The Key to the Case Read online

  Rawston brought me down to earth abruptly. ‘I reckon it must’ve been something spectacular, this thing he’d got for her. It must’ve been, if she persuaded him to go and live in Willenhall. Can’t have been any other way—don’t you think?’

  And it’d changed his whole way of life? That too, perhaps, if he’d got himself working for Milo as a tout, ferrying the mugs to the club. Not quite so illegal, he would think, a sop to her delicate feelings, and not, at the same time, the ultimate concession—that he should get an honest job.

  And, thinking of Milo and the Ace Of Clubs...‘That alibi of his at the club,’ I said. ‘I know the local squad couldn’t confirm it as an alibi. Ronnie’s job there—if you could call it a job—was to bring in the suckers from any bar where he could find them. In other words, Ronnie would be in and out. There one minute and missing the next. You see the point?’

  ‘What point?’

  ‘Nobody would be able to say when he was there and when he wasn’t.’

  ‘So...no alibi.’

  ‘Or one that nobody remembers?’

  He laughed shortly. ‘I like that. Really, I do.’

  ‘And now he’ll get no help from there, ever again, anyway. There’s a big black mark against Ronnie’s name in Milo Dettinger’s little hate book.’

  He laughed more heartily now. ‘I like that better. So how d’you expect to dig him out of trouble, Mr Patton? You’ve got a job on there.’ His hand was on the door-latch.

  ‘I’m hoping to see him this evening at the hospital. He’ll be in pain and weak and unresisting, so perhaps I’ll be able to persuade him to tell me where he really was.’

  He glanced suspiciously at me, then opened the door and climbed out, glancing back just before he slammed it. ‘Keep me in touch.’

  ‘I’ll do that.’

  He walked directly across the grass to his old and rusty Triumph 2000. I sat there, quietly smoking, until he was clear. It was now too late for lunch and too early for dinner, but I decided to drive home. Perhaps Amelia would be there by that time.

  She wasn’t. Mary was hovering anxiously, because she wasn’t sure about our evening meal. I reassured her, though in fact I would have liked to have it early, having made my own plans to go along to the Wolverhampton Royal to cheer up Ronnie. Or terrify him, if it became necessary.

  I hovered by the sitting-room window, waiting for a sight of the Granada. It had not been a good idea her going without me. Going at all. If I’d had my way...but it’s never any use taking that attitude with her and frankly I wouldn’t have it any other way.

  The Granada turned into the driveway and stopped opposite the window. As she stepped out I knew at once it had all gone wrong. Realizing I was watching—she’d just parked beside my Stag—she tried to assemble her expression. She smiled in my direction, but it was tight, and didn’t stretch very far. In the fading light I couldn’t tell whether she was pale. Certainly her face was drawn, and when she waved a hand to me there was no enthusiasm in it. She was moving with stiff precision.

  Sheba fumbled herself out of the door. She’s very sensitive to atmospheres, and completely gave the game away. No bounce in her, there wasn’t, when I got to the front door, merely a snuffle for me and a turn of the head to check she hadn’t lost Amelia.

  ‘What’s this!’ I said cheerfully. ‘No puppy? I’d have sworn you’d got your mind set on that. Don’t tell me Sheba couldn’t find a single friend...?’

  Amelia grimaced. It was possibly intended to be a smile. ‘Sheba didn’t even get out of the car.’

  We were through to the kitchen by that time. Mary said, ‘You look as though you’ve had a rough time, dear.’ No diplomatist, was Mary. The truth is easiest and quicker. ‘You must be starved.’

  ‘No. No, but I could do with a cup of tea.’

  Mary caught my eye, then looked away. ‘I’ll bring it through. You go and get comfortable in the lounge.’ To Mary, it would be for ever the lounge.

  I settled Amelia on the settee, and sat myself in one of the easy chairs, lifting it over to be close. I desperately wanted to sit beside her, but I knew she would then break down with most of it untold, which wouldn’t do at all. Besides, I wanted to watch her face.

  ‘Poppy,’ I led in. ‘The dogs.’

  ‘Oh Richard, she was in such a flap! There was some sort of illness with one of the bitches and she was waiting for the vet. That sort of thing can go right through a breeding kennels...You can imagine.’

