Charlie (55 page)

Right at the end of the corridor the man opened a door on the left-hand side. ‘’Ere we are at last,’ he said jovially. ‘Mrs Randall’s dining room.’

Charlie was soothed by the sight of a tray of tea on the large oval antique table and its matching spoon-backed chairs, also by the view of the front garden through the windows. ‘It’s a very big house for an old lady,’ she ventured as he pulled out a chair at the side of the table for her.

‘Yeah, much too big,’ he said, sitting down at the end of the table with his back to the door. ‘Mrs Randall spends most of ’er time these days at her daughter’s place, that’s why I ’ave to be so careful.’

The bone-china tea service, the lace-trimmed tray cloth, was all appropriate for the room and indeed for the age of the woman he worked for. Yet on a moment’s reflection it seemed strange to Charlie that a working man would choose to use it. The gardener at ‘Windways’ wouldn’t have dared take anyone beyond the kitchen, and if he was making tea it would have been a mug.

It crossed her mind that he could be an intruder himself! Suppose he’d actually been burgling the house when she startled him? But she dismissed that thought as ridiculous; although he looked and sounded like a stereotype of a burglar with his bulging muscles and his missing front tooth, he was too relaxed, too at ease for that. As he poured the tea, he chatted companionably about how he wished he could find time to tackle the back garden, but just keeping the front nice was too much work.

Looking around her at the many large paintings on the walls, all in ornate gilt frames, she noticed there was no theme to them. Portraits were mixed with views, animals and seascapes. Her father would have dryly commented that the owner had no real interest in art but merely bought a job lot as an investment and had them framed identically. Likewise, the large silver salver and three different-sized tureens on the sideboard looked as if they’d been placed there to create an impression of country house living.

‘Now, how about telling me why you really came in here?’ the man said suddenly as he handed her the tea. He smiled disarmingly at her and his blue eyes were twinkling. ‘I’ve been around the block a few times, Charlie, so don’t try to kid me. From the field at the back you can see the road clearly, so no one but an idiot would push their way through that fence and brambles. And you ain’t that, are you?’

Charlie smiled weakly. After being so long on her own and frightened out of her wits for most of the time it felt good to find he wasn’t the bully she’d taken him for at first.

‘No, I’m not stupid, just nosy,’ she said. ‘Okay, I did come in purposely, but only because I saw the front of the house and it looked so posh I wanted to see the back too. I found I couldn’t see anything through the bushes, so I wriggled through a small hole. Once I got inside I was baffled as to why the back garden was so overgrown. I thought maybe the house was empty, so I couldn’t resist taking a peep in the windows.’

He smiled again and patted her hand almost affectionately. ‘That’s better, now we’re getting somewhere. But that’s not all, is it? I’ve got a feeling someone told you something about this house, and that’s why you looked for it. Am I right?’

Charlie was tempted to tell him the truth, to be done with it all and get back to London, yet a sixth sense told her not to.

‘No, no one told me anything. Why, is there something strange about its history?’ she said, looking at him inquiringly.

‘Not that I know of.’ He shrugged. ‘But you said you lived in London, so why come here? It ain’t a place people usually go for day trips.’

‘I had a holiday somewhere near here when I was a kid,’ she said impulsively. ‘I just remembered it being pretty and wanted to see it again. But I must have taken the wrong road from the station, because I couldn’t find the cottage we stayed at.’

He smiled again, and now his rather cold blue eyes looked warmer. ‘I did that once, tried to find a place out in Essex I’d been to. Got meself well and truly lost.’

‘I hope you didn’t wind up in trouble like me?’ she laughed.

‘Well, I didn’t go traipsing round anyone’s garden,’ he said, raising his eyebrows reprovingly. ‘Now, do you live with your mum and dad, Charlie?’

‘No, in a flat.’

‘On your own?’

It was an innocent enough question but aware she was vulnerable enough here in a strange house miles from anywhere, with a man who hadn’t even told her his name, she didn’t think she’d better portray herself as a loner.

‘No, with three other girls,’ she said. ‘It gets a bit noisy there too, that’s why a day in the country seemed a good idea.’

‘Did you tell them where you were going today?’

