He heard her voice out on the stairs at five, just as he was about to go home. But he had to tell her then, he couldn’t stand another night of holding it in, so he went out and called down to her.
Ironically, he’d never seen her looking lovelier in the whole time they’d worked together. She was wearing a camel coat with a big furry collar and cuffs and matching hat. Her face was rosy from a walk back from the courts in the snow.
‘What is it?’ she called back up the stairwell. ‘I was just going home to get warm.’
‘About Susan,’ he said abruptly, and went back into his office to wait for her.
‘Bad news?’ she asked as she came in.
Steven nodded. ‘The worst, I’m afraid. She’s made a full confession to the murders of Liam, Reuben and Zoë.’
Beth’s face blanched and she covered her mouth with her hands. ‘No!’ she exclaimed. ‘That can’t be right.’
Steven went over to her and made her sit down, then got her a drink of brandy he kept for emergencies. Then he rapped it all out, as concisely as he could, how Susan had killed them and where the bodies were.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she gasped out. ‘I can’t believe it.’ Tears started up in her eyes.
‘Neither could I,’ he said, and explained how much of it had been confessed on Friday, and why he hadn’t felt able to tell her then. ‘But it’s true, Beth. She wasn’t coerced or tricked into talking, it was all of her own volition. The police will begin digging tomorrow, I expect. Then it will all be confirmed.’
She just sat there for a moment, her wide mouth trembling. ‘I have to go home,’ she said eventually, getting up a little unsteadily. ‘I need to think this through on my own.’
Steven saw what real dignity and courage was then. Any other woman he’d ever known when faced with such shattering news would have crumbled. But Beth wouldn’t, not in front of him or anyone else. She would go home and cry alone.
He wanted to hug her, but he sensed to do so might make things worse. He couldn’t even suggest she phoned him later because that would start Anna off again.
‘I’m so sorry, Beth,’ he said simply. ‘I’ll come in early tomorrow if you like and we can talk more about it.’
‘Okay,’ she said, and with that walked out of the door. Steven watched as she made her way down the stairs, only a faint wobble in her walk showing she wasn’t as composed as she looked.
Beth walked into her flat, turned up the heating, took her coat, hat and boots off, then drew the curtains before sitting down.
She was so shocked she felt numb. One word kept running through her mind. Involvement. Yet it was a word that until a few months ago had no real meaning for her.
But she had experienced it now. A dry mouth from anxiety, butterflies in her stomach, constant questions in her mind, her sleep being invaded.
She’d had cases before which other lawyers claimed would have given them nightmares. But they didn’t affect her. She had listened dry-eyed to tragedies that would have made a strong man weep. She had always been able to listen to the verdict at a client’s trial, and whether they were found guilty or innocent, her only concern was whether she’d played her part in the case to the best of her ability. It never concerned her how that same client would cope afterwards, whether in prison or going back to their normal life. Once her job was done, she shut herself off. Justice had been done, and that was that, to her.
Yet since the day Susan came back into her life unexpectedly, everything seemed to have changed. She wasn’t sorry it had, but she still couldn’t understand why one woman should have such an impact on her life.
So they were friends as children, but that was such a tenuous link. They spent one month a year, for five years, in each other’s company, a mere five months in total. Beth had worked for years with some people, day in, day out. Would she have found it as distressing to find that one of them had become a serial killer? She very much doubted it. She’d hardly bothered to find out most of those people’s birthdays, the names of their children, or even where they lived.
Steven was distressed too, she had heard it in his voice, seen it in his face, yet she knew much of that distress was for her, which was why she had to pretend she was fine. He was the opposite to her, he cared for everyone. He had almost certainly fallen in love with Anna because of her problems – caring people always did seem to find the lame dogs of this world to support. Once she would have found that funny, or pathetic, but not any more. Now it looked more like nobility.
She remembered how at sixteen she thought Susan was noble to stay at home and nurse her mother. Nothing would ever have persuaded Beth to do such a thing. Not even if her mother had been crippled and widowed, and begging her. But then Susan was tender-hearted in every way. When the Aberfan disaster happened in Wales, Beth could remember her sending all her saved pocket money to the relief fund. She looked out for ducks and swans on the river, always afraid they’d injure themselves on fishing lines. She sobbed through romantic films, she cried when the two of them parted at the end of August.
So how could such a sensitive and placid girl become a killer? Beth could understand her shooting the doctor, in a strange way it appeared righteous and clean. But not the others. That was just savagery.
Beth felt icy cold all evening, inside and out. She had two large brandies and a bath to try to warm herself up, yet she still felt chilled. As she sat at the dressing-table brushing her hair, she was still thinking about involvement. She had shunned it all her life and now she was ensnared by it. Susan, Roy and Steven had all made a place for themselves in her heart, which had once held nothing but a few valves and a great deal of blood.
Cold reason told her that Susan was Steven’s client, and it was just Roy’s job to bring her to trial. She could distance herself from it all.
But that wasn’t possible, not now. Steven would need her support and guidance in preparing the defence. Roy would almost certainly get commendations for his work on this case, and she was going to be torn between pride in his work and remorse at betraying her old friend.
