Aftermath (55 page)

‘Despite what happened,’ Maggie went on, ‘I want you to know that I’m not going to let it turn me into a cynic. I know you think I’m naïve, but if that’s the choice, I’d rather be naïve than bitter and untrusting.’

‘You made a mistake in judgement and it almost got you killed.’

‘Do you think she would have killed me if you hadn’t come?’

‘Do you?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve got a lot of thinking to do. But Lucy was . . . she was as much a victim as anything. You weren’t there. You didn’t hear her. She didn’t
want
to kill me.’

‘Maggie, for crying out loud, will you just listen to yourself! She murdered God knows how many young girls. She
would
have killed you, believe me. If I were you, I’d put the victim thing right out of my mind.’

‘I’m not you.’

Banks took a deep breath and sighed. ‘Lucky for both of us, isn’t it? What will you do now?’

‘Do?’

‘Will you stay at The Hill?’

‘Yes, I think so.’ Maggie scratched at her bandages, then squinted at Banks. ‘I don’t really have anywhere else to go. And there’s still my work, of course. Another thing I’ve discovered through all this is that I can also do some good. I can be a voice for people who don’t have one, or who don’t dare speak out. People listen to me.’

Banks nodded. He didn’t say so, but he suspected that Maggie’s very public championing of Lucy Payne might well tarnish her ability to act as a believable spokesperson for abused women. But perhaps not. About all you could say about the public, when it came right down to it, was that they were a fickle lot. Maybe Maggie would emerge as a heroine.

‘Look, you’d better get some rest,’ Banks said. ‘I just wanted to see how you were. We’ll want to talk to you in some detail later. But there’s no hurry. Not now.’

‘Isn’t it all over?’

Banks looked into her eyes. He could tell she wanted it to be over, wanted to stand at a distance and think it through, get her life going again, work, good deeds, the lot. ‘There still might be a trial,’ he said.

‘A trial? But I don’t . . .’

‘Haven’t you heard?’

‘Heard what?’

‘I just assumed . . . oh, shit.’

‘I’ve been pretty much out of it, what with the drugs and all. What is it?’

Banks leaned forward and rested his hand on her forearm. ‘Maggie,’ he said, ‘I don’t know how to say this any other way, but Lucy Payne isn’t dead.’

Maggie recoiled from his touch and her eyes widened. ‘Not dead? But I don’t understand. I thought . . . I mean, she . . .’

‘She jumped out of the window, yes, but the fall didn’t kill her. Your front path is overgrown, and the bushes broke her fall. The thing is, though, she landed on the sharp edge of one of the steps and broke her back. It’s serious. Very serious. There’s severe damage to the spinal cord.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘The surgeons aren’t sure of the full extent of her injuries yet – they’ve got a lot more tests to do – but they think she’ll be paralysed from the neck down.’

‘But Lucy’s not dead?’

‘No.’

‘She’ll be in a wheelchair?’

‘If she survives.’

Maggie looked towards the window again. Banks could see tears glistening in her eyes. ‘So she
is
in a cage, after all.’

Banks stood up to leave. He was finding Maggie’s compassion for a killer of teenage girls difficult to take and didn’t trust himself not to say something he’d regret. Just as he got to the door, he heard her small voice: ‘Superintendent Banks?’

He turned, hand on doorknob. ‘Yes?’

‘Thank you.’

‘Are you all right, love?’

‘Yes, why shouldn’t I be?’ said Janet Taylor.

‘Nothing,’ the shopkeeper said, ‘Only . . .’

Janet picked up her bottle of gin from the counter, paid him and walked out of the off-licence. What was up with him? she wondered. Had she suddenly sprouted an extra head or something? It was Saturday evening and she had hardly been out since her arrest and release on bail the previous Monday, but she didn’t think she looked
that
different from the last time she’d been in the shop.

She climbed back up to her flat above the hairdresser’s, and when she turned her key in the lock and walked inside she noticed the smell for the first time. And the mess. You didn’t notice it so much when you were living in the midst of it, she thought, but you certainly did when you went out and came back to it. Dirty clothes lay strewn everywhere, unfinished coffee cups grew mould and the plant on the windowsill had wilted and died. The smell was of stale skin, rotting cabbage, sweat and gin. And some of it, she realized, turning her nose towards her armpit, came from her own body.

