Angel of Death (6 page)

He turned to face her, his stare level and remote as if he didn’t know her and did not like what he saw.

‘You realise you’ll have to leave the firm? I couldn’t keep you on after this.’

She lowered her head and stared at her hands, biting her lip. What was there to say? She had been expecting this ever since she really started to think last night in bed, working out the reactions that were bound to follow her accusation against Sean.

After a pause Terry burst out, ‘Haven’t you got anything to say? My God, you’ve accused my son of murder. Murder! Why? Why did you do it? Are you off your rocker again? When I offered you a job people said I must be mad, said I was taking a terrible risk, employing someone who wasn’t all there. But I thought you were over all that. I thought you were cured. But you weren’t, were you? And now you’ve done this to my son, a mere boy, only twenty-one, his life just beginning, and you’ve accused him . . .’ He broke off, breathing roughly. ‘Well, you’ll have to go. I don’t want you around me from now on. There’s no room in my firm for crazy people. Do you understand?’

She sighed, nodded. Yes, she understood. She didn’t blame him. Everyone knew how much Terry loved his son. Sean was the apple of his eye and he had great hopes for him. She had always admired Terry’s love for his only child and had understood how he felt. Terry had built up a successful company by a lot of hard work, he was proud of what he had achieved, with good reason, and he wanted to leave it to his son, to give Sean all the things Terry, himself, had not had when he was growing up.

‘I’m sorry, Terry – really. I thought about ringing you before I talked to the police, but I was in a terrible state. I had to make up my mind quickly and . . . well, I couldn’t just ignore it, could I? I had to do something fast. If you had heard her drowning . . . it was horrible, Terry . . .’

He burst out angrily. ‘It never happened, you crazy bitch! You imagined the whole thing! And not for the first time, either. I told the police all about you. It’s not the first time you’ve claimed to hear people drowning, is it? That’s why they put you away.’

She flinched. ‘I was ill, then, I’m not ill, now, Terry. I’m quite clear about what I heard and saw.’

‘Sean was with me, at home,’ he told her furiously. ‘He wasn’t in London at all. You know, I was sorry for you, after your husband’s death, that’s why I gave you the job, but now you’re trying to destroy my son. Why are you doing it?’

She groaned. ‘I don’t want to harm Sean, I’ve always liked him, but I saw what I saw and I heard what I heard, it was not my imagination, it really happened.’

‘You lying bitch! My boy wouldn’t harm a fly, let alone drown a girl!’ Terry put his flushed, strained face right next to hers, his eyes stared into hers, she could see the little yellow rays around his dark pupil, the deep-set laughter lines cutting into his upper cheekbones. Terry was always laughing, smiling; that cheerfulness had carved out his flesh, made his features what they were. She had always liked his face, but suddenly she had a sickening feeling that his face was only some sort of mask, that if you peeled off the smile, the warm curves of cheek, nose, mouth, what you would have left would be something terrifying, The bony, rigid glare of an animal, primitive, predatory, with teeth that bit into you, jaws that could chew you up.

Fear seeped into Miranda. She tried to move away but Terry held on to her shoulders and shook her violently until her head wagged back and forth on her neck so that she began to be afraid it would fall off altogether.

His teeth clenched, he grated, ‘Now, listen to me, and listen hard. I want you to vanish, go away, stay away – from the firm, from me and from my son, and especially from the police! And when I say I want you to do this, I’m warning you that if you don’t, you’ll regret it. Do you understand?’

He shook her again and Miranda cried out at the pain of his grip. His long, brown fingers dug into her and hurt.

‘Do you understand?’

She nodded. Through the iron railings of the park she saw sunlight and flowers and laughing children, but here in this car there was a brooding, threatening darkness. Terry’s physical bulk loomed over her. She was scared.

‘I understand. Please, let go of me, Terry!’

He released her and straightened in his seat, started the engine. As he began to drive on, he said flatly, ‘Get a job somewhere a long way off. I’ll give you a good reference. And to help you with expenses, you can have three months salary on top of whatever you’re entitled to. Just so long as you drop all this nonsense about Sean.’

‘The police said they would want to see me again today.’

‘Well, tell them you realise now that you imagined it all. You had a flashback. One of your crazy dreams. You know that now and you’re sorry you gave them so much trouble.’

He stopped the car outside her flat. ‘Don’t come anywhere near the office again. If you’ve left anything personal, I’ll have it packed up and brought here today.’

She got out of the car, closing the door behind her. His engine flared again; she stood watching him streak off into the oncoming traffic.

As stiffly as a wooden doll, she turned to go back into the building, then stopped as she saw someone standing on the other side of the road.

She wasn’t even surprised to see him there. He was still haunting her. The angel of death.

For a second she stood there, staring. He was still in black, but today his dress was casual – jeans, a t-shirt, a leather jacket. His head towered above those of people swirling around him. Whenever she saw him she was struck by his physical presence; his height, his good looks, the piercing dark eyes.

He took a step forward, as if to cross the road to meet her, and she panicked. Twice now she had seen him and death had followed.

Her eyes clouded with unshed tears of fear and misery, remembering the sounds in the bathroom, the way Terry had spoken to her, her lost job, her anxiety for the future. The tears made her almost blind, seeing through crystal, as she had seen shadows through the window of that bathroom when she was listening to the muffled groans of the dying girl.

She forgot she had been about to go into her apartment block. Without thinking where she was going, what she meant to do, she turned and ran towards the corner of the street. She had to get away from him before something happened.

Tearing round the corner she headed across the street towards a small alley which cut through to another road where there was a shopping centre she often visited. In there, she could hide, keep out of sight, sit at a café and observe who went past.

She ran flat out, breathing heavily, forgetting to make sure no car was coming. She was so absorbed that she didn’t hear a car turn the corner, drive up behind her, until too late.

