Aftermath (54 page)

Lucy shook her head slowly. ‘Look what you made me do, Maggie,’ she said. ‘Just look at what you made me do. You said you weren’t coming back for another day.’

‘It was
you
,’ Maggie said. ‘On that video. It was you. It was vile, disgusting.’

‘You weren’t supposed to see that,’ said Lucy, sitting at the edge of the bed and stroking Maggie’s brow.

Maggie flinched.

Lucy laughed. ‘Oh, don’t worry, Maggie. Don’t be such a prude. You’re not my type anyway.’

‘You killed them. You and Terry together.’

‘You’re wrong there,’ said Lucy, getting up again and pacing the room, arms folded. ‘Terry never killed anyone. He didn’t have the bottle. Oh, he liked them tied up naked, all right. He liked to
do
things to them. Even
after
they were dead. But I had to do all the killing myself. Poor things. See, they could only take so much and then I had to put them to sleep. I was always gentle. Gentle as I could be.’

‘You’re insane,’ said Maggie, thrashing around on the bed.

‘Keep still!’ Lucy sat on the bed again, but this time she didn’t touch Maggie. ‘Insane? I don’t think so. Just because you can’t understand me doesn’t mean I’m insane. I’m different, true. I see things differently. I need different things. But I’m not insane.’

‘But
why
?’

‘I can’t explain myself to you. I can’t even explain myself to me.’ She laughed again. ‘Least of all to me. Oh, the psychiatrists and psychologists would try. They would dissect my childhood and toss around their theories, but even they know when it gets right down to it that they’ve got no explanations for someone like me. I just am. I happen. Like five-legged sheep and two-headed dogs. Call it what you will. Call me evil, if it helps you understand. More important right now, though, is how am I going to survive?’

‘Why don’t you just go? Run away. I won’t say anything.’

Lucy gave her a sad smile. ‘I wish that were true, Maggie. I wish things were as easy as that.’

‘They are,’ Maggie said. ‘Go. Just go. Disappear.’

‘I can’t do that. You’ve seen the tape. You
know
. I can’t let you walk around with that knowledge. Look, Maggie, I don’t
want
to kill you, but I think I can. And I think I must. I promise I’ll be every bit as gentle as I was with the others.’

‘Why me?’ Maggie whimpered. ‘Why did you pick on me?’

‘You? Easy. Because you were so willing to believe that I was a victim of domestic violence, just like you. True enough, Terry had been getting unpredictable and had lashed out on one or two occasions. It’s an unfortunate thing that men like him lack the brains, but they don’t lack for brawn. No matter, now. Do you know how I met him?’

‘No.’

‘He raped me. You don’t believe me, I can tell. How could you? How could anyone? But he did. I was walking to the bus-stop after I’d been to a pub with some friends and he dragged me in an alley and raped me. He had a knife.’

‘He
raped
you and you
married
him? You didn’t tell the police?’

Lucy laughed. ‘He didn’t know what he was getting into. I gave him the rape of his life. It might have taken him a while to realize it, but I was raping him as much as he was raping me. It wasn’t my first time, Maggie. Believe me, I know
all
about rape. From experts. There was nothing he could do that hadn’t been done to me before, time after time, by more than one person. He thought he was in control, but sometimes it’s the victim who’s
really
in control. We had a lot in common, we soon found out. Sexually. And in other ways. He kept on raping girls even after we were together. I encouraged him. I used to make him tell me all the details of what he’d done to them while we were fucking.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Maggie was crying and trembling, no longer able to keep her horror and fear in check now she knew there was no chance of reasoning with Lucy.

‘Of course you don’t,’ Lucy said soothingly. ‘Why should you? But you’ve been useful, and I’d like to thank you for that. First you gave me somewhere to hide the tapes. I knew they were the only things that might incriminate me other than Terry and I didn’t think he’d talk. Besides, he’s dead now.’

‘What do you mean about the tapes?’

‘They were here all along, Maggie. Remember I came to see you that Sunday, before all hell broke loose?’

‘Yes.’

‘I brought them with me and hid them behind some boxes up in the loft when I went up to the toilet. You’d already told me you never went up there. Don’t you remember?’

Maggie did remember. The loft was an airless, dusty place, she had discovered on her first and only look, which gave her the willies and aggravated her allergies. She must have mentioned it to Lucy when showing her around the house. ‘Is that why you made friends with me, because you thought I might be useful?’

‘I thought I might have need of a friend somewhere down the line, yes, a defender, even. And you
were
good. Thank you for all you’ve said on my behalf. Thank you for believing in me. I’m not enjoying this, you know. I get no pleasure from killing. It’s a pity it has to end this way.’

