Bartholomew 02 - How to Marry a Ghost (43 page)

I looked at Martha and I opened my mouth for the first time.

“What happened to you, Martha?” I asked. “You left without saying good-bye, without telling anyone.” Some instinct told me

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to be gentle with Martha, to pander to her like a child but not in the arrogant, patronizing manner Angie adopted with her.

“Her so-called boyfriend dumped her,” Angie laughed, “so she came running to me.”

“I know,” I said. “Louis. I saw him, Martha.”

Martha’s eyes widened with a pathetic glimmer of hope. “You did?”

“At your trailers. He’d come round to see you but you’d gone.

I found something, Martha. A quiver, buried in the sand. Probably the one that held the arrow that killed Bettina.”

“But I didn’t know it was there,” said Martha, anxiety making her voice rise. “I swear I didn’t. Tell her, Angie.”

“Calm down, for God’s sake. Lee, she had nothing to do with burying that quiver. I killed Bettina.”

“And Sean?” I looked her in the eye for the first time.

“Oh, I didn’t kill Sean,” said Angie. “My own son, are you crazy?” She came over to clasp me roughly by the arm. I pulled away from her in panic and she snapped at Martha, “Don’t just stand there. Help me! I want to put her next door.”

I could see Martha was reluctant, apprehensive even, but she dutifully took hold of my other arm and the two of them propelled me forward. I contemplated trying to struggle free but it was two against one and Angie was surprisingly strong.

They led me out of her bedroom across the narrow landing at the top of the stairs and into what appeared to be nothing more than a small box room. There was no furniture, just bare floorboards. Its message was unmistakable. It was a cell and I was to be the prisoner.

But it was what was lying on the floor in a corner that made me begin to struggle frantically in their arms. A coil of rope—

with the end fashioned into a noose.

With almost superhuman strength, Angie flung me onto the

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floor and before I had time to move she was kneeling over me, holding me down while Martha bound my wrists and ankles.

“I’m not sure whether we can use that here.” Angie had followed my terrified gaze to the noose. “You need a high beam of some kind. But I’ve got to hand all credit to Martha. I got the idea from reading her novel. I found myself getting hooked on that story she wrote. Quite ingenious, I thought, what about you? I told her, didn’t I, Martha? I said, stick to writing. You’re a darn sight better at it than you were at acting.

“But anyway, the noose is an option providing we can find the right place. I’ll be moving you to a different location tomorrow but I’m going to need a few hours’ sleep before I take to the road.”

“Where are we going?” asked Martha.

“Like I’m going to tell you, now, in front of her.” Angie’s tone was contemptuous. “I’m not going to go into any overdramatic details but I think we all know what’s going to happen. But right now I’m exhausted so I’m just going to leave her in here.”

She knotted a scarf around my face and then she pushed Martha out of the room and locked me in.

I lay there listening to the sounds of them moving about the house.Was Martha staying here? My mind was racing with the realization that she had deceived me right from the start. Who knew whether anything she had told me had been true.
M saw
something
.Yet I could not accept that Martha was as deranged as Angie although she was clearly in thrall to her in a way that was very scary. Didn’t I have to take her novel into account? By having me read it, had she not been trying to tell me something? Yet surely she must have known it would be too much of a stretch. I had thought the story was autobiographical in some way but there was no way in which I could have made the leap from those

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destructive schoolgirls in the book to two crazy menopausal huntresses in the Mallaby woods.

Because I was assuming Angie had involved Martha in Bettina’s murder in some way.

And I was right, as I found out a few hours later in the most unlikely way I would have dreamed—from Martha herself.

I didn’t sleep, not that I expected to for a second, so wound up was I by the events of the evening. I was still awake when they started setting up the market in the early hours before dawn. I could hear the cautious rumbling of the carts of produce being trundled over the cobbled streets of the mews nearby, coming closer and closer. I lay there stiff and aching and wondering what my father would do when he discovered I hadn’t been home for the night. He’d call Cath before he called the police and she might mention it to Richie and he might say something to Max who might guess I’d gone to see Angie. Or he might call Genevieve first but had I told Genevieve
when
I was seeing Angie? As far as I could remember, I hadn’t said a word to anyone.