  ‘I imagine you’re going to say she couldn’t go with you.’ I nodded. But she wouldn’t have abandoned her intentions. ‘You went alone, didn’t you?’

  ‘I’d made up my mind to it.’

  She meant she’d had to summon up all her determination and courage—and could not expect to do it twice. ‘I can understand that. So you went alone.’

  ‘I had Sheba with me.’

  And Sheba looked thoroughly miserable—as opposed to her normal miserable face—at having failed in her duties. Very selfish, animals are. Even the distresses they claim as their own.

  ‘When I phoned, Mary said you’d completed one meeting and seemed happy enough with the result.’

  ‘Oh...I was. I think. No I wasn’t. Richard...this was the youngest girl I saw first. Ellie Parkes.’

  ‘Tea,’ cried Mary brightly, rattling in with a tray. She placed it on the table beside the settee. I noticed she’d put out three cups and saucers, so I raised my eyebrows and inclined my head. Mary got it. She brought over another chair so that she could pour out and be there. Just there...a presence.

  ‘She was fifteen,’ I recalled, ‘at the time.’

  ‘Yes.’ The word hissed between her teeth. ‘I found the house and her parents said she was out. Ellie, they told me, had taken little Tony to the park. Well...it was cold but quite bright. Did you see any sun, Richard?’ She turned sideways to accept her tea but I’d noticed the shadows behind her eyes. She was trying to keep it all chatty. Treat it as a visit to a friend.

  I shook my head but she didn’t see it. No sun for me.

  ‘I didn’t know where the park was,’ she went on. ‘The district was strange to me, but they gave me directions. Such a very big park, Richard. I had to leave my car in the street and walk through, looking for a girl with a little boy. They’d mentioned geese at the house, so I was looking for a pool.’

  ‘That would be Central Park. The pool’s nearly big enough to be a lake. I know it well. You had Sheba with you?’

  ‘Oh yes. On her lead. There was hardly anybody about, so it wasn’t difficult to find them. There was this pool, and a young woman in jeans and an anorak, with a little boy all bundled up, with a woolly cap with a bobble on it and a fawn coat and little blue trousers tucked in little boots.’ She lowered her head in order to stir her tea. The cup rattled in the saucer. ‘Of course, he would be...be his child, Richard.’ Her eyes flicked up at me, down again.

  ‘So it would seem.’

  ‘And they were feeding the geese. I sat down on the bench just behind them—they were standing down by the water. Her shoulder-bag was beside me. Canada geese, Richard. Have you ever seen them close up? They’re huge. I’d never have thought it. Waddling up and pecking, snatching. It would’ve scared me, I can tell you that.’

  I nodded. ‘They can be quite pushy.’

  They pecked at your trousers, I knew, having fed their ancestors myself, with Vera my first wife at my side, in that very same park. Laughing at my side. I didn’t mention this.

  ‘And the little lad—Tony—she was handing him chunks of brown bread, and they plucked them clean from his fingers, and he was screaming with happiness and—I suppose—a bit of fear. They were as tall as him, Richard. Their bobbing heads were quite as high. And then...there was this white farmyard goose came flopping up from the water. Bigger than the others, he was, and hissing horribly. They gave way to him—or her. He was aggressive...and, and frightening. But the little lad—Tony, I must call him Tony—he shouted out, “Honky! H
onky!” or something like that. And that goose—you know—he picked the bread so very gently from Tony’s fingers. So very gently,’ she said softly.

  ‘They knew each other,’ I suggested.

  ‘So it seemed. When the bread was all gone, and the geese back in the water, the girl brought her son back to the bench and we said hello and Tony made friends with Sheba, and I asked her if she was Ellie Parkes. She was, of course. A pretty girl, Richard, a quiet and charming girl, with blue, dancing eyes. I told her I wanted a word with her, if she didn’t mind, and then she frowned and asked me if I was from a newspaper. Of course I denied that. But...d’you know, Richard...they’d actually been pestering her, after Bryan’s death. Can you imagine, Richard! What a terrible thing.’

