“Why did you kill her, Edith?”
“Because I hated her, of course.” Edith gave a tinkling laugh, as though the question was quite absurd. “She accused me. How was I supposed to react?”
“And you killed her for that,” DI Pollock said flatly.
He’d used the same neutral tone throughout. Subdued, Edith thought, to be in the presence of such greatness.
“Yes.” She lounged nonchalantly in the hard-backed plastic chair.
She scratched absently at her shoulder under the sling. The hospital had inserted a plate to reattach her shattered collarbone. It itched constantly.
Now, sitting restless in yet another interminable interview, she still wasn’t sure exactly what went wrong. Only that the recoil of the Barrett was like nothing she’d experienced before, a sledgehammer blow that blocked her mind to everything except the pain.
At first, in shock, she’d been devastated that all her plans had come to nothing. But now she realised this could still turn into a huge opportunity. After all, she’d been there, hadn’t she?
For most of it, anyway.
“So, Mrs Inglis accused you of stealing a pair of antique cufflinks, and you obtained a large calibre sniper’s rifle and shot her dead for it?” Pollock said, and Edith thought she detected a hint of wonder.
She nodded.
“Please speak.” The other detective, Weston, gestured towards the recorder that sat at one end of the table. “For the record.”
He was the blond one, Gestapo good-looking in a mean and dangerous way. The one who’d come bursting out of the woods behind her with the AK in his hands and death in those cold blue eyes. She thought he’d shoot her right there. But if he had, she would have missed all this.
Edith made a show of leaning closer to the microphone. “Yes,” she said clearly and distinctly, “that’s why I shot Angela Inglis. And her dog.”
“Really, Miss Airey,” protested the drippy solicitor the Legal Aid people had assigned her, hands fluttering, “I strongly suggest you volunteer as little information as possible.”
Edith looked at her with astonishment and contempt. “Why on earth would I want to do that?”
“Where did you get the rifle, Edith?” Pollock said, almost gently, the sweat beading at his temples and across his broad forehead. It was hot in the interview suite at Hunter Lane, almost stuffy, but Edith had never felt so cool.
They’d never caught Lyudmila Pavlichenko, however hard they’d tried. Hadn’t her tally of kills included thirty-six enemy snipers? But she was injured, too, in the course of her work. A mortar blast. A major by then, they’d withdrawn her from active duty. The Russian hierarchy had considered her too great a propaganda asset to risk again in the field.
“My father’s been a collector for years,” she said demurely. “You’d have to ask him.”
“We have. He claims he’s never seen it before, that it’s nothing to do with him.”
“Well,” Edith smirked, “he would say that, wouldn’t he?”
Pollock sat back heavily in his chair and waved Weston forwards for his bout, as though they were tag-team wrestling.
“You haven’t asked us about your father.” Weston propped his elbows on the scarred tabletop. “Don’t you care how badly you hurt him?”
“I only hit him in the leg,” she scoffed, as if it was calculated, intentional. She lifted her chin. “If I’d wanted him dead, he’d be dead.” A fine piece of bravado—worthy of Pavlichenko herself.
Weston let his eyes drop for a moment as if acknowledging her skill, then he flicked them up, piercing her. “Did he ever hurt you?” he asked then, hesitated. “Touch you in any way?”
It took Edith a moment to get his meaning, and then she flushed a deep, unbecoming red. Did he really think there’d been anything like that going on?
“Don’t be disgusting.”
“How far out where you?” he asked, changing tack. “When you made that first shot?”
“Eighteen hundred and thirty metres, give or take,” Edith said promptly. “But you uncovered my hide, so surely you know that?” She found the courage to stare into those vivid eyes. “The execution was flawless, wasn’t it?”
“And the second? Another hide?”
