Chain Reaction (41 page)

‘Yes. I am afraid she is dead, Mr Marsh.’

‘She can’t be dead! We were moving house—’

‘And when you feel able, we would like you to come and identify the body.’

Vernon looks like a man who has just been told he is dying of cancer. His skin turns grey. He pants for breath. He removes his glasses and shakes his head. The loose flesh under his chin shakes like the jowls of a dog and the only expression in his soft brown eyes is a total bewilderment. ‘You must have got the wrong person.’

‘I doubt it. I wish I could say otherwise.’ The policeman, used to delivering such news, is sympathetic yet necessarily distanced.

Vernon looks at Babs and gives her a sickly smile, blunted by perplexity. ‘Would you believe it? They are telling me that my wife is dead.’

Babs, dazed and nauseated by such sudden horror, sits there in hopeless silence. She experiences the most blistering pity, but what words can you give in this situation? What possible gestures can you make?

And then the final blow, delivered in a decently sombre tone. ‘I have to tell you, it looks as if she has been murdered, Mr Marsh.’

The shock is so great that Vernon falls back in his chair, his mouth wide open so his bottom teeth show as if he has suffered a physical blow and the pain of it is too much to take. A great shiver runs through him. His head begins to roll in an agony of realisation. His despair seems too complete for tears. The first policeman puts a supportive hand on his shoulder while the second gazes out of the window, absent-mindedly folding and re-folding a piece of paper. Babs wishes she’d never come; she wishes she was miles away. This is the sort of thing that ought to stay on the television. You should never have to experience it in real life.

Eventually, and his words are so slurred it sounds as if he is gibbering.
‘But who would want to kill Joy?’

‘At the moment it looks as if it was one of those sickening coincidences.’ The policeman speaks as if he knows his words are wasted, but he speaks all the same. ‘A man who the police are seeking quite urgently was hiding out at a cottage on the moor and your wife must have made her way there and surprised him.’

‘You’ve got him?
You’ve got the man who did it?’
A sudden stab of life appears in what seemed, only a moment before, to be dead man’s eyes.

‘We haven’t found him yet, I’m afraid, Mr Marsh. But we think we know who he is. It won’t take us long to apprehend him.’

‘Who? Tell me? Who? Who would do such a terrible thing?’

‘His name is Jody Middleton, sir, the boy I believe you allowed to stay here three nights ago. The one who acted so strangely and showed such a peculiar interest in your wife.’

Slowly, slowly, it seems to take a lifetime, Vernon turns his heavy eyes towards Babs. She doesn’t see. She faints completely away and slides off her chair onto the spotless and brightly polished floor.

Three hours later, Jody Middleton, pedalling away and feeling healthier than he has felt in a long time, wonders vaguely why the police car is following so slowly and deliberately behind him. He has seen so many in his hours on the road he no longer suffers that stab of fear every time one passes. His confidence grows by the mile, and he has found a reasonable place to stay—an old, disused Army hut where he has spent the last two nights and managed to light a fire. He even began to enjoy it as he lay out on the short moor grass on a midnight that felt as warm as noon and only the dark hills rolled beneath the stars. As he watched the rosy tint of morning flush the tor tips, and the sky, his hope started to grow. Perhaps, after all, if he is caught he will be able to fight the ludicrous charge against him. Perhaps Janice Plunket will speak out and defend him. She loves him, or she used to say that she did. And then he can go home, take up his university place and start all over again. Life’s not so bad after all. Today he ventured into a shop for the first time, a supermarket where he’d less easily be recognised. He managed to refill his rucksack and buy a couple of good paperbacks while he was at it.

He even has the confidence to gesture them past with a wide arm signal.

Hey. They are driving him right off the road and into the verge!

‘Get in!’

‘What?’

‘I said get in!’

‘But what about my bike?’

‘I’ll deal with your bike.’

‘How did you find me?’

‘A description, a good description, given by the bloke you skived off the other night.’

Jody cannot believe this.
‘Vernon Marsh?
Vernon Marsh gave you a description of me? But why would he do that?’

‘Because he knew who you were and what you have done. What other reason would anyone need?’

