When they reached the road again they left Adam’s Porsche and took David’s Land Rover instead. The snow was still falling heavily and progress was frustratingly slow. Adam drove so that David could call Kate again. He talked to her reassuringly. Though he still looked a mess the crazy light that had been in his eyes earlier had gone.
‘Did you call the police? And you spoke to Graham?’ David questioned. ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be alright.’ He broke off, listening to Kate, then said to Adam, ‘They’ve just arrived at the house. They can’t see any tracks but Kate thinks Angela followed Mary along the lane away from town.’
Ahead of them the bridge over the river appeared through the swirling snow and Adam slowed to take the turn. ‘The cottages, tell them to go to the cottages,’ he said, though he knew they would arrive first.
David relayed the message and then after a few more reassuring words to his daughter hung up the phone. He turned to Adam. ‘You think Mary would have gone back there?’
‘Yes.’
‘There’s something else,’ David said. ‘What is it?’
Adam glanced over at him. ‘I’m worried. I think Mary’s in danger. And if Angela went after her then she is too.’
‘What kind of danger? What are you talking about?’
‘Think about it. If Nick didn’t kill Jane and those boys, then somebody else did.’
David was bewildered, and Adam didn’t know how to begin to explain, except by starting at the beginning. ‘This goes back a long time. Back to when you knew Meg Coucesco. You did know her, didn’t you?’
‘Meg? What the hell does she have to do with any of this?’
‘Everything. She has everything to do with it.’ They had reached the top of Back Lane. The snow was still falling heavily.
‘The other day at the lake, you knew it was her they’d found, didn’t you?’ He looked across at David when he didn’t answer. ‘For Christ’s sake!’
‘Alright, yes, I thought it was her,’ David admitted. ‘Look, I knew her, I’m not denying it. We used to meet near the sawmill. That doesn’t mean I killed her. I didn’t even know she was dead.’
Adam didn’t know how that could be true. ‘You met her the day she vanished though. I saw you.’ Though I never told anyone you bastard, he silently added.
‘Meg wanted to run away,’ David said heavily. ‘She’d been talking about it ever since I met her. She asked me to help her, so I did. I put her on the bus that day on the road to Alston up on the fells, and I gave her some money. I never saw or heard from her again.’
‘Why did she want to run away?’
‘Her family treated her badly. She was unhappy I suppose.’
But there was more to it than that, Adam knew. ‘You’re saying that even after her disappearance was in the papers and on TV you never heard from her? Not even a phone call?’
‘No.’
‘If what you’re saying is true, why did you and Nick put that bracelet in his dad’s van?’
David couldn’t hide his shock. ‘You knew?’
‘I followed you that day.’ Adam held his gaze. And I didn’t say anything then either, he thought, knowing he didn’t need to say it out loud. ‘You tipped off the police, didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ David admitted.
‘Why?’
‘Meg gave me the bracelet. Sort of a memento. We, Nick and I, thought if we made it look as if his dad knew something about what happened to her, he’d have to leave. Everybody knew he used to go to the camp, and Meg hated him.’
‘So, you framed him for a murder he didn’t commit.’
‘There wasn’t any murder. We knew the police would have to let him go without proper evidence and there wasn’t any because Meg wasn’t dead. But nobody else knew that. It was just a way of getting rid of him. If he’d stayed around the gypsies would have had their own revenge. He was a bastard, Adam, so don’t waste any sympathy on him.’
‘But if all this is true how did you know it was Meg they found in the lake? You said you didn’t know she was dead. And why did you accuse Nick of killing her? That is what you fought about, isn’t it?’
‘How did you know?’
‘A guess,’ Adam said, though, in fact, he’d only just made the connection.
‘A few weeks after it had all died down, after Nick’s dad was killed I saw Nick with a bracelet. We were up at the tarn. It was like the one she had given me. She had four of them, all the same, that she wore on one wrist. When I asked him where he got it he said that she had come back. She wanted more money. It was the day after his dad was questioned by the police. He said he gave her some more money and persuaded her to leave because he was afraid that if she didn’t his dad would find out about what we did.’
‘And you believed him?’ Adam said sceptically.
‘Yes. Why wouldn’t I?’
But Adam remembered the day he’d seen David contemplating throwing that same bracelet into the lake. Was it coincidence that it was the very place where she had been found, or had David even then suspected something that he hadn’t been willing to face?
‘So, when she was found that was when you attacked Nick in the pub? Because you thought after all these years he had lied?’
‘Yes. But after I left the pub that night, I talked to him. He was waiting for me down the road. He told me what happened, he admitted that he’d killed her but he said it was an accident. When she came back he tried to persuade her to leave and she got hysterical. He didn’t mean to hurt her. And afterwards he panicked and dumped her body in the lake.’
But Adam didn’t believe that was true either. He thought the truth was Nick had killed her because he was afraid of what would happen if his father found out what he had done. But he didn’t believe Meg had come back for money.
‘George Hunt was being blackmailed because his wife had a breakdown when she miscarried her baby. She was treated at Carisbrook,’ Adam said. ‘The director there, a man called Webster, swapped the dead child for a baby girl a young woman had given birth to. It was 1985.’
David looked bewildered.
‘It was Meg’s child,’ Adam said.
He should have seen the resemblance the day that he’d first gone to Hunt’s house. Judith Hunt, aged seventeen, pictured on holiday in Spain with her parents. She looked like her mother. The same dark hair and eyes. It could have been Meg looking back at him from the photograph, but he hadn’t seen it for the same reason he hadn’t realized that Jane couldn’t have gone back to London. He was blind to everything but his own agenda.
He remembered the day he’d first seen Meg. He’d been struck, as any adolescent boy would be, by the glimpse of her full breasts delineated against the fabric of her dress. He hadn’t realized it but he knew now she must have been heavily pregnant then.
But there was no time to talk any more. The Land Rover crossed the snow-covered bridge over the river and came around the bend in view of the cottages. They were ominously quiet, though a light was on in one of the upstairs windows.