Authors: Derek Farrell
Falzone’s nostrils flared. His colour morphed through several shades of outraged purple before settling down and he lifted his eyes to mine. “Thank you, Danny. Thank you for bringing these matters to my attention. This will not be forgotten.”
I didn’t like the sound of the last statement.
“So if
he
didn’t kill her,” Jenny broke the moment, “who did?”
All eyes turned to me.
“Danny?” Robert prompted.
And at that moment the mobile vibrated twice. I touched the screen.
Two messages. Dear God, please let this be them.
I opened the message screen, scanned the incoming missives and looked up at the assembled group.
“Who indeed,” I said.
Chapter Fifty-Six
“There’s a more interesting question,” I began, “and it’s this:
how did Lyra die
?”
“Someone strangled her,” Reid announced flatly from the back of the room.
“Right. Only they didn’t just do that, did they? The killer didn’t just put their hands around her neck, do the deed, wipe off any surfaces they’d touched and leave. They throttled her, toe open packets of drugs and hurled them all over the room. What does that suggest?”
“Fury,” said Nick.
I nodded. “Fury sounds about right. This wasn’t someone who killed Lyra just because they wanted her dead. This was someone who was so consumed with rage that killing her wasn’t enough: they wanted to tear the place to pieces.
“Only that would have attracted attention and – despite their rage – the killer wasn’t stupid. They didn’t want to be caught. Or punished. But this was not a killing for profit. This was a killing by someone who had idolised Lyra for a lifetime, who’d set her up as something perfect and who had just discovered that their idol had feet of purest clay. The disappointment must have been intense. And then, of course, it turned from disappointment to outright rage and...”
“Leon?” Liz frowned. “But Leon’s dead. If he killed Lyra, who killed him?”
“Not Leon,” I said, “though he is the obvious suspect. This was someone who’d been pushed to the edge of loathing and had then plunged off the edge. So who’d been upset by Lyra that day?”
I looked around the table.
Jenny Foster snorted. “Pretty much everyone,” she snapped, wrapping her arms around herself.
“She’d pissed you off,” I prompted.
“She made a pass at my fiancée. As if Dom would have any interest in a dried-up old hag like her.”
“And you?” I turned to Dominic Mouret. “Had Lyra annoyed you that day?”
He shook his head. “Not especially; she could be difficult at the best of times, but she was no worse than usual.”
“So the presence of Leon Baker – a man who’d sworn that he’d write the defining biography of your subject – didn’t worry you?”
Mouret waved a hand dismissively. “I’m a professional writer,” he smirked. “Leon was a fan. Anything he’d write would have been nothing of any weight.”
“I wondered about that. Your first book –
Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On.
That’s a Shakespearean quote, isn’t it?”
Mouret nodded, confirming I’d got the title of his book and its origin, right.
“It wasn’t a celebrity biography was it?”
“You know it wasn’t,” he answered, “it was a memoir of my childhood.”
“Of an abused childhood,” I prompted, “of a boy abandoned by his mother, into an orphanage where he’s sexually and physically tortured for years.”
“Is this going somewhere?” Jenny asked. “Everyone knows Dom’s story; and how he was finally rescued by a wealthy couple who loved and helped him. What’s that got to do with Lyra’s murder?”
“Well Dom reckons he wasn’t particularly upset by Lyra on the day in question. But the thing is I saw the pass that Lyra made at him and I saw his reaction. I can imagine – to someone who was subjected to unwanted sexual advances from an early age – that what happened would be pretty upsetting.”
“I’m at peace with my past,” Mouret said. “I have nothing to be ashamed of; no guilty secrets.” This last was said whilst staring pointedly at Morgan and Liz.
Morgan Foster sighed heavily. “Listen, much as I’m enjoying this trip down memory lane, I fail to see the point.” He stood, gesturing to Liz Britton, who began to gather her handbag and jacket.
“The point,” I said, “is that I know who killed Lyra. And more importantly, why they did so.”
