Authors: A.J. Waines
The applause continued and people were getting to their feet, starting to break ranks. I stood up as elegantly as I could muster, but in the melee, lost sight of the figure I’d been painstakingly watching all this time.
I needed to get to the front and speak to Andrew. I didn’t care about the painting right now, I’d have words with him about that later. What I needed to know was if he knew the man I’d recognised. I had to find out who he was.
I slipped to the end of my row and from behind a pillar, tried to scan the room. ‘Demo-man’ was one of few men at the event not wearing a suit and tie, so I was quickly able to dismiss large numbers of people. I checked everyone at the drinks’ table, those already moving towards the exit, those dotted in groups in the centre. I was about to give up when I spotted him at the far side, talking to a woman with a loud voice.
Andrew had now become the star of the show and I had to fight through the fawning mob to get anywhere near him. I was worried that before I reached him, he’d be swept away by some sharp entrepreneur offering him a celebration supper. I pushed further forward. Eventually there were two bodies between me and him. I could hear Andrew thanking people, acknowledging their praise. Then a man moved away and I was standing right in front of him.
‘Jules. Really glad you could come.’ He put a hand on my arm, but he didn’t attempt to get any closer.
‘Don’t push it.’ I nodded towards the canvas in front of me. ‘We need to have a conversation about this, sometime.’ I glanced at the painting at close range. There was no doubt about it, it was an uncannily good likeness. A tad on the flattering side, to be honest.
‘I think it’s too late for that now,’ he said, sheepishly.
I managed to guide him behind the easels, away from a group of people still waiting to speak to him. ‘Listen. I know this is weird, but I need your help.’
‘Huh?’ He frowned.
‘Do you remember the guy I mentioned, who threatened me at Fairways? The guy at the demonstration?’ I could see him trying to make the cognitive leap between basking in his current glory and a conversation we’d had several weeks ago. ‘Sorry to do this at a time like this, but he’s here…I’ve seen him and I wondered if you knew who he was.’
Droves of people were already drifting towards the door. I knew it was too late now to borrow Andrew’s phone and call the police; by the time they got here ‘demo-man’ would have been long gone. Andrew put his weight on one leg and brought a hand to his hip. His face was blank.
‘Jules. This isn’t really —’
I grabbed his wrist. ‘He’s a police suspect. It’s really important.’
‘Well, where is he?’ He looked over my head.
I turned gingerly, trying to stay behind the easel. ‘See the older woman in the yellow dress?’ I watched his eyes travel across the room.
‘Okay, yeah, I’ve got her.’
‘The man nearby with tatty hair, long side-burns, wearing a brown jumper. Can you see him?’
‘I think so. With black jeans?’
I took another look. ‘Yes, that’s him. Do you know him?’
‘He doesn’t look familiar.’
‘Go a bit closer.’
He made a path towards the woman in the yellow dress, who seemed delighted he’d come over to speak to her. As he said a few words I saw him send his eyes over her shoulder. He came back, shaking his head.
‘Never seen him before. Don’t know who he is.’
I cursed. ‘Okay. Thanks, anyway. I’ll let you get on with your celebrations.’
As I turned to go, he grabbed hold of my little finger.
‘A few of us are going over to Covent Garden later. Fancy coming?’
‘I’m working, tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Thanks anyway.’
I started to pull away again, just as the young woman with long blonde hair was trying to get Andrew’s attention. She was, indeed, decidedly pretty from the front.
‘Someone wants your autograph,’ I said, raising my eyebrows.
‘See you,’ he said and blew me a kiss. I turned and tried to locate the mystery man again, but I’d lost him. I did a full circuit of the hall, but he’d disappeared. Damn. I could have alerted my minders as soon as I left the building. Now it was too late.
As I stepped out into the cold, I felt a shiver flutter down my spine, but it wasn’t anything to do with the weather.
I spotted the blue Astra as I left Leighton House. I was starting to feel sorry for WPC Penny and her side-kick, Zak, spending their lives trying to keep up with me. We’d set up a system right from the start, whereby I sent a text message whenever I knew I was going to be on the move. It made things easier for them. I’d only had two days of it, but I was already getting tired of the cloak and dagger pantomime. Given that I didn’t have my phone, I went over to the car to tell them in person that I was going home, even though it was officially ‘against the rules’. I was tempted to ask for a lift, but that would have pushing things a little too far.
