“Here,” she said, pointing across the windscreen towards a ’60s-built faux Scandinavian villa looking out to sea.
Lights were blazing at every window and Sean could see the same car Smollet had left the station in still standing in the driveway. As he pulled in, the front door opened and Smollet stepped out, carrying a woman in his arms.
Smollet’s head snapped around as Sean braked, blocking off the exit to the drive. The DCI’s face registered surprise as Sean opened the car door and got out, an expression momentarily lit against the slanting rain by a second set of headlights, Gray’s car pulling up behind Sean’s. The woman in his arms didn’t move.
“DCI Smollet,” Sean moved swiftly across the driveway. “I need to finish my interview with you now.”
“What’s all this?” Smollet tried to bluff it out. Saw the retired DS Gray coming up behind Sean. “Get out of my way, can’t you see my wife’s ill?” he said. “I’ve got to get her to hospital.”
Sean moved in closer to study the woman. Her eyes were closed, her face tranquil. She didn’t look ill, just sleeping.
“That’s her, in’t it?” said Paul Gray from behind him. “That’s who you’ve been protecting, all this time.”
Smollet’s jaw slackened. “What?” he said.
“Who is she?” asked Sean, no longer sure what was going on.
“She used to be called Samantha Lamb,” said Gray. “Her granddad owned this house, the Leisure Beach and half of the rest of Ernemouth. Died a widower in ’89, estranged from his
daughter, left half his fortune to his best mate – Len Rivett.”
Francesca’s face flashed into Sean’s mind. “Leisure Beach Industries Inc of Ernemouth, you mean?” he asked. “The other half owned by DCI Smollet, here?”
“Sound about right,” said Gray. “And if I in’t completely lost my marbles,” he nodded towards the sleeping woman, “she’ll be the one with your missing DNA.”
“No,” said Smollet, taking a step backwards. “No, get away from us.”
“The missing DNA,” said Sean. “Rivett already provided me with the match.” He looked Smollet dead in the eye. “From a sample he took this morning.”
The DCI looked down at his wife and then up again at Sean, an expression of horror on his face. “No,” he said, “he can’t have done. He couldn’t have …”
“He did,” said Sean. “I’m looking forward to hearing his explanation for it almost as much as hearing how come his own DNA is so similar to Corrine Woodrow’s.”
“My godfathers,” he heard Gray say. “Gina.”
Sean glanced around, wondering if any of the cars parked on the road belonged to Francesca. “Where is he, anyhow?” he said. “Where’s Rivett?”
But Smollet had started to sway. Gray stepped forwards, catching hold of him. “Steady,” he said. “I think you need a brandy.”
He looked down at the slender woman lying compliant in Smollet’s arms, a raindrop sliding off her eyelashes. Wondered how it was that she could look so peaceful.
“Let’s go inside,” he said, propelling the pair of them back through the front door.
Sean looked round. No one had answered his question
about Rivett, but he clearly wasn’t here. He glanced back at his car. Noj wasn’t there either, her door was wide open.
“I’ll catch up with you in one second,” he said to Gray, his hand closing over the swab kit full of Noj’s DNA, still nestling safe in his pocket.
On the passenger seat of his car he found another little effigy, like the one he’d retrieved from the pillbox. A doll-Rivett lying with his feet in the air, a pin piercing his heart.
* * *
Noj was running, running in the rain, the book safely in her bag, racing through the back streets, choking back sobs.
The moment they had pulled into the driveway she had seen it in her mind’s eye, lying on the white shagpile carpet of the bedroom floor. While everyone – including Gray, the copper come back from the past – had crowded around Smollet and his sleeping beauty, she had seized her chance to slip inside the open front door, moving rapidly up the stairs, locating her target as if the book itself were guiding her along. None of them had seen her come out again, none of them had seen her go. She was as sure of that as she had been of the vision in the crystal ball that had led her to Samantha Lamb. Even so, she could hardly believe she had finally got it back again, finally retrieved it from a source more powerful than her conceited teenage self would ever have given credit for. Although Corrine always had.
