They completed the search because even if Tessa was gone none of them believed that Joe, overtaken by remorse, had followed her into the forty-storey abyss. But they found no sign of him.
‘Could he have climbed down the shaft?’ Sheelagh asked doubtfully.
Richard shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t have thought so, but …’ He had managed, with some help; Midge did it without; but a bulky retired printer whose strength-to-weight ratio had been going downhill for thirty years even before illness left him weak and witless? On the other hand, single-minded obsession gets people through all manner of things that no rational assessment of their capabilities would predict. ‘I think he must have done, otherwise we’d have found him.’
‘He might have fallen,’ hazarded Larry. ‘While he was …’ He gestured with his head towards the lift, reluctant to say it.
‘He might,’ agreed Richard sceptically. ‘But I don’t think we should count on it.’
They returned to the sickroom and broke the news. Mrs Venables turned away. Tariq shook his sore head in wonder. ‘So he really means to kill us all. In spite of what he said, he blames us for Cathy’s death and he wants to kill us for it. He doesn ‘t care about getting away with it. He just wants us dead.’
‘Why Tessa?’ asked Will. ‘She hardly knew Cathy.’
‘Why any of us?’ countered Richard. ‘Nobody killed his daughter. She committed suicide. Maybe in a perfect world we could have saved her, but God help us, we did our best! Joe knows that. If he still wants us dead it’s because he’s crazy. We’d better accept that we’re dealing with a madman.’
A tremor vibrated in Sheelagh’s voice. ‘He daren’t leave anyone alive. On Monday morning the builders are going to find bodies and call the police. If there’s anyone left to say what happened Joe’ll end his days in Broadmoor. But if we’re all dead, maybe he thinks he can just slip away. Maybe no one else knows he was here.’
‘Of course somebody knows he was here,’ growled Larry impatiently. ‘It was him set this up, remember? However casual it was, even if there’s nothing on paper, somebody must have given him the OK, the keys, even the goddamned furniture. Lazaire’s won’t cover for him when the police ask why their building’s full of corpses.’
‘He must have known that,’ mused Richard, ‘and decided it didn’t matter. So if getting away isn’t a priority, why did he kill Tessa?’ He looked at Will as if it were a puzzle to which Will had the solution.
That wasn’t quite true. Will hadn’t worked out the answers yet but he was getting good at identifying the questions. ‘Because she didn’t tell us the whole truth. She knew Cathy as well as the rest of us. Think about it. Joe wouldn’t have wasted his time and money getting hold of a GP who might have treated Cathy but not often enough to remember her. Hundreds of people must have known her better than that, and any one of them would have had as good a chance of saving her. But Joe wanted Tessa here, and he paid a medical journal to commission the article that would bring her. He must have had a good reason for that.’
No one spoke. But the quality of the silence changed as they acknowledged the possibility.
‘We began by thinking we were a random cross-section of everyday neurotics on a regular course and there was nothing odd about an independent observer. Even when we stumbled on the hidden agenda, it seemed enough that Tessa agreed she could have treated Cathy. But if Joe brought us here not to confront us but to kill us, there had to be more than that. Whatever she said, Tessa knew Cathy too.’
‘She might have made a mistake, like she said,’ suggested Richard. ‘Maybe Joe thought that was the beginning of the end – that if she’d been treated appropriately then none of the rest need have followed.’
It sounded feasible. But Larry shook his head. ‘I can’t say Cathy never consulted Tessa, but she wasn’t her regular doctor. I knew him – he worked with a lot of tennis-players. He was experienced and pragmatic and we both trusted his judgement. That was important.’
‘What about when she stopped playing? Could she have gone to Tessa precisely because you didn’t know her?’
‘She stopped seeing my man, I know that. I asked him to look out for her when she wouldn’t see me any more, and he said she hadn’t been near him for months.’
‘That’s it, then,’ said Richard. ‘She was Cathy’s doctor. Joe blamed her for not seeing the state she was in.’
‘But by then Cathy’s problems were already well established,’ said Will. ‘Joe couldn’t have blamed them on Tessa.’
‘He couldn’t blame you, either,’ Tariq said reasonably, ‘but he did.’
‘I know where Tessa fits in.’ There was a note of certainty in Sheelagh’s voice that made everyone look at her, and she nodded. ‘She may have treated Cathy professionally, but that’s not why Joe brought her here or why he killed her. Tessa was the missing link, the one who should have been here and wasn’t. She was Cathy’s last lover.’
Whatever they were expecting it wasn’t that. Silence fell: the sort of lumpen silence that falls from a height and kicks up dust and rocks people with its tremors. None of those closest to her had guessed: not her coach, her agent or her fiancé.
