Killing a Unicorn Read online

  Once, he’d had fresh-faced good looks, but he’d lost his hair and grown fat and pale and moon-faced, due to prison stodge and lack of exercise. He’d remedy that when he got out, he’d always told himself, trying to do as he’d been encouraged, and to look forwards, not to dwell on that one failure which had been the cause of all his later troubles. It had never worked. He was too deeply depressed for that. But he was also monumentally good at hiding his feelings, and a whole lot more intelligent than people gave him credit for. He had let them talk to him, made them think the rehabilitation programme they were putting him through was working, while inwardly he forbade himself to forget the wrong done to him by his ex-wife.

  He cursed the day he had ever applied for managership of the Ascomb Arms, not because of his subsequent failure to make it once more a viable business proposition, but mainly because if he hadn’t he wouldn’t have met Bibi Morgan and then his life would never have revealed itself in all its inadequacies and hang-ups.

  When he first saw the hotel, he’d admired what Carys Morgan had done to it and had been filled with enthusiasm for the idea of expanding on what she’d already achieved, knowing that he and her daughter, working together, complementing each other, could make an outstanding success of it. He had the necessary management skills: he appreciated the good things in life and liked to surround himself with them, in his working environment as well as in his home life. He knew how to look after money, none better. And she was beautiful enough to add that finishing touch, the grace note that would have the customers coming back, again and again. He imagined them, an urbane and charismatic partnership, she playing the same role as her mother had done, he with his epicurean good taste, as the top recommended hoteliers in Egon Ronay and The Good Food Guide.

  It had only been a small step from that to imagining them as a married pair. At first, he’d hardly dared to believe that she — so far above him! — would look in his direction, but when he saw she wasn’t at all averse to his attentions, in fact rather the opposite, he had looked at himself in a different light and reassessed his chances. Apart from the professional qualifications he possessed, he wasn’t bad-looking: he had a good height and physique, with a round, fresh face and — his best feature — the big, soft dark eyes his mother had always loved, that girls had found melting and attractive. He had never before, however, had any relationship with the opposite sex that amounted to more than a passing attraction, though he recognized within himself an infinite capacity for tenderness, love and faithfulness. He loved children and family life and felt with a beating heart that he could ask no more in this world than a life of domestic bliss with Bibi … the sort of woman who had hitherto intimidated him, but whom he’d always admired from afar.

  And, wonder of wonders, this paragon, Bibi, had accepted him.

  For the first months of their marriage, life was idyllic. She was warm and responsive beyond his wildest dreams; within a few weeks she became pregnant, and though she gradually lost interest in having sex, this was only to be expected. After the baby was born, it would be different, he knew. Only it wasn’t. She submitted to his needs, but under sufferance. What was wrong with him? he asked her, but she only shrugged. He began to look around, and see how she smiled at other men, how they responded. He could scarcely contain the great, boiling jealousy that seethed up inside him.

  As a child, he’d been fascinated by the myths, fables and legends he’d found in an old, beautifully illustrated book given to him by an old lady his father had worked for. In the same way that kids nowadays were obsessed by dinosaurs, he’d become obsessed by mythical beasts: dragons and mermaids, phoenix and salamander — and in particular, the unicorn, a wild animal elusive of capture by anyone except a spotless virgin. A beast so pure that drinking its blood would give you eternal life. Yet the paradox was that if you killed a unicorn your life was cursed — to eternity. He read until he knew by heart the legend of the Lady and the Unicorn, how her innocence and virginity tamed and protected the beast. He read until the two images were inextricably wound together in his mind and he could no longer distinguish one from the other. He had in fact never completely grown out of his childish obsession, the Lady had imprinted him with the image of his ideal woman.

  He had searched for her for a long time. Virginity and innocence were thin on the ground, these days, but at last he believed he had found her. Only to discover that she was not the woman he’d imagined her to be. Her innocence was a façade. And he’d seen it too late.