Janet looked in the mirror. It didn’t surprise her to see the lank, lifeless hair and the dark bags under her eyes. After all, she had hardly slept since it happened. She didn’t like to close her eyes because when she did, it all seemed to play over and over again inside her mind. The only times she could get any rest at all were when she’d had enough gin and passed out for an hour or two. No dreams came then, only oblivion, but as soon as she started to stir, the memory and the depression kicked in again.

She didn’t really care what happened to her as long as the nightmares – sleeping and waking – went away. Let them kick her off the job, put her in jail, even. She didn’t care as long as they also wiped out the memory of that morning in the cellar. Didn’t they have machines or drugs that could do that, or was that only something she’d seen in a movie? Still, she was better off than Lucy Payne, she told herself. In a wheelchair for life, by the sound of it. But it was no less than she deserved. Janet remembered Lucy lying in the hall, blood pooling around her head wound, remembered her own concern for the abused woman, her anger at Dennis’s male chauvinism.
Appearances
. Now she’d give anything to have Dennis back and thought even eternity in a wheelchair too slight a punishment for Lucy Payne.

Moving away from the mirror, Janet stripped off her clothes and tossed them on the floor. She would have a bath, she decided. Maybe it would make her feel better. First, she poured herself a large gin and took it into the bathroom with her. She put the plug in and turned on the taps, got the temperature right, poured in a capful of bubble bath. She looked at herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. Her breasts were starting to sag and the lard-coloured skin was creasing around her belly. She used to take good care of herself, work out at the police gym at least three times a week, go out for a run. Not for a couple of weeks, though.

Before dipping her toes into the water, she decided to bring the bottle and set it on the edge of the tub. She’d only have to get out and fetch it soon, anyway. Finally, she lay back and let the bubbles tickle her neck. At least she could clean herself. That would be a start. No more off-licence assistants asking her if she was all right because she smelled. As for the bags under her eyes, well they wouldn’t go away overnight, but she would work on them. And on tidying up the flat.

On the other hand, she thought, after a good long sip of gin, there were razor blades in the bathroom cabinet. All she had to do was stand up and reach for them. The water was good and hot. She was certain she would feel no pain. Just a quick slit on each wrist then put her arms underwater and let the blood seep out. It would be like going to sleep, only there would be no nightmares.

As she lay there wrapped in the warmth and softness of the bubble bath, her eyelids started to droop and she couldn’t keep her eyes open. There she was again, in that stinking cellar with Dennis spurting blood all over the place and that maniac Payne coming at her with a machete.
What could she have done differently?
That seemed to be the question that nobody could, or would, answer for her. What
should
she have done?

She jerked to consciousness, gasping for breath, and at first the bathtub looked as if it were full of blood. She reached out for the gin, but she was clumsy and she knocked the bottle on the bathroom floor. It shattered on the tiles and spilled its precious contents.

Shit!

That meant she’d have to go out and buy more. She picked up the bathmat and shook it hard to get rid of any glass that might have lodged there, then she hauled herself out of the tub. When she stepped onto the mat, she underestimated her capacity for balance and stumbled a little. Her right foot hit the tiles and she felt the sting of glass on her sole. Janet winced with pain. Leaving a thin trail of blood on the bathroom floor, she negotiated her way into the living room without further injury, sat down and pulled out a couple of large slivers of glass, then she put on some old slippers and went back for peroxide and bandages. First she sat on the toilet seat and poured the peroxide as best she could over the sole of her foot. She almost screamed out in pain, but soon the waves abated and her foot just started to throb, then turn numb. She swathed it in bandages, then went to her bedroom and got dressed, putting on clean clothes and extra-thick socks.

She had to get out of the flat, she decided, and not just for as long as it took to go to the off-licence. A good drive would help keep her awake, the windows wide open, breeze blowing in her hair, rock music and chatter on the radio. Maybe she’d drop in on Annie Cabbot, the only decent copper among them. Or perhaps she’d drive out into the country and find a B & B where nobody knew who she was or what she had done, and stay a night or two. Anything to get away from this filthy, smelly place. She could pick up another bottle on the way. At least now she was clean, and no stuffy off-licence assistant was going to turn his nose up at her.

