Ruth Galloway (57 page)

Judy hardly dares to breath. She knows it is vital that Sister Immaculata goes on speaking so she prays that no one else comes into the conservatory, that no well-meaning soul offers them tea or coffee, that the elderly nun doesn't become too weak to continue.

‘Who killed her?' she prompts gently.

But when Sister Immaculata turns to look at her, Judy sees that the old woman is no longer there. The eyes, full of anguish and brimming with tears, are the eyes of Orla McKinley.

‘I was only twenty-three,' she says. ‘He called me his Jocasta. I was twenty when the baby was born. Too young. I didn't know. I was only an ignorant girl from County Clare. He was so much cleverer. He knew all about history, about Ancient Rome. About the gods. About the terrible things you had to do to placate them.'

‘The baby,' prompts Judy, a cold hand starting to close around her heart.

‘My baby,' says Sister Immaculata, her face shining now with some remembered light. ‘My Bernadette.'

‘You had a baby?'

‘A little girl. I had her for three years. And then he killed her. He said the gods demanded it.'

The cold has now spread through Judy's entire body. ‘Christopher Spens killed your baby?' she whispers.

Sister Immaculata does not seem to hear. ‘He said that the gods needed a sacrifice. We had to make the walls safe again. Annabelle had died, he said, because the walls weren't safe. We had to offer the gods something precious. That's why he killed her, he said.'

‘So he killed your baby
as a sacrifice
?'

‘It was his baby too,' says Sister Immaculata sadly, ‘that didn't seem to make a difference though.'

‘It was his baby too,' echoes Judy.

‘I knew it was wrong.' Sister Immaculata grasps Judy's hand. ‘I knew it was wrong. A sin. And sin catches up with you, doesn't it? That's what the sisters used to say, back home in Ireland. Well, I sinned. With him. And I got pregnant and had the baby. Born in sorrow, that's what they say. A bastard. Well, she paid the price, didn't she? My Bernadette.'

‘How did he kill her?' Judy knows she must get the whole story. She'll have to come back and take a proper statement but somehow she knows that this chance might not come again. Sister Immaculata has kept her secret for over fifty years and now she is choosing to talk. She mustn't stop now.

‘I was washing clothes in the laundry,' says the nun wearily, ‘the maids had the morning off. When I went to check on her she was dead. Stabbed in her cot. There was blood over the walls, the covers, the floor – everywhere. He wanted me
to put my hands in her blood. It was part of the ritual, he said.'

‘What did you do?' asks Judy in horror.

‘I covered up for him,' says Sister Immaculata sharply, ‘didn't I tell you?'

‘How?'

‘I disappeared. He buried the body in the garden. Said he would dig her up later and put her under the door. An offering to Janus. The head would go in the well, he said. I left. I left that day, went back to Ireland. Everyone thought I'd taken Bernadette with me. That crazy unreliable Irish girl, they would have said. I did it to protect him.'

‘But why?' Judy almost wails.

The nun looks at her with a curious expression, almost of pity, on her face. ‘I still loved him, you see. That was the worst thing. He'd killed my baby and I still loved him. I think now that was the biggest sin of all.'

‘So you went back to Ireland?'

‘I went back and I became a nun. What else can you do when you've committed a mortal sin? Then, years later, Father Hennessey came to the convent. He was looking for sisters to work in his children's home. When he told me where it was, I knew. God had sent him. It was my chance to be near Bernadette again. I used to talk to her. At night. I used to walk in the grounds and talk to her. They were the happiest years of my life.'

‘Did Father Hennessey know?'

‘Oh no. He suspected. Not about Bernadette but he knew I had a secret. He tried to get me to tell him. The truth will set you free, he used to say. Free! I'll never be free.'

As she says the last words, her head slumps forwards on her chest.

‘Sister Immaculata?' Judy bends over the huddled figure. She is still breathing, harsh uneven breaths, but her eyes are closed.

Instantly the Sister is at their side.

‘You'd better go now,' she says to Judy.

