The First Cut (33 page)

The vain delusions he’d had that summer, of what he was capable of, of how life and love would be . . .

‘Get back in the car.’ Troy was standing with the door open. Greg did as he was told and drove on to the house and parked by the front door.

Nicky moved fast, but carefully. She put the photo in her pocket and put the picture of Catherine back into the frame on the bureau. She picked up the gun from the doorway and headed for the stairs. She was halfway across the landing when she heard someone trying the unused front door. It was someone who didn’t know the house. She moved to the landing window that didn’t have shutters and glanced out to see Greg and crash man. Together, here, walking side by side. The terror she had felt jumping out from the scaffolding onto the Westway came back to her with a force that socked her in the guts. And following on was the darker, more persistent memory of the dead weight of Grace as Nicky flailed around in that inky lake, screaming with all the energy she possessed for someone to help her. She gripped the barrel of the gun. She had failed that day, she had failed Grace. She wouldn’t let it happen again. A surge of pure rage filled her. That Greg could do that to Grace, play the tragic widower when he knew what he had instigated . . . Her husband was the man who killed every woman he touched, the man who had spent a lifetime getting away with it, the man with a sister who kept his secrets. She heard the back door opening.

Nicky ran across the landing, opened the door to the hidden room and moved into the gloom. She turned towards the laughing cavalier and carefully removed the small block of wood with the painted eyes. She stood looking out onto the landing. I’m finally in control, she reasoned.

Which was why, when the hand closed over her mouth from behind her in the shadows, she couldn’t understand how she had got it all so wrong.

D
I Jenny Broadbent looked at the two white boxes on Asda’s homeware shelf. ‘This one’s got the cage thingy that you pull out,’ she said to Isla. Isla didn’t reply; she was texting, leaning with her foot up on the lower shelf, where a wok was in danger of falling to the floor. ‘Whereas this one’s got something called an auto-defrost function.’ There was no reply. ‘Isla!’

Isla pressed send and turned, blinking, to her mother. ‘They’re just toasters, Mum. Get whatever.’

‘
Which
ever.’ Her mobile rang. ‘Find me some barbecue tongs,’ she said, waving her hand in a get-to-it motion at Isla. Isla thumped off down the aisle, boredom radiating off her. There was too much choice, Jenny thought, always too many options. It weighed one down, stopped one thinking straight. ‘Hello?’ It was Sondra. ‘What’s up?’

‘London got a call from Nicky Ayers’s sister-in-law. It’s been passed on to us. She’s concerned about Nicky’s safety and seems to think her life might be in danger.’

‘Did she say who from?’

‘Her brother. She was very insistent. She also said she thinks Nicky’s back at Hayersleigh House and the husband’s followed her.’

‘Why has she gone back there?’

‘It turns out Adam Thornton’s mother had an affair with Nicky Ayers’s husband about twenty years ago.’

Jenny sighed. ‘Where’s Adam Thornton?’

‘We don’t know.’

‘OK. Get a squad car.’

‘Do you want me to pick you up?’

‘Yes, please.’ Jenny started walking down the aisle towards her daughter.

‘It’s raining today, if it’s any consolation. Wet weekends, they’re the worst,’ Sondra added.

‘I don’t know, I like the rain,’ said Jenny, looking at her daughter. ‘When it’s raining you know the weather at least can only get better later.’ She hung up and watched Isla fiddling with a pair of tongs. Affairs caused more damage than anyone understood. Human desires that couldn’t or wouldn’t be kept in check. Isla’s dad certainly hadn’t kept it in his pants. She wasn’t proud of how she’d punished him, of how she’d made it difficult for him to see Isla until he didn’t bother to try any more. She had been eaten up with trying to throw the pain he’d inflicted on her back at him, with trying to make him feel the pain of his rejection. She regretted her behaviour in silence now that Isla was older, but she couldn’t turn back the clock. Every time Isla badmouthed her dad Jenny felt the blush of shame. We hurt the ones we love, she thought.

‘Look, Mum, these only open if you point them downwards.’ Isla flipped the tongs this way and that, their metal sides clacking in the warehouse space. Her daughter could still find excitement in the little things. Jenny felt a gush of love for her.

