Part 14 (1/2)

”Lying on the bed.”

”Dressed or undressed?”

”Dressed.”

”So Sally Loreto was lying on the bed, dressed. Did you speak to her?”

”No.”

”Was she asleep?”

”She was lying with her eyes closed.” He didn't want the memory that was creeping up on him.

Maybridge, sensing withdrawal, leaned forward and thumped the table sharply. ”Come on - come on - come on - I want it fast - she might have been asleep - you don't know - you went up to her and you - come on, I want it - and you'll give it - you touched her, didn't you? How? Where?”

”Her hair ... I... it was a set-up ... you lot set me up ... I don't believe she was asleep ... I think she knew I was there ... and Mrs Mackay knew I was there ... if it hadn't been a set-up she wouldn't have looked as she did ... all tarted up ... long hair like the other one and her hands on her frock, one hand on top of the other on top of her private parts ... and then I ...” He totally lost control. ”You b.l.o.o.d.y b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, what did you expect me to do ... or try to do ... I had to get at it, didn't I? ... And I couldn't get at it with her frock on ... and then she, Mrs Mackay, came in and went for me with the tray ... and I tried to hold her off and it got her in the face ... and she dropped it ... and I stepped back on it and fell.”

Maybridge spoke quietly and persuasively again: ”So you think we - the police - set you up. You're an intelligent man and you wouldn't think that without a good reason, I'm sure. Tell me about it.”

Millington shook his head.

”You mean you won't or you can't?”

”I can't remember.”

Maybridge sighed. ”You've given that excuse enough mileage, Mr Millington. Let it rest. Let's look at it together. You see a girl lying defenceless on a bed. You rip her dress because you intend to rape her. The police, with Mrs Mackay's help and - we a.s.sume - the girl's agreement, arrange for her to lie on the bed in order to entice you to commit a s.e.xual offence. The police and Mrs Mackay and the girl - please note, not a policewoman, but a member of the public - do all this for you. No one else - not the postman - the milkman - the interior decorator - a pa.s.sing tramp - none of those. You. Interesting. You arrive and are about to perform. Can you put me wise? Tell me more.”

Millington was sweating heavily. He didn't answer.

”Well, then, let's a.s.sume you weren't set up. You mentioned just now - and we have it on tape, I advised you at the beginning of the interview that you would be recorded - you said that she had long hair like the other one. What other one?”

”I don't know.” Millington was getting tired of the sparring match. His head ached and his concentration was beginning to slip.

”I think you do and the sooner you tell me, the better. It has to be said some time, Mr Millington, even if it takes all night. This other girl with long hair - you mentioned her hands, one on top of the other. Who was she?”

Millington looked down at his own calloused hands. ”I don't keep pigs.” He thought he'd told Maybridge that before. It seemed important. He hadn't kept pigs for over two years. Nothing paid these days. That other girl, the one with the posh accent, had made sarcastic remarks about his battery hens. It was disgustingly cruel, she'd said, the things people did for money, and she'd told him he was charging too much for a nasty little bedroom and refused to pay for the night she hadn't slept in it. He began drifting out on that more recent memory, visions of blood floating before his eyes. Maybridge allowed him rope for a moment or two then hauled him back in. There was more here, he sensed, than he had antic.i.p.ated, and he was going to get it by whatever means he could. A squad of police were at this moment going over Millington's farm again, but thoroughly this time, inch by inch, inside and out. They should know something more by the morning. And by morning Mrs Mackay might be sufficiently recovered to be discharged from the casualty department of Bristol Royal Infirmary, where she was being kept overnight. If she were lucid and emotionally strong enough to be interrogated, she would have a lot of explaining to do. The stolen drugs, identified by Donaldson when he had gone into the bathroom in search of bandages and lint, had been left carelessly on a shelf. Maybridge guessed that she would eventually be convicted of manslaughter, rather than premeditated murder, Her anguish had been genuine when she had crouched by the body of the dead girl.