As she ran, Noj cried for Corrine, who, so anxious for knowledge, so hungry for power, she had abandoned on that crucial night to study with the master she would now finally return the book to. The master who had made her what she was today – but at what price? Had she only been there for
Corrine, then none of this would ever have happened …
But time had come full circle now and she could feel the transformation, the same as it had come to her in the graveyard on the night she had placed the curse on Samantha. The streetlights blurred into the tears that ran down her cheeks, this lesson was the hardest one to learn of all.
When she arrived at Mr Farrer’s door, Noj put her hand up to her face. Felt a prickling of stubble, there beneath her skin.
* * *
Francesca knelt beside him, but Rivett didn’t see her. He was on the edge of the harbour wall, looking up at the statue of Nelson. Only, it wasn’t the Admiral there. It was Sean Ward staring down at him with his dark brown eyes, a grin upon his face.
“
Justass!
” he called out. “
See you on the other side!
”
Then Rivett fell backwards, let the water take him.
Janice Mathers followed Dr Radcliffe down the long grey-green corridor, their footsteps echoing through the unadorned walls and the rows of windowless doors, under fluorescent light and air heavy with antiseptic.
After they passed through the security gate, splashes of colour started to appear along the walls, the artwork of inmates proudly displayed. The sound of voices could be discerned and shapes moved behind the frosted, reinforced glass of the classrooms. Dr Radcliffe didn’t pause until they had reached the dormitory rooms that were allowed, within certain hours, to keep their doors open. All except for one, the last door on the left.
Here, the doctor came to a halt, and turned to face the barrister.
His eyes had lost the flinty hostility she had grown to associate with him on her previous visits here. Now they were soft, with a slight sparkle to them, an emotion mirrored in his voice as he started to speak. “I feel I owe you an apology, Miss Mathers,” he said.
The QC shook her head. “You always did what you thought
was best for her,” she said. “Which was more kindness than most people in her life have ever shown her. You kept her safe,” she smiled sadly, “in here.”
Dr Radcliffe nodded curtly, put the key into the lock of the door. “Her insistence,” he felt duty-bound to add, “not mine.” He turned the handle gently.
Corrine didn’t raise her head. She was sitting on the bed, a watercolour spread out in front of her that had recently been taken down from the wall. It was a picture she had painted continuously since she’d first arrived in Dr Radcliffe’s care, a replica of the one he had shown to Sean Ward fifteen months ago, that Mathers’ defence team had in turn exhibited to the Court of Appeals. There, they had managed to convince a jury that Corrine hadn’t, as her psychiatrist had always maintained, been duplicating this image in an attempt to access the innocent child she had left behind long ago on Ernemouth beach, but as a way of trying to assuage her guilt over Darren Moorcock – for leading him into the lair where his murderer waited.
Her former form teacher, Philip Pearson BSc, testified that it was the same depiction as one of the paintings he had caught the sixteen-year-old Samantha Lamb defacing on the school wall, the day before Moorcock was killed by those same hands that had covered the original with obscenities in black marker pen. Although, like Dr Radcliffe, he had no idea where Moorcock’s idea had originated, also assuming it had been sketched from life along the local beaches.
Janice Mathers had been able to tell them all where it was from. The cover of Darren Moorcock’s favourite – or maybe second favourite, he had never had the time to really decide – LP. Some of the jury had been moved to weep at the irony of its title:
Heaven up Here
.
This time, when all the evidence had been presented before the court, including the testimonies of Pearson, Sheila Alcott and Paul Gray, the real tragedies at the heart of this case had finally been allowed to emerge. Darren Moorcock as a person who had lived and breathed and dreamed of his future, rather than a sensational element in a lurid farce. Corrine Woodrow as a girl whose unfortunate circumstances, including her unsuspected blood ties to the man who had been allowed to take charge of the original investigation, had been spun into the deadliest propaganda, effectively robbing her of the rest of her life too.
The only point that the QC had not been able to fully prove was that the pentagram drawn around the corpse in the victim’s blood had been added to help frame Corrine as a devil-worshipping murderess after the body was found. Former DS Gray reiterated on oath that he could not remember seeing it when he made the discovery. His former colleague Alf Brown was equally adamant that he had – and his original crime-scene photographs appeared as unequivocal evidence. But by then, Brown was the only member of the original murder squad who was left in a position to testify.
