The First Cut Read online

  It was hot in the room, Jenny thought, so goddamn hot it was hard to concentrate.

  ‘I think in the heat of the moment I misinterpreted what really happened.’

  ‘You seemed to think it was pretty clear-cut only a few hours ago.’

  ‘I believe this Struan Clarke broke in to burgle the place but Adam woke up and they fought. I think the shock of having killed him – I’m sure it was in self-defence – gave him a funny turn.’

  Jenny looked down at the original statement. ‘It says here you thought you heard them talking before they started fighting.’

  ‘I . . . I’m not sure.’

  Jenny shifted forward to the edge of the chair. It was a police issue armchair with a saggy, plasticky middle that made her thighs splay uncomfortably on the hard edge. ‘Well, were they talking, or weren’t they?’

  ‘I’m afraid I really can’t say for sure. We should have called the police the moment it happened but we . . . we didn’t.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  She shrugged. ‘I think he was very stressed at what had happened and acted irrationally. He had been injured in the fight and I think he was horrified that the man had died. Of course he knows he should have called the police immediately but maybe that would have made it real, if you know what I mean. My car had a flat tyre . . . We were trapped, essentially . . .’ She tailed off, frowning and looking at the floor.

  ‘Nicky, did he handcuff you? Imprison you so you couldn’t report the incident?’

  She paused. ‘I think the longer the indecision went on, the worse it got for him. He had the phone and wouldn’t listen to my pleas of calling for help.’

  ‘You didn’t answer my question. Did he imprison you?’

  Nicky shook her head. Jenny watched a fat tear roll down her cheek. ‘Today I had had enough and we had a fight and I ran away.’

  ‘A fight so violent that he broke the side window of the car with a baseball bat and tried to break the windscreen?’

  Nicky nodded, not meeting her eye.

  Something uneasy moved within Jenny. This woman was lying and she thought she knew why. She started to get angry. Why was shame still a woman’s default response to abuse? The number of rapists she’d seen escape justice, the men who pummelled the life out of the mothers of their children . . . These animals rarely went to jail and it made her ashamed of her job. She thought of her daughter, Isla. If any man dared do that to her she’d kill him with her bare hands. When she worked at the Domestic Abuse Unit it had been hard to stay uninvolved. She’d come home from work and watch Isla bounce Barbie in her wedding dress down the aisle in the corridor and make the doll kiss Herbie the toy caterpillar at the altar, while Disney cartoons showing princesses dancing with handsome suitors played on a reel in the lounge. And she’d have fresh images from her shift of what those women had endured at the hands of their husbands and boyfriends: violence and pain and exploitation masquerading as love.

  Jenny’s skirt was sticking stubbornly to her legs again. Then there was the age difference. Nicky was thirty-six and the kidnapper wasn’t yet twenty-three. In the conservative light of a courtroom she could be made to look ridiculous. Of course this woman with her expensive clothes and sports car – a BMW, she read in the report – didn’t want this story to get out. She would be keen to keep up appearances, probably keen to salvage her marriage.

  ‘What are those marks on your arms?’

  She saw Nicky stiffen. Her short sleeves had ridden up and the welt marks could be seen running around her biceps.

  ‘Nicky?’

  ‘Who was Struan Clarke?’ Nicky was on the offensive.

  ‘A fifty-three-year-old bouncer and former soldier who served in the Falklands. He has no connections from what we can gather with this part of the world. Most burglars operate very locally.’ She paused. ‘He was a long way from home, Nicky. But don’t worry, we’ll be looking into why.’

  ‘Did he have a family?’

  Jenny was getting irritated. The power of the police had swung behind this woman to help her in her predicament: no money or effort had been spared to protect her, arrest the perpetrator and lay charges. Her team was the mark of a civilized society taking care of its citizens. But only a few hours later her retraction made Nicky the enemy – and none of them would forget it.

  ‘He had a girlfriend who is at this moment being told very unpleasant news.’

  ‘Does Adam have a police record?’ And here she was, acting like a journalist and thinking she was in a position to ask questions.

  Jenny stared at Nicky. Something about this woman didn’t add up. ‘You do realize that if you change your statement Adam Thornton will most likely walk out of here soon and I probably can’t keep your – or his – name out of the papers. Are you prepared for that?’