On the day that Sally died Simon and Rhoda made love. He hadn't known then that Sally was dead. There was no premonition. Nothing to trigger the panic attack. Rhoda had been about to leave him to go back to her own flat when he suddenly became terrified of being left alone. The police would come for him. He would never see her again. He felt the claustrophobic crus.h.i.+ng of the nightmare bird on his face and he couldn't breathe. He tried gaspingly to take in air and began to shudder and sweat.

Frightened for him, she tried holding him, and spoke soothingly.

”It's all right, Simon. Calm yourself.”

When he could speak he begged her not to go. To stay with him.

”As long as you want me to.”

”All night.”

”If that's what you want.”

”I love you.”

Oh, Simon, she thought, why did you have to say it? Emotions should be decently suppressed. The fourteen-year difference in their ages was strongly in her mind. But did it matter? What would Peter think of this - were he here to think of anything? What should she do now?, Tell him to go and lie down in bed while she warmed up some milk for him? Sit beside him on a chair all night? Play the maternal role - frustrate him even more? To sleep with him wouldn't be an act of seduction. He was already aroused. He had been wanting her a long time. So why resist him any more? Why make a moral dilemma out of a perfectly ordinary act? With Peter and Rhoda the foreplay had been skilled, funny, occasionally rough and with moments of tenderness. With Simon it was wholly tender, very gentle. She didn't flaunt her body as she had with Peter, but she used it in every way she knew. For Simon this was an act of love in the truest sense. He fell into a long deep sleep afterwards and she held his naked body close to hers for most of the night.

Maybridge was told by the police officer on surveillance duty that he would find Simon and Miss...o...b..rne at a wine bar in Regent Street. The lad had been acting like a tourist. Over the last couple of days he had visited the National Portrait Gallery and had sat for some while looking at the pictures. Miss...o...b..rne had sat with him. And she had accompanied him to the V. and A. and to Harrods - the food department. They hadn't bought anything.

All these to Simon were ordinary things. And he was an ordinary person doing them. Doing them, perhaps, for the last time. He was absorbing freedom through his pores while he still had it. n.o.body was noticing him or caring about him - only Rhoda. She had given him the photograph of his parents - and Clare - that morning. Rather warily and with apologies. She had nothing to apologise for, he told her. She couldn't help what other people did. For him she was perfection.

They were eating hamburgers and drinking lager at a corner table when Maybridge spotted them. It wasn't the best of venues to break the news, but where would be? The quiet ambience of a church, perhaps, but he couldn't ask them to accompany him outside and go somewhere else. Simon would think he was arresting him.

They looked at him, startled, when he approached. He was tempted to say quickly to Simon: ”It's all right - you're off the hook - I'm sorry you were ever on it,” but Sally at this moment, in this crowded noisy bar, was a presence that was very real to him, a young girl to be mourned. He broke the news gently. ”Sally has been found dead - of barbiturate poisoning - no, not suicide.” He leaned over and touched Simon's hand. ”I'll tell you more on the drive back to Macklestone. Just remember this - none of it was your fault.”

And then he turned to Rhoda. ”I'd like you to come, too.”

”Of course.” Simon looked sick with shock, he would need her company, her support. ”I'm most desperately sorry.” And then she read Maybridge's expression more accurately. His compa.s.sion now was for her.

She felt suddenly very cold. ”You've found Clare?” ”We think so. We've found a body - and clothes.” ”I. see.” It sounded calm. She heard but refused to see. This was unacceptable information. She wouldn't let it register.

Maybridge dreaded the drive back. Why was life so abominable for some? Why was there so much pain? When would her composure break? When someone was near to help, he hoped.