DS Andrew Kidd and DS Jason Blackburn had both been dismissed, pending their own trials for misconduct brought by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. Rivett was in the ground and Smollet, unable to come to terms with events, had resigned on medical grounds.
Mathers had some sympathy for Smollet, unaware that he had also been set up by Rivett, to shield his best friend’s murderous progeny for the past two decades with the myopia of his love. But then, the QC had never thought that Smollet was really all that bright.
She had always known that it would take an outsider to see through the complex web woven by those two terrible old men in that small town so long ago, to see what had been hiding under everybody’s noses all along. Sean Ward had brought it down strand by strand, revealing both the arrogance and ignorance of Leonard Rivett in the process.
From what they had managed to piece together, Rivett’s last act had been an attempt to murder Francesca Ryman and frame his protégé for it. The gun he had aimed at her was Smollet’s police issue, removed from the safe in his office without the DCI’s knowledge. Documents linking Smollet’s marriage to Samantha and the business assets he acquired through it had been left on the desk of the Leisure Beach office, along with a tell-tale photograph of Samantha and her mother. Rivett had intended to make the scene look as if Smollet had stumbled into a break-in that would have given the
Ernemouth Mercury
editor the evidence she needed to tie up the business interests between the Hoyle and Rivett families, while pointing Ward towards the identity of the person with the phantom DNA.
It hadn’t take Mathers long to ascertain that the identity of the DNA match Rivett provided for Ward was a fake: the biker, Adrian Hall, had gone under a lorry ten years ago, another of Rivett’s dark little jokes. Perhaps he had intended to reveal Samantha Smollet’s identity after her husband had been safely arrested, claiming it as part of a strategy to draw him out – while getting rid of Ryman with the same stone. But Ryman and Ward had no idea how Rivett had been one step ahead of them when they started down this trail.
The premises of The Ship Hotel, where Ward has been staying, were searched for clues and the landlady’s son was found to be a computer expert. Damon Boone had admitted
that he let Rivett use his computers and had taught him some elementary programmes, but maintained that he had no idea to what end the man he considered to be an old family friend was using them for. After due consideration, and with a lack of any other evidence, he had been let off without any charges.
Rivett’s belief that he was both indestructible and impenetrable had been his downfall. His doctor had warned him of a heart murmur, told him to give up the booze and the cigars and all the rich food. But even in death there was still something of a last laugh in it for him. He had evaded both capture and public scrutiny. Still, Ryman was writing up as much of the truth as anyone could discern, for the record at least.
Samantha Smollet would not have to stand trial either. Once a fresh test had matched her to the phantom DNA, she had been admitted to a high-security hospital – long before the appeal took place and the public had a new face to focus their outrage on. Not for her the hysteria of the mob. Where she was, not even the front pages of the tabloids could reach. She had swapped places with Corrine one last time.
“I’ll leave you two alone,” said Dr Radcliffe. “Knock on the door when you need me.”
Mathers nodded her thanks, stepped inside the room and waited for him to close the door. Corrine turned her head slowly. As the QC walked towards her, her gaze fell to the paper stretched across the covers of the narrow single bed.
It was blue, so blue. The long stretch of the sea, the seagulls taking off from the shoreline, the four figures standing there, hunched against the wind. She had lost count of how many times she had stared into this picture, willing with all her might that the figure on the second from the right, the one he had modelled his hair on, would somehow turn around and
that she would see Darren’s smiling face again. But, unlike Corrine, she did not believe in magic. When, many years before, she had changed her own name, she had chosen the surname Mathers as a dark joke, a way of proving, once and for all, that there was nothing to the superstition and folklore that had brought down this disaster on them in the first place.
That book, the one that everyone had mentioned at the original trial, but that no one could actually produce, that book that had sent Corrine and Darren down to the pillbox and their damnation, had been written by Aleister Crowley and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. But Crowley was the only one anybody mentioned. Everyone always forgot about Mathers.