Disordered Minds

'So why pick on Howard? Nothing you've said so far proves he was even there.'

'Who else could it have been?' she said with a shrug. 'There was no one else went near Grace, except us and him.'

'How about Roy Trent, Colley Hurst and Micky Hopkinson?'

She was ready for that, he thought. Her answer was too quick. 'Dream on,' she said scornfully. 'They never left Colliton Way. What the hell would they be doing at Grace's?'

'Looking for Cill,' Andrew suggested. 'They'd raped her once, maybe they fancied another go.' He watched her mouth turn down. 'Perhaps they were looking for you?'

'What for?'

'To teach you a lesson for giving their description to the police.' For the first time lines of indecision appeared around her eyes. 'I should think they were mad as hell to have a two-bit kid rat on them.'

'I didn't name them.'

'You didn't need to. They must have been so well known to the police that saying there were three of them was probably enough.' He watched her for a moment. 'If you added in the bonus of Colley Hurst's red hair, then you might just as well have named them.'

'It wasn't them,' she said dismissively, 'and I should bloody well know. I married one of the bastards.'

Andrew smiled. 'That's hardly proof of innocence.'

'You think I'd marry a murderer?'

'No reason not to. They don't have 'M' tattooed on their foreheads.'

She considered for a moment. 'Meaning he might have done it, but I didn't know.'

'That's one interpretation.'

'What's the other?'

'That you could marry him safely because no one else knew he was a murderer.' He watched a look of amusement crinkle her eyes. 'So why did you marry him?'

'Why does anyone marry anyone? He was like Everest ... he was there.'

'Didn't it worry you what he did to Cill?'

'Not particularly. He was a damn sight better prospect than the bastard I had before. At least Roy had a place to live with some money coming in.' She shrugged. 'Name me a man who hasn't gone in for a bit of rough sex at some point in his life. It's natural, isn't it? You're all just Stone-Age types under the suits.'

Andrew gave an abrupt laugh. 'So that's where I've been going wrong. I had no idea sex was supposed to be painful. I thought it was about pleasuring women.'

'Oh, sure,' she murmured sarcastically. 'And you can tell when a woman's having an orgasm, I suppose?'

He'd always thought he could, until Greg moved into his bed. 'No,' he confessed. 'I wouldn't be divorced otherwise.'

'Jesus!' Louise wasn't used to honesty in men. 'You shouldn't admit to things like that.'

'I'm not very good at lying.' He grinned as she pulled a face. 'And I don't have the kind of personality that measures itself by the length of its penis.' He tapped the side of his head. 'I'm more interested in this. What makes people tick? Why are some of us a success and others a failure?' He let a moment pass. 'How does Roy make money when his pub doesn't have any customers?'

Louise reached for her jacket. 'Not my problem. It was fine when I was there.'

'Who owns it?'

'Maybe Roy does.'

Andrew shook his head. 'No chance. It's prime development property. He'd be under siege from potential buyers ... and one of them would have persuaded him to sell by now.'

She threaded her arms into the sleeves of her jacket. 'How come you know so much? I thought it was your mate who was writing the book.'

Andrew looked amused. 'He consults with me ... so does George Gardener. Is that a disappointment? Did you choose me because you thought I was too ignorant to ask questions?'

'Apart from George's, yours was the only address I had,' she told him matter-of-factly, 'and I wasn't going to talk to George. She'd have spilled the beans to Roy, and I don't need that at the moment.'

'Why not? You said he wasn't involved.'

'Different stuff,' she said rather bleakly, 'nothing to do with Cill or Grace.' She pushed herself forward in the chair. 'Are you going to tell George and your friend what I've said?'

'It's why you came, isn't it?' He took her silence for assent. 'They'll want to talk to you themselves, though. If what you've told me is true, then you're only guessing that Howard took his obsession with Cill too far ... but you know for a fact that Roy and his friends did. You were there,' he said in a conscious echo of what she'd said earlier, 'and gang rape is a better indication of sociopathic behavior than a bit of clumsy groping on a sofa.'

'She'd been geeing them up to it for weeks,' she said with an edge of malice in her voice. 'They were drunk as skunks and she talked dirty for half an hour to get them excited. I told her she was asking for trouble, but she wouldn't listen to me.' Her mouth thinned as she remembered. 'She was an arrogant little cow. She thought she knew everything. It drove me mad sometimes.'