Janet hesitated a moment before she picked up her car keys, then pocketed them anyway. What more could they do to her? Add insult to injury and charge her with drink driving? Fuck the lot of them, Janet thought, laughing to herself as she limped down the stairs.

•

That same evening, three days since Lucy Payne had jumped out of Maggie Forrest’s bedroom window, Banks was at home listening to
Thais
in his cosy living room with the melted-Brie ceiling and the blue walls. It was his first escape from the paperwork since he had visited Maggie Forrest in hospital on Thursday, and he was enjoying it immensely. Still uncertain about his future, he had decided that before making any major career decisions, he would first take a holiday and think things over. He had plenty of leave due and had already talked to Red Ron and picked up a few travel brochures. Now it was a matter of deciding
where
to go.

He had also spent quite a lot of time over the past couple of days standing at his office window looking down on the market square and thinking about Maggie Forrest, thinking about her conviction and her compassion, and now he was still thinking about her at home. Lucy Payne had tied Maggie to the bed and was about to strangle her with a belt when the police broke in. Yet Maggie still saw Lucy as the victim, and could shed tears for her. Was she a saint or a fool? Banks didn’t know.

When he thought about the girls Lucy and Terry Payne had violated, terrorized and murdered – of Kelly Matthews, Samantha Foster, Melissa Horrocks, Kimberley Myers and Katya Pavelic – paralysis wasn’t sufficient; it didn’t
hurt
enough. But when he thought of Lucy’s violent and abusive childhood at Alderthorpe, then a quick, clean death or a lifetime of solitary confinement seemed a more apt punishment.

As usual, what he thought didn’t really matter, because the whole business was out of his hands, the judgement not his to make. Perhaps the best he could hope for was to put Lucy Payne out of his mind, which he would succeed in doing over time. Partially, at any rate. She would always be there – they all were, killers and victims – but in time she would fade and become a more shadowy figure than she was at the moment.

Banks had not forgotten the sixth victim. She had a name and unless her childhood was like Lucy Payne’s, someone must have once loved her, held her and whispered words of comfort after a nightmare, perhaps, soothed away the pain when she fell and scraped her knee. He would have to be patient. The forensic experts were good at their jobs, and eventually her bones would yield up something that would lead to her identity.

Just as the famous ‘Meditation’ at the end of the first CD started, his phone rang. He was off duty and at first thought of not answering, but curiosity got the better of him, as it always did.

It was Annie Cabbot, and she sounded as if she were standing in the middle of a road, there was so much noise around her: voices, sirens, car brakes, people shouting orders.

‘Annie, where the hell are you?’

‘Roundabout on the Ripon Road, just north of Harrogate,’ Annie said, shouting to make herself heard over the noise.

‘What are you doing there?’

Somebody spoke to Annie, though Banks couldn’t hear what was said. She answered abruptly and then came back on the line. ‘Sorry, it’s a bit chaotic down here.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘I thought you ought to know. It’s Janet Taylor.’

‘What about her?’

‘She ran into another car.’

‘She what? How is she?’

‘She’s dead, Alan.
Dead
. They haven’t been able to get her body out of the car yet, but they know she’s dead. They got her handbag out and found my card in it.’

‘Bloody hell.’ Banks felt numb. ‘How did it happen?’

‘Can’t say for sure,’ Annie said. ‘The person in the car behind her says she just seemed to speed up at the roundabout rather than slow down, and she hit the car that was going round. A mother driving her daughter home from a piano lesson.’

‘Oh, Jesus Christ. What happened to them?’

‘The mother’s okay. Cuts and bruises. Shock.’

‘The daughter?’

‘It’s touch and go. The paramedics suspect internal injuries, but they won’t know till they get her to hospital. She’s still stuck in the car.’

‘Was Janet pissed?’

‘Don’t know yet. I wouldn’t be surprised if drinking had something to do with it, though. And she was depressed. I don’t know. She might have been trying to kill herself. If she did . . . it’s . . .’ Banks could sense Annie choking up.