It was that feeling of betrayal that worried her the most. She had convinced herself that she only went digging into Susan’s past to provide a watertight case of diminished responsibility. But was that her real motive? It seemed more like a case of insatiable curiosity about her old friend now. Surely Annabel’s death alone was enough for a court to hear? If she hadn’t wanted to know every last thing about Susan, it was doubtful the other three murders would ever have been discovered.
That was perhaps her real dilemma. Susan would get life, because of her. The whole world would say she deserved it, especially the relatives of her victims. They would applaud those who had brought her to justice. But Beth would always feel like a Judas.
She looked around her bedroom and saw for the first time how impersonal it was. Cream walls and carpet like the living room, the expensive brocade curtains a slightly darker shade. Wardrobes and cupboards all built in, the wood a light beech. It was like a hotel room, tasteful, comfortable, but there was not a shred of her personality in it.
‘But then you don’t have one,’ she whispered to herself. ‘You’ve spent your whole life squashing what you feel. If you died tomorrow, what could anyone say about you?’
She supposed someone would say she was an excellent solicitor, punctual, trustworthy, reliable. But that was about all. There would be no one to tell funny anecdotes, no friends weeping. Even Robert and Serena would be hard-pressed to give a reason why they loved her.
She got into bed and lay there looking at the ceiling. For twenty-eight years she’d let the rape dominate her life. She would have denied that just a few months ago, insisted that it had spurred her on to greater things than she would have achieved if it hadn’t happened. She had even convinced herself that she was born with a frosty nature.
Then Susan turned up, bringing with her the memories of the days when she wasn’t cold and aloof, and a thaw had begun to set in, melting th
e ice she’d packed around those secrets and feelings inside her.
Maybe it was Steven who chipped away the ice, and Roy blew warm air to speed the defrosting, but Susan started it.
She began to cry then, scalding-hot tears flowing down her cheeks unchecked.
Chapter twenty
Two days after Susan’s confession, Roy stood in the Welsh woods, shoulders hunched, hands in pockets, watching as the team of men cleared another area of fallen leaves and undergrowth.
It was eleven-thirty in the morning and bitterly cold. Too cold for snow, someone had said earlier, as if that was a bonus. The men were all in good spirits, for usually when they were sent out searching an area for evidence of a crime or a missing person, they half expected a long and often fruitless task. But with a taped confession and a map of where the bodies were, everyone was expecting a quick result.
Yet Roy was very tense. He hadn’t expected that when they arrived here at first light, they would find the spot marked on Susan’s map immediately, but he hadn’t imagined it would take this long.
Susan might have been very clear in her mind about where the grave was located, but without measurements from some kind of landmark – a big rock, an easily identified tree – it could be almost anywhere. They had nearly completed clearing the area Roy believed she meant, looking for a hump or an indentation which would suggest digging had taken place in recent years. But so far they had seen nothing unusual, and the ground was frozen solid all over.
Doubts had started to creep into his mind. Could Susan have made it up? It was he after all who suggested she’d killed them here. It wasn’t unknown for someone held in custody to confess to other crimes out of some kind of mental sickness. Even while she’d been relating what she’d done, it hadn’t sounded totally believable. And there was a large part of him which still couldn’t believe she was capable of it anyway.
He supposed that in his heart he didn’t want it to be true. Yet if it wasn’t, and the search revealed nothing, he knew he’d be in hot water.
Roy wondered, too, what was going on in Luddington. The search of the garden at The Rookery was being handled by the Warwickshire murder squad, and it was only late yesterday that he’d heard they’d got the necessary order to go in and start digging.
‘There’s a lot of dead branches here, guv!’ a young constable suddenly called out from a place on the fringe of the cleared area.
Roy’s heart leapt and he raced over to the younger man.
The heap of branches uncovered beneath a mulch of dead leaves did look incongruous. They covered an area of some eight feet by four, and they were stacked at least a foot high.
‘They couldn’t have just fallen that way, could they?’ the younger man asked.
‘I doubt it,’ Roy said, looking up at the nearest tree. It was a fine healthy one, the branches couldn’t belong to it. Besides, branches didn’t fall into neat piles, this one had been made by hand. ‘It could be that someone collected it up to burn it, but changed their mind. But we’ll look under it anyway.’
As the constable began moving the heap, Roy had his fingers crossed inside his pocket. Some of the men were beginning to grouse about the cold, but if there was something here they’d get a new burst of energy.
‘I’ve found something, guv!’ another constable called out behind him. Roy turned in the direction of the small stream Susan had mentioned. The man was holding something on the end of a stick. ‘Looks Like a woman’s boot,’ he yelled.
Roy examined it before bagging it as evidence. It was the remains of a black leather, small-size ankle-length boot with a side zip. It appeared to have been chewed by an animal, and it was so thickly covered in mould that it could have lain there for years. He examined the site where the constable found it, but there was nothing further there.
Going back to the spot with the branches, he saw the men had now cleared it, and were tentatively putting spades in all around it, feeling for softer spots. ‘Go on, dig,’ he called out.