All at once she felt uneasy. ‘Yes, I did,’ she lied. ‘In fact if I don’t get back by the time they get in from work they’ll be worried about me. I couldn’t phone one of them at her work could I?’

When he didn’t reply immediately Charlie looked hard at him. He was rubbing his chin as if thrown by the request.

‘I’ll pay for the call,’ she said quickly. ‘Please?’

He still didn’t reply and his eyes moved sideways. Charlie assumed he was actually looking towards the phone as if pondering on her request. Yet there was no phone in the corner to which he glanced, only a small hatch, the kind for passing food through from the kitchen.

‘The phone’s not working,’ he said.

‘You said you’d called the police?’ she retorted indignantly.

He looked flustered. ‘I went out to phone them.’

At that alarm bells began to jangle in Charlie’s head. It would have been fair enough if he’d refused to let her use the phone, but why lie to her? Had he forgotten he said the police phoned him back just recently?

All at once all the oddities she’d noticed about him and this house bound themselves into one large mass. Maybe it didn’t belong to Daphne Dexter, but there was something very strange about the whole set-up here. The hairs on the back of her neck were standing up, and she felt threatened. ‘I need to go to the toilet,’ she blurted out. It was the only ruse she could think of which might give him a chance to prove he was harmless. ‘Where is it?’

Again his eyes flitted to that hatch. All at once she realized why. There had to be another person on the other side of it listening to them.

A cold chill ran right through her. It could of course be the owner of the house and that she’d just wanted to hear Charlie’s explanation herself before deciding what to do about her, but such devious behaviour wasn’t typical of old ladies.

She had to know for certain. Leaping up, she rushed to the hatch and pushed it open before he had a chance to stop her.

As the two doors fell back Charlie recoiled in shock. It wasn’t an old lady there, or even another man, but a dark-haired woman with vivid blue eyes.

Their eyes locked for only the briefest split second before the woman slammed the hatch shut, but Charlie instinctively knew who it was.

Daphne Dexter.

Coming face to face so unexpectedly with the woman she was sure was responsible for all the misery in her life suddenly made her feel faint. But as the man grabbed hold of her arm to haul her away from the hatch, she realized she was now in a very dangerous situation.

‘I know who you are, you bitch,’ she yelled at the top of her voice. ‘Don’t even think of hurting me like you did my mother because the police are on to you.’

‘Take her back downstairs, Mick,’ she heard the woman call out.

Stunned and scared as Charlie was, when the man grabbed her arm more tightly, she knew she had to fight from being taken back to the basement. She had already checked the barred windows in that room and they were as strong as the vaults in a bank. She had no doubt now that the man was one of the two who’d helped maim Rita and crippled her mother. She had to get away from up here and save Andrew.

‘Don’t lock me up again,’ she pleaded with him as he manhandled her bodily out into the corridor. ‘I’ll do anything you say, just let me stay up here.’

She knew that sounded daft after what she’d just yelled at Daphne, but she was only playing for time. The front door was right in the middle of the house, so by that she guessed the middle door in the corridor led to it.

‘If you think we want you up here yelling and screaming you’re off your rocker,’ he said, his face turning bright red with the effort of lifting her. ‘Now, just be a good girl and come quietly.’

‘Don’t hurt me then,’ she whimpered, making herself go all limp. ‘Please don’t hurt me!’

Whether it was this sudden subservience, or just that the corridor was so narrow, she didn’t know, but he put her down and took up a position in front of her, dragging her along by only one arm. His grip was like a vice, yet while the other was free, there was still hope. She didn’t attempt to struggle, just followed him meekly.

‘I know you’ve got Andrew here in the cellar, that’s why I came,’ she said softly. ‘Put me in with him, will you? If we’re going to be killed, I’d rather we went together.’

Maybe it was her calm tone of voice, or even shock that she knew Andrew was here, but he turned to look at her as she hoped he might. She caught hold of his arm with her free one, insinuating herself closer to him. ‘I love him, Mick, wouldn’t you want to see the person you loved one last time?’

That statement must have softened him marginally because she felt his grip on her arm weaken. Looking right into his cold eyes, she pleaded with her own. ‘Please!’ she whispered. ‘It’s not much to ask, is it?’

