The Watcher (41 page)

‘The police know that Carla Roberts was happy to open the door when her murderer rang the bell. A woman living on her own in the otherwise empty top floor of a block of flats doesn’t just open the door for anyone. But if someone she knows well is at the door, then of course that’s different.’

Liza got up. She started to say something but at the last moment decided against it. John knew what she had wanted to say. She had wanted to tell him to get lost. And then she had reconsidered. She could not afford to annoy him. She was in his hands.

He could see the anger in her face.

He stood up too. For a few seconds they looked at each other in silence. Then he said, ‘Why don’t you just throw me out? Why are you so scared that I’ll head straight to the police and reveal your hiding place? Why, for God’s sake, if you haven’t done anything, are you so scared of being found? What’s happening, Liza? What’s happened in your life?’

She did not reply.

He tried again. ‘You took part in a self-help group for single women. Women who had been suddenly bereaved or were divorced and were trying to come to terms with their new situation. You explained to them that although you were married, you were thinking of separating. Why, Liza? Why did you so urgently want to get away from your husband, so much so that you are now in hiding, living incognito in this tiny flat in Croydon?’

She still did not say a thing. He thought she was never going to answer him and that he would have to leave without hearing another word from her.

But just as he’d given up and was about to grab his car keys and go, she started to talk.

‘You really want to know? What’s up with my life?’ She closed her eyes for a moment. ‘I can’t believe it. After all these years, someone really wants to know!’

The mansion lay in complete darkness.

There was not even a lamp lit at the gate or along the drive. Only the snow gave some light that evening. The branches of the trees bent under its weight.

Christy looked at her watch. It was six o’clock. She had hoped to find either Dr Stanford himself or his son at home, but no one had reacted to her ringing of the doorbell. The darkness behind the trees that sealed off the house from the road also told her that no one was in.

Christy wondered whether she should drive to Stanford’s chambers. She was afraid that she might miss him on the road if she did.

But to wait here, in this horrible cold?

Where was the boy?

Slowly, undecidedly, she crossed the quiet, snowy road to her car. As she was about to unlock it, she was suddenly approached.

‘Did you want to see the Stanfords?’

Christy turned around. A woman was standing at the garden gate of the house diagonally opposite the Stanfords’. Christy guessed that she was around seventy years old. She had thrown a coat over her shoulders, and clasped it closed with both hands. Christy stepped across to her.

‘Yes. I have to speak to one of them urgently – Dr Stanford or his wife. But it doesn’t look like they are in.’

The woman spoke in a low whisper. ‘No one’s seen Mrs Stanford for weeks.’

‘Oh?’ Christy acted surprised. Maybe she would glean some new information. She kept to herself the fact that she was a policewoman, so as not to scare the woman into silence. ‘For weeks, you say?’

‘Since . . . let me think, mid November, I’d say. That’s the last time I saw her. She picked her son up from school. She didn’t often leave the house, you know, but she would give her son lifts here and there. I saw from my living room window.’

‘Maybe she’s in bed, ill?’ wondered Christy out loud.

‘Oh come on – ill! For two months? And without a doctor coming to visit? No, I don’t think so. Nor do any of the neighbours.’

‘What do you think? And what do the neighbours think?’ asked Christy.

The woman lowered her voice even further. ‘There’s something going on over there!’ she hissed.

‘Really?’

‘You won’t say you heard it from me, will you? I’m afraid of him. Everyone here is afraid of him!’

‘You’re talking about Dr Stanford?’

‘You wouldn’t guess it to look at him. He’s well-mannered, polite. Quiet. You couldn’t complain at all about it except . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘As a neighbour, you see certain things. No one here is nosy, but you can’t always look away, can you?’

‘Of course not,’ agreed Christy.

‘Well, Liza Stanford sometimes looked a right mess. She nearly always wore giant sunglasses, even when it was rainy or dark, but I sometimes saw her without them, when she came to the gate to fetch the post from her letter box. Often her face looked beaten up. Swollen eyes, a split lip, bruises. Her neck was often bruised too, or her nose bloody. She looked as if she’d just been in a boxing match. One that she had lost.’