Tragedies tend to be built on trivial foundations and chance plays a part. Had Dawn been on the premises and not at choir practice she would have behaved sensibly towards Clare and Clare, in turn, would have been polite. She had booked a room for two nights at the farm as a gesture of independence. It was time, she believed, to declare herself. She wasn't a tart - or a nineteenth-century courtesan - or a red light floozy - or a ... whatever Peter liked to call her. She was Clare, who loved Peter and lived with Peter - well, most of the time - not someone to be kept quietly under wraps. This was the twentieth century, d.a.m.n it. She was Lisa's equal in every way except in marriage. She wanted to meet her. Peter had mentioned, casually, that he would be away for a few days in Birmingham a.s.sisting in a murder investigation, but that he would spend a few hours in Macklestone for the opening of the library extension where Lisa's mural would be on display. He felt he should be there. Clare had felt she should be there, too. Not brashly displayed as Peter's acquisition, but as a human being who didn't mind looking at murals. Or socialising with Peter's wife. Lisa needn't know she lived with Peter. But there was no harm in her knowing she existed. If everything went according to plan there would at some stage be a civilised divorce. She had told Rhoda this, many times, but not Peter. Peter had kept on living his dual existence in the bland a.s.sumption that she didn't mind.

A visit to Macklestone for the day would have sufficed. To stay two nights at the farm wasn't necessary. But she had seen it advertised in the local paper and it sounded rather attractive. She had booked in on impulse, without telling Peter, had stayed there the previous night and was mingling with the crowd around the mural when he arrived. He introduced her to his wife, coldly and very politely. Lisa responded even more icily before turning away for the group photograph. The row with Peter came later. He told her to cancel the room at the farm and go home. Which home? she'd blazed. She hadn't got a home. She had a bed in a flat. Lisa had a home. Lisa had everything. She wouldn't go back to the flat. She had other friends in other places. And he had better go back to his wife now. And stay. He'd told her brusquely that he had to return to Birmingham and do an autopsy. Which was true. Had he allowed himself more time, he could have gone to Millington's farm with her and then driven her to the station. Instead, he told her to call a cab. A few days later, when he returned to London, he wasn't too perturbed not to find her in the flat. She had walked out a few times before. She would come back, he believed, when she started liking him again.

Catching Millington in a bad mood was an unavoidable hazard and she had been too cross to sense the danger. When he had handed her the bill in his office, she had bent over the desk to read it before saying all the annoying things she.had said. And he had looked at her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, seductive curves in her red and black dress, made more prominent by the way she stood. After paying him what she said was fair - the use of one bed for one night - and no cancellation fee - she walked out in the middle of his diatribe. And she walked the wrong way - past the shed where the hens were kept. She had stood in the doorway, her red straw hat in her hand, her long hair blowing in the evening breeze, and she had sniffed the fetid air of the shed and talked about money and cruelty, the rights of animals and the beastliness of man. Had she not taken a few steps inside the shed and made a sweeping gesture towards the hens, and caught him inadvertently across the face, she would have walked out alive.

Killing the woman in the copse had been swift and easy and terrible. Killing the woman in the shed had been marginally less terrible. Had he gone on killing, it would have been easier every time. A little manipulating of his memory afterwards, like twiddling the k.n.o.bs of a television set to blur the picture, helped. But not when Maybridge was there.

Clare Warwick was found fully clothed under the cement floor of the dog kennels. She had been buried hastily, wrapped in sacking. Dawn was due back and Millington hadn't hung around. The area had been in the final stages of preparation for the kennels and the cement, already mixed, was not yet hard. Millington couldn't remember what he had done with her hands.

He thought he had buried them somewhere else. With Maybridge's help he began remembering. ”In the hens'shed,” he said, ”under the cage next to the door.”

It would be an easy case to prove. Proving that he, and not Hixon, had murdered the fifth Rapunzel would take more time. Confessing to it wasn't enough. Clothes had been found in the barn and were being examined forensically, but it wasn't established and perhaps never would be that they were hers. Creggan's a.s.sertion that she was of Canadian origin would need to be verified. If correct, then her family might be traced and further evidence, such as date of birth and dental records, produced. Professor Bradshaw's testimony would have to be re-examined.