“Of course not.” She frowned at his refusal to be drawn. “That was more a spur-of-the-moment thing. Fire and manoeuvre, you know? I was in the back of the Land Rover with the bipod resting on the top of a dry stone wall. It may even have left marks.” She glanced from one face to another. “I could show you, if you like?” she offered, disdainful, flicking her gaze into the corners of the room. “Could do with a ride out from this dump.”
Weston sat back again, let his inspector take over.
“And your choice of target?” Pollock asked, allowing a hint of heat to slide through. “Did you hate Police Constable Daniel Robertshaw, also?”
“After the lies he spread about me?” Edith flushed anew at the memory. “Yes!” She shrugged as well as she could with only one working shoulder.
“And why try and kill CSI McColl?”
Edith gave another careless half-shrug. She wasn’t about to recount the conversation they’d had that day at Hunter Lane, where the tall redhead had speared her with a frighteningly accurate picture of her life, her secrets. How dare she try and claim something of this pain for her own?
No-one had ever been through precisely this before, and no-one ever would again. Edith’s position was unique, and she clung to it. She set her jaw.
“Why not? She came into my home, took away my rifle—one of my rifles,” she added quickly. “I couldn’t let that go unpunished.”
“And Ian Hogg?” Pollock persisted. “What had he done?”
“He tried to get in my way,” Edith said, flooded with a reflex burst of rage as she remembered him wrestling with her for the gun, the discharge, Patrick falling… “Hogg was a traitor.” She curled her lip. “He deserved what he got.”
Pollock exchanged a glance with Weston that she couldn’t decipher.
“Who’s Patrick Bardwell?” the inspector asked, head tilted slightly to watch her reaction. She tried to show nothing.
“He was just some loser, staying at the Retreat,” she said, as casual as she could. “I used to clean for him.”
“How well did you know him?”
“Not well. He wasn’t the chatty type.”
“We have a recording of a female voice telling us Patrick Bardwell was behind these shootings,” Pollock said, stony. “It now seems that call was made solely to lure our officers into an ambush.” He paused, went on quietly, “When our experts finish running voice comparison tests, they’re going to find you made that call, aren’t they, Edith?”
A slow smile spread across Edith’s face, then she began to laugh. “Of course. You should have just asked before you went to all that trouble, and I’d’ve told you.” She looked from one to the other. “He tried to strangle me, if you must know. Here.” She pulled the collar of her shirt down, tragic, showed them the last pale smudges around her throat.
“Why would he do that?”
“Because he was a loony. Post-traumatic stress or something. Why else would he be at the Retreat?”
“So, why did you tell Mr Mercer he was the sniper?”
“Because I wanted rid of him,” she said. “And I wanted to fool you into thinking it wasn’t me with the gun. Worked, too, didn’t it?”
“Two men died,” Pollock pointed out, hushed and solemn.
Edith scrambled to recall what her father had said about the explosion at the barn, but she’d been so paralysed with worry about Patrick she hadn’t paid attention. It had only sunk in that he’d tricked, used, and abandoned her. So, he was a traitor, too, in the end.
She shrugged again, tried to look mysterious.
“We found a lot of blood at the byre,” Pollock said now. “What happened to Bardwell?”
She opted for partial truth over invention. “Oh, some SAS hit squad came and took him away—in a dark red Land Rover Discovery.”
She shifted in her chair, trying to appease the ache in her shoulder. The plate under her skin was lumpy and awkward, and it was itching unbearably again. Her solicitor was on the ball for that, at least.
“We need to stop there for a break,” she said primly. “My client has only just undergone surgery. She needs to rest.”
“I’m done for the moment.” Pollock threw a sideways look at Weston. “Anything else you want to ask at this point, Nick?”
“Just one final question.” Weston eyed her again, a butterfly pinned under glass. “Why, Edith? What made you want to do anything like this?”
Edith stared at him. Surely he can’t be serious?
“To be somebody, of course.” She realised that three expressionless faces had turned in her direction. She almost laughed at their lack of comprehension. After this, Edith Airey will be a household name. “Oh, come on! How else was I going to be famous?”