It had started to rain while I was watching Tess Ivors die, and I was soaked to the skin by the time I got to Adele’s flat. My throat ached from unshed tears; I was still devastated but I couldn’t cry about it yet. I was too angry, and too scared.
‘Ingrid, what happened to you?’ It was surreal how normal Adele looked in her jogging bottoms and big jumper, her hair greasy with some sort of leave-in mask, ready for a night of snuggling on the sofa watching a box set. That life – that normal, untroubled, tranquil existence – seemed as out of my reach as the far side of the moon. I couldn’t imagine how I looked, but her eyes were wide with shock as she looked me up and down. ‘Come on. You can’t stand out there all night. Come in and get warm. You look terrible.’
‘I can’t stay here. He’ll know I’m here. He’ll look for me here.’ My teeth were chattering.
‘Who? Webster?’
I nodded.
‘Is he chasing you again?’
‘He never really stopped.’ I leaned against the wall, exhausted. ‘He’ll come here when he doesn’t find me at home. I feel like such a fool.’
‘What did he do?’
‘A woman died in front of me. She was trying to tell me he was working with her to punish me for what I did in that rape trial. He scared her and she fell out of a window.’
‘Oh my God.’ Adele covered her mouth. ‘And you saw it?’
‘He was glad she was dead. And I’m sure he attacked Mark.’
‘You think that was him too?’
‘Who else?’
She put her arms around me and I closed my eyes, breathing in the coconut smell from her hair. ‘I’m so tired, Adele, but I can’t stay here. I don’t want to put you in danger.’
‘So what are we going to do?’ She stepped back and folded her arms, my fierce defender in fluffy slippers.
‘You’re not going to do anything except lock your door after I leave. Don’t open it for any reason. Lock all the windows too. Keep your phone with you in case you need to call 999.’
Adele swallowed: this had all become real for her, all of a sudden, and I felt nothing but guilt about it. But she rallied. ‘What about you? What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to call the police.’
The police turned up about forty-five minutes later, in the Golf, alone. Adam had a thunderous expression on his face as he pulled in beside the bus shelter where I’d been waiting for him.
I opened the passenger door and got in.
‘Thanks for coming.’
‘What’s going on?’ He was at maximum grimness. ‘Why wouldn’t you tell me on the phone? And where the hell have you been for the last few days?’
‘Away.’ I couldn’t bear to look at him; I knew he was right to be annoyed. ‘Getting my head together.’
‘Away? What does that mean? Where did you go? I thought – well, I thought all kinds of things.’
‘It doesn’t matter where I was. I just needed to get away.’
He controlled his temper with an obvious effort. ‘Okay. You don’t have to tell me everything. Here’s a question you might like to answer though – why didn’t you tell me you were disappearing? I’ve been going out of my mind.’
‘I’m sorry. I thought it was best not to talk to anyone about it. I hadn’t been in touch with anyone at all until this morning when I came back.’
‘So I wasn’t first on your list to contact.’
I bit my lip. ‘I wasn’t ready to talk to you.’
‘I thought something had happened. I couldn’t think of any other reason you wouldn’t call me.’
There was a question implied in that: don’t you care about me? I chose to ignore it for the time being. ‘If anyone was looking for me, they’d start with you. I couldn’t take the risk. It wasn’t a planned thing. I just went.’
‘Okay.’ He looked out through the windscreen, collecting himself. ‘What’s the problem now?’
‘I need to get away from here.’
‘Why?’
‘John Webster is looking for me.’
That actually made him laugh. ‘What else is new?’
‘I know.’ I shoved my hands between my knees, shivering. ‘I’ll tell you everything if you just take me away from here.’
The amusement faded from his eyes. ‘You’re really scared, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are we going somewhere just for tonight, or—’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’
‘My flat?’
‘No.’ I said it before I thought about it. ‘He would look for me there. I’d assume he knows where you live.’
It wasn’t just that. I couldn’t be alone with Adam Nash, not without explaining to him that I was still in love with my ex-fiancé, and after I explained that to him we would be stuck in a small flat together for an indefinite amount of time. I’d experienced more than my fair share of awkward situations, especially lately, but that one was off the scale. I liked Adam, but when I tried to remember kissing him it felt like something from another life.
‘I could take you somewhere out of London. A safe house. I was thinking about this anyway.’ He paused. ‘I’ve been waiting to get the full picture before I talked to you, but you know there’s an ongoing police investigation into Vicki’s death. They’ve been doing a lot of work to confirm that there is a real and credible threat to your life. It looks as if there’s a group of people behind this, from what they’ve told me, but until they’re all in custody, you’re in danger.’
