Death Comes First (38 page)

She thought maybe she was going mad. Like Charlie. Even madder than Charlie. She didn’t mind. If she was mad then it could mean that Fred and Molly might still be alive. Couldn’t it?

She knew better.

And what about Charlie? How mad had he become to do what he did, to deliberately drive the wife and children he purported to love so much into the deep water of the harbour? And the young woman who’d been duped into believing that he wanted to start a new life with her, she’d been in the car too. Monika, whom Joyce had considered part of her household. Not that it mattered. Not that any of it mattered.

It mattered that Charlie had survived. She’d been aware of him arriving in A & E. For some reason she did remember that. Clearly. Everything after that was a blank. Perhaps she had been medicated. Later – she had no idea how much later – once she’d begun to come round, she’d asked a young nurse how he was. Medical staff had been buzzing around her like flies, as concerned about the state of her mind as of her body. But she had felt calm. Icily calm. She just wanted to know about Charlie. Straight away. He was her husband, after all, and it was possible that the nurse was not aware of the circumstances which had led to Charlie and Joyce being admitted to hospital. Nonetheless the nurse had told Joyce
that she had no information about Charlie’s condition. But that was enough. It was enough to tell her that Charlie was still alive. And she found that fact unbearable. Her children were dead and the man who had murdered them, a man she had once loved so much, the man she had married, who had now totally destroyed her every bit as much as he had destroyed their children, was still alive.

She wondered where he was. She tried to think where he might be. It was hard for her. She was still not functioning fully. But then, she didn’t expect to ever again function fully. And this was important.

She looked around her. She was in intensive care. So would Charlie be, wouldn’t he?

She lay still. She concentrated on appearing calm and peaceful. She pretended to fall asleep again. Eventually the concerned nursing staff drifted away, having come to the conclusion that she was no longer a threat to herself or anyone else. Which had been her intention.

After a while she opened her eyes cautiously, and peered around the ward. There were nurses in attendance at a bed across the way. But nobody seemed to be taking any notice of her.

Joyce disconnected the two tubes attached to her arm. She had no idea what they were or what they did. Or what disconnecting them would do to her. She didn’t care.

She pushed herself into a sitting position, swung her legs over the side of the narrow bed and stood up. Overcome by dizziness, she had to lean against the wall until it passed. Then she set off down the ward, moving slowly and deliberately, looking from left to right, checking out the other patients. Nobody seemed to notice her. Not any of the staff, anyway. Or if they did they didn’t react. Strange, because a
short while earlier they had been fussing over her, anxious about how she might behave. Perhaps there had been a change of shift. Perhaps the new staff on duty had not been told that they should be concerned for and about her. Maybe, if they’d noticed her at all, they thought she was going to the toilet. Were intensive care patients supposed to go to the toilet on their own? She had no idea. She realized her brain was all over the place, her thoughts incoherent.

However, her sense of purpose was absolute. It didn’t take her long to find Charlie. He lay in a bed close to the door. His eyes were shut. She assumed he was unconscious. In fact, although she didn’t know how or why, she was positive he was unconscious and not merely asleep. But that wasn’t good enough. She wanted him to be dead. He wasn’t dead.

She studied him for a moment. Various tubes and leads connected him to an array of hi-tech medical equipment. His chest was rising and falling rhythmically. He definitely wasn’t dead. Not yet.

She had no idea what Charlie’s prognosis might be. Maybe he wouldn’t pull through, whatever she did or didn’t do. On the other hand, he could recover consciousness at any moment. People did, didn’t they? Sometimes when they were not expected to. People came out of comas after months and sometimes years.

Joyce wasn’t prepared to risk that. She couldn’t. She wasn’t prepared to give Charlie any sort of chance, however slim, of living, when her children, her precious children, had died at his hands.

Charlie had to die. He had to die now.

Joyce stepped forward. She wondered if she dared switch off the machines that were helping to keep Charlie alive. Or pull out the tubes that were feeding him. Feeding the man she
now thought of as an incarnation of pure evil. The fiend, the ogre, the beast she had married.

