Bold Counsel (The Trials of Sarah Newby) (53 page)

‘It must have been difficult to kill a woman like that, don’t you think?’ he said, as conversationally as he could. ‘I mean, she might have fought back. When she knew she was going to die.’

He watched Peter’s eyes closely. As he expected, there was a flicker, as his delicate shaft went home. Peter had tried something similar with Elizabeth Bolan, and failed. Not just failed - he’d been humiliated. He might have some admiration for a killer who’d succeeded.
Or was he the killer himself?

Peter looked down at his hands, thinking for a moment. Or remembering, perhaps. ‘He used a knife, I reckon,’ he said at last. His voice was flat, trance-like - not excited, but calm, dull, monotonous. ‘That put the fear into her, that would. Tell her he’d cut her throat or stick it in her tits, that makes her freeze. Then tape her hands behind her back nice and tight. Scarf round her neck, march her downstairs, stand her on a chair in front of that mirror, and you’ve got her, it’s all too late. Reach up, quick, tie the scarf through the banisters. If she moves, you pull it tight; if she don’t, leave her standing on the chair till it tips. Or just kick it away when you like.’

He paused, and the room fell silent. Neither Terry, Jane, nor the solicitor Rachel Horsefall sitting beside him said a word. Peter looked up at Terry and smiled.

‘That’s how it happened. I reckon.’

‘That’s how you killed her, you mean? Is that what you’re saying?’

Another long silence. The nervous, trembling grin on Peter Barton’s face widened slightly. There was a tremor in his left cheek. But none of the perspiration or fear that had accompanied his confession yesterday, to the assault on Elizabeth Bolan. There was something almost ecstatic about him - a beatification, almost.

‘How I killed her?’ he said at last. ‘Yes, that’s how I did it.’

57. Confessions

‘A
ND NOW I’ve won a case in the Court of Criminal Appeal,’ Sarah said. ‘That’s another feather in my cap. Of course I’m proud of it. But you don’t approve, do you?’

‘It’s not that I don’t approve, of course not. I just don’t believe that man Jason Barnes is innocent, that’s all.’

Michael spoke softly, but when Sarah looked up she saw a slight frown on his face. He was sitting on the sofa in the first floor room in the windmill. Sarah lay stretched out with her feet on one end of the sofa, and her head in his lap. The lights in the room were low, and Mozart was playing quietly on the CD player. Outside, the night sky was bright with stars, washed clean by the passing storm. The wind had fallen, and the sails turned slowly now, a quiet comfortable rhythm. They had been talking companionably for an hour or more, Sarah telling him about her past, the events and decisions that had brought her from being a teenage single mother in the slums of Seacroft to where she was today.

She was aware, as she spoke, that the conversation was less natural than it seemed. There were two motives behind it. The first was to make it clear to him, in a quiet non-confrontational way, how central a role her career had played in her life, and thus how difficult, almost impossible, it would be for her to abandon it and follow him to Spain. And the second, even more subtly perhaps, was to invite him to respond in kind, with details of his own life story. Especially, she hoped, those connected with the picture in the file she had found in his office. Of Michael holding hands with Alison Grey.

Now, she thought, they had reached the moment when this might happen. If it was ever going to, that is. This was why she had introduced the subject of Jason Barnes’ appeal. Whenever this subject had come up before he had dismissed it, as if it didn’t matter to him. But the file in his office suggested it did. Sarah wanted to find out more, without revealing what she knew about the file.

‘You knew both of them, didn’t you?’ she said softly. ‘Jason Carr and Brenda Stokes.’

Lying as she was across his lap, she felt his body tense slightly as he breathed in.

‘A little, yes.’

‘It must have been a big event at the time. Was there a funeral?’

‘A funeral? No, there couldn’t be. They never found her body.’

‘A memorial service, I mean. I bet hundreds of people went.’ She kept her voice as relaxed, as disinterested as she could, but her mind was on high alert.

‘Yes, there was.’ He paused, and she thought he would say no more. To her relief, at least there had been no angry reaction. Then he said: ‘I was there, as a matter of fact.’

‘You were there? At Brenda’s memorial service?’

‘Yes. It wasn’t as big as all that. Forty or fifty people maybe, no more. She wasn’t ... that nice a person, really.’

‘So why did you go?’

