Lynda La Plante - Silent Victims

From his breast pocket Parker-Jones took out a clean white handkerchief and dabbed his lip. He returned to his office, picked up the phone and dialed, dabbing his lip and looking at the spots of blood on the pristine white linen.

The connection came through.

He held the receiver close to his mouth, feeling the sluggish warm trickle on his chin.

“Mrs. Kennington? It’s Edward Parker-Jones.”

Jimmy Jackson was bent double in the chair, his hands locked across his head, tufts of hair sprouting through his fingers.

“All right. I never lent him any money!”

Mr. Arthur sat close by him, knees firmly together, fingers laced beneath the threadbare cuffs of his overcoat.

Tennison went on, “You were told by Martin Fletcher where Connie was. You then went to Vernon Reynold’s flat.”

“I didn’t-I’ve admitted I was looking for Connie, but I wasn’t the only one.”

“Who else? Who else was looking for Connie on the night he was murdered? Jimmy, it’s just five… ten minutes there and back from the advice centre.”

“I never killed him. I couldn’t have.”

Otley put his hand on the back of Jackson’s chair and leaned right over. “But you had to silence him, didn’t you? Connie was going to tell about the way you kidnap underage kids. The room at the top of the house. We’ve seen the chains, the weapons, the knives.”

“Did you torture boys up there?” Tennison said expressionlessly. She looked at his hands, the spiky hair sticking through. “Is that why we have, to date, fifteen separate blood samples, from walls, floorboards, bed sheets? What were you doing to those children?” She glanced at Mr. Arthur, and then inspected her fingernails. “Mr. Jackson, I would really try to be as helpful as possible. The charges against you…”

“Look, I did go to the centre, right?” His head came up, eyes bulging at Tennison, lips red where he’d been chewing them. “I told Mr. Parker-Jones I couldn’t find him, right?”

“Edward Parker-Jones,” Tennison said, looking at Otley.

Jackson nodded. “Yeah…” He sounded short of breath. He twisted around to Mr. Arthur, and twisted back again, plucking at his T-shirt where it stuck to him, one boot agitatedly thumping the carpet. He said hoarsely, “Martin Fletcher took my stuff out of the house…”

“What stuff?”

“Things, photographs… I wanted them back, right?”

“Photographs of you?”

“Some of them,” Jackson said cautiously, “but Connie had nicked them, he got Martin to get them for him from Camden, right? You with me?”

“Who else was in the photographs?”

“I can’t remember,” Jackson said too quickly.

“You almost kill a boy for them,” Tennison said, her voice brittle with disbelief, “and you can’t remember who they were of? Who was in the photographs?”

Jackson shakily lit up. He dragged deep, crouched forward, elbows on his knees, blowing smoke at the carpet.

“Was Parker-Jones in these photographs?” Tennison said.

“No.”

“How about a John Kennington? Was he in any of these photographs?”

Jackson tried to shrug it off. “Just kids, blokes dressed up… bit porno, that’s all. Anyway, it got to about eight, bit later, an’ I told Parker-Jones that I couldn’t find Connie, an’ he said go and get Martin Fletcher, he’d know where he was.” He stared at her sullenly from under his thick brows. “So I did. Ask Martin Fletcher, he’ll tell you.”

“Martin is dead, Jimmy.” Tennison allowed the silence to hang heavy. “So Parker-Jones wanted the photographs-why? If as you have just stated he wasn’t in them, why would he want them?”

“I don’t know. All I know is he wanted them, but so did I.”

“But you were in the photographs.” Tennison pointed her finger. “Are you sure there weren’t any of Edward Parker-Jones?”

“I didn’t have any pictures of him,” Jackson said through his teeth.

“Was John Kennington in any of these photographs?”

“No! I told you before, I don’t even know that bloke…”

“So they were just photographs of you? And you wanted them so desperately you were prepared to kill for them?”

“Look, when that fire started… I was over the other side of Waterloo Bridge.” He waved his arm, indicating a vast distance, the backside of the moon.

Tennison rubbed the nape of her neck, trying to ease the hangover that was thudding in the base of her skull. Red wine was lethal bloody stuff. She felt rotten.

Otley saw her close her eyes for a second. He said, “So, who was at the centre when you were there?”

Jackson half-turned to him. “I was only there two minutes, no more,” he said irritably. “Then I come out.”

“Anybody else?” Tennison asked. “Did you speak to anyone else apart from Parker-Jones?”

“Yeah.” Jackson sounded weary. “Vernon Reynolds.”

Tennison and Otley exchanged looks. Vera? Since when was she at the centre that night? First they’d heard of it.

Head hunched down between his bony shoulders, Jackson stared miserably at his boots, blowing smoke at the carpet.

Tennison drove north along Highgate Hill, fuming at the traffic. Otley sat beside her, filling his face with a cheeseburger, a plastic cup of coffee held up in front of him to avoid spilling any. It was twelve-thirty. A soothing Brahms string quartet was on Classic FM, but it didn’t help Tennison’s temper any.

She swung the wheel, avoiding what she knew would be a totally clogged Archway and Muswell Hill, and took to the side roads on the eastern edge of Hampstead Heath.

“If Jackson is telling the truth, then he couldn’t have done it,” she said, turning right unexpectedly, so that Otley had to concentrate like fury to save his coffee.

He stuffed in the rest of the cheeseburger, cheeks bulging. “What about Vera, then? That was a turn up. I mean, she’s never mentioned anything about being in or anywhere near the centre.” He swallowed and took a slurp of coffee. “But she couldn’t have started that fire-she was onstage at Judy’s at nine-fifteen. She was bloody onstage.”

The Sierra Sapphire came into the tree-lined avenue of large detached houses. Tennison leaned forward, peering through the windshield.

“What’s going on here?”

There was an ambulance outside the gates, its rear doors standing open. Two attendants were wheeling a trolley from the driveway. There was a humped shape under the red blanket.

Tennison stopped the car and hurried forward. Otley took a peek through the gates, seeing the Panda car outside the front door.

“What’s happened?” Tennison asked, showing her I.D.

The attendants were about to lift the trolley into the ambulance. She turned back the blanket. It couldn’t be, she told herself, it couldn’t be, but she was wrong. She clenched her jaw.

“It’s John Kennington. Shit.”

Otley glanced toward the house. “We’d better leave it,” he advised, “must have just happened.”

He looked around for her, but she wasn’t there.

“Guv!”

Tennison was walking through the gates, heading up the gravel drive.

“Guv!”

Tennison stepped through the open front door into the parquet-floored hallway. To her left she could see a cluster of uniformed police in the study. There was a plainclothes officer kneeling on the carpet. Somebody else was taking flash photographs. She moved across the hallway toward them, and then stopped. The door to the drawing room was open. Mrs. Kennington was sitting on the sofa, her head downcast, a cigarette in one hand, a crumpled lace handkerchief in the other. A crystal tumbler, filled nearly halfway with Scotch, was on the coffee table in front of her. An open bottle of Macallan’s Malt stood next to it.