’

  ‘Oh yes, I think I did, from time to time, without really recognizing what it was. It probably hurt her more than anyone else.’

  They sat for a while, saying nothing. Insects whirled and danced in the shafts of sunlight coming through the trees. The silence was complete. Fran picked a piece of bark off the tree trunk and began to shred it. ‘Supposing it were to come to light now — what would happen?’

  ‘He thinks he could be charged with conspiring to avert the course of justice, or however they put it, and I expect he’d be fined. That wouldn’t matter, he’d welcome it, in a funny sort of way, the chance to clear the slate. But think of what it would do to his reputation! That’s something he’d never get over.’

  ‘No one expects anyone to be perfect, nowadays. I’ve often wondered if there’s anything at all that would put someone in the public eye totally beyond the pale. They can get away with anything. Most people would think what he did wasn’t so very terrible anyway. He’d survive, people would forget.’

  Jilly looked at her. ‘But Jonathan wouldn’t.’

  ‘No.’ Fran privately thought he might rather be enjoying wearing his hair shirt. ‘But I can’t see any good would come of resurrecting it now, except to relieve his conscience - and
he’s managed to live with that all these years,’ she added drily.

  ‘That’s not fair! You don’t know how it’s preyed on his mind. Not to mention how his work’s been suffering, ever since Bibi got hold of the story.’

  ‘Well, he won’t have to put up with her any more now, will he?’

  ‘Fran!’

  Fran sighed. ‘Don’t take any notice of what I said, we’re all on edge, aren’t we? Look, I don’t much feel like going on to Endbury. Come back home with me and I’ll find us something to eat there.’

  In a caravan on the cliffs on the edge of the North York moors, a man sat drinking coffee from a mug, staring out over the North Sea. A mongrel dog resembling a dusty black hearthrug sat expectantly at his feet, waiting to be let out, but the caravan was too close to the edge of the cliffs for comfort and he never let the dog out alone. The coastline around here was subject to dangerous rock falls. In fact, not too far from where the caravan was parked, a mere few miles away, whole sections of the cliff face had not long ago broken away without warning and slid with a great roar down to the beach below, taking everything that had been on the cliff top with them. Not long ago, a hotel in Scarborough had been swallowed by the sea. This van, now decrepit and unused, was the only one still left on a site that had once accommodated twenty or more, but no one would contemplate coming to stay here now.

  The dog whined again, but he couldn’t bestir himself out of the appalling apathy that seemed to characterize his days since he had come out of prison. Inside, the shrinks had encouraged him to put his past behind him and look forward to the future, not to bear a grudge or dwell on the circumstances that had brought him there. But Graham Armstrong had never been one to forget, much less forgive, a wrong done to him. He had brooded ever since the start of his marriage on what he regarded as the injustices he’d suffered — more than that, he was congenitally incapable of relinquishing thoughts of his child, or of accepting the fact that he was now permanently lost to him. The only thing that had stirred him and kept him going was the thought of the day when he’d have little James back with him. He was prepared to watch and wait for as long as it took. He would never run out of patience. He’d made one bad mistake and he didn’t intend being defeated a second time.