The Backs (2013) (37 page)

Despite an absence of ten years, she could still read him well. She remembered following after him through school, where he’d been popular and sporty and ambitious. He looked like the kid who had it all sorted. She’d trailed behind, unremarkable and inept.

At school he’d seemed a stranger; at home he’d been her brother – the perfect public image didn’t exist there. She thought she’d known his flaws, and empathized with the disgust he felt towards their parents.

Now her heart began thumping.

Of the three of them, she’d usually been the angry one. The exception came only in the moments when Dan’s temper flared. Logic would leave, reasoning with him became impossible, and always the safest route had been to stay clear. Jane had been careful to watch out for the warning signs: Dan brooding, introspective, and festering over some perceived slight.

She could feel that same energy coming from him now. Like he was about to pounce.

Despite its probable futility, she needed to say something to him. But her head was empty of words. A silent vacuum. He stopped just short of the front door and turned to look at her. ‘I came to talk to you. I actually
want
to talk to you.’

Despite that comment, he said nothing else at first.

She heard herself speak. ‘Do you have a plan, Dan?’ It had been an old phrase of hers, and she hoped its familiarity would strike some kind of note.

There wasn’t even the glimmer of recognition. ‘Shhh, I need to think,’ he told her.

‘I thought you wanted to talk?’

She noticed him move only a fraction of a second before his fist connected with her abdomen. It then felt as though she folded in on herself, and the floor rose to meet her. He’d never hit her before. Ever. But she had no doubt now he wanted her dead.

Had this version of her brother always been the one fighting for supremacy? Had the infrequent rages been his true face after all?
She tried to think but she realized how much she must have forgotten, too. Her whole life spent in this house seemed to be fading.

She gasped for air and gradually her lungs refilled. She looked up at him and watched her brother’s expressions run through a gamut of tiny changes. She wondered whether she’d become just a shadow in his memory, too. His head tilted to one side and he stared deep into the corner of the hall. His lips were parted and sometimes twitched with ghosts of the words running through his thoughts. An almost imperceptible tremor came at the end. In his mind he’d thought it through, reached the end, and said no.

Do you have a plan, Dan?

His eyes flickered, refocused elsewhere and his brain ran the cycle again.

Do you have a plan, Dan?

‘Tell me when I can speak.’

‘I’m still thinking.’

Stubborn Dan; she remembered that now. His terms. At his speed. Well, her last minutes alive would not be spent like that.

‘Campbell will be watching, and he’ll see us if we go out. He’ll already know you’re here now.’

‘Shut. Up. No one saw me, Jane. No one saw me.’ His weight shifted from foot to foot. ‘Now be quiet.’

She ignored him. ‘Why kill Becca? That’s what I want to know.’ He kicked out then, but she managed to move aside just enough to protect her ribs with one arm. It still hurt. ‘Becca loved you,’ she persisted.

‘Becca was our mother all over again.’

‘No, Dan, she wasn’t. You’re kidding yourself. Becca was warm and generous and sad. Becca was
sad.
Just tell me why you killed her.’

She thought he’d kick her again then, but he refocused. ‘You have put that well. Yes, she was all of those, wasn’t she? And most of the time she hated Mum too.’ He glanced up the staircase. ‘It’s falling apart,’ he said, but she was sure he didn’t just mean the house. His demeanour had settled into an artificial calm. ‘Mum was going to disappear, just start over and leave the rest of us fucked. I’d already told her I needed help with money, but she turned on me. I wanted to kill her at that moment, and the feeling never went away.

‘She told me I had no right to anything.’

He continued to stare up at the vaulted ceiling above the staircase. ‘This house belongs to this family – not her family but Dad’s. And we have spent every fucking day in her shadow. It wasn’t her moment any more. I had every right.’

‘To kill her?’

‘Every right to be free from her. Every right to stop her taking any more.’

‘What about Becca, Dan?’

‘I planned to kill Mum on the night she left. I was the only one who knew what she had planned until one day she drank too much, and screamed it all at Becca. And Becca ran crying to me. I needed no one else to know.’

‘And two people can only keep a secret properly when one of them is dead?’

