Хилари Боннер - A Deep Deceit

When Mariette came home from the library I told her the whole sorry story. About Will. Everything. She listened carefully. ‘It doesn’t alter what Carl did to you in the end, though, or what he did in America, does it?’ she said eventually.

‘I s-suppose not,’ I agreed falteringly.

‘And now he’s done a runner,’ she added. ‘I think he’s barking, that’s what I think.’

I didn’t know how to argue with that. Although in my heart it still didn’t add up, still didn’t equate with the Carl I knew.

‘Look, you’ve told me yourself it’s over with Carl,’ she went on. ‘What you need to do now is build yourself a new life.’

‘You can’t go back to that house until they catch the devil, that’s for certain,’ Mrs Powell volunteered.

I would have laughed if I had had any sense of humour left. I was having difficulty regarding Carl as a fugitive at all, let alone as some kind of devil.

Sometimes in the morning things seem better. The morning after Carl’s escape everything seemed worse.

I had to face up to a few things. Carl was on the run. Maybe Mrs Powell was right, maybe he was a devil, perhaps in a way every bit as much of a monster as Robert Foster. And maybe I had to accept that before I could move forward, which I had to do somehow or other.

Mariette’s mother walked with me to Rose Cottage so that I could pick up some things, which I had not been given time to do the previous day. I didn’t really want to go. The cottage was beginning to represent too many bad things. My life there with Carl just seemed like a lie now. And it was also where Will Jones had confessed that he too had deceived me.

Rob Partridge was no longer propping up the wall on the corner to Rose Lane, but another officer – one I didn’t recognise, just as conspicuously obvious in spite of his unremarkable casual clothing – was on duty.

He stepped forward as we were unlocking the door and I had to explain who we were and what we were doing there.

He glanced into the cottage over my shoulder. You could feel the silent emptiness of the place. ‘I’ll be right outside if you want me,’ he said.

I thanked him, but I could not imagine what Brenda Powell or I could possibly want him for.

There was a coldness about the cottage that I had not noticed before. Also the way that Carl and I had lived – turning the upstairs room into a bed-sitting room because of the view, lighting the dingy dining room only with candles so that you could not see the ugliness of it, shutting ourselves off, except in the most superficial ways, from the outside world – now seemed like an absurdity.

I climbed the stairs with reluctance and began to sort out enough clothes to keep me going for as long as Mariette and her mother would have me. Downstairs I could hear Mrs Powell bustling about. She had volunteered to clear the fridge and make sure nothing perishable was left in the kitchen. I didn’t care, really, but she was that sort of person. I could hear her muttering to herself.

After a bit she called out to me. ‘Suzanne, will you come down and give me a hand with this flagstone out yer. One of us is going to fall down that hole in a minute.’

I thought for a moment whether there was anything else I wanted to retrieve from the cellar before we sealed it up, but I knew there wasn’t. In any case, I really didn’t want to go down there again. Together we tried to manoeuvre the stone until Brenda Powell gave a little cry and stood up straight clutching her back.

‘Don’t hurt yourself,’ I said. ‘Let me try on my own. I know there’s an easy way to do this. I’ve seen Carl do it often enough.’

He used to pivot the stone on a raised bit of the uneven floor and just use the crowbar to ease it back into place. I imitated what I had seen him do so many times and with surprising smoothness the flagstone slotted snugly back into the black hole, which was all you could see of the cellar below. I unrolled the vinyl floor covering over it and stood up to await further instructions. I still wasn’t capable of doing much thinking for myself.

‘Something else we won’t fall over now,’ said Mariette’s mum.

Only when the cottage was ‘in apple pie order’ – her words not mine – did she consent to leave.

Apart from the fact that the Powell home was so small – although I had insisted that I take the sofa bed in the front room this time – there were a number of other reasons why I couldn’t stay with Mariette and her mother for ever. Some of them were completely selfish. It was wrong to be irritated by Mrs Powell, because she was a kind woman. Nonetheless I reckoned she would drive me quite barking if I spent too much time with her.

Mrs Powell and Mariette were probably right, though. My life at Rose Cottage was over. I still didn’t really feel in danger from Carl, but neither did I think that the cottage could ever be my home again. I needed to work, to earn money, to discover whether I was even employable, in any capacity.

My most immediate concern, however, was to find out what had happened to Carl. He hadn’t returned to Rose Cottage, so where had he gone?

Back at the Powell house I paced the floors waiting for news. Several times I called Penzance police station, but DC Carter was never available. Eventually, I think maybe because those answering the phone became so fed up with me, I was given the detective’s mobile phone number.

He didn’t seem all that overjoyed to hear from me but at least he answered my questions. He was, it transpired, still in Plymouth. ‘We’re pretty sure it was Carl here,’ he said. ‘The lorry driver couldn’t identify him for certain from the photograph we showed him because he said the man he picked up was wearing an anorak-type jacket with a hood, which he kept over his head all the time, and didn’t seem to want to look at him. But that was the kind of coat Carl had on when he was taken to Penzance and there’s been a robbery here in Plymouth...’

I felt the by now all too familiar tightening of my stomach muscles. ‘But, but, you haven’t caught him then, you don’t know for sure...’

‘We haven’t caught him, that’s right enough.’

‘And the robbery? Why do you think it was Carl?’ A terrible thought occurred to me. ‘Nobody was hurt, were they?’

‘No, not unless you count the old lady he half frightened to death pushing past her, in such a hurry to get away. She’s our witness. Same thing. Man with his anorak hood over his head. Right height and build.’

‘Is that all?’

‘That and what was taken,’ replied DC Carter tetchily.

I waited.

‘The robbery was in one of those luxury blocks of flats up on the Hoe... some cash, jewellery, a few easy to sell knick-knacks – and a passport.’

Carter paused triumphantly.

I could see what he was driving at. Carl needed money and the means to get away. He needed a passport. The police had his old out-of-date American one. If he had a new one in either of his names, I had never seen it. I didn’t think Carl was likely to be the only person in Devon or Cornwall who might have a use for someone else’s passport, but I supposed the circumstantial evidence did point to him.

‘And the timing,’ DC Carter continued. ‘The timing’s spot on. The robbery happened about two hours after the lorry driver reckoned he dropped him off. Carl would have had just one aim once he’d got out of Cornwall – money and the means to get abroad if he wanted to.’

‘But how could he get away with someone else’s passport, what good would that do?’

‘Flown out of Heathrow lately?’

That was a laugh. I had never been out of the country.

Carter didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Half the time they don’t even ask you to open up a British passport any more. But I doubt he’d risk that. Across to Europe from any channel port would be a better bet. More often than not the checks are little more than a joke. And your man’s an expert, too, don’t forget.’