Vanessa threw herself down on one of the sofas. ‘I thought I made it clear to you that I was done with this bizarre quest of yours,’ she said in a bored voice.
Carol refused to be derailed. ‘Part of my job as commander of the Major Incident Team is to investigate cold cases. I’ve been looking at an old case involving an assault in Savile Park. Ring any bells?’
Vanessa’s composure barely flickered. ‘Get to the point,’ she said.
‘You were with your fiance, Edmund Arthur Blythe. You told the police you were accosted by a man who wanted Eddie’s money. Things got out of hand and Eddie was stabbed. Almost fatally. And the next thing that happened was that Eddie left town.’
‘Why are you bringing this up?’ There was a dangerous edge to Vanessa’s voice. Carol remembered the Bob Dylan line about the woman who never stumbles because she’s got no place to fall. Except that with Vanessa it was more like never stumbling because she refused to admit falling was a possibility.
‘Because you never have. Tony deserves to know why his father walked out on you both. If you won’t tell me the truth about what happened, then I will reinvestigate this case with full vigour. Your statement seems to me to be very thin. I promise you I will turn your life upside down and I will give a statement to the effect that all these years later you tried to swindle your son out of his inheritance. It’s enough to open an investigation. Believe me, Vanessa, I am every bit as tough as you, and I will cheerfully be a thorn in your side till you give me some answers.’
‘This is harassment. I’ll have your badge if you try it.’ Vanessa couldn’t keep the fury from her face. Carol knew she’d won.
Carol shrugged casually. ‘And how long will that accusation stand up? I can make your life uncomfortable for a very long time. I don’t think you want that. I don’t think you want your name dragged through the mud. Or your company’s name. Not at a time when the economy’s on the floor and people are counting every penny they spend on recruitment and training.’
‘He should have grabbed you with both hands,’ Vanessa said. ‘Pitiful excuse for a man. Just like his father before him.’ She crossed her legs, folded her arms and glared at Carol. ‘So what do you want to know?’
‘I want to know what happened that night to make Eddie run away. And I want to know why you’ve never told Tony.’
Vanessa gave Carol a hard, calculating stare. ‘How would you feel if the man you’d agreed to marry revealed himself to be a spineless coward? The minute that lad produced his knife, Eddie turned to jelly. He was offering his wallet, begging him to leave us alone. He was crying. Can you believe that? Tears running down his cheeks, snot running down his face like a little boy. He was pathetic. And that bastard lapped it up. He was laughing at Eddie.’ She paused. Her left foot moved up and down to a private internal beat, the gleaming leather catching the light. ‘He demanded my jewellery. My engagement ring, a gold bracelet Eddie had given me. So I kicked him in the shins. That’s when he turned on Eddie. He stabbed him, then he ran for it.’
‘Did you blame yourself for what happened?’ Carol asked, knowing what the answer would be.
‘Blame myself? It wasn’t me that grovelled to that bastard. I was the one who stood up for us, the way Eddie should have. He was a coward, and that mugger knew it. It wasn’t me he went for, because he knew I wouldn’t stand for it. All I blame myself for is not realising what a bloody wimp Eddie truly was.’ Contempt dripped from her words like blood from a slaughterman’s knife.
‘Why did Eddie sell up and leave town?’
‘He was mortified. Thanks to the paper, everybody knew he’d let himself down. And me. He was a laughing stock. The big-shot businessman who couldn’t stand up to a late-night mugger. He couldn’t take the shame. And I’d dumped him by then, so there was nothing to keep him here.’
‘You dumped him? While he was in hospital?’
Vanessa looked unconcerned. ‘Why bother waiting? He wasn’t the man I thought he was. Simple as that.’
Her ruthless egotism was breathtaking, Carol thought. She couldn’t imagine anything denting Vanessa’s self- belief. It was a miracle Tony had survived as well as he had. ‘Nobody was ever arrested,’ Carol said.
‘No, you lot were as useless then as you are now. To be honest, I didn’t think they were that bothered. If he’d tried to rape me, they might have summoned up some interest. But to them, Eddie was just a pathetic rich bugger who didn’t know how to take care of himself and deserved what he got.’
Carol struggled to believe that. Back in the less violent 1960s, the police would have taken such an attack seriously, even given an alleged class divide that didn’t square with Alan Miles’s account of Eddie as a local lad made good. But Vanessa’s version gave Carol a stick to beat her with, which made it irresistible. ‘You didn’t give them much of a description to go on.’
Vanessa raised her eyebrows. ‘It was dark. And he didn’t hang around. He sounded local. You of all people must know how little witnesses actually see when they’re being attacked.’
She had a point. But then smart operators like Vanessa usually did. ‘So why did you never tell Tony the truth? Why let him believe that Eddie leaving was something to do with him?’
‘I’ve no control over what my son chooses to believe,’ Vanessa said dismissively.
‘You could have told him the whole story.’
A cold, malicious smile lifted the corners of her mouth. ‘I was protecting him from the truth. I didn’t want him to know how pathetic his father was. First, because he couldn’t stand up to a lad who was probably as scared as he was. And second, because he cared so much about what people thought of him that he ran away rather than face the music. Do you think it would have helped Tony to know that his father had a yellow streak a mile wide? That he’d been abandoned by a man who made the lion in
‘I think it would have been more helpful than growing up thinking his father left because he didn’t want anything to do with his child. Did Eddie never show any interest in the fact that he had a son?’
Vanessa breathed heavily through her nose. ‘I didn’t know he knew. I certainly never told him. How he found out, I don’t know.’
Carol couldn’t keep the astonishment from her face. ‘You never told him? He didn’t know you were pregnant?’