‘But it doesn’t,’ Maggie begged. ‘Oh, God, please don’t. Just go. I won’t say anything. I promise.’

‘Oh, you say that now, now that you’re full of fear of death, but if I go, you won’t feel that way any more and you’ll tell the police everything.’

‘I won’t. I
promise
.’

‘I wish I could believe you, Maggie, I really do.’

‘It’s true.’

Lucy took the belt off her jeans.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I told you, I’ll be gentle. It’s nothing to be frightened of, just a little pain, then you’ll go to sleep.’

‘No!’

Someone banged on the front door. Lucy froze and Maggie held her breath. ‘Be quiet,’ Lucy hissed, putting her hand over Maggie’s mouth. ‘They’ll go away.’

But the banging continued. Then came a voice. ‘Maggie! Open up, it’s the police. We know you’re in there. We spoke to your neighbour. She saw you come home. Open up, Maggie, we want to talk to you. It’s very important.’

Maggie could see the fear in Lucy’s expression. She struggled to shout, but the hand covered her mouth, almost cut off her breath.

‘Is she with you, Maggie?’ the voice continued. It was Banks, Maggie realized, the detective who had made her angry. If only he stayed, broke down the door and rescued her, she’d apologize; she’d do whatever he wanted. ‘Is that who it is?’ Banks went on. ‘The blonde girl your neighbour saw. Is it Lucy? Did she change her appearance? If it’s you, Lucy, we know all about Kathleen Murray. We’ve got a lot of questions for you. Maggie, come down and open up. If Lucy’s with you, don’t trust her. We think she hid the tapes in your house.’

‘Be quiet,’ Lucy said and went out of the room.

‘I’m here!’ Maggie immediately yelled at the top of her lungs, not sure if they could hear her or not. ‘She’s here, too. Lucy. She’s going to kill me. Please help me!’

Lucy came back into the bedroom, but she didn’t seem concerned by Maggie’s screams. ‘They’re out back, too,’ she said, crossing her arms. ‘What can I do? I can’t go to jail. I couldn’t stand to be locked up in the cage for the rest of my days.’

‘Lucy,’ Maggie said as evenly as she could manage. ‘Untie me and open the door. Let them in. I’m sure they’ll be lenient. They’ll see you need help.’

But Lucy wasn’t listening. She had started pacing again and muttering to herself. All Maggie could catch was the word ‘cage’ again and again.

Then she heard an almighty crash from downstairs as the police broke the front door, then the sound of men running up the stairs.

‘I’m up here!’ she yelled.

Lucy looked at her, almost pitifully, Maggie thought, and said, ‘Try not to hate me too much,’ then she took a run and dived through the bedroom window in a shower of glass.

Maggie screamed.

For someone who
disliked hospitals as much as Banks did, he seemed to have spent more than enough time in the Infirmary over the past couple of weeks, he thought as he walked down the corridor to Maggie Forrest’s private room on Thursday.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ Maggie said when he knocked and walked in. She wouldn’t look him in the eye, he noticed, but stared at the wall. The bandage over her forehead held the dressing at the back of her head in place. The wound had been a nasty one, requiring several stitches. She had also lost a lot of blood. When Banks had got to her, the pillow was soaked with it. According to the doctor, though, she was out of the woods and should be okay to go home in a day or so. Now she was being treated for delayed shock as much as anything. Looking at her, Banks thought of the day not so long ago when he first saw Lucy Payne in a hospital bed, one eye bandaged, the other assessing her situation, black hair spread out on the white pillow.

‘Is that all the thanks I get?’ he said.

‘Thanks?’

‘For bringing in the cavalry. It was my idea, you know. True, I was only doing my job, but people sometimes feel the need to add a word or two of personal thanks. Don’t worry, I don’t expect a tip or anything.’

‘It’s easy for you to be flippant, isn’t it?’

Banks pulled up a chair and sat at her bedside. ‘Maybe not as easy as you think. How are you?’

‘Fine.’

‘Really?’

‘I’m all right. A bit sore.’

‘It’s hardly surprising.’

‘Was it really you?’

‘Was what really me?’

Maggie looked him in the eye for the first time. Hers were dulled with medication, but he could see pain and confusion there, along with something softer, something less definable. ‘Who led the rescue party.’

Banks leaned back and sighed. ‘I only blame myself that it took me so long,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I should have worked it out earlier. I had all the pieces. I just didn’t put them together quickly enough, not until the SOCO team found the camcorder in the pond at the bottom of The Hill.’

