Dying for Christmas (33 page)

Kim suspects Andrew can’t bring himself to say Natalie’s name. ‘She knew it was going on, then?’ she asks.

‘Oh yes. He used to rub her nose in it. It was part of his way of controlling her. He made her think it was her fault for not being interesting enough. He accused her of letting herself go after Sammy was born.’

Robertson glances up at the clock, again. ‘It must have been a relief for you all when Dominic finally walked out,’ he says.

‘At first it was bloody awful.’ Andrew Dunbar again. ‘Cesca was in bits. But gradually she came back to us. Bits of her old self began to reappear. But every time
he
came up to see Sammy, it set her back for days.’

‘Why did she take out a restraining order?’ Martin wants the facts.

‘He started turning up out of the blue and following Cesca if she went out. He didn’t want her, but he didn’t want her to have a life of her own either. He also started taking Sammy off and not bringing him back on time. Once he took him for two nights without telling Cesca where they were going. She was completely beside herself. It was more of his mind games. We consulted our solicitor and he got a court order to restrict Lacey’s access to Sammy to supervised contact at a contact centre. He turned up at our home threatening all sorts. We called the police and Cesca took out a restraining order.’

‘Did that improve things?’ Even as she is asking, Kim knows it’s a stupid question. They all know the answer.

To her relief, Catherine Dunbar doesn’t remonstrate. ‘For a while Dominic stayed away, but even so, something had broken inside Cesca. She was fearful, withdrawn. She jumped at the slightest sound. She was loaded up with antidepressants and sleeping pills. A doctor advised a fresh start and she and Sammy moved into a house belonging to a friend of ours in a village about half an hour away from us. She hadn’t been there a week before she walked past the village pub and saw Dominic Lacey sitting at the bar having a drink.’

‘That’s what he does, you see?’ Her husband can’t hold back any longer. ‘He fucks with people’s heads. She was a nervous wreck. She couldn’t focus on anything. He’d made her feel like she was worthless. When she heard he’d applied for full custody of Sam, she just cracked. You know my wife hasn’t been able to go upstairs since it happened? Not any stairs. Not in three years.’

Martin is leafing through a pile of notes in front of him on the table. ‘But you weren’t the one who found them, Mrs Dunbar? I thought—’

‘I was at the inquest, Detective. I’m the mother. I’m the grandmother. I listened to the evidence the cleaning lady gave. I saw it all in my head just as clearly as if I’d been there myself. I see it still. Going up the stairs. Seeing Cesca’s feet. I even know what shoes she was wearing. The beat-up blue Converses I was always trying to get her to throw out.’

‘He drove her to that, and then he got half her money, did you know that?’ Andrew Dunbar is glaring at the Superintendent as if he is personally to blame. ‘I can’t tell you how many times I’d asked Cesca to get her bloody will changed but she was in such a pit of depression by the end she didn’t have the energy for anything. Everything was left to him – the London house, the trust she’d inherited when she was twenty-one. The lot. Of course we said we’d challenge it but we ended up having to settle out of court. We could have lost everything. We didn’t want to give him that satisfaction. But he murdered our daughter and our grandson, just like he murdered the second one, and was planning to murder Jessica Gold too. I bet there are more as well. Have you searched his computer? What about his photographs?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t give you that information.’

Like the other two officers, Kim is well aware that the computer-forensics guys have combed through Lacey’s hard drive looking for photographs of other potential victims he might have hidden away or even deleted completely. Among the hundreds of largely innocuous images on Lacey’s computer, they’d found photographs of three different women all involved in a variety of sexually sadistic practices but they’d all been traced and had admitted that, despite the violence, the sex was consensual – or at least it had started off that way, and even if it had turned nastier than they’d envisaged, they certainly weren’t about to press any charges. So what made Jessica Gold the exception? Why suddenly did Lacey decide to kill someone himself?

After the Dunbars finally leave, the atmosphere in the meeting room is heavy.

