Charlie watched as the door to Seed Art Services opened with a slow creak. A few seconds later, Ruth Bussey burst out of the dark interior as if someone had shoved her from behind. She was wearing flip-flops on her feet. No socks or tights tonight either, Charlie noticed, and still limping. Charlie wondered again why anyone who hadn’t sprained their ankle would pretend they had.
She hurried over, wanting to catch Ruth before she got to her car, not caring if it was obvious that she was coming from the trees by the river, where she had no reason to be unless she’d been spying on the workshop. ‘Ruth!’
Ruth turned with a cry, then fell back against her Passat, pressing her hand against her chest.
‘I’ve been knocking and knocking,’ Charlie told her. ‘Since five thirty. But you know that, don’t you? You were in there all the time. Sitting in the pitch black with the door locked.’
‘I was thinking,’ said Ruth. Her voice lost itself in the biting wind that blew strands of hair in her face. ‘Trying to decide what to do.’
‘And did you?’
‘Yes.’ From her puffy eyelids and the chapped skin between her nose and upper lip, it was clear that crying had played a significant part in the decision-making process. ‘I wasn’t completely honest with you before, and it got me nowhere. I thought you’d laugh me out of the police station if I told you the full story.’
‘Where’s Aidan?’ Charlie asked curtly. What did the silly cow expect-a card saying, ‘Congratulations, you’ve stopped lying’?
‘I don’t know. I don’t know when he’ll be back. I don’t know much, but I’m willing to tell you what I do know, if you’ll help me. You’ve got to.’ Ruth grabbed Charlie’s arm. ‘He said he was going to kill her.’
‘What?’ A remark like that couldn’t be ignored, even if it came from the least trustworthy person on the planet, which Ruth Bussey might very well be, Charlie thought. ‘Who said he was going to kill who?’
‘Aidan. Mary. He called her “that bitch”. He’s not in Manchester-I rang Jeanette at the City Art Gallery. He wasn’t there last weekend…’
‘Slow down. You’re not making sense.’
Ruth shivered convulsively in her crumpled white shirt. Charlie had her coat in the boot of her Audi. ‘Leave your car,’ she said. ‘I’ll drive you home and we can talk there.’ She would get inside that bloody lodge house one way or another. She’d been irritated all day by the thought of Malcolm Goat-man Fenton trying to keep her out.
‘A man’s been following me,’ said Ruth, as they walked down Demesne Avenue to Charlie’s car. ‘No, that’s wrong. Not following-he doesn’t stalk me when I go out or anything, but he walks past my house. With a black Labrador.’ Having started to talk, she seemed unable to stop-the words flowed out, devoid of tone, as if all she wanted was to get it over with. ‘I first noticed him last June. He was there every day for a while. Then he disappeared, for months. I thought he’d stopped but… he came back on Sunday, yesterday. I can show you-I’ve got him on tape. I saw him this morning too. Aidan says he’s just walking his dog in the park. He gets impatient when I mention it, calls me paranoid, but he’s never seen him, the way he looks at the house.’
Charlie had stopped. In order not to miss anything, she’d had to hang back. Ruth was barely moving and had stopped shivering. She no longer seemed aware of the cold. ‘Has he ever threatened you? Approached you, or the house?’
‘No.’
‘Isn’t it normal for people walking in the park to look at your house? It’s an unusual building. I’ve looked at it in the past and wondered who lived there.’
‘You sound like Aidan. He says everyone who walks in or out through the gates looks at the lodge on their way past. He’s right-nearly all of them do. But this man looks in a different way.’
Aidan Seed, the voice of reason, thought Charlie. Apart from the small matter of his belief that he murdered a living woman.
‘He wears a red woolly hat, the man, with a bobble on the top. Even in summer. That’s not normal.’
‘I’m not sure normal exists,’ said Charlie.
Ruth stared into the distance, eyes wide. ‘He wears it because it looks stupid, comical. No one who wears a hat like that could be dangerous-that’s what he wants me to think.’
‘Ruth, how cold is it today? And you’re wearing flip-flops, no socks or tights, nothing. There you go: proof that a person can be inappropriately dressed and not stalking anyone!’ Charlie wasn’t angry, as she must have sounded, but a certain amount of force was necessary to stamp out irrationality. Was Ruth insane? Was Aidan Seed? If only the answer in both cases was ‘yes’, that would explain everything.
Charlie would have been lying if she’d told Ruth that a look in isolation could never be sufficient grounds for suspicion, though she doubted the man with the red bobble hat was anything to worry about.
‘I never wear socks,’ said Ruth. ‘My parents used to make me wear them every day, and a vest. They were obsessed with stopping heat escaping from their bodies. Our house was like a furnace, heating and gas fires on all year round.’ Her teeth started to chatter.
Charlie had to press the key-fob four times before her car’s lights flashed twice: unlocked. The battery was losing its power. She’d been meaning to buy a spare and put it in the glove compartment, but hadn’t got round to it. She opened the boot and handed Ruth her coat. ‘Maybe your man’s parents wouldn’t let him wear woolly hats, even in hailstorms,’ she said. Ruth didn’t smile.
Once they were in the car and driving, Charlie said, ‘Are you going to tell me why you had that piece about me from the paper in your coat pocket?’
‘You went through my pockets. I thought you would.’ Ruth seemed to shrink in her seat. ‘I’m sorry about… what happened to you. It must have been awful for you. You looked devastated in the photograph.’
‘We’re not going to talk about me,’ said Charlie firmly.
‘That’s why I waited for you on Friday. I was in such a state, I couldn’t have spoken to anyone else. After what you’d been through, I thought you’d be understanding.’
‘Sorry if I disappointed you.’ Charlie thought about the sequence of events: the article was printed in 2006, as were several hundred others, in every newspaper in the country, each gleefully raking over the minute details of the incident that, at the time, to Charlie, had felt like the end of her life. Aidan Seed told Ruth he’d killed Mary Trelease in December 2007. Did Ruth expect Charlie to believe she’d cut the piece out of the
Ruth twisted her hands in her lap. She said nothing. They drove through the town centre. Elaborate Easter egg displays crowded shop windows along the High Street.
‘Has the story changed?’ Charlie asked. ‘What did you mean before-Aidan said he was going to kill Mary Trelease? I thought his angle was that he’d killed her already?’
‘It wasn’t a threat,’ said Ruth. ‘He asked if I thought it was possible to see the future. When I told him I was sure it wasn’t, he said it was the only explanation-everyone’s telling him Mary’s still alive, but his memory of killing her’s so vivid. If it’s not a memory, it must be a…’
‘A premonition?’ said Charlie wearily. ‘You’re not going to like this suggestion, but could Aidan be talking all this spooky crap to scare you? To drive you away? Premonitions, murders that never happened…’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I’m not sure he could fake the fear I saw. He was scared of what he might do. He told me to go to Mary’s house and persuade her to run away, somewhere he wouldn’t find her.’ Charlie felt Ruth’s eyes on her. Waiting, hoping, for an explanation Charlie was unable to provide.
‘Sorry?’
