The Last Girl (32 page)

‘All right. I’ll admit I don’t generally have that reputation.’

‘And you earned your reputation the hard way.’

‘Hard for everyone else. I don’t mind being a twat.’

‘You might even say it comes naturally.’

‘Do you really think that’s what he meant? That he doesn’t want me upsetting Burt?’ He sounded hurt, his emotions unguarded for once.

‘It sort of makes sense.’

‘Nothing else does.’

‘No,’ I agreed.

‘Why did he go to see Skinner? What was he trying to achieve?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why did he take you?’

‘I don’t know that either.’

We sat in the car for another minute or so, listening to the heavy goods vehicles rumbling along in one lane, and a police car with its siren screaming racing past, unseen. Derwent stretched and checked his watch.

‘We’d better get on with this.’

I looked at him questioningly. ‘Not looking forward to it?’

‘Not much.’ He pulled a face. ‘Grieving parents are always a tough interview.’

‘She died eight years ago.’

‘That’s the thing, it doesn’t matter if it was eight hours or eighteen years. They never stop grieving.’

At first glance, Gerard Harman was not in the grip of grief. More importantly for us, perhaps, he was neither a doddering old man nor exceptionally fit. He was tall and thin with short grey hair, his face grave behind thick glasses. He was wearing a long-sleeved check shirt with the cuffs done up, some kind of brushed cotton that looked soft, but far too warm for the hot day. Green cords and brown walking boots completed the country gentleman look.

‘You’re late. I thought you weren’t coming. I was just
about
to take the dog for a walk.’ As if it proved something, he waved the lead he had been holding, and I became aware of a scrabbling sound coming from the door at the back of the hall.

‘We won’t take long.’ Derwent had put his foot over the threshold, casually, as if it was how he preferred to stand. I knew he was ready to stop Harman from closing the door in our faces.

‘You’d better come in.’ Harman had a particularly colourless voice, a monotone that gave little away, but I thought he was nervous. He turned and led the way into a small sitting room to the right, followed by Derwent, who left me to close the door. The bungalow smelled clean but stale, as if the windows were never opened. Probably they weren’t – even with the double-glazing there was no way to ignore the noise from the road. The house hadn’t been redecorated for a while but it was shabby rather than dated, the original choices of wallpaper and carpet bland enough to have lasted well.

‘Do you live here alone?’ Derwent asked, staring around the room.

‘Since my wife died.’

‘When was that?’

‘Ten years ago next month.’

‘That’s a long time to be on your own. I’d have thought you’d have spinsters and widows chasing after you.’

‘I’m not interested in that kind of thing.’ It was impossible to tell if he was offended; even his rate of blinking didn’t change. He turned to me. ‘Do sit down. I won’t be able to offer you anything to drink, I’m afraid. I can’t let Pongo out of the kitchen now. He’ll never settle. He saw the lead.’

‘What kind of dog is he?’

‘Mostly a springer spaniel, but not entirely. I got him from a local animal shelter.’

‘Springer spaniels are lovely dogs.’

His face lit up. ‘Yes, aren’t they?’

‘Can we bring this meeting of the Kennel Club to a close? Then we can get out of your hair.’ Derwent sounded bored.

‘Of course.’ Harman sat down in an armchair and lifted one leg over the other, using both hands. He saw me watching him. ‘I had a mild stroke a couple of years ago. This is the only souvenir.’

‘It must make it hard for you to manage Pongo.’

‘He’s usually quite understanding of my shortcomings. I got him so I had a reason to go for walks. The physios insisted I needed the exercise, but I found it terribly dull when there was no purpose to it.’

‘Does it stop you from doing much?’ Derwent asked, and I knew he was thinking of the crime scene, of the overturned tables and the way Vita had been hunted down. ‘I didn’t notice you limping.’