  They’d stuffed him with so many drugs in that place that even when they stopped them, he was like the walking dead. The thought of James had been the one thing that had kept him going, fired him, stirred him out of what had seemed to be a terminal apathy, made him feel alive, fuelled his sense of injustice and his desire to do something and be revenged against that two-faced bitch and have his son run back into his open arms. He had chosen to bury the knowledge of how James had shrunk from his father in terror because of the way he had frightened his mother.

  ‘Why did you set fire to the house if you thought so much of the boy?’ they’d asked him, time and again, and time and again he gave the same answer, that he’d believed she’d taken advantage that night of the arrangement she had for herself and James to stay in the hotel on the nights she worked late, in a former servant’s room, so inconvenient it wasn’t considered worth converting to a guest room. He swore he’d never meant to kill Bibi by setting fire to her house, despite his threats, but only to frighten her into letting him have James — and the precious Unicorn book he’d unwisely given her, in an access of love.

  The sea had a rolling swell on it, it was a metallic grey except for the whitecaps further out, and despite the heat of the day it looked cold. An offshore breeze stirred the rough marram grass that grew at the cliff’s edge, studded with cushions of sea pinks, yellow vetch and white yarrow. His paternal grandmother, who’d lived fifty miles up the coast, had gathered yarrow and made a herbal tea from it. It would have been better than what he was drinking now. He pushed the coffee away, only half drunk. The milk had gone sour and flecks of curdled white floated on the surface. He should remember to buy coffee creamer instead of milk in future.

  Inside the caravan it was stuffy with used air and the smell of dog and last night’s fish and chips that he’d brought in. It was a measure of his indifference that he’d left the greasy papers screwed up by the cooker all night, where they still were, now stinking, over and above the smell of cheap instant coffee and burnt toast. He hadn’t yet got the hang of the tiddly grill on the even tiddlier cooker, but it didn’t matter, they wouldn’t be here long. His mother had always been the one to use the cooker, or one like it, when he and his parents had come on holiday to this caravan site when he was a child. He’d hardly been able to believe his luck when he’d driven past and seen the one caravan that hadn’t yet been taken away. He’d parked his car where it couldn’t be seen from the road, shielded by the van, and broken in. No one would ever suspect he was here.

  The dog suddenly leaped to its feet and began barking. It had a permanently hoarse bark, due to having been chained up for most of its life in the untended back garden of the house next door to his father’s, where the feckless family had become new neighbours while Graham had been in prison. He had untied it one night when he couldn’t stand the noise any longer, and the dog had joyfully followed him and been with him ever since. Armstrong let it stay. It was company. It went on barking now and he told it to shut up, but it carried on and when he looked out of the window on the other side of the van, he saw cars coming along the bumpy road that had once formed the backbone of the site. Three cars. A Ford Mondeo, followed by two others. Two men got out of the first. Police. Once, Armstrong might not have recognized them so easily, but now he knew them instantly for what they were, and why they were here. All up, then.

  He was unsurprised. Maybe he’d been expecting it, right from the start. Maybe the foreknowledge of failure was so strong in him he didn
’t care now. His most urgent thought was what was going to happen to the dog.

  They knocked on the door, making it rattle, and the whole caravan shook in sympathy. The dog’s noise increased to a frenzy. He shouted to it and raised his hand and was immediately sorry when it cowered down, belly to the floor. He didn’t like to see that. He’d never been a violent man, he thought, not seeing the irony of it. He reached out and patted the dog’s head to quieten it and then went to open the door.

  The telephone rang just after Fran and Jilly had finished their snack lunch. It was Kate Colville, true to her word, ringing to let them know what was happening. Fran listened without interrupting until Kate had rung off.

  ‘What is it?’ Jilly asked.

  ‘Crouch is up in North Yorkshire. The police up there think they’ve located Jasie’s father.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Jesus, thought Crouch as the man came to the door of the caravan and the stench with him. The squalor some people could live in never ceased to disgust him — and this was clean, compared to some places he’d been obliged to enter, he saw as they followed Armstrong inside.

