Authors: Maynard Sims
Sparks took his notebook from his pocket and opened it. “It wasn’t obvious, unless you knew what you were looking for. But once you pointed me in the right direction it didn’t take too long to make the connections. All the deaths are linked, albeit tenuously, but the link is there.” He consulted his book again. “Helen Brown, headmistress at the school. Sylvia Allyn, has two children at the school…”
Annie sat forwards in her seat. “What are you implying, Ian?” she said hotly.
“Bear with us, Annie,” Lacey said. “Carry on, Matt.”
“Susan Grant attended an evening class in astrology at the school. Amy Clarke also took an evening class there, the history of ceramics.”
“So you’re saying the school is the link? My school?”
“No,” Matt Sparks said. “From what I could see, Sophie Gillespie had no connection at all with the school. No children. No evening classes. Nothing.”
Annie visibly relaxed.
“But she did attend Adam Chapman’s art class,” Sparks said.
“Something you said earlier today, Jane, got me thinking,” Lacey said. “You said you thought Diana was hand-picking her victims, that she had probably built up relationships with them, got to know them, maybe not in her Diana persona. Only Laura Sallis can be linked directly to Diana, but the others, including Holly Ireland, all have links to Penny Chapman.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Annie said. “I’ve known Penny for years, ever since I moved to Ravensbridge.”
“Hold on,” Carter said. “Let’s backtrack a moment. Ian, are you saying that Penny Chapman knows Diana and has been feeding her information?”
“I’m saying more than that,” Ian Lacey said. “I believe now that Penny Chapman is Diana.”
Annie was on her feet. Her chair toppled backwards and clattered on the stone floor. “That’s absurd. That’s really fucking absurd! Penny Chapman is my closest friend.”
“And as such you’ve been keeping her in the loop,” Jane said quietly.
“I’m not listening to any more of this…this crap,” Annie said. “I want you all to leave. Just get out of my house.” She ran to the stairs. At the top she spun round. “Now!”
“So what’s our next move?” Jane said.
“I’ll speak with Annie when she’s had a chance to calm down a little,” Carter said.
“So we’re not leaving?”
Lacey stood. “I think it’s best that we do. Come on, Matt. We’ll pay a visit to the Chapmans.”
“I take it you have their address, because I don’t think Annie will give it to you,” Carter said.
“33 Lockfield Road,” Sparks said. “I checked it out before I came here. It’s only five minutes away.”
“Do you think going to see Penny Chapman is a wise move?” Jane said. “In light of what you’ve just discovered?”
“She doesn’t know we suspect her,” Lacey said. “If we ask the right questions she might just let her guard down enough so we can confirm our suspicions.”
Carter rapped lightly on Annie Ryder’s bedroom door.
“Go away. I’ve nothing to say to you.”
Carter pushed open the door and stepped inside. Annie was kneeling in front of an oak chest of drawers, the contents of it scattered all around her. She was clutching a handful of light-blue envelopes with one hand. In the other she held a single sheet of paper. A letter.
Carter went across to the bed and perched himself on the edge. “I’m not going anywhere, Annie. You asked me here to do a job. I’m going to see it through.”
Annie didn’t look up at him. “This is a letter Penny sent me,” she said. “Adam and her were having a trial separation and she’d gone abroad, travelling. When she wrote the letter she’d reached Mexico, and was helping out at a homeless shelter in Puebla. In this she sounds happy, fulfilled.”
“How long did the separation last?”
“Three months. She came home a few weeks after this letter was written. They managed to patch up their differences and, as far as I know, they’ve never been apart since.” She turned to Carter. “Do you think I wouldn’t know if Penny was Diana?”
“When was the separation?”
“Twelve years ago.”
“And she comes back and the murders start.”
“It’s a coincidence.”
Carter leant forwards, resting his elbows on his knees. “You don’t believe that. If you did you wouldn’t be reading the letters. And it looks like you went to a lot of trouble to find them,” he added, indicating the mess on the floor.
Annie closed her eyes and her shoulders sagged. A small tear dribbled down her cheek. “Oh, Christ, who am I kidding?” she said. “I thought it was strange at the time, but I put it down to something else.”
“Riddles, Annie. You’re talking in riddles.”
Her eyes snapped open and she wiped the tear away impatiently with the sleeve of her shirt. “In this letter she said she’d met someone, a woman, who had shown her exactly what was wrong with her life and what steps she could take to change it. I knew she and Adam were having problems before she went away. I think at the time the age gap between them was having an adverse effect on the relationship. She was always insecure about it and was convinced Adam would eventually meet someone more his own age and take off with them. He was making a pretty poor living at that time and she was more or less supporting him, so that added to the friction between them. What finally pushed her to leave was Adam’s affair with a girl he was using as a life model. The girl was barely out of her teens and as pretty as a peach. It was too much for Penny. She just picked up her passport, packed a bag and headed for the airport, telling Adam he needed space away from her to sort his life out. Of course his affair with the girl didn’t last, just over a month, and when it ended Adam realized he had probably thrown away the best thing in his life. Penny. He wrote to her asking her to come back but Penny refused.”
“She was discovering who she really was,” Carter said.
“Exactly. As this letter proves. As I said, she was happy and fulfilled.”
“And yet she came back.”
“Yes, she did. I received one more letter from her after this one.” Annie pulled an envelope from the pile in her hand and dropped the rest on the floor with all the other clutter. Taking the letter from the envelope, she scanned it quickly. “In this one she says she’s missing Adam desperately and that she’s flying back to England, giving me her flight number and asking if I can pick her up from the airport.” Annie handed both letters to Carter.
He read them quickly. “The woman she met in Puebla, her name’s Dee.”
