‘Are they hurt?’ he asked, his heart pounding.
‘I can’t tell you that. I wasn’t there. I was just asked to ring you and let you know they’ve been taken to St Richard’s,’ the officer replied.
Five minutes later, fully dressed, David was in his car on the way to the hospital.
It was too early for the roads to be busy, and the clear sky and already warm sun promised a good day ahead. But he knew that even if he were stuck in a traffic jam with it raining cats and dogs, he’d still be happy because Lotte was alive.
David assumed the officer who rang him must have phoned Dale and Lotte’s parents too; he thought he would give Simon and Adam a ring later just in case they hadn’t been told.
He was in such a hurry to park his car at the hospital and get in to see the girls that he almost clipped an estate Volvo driven by an elderly man in a flat cap, who was just pulling out.
‘Slow down, son,’ the man shouted out of the window. ‘You’re a long time dead!’
Something about that remark made David laugh. ‘Point taken, Pops,’ he called back as he drove on into a parking space more sedately.
*
The girls were in Singleton Ward where Lotte had been before, but in a shared room.
‘I’m afraid I can’t let you disturb them now,’ a dark-skinned Ward Sister told him when he inquired about the girls. ‘They are fast asleep, and after what they’ve been through they need sleep.’
‘What happened to them? Are they badly hurt?’ he asked in alarm.
‘I don’t know the details about what happened, but I do know their injuries aren’t too serious,’ she said, smiling and showing very white teeth. ‘But there’s a policeman waiting to talk to them, so why don’t you have a little chat with him?’
PC Andrew Duggan was dozing in the chair in the waiting room. He’d been on the night shift and had been one of eight officers who rushed out to Moor Lane when the call came in that the girls had taken refuge at a house there, and that Howard Ramsden, the man they’d been searching for, was in his van, injured, nearby.
Duggan had been part of the team headed by DI Bryan working on the girls’ abduction, so like all the team, he was overjoyed to hear they were alive, However, when they got to the isolated house where the girls were, his first impression on seeing Lotte completely drenched in blood was that she must have a life-threatening injury.
As David Mitchell came into the waiting room, Duggan woke and rubbed his eyes.
‘You found them then?’ David said after quickly introducing himself. ‘I rang DI Bryan yesterday about a house called “Drummond” in Itchenor. Is that where they were? With the Ramsdens?’
‘We haven’t got the complete story yet,’ Duggan said. ‘But basically, Howard Ramsden took the girls out to Moor Lane, tied them up in a shed on an allotment and set fire to it. Their escape was down to using their wits and sheer determination, I’d say.’
‘And Ramsden?’
‘He’s in intensive care,’ Duggan said. ‘It’s touch and go if he’ll make it. Your Lotte gave him his comeuppance with an axe.’
‘An axe!’ David exclaimed.
Duggan nodded and grinned. ‘Yes, really! An axe. She gave it some welly too! Nearly amputated his legs. Fair play to her, that’s all I can say. She was a very brave girl.’
‘How bad are her injuries?’ David’s head was spinning at the thought of anyone almost amputating legs with an axe.
‘She got some burns on her legs and feet while escaping from the shed,’ Duggan said. ‘The other girl has only minor cuts, but both of them were traumatized when they were brought in here. Lack of food and sleep has all played its part too. But I’m told they will recover quickly.’
‘Thank God for that.’ David sighed with relief. There was so much he wanted to ask, whether Fern had been caught too, and if they’d found the baby, but all he managed to ask was whether the girls’ parents had been told, and Scott, Simon and Adam.
‘Yes, they’ve all been notified, but advised not to come till this evening. We didn’t bother to tell you that. We knew you’re sweet on Lotte so you’d have ignored it.’
David smiled, but the smile faded quickly as he considered what he’d been told. ‘If this guy dies, where does that leave Lotte?’
Duggan grimaced. ‘Well, she could be facing a murder charge!’
David’s eyes widened. ‘No! After what she’s been through?’