He paused. “So you say. But since arriving here today, all I’ve seen is a very poor gumshoe impression. I’m not prone to vulgarity, Danny, but piss or get off the pot.”
“Lyra’s past killed her,” I announced, somewhat melodramatically. “Not the booze and drugs tabloid-hell past. Something much older than that.”
Haynes lifted the device to his throat, but I cut his protest off. “Didn’t you ever wonder why Lyra vanished as suddenly as she did, Barry? Never wonder why she cut you off so completely? The woman who died was a very different one to the one you knew all those years ago. Everyone said so: time, life, had hardened her. But when did the hardening start?”
“I think it started when – just as she was about to become the star she always wanted to be – she realised she was pregnant with your child. And she panicked. You said she dropped off the face of the earth for about a year. What nobody realised was that she went away somewhere and had the child and put it up for adoption.
“But the child resembled its parents. Doris Chapel said as much at the funeral.
Still, at least he sent his boy
. I didn’t get it at first; thought she was mixing up a man called Harry with a man called Barry. But she wasn’t. She’d seen someone in the crowd she recognised.”
Barry Haynes opened and closed his mouth soundlessly.
“She’d recognised someone who looked like you, Barry, as a younger man. But what really sealed her fate was that she’d seen someone who – she realised too late – looked like her sister as a younger woman. Her last word–”
“Munchkin,” Nick offered from where he sat.
“Not
munchkin
,” I corrected him. “Doris and Eliza had one of those relationships that was built on casual insults.
Harelip Harry
, cos he had a harelip.
Dumpy Doris
and
The Oxo Kid
were the nicknames for some of the kids they grew up with. And Eliza’s nickname was
Bum Chin
.”
“What the fuck is a Bum Chin?” Chopper demanded.
“It’s a genetic development. A cleft chin. I’ve been reading about genetics the past few days: if neither of your parents had a dimpled chin, then you couldn’t possibly have one. But if one of your parents had one, there’s a strong probability you would too. And Lyra did. She was tormented by it to the point where – as soon as she could afford to – she had it surgically altered. Did you ever consider having yours altered, Dominic?” I asked.
All eyes turned to look at Mouret and Haynes let out a choked gasp.
“No. No. No. No!” Jenny spoke. “Dominic couldn’t have killed Lyra. He was with me all night. We told you this already. We told the police.” She looked desperately from her fiancé to the two policemen sitting at the opposite end of the room.
“Yes,” I nodded, “you did. Dominic kindly provided you with an alibi. Lots of people were sniffing around you as a possible suspect and suddenly you have no opportunity to have killed Lyra because you were with him all night.”
“Except, of course, that didn’t just provide you with an alibi; it provided Dominic with one too. And one he desperately needed. Because he wasn’t with you all night, was he?”
“Dom?” Jenny frowned, looking from me to Reid and Nick and on to her silent fiancé.
Mouret sighed. “So – assuming this makes
any
sense – why on earth would I off Leon?”
“For the same reason you killed Doris: self-preservation. I think you’d spent your whole horrible childhood convincing yourself that your mother had really wanted to keep you; that your being placed into the hell you endured was not her fault; that if only you could find her, you could make better all the horrible things in your life. In your book you described your mother as a woman who’d been forced to give you away and who had died before you could find her. The classic saintly mother, now dead. But that bit was fiction, because you didn’t find out who your mother actually was until you had published and at that point, you had the money to mount a mummy-hunt.”
“So when you did finally find her and realised who she was, you were thrown. This wasn’t a weak little woman who might have been bullied into giving up her child. You needed to understand more and I think you were still desperately hoping that you’d be able to prove that Lyra was the mother you always dreamed of.”
“This is pointless,” Mouret murmured calmly. “I’m not hearing any proof other than the fact that I have a cleft chin. Not exactly fingerprints is it?”
