Now You See Me (31 page)

PART 3

SUMMER-AUTUMN

As soon as Tony and the others had left, with Paddy in handcuffs, lurching, half-awake and feebly protesting, Noel rang Sharon’s number. Mick answered the phone and she could hear television voices in the background.

‘She’s not home yet,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Shall I get her to call you?’

‘Yes, please. But Mick, I wanted to talk to you, too.’

‘Oh, yeah? Fine, here I am.’ He sounded surprised.

She told him what had just happened, that Paddy had been charged with the murder of Justine Riley.

‘You what?’ He interrupted her, almost shouting. ‘On what basis, can I ask?’

‘They found something belonging to her in his flat.’ She went on quickly, ‘They didn’t have a warrant, if you’re wondering, but they did ask him if they could look around.’

‘I’ll bet. Was Sharon there when they arrested him?’

‘No. Look, Mick, it was just a routine questioning. They weren’t really expecting to find anything.’ She paused and she couldn’t prevent the break in her voice when she continued, ‘But they did.’

There was a silence at the other end of the phone. Then Mick said in a cold, polite voice. ‘Well, thanks for letting me know. I’ll get straight down there.’

‘I don’t think he’s got much money,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he could afford any of the top defence barristers.’

‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’ll organise something. I hope you and Sharon are happy with what you’ve done.’

‘We didn’t put the fucking sock there,’ she said, angry, but he’d hung up.

She placed the phone back on its rest, slowly. It was past eight o’clock and she hadn’t had anything to eat since a sandwich at lunchtime. She opened and closed the fridge door several times, and finally settled for some dried up cheese and a couple of biscuits. She poured herself a glass of wine, wishing she kept spirits in the flat. She never drank them, but right then the idea of whisky seemed very appealing.

She went into the living room with her meagre meal and scanned her rack of CDs. There was no music she felt like playing. She slumped in the armchair and stared moodily at the fireplace.

*

Rafferty said, ‘What do you mean you can’t write it?’

‘Give me a break, will you,’ Noel said. ‘Paddy was my friend. I’ll hand over my notes to someone else if you like, but I just couldn’t make an article out of it myself.’

‘Don’t you think he did it?’ There was no sympathy in his voice, only impatience.

‘Yes, I do think he did it, and the others, as well. That’s the trouble. I feel fucked over — betrayed or something. I thought he was sort of a tragic figure. I suppose it was patronising of me, but I liked being his friend; I thought I did him some good, damaged soul that he was.’ She gripped the edges of her seat. ‘Rafferty, please don’t try to make me write the piece. I’d have to resign.’

‘I’ll give it to David. Can he interview you?’

‘Jesus Christ, you don’t bend much, do you, when it comes to the crunch. No, he can’t interview me. That’s the whole point. I want to just crawl away and hide until it’s all over.’

‘That’s not like you, Miss Rat-hound.’ He looked down at his desk. ‘You might feel differently in a couple of days — we’ve got till Wednesday. It’s a good angle
:
H
e
wa
s
m
y
neighbou
r
. Sells papers.’ He sensed her reaction and made a gesture to fend off a protest. ‘OK. Whatever. Pass over your notes to David, and brief him as thoroughly as you feel able to. Then you can follow up this stuff on the Sheltex development.’ He handed her some typed sheets stapled together.

She relaxed. ‘Thanks, Rafferty.’

‘You won’t thank me when you see how tedious this is. You’re going to have to search through the companies register, plus council minutes back to the year dot. Even then you probably won’t find out much. And if you do,’ he said gloomily, ‘we probably won’t be able to print it without being sued.’

‘I’ll do it, gladly,’ she said. ‘With a song in my heart. It’ll be like a penance.’

‘Oh, well, now you’re talking my language,’ he said, grinning. ‘I understand all about that, being brought up by the Brothers.’ He gave her a suspicious look. ‘You’re not crying, are you? I can’t stand snivelling women.’

