Bolton, J. - Now You See Me

I didn’t expect to sleep, but I must have done because some time later I woke to hear breathing. I turned, soundlessly. Joesbury was in the chair at the foot of the bed, his head turned my way, his eyes open. I stared at him, at his face that was just starting to emerge from the darkness, and he didn’t move.

That’s when what I’d suspected for a while became certainty. Mark Joesbury wasn’t here for my protection. He was here to protect other people. From me.

He thought I was Victoria Llewellyn.

75

13 September, ten years earlier

V ICTORIA LLEWELLYN IS STRUGGLING TO BREATHE. AIR IS GOING in, and out again, faster than feels normal, but it’s just not having the right effect. There isn’t enough oxygen getting to her brain and that light-headed, drifting-away-from-reality feeling is coming over her again. It’s a common enough reaction to grief, she knows, sudden breathlessness, but what she can’t deal with is this sense of the world slipping away, leaving her behind, alone, in the void .

She’s sitting, bent forward almost double, her head just above her knees. She can’t remember finding a bench on the towpath, the last thing she can remember is seeing a houseboat like the one Cathy had been living on, and then stumbling away, but the wooden slats are hard and damp beneath her and she’s grateful. Because while she’s sitting down, she won’t fall .

They are getting increasingly common, these periods when she can’t remember anything. When her life has just been wiped away like an old lesson from a school whiteboard .

A cardboard drink cup floats past her downriver and she tries not to think of Cathy and those other kids being swept away, sinking down into the depths. She tries not to think about the washed ivory skin and the matted fair hair of the drowned girl she identified only a few days before .

Cathy is gone .

She has a sense of someone hurrying past. She glances up in time to see the suspicious look, the hurrying footsteps, and she realizes that the knife is in her hand again. Her knuckles are white, her fingers starting to hurt. Without noticing it, she’s been slicing into the wooden seat beneath her. A dozen or more score marks show where she’s dug the blade repeatedly into the wood. She almost drops the knife, then, with a huge effort, manages to close it and slip it back into her pocket .

Cathy is gone. Nothing will bring her back now. Might as well get used to it .

She gets up and makes her way home .

Part Five

Mary

‘… he watches to strike his blow with unfailing and remorseless cunning …’

Star , 10 November 1888

76

Saturday 6 October

WHEN I WOKE AGAIN, JOESBURY WAS STILL IN THE CHAIR. As I sat up, he took a long, deep breath and let it out slowly. For a second he seemed to stop breathing. Then his chest rose and fell. His eyelashes flickered and settled again. Some time in the very early morning, my guard had fallen asleep.

I got up and found clothes. When the shower had washed away some of the weariness I dried myself, cleaned my teeth and dressed. As I left the bathroom, I could hear someone moving around in the kitchen.

‘Morning,’ said Joesbury, glancing up from the previous day’s copy of the Evening Standard . The kettle was coming to the boil.

‘Sleep well?’ I asked him and got a grin in return that I think could have broken my heart, had it not been far too late for any nonsense of that sort. I’ll say one thing for Joesbury, he kept his sense of humour till the end.

‘Ready for a road trip?’ he asked me, handing over black coffee.

‘Where?’ I said.

‘Cardiff.’

He squeezed past and I heard the bathroom door being closed and locked. It wasn’t quite six in the morning and the two of us couldn’t have had more than four hours’ sleep; in his case, half of it had been in a chair. And now he thought we were going to Cardiff?

‘No offence, but three’s a crowd in my book,’ I said, when he emerged damp around the edges ten minutes later. ‘Gayle Mizon will be packing her best underwear as we speak.’

‘Well, you’ve got fifteen minutes to pack yours. We can get breakfast on the way.’

‘I’m not coming to Cardiff. And I don’t have any best underwear.’

He yawned and scratched behind one ear. ‘Flint,’ he said, ‘we’re leaving in fifteen minutes, in my car, and you can come with underwear or without it. Your call.’

‘I want to talk to DI Tulloch,’ I said.

Joesbury leaned against the worktop, effectively blocking my way out of the kitchen. ‘First, she gets very grouchy in the morning, so sooner you than me,’ he said. ‘Second, Helen’s flying back to Dundee today, so she’ll be in an extra-bad mood, and third, she’ll only tell you what she and I agreed a few hours ago. We need you out of London for a while. Last night was a bit close to home.’

I couldn’t leave London right now. And I certainly couldn’t go to Cardiff.

‘Here is where I need to be,’ I said. ‘Llewellyn’s done with number four now. She’ll be ready for number five. She’ll do it soon and I’m still the best chance of catching her. You and Mizon don’t need me tagging along.’

‘Gayle isn’t coming,’ said Joesbury. ‘It’s just us two.’

‘And that’s supposed to make a difference?’

Joesbury finished his coffee and rinsed the mug out in the sink. ‘If sulking keeps you quiet, that’s fine by me,’ he said. ‘Ten minutes.’

Eight minutes later, with a soundtrack of the house/jazz/funk rhythms that Joesbury didn’t seem able to operate a car without, we were heading for the river. On Vauxhall Bridge I closed my eyes and pretended I’d fallen asleep. We stopped for five minutes outside the big white Georgian house in Pimlico where Joesbury had a flat. As we reached Chiswick I risked peeping and saw a rosy glow in the passenger wing mirror. The sun was coming up.

When we hit the M4 Joesbury turned up the volume and picked up speed. A lot of speed. Given the events of the previous night, there seemed a significant risk of his falling asleep at the wheel and killing us both.

All things considered, there were worse ways this could end.

So I closed my eyes again and tried to ignore the nagging voice telling me that every mile took me further from where I needed to be. I managed to stay calm enough for the sleep act to be reasonably convincing. Somewhere along the way, exhaustion got the better of adrenalin and the charade became reality. When I woke, Joesbury had pulled into a service station.

‘Where are we?’ I asked, as he parked the car and switched off the engine. The music died.

‘Membury,’ he answered. ‘Hungry?’

Surprisingly, I was. We both ordered the full English breakfast and took a table beside the window. I managed about half my plate before my stomach started knotting itself up again. If I walked out on Joesbury now, what were the chances of hitching a lift back to London?

‘So, are you going to ask why we’re off to Cardiff?’ asked Joesbury, as I concentrated on the industrial-strength tea.

I knew exactly why we were going to Cardiff. Joesbury was going to parade me in front of people who’d known Victoria Llewellyn in the hope that one of them would recognize me.

‘Why are we going to Cardiff?’ I asked.

‘First up, we’re going to talk to Sergeant Ron Williams,’ he answered. ‘He was the custody sergeant the night of the rape. He may be able to give us some background on the Llewellyn girls. Or at least, a more accurate idea of what really happened than we’ll ever get from the boys or their dads. Are you eating that?’