Quintin Jardine - Thursday legends

'Yes, but they're asleep. I wasn't; I don't, not much anyway, when Spike's not here.' She looked at him again, a gleam in her eye. 'What is this, anyway? Are you having second thoughts about dumping Rhian?'

'No,' he answered, roughly. 'It's the first thought I regret; the fact that I got involved with her in the first place, and wound up setting up my best friend.'

She frowned, taking in a long breath. 'I see. I don't think I like the tone this conversation's taking.'

'We'd better carry it on indoors, then.' He stepped past her uninvited, closed the door, then took her arm and eased her upstairs, in front of him, to her living room.

She turned towards him, without a word. He had known that he was right before ringing the doorbell, but it was almost unnerving to see the truth confirmed in the sudden iciness of her stare.

He walked across to the stand by the window and whipped off the white covering sheet. 'Hello, Juliet’ he said.

'Hello, Juliet! Hello, Juliet!' the bird echoed back. He threw the drape back over the cage and turned back to face the woman.

'You were crazy enough to tell me,' he exclaimed. 'Right at the very start. "His name's Hererro." Remember, you said you thought it was some South American reference. You know bloody well that it means "Blacksmith" in Spanish; only that should be two words, shouldn't it? Black Smith; black-hearted Alec!

'Why did you take it, for God's sake? You couldn't have thought that it would blurt out your name to the first copper to come though the door. The bird's a great mimic, but it's got no fucking memory. For sure, it would have made a lousy witness in a murder case.

'I know that you took the cage down from its hook to string Alec up there, but why did you take it with you afterwards?'

'To remind me of him!' Her sudden hiss chilled him even more than her eyes. 'I look at Hererro and I think of him, hanging up there. That beast tortured my husband to death; you cannot imagine how good it felt to do the same to him.'

He had known, of course. He had thought that he might have had difficulty making her confirm the truth, but she seemed eager to tell of it, to boast of it, even.

'Your husband topped himself, Juliet. In his garage, with a hose-pipe into the car.' He took a note from his pocket, and read:

'My darling

'I can't go on, living as I have done. I have deceived you. I have fallen in love with someone else; a very dear man with whom I have had a relationship for some months now. I can't keep this secret any longer, nor can I live with it.

Tell the girls, I loved you all. Goodbye. Dafyd

'That was in the police file into your husband's suicide. It was an open-and-shut job; the Fiscal closed the case without a Fatal Accident Inquiry. And that note; that was all you knew at the time, wasn't it?'

She shook her head, violently, looking away from him. 'No. I knew about Dafyd's affair all along. I realised not long after I married him that he had this thing in him, and I feared that one day it would have to express itself. But that didn't stop me from loving him with all my heart. He was my whole life and, for most of the time, the girls and I were his. He would never have left us, and if he and Ronald hadn't been betrayed, I would have gone on turning a blind eye.'

'How did you know?'

'There were signs. He made love to me in different ways for one thing. There were vague trips to weekend conferences. Also, if your husband never wears aftershave but comes in smelling of someone else's, you tend to notice, and wonder.'

'Did you know who the man was?'

'Not at that time, no. I didn't want to know, for I bore him no malice, none at all; nor do I now. He was helping Dafyd be himself, and it didn't make him any less loving towards me; at least that's how I've always seen it.'

'But when Spike told you the whole truth, that made it all different, didn't it?'

'Oh yes,' she hissed once more. 'When he told me about that vicious, cruel, twisted man, and that miserable little weasel, Shearer, who betrayed Dafyd and Ronald… that made it very different.

'They killed him, between them; they put him through such mental torture. It was as if they had strapped him into that car and turned on the engine.' She paused. 'Does Spike know what I did?'

Martin made a slight, dismissive gesture. 'No. He never suspected a thing. Even now, I don't think he understands. But he did admit to me that he had told you what Howard Shearer — the Diddler, they called him — confessed to him, one night, with an extremely guilty conscience.

'He told me, as he had told you, that the Diddler was an inveterate gossip; he knew it, but couldn't help himself.

'That one Thursday night after a football gathering, he told Alec Smith that his partner, Ronald Johnston-White, was gay and was having an affair with a gynaecologist called Dafyd Lewis.

'That later, he learned from Johnston-White that Smith had a pathological hatred of homosexuals. That he had approached your husband and told him that he was not going to tolerate a — his words — queer gynaecologist, and that if he did not resign his hospital position and leave Edinburgh, some very nasty career-ending stories about him and Johnston-White and you, would appear in the tabloids.'

The policeman looked almost despairingly, into the woman's iron-hard face. 'Diddler was totally conscience-stricken, you know, when he learned of the consequences of that single indiscreet remark to Smith. He had to confide in someone. He chose, from the Thursday night crowd, his oldest and closest friend, Spike Thomson.

'And four years on, Spike, poor bugger that he is, met you. When he realised who you were, he felt that he had to tell you the whole story.'

She nodded. 'Very good. Is that as far as you've got?'

He laughed, bitterly. 'Hell no; though I wish it was. No, Juliet, I've got all of it… although this next part is guesswork. I think you knew Alec Smith. Remember, you told me that you'd been out in the field, through your job? I think, that like all crazies, you dropped me a little hint there. Not as outrageous as the one with the parrot, but a hint nonetheless. I think that you met him then and that, when you needed to, you were able to find out where he had gone, after he left the force to pursue his own lunacy.

'Alec's phone records show that he had a call on the evening he died, from a public phone-box in Edinburgh. I think that call came from you, and that you made an appointment to see him on some pretext or other; job-related research, maybe.

'I think he let you in. Maybe he even did say, "Hello, Juliet". Maybe old Hererro there did mimic him. Maybe he turned to put the blue velvet drape — the one that we found left in the room — over his cage, and maybe that was when you shot him in the back with the tranquilliser gun which your kid had borrowed from the zoo.

'How much of that have I got right? he asked, conversationally.

'All of it,' she whispered, her eyes fixed on him. 'Clever boy.'

'I sure am, just a bit slow, that's all. Anyway, after that, the carnage began. You stripped him, tied him, taped over his gob, then strung him up like a beast for slaughter, all while he was still helpless from the shot. Then you went downstairs, selected a wrench from the cellar and one of Alec's two blowlamps — I don't understand why he bought two from B amp;Q on the same day, but he did — plus a knife from the kitchen, as your instruments of torture, and went to work.

'As a touch of flair, to show everyone how clever you were, you found his video camera and left us a horror movie of yourself at work.'

'Yes,' Juliet Lewis murmured. 'I only wish I'd been able to play it back.'

It made Martin shudder, just to look at her. 'You know,' he continued, 'I might have put you down as a poor sad woman who had been driven mad by what was done to her husband, but for one thing — the fact that you chose to involve Margot. I have to believe you knew she was going to kill the Diddler.' She frowned, a little surprised. 'I know it was her. I took a sample of Rhian's pubic hair from my laundry and had a comparison done with a hair we found on Shearer's body. It showed a close resemblance, a family resemblance.