The fallout from her failed relationship with Isla’s father would last a lifetime; and hers wasn’t the only one. It sounded as if murderous motives were at play at the big house too. Husbands intent on harming their wives – it was a time-honoured act. ‘Love kills,’ she muttered to herself. The state employed her to mop up the mess from overwhelming passion, from adoration that more often than not got warped and twisted over the years. Today was no different. ‘Isla, I have to go.’

‘Really? Can I go to Ella’s?’

Jenny nodded at her thirteen-year-old. ‘I’ll drop you off on the way home.’

‘Brill. So, which ones?’ She pointed at the rack of barbecue implements.

Jenny reached out and blindly picked up a pair of tongs. Too much choice. She would argue long and hard about whether it made anyone happier.

Greg tried the back door and it opened. He crossed the kitchen uneasily, sticking close to Troy. He couldn’t let him out of his sight. The ground floor was empty. He paused for a moment by the photo of Catherine in the hall and turned away. He saw Troy watching him.

They began to climb the stairs, Troy bringing up the rear, but a search of the rooms turned up nothing. No one was upstairs. They went back along the corridor and Greg stared at the paintings on the landing. His eyes came to rest on the laughing cavalier. He stopped, overwhelmed by a sensory memory of what they had done together in that secret room while her husband was working in London during the week . . . Troy’s hand jumped to his waistband. He’d picked up a hesitation in Greg’s movements which made him wary but he calculated that the threat came from the bedroom door on his right. He wasn’t expecting the picture in the landing to burst open and spun a fraction too late.

Greg saw Troy blown back against the wall by the shotgun blast. He cried out but couldn’t hear his own voice; he was deafened by the noise. He stumbled, almost in sympathy with Troy, and fell to his knees amid the burning smell of the spent cartridge. A livid splatter of blood rose up the wall in an arc behind Troy, who was slumped back against the skirting.

Lawrence stood holding the gun.

Greg shouted over and over, ‘Where’s Nicky? Where’s Nicky?’ but no sound penetrated. As the smoke began to clear he could see the beginnings of a smile on Lawrence’s face.

L
awrence had often thought about this moment, when the villain who had ruined his life would be begging on his knees before him. He had remembered a big man, cocky and eager and naive. Jealousy was distorting, he realized. He was pleased to see that the cowering figure on the carpet below him bore no resemblance to that threat from the past. His actions had had an effect and from that he gained some comfort.

‘Where’s Nicky?’ Greg’s voice was getting through now, the shotgun blast radiating away. Lawrence pointed the gun at Greg’s chest. ‘You won’t fire. That’d be too easy. Have you killed her?’

Lawrence lowered the gun. ‘Not yet.’

‘Where is she?’

‘I’ll take you to her. On my terms.’

Greg groaned. ‘Fuck you!’

‘We’re going to play a little game, Greg.’

‘Did you kill Francesca? Tell me!’

‘You remember the Thornton family game, don’t you? I know she’d have played it with you.’

‘You killed Grace, didn’t you?’

Lawrence watched Greg as he crouched awkwardly on the landing, fear making him pant and tremble, the realization of what had been done to him and the women he’d loved giving his face a mask of despair. And Lawrence felt omnipotent. A great peace came over him. It had been worth it. He had had his retribution; he had done this for her.

‘The laughing cavalier game, it was always so much fun, wasn’t it, Greg? Stand on the landing and close your eyes, find the secret hiding place.’ Lawrence backed into the secret room, keeping his eyes on Greg and pulled out a bottle and a lint cloth. ‘Now close your eyes, or she dies and this time you’ll never find her.’

‘This is all because I fell in love with your wife?’

‘You killed Cathy.’

‘Yes, I did, and I’ve paid for that my whole life!’ Greg sat there staring up at the gun. The barrels looked huge to him, like a gaping monster about to swallow him. But he also, finally, felt a liberation. Nicky had done this, had forced the issue, got Lawrence to come out of hiding, had finally made the picture clear. She had been the one close to solving the riddle of his life. He had been so wrapped up in bitter regret and denial that he had been incapable of understanding the depths to which the jilted husband had sunk. He felt a surge of love for his wife and he knew then that to gain just a little more time for Nicky he would close his eyes and put that cloth over his face all by himself.

J
enny and Sondra drove up to the front door of Hayersleigh House and parked next to a BMW. Both women got out and looked about.