‘There has to be due process in law. Even when someone’s an utter bastard and really deserved it,’ Duggan said apologetically. ‘But she’ll be able to plead self-defence and it would be a travesty of justice if she wasn’t acquitted. It’s early days anyhow, and we’ve still got a helluva lot of investigating to do. We only found out late yesterday that the Ramsdens reside here under a false name. We also found papers in Ramsden’s van which link him and his wife to an illegal business in the States. We still haven’t found Fern, or Lotte’s baby. But once she wakes up maybe she can tell us more.’
David had to go out for some fresh air after talking to the policeman because he suddenly felt quite faint. On the way here he’d believed Lotte’s nightmare was finally over. He’d expected there to be some hiccups – no one could go through so much without some cost to their health or sanity – but he’d hoped that he could be there beside her, helping her with that, and rebuilding her life.
Now she might be charged with murder!
He could hardly credit that the law could be so idiotic, for although he didn’t actually know any details about what this couple had put her through the previous time they imprisoned her, she had ended up in the sea. After that there was another attempt on her life, and the abduction, and finally they had tried to burn her alive, so surely she was entitled to defend herself?
Meanwhile, back in the waiting room, Duggan rested his elbows on his knees and held his head in his hands, contemplating what he had seen last night.
He was only thirty, but he’d been with the force five years and seen many acts of extreme violence during that time. But he had never seen injuries as bad as those Lotte Wainwright had inflicted on the American. He had spoken of it quite lightly to David, almost as if he approved whole- heartedly, but in fact he had been shocked to the core by such a young, dainty girl being so brutal.
It wasn’t one or two swipes with an axe, it was a frenzied, vicious assault that had turned the man’s lower limbs to pulp. In homicide cases it was the state of mind of the accused which was all important in deciding whether the charge was manslaughter or murder. There was no doubt in Duggan’s mind that Lotte had attacked this man with absolute desire for his death, rather than in self-defence, and that she’d relished every blow of that axe. But then, the man had tried to incinerate her and her friend in that shed, so maybe that was justification?
When David realized it wasn’t reasonable to expect to see Lotte before early evening, he went to work instead, buying some newspapers on the way. All the nationals had something about the girls being found, but no detail of how it came about, except for the Sun, which appeared to have got its information from the emergency service log. The paper ran a dramatic headline saying ‘Saved from the Jaws of Death’, with an old picture of the girls taken on the cruise. They had padded out their lack of new information with the full back story of how Lotte had been found half drowned on the beach, that she’d had a baby which had still not been discovered, and how she and her friend had been abducted later. But it was the only paper to state that one of the girls had rung 999 and said the man who had held them captive had tried to burn them alive in a shed. It also reported that a man who had been badly injured was taken to hospital in Chichester for emergency surgery, and the police were waiting to question him about his involvement.
David had found it very hard to concentrate at work for his mind was exclusively on Lotte. It wasn’t so much the possibility of her being charged with murder if Howard died, for there was no point in worrying about that at the moment. What really co
ncerned him was whether or not he had unwittingly overdramatized his feelings for her, because she’d appeared so vulnerable.
His mother rang to say she was glad to hear Lotte had been found, but advised him not to rush into anything. Just the tone of her voice suggested that what she really meant was, ‘Keep well away, son, that one’s trouble.’
Just as one swallow didn’t make a summer, he thought one kiss might not make a love affair. But he told himself she was a friend anyway, and there was still so much to learn about what had happened to her.
‘I know you’ve been through hell, Lotte, but try and tell me a bit more about what happened, both this time and the time before, if you remember that now,’ DI Bryan said gently.
It was late afternoon and the girls had only just woken when he got to the hospital. While he was waiting, Kim and Clarke Moore arrived, so he suggested they spoke to their daughter in Sister’s office, while he talked to Lotte. He was anxious to reassure her that this wasn’t a formal police interview, just a little chat to put him in the picture about what had taken place.