And then, over the muffled clattering of the stalls being put up outside, I heard the sound of someone coming up the stairs.

Was this it? Had the time come for me to be taken away to my fate?

I heard the sound of the key being turned in the lock of my room—slowly, as if the person didn’t want me to hear.

Or didn’t want Angie to hear, as it turned out, because Martha crept into the room and with the help of the moonlight shining through the window I could see she had her finger to her lips. I made a sound through the scarf and she clamped a hand over my face.

“Shhh! Keep absolutely quiet! She’s right across the hall. She’s asleep and the door’s closed but the walls aren’t too thick,” whis-

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pered Martha. “If I untie the scarf, you have to promise to keep your voice down.”

I nodded my head frantically and she released the scarf from my face.

“What about my hands and feet?” I said. “Please, Martha.”

But to my utter astonishment she shook her head. “I came to ask you about Louis,” she said. “I need to know what he told you.

You said he came to find me?”

It was beyond belief. She wasn’t here to help me escape. She just wanted to find out if she still had a chance with Louis. She was a pathetic and pitiful creature but she was, as I realized in a moment of desperate lucidity, my only hope.

So in hushed tones I told her what she wanted to hear, that Louis had regretted what he had said to her and that she would undoubtedly be reunited with him when she returned. And when I sensed that I had her complete trust and attention, I asked her again.

“Martha,
please!
You have to set me free.”

But she shook her head. “No point,” she said. “You’d never get out of here. I’m as much a prisoner as you are. Don’t you understand? This whole place is boarded on the street side. The only way out is through that steel gate you came through and only Angie has the combination. You can open the windows up here but it’s a sheer drop to the courtyard. I wouldn’t risk it.”

“So why aren’t you tied up too?”

Martha’s answer filled me with dread.

“Because she knows I would never leave her.”

“Martha,” I said as gently as I could, “did you help Angie kill Bettina in any way?”

She shook her head again. “No,” she whispered, “I wasn’t there that night.”

“And Sean? Did Bettina kill Sean?”

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She hesitated.

“Martha?” I whispered, trying to keep a check on the frantic urgency I could feel mounting inside me.

But she shook her head again. “No, Bettina didn’t do it.”

“So who did? Do you know?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Martha?”

“Yes.Yes, I know.”

“So who was it?”

“I killed him.” She mouthed the words at me.

“It was an accident,” she said, raising her voice to an alarm-ingly high level when she saw the expression of shock on my face.

She clutched me and thrust her face in front of mine to make me pay attention to her words. She manipulated me like a puppet because I was still tied up. “And that’s why I’m here,” she hissed at me. “She called me and said she’d tell the police I killed Sean unless I came to London to be with her. She said she needed me.”

“You’d better tell me everything, Martha,” I said. “Start at the beginning.”

She was silent for a few seconds then she began to whisper urgently, “Here’s what happened.When Bettina suddenly appeared in the Hamptons in August and started going around asking questions about Shotgun, I contacted Angie and she went ballistic! For the first time since she’d asked me to keep an eye out for Sean, she said she wanted to get in touch with him herself.”

“So you set it up?”

“I gave her his e-mail address and she took it from there.Then she called me and said she was coming over. She said Sean had mentioned Shotgun had given him one of his grandfather’s Purdeys and I had to get hold of it.”

“Did Sean know you knew his mother?”

“Of course not. I had to engineer a conversation with him

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about shooting the next time I met him on the beach and he said he’d bring the Purdey to show me. I think he was a little frightened of it, to be honest, but he was proud enough of it to want me to see it and admire it. He came looking for me with it before he went to New York the night before he died.”

M saw Sean w/shotgun in woods
. I remembered Bettina’s notes.