Jody’s lips go tight; his jaw sets in a tense line. He sits numbly in the back of the car between two policemen, breathing harshly and fanning himself. He is suddenly conscious of a feeling of alarm. There’s something wrong here, unless Vernon has given himself up and been overcome by the need to confess.

Back at the station in a spartan interview room he is surprised at the interest his arrest is causing. OK, so his case is a big one back in Preston, but he hadn’t realised he’d made those sort of headlines here.
What’s going on?
Why all the kerfuffle? The maddening pressure of another locked door begins to unnerve him. Where is everyone?

‘Your mum’s here, Jody.’

He almost cries with relief. ‘Mum? That was quick!’

‘She was down here anyway. She came to take another look at the new house—you know, the one at the Blagdons, number eleven, where you stayed with Vernon Marsh, and where you had your photograph taken.’

‘Yes. I know the house.’

There are two detectives at the table and a uniformed policeman by the door. He can feel that man’s eyes boring into the back of his neck. What’s all this about?

‘You knew the wife, too, didn’t you, Jody?’

Jody’s eyes widen. Every nerve in his body goes taut. ‘What’s Vernon told you? Has he confessed—is that it?’

Jody’s interviewer smiles, but it’s a cold one as he delivers the official warning. The tape recorder goes on and he introduces everyone in the room. ‘Charged with the murder—’

‘Hey! Wait a minute! What did you say? What’s this about?
Murder?
How come you’re charging
me
with murder? Mrs Joy Marsh! Vernon’s wife? You’re way out, this can’t be true. I watched him get rid of the body, down the well. I was there, upstairs, and I watched him.’

They listen to him with placid, plastic faces, not believing a word he is saying, acting as if this is just everyday tedious business. The first interrogator, the hairy guy with the permanently knitted brows, moves towards the tape and states clearly, ‘The accused’s mother is at present outside arranging for a solicitor, so until the accused has representation, we will interrupt this interview.’ But Jody isn’t listening. His heart deadens. This is astounding. He can’t cope with this. Good God, is this some sort of nightmare? Surely he’s going to wake up in a minute. He feels that old terror that comes when disaster knocks on your door. He sees his whole future laid waste before him.

‘Where’s my mum? I want to talk to my mum.’

Pathetic little prat. His eyes flash and his voice rises as the detective throws down his papers. He’s seen so many of these cringing creeps in his life, and Detective Inspector Martin Lane firmly believes they ought to be put down. No good to man nor beast, nor ever will be, while decent upstanding citizens like Vernon Marsh have their lives torn in half by the scrotes. He is going to do his damnable best to make sure this little wanker goes down for the rest of his life. Only for the sake of his future career must he force himself to be reasonable. ‘Later, when we’re through with all this. When you tell us what’s been going on, you creepy little bastard!’

Sobbing as if her heart’s going to break, faced with such blinding desolation…

‘Please, I beg of you,
listen to me!
I know my boy, I know him better than myself. Jody would never harm a fly let alone murder anyone, let alone beat them to death and then throw them down a well. Can’t you see it for yourselves? You must have some experience of the criminal mind, of the thug and the brutal psychopath? Where does my Jody come into that? Can’t you use your eyes, your common sense? Does he look that type? There’s been another awful mistake, just like the rape was a terrible misunderstanding, and I know they shouldn’t have escaped and hit that poor prison officer, but wouldn’t you feel desperate if you had been held in custody for something you hadn’t done, if you’d been deprived of your freedom, despised by the whole community, threatened by your peers, seen your family forced out of their home and when all’s said and done Jody is only eighteen years old,
a mere child,
and if he’s saying Vernon Marsh did it then I’m afraid he probably did, OK he doesn’t seem like a murderer and he’s having treatment for shock, I know, but Jody doesn’t tell lies…’

‘Now why don’t you just sit down, Mrs Middleton, drink your tea and wait for your son’s solicitor to arrive. You can talk to him. He is paid to listen. Quite frankly, we have neither the time nor the inclination.’

Gawd. Why doesn’t somebody get that daft bat out of here?

H
EY HEY HEY!
HOW
different everything suddenly looks, rose-coloured and glorious, and Jacy raises his eyes to the sky and it’s almost a prayer. He could almost fall to his knees and worship himself with his arms outstretched in supplication to the powerful, greater being he knew has been merely resting inside him.