Only when a horn blared did she look over her shoulder. A black car, a foreign make, she thought, was very close; only a few feet away, coming fast. She lunged forward, sideways to the left, to get out of its path, but at the same instant, the car swung left, too, as if the driver was, in turn, trying to avoid her.

The car’s bonnet hit her in her right side. Miranda wasn’t even conscious of the impact. Fear and pain oddly muted her sensations. She did not know that she flew up into the air, arms flung wide, legs limp, body twisting in flight.

She did not know that she landed against the metal wing and was thrown off again instantly, fell on to the tarmac of the road and just lay there, arms and legs sprawled.

She had already lost consciousness.

She came back to awareness to see a ring of faces staring down at her. Miranda focused on the cold, remote, dark eyes, not surprised to see him there.

‘Am I dead, or dying?’ she asked him, and heard the others in the crowd take a sharp, indrawn breath of shock.

He didn’t reply, just stared down at her. Pain beat through her, she found it hard to concentrate through the agony.

She couldn’t be dead, or she wouldn’t be in such pain, surely? Did dying hurt?

‘Hello there,’ a bald man in a green paramedic uniform said, smiling down as he knelt on the road, very close to her. ‘I’m Derek. What’s your name?’

Her lips fumbled sound which didn’t really emerge. She was too tired to struggle to speak; the words she tried to say bubbled silently on her lips.

Living took too much energy – was it even worth it? Had she been happy for an instant since Tom died? She had tried to get over his death, but a day had not passed without her missing him, grieving for him. Maybe she had been meant to die with him? Was that why the angel of death kept haunting her?

‘Haunting me, night and day,’ she thought aloud.

‘What’s that, darling?’ the paramedic asked, bending closer. ‘Can you tell me your name? Then we can let your family know what’s happened to you.’

She opened her mouth to speak but pain held her; she made a groaning sound instead. It hurts, it hurts, she tried to say, staring fixedly at the man’s face. He had a big nose, rough skin like lemon peel, kind eyes. She felt him willing her to speak again and she wanted to, but she couldn’t; she gave up and sank back instead into the well of pain.

The news of her accident reached Sergeant Neil Maddrell the following morning. It was handed to him by his inspector, a comfortably padded woman with startling ginger eyebrows. Neil read the faxed report several times, frowning.

‘What do you think? Is it coincidence? Or what?’ Inspector Burbage asked him in her deep, gravelly voice.

‘Or what, I’d say,’ Neil shrugged. ‘I don’t believe in coincidences this big. But I’d better interview the traffic guy who got there first, then I’ll talk to the witnesses he took evidence from. At least one of them seems to suspect the hit and run was deliberate.’

‘Depends whether the guy is paranoid, some people always suspect accidents are part of a plot. Anyway, there’s something else you ought to see.’ Inspector Burbage handed him another fax, a missing person report from an East End police station.

Neil half rose as he read, his face suddenly excited. ‘I must talk to this girl at once. If she’s the girl from the Finnigan case it changes everything.’

He began tidying up his desk, locking papers away in a top drawer.

‘Let me know how you get on, don’t forget the paperwork,’ the inspector said, waddling away like a ginger duck.

Neil took some time to get through the clotted traffic on the main road through the East End, the Mile End road, but eventually turned into a narrow lane running down to the river and the long-abandoned dockland warehouses. He parked and went up in a graffiti-scribbled lift to the fourth floor.

A small girl with a face like a petulant kitten opened the front door of a flat on the corner looking over the river and the grey expanse of buildings on the south bank.

‘Mmm?’ she mewed at him, dyed blonde hair cascading down one side of her shoulders.

‘Miss Liddie? Miss Delphine Liddie?’ Was Delphine really her name? Or had she invented it to give herself a more interesting persona?

‘Mmm,’ she admitted warily. ‘Who’re you?’

He pulled out his warrant card and showed it to her. ‘Sergeant Neil Maddrell.’

He saw her withdrawal, sensed she was thinking of slamming the door shut in his face, and added quickly, ‘About your missing flatmate – has she shown up again yet?’

‘Nah.’

A couple of women with shopping bags came past, staring.

‘Nosy cows,’ the blonde girl muttered. ‘You’d better come in.’

The flat was so grotesquely untidy that for a moment he thought it had been burgled; litter on the floor, the furniture, cans of coke standing on radiators, full ashtrays on tables, magazines and CDs lying on the carpet.

Delphine Liddie swept stuff off an armchair to join the other rubbish on the floor. ‘There you are. Take the weight off. Want a coffee?’

Briefly he hesitated, wondering how clean the cup was likely to be, then decided to risk it. Accepting hospitality made him more acceptable himself, in his experience. The public was always more forthcoming to someone they had fed or given a drink to. ‘Thanks.’

‘Black or white?’

‘Black, please.’

She vanished into a tiny kitchenette; he heard her clinking and banging about, then she came back with two mugs of black coffee.

He accepted one, saying, ‘Thanks’, again, and noting with relief that the mug looked perfectly clean. She sat down on a bean-bag shaped like a bright yellow banana, nursing her own mug, staring at him with those big, panda-like, mascara-ringed eyes. Her skin had an improbable tan, certainly not gained naturally – it probably came from a bottle, thought Neil.

‘So, tell me about your missing friend. When did you last see her?’

‘Last Sunday. She was up early, for once, Tracy don’t get up in the mornings much, but she had a lunch date, she was all dolled up for it, must have took her hours just to do her make-up, and she woke me up to borrow a few quid for fares, selfish cow, although she knew I’d been out late on the Saturday night. I only had a ten-quid note, so she took that, and promised to give it back that evening. Said she would get it off Sean.’

‘Sean?’

‘Finnigan. Tracy’s been going with him for a month or two.’