  He wasn’t what Crouch had expected. A heavyish, balding man with a round, melancholy face, he was pale, not with the prison pallor that should have left him by now, but possibly with fright: it was accentuated by unshaven jowls and big, heavy-lidded dark eyes, of a strange colour somewhat resembling peat, that swam with misery and self-pity. A feral smell of sweat and fear emanated from him. He blinked a lot and drew back his lips, and it was hard not to think of a hunted animal. Crouch trod warily. He might be armed. And unstable men like this could go for the jugular if cornered.

  Yet the hardest thing of all for Crouch to imagine was how in the world this specimen had ever been able to persuade a beautiful creature like Bibi Morgan to marry him, not simply because he was, at the moment at any rate, physically unlovely, or that two more opposites it would be difficult to conceive, but because there was something inherently repulsive and abject about the man.

  ‘All right, Armstrong, where’s the boy?’

  ‘What boy?’

  Crouch sighed. ‘We’re talking about your son, Jasie Morgan.’

  ‘My son’s called James. James Armstrong.’

  ‘No, his mother had his surname changed by deed poll. As you must know. You’ve been following her, up to your old tricks, sending letters to her. Not to mention breaking your parole — and you haven’t done that and forfeited your remission for nothing. Where is he?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. But I haven’t got him. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Not the slightest flicker in the strange, non-colour eyes. But this man would give nothing away. He was a well of secrecy, deep as Hades. For the first time, Crouch felt a plunge of uncertainty.

  ‘That’s a load of bull. Come on, where’ve you hidden him?’

  ‘I’ve told you, I haven’t got him. I haven’t seen him for over two years. Why don’t you ask his mother?’

  ‘You’ll be telling us next you didn’t know he was missing?’

  Something flickered in the peaty depths of his eyes. ‘No, I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Haven’t you seen the newspapers, heard the radio?’

  Armstrong shook his head, slumped against the stained and split red vinyl of the banquette seat. It was hard to tell how the news had affected him. His doughy face was impassive. He wouldn’t break easily under questioning.

  ‘All right, let’s get out of here,’ Crouch said, suddenly sickened by the foetid atmosphere, unable to support it a minute longer, the smell that emanated from the man himself, that thick, nauseating compound of sweat and fear.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’

  ‘You’re nicked, Armstrong. I’m taking you in for questioning about the murder of Bianca Morgan and the abduction of her son, James Morgan.’

  At last there was a reaction in the mud-coloured eyes. ‘Murder?’

  Monday morning found Fran staring out of her office window, overlooking the canyon of a narrow road not far from Oxford Circus. Below, cars slid through, cautiously approaching the bollards at the end that fanned off the road into a narrow alley. Two very elderly ladies, immaculately coiffed, hatted, handbagged and gloved, trotted off to lunch with never a notion that fifty years had brought about a sartorial revolution. From the corner of her eye she could see the traffic grinding laboriously towards Marble Arch.

  She’d fondly imagined that the workplace was what she needed: people, bustle, routine, something to take the place of the churning anxiety which had possessed her for the last three or four days — and now that she had it, she couldn’t reconcile it with an entirely contrary desire to be alone. She could settle to nothing. She might as well have stayed at home, where they were at least all in the same boat. Here, she felt apart, as though marked by stigmata: one of those persons, only previously encountered in newspapers or on television, who had been personally involved in the horror of a murder, and which might rub off with contact, though she suspected it was Kath, with the best of intentions, who had shunted people off. Good old Kath in her old brown mohair cardigan, out at elbows, which she donned on arrival every day against the air-conditioning, and wore over her shapeless skirts and jumpers or blouses. Specs permanently at half-mast on the end of her nose. Bullying Fran into thinking herself back into the partly finished design she’d been working at on Thursday, even if it did mean she was working with half a heart.