‘Curiosity, I suppose. And shock. You don’t expect someone you know to be murdered, do you? Even if she wasn’t very nice.’

‘No.’ Sarah breathed slowly, willing her body to stay relaxed. She listened to the music in the room, letting almost a minute pass before she spoke again. She tested the words twice in her mind before speaking them. ‘I read somewhere that this other woman who died, this Alison Grey, was a student in York at the same time too.’

This time the tension in Michael’s body was palpable. He breathed in sharply; she could feel the muscles in his legs contract, as if preparing to run. If she hadn’t been lying across his lap he would have stood up, she felt sure. But she stayed where she was, totally vulnerable, apparently unconcerned.

‘Yes. I ...’ He looked down at her for a moment, forced a smile. ‘D’you mind getting up for a moment. I’d like another drink.’

‘Of course.’ She sat up, as calmly as she could. ‘Pour one for me too, if you would.’

He stood with his back to her in the shadows, pouring the drinks. It seemed to take a while. He brought hers back and went to stand beside the window. ‘As a matter of fact I did know Alison then too. Rather better than Brenda, as a matter of fact.’

‘Oh?’ Thank God, she thought, he’s telling the truth.
I know this, Michael, I’ve seen you holding her hand in the photo.
So if he’s not lying to me, perhaps everything in that file has an innocent explanation. ‘Was she your girlfriend?’

‘For a short while, yes.’ He gulped his whisky, and went to pour himself another. ‘It was a long time ago.’

‘Did she know Brenda?’

‘A little, yes. They weren’t friends or anything, though.’

‘It must have been hard for you, then, when Alison was killed in your house.’

He came and sat down beside her, on the sofa. It was clear this wasn’t something he wanted to talk about. ‘Look, she was an old friend from university, that’s all. We hadn’t been in touch for years. Until she came back to York looking for a house to rent, that is.’ He sighed, and where the lamplight caught his face she thought she saw a drop of sweat glistening on his forehead. ‘What really upset me about it was when the police came to see me. It was that detective friend of yours, you remember - the one we met jogging on the quay once. I’d thought it was suicide up until then, but he told me she was murdered. That was a nasty shock.’

‘I can see that.’ Sarah frowned. ‘But ... weren’t you upset when you thought she’d killed herself?’

‘Of course I was, but murder is worse, isn’t it? I mean, last time I met her she told me she was ill. She had cancer, you know, and she was scared of the treatment. So when I read that article in the
Press,
suggesting it was suicide, I thought, well, she’d taken the quick way out.’ He shrugged. ‘We all have to go sometime, after all.’

‘She was found hanged in her hallway, wasn’t she?’

‘So they say, yes. Look ...’ Michael bent forward, running his hands through his hair, then looked up and smiled. ‘... do you mind if we talk about something else? It’s not very pleasant, thinking about someone being murdered, is it? Especially someone you knew. So I’d rather ...’

‘You’ve no idea who did it, then?’ It was a risky question but Sarah had to ask it. She expected an angry response. Instead, to her surprise, Michael laughed.

‘Well yes, they think they’ve caught him. Didn’t you know?’

‘What?’

‘I heard it on
Radio York
tonight, while I was cooking. They arrested a man yesterday, in the house where Alison lived. They’ve already charged him with all these assaults on other women, and they’re interviewing him about Alison’s death too.’

He smiled, and lifted his glass. ‘So I think we should drink a toast to the police, don’t you?’

The problems with Peter's confession were in the details. Over the next six hours, they went over it again and again. By the end of that time, Jane loathed him even more than before. His solicitor had demanded a psychiatric assessment. And Terry Bateson had still not charged him.

After Peter’s first, dramatic statement in the interview room, Terry took him slowly, carefully back through all the details, step by step. Very occasionally, Jane asked a question, but mostly she just sat silent in the shadows, listening, letting Terry lead the way. Peter preferred that, she could see. Man to man, he told Terry how he’d stalked an innocent woman, and murdered her. Because she deserved it.

Peter admitted he’d been upset by the way his assault on Lizzie Bolan had gone wrong. He hadn’t expected her to resist, he said; he’d been shocked by the way she’d fought back, and humiliated by his own failure to act quickly and control her. He had cycled swiftly away across the Knavesmire, terrified at the thought of being caught, and furious with himself for his own lack of nerve and planning.

