Martin Edwards - Suspicious Minds

At last he heard her take a deep breath before turning to face him and saying, “Are you buying the ice creams, then?”

He grinned and went to buy a couple of 99s from the kiosk down the road. Munching the chocolate flake, they ambled along the promenade.

“I gather Claire came to see you a couple of times.”

“Yes. After it happened — well, word soon got round somehow. Even though my name’s never been in the papers. There’s a law against that, isn’t there? Anyway, she popped in with some of the girls from school. A nice thought, I suppose, looking back on it, but I simply wasn’t in the mood at the time. And anyway, she and I had never been all that close. Plus the fact she spent most of the time going on about her boyfriend.”

She concentrated on the cornet for a moment, deep in thought, and then said, “Of course, I shouldn’t say those nasty things. She’s dead now.”

“I want to know the truth, Gina. Not what you think you ought to say. You didn’t have much in common with Claire. So were you surprised when she paid a second visit on her own?”

“Yes. I’d started making an effort to get back to normal. Not that I’m there yet, even now, though Mum’s been terrific. And when I heard Claire had been killed — I felt sick. As well as a bit guilty. Because I soon got fed up with her when she was here last week.”

“Why?”

“Oh, she was so ghoulish. If the idea was to cheer me up and take my mind off things, she went about it in a funny way. Every time the conversation veered off you-know-what, she made this big effort to drag it up again.”

“In what way?”

Gina gazed towards the hills of Wales. Harry waited for her to continue.

Not looking at him, she finally said, “She wanted to know what he was like.”

“The man who attacked you?”

“Yes. The Beast. Beast is too good a word, though.”

“And?”

“I didn’t want to talk about it. I know I can’t simply forget everything, I’ve got to come to terms with it and I think I’m starting to do that now. But I couldn’t understand what she was after. She seemed fascinated by what had happened to me, like some real sicko. She even wanted to know if he’d kissed me… oh God, I’m sorry.”

Her voice broke and tears welled in her eyes. Harry put his arm round her shoulders, an unthinking gesture of support. Feeling her body stiffen with anxiety, he cursed his instinctive reaction. She wasn’t yet ready for physical contact with any man after her ordeal.

What had Claire been after? There must be a link between her call on Gina and her own fate. Whether she knew it or not, Gina might hold the key. Yet he could not find it within himself to cross-examine her further. One last question, he said to himself, and then leave her alone.

“Would you recognise his voice again?”

“The police asked me that. I can’t be sure. He was very cold, but he spoke quietly, barely above a whisper.” Gina hesitated. “You know, this has never crossed my mind before, but perhaps he was almost as frightened as me.”

They had reached the end of the promenade now. For a few minutes they watched the little boats bobbing on the water, then Gina added, “I was glad when Claire went home. Of course I never dreamed that twenty-four hours later…”

“No one could have foreseen that.”

“It’s such an incredible coincidence, that within such a short space of time the same man should have murdered her. It sounds horrible to say so, but I feel almost grateful, that perhaps I got off lightly after all.”

Harry studied the skin-and-bone young girl with her pale cheeks and fearful eyes. Maybe she was learning to cope with the assault on her, but it would be a long time before she would ever be able wholly to trust a man again. Maybe suspicion would always lurk at the back of her mind.

“I don’t think you got off lightly,” he said.

And though he did not say so, he did not believe that the murder of Claire Stirrup was such an incredible coincidence, either.

Atlantic waves were crashing against the sea wall at Miranda Beach. Through the night air drifted the sound of a band playing “That Old Feeling.” Ned Racine had that old feeling, too. He flirted with the blonde in the white dress who caught his eye as she walked out of the concert.

“You’re not too smart, are you?” she asked.

Harry was spending the evening at his flat with a bottle of Johnnie Walker for company. For the twentieth time he was running his old tape of Body Heat, although he knew the dialogue so well he hardly needed to glance at the images on the screen. Racine, the gullible small town lawyer and second rate Romeo. Sometimes Harry worried that he might have more in common with Ned than he would like to admit.

He wasn’t being too smart about Valerie, that was clear. She hadn’t been in touch all day and he didn’t think ringing her was the right thing to do. Was he being childish, letting pride elbow aside his need to be with her? To press too much now might destroy their relationship. And yet, while he stayed here she might be spending her time with Julian Hamer, drawing nearer to him, forgetting that she didn’t yet want to be imprisoned by commitment.

Come to think of it, he’d not been too smart over Brenda Rixton or Sally Jean-Jacques either. Two older women, with either of whom he might still be involved had he played his cards differently. Now they were fixed up elsewhere. As the evening wore on and the whisky warmed him and blurred his memory of the past, he recalled Brenda’s soft flesh and the interest he had once seen in Sally’s eyes and he realised that he had no idea what he wanted from women, or whether he would ever find it.

At least Racine knew. Racine, who had sniggered when Matty Walker said, “I’m a married woman,” not realising how easy it was to walk into a snare. Racine, who suspected nothing until it was too late. Easy to identify with him.

The pictures moved. Now Oscar, the black detective, was sitting in the snack bar, hat tipped on the back of his balding head.

“When it gets hot, people start to kill each other,” he was telling Racine.

Violence. There was no escaping it. It had found Gina, had killed Claire. And possibly Alison too. Might her body, like that of her step-daughter, be lying undiscovered somewhere beneath the ground? She must be dead, surely. The victim, if not of her husband, or of the man who had murdered Claire, of another sex killer who had seized and violated her. What else could explain her sudden disappearance, her failure to make any contact with either her husband or her mother?

In the film, things were starting to fall apart for Racine. His lover’s husband was dead, the money seemed to be there for the taking. But there was that funny business over the will and his friends, the policeman and the prosecutor, could tell that he was heading for disaster.

“She’s trouble, Ned. Big time, major league trouble.”

Might Alison have been trouble, as well? The notion swam around in Harry’s mind like a solitary fish in a pool. If she had contrived her disappearance, what could be the reason? To set her husband up — for what? If she was alive, it seemed extraordinary that she had claimed nothing from Stirrup when up to fifty percent was hers for the taking. And she could claim nothing unless she re-emerged from the shadows.

If she was alive, he was overlooking something, making a false assumption somewhere. He toyed with possibilities. They all seemed ludicrous. Might Alison and Doreen Capstick, for instance, be conspiring to keep a deadly secret? A secret connected with Claire, perhaps? Doreen had no love for either her son-in-law or his daughter from his first marriage. She wouldn’t scruple to tell the lie direct. Yet Harry could not credit that she was so good an actress. And it was impossible to see how Alison could gain from such an elaborate charade. She was in no position to cash in on the police interest in Jack which Doreen had inspired. No, he was letting his imagination run riot.