Jail Bird

Somehow your little jokes ain’t going down at all well, Mr Rackland–don’t ask me why.’

‘Okay.’ He stood up, came around the desk, righted her chair. ‘Come on,’ he said more gently. ‘Let’s calm down and be friendly. I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t mean to upset you.’

‘Bullshit! You did mean to.’

Jack looked at her. ‘All right. Admitted. I wanted to get a rise out of you, see how you’d react in the heat of the moment. Mrs King–Lily–all I’ve got is your word for all this.’

Lily stared at him, reassessing. He might look like a big lummox, but there was a sharp brain in there, clicking away. He’d baited her deliberately, and got the response he wanted.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Sit down.’

Breathing hard with temper, Lily sat down again. She felt like storming out the door, but she needed his help. She knew it. He sat down too and returned his attention to the list.

‘Look, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll be methodical about this, okay?’ He looked up at her.

Lily took a deep, calming breath. ‘Okay,’ she said at last.

‘We’ll start at the top of the list and work down. Adrienne Thomson hasn’t included herself on this roll call, I see.’

Lily shook her head.

‘I have to tell you, though, Lily, that these women could be anywhere and doing anything after all this time. They could even be dead. You understand?’

Lily nodded.

‘All right then. Who’s number one on the list? Alice Blunt. Oh yeah.’ He sat back. ‘This is the one I thought I remembered. I told you, right? A nurses’ hostel. I knew nurses were involved somehow.’

‘She’s a nurse?’ asked Lily, curious despite herself, thinking, Oh Jesus, Leo had all these women, all these damned women and I didn’t have a clue.

He was shaking his head. ‘No, she’s not a nurse. She was in a home attended by nurses. Well, a hospital really. Jesus, I do remember her.’ He looked up at Lily’s face. ‘She was crazy. Bandaged wrists, I remember that, it’s all coming back to me. She’d tried to commit suicide. When I found her, she was in a psychiatric unit.’

18

Her head was whirling by the time she left Jack’s office. Alice Blunt. The name meant nothing to her, nothing at all.

Fuck it, Leo, was this down to you? she wondered. The woman had slit her wrists and been admitted to a mental institution. She’d been seriously unstable, Jack had remembered that much.

‘She was spooky to talk to. Sort of locked into herself, you know?’ Jack had said.

Spooky and unstable.

‘She could well be dead by now,’ Jack had warned Lily. ‘But I’ll check, okay? I’ll start in on this, and you start in on getting the cash together, all right?’

‘Yeah,’ Lily had said, and left. Thinking, Oh sure. I’ll get right on that. Go straight down the Post Office, get out a few thousand, how will that be?

She didn’t have money to hand, not the sort of sums he was talking about. She had a roof over her head for now, thanks to Nick O’Rourke, and she couldn’t understand his motivation for that yet–but that was about it. When she thought of Nick, there was that nagging suspicion bothering her again. What, did he feel guilty because he’d done Leo, let her take the rap? Was all this unexpected kindness towards her just about him, feeling he owed her something? But…Nick and Leo had been as close as brothers. So Nick should hate her, just as Si and Freddy did, if he truly believed she’d killed Leo–shouldn’t he? Right now she was almost too tired to think about it, and she had more to do before day’s end, much more.

She went back to the flat to pick up her rucksack, got the bus to where she needed to go, and then another bus; and it was getting dark but she didn’t care, she was on a mission. She then walked about a quarter of a mile as the night closed in around her, to get to the house. Finally, footsore and weary, she walked into the little gravelled turning and stood in front of it.

It was full dark now. Owls hooted back in the nearby woods. Off in the distance, a fox barked. She clutched at the cold metal of the big closed security gates, put her head in between the bars and stared up the drive. The big white shape of The Fort glimmered faintly in the gloom.

Lily drew in a shuddering breath.

She knew every inch of that house. Fifty steps on the main staircase, five strides to the master suite, ten steps from the front door to the indoor swimming pool room. Her house. Only it wasn’t. Not any more. Although she and Leo had owned the house together, as ‘joint tenants’, a murderess could not be allowed to profit from her crime. And so the house–her home, she thought fiercely–had passed to the girls.

Si had filled her in on these facts when she had called out time and again from prison, telling her with grim delight that the courts had appointed him and his wife Maeve as guardians of Saz and Oli and trustees of their considerable fortune, which would come to them when they passed eighteen. Oli had celebrated her eighteenth birthday in the February just gone, and Saz was twenty-one; now, they owned The Fort. Not her.

Lily stared up at the house.

There were a few lights on up there. It was just the same. Big, imposing.

The last time she had come here…oh Jesus, nearly thirteen years ago!…she had been determined to confront Leo because she knew he was knocking off Adrienne behind her back. And then…she screwed her eyes tight shut. Blood. That awful great gout of blood–and the numbness; the disbelief. Leo–big tough brawny Leo, who had always seemed invincible, a Sun King, undying and ever undimmed–was dead.

Deep in shock, she’d picked up the gun and then stumbled, half falling, gibbering, down the stairs, and called the police, something she had never done in her life before. Something she–with hindsight, and wasn’t hindsight a wonderful thing?–probably shouldn’t have done at all.

And she’d stayed there alone in the hall, the rifle in her hands, until the police came and she said, he’s dead, someone’s killed him, and they looked at her as if she was crazy and might at any second start shooting them, and they said, okay, yes, Mrs King isn’t it? Their faces had been white and fearful in the porch light. Put the gun down now, that’s right. Put it down on the floor. She had forgotten that she was still holding it. Couldn’t think why she had picked the damned thing up in the first place. But when she opened the door to the police she was standing there in the hall, blood–Leo’s blood–dripping from her clothes on to the lovely chequered marble tiles she had once picked out with such care.

Oh God, such a nightmare.

And then the trial, the horror building, the whole thing developing like some foul growth. The evidence all piling in against her. The arguments people had overheard, and one in particular when she had shouted: You bastard, if you’ve been playing away I’ll kill you. Not meaning it. Never meaning it. But she’d said it; it had been heard by the cleaning lady. The prosecution had laid it all out, it was plain as day. She had come storming back from the spa on that fatal Thursday to confront her husband. She knew the key to the gun cabinet was kept in the desk drawer. Leo was always punctiliously careful about locking the guns away, and he had a licence; everything was kosher. She had opened the cabinet in his study, loaded the rifle–her prints were the only ones on the gun–and then she’d gone upstairs and blown his head off.

She could hear the prosecution shouting these words at her, accusing, snarling, while she stood there flinching, thinking, No, no, it wasn’t me, I didn’t do it, someone please help me.

To be fair, the defence counsel had tried. Encouraged her to plead guilty, lessen her sentence. She was going to get a sentence–that went without saying. They had to try to do damage limitation, really: there was nothing else they could do. So she said Leo had beaten her. He never had, but dazed and confused and wondering what the hell had happened to her life, what was going to happen to her girls, she agreed to say he had. She was frightened of prison, being locked up–she wasn’t a criminal. Desperation took over. She pleaded guilty, just as her brief advised. She’d screamed at him that she was innocent, but he had explained it to her; don’t be a fool. You have to play the system. Admit guilt and you’ll get a lighter sentence. Guilty, but provoked. And he was right. Her sentence was lighter than it could have been.