Authors: Janice Frost
All thoughts of regaining Taylor’s trust, or putting him at ease were forgotten. Ava stood up clumsily, spilling red wine across the pretty white broderie anglaise tablecloth that had belonged to her grandmother, “S . . . sorry,” she stammered, trying to be calm but suspecting her dinner guest had already seen the sudden terror in her eyes. At that moment, she caught sight of Camden curled on the floor at her feet.
“Camden startled me,” she said, simultaneously giving her poor cat a kick that brought him, squealing and startled, to his feet. Camden darted out from under the table and streaked across the kitchen, a whiz of black, white and orange fur disappearing out the cat flap. To her intense relief, Taylor laughed.
Ava’s thoughts were racing. How could she prove it? Amy and Becci themselves had put off the service appointment arranged by their landlord which might have alerted them to the danger.
It had been an uncommon but not impossible fault that had been found in the appliance. Someone with the appropriate knowledge and skill would have been able to make deliberate tampering look like a tragic accident. Was this enough to build a case for circumstantial evidence around? If Roxy could be persuaded to come forward, if Amy’s extravagant spending the afternoon after Simon Foster had seen her entering and leaving Taylor’s flat could be cited as evidence that she was blackmailing him. So many ifs when what she needed were certainties . . . Ava was paralysed with doubt and indecision.
Above all, it was important to remain calm. Ava’s instincts were screaming at her to get Taylor out of her home immediately, but how to oust him without raising suspicion?
It didn’t even occur to Ava that she was in any personal danger from the man sitting opposite her at her kitchen table. So utterly absorbed was she in working out how to expose him for the detestable killer that he was, that she almost missed what he was saying to her as she creamed dark, velvety chocolate mousse across her plate with the back of a silver dessert spoon — another hand-me-down from her grandmother. Slowly, on the back of her delayed processing, his chilling words insinuated themselves into her consciousness and she looked up.
“ . . . so how should I dispose of you, Ava? Another dodgy gas fire would look far too suspicious so soon after the regrettable deaths of Amy’s young friends. And I doubt whether your dashing Inspector Neal could be convinced that you’re the sort of woman who might stick her head in the oven. That still leaves me with plenty of other options, some more practical than others, that wouldn’t point the finger of suspicion in my direction.”
Ava stood up abruptly, her chair legs screeching on the flagstone tiles of the kitchen floor. Almost simultaneously, quick as a predator, Taylor was on his feet. Ava rounded the table and made a dash for the opening leading to the other room, Taylor right behind her.
The killer heels were a mistake but there was no time to kick them off. Ava made it as far as the doorway before her ankle suddenly gave way and she went down with a thud, looking up in time to see the satisfied grin on Taylor’s face as he grabbed her arm and deftly twisted it behind her back, a move that she had executed on others so many times that she knew it was useless to struggle.
From her undignified position on the kitchen floor, Ava looked up into the amused eyes of a cold-blooded killer.
* * *
Jim Neal laid his mobile phone on the desk in front of him, staring at it as though it had been the phone itself that had conveyed Anna Foster’s shocking news to him some hours ago, “
Simon remembers what he saw the night Amy’s birth mother died and his sister disappeared. His father beat Debbie up, but he didn’t kill her. It was Nancy. Nancy Hill forced a load of pills down her throat and held a pillow over her face until she stopped moving
.”
Neal and Ava already knew that Nancy had abducted Amy, but the thought that she might have been Debbie Clarke's killer had not crossed his mind for a single moment. An old mentor of his had once cautioned him never to think of the past as ‘another country’ when it came to a murder investigation. Always go back to the beginning, had been his refrain, and Neal had lost count of the times throughout his own career when the old man’s axiom had been vindicated.
The explanation for Amy’s murder reached far into the past and involved long kept secrets and hidden lies. Amy’s death was the end result of something that had been set in motion years before.