  Jenny watched Nicky jut her chin forward in an act that looked like defiance.

  ‘I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.’

  28

  Jenny excused herself from Nicky’s room and came back out into the corridor, where Sondra was fanning herself with a copy of Police Review.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Sondra asked.

  ‘We charge her with wasting police time, if I get my way.’

  ‘Do you believe her?’

  Jenny sighed, more irritated than she could articulate. ‘There’s a big fat lie going on somewhere here. For a start, why didn’t she leave until the following day, why did she take off in the dead guy’s car, and who the hell is this bloke who ended up dead anyway? He’s got a record for GBH from ten years ago and he served two months inside, but that’s all. Adam killed him, so they say, but she’s all beaten up—’

  ‘Do you think she killed Clarke?’

  Jenny smiled. That’s why she liked working with Sondra. The girl had ideas that were out-of-kilter with everyone else’s, but whether they would serve her well as she tried to forge her career in the years ahead wasn’t so clear. Jenny herself had learned the hard way that original thinking didn’t get you far in the force. In fact, it was a positive disadvantage. ‘She killed him and got Adam to lie for her, to protect her nice life?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘But then why did she claim he kept her prisoner?’

  ‘Because he did. He was playing funny games with her. Did you see those marks on her arms?’ Sondra shuddered and made a disgusted sound. ‘He’s into subjugating women, gets a power kick from it, and she’s calmed down now she’s away from him and realizes what a serious charge she could face, so is backtracking, hoping he’ll understand she hasn’t squealed on him and will stick to his side of the deal.’

  Jenny sighed. ‘All I know for sure is that it’s too hot to think straight.’ She lifted her hair away from the nape of her sticky neck. ‘Maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome.’

  Sondra turned to look at her full on. ‘Nicky’s been kept prisoner and is now siding with her captor?’ Jenny nodded. ‘So in her mind the fact that he didn’t kill her has become the belief that he saved her?’ Jenny nodded again. Sondra let forth a low whistle, a strange sound, and Jenny knew that it was men who whistled, as a rule. But then, Sondra tended to break the mould. ‘I thought that took a long time to develop?’

  ‘Not necessarily. It’s the intensity of the experience rather than the length of the imprisonment which creates the conditions for it. It can be as short as twenty-four hours. I studied it as part of my work in the Domestic Abuse Unit.’

  ‘Does it have anything to do with how charismatic the kidnapper is?’

  ‘Yeah, it all helps. It’s the situation combined with the person. After all, you’re more likely to believe a handsome guy than an ugly one, right?’

  Sondra made a funny face. ‘I don’t believe any man, troglodyte or Justin Bieber.’

  They were interrupted by Lawrence Thornton approaching. ‘May I ask what’s going on?’

  ‘Miss Ayers is preparing a new statement. She was apparently not held against her will and she’s unsure whether Adam ever wa
nted to bury Struan under the lawn. Her account now tallies with his.’ Jenny couldn’t keep the sarcasm from bubbling to the surface.

  Lawrence gave a look like he’d seen it all before. He held out his arm in a silent gesture of apology for the work he knew they’d put in and for all the tedious paperwork someone was going to have to complete now to lay it all to rest. He frowned slightly. ‘I really don’t believe there is much you can keep my son in on. He is no threat to the public, he has no prior convictions and he will cooperate fully with your investigation, as he has done all along. And after all he and the woman have suffered considerable trauma from the break-in and the defence of the property.’

  Jenny chewed a hanging bit of skin on the inside of her cheek. It stopped her blurting out things best left unsaid. Today Lawrence stood on the other side of the law and order divide. He wasn’t to blame; they just happened to be on opposing sides in a battle neither of them had sought and that Jenny had in all probability just lost.

  No, thought Jenny, despite the trauma she’d obviously experienced, the person who had packed her secrets away was Nicky Ayers and it didn’t look like Jenny could prise them open.

  ‘I’ll be waiting in the interview room,’ Lawrence added as he walked away.

  The two policewomen stared ruefully at each other once he had gone. ‘I need a coffee. Two sugars,’ said Jenny.