‘I drag my foot a little when I’m tired, and there isn’t a lot of strength in the leg at any time. That’s why it needs a bit of help with crossing over the other one.’ He looked down at it and tapped it gently. ‘Not so bad, really. Much improved from how it was.’

Inconclusive. Derwent evidently felt the same way. ‘We’re here to talk about Philip Kennford, as I mentioned on the phone.’

‘Yes. I was surprised.’ He pushed his glasses up to the bridge of his nose. ‘It was a name from the past.’

‘Not a name you like to hear?’

‘It doesn’t have positive connotations.’ Harman’s eyes went to a picture on the mantelpiece, a photograph of a teenage girl holding a rabbit and smiling.

Like Derwent, I had seen it as soon as we walked into the room and recognised the dead girl. Knowing the answer, I asked, ‘Is that your daughter?’

‘Yes. That’s Clara.’

‘How old was she when that was taken?’

‘Sixteen or seventeen.’ He smiled a little. ‘It was hard to
find
a good picture of her. One just of her, I mean. I have some with her mother, and some with me, but that was the only one of her on her own that was good enough to frame. Of course, she didn’t really look like that at the time she died.’

‘She was twenty-four.’

‘Yes. Still young. She had her whole life ahead of her, really.’ Behind his glasses, his eyes glistened, and I thought for one awful moment that he was going to cry. ‘But there we are. She had the misfortune to meet the wrong person and there was nothing I could do to warn her.’

‘Did you try?’

‘I had my concerns, so I tried to talk to her, yes. Maybe if her mother had been around, she might have confided in her. But she wouldn’t admit to me that there was anything wrong.’ He made a gesture with his hands that somehow conveyed absolute helplessness. ‘She was in love. She didn’t want to hear what her old dad thought. And to be honest, I didn’t have any idea what he was really like. If I had, I’d have kidnapped her and locked her away until she came to reason.’

Derwent cleared his throat in a hold-on-a-second-must-I-remind-you way. ‘Harry Stokes was acquitted.’

‘He put her in hospital three times before he killed her.’ The stark statement was enough to silence Derwent, no mean feat.

‘Wasn’t that mentioned at the trial?’ I asked.

‘She lied about how she’d injured herself whenever she had to see a doctor. Never made a complaint to the police.’ Harman shook his head, still bewildered. ‘He broke her nose and she said she’d tripped. He broke her wrist and she said she’d fallen downstairs. He gave her concussion and she told the doctors she was just clumsy.’

‘It’s not that unusual for victims of domestic violence to pretend it didn’t happen.’

He nodded. ‘The prosecutor got someone from a women’s refuge to testify about that. She said it took an average of thirty-six violent incidents before the victim would make a complaint. Maybe Clara had more fortitude than that, or maybe she was scared, but she was with him for two years and she never told anyone the truth.’

‘Not any of her friends?’

‘He made sure she didn’t have any. He wouldn’t let her speak to them or have a phone of her own. She used to call me now and then from a payphone and tell me she didn’t have any credit on her phone, but it was because he’d taken it away from her. He isolated her first. Then he made her dependent on him. Then he killed her.’

I had skim-read the file, but I asked, ‘How did she die?’

‘She bled to death.’

Derwent came back to life. ‘Sounds like murder to me. How did he get away with it?’

‘Well might you ask. He claimed he’d been out with friends and came back to find her lying in a pool of blood.’ A convulsive swallow. ‘He did go out, but she was already dead.’

‘What was the story? She tripped and landed on a knife?’ Not having done his homework even to the limited extent that I had, Derwent was genuinely curious.

‘It wasn’t that far-fetched, unfortunately. They had a glass door to their kitchen and she went through it.’

‘Not safety glass, then.’

‘It should never have been installed, but that was the landlord’s fault. He was a DIY enthusiast. He made it himself. A sheet of glass that was too thin to be used for that purpose superglued into a frame, so when she hit against it and it broke, there were long shards sticking up. She severed an artery in her leg. The pathologist said it wouldn’t have taken her long to die. A minute or two.’