Christy caught her breath. ‘And you think . . .’

‘I don’t want to spread rumours about anyone,’ the woman said. ‘But if you put two and two together . . . Who was beating this woman up? Only three people live in that creepy dark mansion: Liza, her son and her husband.’

‘I see,’ said Christy. ‘It does look as if . . . But then why didn’t she ever go to the police about it?’

She asked the question with an intentionally fake naivety. She was an old hand. She knew that there were a thousand reasons why women in Liza Stanford’s position did not go to the police. Or to anyone else for help. It was the case that very few women did seek help.

‘Her husband is influential,’ the woman said. ‘Lots of money, a bigwig. On first-name terms with the most important politicians in the land. Knows everyone. Probably he’s good mates with the top brass in the police too. It wouldn’t surprise me. Maybe Liza just didn’t think that was a way out. Perhaps she was scared she’d just make things worse.’

‘When you last saw her, was she injured then?’ asked Christy.

The woman shook her head. ‘Not that I could see. Those sunglasses – they cover almost her entire face.’

The enormous Gucci sunglasses . . . Christy remembered her conversation with the receptionist at Anne Westley’s surgery. The dark glasses that Liza obviously kept on even in gloomy rooms made her seem distanced and arrogant, making people dislike her. But she could not have done otherwise. For most of her marriage to Dr Stanford, she’d probably had to hide her face as well as she could.

‘And you are saying that everyone here is afraid of Dr Stanford?’ Christy checked.

The woman nodded. ‘It’s hardly surprising. Seriously, you should have seen the woman. A husband who does that to his wife isn’t normal. He’s dangerous. I mean, that wasn’t just a few slaps. He must have attacked her with real hatred and brutality. Something’s not right about the man. His eyes stare at you too. He seems ice-cold to me. I can’t stand him, even though he always greets me very politely.’

‘But no one in the neighbourhood ever tried to do something?’

‘How? She would have denied everything if she’d been asked. And to call the police . . . no one was brave enough. Nor did we ever witness the incidents themselves. The house is too far back and it has that giant garden and the trees around it. We didn’t hear or see anything. If we had heard screams, cries for help, we would have known the police could catch him red-handed. But without that . . . they wouldn’t have been able to do anything, but he would have found out who had reported him, and then . . .’

‘And then . . . ?’ asked Christy, when the woman stopped speaking.

The woman seemed worried about looking ridiculous or over-excitable. ‘You don’t know him. I was just afraid.’

‘Nothing unusual about the son?’

‘He’s a quiet and very pale kid. Too quiet and too pale, if you ask me. Certainly not a particularly happy child.’

‘But there was no sign that he was abused in any way?’

‘No. Never. Somehow I don’t think Stanford has anything against children. He does against women.’

‘Other women as well as his own wife?’

‘It’s just a feeling . . . but yes. I can’t explain why.’

Christy thanked her for talking and said goodbye, taking note of the house number and the woman’s name, which was written on a doorbell by the gate. Perhaps they would have to talk to her again.

‘You didn’t hear anything from me!’ the woman called after her.

Christy got into her car, turned it around and drove back into town. She called Fielder from the car phone. As she’d expected, he was still in the office.

She outlined her unsuccessful attempt to see the Stanford family and her conversation with the neighbour.

For a while there was nothing but a stunned silence from Fielder’s end of the line.

‘Unbelievable,’ he said in the end, and then added, ‘Do you think the neighbour’s testimony can be trusted? Or could it be that she has an overactive imagination?’

‘I didn’t get that impression. She really seemed to be afraid of him. And somehow it all fits together. We knew that something was up with the family. The story about Liza’s depression and her regular disappearances sounded suspect to us. Now we’re starting to get a clearer picture.’

‘Yes,’ said Fielder. He sounded worried. ‘You mean . . .’

‘I mean that Liza Stanford is either hiding from her husband because she thinks her life is in danger – or she’s no longer alive. That he made her disappear.’

‘Do you know what you’re saying?’

‘Of course I do. This case stinks. I’ve got a terrible feeling. Stanford is feared by his whole neighbourhood. He regularly beats up his wife. The neighbour’s description is of a psychopath, basically, and she didn’t seem like a crazy old woman.’