Outside, on the seafront, Judy takes great gulps of salty air. It is as if she can feel the nun's painful struggle for breath inside her own lungs. She shakes her head, wanting to rid it of the image of the baby, the blood-soaked cradle, the terrified mother, the crazed father, the knife gleaming in his hand …

She forces herself to think logically, to switch off the horror film now running on a continuous loop in her brain (she can even smell the house – lavender polish and lilies and the sour undercurrent of blood). She is a police officer and she has a job to do. Judy shelters in the porch of one of the Gothic hotels to ring Nelson. It is raining and a sharp sea wind is blowing along the deserted promenade. Typical English summer weather.

He answers on the first ring and she tells the story as unemotionally as she can.

‘Jesus.' She can hear Nelson's sharp intake of breath and knows that he, too, is not unaffected. Not that he would ever show it, of course.

‘Christopher Spens got the nanny pregnant and then killed her baby as an offering to the gods?'

‘That's what she said, sir.'

‘Do you believe her?'

‘Yes.'

Another pause and then Nelson says slowly, ‘That would explain why the body under the doorway shared DNA with Roderick Spens. They did share a common male ancestor – they both had the same father, Christopher Spens.'

‘Do you want me to come back, sir?'

‘No. Stay where you are. I'll come up tomorrow and we'll take a proper statement. She's unwell, you say?'

‘She's dying.'

‘We'd better be quick then,' says Nelson callously. ‘You stay in Southport another night. Enjoy yourself.'

This last, thinks Judy, as she walks along the promenade in the rain, might prove a tough assignment.

Nelson puts down the phone. Judy's story is almost unbelievable and yet he does believe it. As soon as he saw the little body, arranged so carefully amidst the stones and the rubble, he had known that something evil was afoot. Whether the child was Elizabeth Black, Annabelle Spens or Bernadette McKinley, something terrible had happened to that little girl and the memory of it still haunted that house, hung in the air around the swing and the wishing well, clung to the wallpaper, was imprinted in the black and white tiles. All traces of the house may now have vanished but Nelson knows one thing; he would not live in one of Edward Spens' luxury apartments for a million pounds.

He jumps when his phone rings again. An impatient voice, a woman, educated and possibly Asian.

‘This is Doctor Sita Patel.'

‘Who?' Nelson's mind is blank.

‘You rang me. About Sir Roderick Spens.'

‘Oh yes.' This is what Nelson had promised Whitcliffe. That he would check with Sir Roderick's GP about his state of health, ask whether being involved in a police investigation, however peripherally, would upset his delicate mental balance (Whitcliffe's words).

Nelson explains as best he can. There is a silence at the other end of the phone.

‘I don't understand,' says Doctor Patel crisply, ‘Sir Roderick Spens does not have Alzheimer's.'

‘He doesn't?'

‘His mind is remarkably sharp. Sharper than yours or mine I daresay, Detective Chief Inspector.'

Nelson clicks off his phone, thinking hard.

‘Interesting God, Janus.'

‘So I understand.' Ruth looks up from the mosaic.

‘A minor deity, of course. Like Nemesis, Morpheus and Hecate.'

‘The minor deities all seem to be baddies,' says Ruth lightly.

‘You could say that.'

Judy's options for the afternoon seem to be: amusement arcade, shopping centre, an endless cream tea at one of the endless hotels or going back to the B and B to stare at the wallpaper (pink with green trelliswork). In the end, she decides to go to the cinema. Inside one of those multiplexes, you could be anywhere. The same worn purple carpet, the same smell of popcorn, the same posters, the same Pick 'n'
Mix with what look like the same fingerprints on the chocolate Brazils.

She hasn't been to the pictures for ages. She and Darren like such different films, she usually waits until things are out on DVD. But a film is just what she needs to stop the slideshow in her head, to rid her mind of Sister Immaculata's words:
There was blood over the walls, the covers, the floor – everywhere. He wanted me to put my hands in her blood.

The foyer is deserted and Judy dithers for ages between a thriller and a girl-fest about bridesmaids. In the end she opts for the thriller. She has been going out with Darren since they were both seventeen and he has started to make noises about marriage. Judy, to her own surprise, finds herself violently opposed. The idea of prancing down the aisle in a huge white dress seems alien, offensive and, above all,
embarrassing
. Judy hates being the centre of attention. It's one of the things that makes her a good detective.

