The Yeare's Midnight (11 page)

Julia Underwood lay back in the bath. There was a pain behind her eyes and anger in her belly. She had hardly slept. Every passing car, every creak and rattle in her old house had made her jump. She had returned from Paul’s place before eleven the previous evening steeled with resolve; prepared for the confrontation that he had compelled her to undertake. But John hadn’t been there. Progress came only with pain. She understood that. Like childbirth, new life only came with agony. Julia knew that it was probably too late for her: once she would have liked to have children. Now she was glad that she hadn’t. She shuddered at the new dimension of complexities that a child would have brought to her current situation.

In the darkest moments of her despair over the previous six months, Julia had often thought about killing herself. Sometimes, if she was standing at a station, she would imagine falling in front of the approaching train; progress only came with pain. She had thought of taking pills: there were two boxes of paracetamol in the kitchen and John always kept a bottle of vodka in the cabinet. She had thought of cutting her wrists: in the bath, probably, to dilate the blood vessels. The last option appealed to her most; there was something beautifully ironic about leaving the world the way you came into it: in blood and water. Riddled with fear and self-doubt, torn between conflicting responsibilities,
Julia Underwood had stared into the abyss and found nothing. That scared her the most: the nothingness of her life, the nothingness of her death. She had been alone for eighteen years. She would not be alone any more. She had read a line in a women’s magazine once: ‘If you can save one life, make it your own.’

She had called her husband four times in the previous twenty-four hours. Two calls to his office, two to his mobile. She had left recorded messages and text messages. No response. Julia understood what was going on. John always retreated from confrontation; rather than take up the exposed ground of an argument, he preferred to launch a kind of intellectual guerrilla warfare. This usually involved long periods of absence or silence bookended by occasional fusillades of invective. It had been going on for eighteen years and she was tired of it now. At least there were winners and losers in arguments. In the war of attrition that was her marriage, everyone had lost out.

Julia looked at her body. She would be forty in five months’ time. You could tell the age of a tree by cutting it in half and counting the lines. Julia could count her lines all too easily. Sometimes she felt like she was trapped in another, unfamiliar body, the body of a stranger. It wasn’t that she was fat: her weight fluctuated but it never soared beyond her control. It was more that she just looked exhausted: baggy and exhausted. She looked like a crumpled suit someone had left hanging in a wardrobe for eighteen years.

When she had started seeing Paul, Julia had avoided overdressing. She had chosen her plainest, smartest, most sexless clothes. From early in their relationship – God, how she hated that word – she had fantasized and panicked about sleeping with him in equal measure. She had feared the moment when he would look on her naked for the first time; feared that he might in that instant feel he had been misled or had made a terrible mistake. ‘At least,’ she had reasoned, ‘if I dress like a frump he won’t be surprised.’ She needn’t have worried.

She had met Paul at a concert in the New Bolden Theatre. It was a charity fund-raising event. The orchestra had played Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s
Pictures
at
an
Exhibition.
Paul had introduced himself at the interval. He was a director of the orchestra. They had talked about Mussorgsky. Julia remembered snippets about the composer from school but Paul had talked freely about Mussorgsky’s early life in St Petersburg and his training with Balakirev. Julia felt in that instant that her life had changed gear: that she was being
engaged;
he had assumed intelligence in her, he had taken an interest and opened the door to a different world. A rarefied world of music and conversation. In that moment she was lost. At the end of the performance Paul had invited her to a recital of Mussorgsky’s
Songs
and
Dances
of
Death
in Cambridge the following week. It didn’t sound particularly romantic but she was intrigued. He was polite and softly spoken. She had accepted.

And here she was. Six months down the line, on the verge of leaving her husband. She wondered how much John already knew. He had a dark, perceptive intelligence that she understood only too well. He suspected something was wrong, that was clear enough, and his natural pessimism had probably already led him to believe the worst. Julia climbed out of the bath and towelled herself dry. She put some cream on her legs – their skin always seemed to dry out so quickly – wrapped herself in her dressing gown and went upstairs. Her clothes were lying on the bed. The bed she and John had shared for eighteen years: the bed where neither of them could sleep.

