Bartholomew 02 - How to Marry a Ghost (41 page)

MM: They never asked. They’d already spoken to me and the truth is, I forgot about her.They were very interested in hearing that I’d seen Shotgun Marriott go out because of course I gave him a bit of an alibi. And when I saw her on the TV, I didn’t really think anything of it beyond “Oh, that was his wife I saw.” It seemed only natural that she was going to their apartment.

BP: So what you’re saying, Mr. Molloy, is that when Angela Marriott arrived at the apartment that night her husband wasn’t there?

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MM: Don’t see how he could have been. I saw him leave the building and I didn’t see him come back in with her. No, she was on her own when she went up in the lift with me.

I turned the page but there was no more transcript, just a note in what I assumed was Bettina’s handwriting. “Telephoned Shirley Molloy, Sydney, August 1, 2004
.
Mike Molloy died 2003.” August 1. Bettina must have followed up as recently as this summer once she learned that she might have another chance to do Shotgun’s book.

Shotgun had not mentioned Angie being at the apartment that night. He had given me to understand that the whole point of having the apartment was so that he could go there after a concert and leave Angie at their house to sleep undisturbed.What he had said was that she had barricaded herself into the house and if she had heard him banging on the door, she had probably not answered because she had thought it was one of his fans.

But what if she hadn’t been there?

Now I couldn’t wait to go around and see her.

She opened the door to me in what was obviously her version of mufti—a white polo shirt and lime green capri pants. On her feet were spangled flip-flops and her toenails were painted the same bloodred as her lipstick. It didn’t really go with the lime green but you can’t have everything. Her dark hair was tied back in a long braid that fell over one shoulder. It was unwashed and greasy and I realized it was dyed. It didn’t do her any favors; it made her strong face look hard and unforgiving.

Her house was a bit of a bombshell.When I arrived at the address she had given me I thought I must have misheard what she’d said. It was just off Portobello Road, a shabby nondescript door in a rather beat-up terraced house. More ordinary you could not

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get and it had to be one of the noisiest locations in Notting Hill.

They started setting up the stalls for Portobello Market every morning around five o’clock and the racket was unbelievable.

But then maybe Angie Marriott was one of those driven, edgy people who never slept.

But once inside I got the picture. The place had been gutted and given a mega makeover. I was standing in a kitchen with marble countertops and an impressive display of status appliances that would have given the Phillionaire a run for his money. The place was like a giant loft and I’d stepped directly into it, there’d been no hallway, no staircase. Suddenly I realized the ceiling was exposed to the rafters and the kitchen seemed to take up the whole house. There was no upstairs. So where did she sleep?

“Cath’s lovely, isn’t she?” said Angie, taking out a bottle of rosé and offering me a glass. “It’s all right,” she must have noticed my concerned look, “I’m on the pomegranate.”

“They say it’s the new cranberry juice,” I said.

“Do they indeed? Let me just throw some snacks together and then we’ll go and sit down. I only just got back from work.”

“Which is?”

“Oh, sorry. Don’t you know? I have a financial advisory service. Our main office is in London, in Chancery Lane actually, but we’ve got another one in Kent and I seem to have been running nonstop between the two recently. Suddenly the world is full of people who’ve just realized they haven’t given enough thought to their pension requirements—all those irresponsible baby boomers—and they want me to invest twenty pence for them. Still, it does me good to keep busy after what happened to Sean. By the way, what provision have you made for your old age, Lee?”

Give me a break! I hadn’t come over to be sold a pension plan.

“Do you use the name Angela Marriott at work?”

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“I don’t use it at all, anywhere. I’ve been Angela Braithwaite for years. Ever since—well, you know. Come on, let’s go and make ourselves comfortable. Could you take these?” She handed me a bowl of crisps and the bottle of rosé. “And I’ll bring the rest.”

I couldn’t help noticing she picked up my glass of wine and hers of pomegranate juice and then she grabbed a third glass by its stem.Who else was she expecting?