‘Well, as of this evening you can cross one of them off your list.’
‘What? What happened?’
‘I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything. But can we just go?’
‘I’ll need to make a phone call.’ He was staring at me, concerned. ‘And you probably need to pack a bag. Clothes, toiletries—’
‘No way. Neither of us is going back to the flat. I can manage without my things.’
‘Let me make this call,’ he said slowly, ‘and then we can hit the road. On the way you can tell me everything.’
‘The person who died was a woman named Tess Ivors.’
He listened, concentrating on what I was saying. We were crawling through London in traffic that was unexpectedly heavy. Red taillights snaked into the distance in front of us.
‘It happened in the office where she worked, this evening. I’d gone there to talk to her. To confront her, I suppose.’ I swallowed, hard. ‘While I was away, I did some thinking about the trial that we’re all connected with – me, Belinda, Ron Canterville. I found an internet forum concerned with miscarriages of justice – Justice Is Blind UK, it’s called. Tess Ivors was Lisa Muller’s best friend. She was the one who encouraged her to go to the police about what happened that night. I cross-examined her. I wasn’t particularly nice about it.’ I hesitated. ‘I would do it differently now. Anyway, Tess never got over it. She felt guilty and humiliated. I think she was still depressed about what happened to her friend. When people feel that way, they lash out. And she lashed out at me. You were right about a group of people being involved. I think one was Ben Sampson, the man I told you I saw after the scaffolding accident and in the Temple and at the self-defence class, but I still haven’t been able to trace him and I didn’t get the chance to ask Tess. She told me John was one of them. That’s why he killed her. She was going to give the game away.’
‘John Webster was part of the conspiracy against you,’ Adam said. ‘And so was this Ben.’
‘That’s what she said, and what I’ve worked out. I found Webster on the forum. His username was IAmTheLaw, which I presume was ironic. I think Ben was User4102 And I don’t think they knew each other in real life. Tess followed me to that self-defence class but Ben had no idea she was there, or that I would be one of the participants. If they had a conspiracy it was all online.’
‘IAmTheLaw. Cheeky fucker.’ Adam was shaking his head. ‘I told you not to trust Webster.’
‘Don’t rub it in.’
‘I’m just glad you didn’t get hurt.’ He looked away from me, thinking about it. ‘We still haven’t traced the homeless guy on the CCTV when Belinda died, have we? I think that was John Webster. You recognised him immediately when you saw it.’
I was about to say we had located George but in a split second I thought better of it. Webster had found George, and presented him to me as if I could trust what the poor lad said. I didn’t know if he was actually telling the truth. John could have convinced him to say anything. And when I’d tried to push George further on what he knew, he had gone silent.
John Webster was quite capable of finding himself a double, if he needed one. He was quite capable of hurting George to give him a limp to match the vagrant on the CCTV of Belinda’s murder. And he was quite capable of killing.
He had primed George to give me a set of random suspects that I could chase forever, and I had fallen for it – fallen so far and so hard that I hadn’t dared tell Adam or anyone else about George, and how I had been complicit in questioning him.
My main problem was that I still wasn’t sure how Adam would feel about George and the part I had played in kidnapping him, so I decided to keep on saying nothing. Whether it was John at the roadside or not, it didn’t matter at all.
Adam looked across at me. ‘Are you sure this Tess was dead?’
‘Very. She fell out of a window.’
He took that on board, his lips pursed in a silent whistle. ‘Did you call the police?’
‘No. And I didn’t stay. I just ran.’
‘Are you prepared to give evidence against Webster?’
‘Yes. And he knows it too. He lost his temper with her. She was threatening me with a box cutter—’ I broke off because Adam was swearing under his breath. ‘I could have talked my way out of it.’
‘I’m sure you could. Not the first time you’ve had to deal with that kind of thing, is it?’
‘No.’ I was silent for a moment, and so was he. I suppose we were both thinking of Emma Seaton in that grim bathroom, John Webster’s first victim. ‘Anyway, Tess, John and Ben were involved in this conspiracy. I think you might be able to find out Ben’s real identity quite easily if I give you the link to their discussion on the website.’
‘Good thinking,’ he said. ‘You’ve done an amazing job, Ingrid. I can’t believe how much you’ve managed to find out on your own.’
‘I was highly motivated,’ I said drily.
He drove on in silence for the next few miles, then pulled off the road at a petrol station and bought some food, and coffee. I would have said I wasn’t hungry but I ate it anyway, barely tasting it. I felt fractionally better afterwards, and the coffee helped to prop open my eyes which had been threatening to close.