She dressed quickly and packed a few clothes and toiletries into a bag. Her purse and passport were in the bedside drawer. She removed them, along with her mobile phone. She placed a sealed envelope on the bedspread and, after a final look around, Julia Underwood left the house. One suitcase wasn’t much to show for eighteen years, she thought bitterly. She would stay at Paul’s that night and then decamp to her mother in Worcester for a couple of weeks. She had to clear her head and concentrate on the way forward. Progress through pain.

Underwood was trying to draw disparate threads of thought together. His meeting with Stussman had been memorable for two reasons: Stussman herself and the reason she had offered for the killer’s selection of Lucy Harrington. Underwood had been unable to push the memory of Stussman’s stone-blue eyes away from the front of his mind. They had bored into him with the kind of ferocious intelligence he usually found intimidating. She had talked with gravity and conviction about a subject Underwood had previously thought to be the preserve of old men and bespectacled undergraduates. She carried the quiet confidence that only the marriage of natural intelligence and hard work can forge. Underwood realized he envied her: someone so young and in command of their subject; so imbued with life.

Then there was Stussman’s comment about Lucy Harrington. The name was important. Lucy Harrington, Countess of Bedford had been John Donne’s patron four hundred years ago. The killer had chosen her because of her name. Why? It didn’t make any sense. Then there were the flowers. ‘African violet petals,’ a smiling Jensen had told him half an hour previously. What was all that about? The fact that flowers are often associated with death seemed inadequate to him. There had to be more to it than that. The petals weren’t left anywhere near the corpse. The killer had not intended them to be part of the crime scene. It was almost as if he was carrying them around with him. Why? For comfort? Did he like the smell?

Stussman had said one other thing that had rattled him. He checked his notes: he had written her comments down carefully – ‘Maybe your killer thinks that by using his rational mind he can create a new world.’ He had read several articles about how serial killers create a fantasy world for themselves and then live out increasingly ferocious recreations of that fantasy. The killer of Lucy Harrington had removed her eye and scrawled a line of
poetry on her wall. That line had originally been written by a poet four hundred years previously, a poet whose patron had been someone called Lucy Harrington. There was an obvious circularity but what kind of fantasy did it denote? Underwood gave up as he started coughing again.

There was a knock at the door. Jensen entered. She waited for the inspector to recover his composure.

‘Sir, we checked with the phone company. The call to Dr Stussman was made from a payphone on the B692 north of Cambridge. Marty Farrell has been to check it out but he says that there are no usable prints. Cambridge police have agreed to watch the kiosk for us in case the killer uses it again.’

‘He won’t,’ Underwood said abruptly. ‘He’s not an idiot.’

‘Sergeant Harrison asked me to let you know that he has a Mr Heyer in interview room one.’

‘Thank you, Jensen.’ Underwood’s heart skipped a beat.
So
,
he’s
here.
Underwood had crawled out on a limb and was worried it might snap under him. Perhaps it would be better to let Harrison handle the interview: ask the obvious five questions and let the poor bastard go. Then he thought of Julia giving herself up to this man, the man who was trying to destroy his life. It was more than morbid curiosity: a cold hatred chilled his blood. He had the power. He had the advantage.

Paul Heyer was confused. He sat in the claustrophobic whiteness of interview room one racking his brains for any reason why he might be there. He hadn’t committed any offences that he was aware of: a couple of speeding misdemeanours but that was in the past. Maybe it was something to do with his business: property development was a murky world sometimes but he had always tried to act honourably. Perhaps it related to a client or more likely an employee. That was probably it.

‘Will this take long, sergeant?’ he asked Harrison. ‘I don’t mean to be awkward but I am supposed to be in a meeting at the council offices in an hour.’

‘That depends, Mr Heyer,’ Harrison replied.

‘On what, exactly? I still don’t know why I am here.’

‘It depends on how long Inspector Underwood wants you to stay.’

‘Underwood?’ Heyer suddenly felt acutely uncomfortable. What was all this about? He thought of Julia. The door opened and Underwood walked in. Harrison turned to the recording machine.

‘One-fifty-five p.m. Inspector Underwood has entered the room.’