“Oh, by the way,” I said, “has Max Austin been in touch with you?” Only a few hours had passed since lunch but I knew Max never wasted any time. He hadn’t called me for Angie’s number but that didn’t mean he hadn’t got it from another source.

“Who?”

“Detective Inspector—well, no, hang about, he’s a detective superintendent now. Det. Supt. Max Austin. I saw him today and I told him what you told me, what you said about—about Shotgun killing the groupie. Back then he was working for the man who led the investigation, I don’t know his name.”

“Frank Shaw,” she said as if it were a name engraved on her memory for a lifetime, “Det. Insp. Frank Shaw. He’s retired now.”

“Right. Well, I saw Max Austin and I told him what you said about Shotgun. I was going to call and warn you he’d be contacting you.”

She looked at me for a long time. Then she said slowly, “You know, you shouldn’t have done that. Not without checking with me first.” Her eyes were wary. “Did he believe you?”

It was an odd question but in fact a perfectly reasonable one.

Because
I
hadn’t believed
her
when she’d told me on the phone.

Not because I didn’t think she was telling the truth but because I hadn’t
wanted
Shotgun to be guilty.There was a difference.Wasn’t there?

“More or less,” I said. And that
was
the truth.

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“Well then, that’s that,” she said and suddenly she was sad and deflated. “One way or the other, Kip’ll go down now.”

“And there’s something else,” I said, wondering if it was a good move to let everything come rushing out like this but unable to stop myself, “I didn’t believe you at first but now I know you were there.”

She dropped a glass in shock. It slipped from her hand and clattered onto the floor.

“You do?”

As she kicked the broken glass into a corner and went to get another, I explained about Bettina’s tape.

“So you’ve been quite busy since you arrived. How long are you over?”

“I don’t know,” I told her and explained why.

“Well, you
are
going to be finishing the book but it’ll be my book instead of Kip’s so that’s answered that question.You won’t need to go back to Long Island because I can tell you everything you need to know from now on.”

“Except I’ve left my fiancé over there,” I said, “and he doesn’t sound very keen to come back. I may have to go back and drag him across the Atlantic.”

“My goodness,” she said, “when’s the wedding?”

So then of course I had to tell her that it hadn’t happened and there was no firm guarantee that it would.

“Man trouble,” she sighed and opened the kitchen door, beckoning me to follow her. “A woman without it in her life is a woman who can get away with murder. And now you’ve got Max Austin to add to your problems.”

Now it was my turn to stare at her.

“You blushed bright red when you said his name,” she said and laughed. “Come on, let’s go flop in the living room, and have a girly evening together.”

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If there was anyone with whom I could feel less comfortable about spending a girly evening it was Angie Marriott but I followed her meekly out of the kitchen.

And then I gasped.

We were in a glass-roofed passage leading across a courtyard to a totally separate house—a town house, four stories high. She laughed again when she saw my face.

“You didn’t think I lived in that little hovel?” She jerked her head back to the kitchen we had just left. “No, that address is just a front for deliveries. No one ever gets to see beyond the kitchen.

And the entrance to this house in the street around the corner is boarded up. It looks as if no one lives there. I only let my nearest and dearest through to where I really live.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this.

“Don’t look so surprised, Lee. We may not know each other very well yet but I’ve told you the biggest secret of my whole life, haven’t I? The one I’ve been carrying around for fourteen years.

If that doesn’t make you eligible to enter my private domain, I don’t know what does.”

She unlocked a tall iron security gate that led to the front door and let it clang shut behind us so loudly I felt as if I was entering an episode of
Law & Order
.

“When I’m in here no one can reach me. No one even knows I’m here.”

She was almost purring but to me it seemed as if she were making herself a prisoner in her own home. She led me into a sumptuous room, wood-paneled and rich in color with tapestries and velvet-covered sofas and heavy curtains complete with corded tiebacks.The atmosphere was almost medieval except for a giant flat screen TV in a prominent position on the far wall.