But surely someone would notice. In television dramas any such action was invariably followed by alarms bleeping and a major alert. In any case it was possible that Charlie might survive even without being connected to the equipment that surrounded him. No. Joyce decided that she would have to be more proactive than that. There was one narrow pillow beneath Charlie’s head. One pillow would be enough.

How quickly can you smother someone? she wondered dispassionately as she reached out to grab the pillow, pull it from under Charlie and take it in her hands. How long does suffocation take? How long would it take for the vile creature to die?

She had just grasped the pillow when she felt a firm but gentle hand on her arm.

‘C’mon, Mrs Mildmay, I think we’d better get you back to your bed, don’t you?’ said a voice she recognized.

It was David Vogel.

Vogel had known immediately what Joyce intended to do. He glanced at Clarke. The DCI’s expression was deadpan.

Like him, it seemed, she had decided not to notice.

In any case there should have been a police presence with her. PC Perkins had, perhaps a tad over-excitedly, chosen to leave Joyce Mildmay unattended in order to give Vogel and Clarke the news of her return to consciousness. He should not have done so. He should have waited for a replacement.

This was the kind of cock-up which could lead to shattered careers. Not to mention, in this case, yet another violent death.

Joyce returned to her bed meekly enough and by the time
Perkins rejoined them, having excused himself to go to the toilet on the way back to intensive care, Clarke and Vogel had found a nurse to attend to her.

Neither officer passed comment on what may or may not have happened in PC Perkins’ absence, and Perkins himself was to remain blissfully unaware of the career-threatening incident.

Vogel looked down at the stricken woman lying on the bed. Was she relieved to have been stopped from fulfilling her intention? Was she in fact thankful to have been prevented from killing her husband?

Vogel thought not. He thought it more likely that she wished she had completed the act. He doubted that she would care about the consequences. Why should she?

Nobby Clarke asked a nurse to pull a curtain around the bed. It wasn’t much of a privacy barrier, but it at least gave the illusion of seclusion. In any case it was way past visiting time, and none of the other patients in intensive care looked to be in any condition to eavesdrop.

While Clarke apologized for disturbing her, Joyce stared unseeingly into the middle distance. She looked deranged, thought Vogel, but then who wouldn’t, given what she’d been through that day? He glanced at Clarke, who gave a brief nod to indicate that she wanted him to lead the questioning.

‘We need you to tell us exactly what happened when you were proceeding along the Hotwell Road alongside the Floating Harbour, Mrs Mildmay,’ he began without further preamble. ‘You told me earlier that your husband, Charlie, was driving. Is that correct? Can you tell us how your vehicle came to leave the road and be submerged?’

Joyce focused her newly mad eyes on Vogel.

‘I told you that too, didn’t I? I told someone, back on the
quay, he wanted to kill us all,’ she said. ‘He tried to kill us all. My children are dead. And Charlie did it deliberately. Oh my God, yes. He slammed his foot on the accelerator and drove at the railings as fast as he could.’

Joyce, it seemed, needed no official confirmation of the death of her children. She had been in the car with them when it went under. She had probably watched them drown.

‘Can you tell me how you all came to be with your husband in the Range Rover?’ the DI asked. ‘I know this must be unbelievably hard for you, but can you please tell me, starting at the beginning, everything that happened from the moment you and Molly left the house to come here and visit your father?’

Joyce looked blank.

‘Mrs Mildmay, if you want justice for your children, please help us now,’ interjected DCI Clarke.

‘Justice? What good is justice?’ Joyce snapped.

She closed those mad eyes. For a moment Vogel feared she was going to clam up and they would learn nothing. Then she opened her eyes again and proceeded to speak in a voice that was quite calm, albeit distant. She seemed to be at least trying to tell them everything she could, continuing at length in the same dispassionate manner, and in surprising detail. It was as if, Vogel thought, she was telling a story about somebody else, or even reciting a piece of fiction.

She told the two detectives about the texts to Molly, the drive to Exmoor, the barn in the wood, about her shock at finding out that Charlie was alive, about Monika and the affair with Charlie, and, perhaps most significantly of all, about Charlie’s explanation for having staged his own disappearance.