‘Is that Nicky’s car?’ Sondra asked.

‘Or the husband’s,’ Jenny replied. A plane began to drill its engine noise into her skull as they moved round to the back door. She saw Sondra raise her head and mime an oath at the racket overhead.

Jenny knocked loudly on the door with her knuckles for a time, but no one appeared so she tried the door. It opened and they stepped inside. ‘Is anybody here?’ Jenny called out. ‘I’m a police officer.’

There was no reply. They walked together into the hallway and then Jenny stopped and sniffed. It was a faint, familiar trace. She sniffed again. Gunpowder.

She took the stairs two at a time, calling out Nicky’s name as she climbed, Sondra behind her.

She saw the blood first, arcing up the wall and smeared across the skirting board, and then she saw the body on the floor. A white male lay in a spreading pool of dark red, his hands clutching his stomach. Jenny crouched down low by his head so she was as close as possible to him. ‘I’m a police officer. An ambulance is on its way. Who shot you?’ His face was waxy, his lips drained of colour, but he was still clinging onto life.

Jenny could see the man’s mouth working, that a great and final effort was being made. ‘Stay with me, stay with me!’ She could hear Sondra on the phone, calling in all the backup they needed. ‘Who did this?’

The man’s mouth opened and he said something, a whisper Jenny couldn’t catch. She leaned closer, willing him to repeat it.

A roaring sound filled Troy’s head, underscored by the frenetic beats of a samba band. It was the sound of a crowd of thousands, pressed together in a west London street. The last image Troy saw before he died was of a figure flying through the air above him, her blonde hair splaying out behind her. It was Nicky hurling herself off scaffolding above the roar of the carnival, her longs legs stretched, her arms cartwheeling in the air.

Jenny saw the man’s neck relax for the final time. She stared down at him. Had he just said Nicky’s name? Maybe, but she couldn’t be sure. In this job it was important to be sure. She felt the familiar rush of frustration that they were too late; so often they were too late. She stood up and looked at the shotgun that had been dropped a short distance away. A blast in the stomach was a nasty way to die. She caught Sondra’s eye as she finished her call. Where was Nicky now? The sick feeling of being too late yet again swamped her.

They did a quick search of the top floor but found no one else in the house.

They came downstairs and Jenny looked through the ground-floor rooms and then followed Sondra outside. The girl was standing by the kitchen window, staring into space. ‘You OK?’ Jenny asked. Sondra didn’t reply. Jenny realized that this would be Sondra’s first dead body. As an initiation, it wasn’t pleasant. He would have been in a lot of pain for probably nearly an hour. Jenny patted Sondra on the shoulder. ‘It gets easier, you know.’

Sondra looked at her in surprise. ‘Oh, I’m fine. But I was thinking . . .’ She tailed off and took a few steps forward. ‘We know from Adam’s statement that the front door doesn’t open, so anyone who knew the house, including Nicky, would park round here by the back door, right?’ Sondra bent down low to the gravel. ‘So I think Nicky wasn’t driving that car out front.’

‘Go on.’

‘These marks.’ Sondra pointed to four long streaks in the gravel that gave out after a few metres. ‘Strange, aren’t they? Something heavy’s been dragged out of the back door. They suddenly stop, like when you put something in—’

‘A car.’

Sondra nodded. ‘Bodies are heavy . . .’ She shrugged. ‘It’s just a thought.’

Jenny swore and pulled out her phone.

L
iz was grappling with an unfamiliar sensation: indecision. She was a woman who worked in black and whites, who was comfortable with moral absolutes. She liked people or she didn’t, dismissed them or embraced them, believed them or didn’t, but now a weird feeling chewed at her guts. Was Nicky right? Was Greg not the man she had always thought he was? The idea that she could have been wrong was a shock to Liz; she revelled in her self-righteousness, the pleasure of her own point of view, knowing it was the right one.

She had come back to Greg’s house after a couple of hours of fruitless searching for Nicky but he was no longer there. Neither he nor Nicky would answer their phones and so she’d made a decision that had been difficult but necessary. She had phoned the police and told them what Nicky had told her, and then she had followed the path set by Nicky and driven down to Hayersleigh. Now she was barred from entering by a policeman standing by the large gate. Something huge was obviously happening for there to be a guard on the gate. ‘You can’t come through, madam,’ he said.