At last they were ready. The duty brief had arrived, the tapes were spinning, those present had been introduced and the regulations had been read to the suspect who had been formally arrested on a murder charge. Ingrid refused to answer questions about the deaths of Patrick Henshaw, George Corless, Maurice Bradshaw and John Birch.
‘I don’t know what you mean, I don’t know who you’re talking about, I wasn’t there, it wasn’t me,’ was all she said.
Geraldine tried a different approach.
‘You can sit there and claim ignorance of these murders until you’re blue in the face, but you can’t deny your attempted assault on me earlier this evening, in your kitchen.’
She paused for effect.
‘Attempted murder of a police officer. That’s not in question. You’ll go down for that, for a long time.’
She paused, ignoring Sam’s gasp. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the sergeant staring at her, wide-eyed. The solicitor’s eyes flickered from Geraldine to Sam and back again, a quizzical expression on his sharp features. But nothing seemed to register with Ingrid who sat, staring dully at the table.
‘You never wanted to kill me, did you?’ Geraldine resumed. ‘It wasn’t me you were after. I’m not the one you want. Why don’t you tell us what’s going on, Ingrid? What exactly happened in your flat today, and why did you attack me? Ingrid?’
There was a silence. The tapes whirred gently. Somewhere outside a phone rang. The solicitor cleared his throat. Geraldine leaned forward and spoke gently.
‘You didn’t mean to kill me, did you? So why did you attack me? You know you could have killed me. Why did you do it?’
Ingrid didn’t answer.
‘Tell me about your uncle,’ Geraldine gently. ‘Tell me all about it.’
‘He had to be stopped!’ Ingrid suddenly cried out, raising bloodshot eyes and staring wildly round the room, as though looking for someone. ‘I had to do it.’
She half rose to her feet and the solicitor leaned towards her and muttered under his breath.
‘What did he do, Emily? Tell me about your uncle.’
Ingrid stared at the solicitor for a second, trembling, and he drew back as though unnerved by her expression. She turned back to Geraldine.
‘It was all his fault,’ she muttered.
‘You went to live with your uncle after your mother died, didn’t you? Linda’s husband, William.’
‘Yes.’
It was barely a whisper now, she spoke so softly. Her eyes never left Geraldine’s face.
‘Tell me about Uncle William. Did he hurt you?’
Ingrid nodded again. Tears streamed silently down her pale cheeks.
‘What happened with your uncle, Ingrid? What did he do?’
Ingrid was sobbing too violently now to speak. Dropping her face in her hands, she cried without restraint.
‘What happened with your uncle?’ Geraldine resumed after a few moments, when Ingrid’s crying fit had died away.
‘I had to stop him, I had to stop him.’
Her voice was muffled, her hands still over her face.
‘Stop what?’
‘He came into my room every night and I didn’t want to – I didn’t want to – it hurt so –’
Geraldine sat back in her chair.
‘So you stopped him.’
Ingrid looked up.
‘I tried to get away but he followed me downstairs. I wanted to leave by the back door, run away from there and never return. But he found me, hiding in the shed. He grabbed me by the arm. I was screaming. He pushed me down on the floor. There was a hammer. I reached for it and I hit him and hit him – I just wanted it to stop –’
Her eyes were streaming again. Wiping them on the backs of her hands she looked slowly round the room. Her eyes rested on the solicitor, thin and balding, moved past Sam, and came to rest on Geraldine.
‘I stopped him all right,’ she said, and her thin lips curved into a smile.
‘How did you stop him? What did you do? Tell me what you did, Ingrid.’
‘I hit him on the head.’
‘And what happened then? Did he fall? Or what?’
‘I heard his skull crunch and then he fell backwards. He was moaning and making a disgusting wheezing noise. His hands kept groping in the air, pulling at me. He wouldn’t stop, so I hit him, again and again, until he was dead.’
‘Where did you hit him?’
‘I hit him where it hurt.’ She grinned. ‘Right in the balls.’
‘What about the others, Patrick Henshaw, George Corless, Maurice Bradford and John Birch, why did you kill them? What had they done to you?’
Ingrid gazed earnestly at Geraldine, staring straight at her, dry-eyed for the first time. She spoke clearly now.