‘You should’ve sued the landlord.’

Harman blinked at Derwent. ‘What would be the point?
Stokes
was going to kill her one day. If it hadn’t been the door, it would have been something else.’

‘But he wasn’t convicted. I suppose they couldn’t prove it wasn’t an accident.’

‘That was Kennford’s doing. He made a big fuss about forensics – there was no DNA on the door from anyone except Clara. Why should there have been? Stokes didn’t need to touch the door to push her through it. But the jury thought that was important. I could see them nodding when he talked about it in his final speech. Too much faith in him, not enough thinking.’ He tapped his forehead with a finger that shook very slightly, the strain of the conversation showing in the sweat pearling on his forehead and the tension that vibrated through him.

‘Kennford was just doing his job.’ Derwent sounded as if he was solidly on the QC’s side. No one would have guessed how he really felt about him.

‘He was doing what he calls his job. But it was so cynical.’ Harman drew a long quivery breath and let it out again. ‘He didn’t believe Stokes was innocent, you know. He said as much to me one day in a café near court when I happened to bump into him. He said, “Everyone deserves a proper defence, Mr Harman, no matter what they’ve done or what sort of shit they are.” And then he laughed and asked me not to tell anyone that he’d said that about his own client. I asked him if he thought he would win and he said no, the prosecution case was too strong. But he pulled it apart. Worse than that, he made Clara out to be a drunk, unstable, and said that was why she had left her job. She was a hotel receptionist before, but it was Stokes who made her leave. He didn’t like her talking to other men when he wasn’t there. Didn’t like her having her own income either. It was another way to control her.’

‘I believe that’s very common in domestic cases too,’ I said sympathetically.

‘She spoke three languages, you know. She was going
places.
She wanted to manage a hotel someday, but she was happy enough to start at the bottom and learn the trade. That was the sort of person she was – no sense of entitlement, a gentle girl. She was quiet but she always had lots of friends because she was loyal, and caring, and never had a bad word to say about anyone. Kennford said she was a loner and unsociable, and that was why Stokes had to go out to drink with his friends alone.’

‘Explaining why he left her in the house. But that doesn’t explain how she happened to fall through the door or why she was always getting injured,’ I pointed out.

‘She was covered in bruises when she died – all at different stages of healing, so there was a history of it; it wasn’t a one-off. The prosecutor said it proved that she was living in a dangerous environment. Kennford said she was clumsy – accident-prone, because of the drinking. And Clara was
never
a drinker.’

‘Had she consumed alcohol before she died?’

‘She was over the legal limit to drive, but only just. She’d had two glasses of wine, the pathologist estimated. It was a Friday night and they used to open a bottle of wine then.’ Harman stopped for a second and squeezed his hands together, agonised. ‘I bought her a case of red wine for Christmas that year. One of those special offers from the paper, you know. I thought she’d enjoy it, because she had picked up a taste for it when she spent a year in France. Kennford suggested to the jury that she was a raging alcoholic who would have been barely able to stand with the amount she’d had to drink. And he
knew
it wasn’t true.’ Harman pointed at the picture. ‘You can’t tell from that, but she was very slight. She’d been a gymnast as a teenager and she still had that physique, small and slender. The very thing that made her most vulnerable to Stokes was what Kennford suggested had killed her, that she was too small to cope with the amount of alcohol she had drunk. I thought it was loathsome.’

‘It must have been very difficult for you to sit in court and listen to that,’ I said.

‘It wasn’t easy, but I went every day. I owed her that much. Her mother would have wanted me there too. I went for both of them.’ Harman took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. ‘I didn’t get a lot out of it, I must admit.’

‘I still don’t see that Kennford did anything other than his job.’ Derwent, bullishly controversial.

‘You’re right. He was doing his job. It was cynical, the way he went about it, but that’s not against the rules. What bothered me was that he didn’t care about the consequences. He put a guilty man on the street.’