  She went back to the screen and sat looking at it, unseeing. She thought about ringing Claire again. She’d previously been engaged elsewhere, and of course, she would be very busy after her long weekend in Spain, and that would explain why she hadn’t yet returned the call when she’d be dying to tell Fran everything about the first time she’d met Mitch’s mother. It was conceivable, by having gone straight to the office after flying in this morning, as Fran knew she’d planned to do, that she wouldn’t have seen any newspapers and would know nothing yet of what had happened to Bibi, and Jasie. Actually, she thought that was more or less a certainty, otherwise Claire would surely have contacted her.

  No, the call would have to wait now. She’d rather rashly promised to take her lunch hour at a time when she could slip in to Jonathan’s final rehearsal at the Wigmore Hall. The tickets for the actual performance were all sold out anyway, since the string quartet he was playing with was world famous and the Schubert Quintet one of the most renowned pieces in their repertoire. Talking to Claire would have to wait a little longer.

  She left the office, already late, knowing she was going to the rehearsal more out of a sense of duty than inclination, showing solidarity, if you like, but now rather regretting the impulse that had made her say yes to Jilly when asked. Music was a pleasure to her, but not a necessity of life, though on occasions it could move her deeply. Which was why she wished she hadn’t promised to attend the rehearsal … this particular piece might be just too heartrending to be endurable today.

  The heat was like a blanket as she waited to cross Oxford Street, she was nearly suffocated by hot diesel fumes from the almost stationary traffic and the heat rising from the tarmac. ‘Come on, come on!’ she muttered. In the end, losing patience, she dodged between two buses, giving a conductor who was leaning out over the step with his arms wrapped around the pole the opportunity to blow her a cheeky kiss. Obscurely cheered by this, she grinned back, carried on and reached the other side without incident. Then as she cut across to Wigmore Street, a bookshop display caught her eye and quite suddenly she was rocked almost to a standstill with a sense of Jasie’s warm little body in her arms, while she read Harry Potter’s latest adventure to him, doing all the voices, one he could perfectly well read himself but still loved to have read to him. She wished she could weep, but she was beyond that. Would it always be like this, catching one unawares?

  Half-way into Monday, back in Felsborough, and they still hadn’t been able to break Armstrong. He had no alibi for the time of the murder. He swore he’d been
living in the caravan for a fortnight, and there was no one to say he had, but on the other hand, no one to say he hadn’t. Crouch tried to wear him down, but he’d met his match. Armstrong simply went on insisting that he hadn’t killed Bibi. He had no knowledge of where Jasie might be now, either, he repeated, his face white, his big eyes like muddy puddles.

  ‘Then what about the letters you sent to her?’

  In the same stolid, deadpan way, he also denied ever sending any letters, threatening or otherwise. This in the teeth of evidence to the contrary which Crouch had found stashed away in the caravan, in the shape of a pack of recycled paper envelopes in a cardboard box, alongside a battered, old-fashioned portable typewriter. Crouch had appropriated the lot — though it wasn’t the sort of evidence he could be happy with, when the envelopes themselves, and the letters therein, had disappeared. Armed with the knowledge that Armstrong didn’t know this, he tried to feel confident that sooner or later he’d be forced into an admission.

  Several hours in close proximity with him on the journey from Yorkshire hadn’t lessened Crouch’s disgust for the man. Hadn’t he washed at all since he left home? Grinding his teeth, he was being forced to admit that he wouldn’t be able to keep him much longer. Unless he confessed to the murder, he’d have to be handed over to a lesser justice, to await punishment for breaking his parole, which would mean forfeiting the remission he’d earned and serving the rest of his sentence, but was nothing like the sentence he’d get if he could be proved to have killed Bibi and kidnapped Jasie. The worry was — if he had taken the child, had Jasie now been left abandoned and alone? Crouch broke out into a sweat at the very thought, but he would have liked to think even Armstrong wouldn’t be that much of a sadist.