Underwood circled the table and sat down directly opposite Heyer. He was scared, exhilarated and sickened – all at the same time. So this was the man who was fucking his wife. He wasn’t much to look at. Thin, not very well built. Affluent, though, that much was obvious. Underwood looked at Heyer’s hands. They were smooth, hairless. He wondered if they smelled of his wife. He tried to remain focused.

‘Mr Paul Heyer?’ Underwood’s gaze locked on the papers in front of him.

‘That’s right.’

‘Of 17 The Blossoms, New Bolden?’

‘Correct.’

‘Do you know why you’re here, Mr Heyer?’

‘No idea, I’m afraid.’

‘Do you read the papers?’

‘Regularly. Would you mind telling me what this is about?’ Heyer looked at Harrison whose face remained expressionless.

‘So you’ve heard of Lucy Harrington?’

‘Of course.’ Heyer paused for a moment. ‘What are you implying?’

‘I’m not implying anything. “The Blossoms”? Do you like flowers, Mr Heyer? Gardening?’

Harrison leaned forward slightly in his seat and looked at Heyer more closely. The man suddenly seemed on edge.

‘As much as the next man. Have I been arrested for gardening?’

‘Where were you between eleven p.m. and two a.m. on the night of December the ninth?’ Underwood checked his notes again. He didn’t need to. Heyer opened his mouth to speak and then hesitated.

‘Mr Heyer?’ Harrison prompted.

‘I was at home.’

‘At home?’ asked Underwood. ‘Are you sure about that?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Can anyone verify that, sir?’ Harrison asked the question for him. Underwood bit his lip to stop smiling. A film of sweat had spread across Heyer’s brow. Underwood suddenly wanted to force his fountain pen into Heyer’s eye.

‘No. I was alone.’

‘Can you remember what was on TV?’ asked Harrison.

‘No. I don’t watch television. I listened to music all evening.’

‘With a lady friend?’ Harrison watched Heyer intently.

‘No. As I said, I was alone.’

‘That’s very interesting. You see, we had a call yesterday from someone who claimed to have seen your car – blue BMW with licence plate S245 QXY – on Hartfield Road very late on Monday night,’ said Underwood. He had grown in confidence as the interview had progressed and was now looking Heyer directly in the eye. ‘Said you were going extremely fast and they had to swerve to avoid you.’

‘That’s absolutely ridiculous.’

‘You
have
had a couple of speeding convictions, Mr Heyer,’ Harrison added, consulting his notes. ‘Maybe you’d had a few drinks and can’t remember the details. It happens. We know how it works. Businessmen work under a lot of pressure these days.’

‘Look.’ Heyer was getting annoyed. ‘There has been a mistake here. I was in all Monday night. By myself. Your information is wrong. I didn’t take the car out all night. Actually, you can check my phone records if you like. I made a couple of calls from the house quite late that night.’

“Thank you, Mr Heyer. We might just do that,’ said Harrison. Heyer hoped they wouldn’t. The only call he had made after eleven had been to order Julia’s minicab home.

‘You can understand our concern, though, Mr Heyer,’ said Underwood. ‘A well-known local girl is murdered, your car is reported to have been in the area and you don’t really have an alibi.’

‘There has been some mistake here. I came here in good faith. I don’t understand how this has happened.’ Frightened though he was, Heyer decided to go on the offensive. He was beginning to see the light. Underwood obviously knew exactly what he’d been doing on Monday night. He had to talk to Julia. ‘I think, if you wish to continue this interview, that I should have my lawyer present.’

‘No need, Mr Heyer.’ Underwood sat back in his chair. ‘I don’t have any further questions. That was very helpful. If you could provide us with an itemization of your phone calls that night, we’ll check them out with the telephone company.’ He paused as Heyer stood up. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

Heyer turned to face him. ‘I think someone is playing games with you, Inspector.’

‘You know, it’s funny,’ Underwood said. ‘That’s just what I was thinking.’

Harrison led Heyer from the room. Underwood looked up at the clock on the wall.

‘Interview concluded at two-oh-six p.m.’

It had been an enjoyable ten minutes. He had derived great pleasure from making Heyer wriggle in his seat: local notable he might be but Heyer wasn’t a very adept liar. Harrison didn’t miss much and Underwood was sure he would have picked that up. A couple of minutes later the detective sergeant returned to the room. He looked thoughtful.