Dumpster must have seen him.

“I had arranged to meet him in the woods. We often used Dumpster’s hunting blind as a meeting place. But I didn’t see him and I found the gun in the blind. I caught a glimpse of Dumpster’s truck in the woods and I was worried that he’d seen me take the gun,” said Martha. “Of course it was covered with Shotgun’s prints.Then Angie flew to New York and came out to hide in my trailers.”

“Before Sean was killed?”

Martha nodded. “The day before. Sean told me he was going to the city and that he would be back the following night. He said he had arranged for Bettina to meet with Shotgun at the house at seven thirty and then come and meet him, Sean, off the jitney at around eight forty.

“I was in Sag Harbor and Shelter Island that Friday, just as I told you, and Angie drove over there in a rented car and picked me up about six thirty.We were back in the Mallaby woods about seven fifteen. It was just getting dark.We left the car quite a long way away and found a place to wait in the woods. Angie had learned to shoot when she lived on the Yorkshire moors. She had Sean’s Purdey that I had passed on to her and she made us both wear gloves. She wanted me to help her carry Bettina’s body.

Once she’d shot her, she planned to take her out into the middle of the bay in my boat and dump her in the water.”

I wondered if Martha realized she was revealing herself to be an accomplice in Bettina’s murder. She was on her knees beside

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me with a wide-eyed look on her face that belied the horrific details coming out of her mouth.

“But seven thirty came and Bettina never arrived,” said Martha. “I wanted to leave but Angie said that even though the meeting with Shotgun clearly wasn’t happening, there was still a chance that Bettina would pick up Sean from the bus and drop him at the house—and we could get her on the way out.

“It was pitch-black, just starting to rain, and nearly nine o’clock when we glimpsed a figure coming through the woods—

on foot. It was very sudden and we weren’t prepared. I had assumed we’d have the headlights of the car to give us warning and that then there’d be a few minutes while she dropped Sean off. I suppose we never stopped to wonder why Bettina was on foot.

Angie had stood the Purdey up against a tree and I reached for it, intending to hand it to her. I had never shot anything in my life.

The shadow was upon us so fast and I panicked. The gun was loaded. Somehow I lifted it up and it went off.”

She looked at me expectantly. “See? That’s how it happened that Friday.”

“It was Sean?”

“The figure fell instantly and we waited to see if it would stir.

When it didn’t we rushed over and discovered what I’d done.”

She was terrifyingly calm, I noticed, as if she had already divorced herself from the proceedings in her mind.

“It was my idea to use one of my wedding dresses as a shroud,”

she whispered proudly. “We carried him down to the beach and I made Angie help me drag him into the shallows and I opened his shirt and washed the blood from the hole in his chest where he’d been blasted by the shotgun. I stuffed an old cloth into the wound to stop the blood seeping out.Then I rowed out into the bay and we tossed his body into the water. Angie wanted to say a prayer but there wasn’t time.” Martha was quite matter-of-fact now. “I

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insisted she drive me all the way back to Shelter Island so I could establish an alibi. My story of having been on Shelter Island would have to stick. Angie dropped me off and I went around asking for a ride home from Shelter Island so the guy who drove me all the way back would remember me. I didn’t get back to the trailers till almost midnight.”

“And the next day, Saturday, Angie killed Bettina.”

“When I left my trailers on that Saturday, she told me she was only going to go out to get rid of the Purdey. She said she was going to bury it in the sand just along the beach near Shotgun’s property.When she’d done so, she said, she saw movement in the woods. So she started back the way she’d come, but using the woods as cover, and she came across a truck. She found this bow and arrow in it and then this figure appeared out of nowhere. It was almost a repetition of the night before. It was a woman and she came toward Angie and started waving at her as if she knew her. It was Bettina and she’d recognized Angie but then as she grew closer she saw Angie had a bow and arrow pointed right at her so she turned and ran. And Angie shot her in the back.”