Piercingly sweet, it is like returning from the dead, wiser, and with a brand new chance of fulfilment, thanks to the bluff and outspoken Walter Mathews who knows damn well what he’s talking about, knows exactly what he wants and is keen to re-launch the new group, Haze, with Jacy in front as lead singer. It’s an appeal, not to the kids any more, but the new young adults who are looking for something familiar to latch onto, something with class, something with which they, with all their hopes and fears in this crazy world, can identify. He’s got hold of this new song-writer—Jacy was slightly miffed about that because he used to write all the songs in the balmy days of Sugarshack—and Walt is eager to try this new guy out. There’s almost too much going on so you don’t know what to talk about first, but as it goes they don’t talk much on the train on the way home. Instead, Jacy, Cyd and Darcy get through three packs of lager between them and upset the rest of the carriage with their lewd and dirty jokes and smoke themselves into a yellowy nicotine sickness.

Celebration!!!
But how? How do you celebrate something too big to put a name to? It’s a case of silent ecstasy. The joy is almost intolerable.

That’s part of the reason he hasn’t told Belle the true enormity of their expectations. Right to the top, is what Walt believes, and he’s got the charisma to make everyone else believe it, too. Oh sweet Jesus, this must be like climbing the highest mountain in the world and catching sight of the summit again. Golden and glorious amongst the clouds…

There’s one small, slightly worrying condition. Walter’s made this quite clear: the launch is to coincide with Jacy’s wedding to the could-be-Supermodel Belinda Hutchins, at The Grange. Walt is going to lay on a publicity celebration to outdo all others, ferrying the various influential journalists and DJs backwards and forwards from London by helicopter, and the revels under the monster Union Jack marquee are to last a day and a night. ‘By which time the bastards’ll be so damn sozzled they won’t know their microphones from their dicks,’ says Walt. Tickets will be given to celebrities, TV and newspaper moguls, the young nobility and even the minor Royals—‘and those blue arseholes could do with a few stiff lunges of positive publicity for a change, by God,’ says Walt.

A man of action, and expansively stylish, he has already hired a specialist firm from the States to organise the whole mega-event. Walt is like the charismatic Minister of some sort of weirdo church, bowers and arbours, palaces and forests included. It’s going to cost him an arm and a leg.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
is the title of the group’s first expected smash-hit CD, which will take another couple of months to complete to Walt’s satisfaction. ‘We’re gonna need a few fairies when you think of who’s coming.’ He has even booked the couple in at the Register Office—merely an irritating formality: ‘Get the sordid business over and done with first thing in the morning to make way for the main event,’ says Walt, belching upon his fierce cigar.

After their long spell in the gutters of London, Darcy and Cyd seem more bewildered than anything else, hardly able to believe their good luck. But Jacy, who has been waiting and hoping and dreaming for this day with an aching and unending hunger, casually reassures them: ‘We’re good. We were always good. OK so we cocked up last time. We’re not going to cock up again.’

‘Yeah, and Walt thinks if you’re safely hitched to Belle it’ll increase your chances of staying straight. Christ, I don’t envy you man, chained to that vicious hag bag.’

Jacy snorts. ‘Belle doesn’t have any influence on me. Hell, I tried to explain that to good old Walt but he just wouldn’t have it. Still, when you think about it, the kind of nuptial feast Walt has in mind is kind of romantic—just what the punters want these days. Hey—a wedding to outdo the Royals.’ He rubs his hands with delight as the train pulls into the station. Wait till he tells Belle how it is. He hasn’t told her he’s on his way home; he thought he’d surprise her and get a taxi. Well, he’ll soon be able to afford a fleet of taxis, won’t he?

Jeez! Hey! Get a look at this!

Walter is a man of his word. A team of men are already at work in the grounds of The Grange; the gardens have been cleared and cut, the marquee is laid out flat on the lawns, vans belonging to carpet-layers and caterers, lighting and sound-systems engineers, florists, musicians and decorators are packed around the entrance.

‘Walt doesn’t hang about.’

But annoyance shows in Jacy’s eyes. ‘Where’s Belle?’