A Dead Man Out of Mind (32 page)

‘Ben's message, of course.'

‘Who is Ben?'

‘You don't have to pretend,' Nicola assured her. ‘She can't hear, even if she presses her ear against the door. But if this will make you feel better . . .' She switched on her bedside radio, which was tuned to Radio 1, and turned the volume up. ‘Now we can talk. Tell me what Ben said.'

‘But I don't know any Ben,' insisted Ruth.

‘If you don't know Ben,' Nicola said slowly, fixing her with feverish and rather beautiful eyes, ‘then who are you? And what are you doing here?'

Ruth knelt down beside the bed; her voice matched the other girl's in intensity. ‘I'm here because of Rachel – Rachel Nightingale. Miss Bright told me that you cared about Rachel.'

Nicola's eyes grew wider, and her mouth opened in a soundless ‘O'. ‘But she's dead,' she whispered. ‘Rachel is dead.'

‘Yes, and I'm trying to find out who killed her!' Ruth blurted out passionately. ‘Rachel was wonderful, and I don't want them to get away with it! The police don't care. She didn't die by accident. I've got to find out who killed her!'

Nicola flung herself down on the bed and turned her back to Ruth. ‘No,' she said, her voice muffled in her pillow. ‘Just leave it.'

‘I can't leave it, and neither can you. Not if you cared about Rachel.' There was no response, so Ruth leaned over the recumbent girl and added a little more loudly, ‘And there was Father Julian, as well. Did you know Father Julian? Did you know that someone murdered him?'

Covering her ears with her hands, Nicola spoke stonily. ‘Just go away. I won't listen to you.'

Roughly Ruth pulled a hand away and spoke close to the other girl's ear. ‘And now someone has killed Miss Bright.'

‘No!' Nicola turned to face her, her eyes huge in her paper-white face. ‘You're making that up!'

‘On Monday morning,' Ruth said deliberately. ‘Someone went to her house, and killed her. So that she wouldn't tell what she knew about who murdered Rachel and Father Julian.'

‘Oh my God.' Tears brimmed in the luminous eyes, spilling over and running down the full cheeks. ‘It's true, isn't it? Mum didn't tell me.'

‘It's true, all right.' For emphasis, or out of wilful cruelty, she told her, ‘They went into her house and smothered her with a carrier bag.'

‘Oh God.' Nicola covered her face with her hands. ‘I liked Miss Bright.'

‘So did I. Don't you see, then, that you've got to help me? You've got to tell me what you know!'

‘Don't
you
see – you've got to get out of here, and don't ever come back.' Nicola's voice dropped to a whisper in volume but lost none of its vehemence. ‘I'm cursed,' she said, with the extraordinary egocentricity of the young. ‘All the people I talk to end up dead. Don't you see – it's all my fault! They'd all still be alive if it weren't for me!'

Ruth tried to take it in. ‘What on earth are you saying?'

‘It's God's punishment on me for disobeying my parents.' The tears trickled faster; she reached for a tissue.

‘What a load of rubbish!' declared Ruth in a robust whisper.

‘No – I promise you it's true! I talked to Father Julian, and he died. Then I talked to Rachel and
she
died. And now Miss Bright!'

‘They didn't just die – they were murdered!'

Nicola gave her head a hopeless shake. ‘It doesn't matter.'

‘Of course it matters!' Ruth leaned down so that her face was only an inch or two from the other girl's. ‘You've got to tell me what you know – you've
got
to. You owe it to Rachel.'

For a moment it hung in the balance, as Nicola stared into Ruth's eyes. Then she made up her mind. ‘Yes, all right,' she said quietly. ‘If you really want to know, I'll tell you.'

She did just that, concisely and unemotionally, over the next quarter of an hour, until the sound of the key turning cut her off in mid-sentence. Instantly she composed her face into a smile, which she turned towards the door as her mother entered.

‘Don't you think that this gossip session has gone on long enough?' Dolly Topping said in a jolly voice. ‘I, for one, think that it has.'

‘Sophie's just been telling me about everything that's been happening at school while I've been . . . sick,' Nicola explained lightly. ‘You wouldn't believe some of her stories.'

‘Would you girls like a cup of tea?'