Considering the terrible events of the previous night, and the starvation of the past few days, Lotte looked surprisingly good. Bryan knew she had burns on her legs and feet, but they were beneath the covers. Aside from a few lacerations on her hands, no doubt incurred while trying to get out of the shed, she looked unharmed, except for the haunted look in her eyes.
‘All my memory has returned,’ she said, and half smiled at him, which made the haunted look vanish. Once again she was just a very pretty small blonde with speedwell-blue eyes and a soft, sweet mouth. ‘Well, at least as far as I know. How would you know for certain?’
‘You’ve got a point there,’ Bryan agreed. ‘I forget what I did ten minutes ago, and who knows what I’ve forgotten about the past!’
‘Well, it’s all come back, in as much as I can recall what happened in each month, each year,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘When you last interviewed me we were concerned about the baby I’d had and where it was…’ She broke off, the haunted look came back and she picked at a scab on her hand.
‘She’s dead, I’m afraid,’ she blurted out, and her eyes dropped. ‘Howard threw her body into the sea with me.’
‘What did she die from?’ Bryan asked cautiously.
Lotte gave a dramatic sigh and waved her arms in a way which suggested she hardly knew where to start. ‘Neglect! Well, that’s my opinion. They left her crying for hours.’
Bryan must have looked puzzled as to why she wasn’t looking after the baby.
‘I’ll explain all that when I get to that part,’ she said quickly. ‘But you’ll be able to find her cause of death when you find her body, won’t you? It’s bound to wash up on a beach somewhere before long.’
Bryan frowned, suddenly remembering a message that had been sent to the station that morning. ‘A baby’s body was found yesterday on the beach beneath the Seven Sisters,’ he said. ‘That’s near Eastbourne.’
‘She was wearing a white babygro,’ Lotte said, then, barely stopping to draw breath, she launched into the story of how Fern and Howard had invited her to stay with them at the Dorchester, when she left the cruise.
‘I supposed it turned my head to be somewhere so grand, and so I jumped at the chance of moving with them to Sussex as their housekeeper/PA,’ she said.
‘Mind you, I must have been pretty thick not to cotton on there was a hidden agenda,’ she added with a wry smile. ‘But people go and act as nannies, housekeepers and PAs all the time, don’t they? You see adverts in The Lady magazine. Not all those people who advertise can be weird.’
‘Of course not,’ he reassured her. ‘And we know now they were a pair of practised deceivers. Anyone could’ve fallen for it.’
She carried on telling him about her life with them quite calmly. It was only when she got to the part about where Fern and Howard suggested that she had a baby for them that she began to get distressed.
Bryan found it distressing too, for it was only the previous night, when police officers had found papers in Howard’s van relating to a babies for sale business, that he understood what had been behind all this.
Yet even so, he hadn’t imagined that Howard Ramsden had fathered Lotte’s baby. He’d had the idea that was the work of another man, and the couple had induced her to stay with them until they found adoptive parents.
Bryan could understand why Lotte was faltering now. He too was stunned by the enormity of what this couple had done to her, and he moved to perch on the bed beside her and hug her. ‘You’ve been through so much, so bravely,’ he said gently. ‘I wish I didn’t have to bring it all back with questions.’
She went on then to outline briefly how she was locked up and subjected to threats and emotional blackmail. She was too embarrassed to say anything much about the actual baby- making, and he didn’t press her. But she did describe how she tried to escape after the first time, and said she knew that was what sealed her fate because the couple never trusted her again.
She tried to shorten the details about her pregnancy and the birth which took place on 20 February, so Bryan frequently had to stop her and ask for more detail, for it was vitally important he understood fully how she’d been treated.
It was very telling that she said nothing about how she was after the birth, only that the Ramsdens kept going out, and must have often left the baby behind because she heard it crying. She might not have wanted a baby, and hated Howard and Fern, but her instinct was to protect her child and it must have been torment to be unable to. She said she sensed the baby was growing weaker and needed medical help but this was not forthcoming, and eventually she died.