There are only four people in the cinema. An elderly couple, a single man who looks so like a pervert that he could be an undercover policeman – and Judy. She sits near the back, eating Revels and feeling rather guilty. Going to the cinema is no way for a person of working age to spend the afternoon. But, in the cinema, there is no afternoon. Just as you could be anywhere, it could be anytime. She knows that when she leaves the light will hit her like a blow. It is always dark in multiplex world.

The thriller is quite entertaining though she had forgotten that Americans mumble so much. She wants to lean forward like an old lady with an ear trumpet, ‘
What
did you say, young man?' And the music is loud enough to pin her back
against her seat. It has been a long time since she has been to a club or anywhere that plays loud music. She is used to the gentle murmur of her iPod. She really must get out more.

Gradually, though, she starts to get into the plot which involves the FBI, a conspiracy to kill the president and, rather inexplicably, aliens. She is just drifting into zombie-like enjoyment when one of the characters mumbles something about ‘my kid sister, Jocasta'.

Jocasta.

What is it about that name that rings alarm bells in Judy's mind? Ignoring the on-screen attempts to blow up the Empire State Building (the genre is post-9/11 apocalypse), she runs the last few hours through her internal scanner. Judy has an excellent memory – another reason why bloody Nelson should promote her. Jocasta … Jocasta. There. She has it.

I was only twenty-three. He called me his Jocasta.

The next minute, Judy is stumbling out of the cinema, oblivious to the fact that she will now never know whether Todd, Brad and Shannon manage to save the planet. In the foyer, she sits on the dusty, popcorn-strewn steps and rummages for her BlackBerry. She keys Jocasta into the search engine and there it is: ‘Jocasta was a famed queen of Thebes. She was the wife of Laius, mother and later wife of Oedipus …'

Mother and later wife of Oedipus.

Oedipus had inadvertently married his mother, hence the complex. Why would Sir Christopher, a much older man, call Orla ‘his Jocasta'? Judy scans further back in her memory, to the Spens family tree that she had scribbled in her notebook.
Roderick: born 1938.
If Orla/Sister Immaculata is seventy
five now, she must have been born in 1933. When the baby died, she was twenty-three. Roderick would have been eighteen.
He called me his Jocasta.

Judy dials Nelson's number.

But Nelson ignores the call. He is staring at a six-word text message:
I'm going to kill your daughter.

I got my knife and went indoors. All was quiet. The mother was washing clothes in the laundry, the maids had the morning off. I went into her room. The blinds were drawn and the light was pinkish, like the light on the inside of your eyelids.

Her eyes are blue, like mine. I've never noticed that before. Her lips move as if she's about to say something. She doesn't say much (another sign of her backwardness) but it looks as if she's about to say something now. I decide I'd better speak first.

‘Hallo,' I say.

‘'Lo,' she replies.

Nelson is running, faster than he has ever run in his life. Twice in his police career his life has been in danger and, even at the time, he'd been quite pleased at how he'd handled this. The knowledge that he might have been about to die had sharpened his reactions, made them cold and precise. He had not been scared so much as angry and determined not to let the perpetrators get away with it. But this, this is something else altogether. His heart is leaping in his chest, huge shuddering movements that make him feel sick and dizzy. He lurches as he runs, coordination shot, breath coming in shallow, painful spasms. His daughter. Someone is going to hurt one of his daughters. It is as if they have already cut out his heart.

He reaches his car and looks at his watch. Three thirty. Think. Focus. He forces himself to take deeper breaths, gripping the steering wheel. Like this, he is no good to anyone. Where should Laura and Rebecca be at three thirty? Just leaving school. If he hurries, he can be there in five minutes.

If he hurries … Nelson leaves a trail of bemused and terrified road users behind him as he drives, mostly on the
wrong side of the road, to the girls' school on the outskirts of King's Lynn. The siren is blaring and he barely slows down for anything, red lights, junctions, pedestrians, anything. Finally, he screeches to a halt beside the school, mounting the kerb, scraping the side of the car against the wall.