For just a split second she allowed herself to picture that scene on the lawn at ‘Windways’, to hear again her mother’s agonized scream as her knees were crushed. She couldn’t be absolutely certain he was one of the men who crippled her, but that didn’t matter. It was pay-back time anyway.

Her knee came up like a sledge-hammer, hitting him right in his testicles. He staggered back, letting out a fearsome bellow of pain, but she was off past him, running up the corridor to the middle door.

As she grasped the brass knob she heard the kitchen door open, and another man’s voice, but she didn’t even dare look in that direction. She flung the door open and hurled herself across the wide hall towards the front door.

‘Don’t let it be locked,’ her mind screamed, and miraculously it wasn’t. She could hear feet thundering behind her, and she had no intention of being caught again.

Down the steps taking them two at a time, straight across the lawn to the bushes. She knew the wall behind them was four feet or so high, she had never been any good at gym at school, yet sheer terror drove her blindly through the bushes to vault over the wall.

Daphne slumped down on one of the kitchen chairs after returning from seeing her brothers drive off to catch the girl. She was trembling from head to foot, her heart was beating much too fast. She opened Baz’s pack of cigarettes he’d left on the table and lit one, inhaling deeply to calm herself. ‘Why on earth did I allow myself to get panicked into this?’ she rasped aloud.

She took another deep draw and tried to gain her equilibrium. She knew why. Jin was the only man who’d ever made her behave recklessly, and even though she thought she’d put all that behind her a long time ago, it only took a mention of his name from Spud to start it up all over again.

Before she met Jin, she’d believed love was a weakness only fools succumbed to. But he’d turned her upside down and inside out, she’d let her defences down and become vulnerable. She would have done anything for him, but when he walked away from her, back to the wife and child he wouldn’t and couldn’t leave, that love turned to savage hate. She had to destroy him.

Sitting watching his daughter through a crack in the hatch had brought back all that passion she’d felt for him. Over the years, despite having seen the child as a baby countless times, she’d made herself picture it looking like Sylvia. Maybe she’d never convinced herself it was a blue-eyed blonde, but she’d taken pleasure imagining it had the same submissive and vulnerable nature, so that in time she would be exploited in the same way her mother had been.

Yet the girl she saw sitting in her dining room was all Jin. The same calm demeanour, the same steady, sloe-eyed gaze which gave nothing away. Her glowing skin, raven-black hair and defiance was all his. If she had any of her mother’s nature she would have sobbed out everything to Mick, but instead she stuck tenaciously to her story and had the wits to work out she was being observed.

Finally when she knee-ed Mick and escaped from him, the girl had proved she had Jin’s quick thinking and courage too. He had never bowed down to anyone, he was his own man always.

In the last two years, with all that passion and hatred spent, in reflective moments she occasionally pondered on what had made her so ferocious. Jin might never have returned the love she felt for him, but he’d been a caring, sensitive lover and a friend too. He’d set her up with the Lotus Club and when he said he wished her well, he had meant it. Yet that hadn’t been enough, she’d wanted all of him, his heart, mind and soul. When she couldn’t have that, there was nothing left but plotting her revenge.

She did it too, even though it took many years. She took his money, crippled his wife, spoiled the kid’s life and destroyed his good name.

‘But you’ve come back through her to haunt me, you bastard,’ she hissed through her teeth. ‘Well, I haven’t finished yet. No one gets the better of me.’

Andrew sat down on the top step of the cellar stairs. He was very confused by all the sudden noise and charging about he’d just heard. First he’d heard a car pull up outside, then another man had come back into the house with the one who had brought him the food earlier. There was silence again for some time, then all at once he heard feet rushing across the hall and out through the front door. This was quickly followed by a man’s heavy footsteps, then a woman’s, and she shouted to someone called Mick to ‘pull himself together and find her’. Finally the second man came past the cellar door, and he was groaning, his steps uncertain and slow. The car roared off from the drive outside, its wheels spinning on the gravel, and then the woman had come back in.

He couldn’t be absolutely certain – after all the woman had been shouting – but she sounded like Martha Grimsby, her voice had the same low pitch. But who was the ‘her’ the men had been sent to find? He might not have heard one woman coming earlier if she was wearing soft shoes, but surely he couldn’t have missed two of them?