‘That’s where it was?’

‘Yes. Lucy must have dumped it there some time over that last weekend.’

‘I go there sometimes to think and feed the ducks.’ Maggie stared at the wall, then turned to face him again after a few seconds. ‘Anyway, it’s hardly your fault, is it? You’re not a mind reader.’

‘No? People sometimes expect me to be. But I suppose I’m not. Not in this case. We suspected from the start that there must have been a camcorder and tapes, and we knew she wouldn’t part with the tapes easily. We also knew that the only person she was close to was you, and that she had visited your house the day before the domestic disturbance.’

‘She couldn’t have known what was going to happen.’

‘No. But she knew things were coming to a head. She was working on damage control, and hiding the tapes was part of it. Where were they?’

‘The loft,’ Maggie said. ‘She knew I didn’t go up there.’

‘And she knew she’d be able to get at them without too much trouble, that you were probably the only person in the whole country who’d give her house room. That was the other clue. There was really nowhere else for her to go. First we talked to your neighbours, and when Claire’s mother told us you’d just got home and another neighbour said she’d seen a young woman knocking at your back door a couple of nights ago, it seemed to add up.’

‘You must think I was
so
stupid to take her in.’

‘Foolish maybe, naïve, but not necessarily stupid.’

‘She just seemed so . . . so . . .’

‘So much the victim?’

‘Yes. I
wanted
to believe in her, needed to. Maybe as much for me as for her. I don’t know.’

Banks nodded. ‘She played the role well. She could do that because it was partially true. She’d had a lot of practice.’

‘What do you mean?’

Banks told her about the Alderthorpe Seven and the murder of Kathleen Murray. When he had finished, Maggie turned pale, swallowed and lay back in silence, staring at the ceiling. It was a minute or so before she spoke again. ‘She killed her cousin when she was only twelve?’

‘Yes. That’s partly what set us looking for her again. At last we had a bit of evidence that suggested she was more than she pretended to be.’

‘But a lot of people have terrible childhoods,’ said Maggie, some colour returning to her face. ‘Perhaps not as terrible as that, but they don’t all turn into killers. What was so different about Lucy?’

‘I wish I knew the answer,’ said Banks. ‘Terry Payne was a rapist when they met, and Lucy had killed Kathleen. Somehow or other the two of them getting together the way they did created a special sort of chemistry, acted as a trigger. We don’t know why. We’ll probably never know.’

‘And if they’d never met?’

Banks shrugged. ‘It may never have happened. None of it. Terry finally gets caught for rape and put in jail, while Lucy goes on to marry a nice young man, have two point four children and become a bank manager. Who knows?’

‘She told me that
she
killed the girls, that Terry didn’t have the nerve.’

‘Makes sense. She’d done it before. He hadn’t.’

‘She said she did it out of kindness.’

‘Maybe she did. Or out of self-protection. Or out of jealousy. You can’t expect her to understand her own motives any better than we can, or to tell the truth about them. With someone like Lucy it was probably some strange sort of combination of all three.’

‘She also said they met because he raped her. Tried to rape her. I couldn’t really understand. She said she raped him as much as he raped her.’

Banks shifted in his chair. He wished he could have a cigarette, even though he had determined to quit before the year was out. ‘I can’t explain it any more than you can, Maggie. I might be a policeman, and I might have seen a lot more of the dark side of human nature than you, but something like this . . . For someone with a past like Lucy’s, who knows how topsy-turvy things can get? I should imagine that after the things that had been done to her in Alderthorpe, and given her peculiar sexual tastes, Terence Payne was a bit of a pussy cat to deal with.’

‘She said to think of her as a five-legged sheep.’

The image took Banks back to his childhood, when the travelling fair came around at Easter and in autumn and set up on the local recreation ground. There were rides – Waltzers, Caterpillar, Dodgems and Speedway – and stalls where you could throw weighted darts at playing cards or shoot at tin figures with an air rifle to win a goldfish in a plastic bag full of water; there were flashing lights and crowds and loud music; but there was also the freak show, a tent set up on the edge of the fairground, where you paid your sixpence and went inside to see the exhibits. They were ultimately disappointing, not a genuine bearded lady, elephant man, spider woman or pinhead in sight. Those kinds of freaks Banks only saw later in Todd Browning’s famous movie. None of these freaks were alive, for a start. They were deformed animals, stillborn or killed at birth, and they floated in the huge glass jars full of preserving fluid – a lamb with a fifth leg sticking out of its side; a kitten with horns; a puppy with two heads; a calf with no eye-sockets – the stuff that nightmares were made of.