‘He said that he and my father worked for the government, brokering arms deals. He said he’d been seduced into joining the business by my father
 . . .
’

She broke off then, lost in her own thoughts. Awful, soul-destroying thoughts.

‘My father has always been persuasive,’ she continued sourly, her voice rising in anger. ‘He’s always been able to get people to do exactly what he wants. To bend their wills to his own. Damn him. Damn him to hell.’

Then, suddenly calm again, she carried on with her dark tale.

‘But it all went stale for Charlie over the years, he said. He came to regret relinquishing his ideals and allowing my father to take over his life. When Dad started trading in chemical weapons, Charlie said he was disgusted. But the final straw for him was when he found out that Dad was siphoning off arms and supplying them to criminals.’

Vogel glanced at Clarke. She raised an eyebrow, in that quizzical way that she had.

Oblivious, Joyce continued: ‘Charlie said my father turned against him as soon as he challenged him over the chemical warfare thing. Charlie threatened to go to the authorities, but Dad talked him out of it. He didn’t dare challenge Dad about supplying weapons to criminals. He said it would have been too dangerous, and anyway he’d given up trying to talk Dad round. He was planning to go to the police without saying anything, or so he said.’

Joyce sounded unconvinced.

‘But Dad found out. Charlie thought he might have been hacking into his computer. He said my father was planning to put a contract out on him. That’s when he decided to stage his own death and run away to start a new life. I thought it
was all too far-fetched to be believable. Now I don’t know. I don’t know what to believe about anything any more.’

The two detectives continued to press her further on the matter of illicit arms dealing. Joyce continued to cooperate to the best of her ability. Or certainly she appeared to.

‘Charlie blamed everything on my father,’ she said. ‘He glossed over his sordid little affair with Monika as if that didn’t matter. Not that it did really. Or it doesn’t now. He blamed my father for ruining his life.’

Clarke cut in with a question: ‘Charlie was quite clear that your father was the person who was trading arms with criminal elements, was he, Mrs Mildmay?’

‘Yes. Absolutely clear. Who else? My father
is
Tanner-Max, whatever anyone else might think. He had access to the sort of people who kill for a living. “On a daily rate.” That’s what Charlie said.’

An idea was forming in Vogel’s head.

‘Mrs Mildmay, did Charlie say how he’d found out that your father was involved in illicit arms deals?’ he asked.

Joyce shook her head.

‘Did you ask him how he found out?’ Vogel persisted.

‘No. I was too busy trying to take in what he was telling me.’

‘So he gave you absolutely no idea about that.’

‘No. I suppose he must’ve found an email or something. That he’d hacked into Dad’s email
 . . . 
Only, no, it was the other way round. He said Dad had hacked into his computer. Or got somebody to do it for him. Neither Dad nor Charlie have ever been very good with computers.’

Vogel asked whether she had considered that Charlie could have shot her father. She nodded, then repeated what
Charlie had told her about being miles away on the moors with Fred at the time.

‘In any case, he wouldn’t have known how to handle a gun, even if he’d got hold of one,’ she volunteered. ‘Or at least, I don’t think he would. Right now I’m not sure that I ever really knew Charlie at all. Or my bloody father.’

She looked directly at Vogel.

‘He was out of his mind, completely out of his mind,’ she said. ‘And he’d brought it on himself, like he always brought everything on himself. For years I suspected he was addicted to prescription drugs. Then I found out that, since going missing, all those months he was living with that woman, he’d been smoking skunk. Day in and day out, she said.’

‘Skunk,’ repeated Vogel thoughtfully. ‘So do you think he had become psychotic?’

‘Maybe. What does it matter?’ asked Joyce. ‘He killed my children.’

Vogel returned to his previous line of questioning: ‘Did Charlie express a view about who might have shot your father?’

‘He said he didn’t even know Dad had been shot until I told him. Then he said it must have been the criminals Dad was dealing with. That Dad had been playing with fire. Maybe Dad hadn’t delivered what he said he would, or fallen out with them
 . . .
’

She stared at Vogel with those disturbing eyes.