Since then he’d been hiding in his shed on the airfield. He had stored food there, so he wasn’t hungry, and he stayed inside until after dark. He was cold, of course, but that was part of his ‘survival training’; he had his sleeping bag and thermal underwear. After dark he crept out to roam around. He knew the area well - he’d been coming here since last summer, when he’d first found the shed. It was close to York, but wooded and remote - few people went there, especially at night in midwinter. He saw animals; set snares for rabbits, though he failed to catch any. But his main interest was spying on people in houses.

Cross-country, it was about two miles from his hut to Crockey Hill. Most of it was through woodland - plantations and copses of one sort and another. He only had to cross a couple of open fields, and some uncultivated marshland behind a golf course. People in remote houses, he’d discovered, sometimes left their curtains undrawn at night. He’d watched Mrs Richards one evening, but been scared away by the dog. He’d spied on several other houses too, lying quietly hidden in a hedge at the end of their gardens, imagining himself in hostile territory, a soldier in the SAS. But most houses had men or dogs in them; he steered clear of those.

Then he came across Alison Grey’s house. This was perfect for him. She lived alone. She often worked late at night. She was careless about curtains. And her house was remote, with no neighbours nearby.

He’d reconnoitred the house once, and came back again. This second time he’d crept through the hedge into the garden, watching the house carefully. Nothing happened; no dog barked, no alarm rang. No one saw him. And then something moved.

It was a cat, he told Terry with a half smile. A cat sticking its head out of a downstairs window. It looked around for a while, sniffing the air, letting its eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. Then it leapt lightly to the ground and ran away into the undergrowth, on a hunt of its own.

This, Peter claimed, was too tempting. An open window, a woman alone upstairs. He remembered his failure with Elizabeth Bolan; but he remembered, too, the excitement he had felt - the overpowering thrill of entering the house of a woman who didn’t know he was there. He wanted to experience it again. And this time, surely, no neighbour or child would burst in and disturb him. She would be alone, helpless, in his power.

From the lights he guessed she was already upstairs, getting ready for bed. He crept up to the window and lifted it with his gloved hand. It moved up easily, leaving plenty of space for a man to climb in. So he did, cautiously, quietly, his movements silent, his heart beating like a drum in his ears. He wore gloves as before, careful this time to leave no prints on the sill. But he wore no mask, just the hood on his anorak. When he was in the kitchen he drew a hunting knife from its sheath. No danger, he told Terry - I won’t fall for that scissors trick a second time.

It’s not a second time,
Terry thought
- this is a different woman.
But he made no challenge. He just quietly asked Peter what happened next, with as little hostility as he could manage. And listened, while Peter warmed to his tale, his words coming quicker now, in short, eager bursts of excitement. The women, Jane Carter, and Rachel Horsefall, remained silent. Their faces stony, distant, disgusted.

I climbed the stairs, Peter said, and the woman was just coming out of her bath. They met right there on the landing, between her bathroom and bedroom. She was naked, steaming from bathwater, wrapped in a towel. But unlike Lizzie Bolan, she’d offered no resistance at all. She’d been terrified, of course. He’d held the knife to her throat, and she’d stood there shivering, in front of him. Frozen with fear. Unable to move. A naked woman at his mercy.

‘So then what?’ Terry asked softly. ‘What did you do?’

‘Do?’ Peter drew a deep breath; the light in his eyes, shining, ecstatic. ‘I shagged her, of course.’

That was the moment when Terry ceased to believe him. Jane leaned forward urgently, but he put out a warning hand to restrain her. He knew, as Jane did and Rachel Horsefall did not, that Alison Grey had
not
been raped. Murdered, yes; raped, no. Not if the pathologist were to be believed. There’d been no sign of vaginal tears or bleeding. No forced penetration. No male hairs or semen to be sent for DNA testing.

Terry’s mind raced to remember whether this fact had been made clear in the newspaper reports. He thought not. They had focussed on what
had
happened to her, not what had not. Very quietly, Terry asked: ‘How did you do that, Peter?’

Peter described it, as he had described everything else so far. Graphically, and - given his limited range of vocabulary - with striking detail. He spoke slowly, sometimes looking down at the table or his hands, at other times staring directly into Terry’s eyes. As though it was important that he, the man, understood. He ignored the two women completely.