Ruth looked at her watch. ‘Thanks awfully, Mrs Topping, but I really must be going. My mum will be expecting me.'

Dolly saw her to the door, then returned to Nicola's room with her daughter's tea. ‘What a nice, polite girl,' she commented. ‘You must have her round again, when you're feeling better.'

Bursting with her news, Ruth went straight to Lucy's house. She let herself in with her key, to find her aunt in the sitting room curled up on the sofa, feet up, sipping a cup of tea.

Lucy, who had been listening to Choral Evensong on Radio 3, looked up, startled at the girl's precipitate arrival. ‘Ruth! Whatever are you doing here? What's wrong? Where's David?'

‘Oh, never mind him,' the girl said impatiently. ‘He's still at work, for all I know. Or care. But, Aunt Lucy – wait till you hear what I've found out!'

‘Does he know that you've come home by yourself?' Lucy persisted.

‘No, I just walked out. But that doesn't matter. I've just been—'

‘He'll be worried sick, then. I'd better ring him and tell him that you're home safely.'

‘All you care about is
him
.' Ruth's voice lost its excitement, became shrill and aggrieved. ‘I've got something important to tell you, and you won't even listen to me.'

For once Lucy was firm. ‘Whatever it is, it can wait until David gets home. I'm going to ring him now. And you'd better have a jolly good reason for doing what you've done, young lady!' she added with unaccustomed severity.

Unchastened and unrepentant, Ruth helped herself to Lucy's biscuits while her aunt went out to use the phone.

David
hadn't
missed her, he was chagrined to admit – to himself if not to Lucy. If he had been aware of the unusual tranquillity around the offices, he had accepted it gratefully – after all, if you went looking for trouble, you usually found it. So he'd stayed at his desk and enjoyed the brief if unexplained respite from Ruth's astringent presence.

After Lucy's call he came home straightaway, though; partly to propitiate his guilt and partly to assuage his curiosity. She had said that Ruth had found out something important: what on earth could it be?

The girl was in a fever of impatience by the time they'd all gathered in the sitting room. ‘I've been to see Nicola Topping,' she burst out.

‘Nicola Topping? Who on earth is she?' demanded David.

‘Dolly Topping's daughter, of course.' She glared at him scornfully. If she'd dared, she would have added ‘stupid', as she would have done with her brothers.

‘How did you know that Dolly Topping had a daughter?' Lucy asked.

‘Miss Bright told me. And she told me that she'd been close to Rachel, though her mum didn't know it. So when you said that Father Julian had had an appointment with someone called NT, I thought that it might have been Nicola instead of her father.'

David, though secretly impressed by her deductive powers, was not amused. ‘Why on earth didn't you say?'

‘Because,' she muttered rebelliously, ‘you were keeping things from
me.
So I decided to investigate it on my own. Then you'd be sorry that you didn't tell me everything.
And
,' she went on, her level of excitement rising again, ‘I managed to see her. I was really clever – I pretended that I was a friend from school, so that her mother would let me in the house to see her. And she talked to me! She told me everything!' Ruth paused momentously. ‘So now I know who killed Rachel. And Father Julian, and Miss Bright.'

It was a poignant story, all the more heartrending for being narrated by someone who was still almost a child, as told to her by another who was very little older. Lucy and David listened, appalled yet fascinated, as Ruth related Nicola's tale.

In love with a boy of another race, against her mother's implacable – though not unexpected – opposition, Nicola Topping had confided in Father Julian Piper. Father Julian had been sympathetic, even to the extent of promising to marry the two young people when they reached eighteen and no longer needed their parents' consent. But after Father Julian's death, the girl had been without a confidante until the new curate had arrived at St Margaret's.

She'd lost no time in baring her soul to Rachel Nightingale. Rachel, too, had been sympathetic but cautious of becoming involved, given the virulence of Dolly's hatred for her. ‘Wait until you're eighteen,' she had advised with prudence.

Desperate to take some sort of action, to seize the initiative from her mother, Nicola had deliberately become pregnant, believing that her parents would then have to allow her marriage. She had underestimated her mother. ‘You're not marrying that wog,' Dolly had declared implacably. ‘And you're not presenting me with a half-breed grandchild. It's out of the question.'