‘Of course not.’ She took the papers he’d handed her and stood up. ‘But, thanks again.’ She brushed her shirt-sleeve over her damp eyes as she went out.

At her desk she gazed at the information she held without taking in a word. Her fingers hovered over the phone, then dropped. She sat for a while with her head in her hands, thinking.

‘Are you OK?’ Pearlie said, sitting down at the next desk on a waft of French perfume.

‘No,’ Noel said, without opening her eyes.

‘Oh, right. I’ll leave you to it, then.’ Pearlie turned her chair round with an ostentatious bounce and bent over her keyboard. Noel laughed, then she reached for the phone and dialled Tony’s work number.

*

Tony paced and re-paced the length of her living room in the space behind the sofa. Noel lay on the couch watching him from under her bent arm. He was so angry he was barely articulate, shooting remarks at her when he reached certain places in his march. ‘I just don’t get it,’ he said when he got to the window. At her shoulder he said, ‘You admit he did it. You admit we’ve got him cold.’ He turned and headed for the window again. He paused for a moment and made a sound like a growl. ‘So what’s this al
l
abou
t
? Have you changed your mind
?
Don’
t
you think he did it?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said miserably. ‘I can’t think straight. It was like a game — working out the rules, angling for the moves. Then it stopped being a game, it was someone I knew, someone I cared for. It made me go to water. Now I’ve ... I dunno, the shock’s worn off or something, and I’m looking at it more ... dispassionately. It seems wrong. There’s something wrong about it, Tony.’ She held up a hand to stop his interruption. ‘I know it’ll make you angry, but I’m going to say it anyway. It feels too pat, all of it, again. It’s all circumstantial, just like before.’

He grasped the window sill behind him, staring at her. ‘I don’t fucking believe this. You think it was all planted? The sock, the magazines, the rest of it? You really think there’s some mastermind at work here making fools of us? Listen, Noel, he’s virtually admitted he did it — them — he’s given us details, descriptions, incidental stuff he couldn’t have known if he wasn’t there. How do you explain that? Telepathy?’

She shook her head. ‘No. I told you, I can’t think straight. But it feels wrong,’ she repeated, stubborn now.

‘It feels wrong,’ he said blankly. ‘So you ring fucking Mick Morgan before we’ve even got Galen booked, let alone in the cells. And he charges in like the fucking fifth cavalry and won’t let us use anything Galen’s already told us, makes empty threats about illegal search and entry.’ He came over to stand near her, looming threateningly. ‘Morgan’s personally briefing the public defender, did you know that? For no fee.’

She couldn’t restrain a slight smile. ‘Is he? Good on him.’

He sighed and groaned on the one breath. He sat on the coffee table in front of her and pulled her hand away from her eyes. ‘Noel, there’s got to be a point where you say, That’s it, all the evidence goes to show he did it, that’s the end of it. You can’t just dismiss it because it wasn’t the outcome you wanted. Because it’s someone you know, not some evil faceless stranger,’ he said. ‘Well
,I
can’t. That’s the problem, isn’t it
?
Yo
u
can say i
t
feel
s
wron
g
and dip out of facing up to it, and I can’t, so I’ll be the sop to your conscience. You can blame me for everything and you’ll be home free.’

She looked at him through slowly spilling tears. ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ she said. ‘Perhaps that is what I’m doing, but I can’t help it. I look at you and I se
e
policema
n
, writ large — and I’m not talking about your size. I see someone who took advantage of a pathetic bloke who’s not all there any more, someone who tricked him into implicating himself. He hadn’t had any sleep for twenty-four hours, Tony, he didn’t have a clue what was going on.’

‘You think we gave him the third degree, do you? Do you think we put live wires to his balls as well? It wasn’t like that.’

‘What was it like, then? Why would a guilty man let you look through his flat, knowing there was incriminating evidence, if he wasn’t completely cowed and ... rendered hopeless? Tony, he was practically frothing at the mouth down here. You can’t have it both ways. Either he’s guilty and you took unfair advantage of the state he was in, or,’ she added defiantly, ‘he’s innocent, and he didn’t know what you were going to find.’