The weather was even worse on the motorway. The windscreen wipers were operating at full speed and still they couldn’t quite keep up with the rain. The wind tugged at the car when the road was exposed.
‘Where are we actually going?’
‘Hampshire.’
‘That’s a big county. Do you want to narrow it down a little?’
‘You don’t need to know where it is. I know and that’s what matters.’ He gave me an affectionate smile, though. ‘It’s a lot nicer than our official safe houses. It’s also more secure. I don’t trust John Webster not to know where every police property is, but he shouldn’t have any idea about this one.’
‘Good.’
‘I’m glad we’re doing this. Until they’re all in custody, you’re in danger. We can’t take any risks with you.’
I drifted a bit as the road disappeared under our wheels, soothed by the thud of the wipers. I actually dozed off for a while, despite the coffee, and woke up to discover we were on a country road.
‘Where are we?’
‘Ten minutes to go.’
Apart from the whirling rain and the tree branches that glanced past, silver-white in the headlights, there was nothing much to see. The road we were on was narrow and made narrower by the hedges on either side.
‘All right?’
‘Fine.’ It came out as a whisper.
The car slowed and he leaned forward, looking for something. Two granite gateposts loomed on the left and he drove between them, then stopped.
‘I have to close the gates.’
He jumped out and I heard the metal squeal as he dragged them closed. I leaned forward so I could see him in the side mirror. He had stopped to look at his phone, tapping out a short message. When he got back into the car, I raised my eyebrows.
‘Should that be on?’
‘What?’
‘Your phone.’ He had taken mine, back in London, and removed the SIM.
‘Don’t worry.’ He reached out to trace the curve of my cheek with his thumb. I moved away a couple of inches, uncomfortable. His hand dropped and his eyebrows drew together, but he didn’t comment except to say, ‘It’s a throwaway one. I’m not taking any risks.’
I would need to talk to him about Mark, I thought. I needed to be honest with Adam. He deserved that.
‘John Webster—’
‘—is probably in custody even as we speak.’
He set off again, the car making heavy weather of the rutted track that led down the other side of the hill. Woods stretched away on either side of the road and dead leaves danced in front of us. The road improved as it swept down to the bottom of the valley – a river valley, I realised as a narrow humpbacked bridge came into view. The bridge wasn’t much longer than the car, but Adam took it slowly, inching forward and swearing under his breath. I looked over the side to see white foam as the water forced its way downstream, and remembered the weather alerts I’d watched in Brighton.
‘They did say there would be flooding.’
‘What?’
‘Never mind.’ I drew my knees up and hugged them for comfort as the car left the bridge and accelerated around a bend. A foursquare Georgian house stood there, not large but immaculate, with a lawn in front and a straggling collection of outbuildings behind it. In the darkness the white-painted house seemed to glow against the black backdrop of a wooded slope.
‘Beautiful.’
‘Isn’t it?’ Adam glanced at me and smiled. ‘Not such a bad place to wait this out.’
He drove carefully along the side of the house, pulling into the big empty courtyard to the rear of the property. I must have been looking apprehensive because Adam patted my knee.
‘It’s going to be fine.’ Without waiting for me to reply, he got out of the car and went to the boot, lifted my bag out and carried it across the yard. The back door opened before he had a chance to knock. A silver-haired man stood on the threshold, nodding to Adam. He said something and both of them turned to look at the car where I was still sitting.
There was no reason not to get out of the car except that I didn’t want to, and I couldn’t work out why.
Adam handed the silver-haired man my bag and he turned away to put it down in the hallway behind him.
I was afraid, and there was no reason to be.
Adam was making his way back to the car at a jog, frowning as the rain stung his face. ‘Come on,’ he mouthed at me, puzzled, and I heard a car engine roaring behind me. Headlights lit up the interior of the Golf, and Adam’s horrified face beyond it. The car wasn’t slowing as it approached.
Get away from here, a voice said in my head, and I obeyed it without thinking.
I shot across to the driver’s seat where the keys still hung from the ignition, and started the car, and swung the wheel to the right as I accelerated, trying to make a quick turn, and I was too late. The vehicle behind me ploughed into the back of the Golf, spinning it off course and off balance. The car slid across the yard as I braked uselessly, and the thick stone wall of an outbuilding filled the windscreen, with Adam right in front of it. He had no time to react. I think he tried to jump clear once he realised what was happening, but he was too slow.
The car ploughed into the wall with a horrible metallic screech, the airbag exploded, and I blacked out.