I looked around the room. There were photographs of Sean everywhere, in silver frames, in wooden frames, and some just

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snapshots propped up on the bookshelves. As I took in the poignancy of this display of the son she had not raised and would never see again, something registered with me.These were all recent photos of Sean. Sean as a young man, clearly taken in the last two or three years.Who had sent her these pictures?

“Have a seat,” she said, flopping down onto one of the sofas.

“So, this is a little weird. I guess you know all about me from Kip by now. So what did my old man have to say about our marriage?”

She wasn’t stupid. Talk about blunt and direct! Okay, so she was determined to be in control of the proceedings from the word go. What should I tell her about my meetings with Shotgun? Well, the truth would be the simplest route to go. Not only that but past experience had taught me that the more forthcom-ing I was, the more that approach persuaded my interviewee to open up.

Only right now I wasn’t quite sure who was interviewing whom.

“He told me everything.” Let her make of that what she wanted.

“All about his other women? All those little girls on the road and then the real threats that came along once I started drinking?

Can’t blame him, I suppose. I wasn’t much use to him in those days.” I saw the unmistakable pain in her eyes before she carried on without giving me a chance to answer. “Oh, I’m sure he didn’t tell you the whole story. In fact, I know he didn’t, otherwise he’d be locked up by now. And it’s my own fault. I could have picked up the phone and told the police everything I know any time I wanted.” She looked hard at me. “But I didn’t, did I? Because I still love Kip, as you’ve probably guessed, and I couldn’t do that to him.That’s why I want to do a book. It’s the only way I’ll ever be able to tell the truth, that I went round to the apartment that night because I wanted to be with him and I walked in on him

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with a girl—just as I had so many times before. Only this time he was holding a pillow over her face, smothering her. He looked at me the whole time—while he was squeezing the life out of that poor girl, Lee, he was looking at me. I saw her legs twitching, her hands. She was lying there on the bed putting up a pathetic struggle but she was a tiny little thing. She was no match for him.”

It took a moment for me to register what she had just told me and I began to feel slightly sick at the thought of having to accept once and for all that Shotgun was a killer. But the intensity with which she had just described the killing told me she really had been in the room.

“You saw him and you didn’t call the police?” I looked at her.

“Terrible, isn’t it?” She nodded her head several times, agree-ing with me. “But I could never have done that.What you have to understand is that Kip and I loved each other with an intensity you just wouldn’t believe and that’s why I had such a hard time turning a blind eye to his other women. He always said they didn’t mean a thing, they were just evidence of a weakness in him and he had absolutely no feeling for them, they were just about sex. But I couldn’t handle it.”

“You’ve lived with it all this time?”

“Yes,” she said, “I’ve been in my own form of hell.”

“You left Shotgun—”

“I couldn’t stay with him after that—”

“But you left your son. How could you leave Sean—with a murderer?”

“I told myself I wasn’t leaving him with a murderer. I was leaving him with his father. Because Kip gave me no choice. He said he was taking Sean as a hostage; if I ever breathed a word of what had happened, he’d—”

“He wouldn’t harm his own son?”

“I had no way of knowing what he would or wouldn’t do but

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he said if I tried to get custody of Sean, he’d drag up all my drinking and prove I was an unfit mother.”

“But he let you go—that night. And he stayed—with the girl?”

“Probably sounds weird that he didn’t get as far away as possible but we agreed he would appear less guilty if he stayed and said he’d found her dead beside him when he woke up. And that’s when we made the pact to keep quiet about what really happened. Forever.”

“But you left later on, because you weren’t there in the morning.”

“Right,” she said quietly, “I went back and said good-bye to Sean. I mean I didn’t actually say the word ‘good-bye,’ I just crept into his room and sat by his bed watching him sleep. In any case it was sometime after that that I actually relinquished him. We wanted to make it seem like a natural turn of events prior to a divorce, like it tied in with Kip moving to the States. But I think that night was when I forced myself to acknowledge that I would be losing Sean. I’ll tell you something”—she looked hard at me for a second—“but I don’t want this going in the book. Okay?”