‘Still. It’s all just conjecture, Christy. And the claim that he has abused his wife is only backed up by a conversation with a neighbour over the garden gate. That’s paltry evidence.’

‘What’s so paltry about it? Liza has disappeared. Two women she knew were murdered by someone who is obviously a psychopath!’

‘You mean to say that Stanford . . .
Charity Stanford
, the guy who regularly collects hundreds of thousands of pounds for the poor . . . that he is responsible?’

‘I wouldn’t exclude that possibility. There’s something odd about him. He has issues about power, which is why he beats his wife up so brutally. Maybe he thought Carla Roberts was a danger to him. Maybe Liza had told Carla about her disastrous marriage and Carla had kept on at her, saying:
Go to the police! Take him to court! If you don’t, I will!
Something like that. He heard about it and flew into a rage. Like he seems to have done with his wife often enough!’

‘And Dr Westley?’

‘Dr Westley, as we know, had tried to talk to a colleague about Liza Stanford. Because there was a problem, as she said. She might have detected some signs of physical abuse. She was a doctor, she’d notice such things. Or Liza hinted at something to her. Anne Westley might not have known exactly what to do, and so she wanted to talk to someone about it. Her husband’s death then pushed it all out of her mind.’

‘But that was over three years ago. She was only murdered recently.’

‘Because Stanford just heard about it now. Liza might have threatened him with it in a fight.
My friend knows! And our son’s former doctor!
She was scared. She wanted him to know that there were people who knew what was going on and who would look into it if anything serious happened to her. But she hadn’t realised the danger she was putting the two women in.’

‘And how does Thomas Ward fit into this theory? Or Gillian Ward, if she was the intended victim?’

‘I don’t know,’ admitted Christy. ‘But I’m almost sure there’s a connection. We just don’t know what it is yet.’

‘We must find Liza Stanford. There’s nothing else for it,’ said Fielder after a few seconds of silence. ‘With all we know, we could do worse than to check on the women’s refuges in the area. She might well have fled to one.’

‘She might be dead. Or in extreme danger. Or someone helping her might be in danger!’

She heard Fielder sigh. ‘I know what you’re getting at, Christy. But the way things are now . . . there’s just not enough to justify arresting Stanford. We have nothing but speculation and vague statements.’

‘What the neighbour said was anything but vague,’ Christy replied, braking just in time at a red light. She felt an enormous ball of anger gathering inside her. This was what had made her drive too fast and inattentively. Fielder was trying to worm his way out of something with potentially unpleasant consequences. She knew why. Stanford’s influence. The contacts and friendships of a successful lawyer and good friend to politicians. He was a member of the most influential clubs in London. And what did the neighbour say?
Probably he’s good mates with the top brass in the police too
. That was just what Fielder was afraid of, thought Christy. He could see his career and further promotion disappearing over the horizon if he took a step now and the ice turned out to be thin.

Damn it! She felt like slamming her fist down on the steering wheel. She hated these guys who carved out a position for themselves where they were apparently beyond the law, who hid behind their wealth, success and influential contacts to live out their disgusting perversions, certain that no one would ever be able to touch them.

You won’t manage to do that with me, Stanford, you can bet on it!

‘We’ll redouble our efforts to find Mrs Stanford,’ Fielder said stiffly. ‘Until I have her testimony, I’m not going to do anything about her husband.’

‘And what if he finds her before we do?’

‘He’s not even looking for her.’

‘He says. Do you believe him? He’s rich enough to set five assassins on to her. She’s dangerous for him. He has to find her!’

‘Don’t get carried away, Sergeant. We don’t know if he is looking for his wife, or getting anyone else to. We don’t know if he’s responsible for the murders of Roberts and Westley, let alone for Thomas Ward’s death. We don’t even know for sure if he’s physically abusive to his wife. We just don’t know! I’m not going to risk my neck for something this vague, I’m sorry.’

Christy did something that she had never let herself do to her boss. Without another word or so much as a goodbye, she hung up and switched the phone off so he could not call her back. Although she guessed he would be unlikely to do so. He would be relieved not to talk to her for now.