‘Please, Alice,’ Andrew’s muffled voice called through the window, ‘I need to speak to you. Please?’
Alice blinked several times, certain her eyes were playing tricks on her. How could such a friendly and shy colleague be the same person who’d been leaving her letters, making unproven allegations against Ben? She would never have believed it if she wasn’t seeing it with her own eyes.
‘Please,’ he called again, as the two guards gripped his upper arms and peeled his face from the window.
Alice managed several steps backwards, but her eyes never left Andrew’s rapidly shrinking image. Finally, she allowed herself to breathe, and the sudden gasp of air was enough to charge her brain with a reaction. Rushing into the kitchen, she unlocked the back door and marched out into the decidedly cooler air.
‘Wait,’ she shouted towards the guards who were manhandling Andrew around the side of the property, where they were presumably planning on holding him until the police arrived. ‘I want to know why. I want to know why he’s here and what he thought he’d achieve.’
The guards stopped still, and exchanged a curious look.
‘Our orders are to call the police,’ one of the men shouted back.
‘I know him,’ Alice challenged. ‘Bring him inside until the police arrive.’
She headed back into the kitchen and pulled out one of the kitchen chairs so they could sit him down. He looked far less intimidating without his hat, and as Alice sat on the remaining unoccupied chair, she watched as the two guards pulled Andrew’s coat down over his arms to keep him restrained, before frisking him for weapons. All they located was a set of keys to a motorcycle, and a wallet.
There was panic in Andrew’s eyes as the men’s hands moved over his body, as if he feared for his life, but once they were satisfied there was nothing hidden on his person, one of the guards excused himself. The other remained halfway behind Andrew and the now-locked back door.
The creased letter lay on the table between them, this time without sticky tape. Had he planned to hand deliver it? Or maybe just leave it on the doormat for her to find the following morning? He must have seen the guards patrolling the front gate and decided to take his chances with the fence, though Alice had no idea how he could have scaled it given his rotund physique and age.
He looked different without his large spectacles, and she couldn’t be certain whether he had come without them, or if they’d been knocked off during the struggle. Either way, their absence was clearly causing him difficulty as he squinted awkwardly, his face a mess of sweat and dirt where he’d been tackled to the ground.
‘Well?’ Alice growled when she could take the silence no more. ‘Are you going to tell me what you’re doing trespassing on my property? How did you even know where I live?’
His face crumpled into a look of shameful regret. ‘I’m sorry if I scared you,’ he said quietly. ‘The last thing I wanted to do was cause you unnecessary stress, but I had to see you; I had to tell you the truth about your husband. I found your address on the staff directory.’
Alice snatched up the envelope before he had even finished, tearing it open and pulling out the single sheet of typed paper, with the same font and size as the others.
Dear Alice,
You’re not safe with Ben, and now I have proof.
I’ll share what I know if you’ll give me the chance.
I know that you love him, but that’s blinding you from the truth.
He’s killed before and he’ll kill again.
She felt the nausea growing before she could stop it and only just made it to the sink before throwing up the undigested remains of her fast-food dinner. What was it with all the men in her life and the lies they told? All these years she’d seen Andrew as a lonely but ultimately sweet acquaintance. Now she discovered he’d been plotting against her – for what reason?
Running the tap, she ducked her mouth beneath it and spat out the hideous taste, before washing the contents of the sink down the plughole. Returning to the table, she couldn’t control the shaking of her hands and legs, and it was all she could do to sit on the chair without knocking it over. The security guard stepped forward to help her, but she batted his hand away.
‘Do you hate me, Andrew? Is that why you’re trying to destroy my marriage?’
The look of shame remained as he gently shook his head. ‘Quite the opposite in fact.’ He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. ‘I’ve been in love with you, Alice, since the first time I set eyes on you. You probably don’t remember, but I was the first person you met at school on the morning you came for your first interview. I was chatting to Tina on reception when you entered and asked where the head teacher’s office was. I offered to escort you there. I was so shy, and I knew you could never be attracted to a bumbling old fool like me, but that didn’t stop me dreaming that a friendship could one day blossom between us. When I heard you’d got the job and would be joining us at the start of the new school term I thought it was fate’s way of confirming that we would become good friends.
‘I instantly knew Ben was trouble when you first brought him to the teachers’ Christmas meal. He had this look, like he thought he was better than us because he owned his own business, and he refused to talk to any of the rest of us. I remember the two of you left the meal before dessert, and I could see he’d been badgering you to go. Call me old-fashioned, but partners shouldn’t behave that way. It was your night, your chance to enjoy yourself, and he should have been supportive.