On the last afternoon of Rachel's life, a frantic Nicola had gone straight from school to see her, pouring out her fearful dilemma. Her parents hadn't relented, the marriage would not be allowed, and now there was the added complication of the baby to consider. What should she do? Her mother – that highly principled woman whose latest ideological involvement was with an anti-abortion group – was insisting that the pregnancy be terminated, secretly and at once. Nicola was resisting, and seeking support for her resistance. Rachel, feeling that her support would be counterproductive as far as the girl's parents were concerned, advised her to talk to Vera Bright, a woman to whom the senior Toppings might listen. On Nicola's return home from Rachel's there had been a terrible scene – the worst yet. She'd admitted her visit to Rachel; her mother had been livid.

And then Rachel was dead. Nicola, overcome with grief and guilt, had taken Rachel's final advice and had gone to see Vera Bright a few days later. There, in an emotional encounter, she had discovered why Rachel had sent her to that particular person.

She'd poured out her dilemma to the older woman, and had begged her to tell her what to do. ‘Don't let them bully you,' Vera had insisted forcefully. ‘Don't let them ruin your life.' Then, amidst tears on both sides, she had revealed her own story.

The Romeo to Vera's Juliet had been an American airman, in those long-ago wartime years. They had wanted to be married; her parents had been adamant in their opposition. ‘No daughter of ours is going to marry a foreigner and go off to some foreign country to live,' Dr Bright had stated immovably. Like Nicola, young Vera had seen pregnancy as an escape route. It had seemed foolproof: in those days, unwed motherhood was a stigma too terrible to contemplate, and abortion was illegal. Her parents would have to consent to the marriage, or face public shame.

Vera had underestimated her father, as Nicola had underestimated her mother. Fate had played a role, as well: tragically, Gerry Hansen had been shot out of the sky before he even knew that he was to become a father. And Dr Bright had performed the abortion himself.

In the long years following, he had never let his daughter forget how she had disgraced him, or missed an opportunity to remind her of her indebtedness to him. ‘You've made your bed, girl, and now you'll lie in it,' he'd been fond of saying, whenever making some particularly unreasonable demand. But the life had gone out of Vera with Gerry Hansen's death, and the loss of her baby. Her mother had died not long after – of shame, Dr Bright had insisted – and Vera had almost willingly embraced the life of servitude to a selfish old man's whims.

But she hadn't wanted to see Nicola take the same path; it was almost as if, in Nicola, she was being given a second chance to redeem her own folly. ‘I've ruined my life. You mustn't ruin yours,' she'd insisted, adding, ‘And that baby's.'

Galvanised into strength by Vera's support, Nicola had returned home to do battle for her baby's life. But over the nightmarish days that followed, locked in her room and on starvation rations, she'd been gradually worn down until, at last, crushed into submission by her mother's iron will, she'd had the abortion. Quickly, quietly. In a private clinic in the country, where the Toppings weren't known. Then back to her locked room for recuperation, insulated by her mother from the outside world, from news of Vera's death, from Ben. From everything, until a persistent girl who called herself Sophie had managed to penetrate the fortress and reach her in her misery and her guilt. Guilt upon guilt. Guilt about the baby, about Father Julian, about Rachel. And now about Vera Bright as well.

As Ruth drew near the end of the story, Lucy found that she'd been holding her breath. She let it out consciously in a sigh, then bowed her head, her hands still clenched.

‘So did she actually tell you that her mother had killed them?' David demanded when she'd finished. ‘Rachel, Father Julian, and Vera Bright?'

‘Well, no,' Ruth admitted. ‘She didn't have a chance to tell me – her mother came in the room before we got that far. She was just telling me that she'd heard her mother go out on Monday morning, when Miss Bright was murdered. And that her mother shops in Knightsbridge. But I'm sure that it was Dolly Topping who killed them, because they'd tried to help Nicola. And I know that Nicola thinks so, too – otherwise why would she feel so guilty?'

There were dimensions of guilt and variations of guilt that Ruth, in her youth and arrogance, couldn't begin to comprehend, David realised, feeling tremendously old. He took Lucy's hand and squeezed it, then addressed himself to her rather than to Ruth. ‘Well, love. What do we do now?'