  29

  Jenny stood in the hallway of Hayersleigh House, trying to give instructions to the scene of crime officers, but she had to pause as a plane passed overhead.

  ‘Those planes would send you mad, surely?’ Sondra said after it had faded away.

  Jenny didn’t reply. She looked at the dried bloodstain on the wood-panelled floor and the Persian carpet. The body had already been removed. In this heat no one wanted to hang about. She looked at the stairs and saw the tall, narrow table on which the vase had stood before Adam had hurled it. There was probably a name for that bit of furniture, but Jenny had never lived in a house big enough or grand enough to need one.

  ‘Imagine growing up here,’ Jenny said. ‘Amazing, but weird.’

  Sondra looked up the stairway at the pictures that lined the walls. ‘I know I don’t know nothing about art, but those are really rank, aren’t they? This whole place just feels . . .’ She grappled for the correct word.

  ‘Unloved?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s it. Sad and unloved.’

  ‘Houses reflect the mood of their occupants, don’t they? Is that what Adam is, sad and unloved?’

  ‘My dad never loved me,’ said Sondra. ‘He bunked off when I was two. But I’m not sad.’ She grinned playfully.

  ‘Adam never had a mother. Did you know that men who lose their mothers when they are children are twice as likely to end up with mental health problems, become drug addicts or be violent?’

  Sondra flared her nostrils in disgust. ‘Poor biddy-biddy baby. My mum works double shifts at the Co-op, takes in ironing . . . He’s bloody privileged. There’s always a choice.’

  Jenny walked into the drawing room and looked out at the mess of garden, where the plough stood abandoned, the turned clods of earth a grey scar in the landscape.

  ‘What was he doing?’ she asked no one in particular.

  ‘He’s got a screw loose, if you ask me,’ Sondra replied. ‘A silver screw, to be exact.’ Jenny felt Sondra’s hand on her arm. ‘Look.’ Jenny followed Sondra’s pointing finger. A pair of handcuffs lay on a side table.

  ‘But does that make him a killer, or a kidnapper?’ asked Jenny.

  Sondra scrunched up her eyes against the sun and enjoyed a few moments in the heat. ‘Well, he killed a man, but I doubt he’ll ever see the inside of a cell.’

  Jenny looked around at the large room. ‘Fighting for your life to defend all this.’ She paused. ‘This case is likely to be dropped before it ever comes to court and since Nicky’s withdrawn her statement there’s no kidnapping charge either.’ She shook her head in frustration. ‘What I mean is this: is this going to come back in a few years and haunt us? Are we – and the Ayers woman, for that matter – letting a dangerous psycho off the hook?’

  ‘You know she’s an obituary writer?’

  ‘I tell you, if this goes bad, you’ll be reading my career obituary in Police Review.’

  ‘Want me to check if there are any other bodies poking out of the ground over there?’

  Jenny tutted. ‘We need to continue to investigate Struan.’ She gazed over the lake to where the wall separated the estate from the airport. ‘Maybe Struan’s connection was through someone at the airport. Did Struan ever work at Heathrow? It’s one of the biggest employers in west London, I bet. Maybe that’s how he heard about this place, rotting away with little to protect it.’

  ‘It’s odd though, why burgle the place when there are people in it? Most of the time it’s empty. If you turned up and saw the shutters open and a car, wouldn’t you just come back another time?’

  Jenny frowned. She walked back out to the hallway and shouted for an officer. ‘Did Struan have a bag with him? Something to carry what he wanted from the house with him? It was a long walk back to his car.’

  The man shook his head. ‘Found nothing like that.’

  Jenny and Sondra looked at each other and turned back to continue their tour of the house. They passed the wine-cellar and spent a moment regarding the splintered door; it had been broken in half. Jenny walked upstairs. She wanted to put herself in Nicky’s shoes, to stand at the top of the stairs and just feel the situation for a while. When she passed a first-floor window a few moments later she saw Sondra walking along the furrows, taking a look, just in case.

