Used to, being the operative way of putting it. I'd spent a couple of fruitless hours searching the flat before he got there, but I'd singularly failed to turn up my voice changer box. I had to admit it – it was gone.
That was a nasty coincidence I didn't really want to believe in, but I didn't have much of a choice. For the moment, however, I pushed it to the back of my mind and tried to make like it wasn't there.
I repeated what my mystery caller had said to me as closely as I could remember. It wasn't difficult. The words were acid-etched into my brain.
When I finished the Superintendent looked pensive. He came and perched on my sofa, rubbing his chin absently. I noticed he was old-fashioned enough to be wearing neat gold cuff-links.
“You do realise, of course,” he said, “that we have reason to believe the incident last night is linked to the serious assault on another young woman a few weeks ago, and a more recent rape and murder?”
My heart over-revved so hard it bumped painfully in my chest. My mouth was suddenly dry. “It's the same man who killed Susie Hollins?” I said faintly. “But she was raped, and so was the other girl. Does that mean – Joy – did he—?”
MacMillan's face was shuttered, giving absolutely nothing away. It wasn't difficult to imagine him sitting quietly behind a table in a darkened interview room somewhere, watching some villain sweat as he twisted on the hook of a confession. People would talk just to fill the silence in him.
I opened my mouth to ask, “If it's the same bloke, how does Terry fit in?”, but then I remembered I wasn't supposed to know about that. There hadn't been much in the press about his death yet. Not enough for me to have a viable reason to believe they were linked, at any rate.
I glanced up and found MacMillan studying me, as though he'd been eavesdropping on my thoughts. Instead of my question about Terry, I swallowed and said, “So, what happens now?”
“Well, we could put a tap your phone and trace all your calls, intercept your mail, and put a watch on the place – if you really want us to go to those lengths, of course,” he said, his voice casual, even as he was studying me with a sudden intensity. “If someone really is threatening you, we can probably get them by one of those means.”
“What d'you mean,
He cocked his head on one side. “Well, let's look at the facts for a moment shall we, Miss Fox? We've got a rapist and murderer on the loose. A very dangerous man, but at the same time one who's shown himself to be both clever, and careful. So far, he's been selecting his victims apparently at random, probably because he knows how difficult that makes it for us to catch him.”
MacMillan started to pace again, measured steps, light on his feet. “But now,” he continued in an almost silky tone, “now, miraculously, he's made the seemingly ludicrous mistake of telegraphing his next move to us by ringing
I felt the knife twist in my side. I'd been faced with this kind of suspicion before, and it had damned near finished me.
“Why would I lie?”
“Well now, Miss Fox,” he said quietly, “it wouldn't be the first time you've cried this particular brand of wolf, would it?”
I wanted to speak, but my tongue seemed to have stuck itself to the roof of my mouth.
“I have to ask,” he went on remorselessly, “why you think that claiming people have threatened to kill you would work any better in civilian life than it did four years ago when you were facing being thrown out of the armed forces? What do you hope to gain this time, Miss Fox?” There was something about the stress he put on my surname that alerted me to the dangers of this soft-spoken man. Much more than the actual words.
I met his eyes, and realised with a cold clutch of dread that he knew. He knew everything.
“I suppose I shouldn't really call you Miss Fox at all, should I?” MacMillan said, with the slow inevitability of a steam traction engine. “Seeing as it was only when you moved to Lancaster that you changed your name, wasn't it? To Fox from Foxcroft. Now, why was that, exactly?”
There was no point in prevarication, or lying. “You've obviously done your digging,” I said instead, feeling my face curling up like a salted slug. “Why don't you tell me?”
My words were empty bravado. I didn't need the Superintendent to remind me what had happened.
My case at the court martial had rested mainly on the testimony of another soldier, Kirk Salter. A man I barely knew, but one who'd saved my life.
Kirk had scraped onto the course mainly because of his physical prowess. His head might have been little more than a life support system for a beret, but he could carry a GPMG and two hundred rounds of belted ammunition over an assault course without breaking sweat. And his heart was firmly in the right place.
If he hadn't stumbled on my attackers before they'd put their cover-up plan into action, I'd have ended up as another tragic crime statistic. If my body had ever been found.
They'd been fully intending to snap my neck like a winged pheasant and bury me in shallow grave somewhere in the nearest woods. Kirk had stopped them going through with it, and I'd always be grateful to him for that.
Then he'd been pressured – bullied, cajoled – into denying, under oath, that such a plot had ever existed. I reckoned that just about cancelled out the debt.
“Was changing your name your idea, or your parents'?” MacMillan asked now. “It caused quite a scandal at the time, didn't it? First the court martial, then when you tried to pursue the matter in the civil courts.” He looked at me briefly and I thought I saw the pity in his face before he lowered his gaze to concentrate on adjusting his cuff- link. “The tabloids had a high old time of it with you, didn't they, Charlie?”
I swallowed. Oh yes, they had indeed.
There hadn't been anything in the papers to start with, of course. The army don't tend to wash their dirty linen in public if they can help it. Once I'd made the foolish mistake of bringing a civil action, though, then they really let rip.
To begin with, the headlines had just been sensational.
Then, God knows how, some particular ferreting had brought out my relationship with Sean. Oh, he wasn't married, or anything like that. That would have been too straightforward. Instead, he was one of my training instructors, and that was a complete no-no as far as the top brass were concerned. Relieved to have so easy a get-out presented to them on a plate, the full might of the army had swung against me. I never stood a chance.
As for the press, in the space of a print-run I was transformed from an innocent victim into an immoral slut. If I was prepared to screw one soldier, why not a whole bunch of them? Maybe, they reasoned, the men's claims that I'd been a willing participant weren't so far-fetched?
My parents' house had been besieged. We had reporters and photographers creeping through the garden for weeks. By the time of the civil case, the twisted facts and outrageous stories they'd printed had hopelessly biased any chance of my getting a fair hearing. The media went into a frenzy over the Not Guilty verdict against my attackers. By the time they'd finished with it, it was me who was as guilty as hell.
“It must have been quite a shock that your mother refused to support your appeal,” MacMillan said now. “Especially with her being a magistrate herself.”
“She's a great believer in the criminal justice system in this country,” I said through gritted teeth. So great a believer that she'd refused to acknowledge the possibility that there might have been a miscarriage of justice. She'd shut her mind to it. And shut me out. It had been the final nail in my coffin.
The Superintendent made no comment as he came to his feet. He'd obviously gone over the reports from the time, and the scepticism was plain on his face. I'd been pilloried as a cold-blooded liar in a court of law. Why on earth should he take my word as gospel now?
“I don't suppose,” he said, although clearly not holding out much hope, “that you
I wasn't sure whether to be surprised that he'd bothered to ask my opinion, or insulted, but I remembered Joy, and gave it thought. “There's always Angelo – one of the doormen from the New Adelphi,” I suggested. “The