‘I was devastated when you announced the two of you would be getting married, but I made a promise to myself that I would be civil to him if we met at your wedding. Then you didn’t invite me to come along. That was hard to stomach, but it didn’t stop me coming to the church on Saturday and watching from the choir balcony. You really did look sensational in your dress. Like an angel sent from heaven – and Ben the devil with his grubby hooves all over you.’
‘You think you’re in love with me?’ Alice asked as her brain tried to process his declaration. ‘And you thought the best way to show that was to leave sinister letters accusing Ben of crimes he didn’t commit?’
‘I really wish for your sake he is as innocent as you blindly believe, but he isn’t. He’s a killer, Alice. He got away with it once, and now he’s going to get away with it again, unless you stop him. I’m terrified that you’ll be the next victim they discover, and if that happened, I don’t think I’d be able to carry on – knowing that I could have saved you and failed.’
The comment stirred something inside her – she knew the guilt he was feeling as it was the same she’d been feeling about both Kerry and Faye for the last week.
‘Ben hasn’t killed anybody, Andrew. The police have arrested the person responsible for Kerry Valentine’s death. It had nothing to do with Ben.’
Andrew’s eyes stared tearfully at her. ‘Even if he didn’t kill that dancer, he has definitely killed before. It was eighteen or so years ago, but he pushed an innocent woman to her death so he could claim on her insurance policy.’
Alice narrowed her eyes. ‘How could you know about that?’
‘Mary,’ he said plainly.
‘How do you … how could you …?’
‘We were at school together,’ he shrugged. ‘She was one of the few girls who would talk to me, and I was even at her wedding to Ben all those years ago. We lost touch, but recently we reconnected at the birdwatching club. Remember, I told you I’d bumped into someone I hadn’t seen for a number of years?
‘Fate brought us back together so we could save you from making the same mistake she made. When she told me what Ben did to her and her mother, I knew it was my calling in life to do something.’
Andrew blinked several times as sweat ran from his brow to his eyes. ‘I never meant to hurt you. I knew if I came and spoke to you in person I’d get flustered and you wouldn’t want to listen to me. This was the only way I could see to get through to you. But even after my first two letters you still didn’t leave him, which is why I had to come and see you in person – so that you would know I was telling the truth.’
‘Don’t pretend you care,’ Alice said. ‘She’s used you, that Mary, you know that, don’t you? She’s a spiteful and vindictive woman.’
‘She freely admits that her relationship with Ben wasn’t good, but her motivation for reaching out now is to stop him hurting you as he has others. I know you don’t want to believe it, but we think he killed that girl in Bournemouth, too.’
‘You’re wrong! It couldn’t have been Ben; he was tied to a lamppost when she died. Plus, the police examined his clothes and found no trace of Kerry’s DNA.’
‘Maybe he bought replacement clothes which he gave to the police. And the photographs of Ben tied to that lamppost could have been staged at any time.’
Alice pulled out her phone and opened the images app, determined to shut Andrew up with cold, hard fact. ‘Here you go. Just look. Here’s Ben, securely tied up with his mates looking on.’ She swiped right, ‘and here’s Ben again, an hour or so later when they came to let him go. See!’
Andrew squinted at the phone. ‘That isn’t evidence! The shirt doesn’t even look the same. In this one his shirt sleeves are rolled up, but in the other one they’re down.’
She pulled the phone back and stared at the image. How hadn’t she noticed that detail before? Sure enough, in the later image the cuffs of both sleeves were rolled up, revealing a line of embroidered material inside. The pattern was hard to determine, even with the image zoomed in, but there was definitely a pattern of some sort. She couldn’t recall Ben’s white shirt having any such material inside the cuffs, but then maybe he’d bought a new shirt for that night. Returning to the first image – the one with the cuffs rolled down – she saw something else she hadn’t noticed before. She zoomed in, moving the screen closer to her eyes, before skipping back to the later shot.
Andrew had noticed her sudden urgency. ‘What is it? What have you seen?’
She wasn’t prepared to utter the words aloud.
It was impossible, but according to the images, if Ben’s version of events was to be believed, not only had he managed to roll up the cuffs on both sleeves despite having his hands bound at the wrist, but somehow a breast pocket had miraculously appeared on his shirt.