Disordered Minds

'Like hell he was,' said Louise bluntly, taking up her glass again. 'I was the gooseberry so his gran wouldn't ask questions. He'd have gone the whole way with Cill if he could've got rid of Grace. He was always pressuring the silly old cow to go to the shops, but she never did because she hated leaving the house.'

Andrew watched her drain the glass. It wasn't hard to see where she was going with this. 'So because he was sexually obsessed with Cill, he killed his grandmother?'

'Had to've done,' she agreed. 'He was a dirty little pervert.'

'Had to have done?' he queried. 'You don't know?'

'Oh, I know all right,' she said confidently. 'I just can't prove it.'

Andrew let a silence develop. 'What was the point of coming here?' he asked at last. 'I may be a soft touch in some areas of my life, Louise, but I'm not entirely stupid. Were you expecting me to believe this rigmarole?'

'What's not to believe?'

'That Grace would have allowed Cill to stay in her house once the police became involved. They were appealing for sightings on the Saturday morning. Grace wouldn't have hidden her in those circumstances.'

Louise shrugged. 'Maybe she was already dead.'

'She can't have been,' he said with conviction. 'There was a debate over time of death at the trial, but the disparity between the two sides was twenty-four to forty-eight hours. If Cill disappeared on the Friday evening, then Grace would have had to have died on the Saturday in order to be ignorant of police involvement ... which would have meant her body lying for nearly a week before it was found.' He shook his head. 'And that isn't possible. Decomposition would have been well into the second and third stages.'

'Not my problem,' she said indifferently. 'I'm telling you how it was. It's up to you to work out how it fits.'

He gave an abrupt laugh. 'Then it's a pity you didn't make your story match the facts before you brought it to me. Let's start with Cill. If you knew where she was, why didn't you tell the police?'

'She'd have killed me.' She reached forward to stub out her second cigarette. 'Like I said, she was a psycho. If they'd hauled her kicking and screaming back to her dad for another larruping, she'd have got me in a corner, first opportunity, and scratched my eyes out.'

'So why tell them about the rape?'

'Because they wanted to know what the fight was about. Plus, I reckoned that if the police knew she'd been raped and got social services involved, her dad wouldn't be able to take her apart for it.' Her expression became almost rueful. 'I was trying to do her a favor, though you wouldn't think it the way things turned out. It's no good looking at it with twenty-twenty vision, you have to picture what it was like then. Far as I knew, Cill'd sneak home when she got bored and that'd be the end of it. I didn't know she was going to vanish and Grace was going to die; No one did.'

It was a fair point, he thought. 'How did you know she was in Grace's house?'

'Soon as her mum phoned to see if she was round our place, I went and checked. We used to go through the gate in the fence at the back and in the kitchen door. I watched her through the window, stuffing her face with ice cream.'

'Did you talk to her?'

'No chance. She'd have gone for me. It was my fault that cow Brett suspended her.'

'What about Grace?'

'Didn't see her.'

'Howard?'

She shook her head.

'What time was it?'

Louise shrugged. 'Nine o'clock or thereabouts.'

'Morning? Evening?'

'Morning. I was down at the nick two hours later, being quizzed by the cops.'

It sounded convincing, but Andrew wasn't much of a judge in these matters. Women had always run rings around him. He couldn't forget that, at the period Louise was describing, she was only thirteen years old-and, if her ex-headmistress was to be believed, not very bright. 'Had you had dealings with the police before?' he asked. 'I can't imagine withholding information at thirteen.'

Her eyes glittered scornfully, but whether in contempt for Andrew's boyhood fear or impatience with his questioning, he couldn't tell. 'It was my mother did most of the talking, and she was mad as hell that anyone'd think we knew where Cill was and wouldn't tell.'

'But you knew.'

'Right.' She lit another cigarette. 'That's why I talked about the rape.' She forestalled his next attempt at a question. 'Oh, come on, lighten up, for Christ's sake! What was the big deal? I wasn't going to rat on Cill, even if I did think she was a little bitch. All she'd done was take herself off for the night ... hundreds of kids do it every day. In any case, I didn't want the cops finding out we'd been truanting round there because I didn't know what they'd do to Grace. Or me for that matter,' she added reflectively. 'My plan was to go round as soon as I got home and give Cill a bollocking, but Mum got fired up about the rape and wouldn't let me out of her sight. After that it all went pear-shaped.'

'How?'

'How do you think?' she said morosely. 'When I next went round, it looked as if a bloody war had broken out.'