  ‘It’s their job, as they see it. You learn to live with it.’

  ‘But of course, I had to admit that I, also, wanted to pester her about the same thing, but it was because my husband was investigating Bryan’s death, and of course men wouldn’t understand, but it all had to do with what Bryan was like...and...and...Oh, Richard, it turns out I’m no good at this pestering business. No good at all. I expected her just to walk away. I said that. I told her she could tell me to go to hell and I’d understand. And d’you know what she said? You’ll never guess.’

  ‘Then perhaps you’d better tell me.’ I grinned at her. Her face had become animated, flushed.

  ‘She said she didn’t mind a bit, and that Tony was the most wonderful thing that’d ever happened to her—her parents were delighted with the whole set-up—and if Bryan was there now she’d kiss him right on the lips. Can you believe that? Can you?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said cheerfully. ‘I can imagine it.’

  I could also believe that Ellie Parkes must be an exceptional young woman with a great deal of character. And I could believe that the catch in Amelia’s voice as she said it was not from joy. The expression she’d held for so long, all through the telling, had been unemotional, but it was beginning to break up.

  Without looking sideways, she fumbled her cup and saucer into Mary’s hands. ‘Then she told me, Richard, how Bryan had been—you know, with her. That day. She was fifteen. It had been in that very same park. She told me he grabbed her and pulled her into the bushes. She’d been on her way home from school. He wasn’t strong, she said. He got her on the ground and she struggled, because she didn’t really know—she said. Know what to expect, she said. But he got his hands to her throat and said he’d kill her if she shouted out, but his hands were very gentle. Gentle, Richard. How could he have been...but he didn’t know anything, she claimed. Awkward and fumbling...and she said he was weeping. Weeping! And afterwards he actually helped her to her feet, and apologized. Then he ran off.’ She took a deep breath. ‘And that’s the man, you say, who raped and killed a woman two years later.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  I wasn’t sure what I’d said in the past or what I was saying now. What she had been telling us couldn’t have been all that upsetting, yet she clasped her hands to her face and was near to choking.

  ‘Love!’ I whispered, and I twisted myself on to the settee in order to get her into my arms, just in time to hold her together. She shuddered and sobbed against my chest and I whispered into her hair, hearing the door close gently behind Mary.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said softly. ‘All right.’ Which was stupid, because it obviously wasn’t. And—heaven help me—I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t.

  At last it settled down to more sniffs than sobs, until she raised her face, flushed, her eyes red, cheeks wet, and said, ‘Sorry. I’m sorry, Richard.’

  ‘It’s what I’m here for. Care to explain?’

  ‘You’re not usually so slow. You must see. There was this splendid young creature, calmly explaining that a rape wasn’t such a terrible thing...and if you say they’re all experienced, these days, at her age, I’ll crown you. It wasn’t that. She was so happy! She doted on that lad. She told me she was teaching him not to be afraid of anything. She said she was going to teach him to grow up into a sensible and strong young man, who respected women and was polite—and as gentle as that big white goose. Gentle!’

  ‘She’ll have the feminists after her blood. And he’ll be hounded...’

  ‘They don’t hound you, Richard.’

  What could I say to that? As it happens, I said the wrong thing. ‘Then why are you upset?’

  ‘Oh—you’re so stupid, sometimes!’

  Then she flung herself at my chest again, but this time to pummel me with her little fists, all the while making keening noises in her throat. Sheba moaned and hid in a corner. I sat there and allowed her to get on with it. In the end, she was exhausted, and I could eventually catch her wrists and draw her to me and kiss her salty lips.

  ‘Care to explain?’ I said.

  ‘So...so happy,’ she mumbled. ‘She was, Richard. And my own dear little Coral—oh, you must see—that girl, Ellie Parkes, she’d just demonstrated that it was possible to recover, and be happy, and live a good life...and my little Coral, if she’d lived, if she’d been allowed to live—she, too, could have been happy, with me to help her, both of us trying to forget it. And she was killed! I couldn’t face that, Richard, having to understand the life she might have lived.’

  Yes, I saw. Exactly. She rarely mentioned her daughter, and never, never used her name. The distress had penetrated to the very heart of her.