  30

  ‘Are you OK?’ Lawrence felt Bridget’s warm hand on his knee and he covered it with his own. She was driving, her black eyes hidden behind gigantic sunglasses. The bushes lining the country lane were a blur, impossible to focus on. He reasoned he lacked perspective: on Adam, on Hayersleigh, on the hateful and bullying Mr Barnsley, who was straining at the leash to gobble up his land in his airport expansion. Even his name gave Lawrence the shivers. Lyndon B. It was the name for some kind of pop star crossed with a footballer. He was Connie’s kind of man – a man without history, making it up as he went along, reinvention being the great and ongoing act of his life. He was like the playboys and actors Connie had known when she still had a job. Connie had actually met him. She had wanted to sell, take the money built up in the bricks and vistas of the house, and spend it on transient things. But then the tragedy hadn’t been hers, had it? Her relationship with the house would never be what his was.

  Bridget grabbed his hand and bounced it up and down on his knee and he felt the terrible pressure, which left him fighting for breath whenever he got close to the house, beginning to ease as they motored away.

  ‘Thanks for coming.’

  She smiled. ‘I would always come, you know that. Lawrence, this is not your fault, remember that.’ She squeezed his hand, then added, more insistent now: ‘I know you don’t agree, but it’s the bloody truth.’

  He didn’t reply. His own son, fighting and killing a burglar in that blasted house . . . It didn’t shock him. He’d lost the capacity for shock many years ago. When the worst thing that you can ever imagine happens, the rest is only noise. He felt only a great disappointment. That children were a joy was the great con of the age. His own flesh and blood – the only thing Catherine and he had created together that had lasted – was flawed . . . as deeply flawed as she had been.

  A twist of fate had robbed Adam of a mother’s love, and in this confessional age his son had ended up mourning an idealized relationship he had constructed entirely in his imagination; Lawrence had had to endure the loss of the actual thing. Cathy could be nothing but a saint to Adam, and saints weren’t real. Cathy had been vain and bored and flighty as well as charming and bright, but he had loved her all the same. He had adored her faults: the risible paintings, the snobbery, the wittering. And he would have adored them now.
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  At times it was as though her death had happened five minutes ago, but at other times it felt so long ago it seemed impossible she had ever existed. The time expanded and contracted like a piece of origami. She had lost her life; he had lost the person he had been. I am an exile, he thought, a refugee from my own life. He saw Adam as a baby in Andy Pandy dungarees crawling down the shallow steps that led from the terrace to the lawns beyond, falling one day as he tried to drag the duck on wheels with him, and cutting his lip. He had felt his son’s pain acutely then. The scar that had remained had been visible through Adam’s tan at the station today. Lawrence had looked and felt nothing. Their child should have sustained him, but he hadn’t. People in grief talked about losing their anchors, their lodestars. He hadn’t known it then, but realized it all too acutely now, that he had lost his future. He had suffered a break in the continuity of who he was that could never be repaired.

  Bridget said it made him a better judge. He feared it made him the worst kind: he was emotional, when the law worked only because it was entirely without emotion. He saw so many sides to grief every day in his calling – the blank faces of the victims’ relatives, their hands, whether bony or fat, rigid with a tissue crumpled inside them. He heard their shouts of rage when the legal system tied his hands and he couldn’t deliver them the justice they deserved. But success was often no better: if he sent someone down for many years their faces would crumple with exhaustion. What now, they silently said. And he could provide them with no answer.

  The car sped up as Bridget turned onto an A road heading for the motorway. Lawrence rolled up the window to stop the wind. ‘Maybe it’s a good thing that he called you,’ Bridget ventured. ‘Maybe this is his way of reaching out to you, of beginning something new.’

  Lawrence and his son had lived together since Adam left university and began to dabble in this and that. They had been together through Connie’s illness and her deterioration. He tried to think positively. Adam couldn’t be bothered to get a job or do training (that circus course surely didn’t count), but he spent hours with Connie, making her last months more comfortable, talking to her, keeping her company. He had shown great patience – love, even – to her. He hadn’t expected that, because he and his son were strangers who didn’t understand one another. They were civil, even perfectly pleasant to each other, and they put on a show for visitors and relatives, but the hard truth was that his son was unknown to him. Bridget was right. The phone call had come as a shock; what he heard when he got to the station was even worse.