With a flash of insight, Neal pictured Wade Bolan, heard his protestations of innocence, his sneering words about having the perfect alibi for the night of Amy’s death. He was serving a life sentence for murdering his wife; he had been suspected of abducting and killing Amy, an accusation that he had always denied. He had admitted to beating Debbie, but insisted that the injuries she sustained at his hands could not have resulted in death, maintaining, ironically, that he had beaten her enough times before to know how far to go.
It had been the overdose that killed her, but had the pathologist overlooked signs of smothering? Neal knew that homicidal smothering was not always easy to detect. The empty bottle of pills together with her injuries might have seemed like proof enough to a tired, overworked or downright negligent pathologist.
In the hours since Anna Foster’s revealing phone call, Neal had been busy, making calls of his own, forming hypotheses and trying to think outside the box whilst remaining grounded in solid detective practice. He had also been in touch with Ava Merry for an update on her follow up interviews regarding Bradley Turner and his movements the night of Amy Hill’s murder.
Five minutes ago, he had received a phone call from a contact in the Met who had provided some vital information that was helping him to piece the puzzle of Amy’s murder together. Something had been niggling away at him since his visit to Wormwood Scrubs. It had to do with something the guard had said when they enquired if Simon had been to visit his father.
No one fitting Simon’s description had visited, but the guard mentioned that Wade had recently had a visit from someone who was not a regular visitor. On a sudden impulse, or perhaps because Bradley Turner was so much in his thoughts, Neal had faxed a photograph of Bradley to his contact, who had shown it to the prison guard and received a positive identification. He had used his mother’s maiden name, Henry, which had not sounded any alarm bells.
Earlier in the day, Ava had texted him with the suggestion that Bradley might have had time to drive to Stromford, kill Amy and be back in bed in his flat-share in Sheffield in the window of time when his mate was asleep. The pub crawl could have been a carefully constructed alibi.
Neal sighed. His old mentor’s words about the past impacting on the present kept hammering away in his head. Bradley Turner had a role in Amy’s death, of that he was convinced, but was he the killer? Of that, Neal was less sure.
Another explanation for Amy’s death was taking root in Neal’s mind; on the surface it seemed preposterous, too far-fetched to be real, but nevertheless . . .
He needed to speak with Ava, get her slant on things, but he had been calling her number repeatedly over the past hour, and she hadn’t answered. Ava wasn’t the kind of person who switched off her phone on a day off, or let it go unanswered; she was far too conscientious for that. The only time she was likely to part with her mobile, was when she was in the pool and, even then, she would follow up missed calls immediately after retrieving her belongings from her locker, of this he was certain.
Still, she had let him down on two occasions recently. Neal looked at his watch. It was still early evening. Archie and Maggie were due back from the cinema soon. If he had not managed to contact Ava by the time they arrived home, then he would swing by her place and the pair of them could talk it through.
* * *
Taylor smacked Ava hard across the face, bringing tears to her eyes. The force of the blow jolted her neck painfully sideways, but she turned immediately to look him in the eye, with, “Whatever way you play this, Taylor, you’re finished. What’s it going to look like if I suddenly turn up dead? Don’t you think no-one else knows of my suspicions about you?”
“Shut up, bitch!” Taylor said, jerking her to her feet, shoving her towards a chair, forcing her to sit down, “You’re not in any position to give me advice.”
“You tampered with the gas fire in Amy’s room and didn’t even bother to go back and repair it after she — so conveniently for you — turned up dead. You killed Becci and Gary.”
“I didn’t know her stupid little flatmate was going to swap rooms before Amy was even in the ground.” No regret about the deaths he had inadvertently caused, only irritation that things had not gone according to plan, Ava noted.
“If you’d stopped at raping and molesting underage girls, it would have been bad enough, Taylor, but double homicide? That’s a big step up,” Ava taunted, steeling herself for the inevitable blow.
“Shut it!” This time Taylor used his fist, and the force of the impact of his hard knuckles on her face sent her senses reeling. Ava tasted copper in her mouth and felt warm blood trickling down her throat. Perhaps she would do well to stop antagonising him. Reluctant as she was to follow his order, Ava kept her mouth shut, considering her options, except her head was still befuddled from the blow, and she couldn’t think of a single one that made any kind of sense in the circumstances.