When I got back, I was restless and unnerved after seeing the man from the demo and then losing him again. I’d gained nothing from my trip over to Andrew’s prize-giving except humiliation. I had no real information to pass on, but I rang Brad anyway. At least I could tell him the guy they were looking for was still in London.
‘I was just about to ring you,’ said Brad. ‘I’ve had some more details through about Andrew Wishbourne.’ There was a hesitancy in his voice and I knew it wasn’t going to be good news. ‘Did you know he’s got a history of GBH?’
My silence answered his question.
‘He had a twelve-month prison sentence for whacking someone with a golf club,’ he continued. ‘We’re bringing him in again for questioning.’
I put my hand over my mouth.
‘Juliet, you still there?’
‘Yes, sorry. Bit of a shock.’ I told him about my evening.
‘Nice try,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to go…been called to an incident.’ I could hear the sound of sirens in the background.
As I dropped the phone into my lap my front doorbell rang. It was Jackie wanting to borrow my hair-dryer.
‘Mine’s been bust for weeks,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to get to work and it’s too cold to go out with wet hair.’ I held it out to her. She glared at me. ‘What’s happened? You look awful.’
I could feel my hands shaking as I handed it over.
‘It’s Andrew - that guy I used to go out with.’ I told her what Brad had said.
‘It’s a long way from GBH to murder,’ she said.
‘You have to start somewhere.’
‘That’s a terrible thing to say.’
‘I know.’
‘Maybe you’re right,’ she said, with regret. ‘I didn’t know him. .’
‘He only let other people see what he wanted them to see: the jokey, fun-loving, pie-in-the-sky, Andrew.’
She fiddled with the plug. ‘You can’t tell what people are capable of, can you? There are always news items on the telly where neighbours of paedophiles say:
Oh, he was such a nice man
.’
I handed her the nozzle for the dryer that had dropped off as she was talking.
‘I didn’t even know he played golf,’ I said.
When I woke the following morning, all I wanted was to get out of London, away from the murders, away from Andrew and even Brad. I didn’t have any clients, so I sent a text to my minder - WPC Wendy Morrell this time - to tell her I was heading off for Norwich.
Thornwell Drive was a leafy residential street; the kind you find in any prosperous city. I hadn’t been back here since I left home for University, in 1996; the same year Mum and Dad moved to Spain. Dad’s bronchitis had been getting worse for some time, but I think they’d been waiting for me to finish my growing up before heading to warmer climes. I also think they couldn’t bear to stay in that fateful house any longer.
I wondered what the odds were that the same neighbours would still be living there, thirteen years later. I remembered Mr Knightly at number sixteen. He would have been in his sixties when I’d left. He could be long dead now. There had been a young family on the other side in the 1990’s. They had a noisy dog and one of the children played the recorder, badly, all the time. Everything would have changed.
I turned the corner and parked at the top of the street. I texted WPC Morrell to tell her there were some coffee shops down the road and to the right, but I didn’t know if she would take up the offer. She was on her own today; her partner had been called away to an incident and they were short on replacements. Cutbacks. I felt awful leaving her to sit in the car, hour after hour. I couldn’t imagine I’d be in any danger on this occasion, so far from the scene of the murders.
I took a few steps down the road and was hit by that strange dream-like feeling of returning to a place one once knew inside out. Like cheating time. It felt as familiar as if I’d been here only yesterday and yet it had existed purely inside my head, mutating into memories that were less and less accurate, for over a decade.
The road seemed narrower than I remembered it, the houses closer together. Details had changed, like the white picket fence, which was now a brick wall at the front of what used to be Mrs Lorne’s house and the post-office had turned into an all-night convenience store. But, the smell of the air was the same, the way the sunlight fell across the camber in the road, the edges of the paving stones, the leaves caught in the grille of the sunken drains - everything else was how I’d remembered it.