‘I had no choice. I had to stop them.’
‘Stop them?’
‘They shouldn’t have done it.’ Her voice rose hysterically again. ‘They shouldn’t have touched me. They shouldn’t have done it, they shouldn’t have done it. I had to stop them.’
She leaned forward suddenly, her thin arms encircling her chest, her head down, as she rocked on her chair, moaning.
‘You stopped him, and then you let your aunt take the blame. You let her go to prison for twenty years for something she hadn’t done,’ Geraldine said. ‘Your aunt, who had taken you in, given you a home when your mother died.’
Ingrid dropped her arms and sat bolt upright.
‘She deserved it.’
‘Why?’
Geraldine leaned forward.
‘Why, Ingrid? I want to understand. What had your aunt done to deserve going to prison for twenty years?’
‘She knew what he was doing. I was only twelve when it started. She knew it was going on and she did nothing to help me.’
Her expression was bitter now, her eyes hard.
‘She should have protected me, but she didn’t even try to stop him.’
‘How could you be sure your aunt knew what was going on?’
‘Because she used to watch. She watched everything, right to the end.’
G
eraldine was relieved that Reg didn’t query her going alone to question a suspect. Of course he didn’t yet know that Ingrid had assaulted her. But now that Ingrid had confessed to five murders, there was no need to dwell on the circumstances of her arrest. Geraldine had brought it up during the taped interview, but there was no reason to draw any further attention to it before the trial. She had asked Sam to exercise discretion, and it would hardly be in Ingrid’s interest for her brief to make a feature of it. The prosecution would doubtless raise it in court, having listened to the interview, but by then the arrest would be history. The details of Geraldine’s part in it would hopefully be buried in general triumph.
In the meantime, Geraldine had other matters on her mind. She felt a familiar tremor hearing prison doors close behind her as she followed a prison officer to the visitors’ room. A long time seemed to pass before Linda shuffled in and sat down without looking at Geraldine. Her dark hair was greasier than Geraldine remembered it, and her extreme pallor looked sickly.
‘You’ve heard the news?’
Linda gave no response.
‘About Ingrid.’
Almost imperceptibly, Linda’s face coloured.
‘I don’t know anyone called Ingrid.’
‘You know very well who I mean. I’m talking about your niece. She’s changed her name to Ingrid, but you used to call her by her first name, Emily.’
Linda raised her head. Her green eyes glittered wretchedly.
‘Leave Emily alone. She doesn’t need you pestering her after all this time.’
‘Linda, your niece has been arrested because we know what happened to your husband. We know it wasn’t you who killed him. Emily’s confessed. You’re going to be released.’
‘Released?’ she repeated, gazing around the room with an expression of bemusement. She turned back to Geraldine, suddenly angry.
‘I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Leave me alone.’
She stood up but Geraldine told her to wait.
‘You can help Emily,’ she added.
With a grunt, Linda sat down again.
‘Why did you take the rap for your niece when she killed your husband? You weren’t responsible for his death. Why lie about it?’
Linda didn’t answer.
‘For twenty years you let his killer go free. You’ve spent a lifetime incarcerated for a crime you didn’t commit. Why did you do it, Linda?’
Linda’s face relaxed into a smile. She leaned forward on her chair and spoke very rapidly, in a low voice. As she explained, her eyes stared ferociously at Geraldine, with a fervour that was almost manic.
‘I wouldn’t expect you to understand. But you’re right. It wasn’t me, it was Emily who killed him, and he deserved it, the sick bastard. I should have done it myself, not left it to the child. Because he deserved to die. And I deserved to be punished.’
‘You think what you did was right?’
Linda shrugged, unrepentant.
‘You sacrificed twenty years of your life to protect your niece, knowing she had murdered your husband. You knew it was her, didn’t you, because you were there, in the shed. You watched her batter him to death and you didn’t do anything to stop her. But what I don’t understand is why you abandoned her like that.’
Linda’s eyes opened wide in surprise.
‘Abandoned her? What are you talking about?’
She raised her voice. The prison officer started forward. Geraldine shook her head and raised a hand to indicate she didn’t want to be interrupted. Linda dropped her voice.