* * *
By the time Maggie’s cherry-red Ka pulled into the drive, it was gone eight o’clock and Jim Neal was more than a little irritated at Ava’s failure to get in touch. It wasn’t that he begrudged her a bit of off time, just that she should know that he would not call her at this hour if it were not something urgent. He felt let down again. The door slammed and Archie and Maggie burst back into his life.
“Dad! Guess what Auntie Maggie said to Ryan Douglas’s mum?”
“I’m all ears,” Neal said, with a quick look at his sister, who was lurking by the doorway, ready to make a quick getaway by the looks of it. Never one who could be accused of being subtle in her approach to human relations, Maggie’s outspokenness had caused Neal many a blush in front of other parents or even teachers at parents’ evenings, to which she always seemed to assume she had an automatic invitation as a sort of surrogate mother figure.
“If they’re saying something about Archie, I’ve a right to know what it is,” she had insisted on many such occasions. And Neal couldn’t disagree given the significant role that Maggie had been playing in Archie’s life for some time now.
“Well, Jordan Prescott tripped me up when I was running for the ball just so he could substitute for me — he didn’t ‘cos I wasn’t hurt that much,” Archie said, looking down at a bandaged knee. “His mum said it was my fault even though everyone was saying it was obvious Jordan did it deliberately. Auntie Maggie got into an argument about it and called Mrs Prescott a bloody lying old cow.”
As the words left his lips, Archie looked at his dad challengingly, knowing he could hardly be at fault for a direct quotation of his aunt’s words. Bad language was banned in the Neal household, and it was usually Maggie who forgot to be a role model.
Neal knew Mrs Prescott pretty well. He had stood next to her at enough football matches and sporting events at Archie’s school to know that she was a deeply unpleasant woman and an indulgent mother whose thuggish son displayed early signs of psychopathy on the playing field.
More times than he could count, Neal had felt the urge to throttle the woman with his bare hands, and it was all he could do to suppress an approving smile at Maggie. Instead, he got ready to adopt the stance of shocked, indignant parent, but before he could get a word in, Maggie was off on a rant.
“She was setting a bad example for the kids. Honestly, Jimmy, she had it coming. It was high time someone stood up to her. She’s an arrogant, shameless bully and her son’s a little shit. If Archie sees me standing up to Jordan’s mum, he’s more likely to stand up to Jordan and other kids like him. Besides, kids need to know that it’s not all right for people to behave like that just because they’re grown up. I mean you’re a bloody copper Jimmy, you must know what happens to kids who don’t learn to look out for themselves.” Leave it to Maggie to come up with a justification for almost anything, Neal thought, but in this instance he couldn’t disagree.
“Thanks for taking him, Maggie, and for feeding him. And the life lesson.” Archie had already told him about the McDonalds, a rare treat, as junk food was usually banned.
“I’ve told you before to stop thanking me for looking after Archie. He’s my nephew and I love him to bits and besides, you know how guilty I feel for living here rent free — surely I can help out?”
“Actually, could you help out a wee bit more this evening?” Neal asked. “Something’s come up and I need to go out.” Maggie stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek.
“No problem. We’ll watch Top Gear and finish that Darren Shan book about the vampire magician at bedtime.”
“Thanks, Mags. You’re a star. I’ll just nip up and say goodnight.”
Before leaving the house, Neal tried Ava’s number again. As he listened to the ringtone, an image of the photographs she had shown him of her rather lonely cottage flashed into his mind and, for the first time that evening, he felt a stab of worry. Why had it not occurred to him before that Ava might not be answering because she was in some kind of trouble?
* * *
Ava listened to her mobile ring for the third time, wondering why Taylor seemed untroubled by the sound. Ever since he’d punched her in the face, she had kept silent, not wishing to antagonise him further, particularly as he was agitated enough already. If he were as smart as a professor ought to be, he would have forced her to send a reassuring text to the persistent caller (whom she knew to be Neal) but so far this solution did not seem to have occurred to him. He doesn’t have a clue how to play this, she thought, wondering how she could use this to her advantage.