‘Amazing he’s been getting away with it all his life.’ Two spots of righteous anger colour Martin’s cheeks. ‘His little sister, his first wife, his second wife. His bloody budgie, for fuck’s sake! At least now we can get him on something.’

‘But he didn’t kill his sister or Cesca or Sam, and there’s only circumstantial evidence that says he killed Natalie.’ Kim doesn’t know how much she is arguing because she believes it, and how much because she wants to disagree with Martin.

‘DNA. Fingerprints. How much evidence do you need?’ Martin insists.

‘Of course there are Natalie’s fingerprints in the apartment. She lived there, didn’t she? And the DNA doesn’t prove she’s dead. What about the woman in the Edinburgh jeweller’s?’

‘And the kidnapping of Jessica Gold? The wounds she suffered? The poison in her system? Will that also turn out somehow not to be his fault?’

By this time the Super has gathered up his things and is standing by the door, clearly impatient to be gone. ‘If you have any theories, Detective Harper, I’d be happy to hear them. Lacey is awake now. If he’s compos mentis as his doctors seem to believe he is, we’re going to have to go back and interview him formally so the CPS can start to form some idea how to charge him. The last thing we want is him out and walking around.’

‘I don’t think he’ll be doing much walking, sir,’ Martin says as they leave the room, and Kim is shocked by how much she resents him.

Chapter Forty-Three

Sonia Rubenstein has pushed the boat out today with a wildly patterned scarf in purples and pinks. Above it her head appears like it is floating on a bed of pansies. She is looking at me in that way she has, with her head cocked slightly to one side, as if she’s not entirely sure what to make of me.

‘I feel guilty,’ I’ve just told her. ‘Even though it wasn’t my fault. And Travis isn’t supporting me. I shouldn’t have gone home with Dominic Lacey, I know that, but it was a lapse in judgement.’

‘Another lapse,’ she says.

I study her face looking for clues as to her meaning, but it is blank. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean it’s not the first time you’ve done this, is it? Remember how you spent the night with that man you’d just met – the one you met in a café over a year ago? Perhaps when all this has died down a bit we can explore why you’ve made such poor choices twice now.’

I gaze at her, pretending to be deep in thought, hoping she can’t hear the thud of my heart slamming itself against my ribcage.

‘The two situations are completely different,’ I say. ‘You can’t compare them. Incidentally’ –
slam, slam, slam
– ‘I’m assuming you didn’t mention that other incident to the police when they talked to you. I did tell you in complete confidence. Isn’t there some kind of Omertà code among therapists in cases like this?’

It had been one of those rash, spur-of-the-moment confessions. I hadn’t told Sonia about Dominic at first. I actually felt I’d outgrown her. Then when the blackmail first started, I got so stressed I ended up on the couch in Sonia’s consulting room, learning visualization techniques for coping with Tube journeys, and I had to come clean. I was too embarrassed to tell her the sordid details of what happened in that hotel room, which I guess makes as little sense as going to see your GP and refusing to get undressed. But I did tell her I’d had a one-night stand with a stranger and was still having to deal with the fallout.

She shakes her head. ‘One of the police officers – the woman – did call me to ask about a compromising photograph but a confidence is a confidence. I take the client–-therapist privilege very seriously. And besides, I never knew any details about that man so what could I have said? Why is that so important to you, Jessica?’

She has a way of saying my name that makes me feel about five years old.

‘I just want to keep some things private. Especially now I’ve become some kind of public freak show.’

I am courting her sympathy, I realize. I want her to feel sorry for me like everyone else does and talk to me in a soothing voice and tell me how brave I’m being. I want her to recognize what I’ve been through.

Even if what I’ve been through is a lie.

* * *

In her own living room, on her own sofa, Kim feels out of place. Her mind is still full of work. The Jessica Gold case has got into her bloodstream so it pumps constantly around her brain and she finds it difficult to concentrate on anything else. Not even her own children.