‘I know I never got to hold her when she was born, and that I hated the way they forced me to have her, but she was still mine, and I felt so much pain when I knew she was dead,’ she sobbed out. ‘I’m quite certain she died from neglect. She was plump and healthy when she was born, but two and a half months later she was dead, and that’s really why I killed Fern. God, I hated her with all my being for that!’
Bryan could only stare at Lotte in shock, unable to believe what he’d just heard.
‘You killed Fern?’ he asked incredulously. He had imagined the woman to be in hiding somewhere, it hadn’t crossed his mind she was dead. He certainly would never have imagined Lotte killing her.
Had Bryan got Lotte’s story second-hand, he had no doubt he would have pooh-poohed her being unable to escape. If truth be told, he thought he would have believed much of the story to be too far-fetched. But aside from the honesty in those clear blue eyes, and Lotte’s obvious distress, Bryan had been at the house in Itchenor the previous evening following the call from David Mitchell. What Mitchell had said, about the man he had seen and the blue van, was enough for Bryan to obtain a search warrant.
There was absolutely no doubt Lotte and Dale had been kept there in the basement room. He found dark and blonde hairs on the crumpled sheets, saw the heavy lock on the outside of the door, and the way the wardrobe had been pushed under the window and the glass smashed out was all evidence of imprisonment.
There were fresh bloodstains on the basement room carpet, so he’d called in forensics immediately to go over the entire house. The kitchen had been cleaned thoroughly but they found further splatters of blood on the plinth below the kitchen cupboards.
Last night, before they had test results, Bryan had thought the blood belonged to the girls. It was only this morning, when they were able to take samples of Howard’s blood and compare them, that they discovered it was his blood in the basement. But they were still none the wiser who the blood in the kitchen belonged to, until Lotte admitted she had stabbed Fern there.
Bryan was still reeling from the shock of Lotte attacking Howard with the axe, and then to hear she had dispatched Fern well before that took some getting his head around. Lotte was the kind of girl he wouldn’t expect even to steal a sweet from Woolworth’s Pick and Mix. He would expect her to run from a sp
ider, to cry at old movies. He would have staked his reputation on her being incapable of any violence.
Because of that he took her very carefully through the evening prior to her being taken out to sea, when they brought her up to the kitchen and she had the knife in her pocket.
Lotte told the story clearly and dispassionately, from the moment she asked for a glass of milk to the stabbing. Then she described the subsequent moments when Howard chased her round the table while his wife grew weaker, to when she was sitting in the hall bound hand and foot, waiting for him to finish tying Fern into the picnic rug.
‘I told him to ring the police,’ she said calmly. ‘I told him I would admit it was me. But he wouldn’t listen.’
Finally there was only the ride to the boat, to be loaded aboard with Fern and the baby, to tell him about.
‘We sailed for quite some time; it felt like hours. Then he got me out of the cabin, sat me on the side of the boat and untied me. Then he suddenly pushed me in and threw the baby after me,’ she stated.
She stopped short, her lips quivering, and took a moment or two to compose herself. ‘I had to make it to the shore to make sure he was punished. If only my memory hadn’t gone then, I’d have been able to tell you where he was and everything.’
Bryan was afraid that in a court case, the prosecution would tear her story about amnesia apart, suggesting she invented it because she wanted to hide the stabbing. They were likely to suggest that she entered into this ménage à trois of her own volition, and killed Fern to have Howard all to herself.
But Bryan did not harbour such thoughts. He felt that Lotte was actually incapable of lying or any kind of deception.
‘I don’t think I fully understood exactly what damage Howard had done to me until the moment I saw him sleeping in that van, after we escaped from the fire,’ she said a little later. ‘I knew exactly what he’d done of course, after all I remembered all the details, and I’d talked about it to Dale and mulled it over in my head. So I wasn’t under any illusions about him, I knew him to be a very nasty piece of work. I just didn’t see the effect it had had on me.