I tapped the phone. “Leon heard rumours that Lyra gave birth to a child out of wedlock; he knew the child had been adopted and, I guess he slowly put the pieces together. His neighbour thought he’d gone to Somerset, which made me think that Liz – the West Country accent and all – had something to do with his death. But of course, what he’d actually said to his neighbour was that he was going to Somerset House. He thought that’s where the Central Register of Births, Marriages and Deaths is kept. Course,” I added, somewhat unnecessarily, “it moved to Middleton Street in the late 90s. But once he’d figured it out, I guess, after years of abuse and mockery at the hands of Lyra and her coterie, he finally had the upper-hand over someone in the inner circle. Problem is, Dominic, my friend just texted me. She’s on her way here in a cab. From Middleton Street. With a copy of your birth certificate.”
Mouret frowned. “Means nothing,” he responded simply.
“On its own, I’d agree with you,” I admitted, tapping the phone again, “but if it leads the police to search your home, it might bring to light, say, the items you stole from Leon’s home – you really should have destroyed them immediately, you know.”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re on about,” Mouret spat back, his eyes blazing angrily. I stared him down, because I knew exactly what the cops would find; and I knew because the ASBO twins had just completed a search of Mouret’s flat, found the photos, the manuscript and the notebooks that had sealed Leon’s fate; and reported back to me their exact position in case the coppers needed a prompt.
But I didn’t think they’d need a prompt. The blazing anger in Mouret’s eyes was dwindling, a dark emptiness replacing them.
“You’d been tiptoeing around the subject for months, while you worked on the book. You even sent Lyra a rosemary bush. What’s that line in Shakespeare?
There’s rosemary; that’s for remembrance
? A Shakespearean quote. Just like the title of your book. You’re trying to remind her and she’s spouting that stuff about never wanting kids, about what a drag they are on someone. Then she’s demanding drugs and finally, she’s propositioning you. The humiliation – the complete realisation that the only thing that had kept you going all those years had been a complete fiction – must have been horrible.”
“I’d been such a coward,” Mouret said, his eyes seeming to be looking into another plane. “Dropping hints, afraid of telling her outright; like, once-announced, I couldn’t take it back. But that wasn’t getting me anywhere, was it?”
He looked around the room, his gaze catching each of us in turn, then fading back into that other place – that scene that only he could see.
“So you told her,” I prompted.
Dominic smiled, a sad broken little curve of those full pink lips. “She laughed at me. ‘Sweetheart,’ she said, ‘People like me don’t have children – let alone forty-year-old bastards.’ She told me to forget we’d ever met, pack my stuff up ‘and head back to your life, there’s a good boy.’”
“So you strangled her.”
“I don’t even know if I meant to. I just – something snapped. One minute she was laughing in my face and the next… I couldn’t breathe. My hands were shaking so much. And she was dead.”
“And Doris?” I asked. “You gonna tell me you snapped with Doris too?”
“Doris…” he murmured, “was where it all started to get out of control.”
“She hadn’t seen Lyra in years, hadn’t seen any of the family for decades,” I said, “yet she nodded to you like you were family. Which, of course, you were. It wasn’t until she realised
that you weren’t supposed to be
that she figured out who you had to be. So you slipped off to Morgan’s room – you knew he had a heart problem and you knew that enough of those pills would shut her up.”
“My stepfather had the same heart condition,” Dominic sighed. “I’d read the warnings on the pill packet. Used to dream of killing him with them, but never had the guts. His heart condition finally did for him anyway. I guess I found the guts with Doris.”
“So you slipped them into her gin and watched her die. Even as she was dying, she tried to tell us. Her last word and staring at the picture of Lyra. Only she wasn’t saying Pumpkin. Or Bumpkin. Or Munchkin; she was saying Bum Chin. The nasty nickname she used to call Lyra by when they were kids. Because up till she had surgery – before she had the eyes and the nose fixed, the teeth capped and the chin done, Lyra Day had looked just like you.”