Alex Barclay - Harm's Reach

‘She said, “Sweetheart, you run along up to your house and never, ever, come down here on your own again. And if you see that man again, you make sure you don’t talk to him.”’ Carolina paused. ‘A couple of nights later, I saw him again. I was looking out the window in the back courtyard. And I saw my father roaring and shouting at him. It was Walter Prince. It was only when I saw her face that I connected the two.’

Janine’s heart was pounding.

‘I spoke with my mother about that time,’ said Carolina. ‘She said that Viggi Leinster kind of burst onto the scene on the arm of Walter Prince. There was a huge age gap that no one spoke of, but Mom reckons that Viggi couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen years old. I couldn’t believe it, but you know... when you’re young, you think everyone is so much older than they are. Apparently, she used to tell people she was going to be an actress. Silver screen or no silver screen, this girl shone, my mother said.

‘No one had heard of Walter Prince in New York and, at first, they passed themselves off, not as husband and wife, but as father and daughter. How creepy is that? They lived in a beautiful apartment, they led a glamorous social life, they hosted parties. They were popular people. Anyway, eventually, their secret came out. But all it seemed to do was make them even more exotic. And then? She was gone, and he was gone. I’m saving the worst till last. The reason there are no statements from my parents in the police report is because they were paid off by Walter Prince. Everyone in the restaurant that night was paid off.’

‘Even the kitchen staff, busboys?’ said Janine.

‘Yes,’ said Carolina.

‘One of them said that Viggi was having an affair with a man called Angelo Marianelli,’ said Janine.

‘I can tell you for sure that was not true,’ said Carolina. ‘Angelo Marianelli was gay. Closeted, but I know my parents knew.’

‘Did you know he disappeared six weeks after Viggi?’ said Janine.

‘No, I did not,’ said Carolina, ‘but it all sounds very strange...’

‘Thank you so much for finding all this out for me,’ said Janine.

‘I want to tell you, though, my mother is very, very sorry,’ said Carolina. ‘She’s lived with this for so long.’ She paused. ‘And that poor woman’s family... what must it have been like? God help them.’

Janine didn’t tell her that she had never known a thing about Viggi Leinster’s family. It was as if she was beamed down from above, a falling starlet with a blank-slate past.

Janine was reeling. Walter Prince had been a pedophile. He had abandoned his family in Butte, traveled to New York with a girl young enough to be his daughter. He had preyed on an eight-year-old girl under her parents’ noses. It seemed like the only thing that stopped it going any further was the intervention of Viggi Leinster... who disappeared shortly afterwards. Poor, dear Viggi Leinster. And a paid-off kitchen porter sent the rumor out that Viggi Leinster had run away with another man and they had lived happily ever after, location unknown. So what happened? Did Walter Prince follow them and have them both killed? Or had Viggi been killed the night of the film premiere and the sighting in Denver was a hoax? Had Marianelli been sent to look for her? Had he found her? Had he killed her? Did Walter Prince worry that she would reveal his secret? Was it a secret?

Then it hit her. The Orchard Girls . The vigilante attack. Walter Prince led the posse of men, not because he was honorable, not because he wanted justice, but so he could lay the blame at a dead man’s feet, so he could play the hero. It was pedophile Walter Prince who murdered those three little girls when he was only sixteen years old.

Janine walked back into the interview room. She locked eyes with Ren.

What have you got?

‘We’ll be right with you, Jesse,’ said Ren. She and Janine went out into the hallway.

Janine talked her through the conversation with Carolina Vescovi.

‘Let me call that woman from the Prince mansion,’ said Ren. ‘See if she can shed more light on Walter Prince.’

Ren went through her phone and found ‘Prince Mansion Lady’. She called her office number. A woman answered.

‘I’d like to speak with Barbara Hynes,’ said Ren.

‘Mrs Hynes no longer works here,’ said the woman. Curt, clipped.

‘Oh,’ said Ren. ‘Do you know how I could get a hold of her?’

The woman hesitated. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid not.’ She hung up.

Ren stared at her phone. ‘Well, someone’s been acrimoniously terminated...’

Ren and Janine searched online and Janine eventually came up with a cell phone number for Barbara Hynes.

‘Hello, Mrs Hynes?’ said Ren. ‘This is Special Agent Ren Bryce from Safe Streets in Denver. We spoke a while back about Walter Prince...’

‘Yes,’ said Barbara, ‘and it cost me my job.’

‘Your job?’ said Ren.

‘Yes,’ said Barbara. ‘I didn’t get the memo. Once the story about the murder of Robert Prince’s housekeeper hit the media, all staff were instructed not to speak about the family to anyone, and to refer all questions to their legal team.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Ren.

‘Not as sorry as I am,’ said Barbara.

‘Is there anything else you can tell me about Walter Prince?’ said Ren. ‘Anything else you knew about the vigilante attack on the Orchard Girls father?’

Barbara didn’t reply.

‘Were there any rumors about Walter Prince?’ said Ren. ‘Anything you mightn’t have mentioned to me before. This is really important.’

‘Well,’ said Barbara, ‘isn’t it interesting that, before the year was out, Patrick Prince — Walter’s father — had bought a site to build his mansion on and he moved the family lock, stock and barrel out of town? The orchard is part of that site.’ She paused. ‘All I can tell you is that, when my father was a boy, he was told to never touch an apple from that orchard, that he’d probably end up choking on bones.’

Ren repeated the conversation to Janine.

‘I was thinking about Viggi Leinster,’ said Janine. ‘If she arrived in New York with Walter Prince, then do you think she might have traveled with him from Butte? If she was sixteen/seventeen in 1957, that makes her having been born 1940, ’41.’

Ren Googled Viggi Leinster, Butte, 1941, 1957.

‘Oh God, said Ren. ‘I’ve got a news story: Christmas Day tragedy, 1955, at the home of the Leinster family in Butte, Montana: Father, Bruce; Mother, Lynda; Sons, Teddy and Thomas. All their years of birth are included, the youngest being their daughter, Virginia... b. 1941.’

‘Virginia... Viggi,’ said Janine.

‘The names Teddy and Thomas were signed on the postcard that fell from Delores Ward’s wall,’ said Ren. ‘She told me about the man who broke her heart. She said it was “ not before he had taken my family away from me ”. Delores Ward is Viggi Leinster.’

Christmas Day, the day after their annual ball, Walter Prince burned her family’s house down, so he would have no resistance, so they couldn’t fight him, so everyone would think she had died along with them.

So ‘he could take her away’.

So she could become Viggi, and she could be his... for as long as he wanted her.

Janine paused. ‘The headstone! The chaplain in Evergreen Abbey. Didn’t you tell me that the Princes were originally O’Sullivans? Patrick “Prince” O’Sullivan was one of the first of the family to emigrate to Butte. If the chaplain here was born in the 1870s, then he could have been Patrick Prince’s brother... he may not have traveled as far west as Montana. And he may just have been persuaded to give Viggi Leinster shelter after what she went through at the hands of his nephew, Walter Prince.’