They thought about it now, eyes flickering in the skimpy light. It solved some of the puzzles. Neither Larry nor Tariq, familiar with the untrumpeted side of professional sport, was surprised or disconcerted when friendships among women who worked, travelled, stayed and socialized together turned to something more. It was a coach’s job to make sure it didn’t affect performance and an agent’s to see it didn’t affect income, that was all. If Cathy Beacham had told them she had a mistress they’d have advised discretion then wished her luck.
But Will Furney had wanted to marry her, and the idea that he’d been thrown over not for her career, not for another man but for a woman jolted him to his foundations. He didn’t believe it; wouldn’t believe it. Partly it was a streak of prudery running through him – solicitors are natural conservatives: such things happen to clients but he’d never expected to meet them in his own life – but mainly because it made a mockery of his time with Cathy. She’d slept with him, and to Will that meant commitment, but if she preferred women what was it about? He’d thought it was love. But how could she have loved both him and Tessa? If Sheelagh was right the sweetest nights of his life had been a sham. He couldn’t begin to deal with that so he denied it. White-faced, he mumbled, ‘That’s not possible.’
‘It is possible,’ Sheelagh said gently, understanding his distress, ‘and the evidence is there. Who’s missing from this route march down memory lane? – the famous Harry. Or it might have been Jerry. Suppose, though, it was Terry. Tessa’s short for Teresa, isn’t it?’
‘Coincidence,’ muttered Will, but there was no conviction in it.
Sheelagh shook her head. ‘It wasn’t the first time, Will. It’s no big deal, all right? Lots of girls go for other girls. It doesn’t mean they’re life-long lesbians. For some it’s a phase you grow through. I didn’t know about Cathy, I hardly saw her after we grew up, she could have changed. But she had the hots for me when we were fifteen. It didn’t go anywhere because it wasn’t my idea of fun, but she made it pretty clear it was hers.’
‘Then – what about me?‘
‘Will, I don’t know. But you could be the only man she ever loved. Maybe that’s something to be proud of.’
‘If you’re right,’ Richard said pensively, ‘other things start to make sense. The state she was in that last year. Larry ruled out drugs because she wasn’t getting them from him, she wasn’t getting them in the locker-room and he trusted her doctor. But Tessa could have got them for her.’
‘She must have taken urine tests,’ said Tariq, chewing the inside of his cheek. ‘If she was on steroids it would have shown up.’
But Larry knew two answers to that. ‘You can use a blocking agent if you understand the chemistry well enough. I dare say a doctor could have helped her with that too. And sometimes you can fix it so that it’s not your sample they test. The procedures aren’t foolproof. Everyone’s heard of samples being switched or interfered with. And by this time Cathy was no longer winning. She could have got someone to help her out, especially when there was nothing at stake. People would have felt sorry for her when she was losing who wouldn’t have helped her win that way.’
‘Steroids?’ asked Tariq.
‘Going off how she was. They build bulk, strength and aggression. She certainly got bigger – I thought it was the work she was putting in – and she was strong. It was her judgement that was the problem, on court and off. You must have seen how angry she got, how trivial irritations sent her into orbit. That was new. I never had a problem with her temper till then. I put it down to frustration, but only because I didn’t think it could be steroids.’
Richard said slowly, ‘If Joe knew this – if he knew half of this – he’d think it motive enough for murder. His daughter’s lover supplied her with stuff that wrecked her head and her career, then left her to fall apart alone. I’d want to kill someone who treated my child like that.’
Will hadn’t come to terms with this, was dealing with it by shifting into a kind of professional detachment so that he could consider the facts stripped of their emotional burden. ‘So when Joe woke up he saw Tariq dozing in the chair by the door and Tessa by the bed. He got up, took the lemonade bottle and the torch, and hit Tariq because he was the biggest danger. The noise woke Tessa so he hit her too – not with the bottle, that was in pieces. He’s a big man, his fists would do.
‘Then he waited and listened. But we’d heard nothing and no one left the conference room. So he hauled Tariq out of his way, dragged Tessa to the lift, opened the doors and pushed her through. She didn’t scream so maybe she was already dead. She hit the gondola so hard the whole side broke away.’ A tic flickered under his eye. It could as easily have broken up the last time something hit it.
‘Probably he intended to go back for Tariq and Miriam. But he heard me opening the conference-room door so he hid in the shaft. He didn’t have to climb. All he had to do was get on to the track and the lift doors closed to hide him. He stayed there while we searched. Hell, he may still be there. Or maybe he climbed out as soon as we came in here.’
There was a long silence. Nobody challenged his hypothesis. Nobody offered to check it by looking round outside. Eventually Sheelagh said, ‘What do we do now?’
‘We go back to the conference room, we take Miriam with us, and we stay together. We barricade the door, and we don’t answer it for any reason whatsoever.’