‘I’ll tell you what it was like.’ He ignored her last remark. He was still holding her hand, and he gave it a squeeze and a light kiss on the palm, almost absently. ‘We asked him if he knew Justine Riley, and he said he did, from when she was in hospital. We asked him if he’d seen her since and he went vague on us. He couldn’t remember; but he didn’t think so. We asked him what he was doing the night she disappeared and he couldn’t remember that, either. He looked up his calendar and it was his night off from the hospital, but he still couldn’t make a guess at what he did. He thought he might have stayed home and played music, but he wasn’t sure. At that point I couldn’t decide if he was genuinely scrambled brains on toast or just dead shifty.’ He sighed and let go her hand.

‘Go on.’ She sat up and moved so that she was closer to him.

‘Nothing. It went on like that. We spoke to him for about two hours, asking him the same things again and again, and he got less coherent every time. We asked him if he wanted a fucking lawyer present and he laughed. We finally asked him if he’d killed Justine Riley and he laughed harder. He got really worked up then, Noel, shaking and almost gibbering. I was packing it, thinking we might have an insanity plea on our hands. He started spouting stuff about ho
w
societ
y
had murdered Justine, that the killer was a merciful instrument. That’s when I asked if he’d mind us taking a look around his place.’

‘He hated it,’ she said. ‘He didn’t want anyone seeing his wank magazines. That was what he cared about most.’

Tony gave her a strange look. ‘They weren’t your common or garden hot wet beaver,’ he said. ‘The guys monitoring that shit say he must have been on some pretty esoteric mailing lists for his particular little library. Heavy S and M, kids, some extremely realistic-looking snuff shots, also involving kids ...’

‘OK, that’s enough,’ she said. ‘I really don’t want to know that.’

‘I thought you were the intrepid investigative journalist,’ he said. You wouldn’t last a minute in my job. Or Sharon’s.’

‘No, I wouldn’t. Right now I feel as if I can barely last a minute in your company.’

‘Well, I guess that answers the half-asked question of the other night,’ he said. ‘I’d want a partner I thought could handle the realities. Funny, I thought I’d finally found one.’

She lay back on the couch again, her hand dabbing at her wet cheeks. ‘Was there anything in the basement?’

‘Yes, there was, in fact. We found a couple of computer disks hidden behind the air-conditioning controls. He’s got a big old computer plus a laptop up in his flat. The disks up there were full of crap, theories about the universe: life, love and reality, all that shit. But when we ran these others through we got what’s virtually a confession.’ He stood up and started to pace again.

‘For Christ’s sake, stop walking up and down. What sort of confession?’

He sat on a chair several feet away. ‘Stuff about his terrible childhood, about how the innocent children suffer. How someone has to save them and the only way to save them is to liberate them from their existence, how he’s the saving angel. He says he doesn’t remember writing it, but he might have. We got one of our computer nerds to take his program apart. He broke the user-protect codes and found it all on his hard disk as well. Just in case you thought the floppies were planted, too.’

‘No,’ she said tiredly. ‘I suppose not.’

‘It’s not all,’ he went on. ‘Sharon did some digging into his past. Mick told her there was some incident when they were students, some girl he was in love with, something the police were involved in.’

‘Jesus, what?’

‘She was fourteen, a high school student. He must have always liked them young. Her parents stopped her seeing him and he went berserk. Suicide pacts, threats to kill the whole lot of them. That’s when he was first put in the bin. Enforced psychiatric treatment. Paranoid schizophrenic, I think was the diagnosis.’

‘Fourteen’s not all that young,’ she said. ‘Not when you’re only twenty or so yourself. Some fourteen year olds are pretty adult. She didn’t say he’d raped her, did she?’

‘No. She refused to give any evidence at all, except about the harassment. She was frightened of that. But there were elements of the same patterns — he stalked her, got into the house when they weren’t there, left things, messages so they’d know he’d visited.’