‘You don’t understand. How could you? I promised my sister I’d take care of Emily, promised when she was dying. And then – then …’
She drew a deep shuddering breath. Geraldine glanced over at the warder whose eyes were fixed on Linda.
‘It was all right to begin with, when she first came to live with us. I wasn’t sure how William would take to it, having her there all the time, but he was very nice with her, very attentive. But then it started. They were very close and one night I heard her whimpering. I went into her bedroom and I saw them. He was on top of her and I could see her face over his shoulder …’
She broke off, lost in the horror of the recollection.
‘I can still see the terror on her face. She was only thirteen. But I didn’t do anything. I just stood there, watching.’
She lifted her face to Geraldine in sudden appeal.
‘I didn’t know what to do. I was only nineteen, not much more than a child myself. You don’t know what it was like. It was such a shock. I’d had my suspicions before then, but yes, I didn’t want to believe it. You don’t want to believe it of your own husband. And what was I meant to do? I was too scared to confront him –’
‘Scared?’
‘I was so much younger than him and he was so sure of himself. I can’t explain it, but he wasn’t the kind of man you could argue with. He never listened to me anyway. But he must have realised I knew, because he changed. He stopped being furtive. I’d go into the lounge and he’d be there, with his arm around her, and he wouldn’t move away from her when I sat down. Nothing was the same after that.’
She dropped her face into her hands as though to shut out the memory.
‘So you closed your eyes to what was going on. Wilful blindness.’
It was a statement, not a question. Linda lifted her head and nodded, with an expression almost serene.
‘When it happened, when she killed him, I finally saw my way to doing the right thing by her –’
‘The right thing?’
‘I’d promised my sister I would protect Emily, look after her. When I was given this chance to make it up to her, I took her place in prison, so she could go free. None of it was her fault. She was only a child. She didn’t deserve to be punished.’
‘But you did, because you had kept silent about your husband’s abuse –’
‘Yes. I don’t regret what I did, not for a second, not even now you’ve caught up with her. Because she knows my sentence gave her twenty years of freedom, twenty years of life she would have missed out on. Twenty years of freedom while she was still young –’
Coldly Geraldine interrupted to explain that if Ingrid had received professional help when she was fourteen, she might in time have been able to live a normal life, with a new identity. There were extenuating circumstances to her murdering her uncle. In sacrificing twenty years of freedom to assuage her own guilt, Linda had sentenced her niece to a lifetime of torment and hatred.
‘She’s insane, Linda; completely insane. Maybe she has been ever since she killed your husband. God knows what has been going through her mind for the last twenty years. You dealt with your own guilt, but left her to deal with hers alone. If she wasn’t damaged enough already, you abandoned her to turn into a psychopath, beyond hope of recovery.’
Linda gave Geraldine a baleful glare.
‘What do you mean, a psychopath? You’re forgetting that Emily was the victim in all this, not William. He got what was coming to him. She never deserved to be abused. She never asked for it. That’s exactly why I didn’t want her to be put on trial, because of that kind of attitude. You don’t understand anything. She killed her uncle, so you immediately assume she must be evil, when she was just a frightened child.’
Geraldine shook her head.
‘That’s not what I’m saying. Whoever was responsible for what happened to your husband, Emily needed help. In the course of a month your niece has battered four men to death, and who knows how many more she’s assaulted over the years. She was abused and seriously disturbed as a young teenager. I don’t know if her urge to kill people is part of her nature or was brought on by her early experience. I’m not qualified to hazard an opinion on that. But she’s a psychopath now, if she wasn’t born one. There’s a chance that, if she had received professional help after killing your husband, she might have grown up to lead a semblance of a normal life. She might have recovered from her experience. People do. But by refusing to acknowledge her guilt, you stole that chance from her.’
With a cry of rage, Linda scrambled onto the table and tried to fling herself at Geraldine who dodged out of the way, just as the prison officer reached them.
‘You’d think she’d be pleased she’s going to be let out,’ the officer called over her shoulder as she led Linda away. ‘We only told her this morning.’
‘That depends,’ Geraldine called after her. ‘There are worse sentences than prison.’