Annie nodded. “In the second letter, the tone’s wrong. The first one sounds like the Penny I knew before she went away. The second one doesn’t sound like her at all. Even the writing’s slightly different, more jagged, not as neat. I didn’t think much about it at the time. Penny said the woman she’d met, this Dee, had told her how to change her life. I thought the tone of the letter was a way that change was manifesting itself.”
“What was she like when you picked her up at the airport?”
“Brighter, I think. More confident, but more or less the same old Penny.”
“And now you’re not so sure?”
“I don’t know, Rob. I remember a few months after she returned, Adam and I had a heart to heart. He thought she’d changed, but for the better, and said their sex life had gone through the roof, so he wasn’t complaining. He thought that Mexico was the best thing that had ever happened to them.”
“And you?”
“I just got used to the new Penny. Yes there were changes, but fundamentally she was the same person.”
“And now?”
Annie shook her head. “Now I don’t know what to believe. There is one thing though.” She bit her lip pensively.
“Go on.”
“Puebla, where she stayed, is in a region of Mexico called Cuetlaxcoapan.”
“So?”
“Cuetlaxcoapan means, ‘where serpents change their skin’.”
Chapter Forty
Adam Chapman took a long time to answer the door. When he finally did it looked like he’d just crawled out of bed. Dressed in only a toweling bathrobe with nothing on his feet, he looked irritated by this intrusion. While Sparks flashed his warrant card, Ian Lacey stole a surreptitious glance at his watch. A little after three. “May we come in, Mr. Chapman?” he said.
“Now is not a particularly convenient time,” Chapman said. “I was up working all night. I was just trying to catch up on my sleep.”
“It should only take a few minutes. By the way, is your wife at home? We’d really like to talk to her too.”
“No, she’s not here. As I said, it’s not convenient. I was in bed.”
“Would it be more convenient to do this at the station? We can wait if you want to get dressed.”
A number of emotions flickered across Adam Chapman’s face in an instant. The primary one was annoyance. “You’d better come in.”
“Thank you,” Lacey said with a smile.
Chapman led them through to an untidy lounge. “Wait there. Take a seat. I’ll just put some clothes on.”
He took the stairs two at a time. When he returned he was dressed in jeans and a jumper.
“Will your wife be back any time soon?” Sparks said. “Only we really would like to speak with her.”
Something registered in Chapman’s bleary eyes. “Oh, this isn’t about those bloody unpaid parking tickets, is it? Because sending two detectives for something so trivial…”
“No, this isn’t about parking tickets, sir,” Lacey said, cutting him off mid-flow. “Has she gone away? Visiting friends, family perhaps?”
“I don’t know,” Chapman said.
Lacey frowned. “Isn’t that a bit unusual? Not knowing where your wife has gone?” he asked pleasantly.
“No, not really. Look, has something happened to Penny? Has she been hurt in some way?”
“Not to our knowledge, sir,” Lacey said.
“So you haven’t seen your wife since first thing this morning,” Sparks said. “Does she make a habit of taking off without saying where she’s going?”
“As a matter of fact she does, yes.” Chapman flopped down heavily on a scuffed leather armchair and flapped his hand at the equally scuffed couch, indicating that they should sit. “Penny and I don’t have what is known as a traditional marriage. We’re not in each other’s pocket. She has her life, I have mine. Simple.”
“Really,” Lacey said.
“Yes, really. We both see ourselves as free spirits. We travel on parallel paths, coming together on occasion and then going our own way again.”
“And that works for you, does it, sir?” Sparks said.
“It works for us. Anyway, I’m sure you didn’t come here to discuss the state of my marriage and it’s not about the parking tickets, so what is it you actually want?”
“Sophie Gillespie and her husband, Mark. They were killed a while ago. I understand from our records that Mrs. Gillespie was a member of your art class,” Lacey said.
“That’s right. She was very talented. It was tragic that she died so young. She would have made a fine artist. Perhaps not Royal Academy standard, but she could probably have made a reasonable living at it.”
“How well did you know her?” Sparks asked.
“About as well as any tutor knows their student. I wasn’t shagging her, if that’s what you’re implying.”
“The thought never crossed our mind, sir,” Lacey said. “No, what my sergeant is getting at was, did you have a social relationship with her? Not sexual, but something more than just tutor and student. Perhaps the occasional coffee together, maybe dinner together with your wife and her husband?”
Chapman shook his head. “No, nothing like that. Penny had no time for Mark Gillespie. The man was an upwardly mobile arsehole, totally oblivious to his wife’s talents, or her happiness for that matter. He was very much the main breadwinner,
my dinner on the table when I get home
type of guy. I didn’t have a problem with him, but Penny couldn’t stand him.”
“So your wife knew Sophie Gillespie?” Lacey said.
“Penny knew her, yes. They met one day when Penny came to pick me up. They got chatting, as women do, and Penny took her under her wing. I think she sensed that Sophie’s marriage left a lot to be desired and that Sophie was basically unhappy. You could see her anger and frustration in her paintings. Angry brushwork and some fairly disturbing images. She wasn’t the twee, watercolor type of person.”
“So your wife was, what, a shoulder to cry on?” Lacey said.
“Penny’s very good like that. Empathy. She has great empathy.”
“She sounds like a very special kind of person,” Lacey said.
“Mexico,” Chapman said.
“Pardon?”
“She’d changed when she came back from Mexico.”
“How long ago was this?”
“A dozen or so years ago. Our marriage was going through a rocky patch so we agreed on a trial separation. Penny took herself off abroad and came back a different person. It was quite magical, the transformation, I mean. It was like living with a different woman. All her insecurities had gone. She was stronger, more capable. I’m sure it’s how she managed to empathize with Sophie Gillespie so well. She’d been through it herself, you see?”