  ‘So that’s that,’ I said. ‘We now know about Bryan. He was inexperienced and frightened and gentle.’

  ‘So he couldn’t have killed the last...last one.’

  ‘He’d done two years in prison, my love. Not long, perhaps, but with people who’re like that, it could have seemed an eternity—and what came out of those prison gates need not have been anything like the young man who went in.’

  ‘You’ve got no feelings, Richard. No imagination.’

  ‘And if he’d changed enough,’ I went on ploddingly, ‘he might still commit rape, but by that time he’d know all about getting away with it. They’d have taught him that. And if the only way to do it was to kill the woman, then he’d have had to do that, too.’

  ‘You’re hard! Hard!’

  ‘Experienced, love. But listen—if he was trying to hang on to his former personality, and found he couldn’t control himself, he would hate and despise himself for it. It would be the exact emotional situation for suicide. Could have been.’

  ‘You’re convinced—’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m just playing around with amateur psychology.’

  ‘Then stop playing about, and please listen.’

  ‘There’s more?’

  ‘The other two...’

  ‘You went on with it?’

  ‘I had to. Surely you can understand that.’

  This was feminine logic, which I never could understand. Best to wait and see, I’ve learned. ‘In any event, you saw the other two?’

  ‘The three...incidents, you hard policemen would call them...they happened in the same park. The three girls, young women, they all lived locally. I saw the eldest one next, but only because she was the nearest. She would be...oh, I suppose twenty-one or twenty-two. She looked a lot older. Married now, or at least a mother, because I could hear a child crying inside. I didn’t get past the front door. She stared at me blankly. An untidy lump of a woman she was. I had to explain why I’d come. I had to remind her. Then she laughed and said she’d forgotten all about it, and it was nothing to make a song and dance about, anyway, and would I please take my foot off her step and bugger off.’

  I was silent for a moment, having heard her forced into using a swear-word. Then, ‘He didn’t make much of an impression on her, then?’

  ‘Clearly not,’ she replied coolly. It was denigrating her basic feelings about the enormity of rape, and she was beginning to question her own rationality on the question.

  ‘But you did see the last one?’

  ‘It was only in the next
street. I couldn’t simply walk away.’

  Exactly as I’d felt on finding I was standing outside Manson Towers. ‘I can understand that.’

  ‘But I was actually afraid to walk up to the door and ring the bell, Richard. And praying she’d moved and nobody knew where to.’

  She had carried with her, all these years, a positive hatred of rape. It was ingrained into her morality, and I was quite aware that women feel their repugnance in a different way from men. I knew it, even though unable to feel it. The result was that men were thought to be unfeeling on the subject. To Amelia, then, it had been something she held tightly inside her, almost treasured, and now it was being battered by a new morality which she couldn’t comprehend.

  I knew all this. I understood her fear. Something had been slowly stripped away and it had hurt.

  ‘I’ve felt the same myself,’ I admitted. ‘Looking for an excuse for not going on with it.’

  ‘Well anyway, she was there. Twenty perhaps. Flashy and over-dressed, she was, in a bright and sloppy way. But that means nothing, these days, though there was just a hint...you know...I’d have picked her out in the street as a prostitute. I wondered if she’d been the same when Bryan...anyway, that’s the way she seemed to take it. She invited me into the hall, but no further. There was a radio on loud somewhere, and a smell of stale beer. Stale something. She laughed when I told her why I’d come to see her. She said he’d been a learner and she’d taken him for a test run. A disgusting way to put it, Richard, don’t you think!’

  ‘She clearly didn’t dread the memory.’

  ‘She said she’d had to show him. Said he was in too much of a hurry, and she’d offered to give him lessons. She’d been laughing at him while it was going on! And in the end he ran away.’

  ‘I don’t blame him.’

  ‘You’re not taking this seriously,’ she accused me, frowning.

  ‘Very seriously, love, I can assure you. Do you realize that those three would have had to give evidence in court at his trial? No—I see you haven’t thought about that. The first one would’ve been reluctant, but she’d have said it. The truth. The other two would have lied their heads off, to give an impression of their sweet and tender innocence, their revulsion...the lot.’