I wondered who was living in our house, number eighteen, and if they knew our history. I wondered, even though we’d had the whole place redecorated, if there were still charred marks on the walls and a lingering smell of smoke.
I came to number twenty and rapped the bronze knocker against the door. A dog barked, but it was a yappy sound, not the deep-throated one I remembered. The figure of a woman appeared through the bobbled glass and she opened the door, wearing rubber gloves. A terrier was trying to squeeze past her. She picked it up.
‘I thought you were the plumber,’ she said.
‘Sorry. Have you a minute?’
The dog was alternating between yapping at me and trying to lick the woman’s face. ‘Not if you’re selling something. What is it?’
I could hear water running in the background.
‘Did you want to turn your tap off?’
She looked flustered, like she’d completely forgotten what she was doing. ‘Hold on.’
She shut the door, then returned without the dog.
‘I used to live next door,’ I said. ‘My name is Juliet Grey. We lived here until 1996. Were you here then, by any chance?’
‘I’m the cleaner, I don’t live here.’ She softened a little. ‘They’ve only been here a few years. 2006, they moved in, I think.’
She didn’t tell me who ‘they’ were, but she‘d told me all I needed to know. I said I was sorry to bother her and turned away.
My next hope was Mr Knightly, who had lived the other side. I remembered him as a jovial sort, always stopping to chat when he met us on the street on his way back from the corner shop. He’d lost his wife during the time we’d lived there and I flashed back to images of her funeral. We’d been to the wake at his house and the smell of lavender came to mind. I remember Luke dropped a vol-au-vent, by accident he’d said, down the back of the record player. A vinyl of Frank Sinatra had been playing. That was before death had touched our family. Mr Knightly brought round trays of stale cucumber sandwiches and dry chicken wings for days, afterwards.
He came to the door wearing tartan slippers. He recognised me, once I’d given my name and he extended a crinkly hand. It was cold and flaky. He looked much the same, except he seemed smaller, thinner and one eye was partly closed. As soon as I started speaking I realised he was hard of hearing. Luke used to call him ‘Sprightly Knightly’, because he was always dashing off somewhere. He owned race horses and was usually either down at the stables or at the next race meeting. Looking at him now, I didn’t suppose that ‘dashing’ was part of his lifestyle anymore.
There was no smell of lavender like I’d remembered, instead, an odour of burnt cabbage was coming from the kitchen. He led me in that direction, where I had interrupted him eating a boiled egg. There was a cross-hatching of toasted soldiers on the side of his plate. He asked if I wanted lunch, but the room was heaped with dirty pans and opened cartons and looked like it would have failed the least stringent of hygiene tests. I said I had someone waiting, which was true, if you counted poor Wendy in her car.
He guessed it wasn’t a social call. I asked if he minded me asking some questions, while he finished his lunch.
‘It’s about the fire,’ I said.
‘I had a funny feeling it might be.’
‘A few new things have come to light.’
‘It was a long time ago,’ he said. A dribble of egg yolk made its way down his chin.
‘I know. Nineteen years. Do you remember the night it happened?’
‘Oh, I remember it, all right. Hard to forget something like that.’ He rubbed his buttery hands down his trousers and pushed the finished meal away.
‘Someone said there might have been a power-cut. Does that ring any bells?’
Mr Knightly screwed up his eyes, as if watching a scene in great detail.
‘I remember looking over at the house, because our electrics were fine. Your curtains were drawn by then. You’d all gone out to the pictures, because…that’s right…you had no power.’
What he said snagged my memory. I’d forgotten we’d gone to the cinema that evening. It made sense, given we had no light or heating. Luke had suggested it. ‘If we’re going to have to sit in the dark,’ he’d said, ‘we might as well have a decent film rolling.’
Luke was clever and cheeky like that.
‘Do you remember anything about the windows?’ I kept it vague. I didn’t want to give him a leading question.
He rubbed his stubble. It sounded like he was scraping the edge of a matchbox.
‘They were open, weren’t they?’ he said.
‘Really?’ I said.
‘Come to think of it, it would have been odd in January to have the windows open, but they definitely were. I can see it now. In the lounge and the other downstairs rooms. Not the upstairs.’