Katy has started doing a new thing every time Kim goes round, sticking to her mother like a plaster, trying to match her little five-year-old’s hands to Kim’s big adult ones, pressing her cheek to her mother’s like she is trying to wear her. Rory shadows her every movement but keeps his distance. He’d make a good undercover cop, it occurs to her.

‘When are you coming home? I want you to come home.’

Katy’s refrain started approximately thirty seconds after Kim came through the door.

‘I just need to finish the case I’m on,’ says Kim.

There’s a small part of her that actually believes this. Now that she’s able to devote so much time to the Gold case, she’ll be key to resolving it. Then, once she has the promotion, with the extra money that will mean, Sean will change his mind. She’ll move back in. The promotion will make her more confident, happier. The kids will understand.

‘I don’t know if I’m in love with him any more,’ she told Heather last night.

Heather, twice divorced and about to turn forty, gazed at her with something approaching incredulity. ‘Grow up,’ was all she said.

‘Daddy wants you to come home,’ says Katy now, shooting Kim a crafty look from lowered eyes. ‘He cries at night-time. Like this—’ She breaks off to do a helpful imitation of someone crying, deep sobs that sound more like groans.

‘Dumbo,’ hisses Rory from behind the armchair.

Kim feels her heart bending against its will like metal in a flame.

* * *

My visit to Sonia Rubenstein has ruffled me. I’m pretty sure she didn’t say anything to the police, but the fact that she could have done just reminds me how precarious this whole edifice is that I’ve created. My story only works if there is no previous connection between me and Dominic Lacey. I never told anyone at the time and I thought I’d destroyed every possible link – got rid of emails and photographs, and even my laptop, spilling coffee over it so it had to be sold for parts on eBay and another purchased in its place. Yet still I keep being caught out – the screen grab of the Facebook page that Joe made me do and now Sonia remembering what I’d told her about the one-night stand with its ongoing consequences. How I met him in a café, not on the Tube as I told the police. I didn’t mention it again, not after that one time, but Sonia never forgets anything.

Though Travis said he probably wouldn’t be home, I still get the taxi to drop me off a few streets away and walk, just in case. It’s getting dark and I’m wearing one of those lightweight down jackets that is no match for the cold wind that seems to have come out of nowhere. I have that antsy, pins-and-needles feeling that makes it impossible to relax. I call David Gallant, who soulds like he’s in the middle of eating, and absurdly I find myself resenting this, wanting him to be concentrating solely on me to the exclusion of all else. I’m after reassurance that Dominic waking up doesn’t change anything, but in the event, reassurance isn’t forthcoming.

‘I have to prepare you for the possibility that you will face charges, Jessica. And if that happens I can recommend some excellent barristers. But I’m confident that despite this new … development … any charges would be relatively minor and, taking the circumstances into account, you’re unlikely to be looking at a custodial sentence.’

I don’t like these words he’s using.
Possibility
.
Unlikely
. I crave certainty. As long as certainty is in my favour. As I come off the phone to David, the need to speak to someone about it all is overwhelming but there is only one person I can talk to.

It’s at least nine or ten rings before Natalie finally answers and she sounds out of breath and cross. ‘I thought we’d agreed we wouldn’t be in touch unless it was necessary. We don’t want to take any risks.’

‘Yes, I know, but I’ve got to talk to someone. I’m going crazy. You don’t know what it’s like being questioned the whole time, having the threat of prison hanging over your head. Why are you breathing like that anyway? Have you been running?’

I start to tell Natalie about the policewoman and how she looks at me as if she doesn’t believe a word I’m saying; the daily phone calls I’ve come to dread. Then, as always, I move the subject back to Dominic, awake now in his hospital bed, biding his time.

‘Why did you have to change the plan?’ I ask her again. ‘After everything we’d agreed? I should have known after the necklace fiasco that you weren’t to be trusted.’