‘In the original quote there were three, and two had to die.’ Without warning he stopped speaking then. ‘Come upstairs, Jane.’

She didn’t move.

‘It’s not about money, Jane. It’s about the life they gave me compared to the one I ought to have. Now move.’

She looked at him and saw only darkness.

And, at that moment, her mobile began to ring.

Goodhew dialled Jane Osborne’s number the moment he stepped back out on to the pavement. It switched to voicemail. ‘Ring me at once, Jane. Or get over to Parkside. It’s urgent.’

He pulled up Marks’s number, then changed his mind. Instead he sent Jane a follow-up text.
‘I’m coming to your house right now.’

He was now about the same distance from Parkside as from Pound Hill, but in opposite directions. He grabbed his radio then started running towards Parkside, darting between cyclists and pedestrians.

He shouted for a car to go to Pound Hill, then he felt his mobile buzz and saw a text box sent from Jane’s number flash on to the screen:
‘Going to see Dad at his studio.’
‘Scratch that,’ he told the dispatcher and redirected the car to the studio in Newnham Road, though he didn’t even know the number.

‘Patch me through to PC Gully.’

‘Where are you, Sue?’

‘Parkside, just got in.’

‘Find Marks. It’s urgent.’ People were turning as he passed them in the street.

‘Where are you?’

‘Regent Street,’ he shouted. ‘I’m on my way there now. Find all the Osbornes, and bring them in. Then get down to the back car park. We need to go.’

He cut off the call and ran out into the road, sprinting along the central white line and only heading back across to the pavement when he saw a clear run to Parker’s Piece.

Five hundred yards ahead of him, a marked car pulled out from the side of Parkside, turned on its lights and sirens, then jumped the lights to race up East Road. He could still hear it in the distance as he pushed open the front door, then rushed straight through and out to the car park at the back.

Marks was waiting there with DC Young and PCs Gully and Wilkes. Goodhew stopped in front of them, breathing hard. ‘Dan Osborne killed them.’

For a long moment no one moved. Evidence? Justification? The odds that Goodhew was totally and utterly wrong? All these were questions for which Marks had every right to demand answers.

Goodhew was grabbing another lungful of air to explain further, but Marks spoke first, barking instructions. ‘Sue, Kelly, get to Pound Hill. Young, to Castle Street. Everyone’s out after Jackson. There’s no one else, dammit . . . Gary, come with me. I’m driving.’

The vehicles poured from the car park, turning right along East Road, just as the previous car had done. ‘That first marked car was heading for Newnham Road, too.’

‘I guessed. Who was it?’

‘PC Jarvis. Get an update from him. He should be there about now.’

Marks wove the car through the other vehicles, jumping a 100-yard queue by cutting through oncoming traffic. They ran the next set of lights just as the radio operator spoke again. ‘It’s PC Jarvis. He’s advised that there’s just one male occupant at the address. State of intoxication.’

‘ID?’ Goodhew demanded.

‘Gerry Osborne.’

‘OK, we’ll take Pound Hill. Advise PCs Gully and Wilkes they are not now required on this one.’

‘Ouch, they won’t thank you for that,’ Marks commented. He had just made the left into Newnham Road, where he swung the car in a wide arc across the road, doubling back up Queen’s Road.

‘He’s dangerous.’

‘Spill, Gary.’

‘It’s that thing Kincaide often says:
Follow the money.
Becca’s death gave Gerry Osborne’s work sudden prominence, so prices went up, and Dan grabbed the opportunity to start working for his dad. He juggled the money around and managed to keep himself out of trouble. When he killed his mother he made sure he got his hands on her share of the money in cash. He’s essentially been laundering that money through the gallery, buying pieces at high prices, pretending that they’ve been bought by a private buyer, then putting the money into Gerry’s account.’

‘Minus the gallery’s commission.’

‘But that’s fine, because Gerry’s pieces then garnered a reputation for having great sales potential. That translates into artificially higher prices commanded at the next exhibition. It is all the publicity and receipts from the gallery that make it look above board. But that’s just the paper trail. Just look at Mary’s body – even post-mortem he carried on inflicting damage on her.’

‘That’s frenzy, not control?’

‘But it was carefully planned. It’s only during the killing itself that his emotions overwhelmed him.’