It took a pick-axe to penetrate the top layer of frozen soil, but once it was through, the digging suddenly became easier, with soft, dark loam beneath.
‘I reckon this is it,’ one of the men called out jubilantly. ‘It’s been dug before.’
It soon became obvious he was right, for the going was only easy within a rough rectangular shape. Outside this, the earth was rock-hard to a far greater depth.
The men’s earlier lethargy vanished. The ones digging were putting their backs into it, their faces growing red with exertion, their breath like smoke in the frosty air. There was a palpable excitement, everyone’s eyes on the ever-growing hole.
The sound of a spade hitting something solid made everyone move closer. ‘Scrape around it now,’ Roy ordered. ‘It might be bone.’
A few minutes later, a skull was uncovered.
Men engaged elsewhere came running over as they heard the news. They crowded round the shallow grave to take a look and one man crossed himself. It looked like something from a horror film, for though the flesh had mostly been eaten away, the hair was still intact, long and grey. The empty eye sockets and the almost grinning open jaw looked very ghoulish.
Even with so many willing hands, it still took over an hour of patient and gentle scraping away with small trowels before the entire body was exposed. As Roy looked down at it, a lump came up in his throat, for the sight of a skeleton in just a rotting sweatshirt, boots still on the feet, was a sharp reminder that Susan had shot Reuben while he was making love.
‘He seems to be intact,’ someone said. ‘And lying on some kind of blanket or ground sheet. That’s handy, we can probably lift him out without disturbing anything.’
That initial jubilation faded as the day wore on, for the pathologist had his work to do before the bones could be removed and photographs had to be taken at every stage. Searchlights had to be set up as it grew dark, the area was cordoned off and a tent erected over the grave. Zoë’s body was only exposed in the early evening, and by then it was eerie working under the lights.
Although coffee and sandwiches had been brought up for the men throughout the day, they were all stiff with the cold, and the hanging around waiting for orders was tortuous.
‘You must be on top of the world about this, boyo,’ one of the senior Welsh police officers said to Roy just after Zoë’s body was found.
This man had been making jocular and inappropriate remarks all day. Roy thought he was probably annoyed that he wasn’t heading the investigation, and also embarrassed that it had taken someone from Bristol to uncover a double murder on his patch.
‘I’ll just be glad to go home,’ Roy said. He wasn’t on top of the world, in fact he felt sickened. Day after day his work brought him into contact with all the worst aspects of human behaviour. There was usually some satisfaction to be had when the guilty were caught and punished, but in this particular case there wasn’t even that. Susan had been in a state of punishment for almost all her life.
‘I won’t lose any sleep over this duo,’ the Welshman said, rubbing his hands gleefully. ‘That bunch at Hill House have been like a stone in my boot for too long. Glad to be rid of the lot of ’em, I’ll be. There’s too many of these cranks, weirdos and druggies coming to live in Wales.’
Roy didn’t bother to reply. He had disliked this Welshman at first sight, for he was a total bigot. The people living at Hill House now were undesirables, no one in their right mind would want their sort on their doorstep, but they certainly weren’t representative of all newcomers to Wales. Yet this man clearly thought that every unconventionally dressed person he came across was on drugs. He wouldn’t understand that sensitive people brought up in inner cities could get high just on the beauty of Wales. Or that the country desperately needed new blood, people who wanted to live peaceable and industrious lives and bring up their children in the country.
Roy left the murder scene at around nine to go down to the pub in the village where he’d booked a room for the night.
He wanted a hot bath, bed and oblivion, nothing more.
But he couldn’t sleep for thinking about Beth and wondering how she had reacted when Steven told her about Susan’s confession. He knew from past experience what friends and relatives of murderers went through. Often it was far worse for them than for the criminal, sometimes they felt in some way responsible, love, anger, shame and pity all mixed up into a cocktail they couldn’t cope with.
He wished he could phone her, but even if she was prepared to speak to him, what could he say? Susan had been right at the centre of their relationship. She had brought them together, and pushed them apart too.
Beth wouldn’t want to hear about how sick he’d felt as he watched the bodies being uncovered, his admiration for the stoicism of the other men in the freezing wood, or his concerns as to how Zoë’s parents were going to take the news that their only daughter was dead.
He remembered how it was this kind of thing which had driven a wedge between him and Meg after Peter died. Meg had no room in her mind for anything other than her own grief. She didn’t understand that he still had a job to do, one that threw unpleasant and often traumatic things up on a regular basis. She wanted him to be as broken as she was, to think and talk of nothing but their son. He was devastated, but he knew he had to work through it. She never forgave him for that. She said he’d shrugged off Peter’s death as if it were nothing.
Beth wasn’t like Meg, of course. This situation was very different too, but Roy was only too aware that a rape victim would find it hard to trust anyone. And sadly, as he headed this investigation into Susan’s further three murders, Beth must see him as being untrustworthy.
As he huddled in the bed, trying to get warm, he wished he was anything but a policeman. His work on this case wouldn’t end tomorrow when the last of the bones were removed from the woods and taken away. It wouldn’t be over until Susan was tried and convicted. By then the chances were Beth would have lost interest in him completely.