He had the effortless, but radically diminished recall of the elderly; he could have told me the tie he wore when he got married, but wouldn’t remember where he’d put the oven-gloves, a few minutes ago. Thankfully, the period in question still had firm roots in his brain.
‘Did you tell the police…at the time of the investigation?’
His good eye was stretched wide open.
‘I don’t know if I did. I don’t think I realised until later. It had all blown over by then.’
A piece of the puzzle the police never got to hear about. It was starting to look like Cheryl’s suspicions could have some justification.
‘Having the windows open must have made the fire spread,’ he continued. ‘The police said that, didn’t they, that the fire spread quicker than they expected?’
‘That’s right.’
‘The lights were off, so maybe none of you saw the windows were open. Your parents don’t remember opening them? Maybe there was a gas leak.’
‘I need to check with them. Might someone else have got into the house, do you think?’
‘Your parents kept a spare key under a plant pot at the front. We all kept keys hidden like that, under plant pots, under the mat, in those days. In case any of us were away and needed plants watering or milk taking in. It’s different now. No one leaves keys around like that anymore.’ He sent his eyes over my shoulder, his head tilted to the side, as if remembering times when life was simpler and safer. ‘Everyone’s far more security conscious these days,’ he said.
I flashed back to finding Andrew’s key so easily, under the hedgehog by his back door. Not everyone, I thought.
‘Do you remember anything else, Mr Knightly? This is very helpful.’ I had the feeling I might be losing him.
He smiled and I saw that he’d forgotten to put his false teeth in. Or maybe he didn’t bother with them anymore.
‘I’ll make us some tea, shall I?’ he said.
‘Why don’t I make it?’ I said, standing up. Less chance of food poisoning, I decided.
‘I’ve got something that might help,’ he said. He disappeared as I rinsed two cups in boiling water. He came back with a photo album. I could see this wouldn’t be a short visit, but his observations could be very useful and I felt sorry for him.
The album opened with his wedding to Maisie and we travelled through days at the races, days at the seaside and holiday snaps from abroad. There were a few pictures of our family; times when we had played in Mr Knightly’s garden for a change. One shot showed Luke and I doing somersaults on the grass with Maisie holding a jug of lemonade.
‘You didn’t have any children?’ I said.
‘No. We would have liked to, but it didn’t happen. None of the special treatments then that you can get now to make babies.’ He chuckled.
He turned the page and there was Luke again, standing on his own, bare-chested, holding a pitchfork. He looked about twelve. My stomach turned over.
‘He came and helped me down at the stables now and again. Your Luke came round that night and borrowed one of my torches. It was the last time I saw him.’
There had certainly been a power-cut, then. An isolated one that had only affected our house, by the sounds of it. Why hadn’t this ever been mentioned in the newspaper reports?
A silence hung between us. I wanted to be on my way, but as we were only half-way through the album, I knew I couldn’t get up and leave. I didn’t want a trip down memory-lane, right now. I couldn’t bear to see more pictures of Luke, but I also didn’t want to be rude. I tried to loosen my clenched fists under the table.
There were a few pictures of me on one of Mr Knightly’s ponies. I’d completely forgotten he’d let us ride them. Then there was a picture of Luke and I with someone I didn’t recognise.
‘Who’s this?’ I asked.
He leant closer. ‘That was your babysitter. You would have been about nine, Juliet. What was her name, now?’ I wasn’t sure it mattered, but he was determined to remember.
‘Mrs Smith…no, Mrs Jones…something like that…not terribly memorable,’ he said. ‘Do you remember her? Had a son about Luke’s age. Bit of a funny lad.’
‘I don’t remember,’ I said. As I looked at the woman’s face, there was an inkling of recognition, but nothing solid. She wore a gold badge on her cardigan that caught the light.
I asked to go to the loo before I left and took the opportunity to have a quick look over towards our old house from his spare bedroom window. I couldn’t see the kitchen from there; the point where the fire had started. Our lovely lawn had been turned into half-decking, half vegetable patch; the swing and sand-pit long gone.