‘We’ll need more than that to charge him.’

‘But not to bring him in.’

Marks killed the siren before they turned into Pound Hill, then swung into the road itself. He took the turn at the bottom of the hill and noticed the lone figure of Campbell standing outside his flat. He was facing the Osborne house, but turned his head to look over his shoulder at them.

Goodhew jumped from the car.

‘Is she there?’ he shouted.

Campbell nodded, then his head seemed to swivel in slow motion as he followed Goodhew’s dash towards the house.

Marks ran, too, towards the front door.

From inside Goodhew heard the sound of splintering wood. Marks banged on the door. Goodhew grabbed a broken fence post and ran round to one side of the house.

Neither of them heard the dispatcher asking for the nearest available car to attend suspicious activity reported at an address in Milton Road. Neither of them, therefore, heard PCs Gully and Wilkes respond.

Greg Jackson had spent the night in the open. The night hadn’t been so cold and part of him knew that this might be one of his last chances at freedom. Drew had rung him late. ‘They’ll be pulling you in. Nothing to worry about. It’s OK to tell them about
Student Services;
they already know.’

But it wasn’t all right. Not at all.

Drew and Karen had been his only support since prison, but he hadn’t told them everything. Didn’t tell them that once each week he had been visited by one of their girls: Andie. Blonde, hopeful and a little melancholy. Not so different from Becca, in some ways.

Andie had become the measure of one week to the next. It wasn’t love. But it was a little bit of hope.

It had worked for both of them, until the week she didn’t come. She’d sent a message: ‘Sorry, I’ve given up.’ He’d never been to her shared house, but knew where she lived. She wouldn’t open the door, but one evening he spied her through a chink in the curtains, and he knew what
I’ve given up
might have meant.

Paul Marshall. Depraved Paul Marshall.

There had been a time with Mary when they’d played rough. Merely
played
rough.

But he’d already seen what Marshall had done to Becca. And now he’d seen it done to Andie. Where did cruelty like that end?

Jackson had slept on that thought, and he began to wonder whether that wasn’t all. What if Marshall had come back and actually killed Becca? What if Marshall was the reason for Jackson’s own seven years in jail? Marshall had to
know
what they’d all suffered.

Jackson shared none of these things with Drew, however. Instead he’d just explained that going to the police now wouldn’t be an option. Drew and Karen were in a mess of their own, but Drew seemed to understand what Jackson needed too.

‘I’ll leave the spare shop key. Once the police have finished searching the building and it’s empty, go in and you can stay upstairs. As soon as I can, I’ll drive you somewhere out of town.’

But Jackson had arrived too soon. Karen was still in the building, and a car he didn’t recognize was parked close to hers. He suspected the police at once. He waited out of sight for a minute, then decided to let himself into the downstairs shop. Partly to hide, but partly to slip up the internal stairs and find out who exactly was there.

Getting into the shop was fine, opening the internal door took longer, and in the end he found a screwdriver and encouraged it. He heard the voices the second he stepped on to the bottom step of the stairs. By the time he’d crept to the top, he understood exactly what every word meant.

Did you know all along that he wasn’t the killer?

With Marshall he’d wanted to hear the truth, to decide at that moment whether he had the will to kill him. But it hadn’t reached that point before the wire had severed Marshall’s neck. In fact, Jackson still couldn’t decide whether Marshall’s death had punished him sufficiently or let him off. With Karen Dalton there was now no such debate.

She had to die.

Gully and Wilkes pulled up on the pavement outside KADO Employment. It had been closed only for a few hours, yet the signs of a failed business were already evident. Lights off. Post lying on the mat.

‘No sign of forced entry at the front of the property,’ Gully reported back.

Kelly cupped her hands to the glass. ‘The internal door’s been forced, Sue, like the witness thought.’

‘We’re checking the rear now.’

A Lexus was still parked near the bottom of the fire escape.

Wilkes ran the PNC check. ‘Belongs to Karen Dalton.’

Gully checked the ground-floor back door. Also secure.

Kelly meanwhile had already mounted the fire escape. She still hovered near the bottom, waiting for Gully to join her. Together they began climbing it.