seventy-two

Detective Strong viewed me as if I’d raised Nicholas Vellender from the dead. Slater stood next to him, hatchet-faced and belligerent, like a female version of Niven. “Stacey Walton is inside,” I gasped.

“And Otto Vellender?” Strong said.

I quickly shook my head. Strong gave the order for the police to move in. Surging forward, boots in unison, they sounded like an invading army.

“You okay?” Strong murmured, giving me a slow sideways look. “There’s blood in your hair.”

I nodded, distracted. I didn’t think I was okay, but it was easier to blag it. Unlike Nicholas Vellender. Virtually catatonic, he’d not put up any resistance when I hustled him out of the building now surrounded by a wall of police. He stood mute, hands on his head, as if he were shielding himself from attack.

“Thing is, she killed them all. It means my mother is innocent.” I looked to Strong and then to Slater. Remote and detached, neither reacted in the way I expected. Outside our remit seemed to be the company line.

“We’ll need to talk to you both,” Slater said as if I’d never spoken. Severe and challenging, he rounded on Nicholas. “And you, you have a lot of explaining to do.”

“Can’t you see the boy’s in shock?” I protested. “He needs hospital treatment.”

Slater glowered and jerked his head towards a WPC, told her to see to it. Someone slammed a blanket around Nicholas’s shoulders. I was offered one too and declined. A paramedic tried to persuade me to go to hospital. I should have agreed, but flatly refused. My head ached. I felt hellishly sick. Wired, all I could think of was Monica and her proven innocence, that I needed to get an urgent message to Chadwick, that I should phone Luke, except he’d pitch a host of questions at me that I didn’t feel in the mood for answering. Tipping up on my toes, searching, I pinpointed Stannard among a crowd of onlookers held back at the end of the street. I raised a hand. Our eyes met and, in an instant, I knew something was wrong.

Noise behind me, I turned to see Stacey Walton handcuffed, flanked by police officers, her clothing and hands stained with fresh blood. Nicholas Vellender watched too, pale and sheened with sweat and misery, before a WPC led him away and helped him into an ambulance destined for the hospital.

“I’ll take it from here,” Strong said, moving off, leaving me with Slater, who said, “I’ll need a full statement from you.”

“Now?” Anxiously, I remembered the gun. What the hell had Stacey done with it? If it were found, I was in trouble.

“Preferably.”

“I need a moment.”

“I can come to you, if that’s easier.”

It wasn’t and I didn’t want Slater’s officious and lingering presence in my home. “I’ll come to the station.” Later, I thought.

“As you wish.” His voice was curt. His eyes hardened.

“Is Niven aware of developments?” I said.

“Not her case.”

“But they’re connected.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do.” I sounded as indignant as I felt. “You’ll inform Niven? You’ll talk to her. Please.”

He didn’t say yes or no. The mutinous expression on his face worried me. “Do you need a car?” he said.

I looked over to Stannard. “I’ll make my own way.”

I pushed through cops and paramedics on legs that felt as if they were made of stone and wood and metal. Numbers on the street had swelled. Police cars and vans and sniffer dogs were everywhere. Someone shoved a microphone in my face and asked me to comment. A tanned hand shot out and grabbed my sleeve.

“She’s got nothing to say,” Stannard said, frog-marching me through the rest of the crowd and down the street. “You look as white as—”

“For Chrissakes, will you stop telling me what I look like?”

He jumped, as dumbfounded by my rage as I was. Brittle and sorry, I burst into furious tears.

We sat in a pub reminiscent of a smoky old boozer. The walls were partly tiled and the colour of nicotine. Stannard ordered brandy. I never drink the stuff but didn’t argue. It tasted hot and soothing. Proper booze.

“I have to call Gavin,” I said. “Can I borrow your phone? Monica is in the clear. This proves it. The police want me to give a statement, but I need to let him know first. Oh, and I’ve lost my gun,” I admitted, shamefaced.

“Slow down and calm down.” Stannard spoke in a voice I’d never heard him use before. “Have another drink.”

I did. My head swam. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation.

“Now tell me what happened, from the beginning.”

I gave him a stumbling, rambling, and random account.

“You need saving from yourself,” he concluded, a reproachful note in his voice. “So what followed next?”

I told him. Nothing had taken place in my head in quite the same way as it had happened in the kitchen. Words did not accurately describe the scene—the horror, gore, and violence. I’d have to improve my delivery for the statement, I reminded myself, downing another glug of brandy that would wreak havoc with my medication.

“Fuck,” Stannard said open-eyed. I blinked, tried to shake off the intensity of the memory. “And Nicholas Vellender watched?”

“He had no choice,” I explained. “There was a second when I thought she might stop, but it was no good.”

I remembered Nicholas talking about the number Otto had done on him. A total mind fuck, he’d said. I hadn’t quite believed him. Made me feel like a hypocrite. Hadn’t I been quick to judge both my father and mother?

“Kim?”

“Sorry,” I said. “You alerted the cops, right?”

“Eventually.” He cradled the brandy balloon in both his hands, the liquid rolling around like a slick of treacle.

“What took you so long?”

He had a cagey expression. “Did you argue with Paris Vellender?”

“Paris?” I said.

His eyes drifted away from mine.

I lowered my voice and looked around the pub, and noticed for the first time that there were people in it, most of them gawping at me. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

He nodded, snatched at his drink.

“How on earth did Stacey get to her so fast?”

“She didn’t.” A haunting chill settled over my skin like a shroud. “I went to the house like you said,” he explained. “Couldn’t get in so I went around the back.” He cleared his throat. “She was on the ground.”

I thought of the four-storey drop. “She jumped?”

“She did.”

I imagined Paris’s lithe body awkward and broken. Death would have been instant and obliterating. Small consolation. My stomach felt heavy with heat and blame.

I could have blamed it on her fear of Stacey Walton. I could have held her high-strung and febrile nature responsible, but I knew it was my fault; I’d tipped the balance by threatening to expose her deceit, a deceit I’d later revealed to her only son. If I hadn’t openly nailed her for telling her son his birth mother had abused him when she hadn’t, Paris would still be alive. It was my fault that she’d jumped from four storeys to her death.

I made a grab for Stannard’s phone. I couldn’t let down another woman, least of all my own mother. I had to call Gavin. I had to tell him everything.

He picked up as soon as my call connected. “Yes?”

I began to talk but he cut me off.

“Kim,” he said gravely. He neither paused nor hesitated. He gave it to me straight. “Monica’s been arrested for the murder of Judge Michael Hawkes.”