Dead Dream Girl (14 page)

The table wouldn’t stop Crane getting out, but it would slow him down, give Hellewell enough time, wherever he was in the conservatory, to get to him. Hellewell began thrashing about him now, at plants and foliage and the curtains of dangling fronds. He no longer bothered to douse the torch, as he had Crane cornered. All Crane could see of him was his shape behind a narrow but
high-powered
beam, and what looked to be a thick heavy stick.

From what he could gather, a path ran down each side of the wide chamber, with cross-paths to give access to fixtures laden with plants, flowers and shrubs. Hellewell wasn’t advancing in a straight line, but branching off along the cross-paths to give his lethal attention to every square foot of the room, as systematically as a beater driving game until it broke for cover.

But Crane wondered what break he could possibly make. Sweat now ran down his spine in rivulets from the heat needed for the many rare tropical blooms. His mind seemed almost to seize up with the overwhelming pungency of the scents clotting the atmosphere. At least he had the spade. And he was in good physical shape. But not in Hellewell’s class, the action man who spent his entire life outdoors working the land.

The beating and slashing was getting relentlessly closer. He forced himself to think calmly and logically. He pictured the garden again as he’d seen it last evening. His mind had been trained to gather detail. He recalled the look of this lengthy conservatory, jutting from the end of the house, like a pier. Had there been a second entrance along the side, one that could be reached more easily from the terrace or the pool area? He was near certain there had been a glass-panelled door that had barely defined itself against the glass walls.

Hellewell was about two yards off, working his way steadily along a cross-path, slashing and clubbing at costly blossoms and alien wide-leaved plants, even swinging at hanging flower baskets in case Crane had pulled himself up on to a beam. Crane estimated he was about halfway down the lengthy annexe, possibly roughly in line with the side door. He began to creep to his right behind the
screen of foliage. For part of a second the beam of Hellewell’s torch flicked over the conservatory’s garden side, but it was enough for Crane to glimpse the door he’d been near-certain would be there. He crept rapidly up to it, holding carefully on to his spade, paused until the torch beam was focused elsewhere, then slipped through the side door and began to run as rapidly as he dared, giving brief flashes on his torch to light his way. But it was no good. Hellewell had razor-edge reflexes to go with the honed body. Within seconds, Crane heard the soft thud of his feet behind him. They were on the circle of lawn now that bordered the pool, which he could see clearly in the light of Hellewell’s torch.

Crane was fast, Hellewell was faster. He came up on him so rapidly Crane knew he’d have to protect himself with his spade. He’d need to hold it in both hands to get his full strength behind the blow, so he stuffed his torch in his pocket, swung round and brought the spade down towards the shadowy figure behind the streak of light.

Hellewell dodged the blow with an almost
contemptuous
agility, and with his beam now locked on to Crane’s legs, gave him a blow to the side of his left knee. It sent him sprawling, gasping with pain. He knew, in a
nanosecond
that this was it. There was nowhere else to go. The torch’s beam then trawled with a deliberate, almost sadistic precision over his body. When it reached his head he knew the carefully positioned strokes would follow it. He also knew he’d not be left holding on to life like Ollie Stringer. Not by a single thread.

But suddenly, inexplicably, the area was flooded with light. High-voltage security lamps blazed from points along the house’s façade and the balustraded terrace. Both
men were momentarily blinded. Except that, when they could see again, Crane wasn’t looking at Hellewell, though the man was tall and fair and fit-looking.

‘… Geoff?’

‘… Frank?’

‘
A
re you all right, Frank?’ a voice cried.

It was Julia. She stood on the terrace, looking down at them from across the balustrade, her face pale as wax, her hair dishevelled, the gleaming, bloody patch on her temple clearly visible. She had what looked to be a
double-barrelled
hunting gun trained on Anderson.

‘More or less, Julia,’ Crane said, getting shakily to his feet. The pain in his knee was excruciating and he could stand only by taking the bulk of his weight on his right leg.

‘Have you any idea what’s going on here? Why did that
maniac
attack me? It was you who rang just before he did, I take it?’

He tried desperately to clear a brain that had had one shock too many. ‘I … I rang you from the road outside. I needed to warn you you might be in some kind of danger.’

‘From him?’

‘No. Someone else. I’m sorry, I’m as much in the dark as you.’

‘Frank,’ Anderson murmured, ‘I’d no
idea
it was you. Thought it must have been one of her retainers.’ Incredibly, he was smiling his usual engaging smile.

‘But you’d have killed me!’ Crane shouted.

‘You, whoever you are. Explain yourself,’ Julia called, in the peremptory tone Crane knew well. ‘The police will need facts that make sense when I ring them.’

‘His name’s Geoff Anderson, Julia. He’s a reporter with the
Standard
. He was supposed to be helping me find Donna’s killer.’

She had a haunted look then in the glare of the lamps, some of which, embedded in the border of lawn, threw light upwards. ‘Very well, Geoff Anderson, spit it out.’

He went on smiling, with the self-possession Crane had rarely known him lose. But he knew that fast brain would be thinking hard.

‘Frank, can you make any kind of guess about what made him
do
this? If you were working with …’ Julia pleaded.

His brain still reeled with the pain in his knee, the throbbing cheek bone, and this final inexplicable shock.

‘Geoff, explain yourself. It’ll come out in the end anyway. Why did you attack Julia?’

Anderson smiled on in the glare. He’d understand the law; maybe he’d decided that silence was his wisest move at this stage. But there seemed more to it somehow. He almost looked to be relishing the tight spot he was in, to be getting off on the challenge of finding a way out of it.

‘Julia, you’re sure you’ve not see him before?’

‘No.’ She put the hand that had steadied the gun-barrel up to her head, which Crane guessed must be giving her the sort of pain that made thinking difficult. She was one tough woman, even so. ‘But he reminds me vaguely of someone I may have seen at some time or other.’

‘Try to remember,’ he said urgently.

Anderson looked on, as if barely interested. They stood
for some time without speaking in the
son et lumière
brilliance
. Showing every sign of considerable effort, she finally broke the silence. ‘I … told you about the man I saw with Donna at the Raven. This … Anderson has a look of him.’

Crane glanced back at Anderson. No reaction. It was surreal. What could possibly be the motive for such bizarre behaviour? Was he mentally ill? Surely not.

‘There’s a bit of a resemblance between Anderson and Joe Hellewell,’ he told her. ‘Same colour hair, roughly the same height and build. And we’re virtually certain Hellewell killed Donna. He’d been seeing her. We also believe he knew about your friendship with her. I thought you could be in danger because he’d decided Donna might have told you she was seeing him around the time she disappeared.’

Another lengthy silence as she came to terms with this baffling new information. Then she said slowly, ‘But … but it wasn’t Joe Hellewell who attacked me, it was this Anderson. So why shouldn’t Anderson be the man who killed Donna and was afraid of what Donna might have told me about
him
?’ She spoke like a child who drew a simple, innocent conclusion, unaware of the complexities that lay behind the situation.

‘He never actually knew Donna, Julia. His only
involvement
with her began when she was already dead and he was writing his crime reports. He’s spent a great deal of his own time these last months trying to get to the truth behind her killing. There’s got to be some other reason why he attacked you.’

He looked at Anderson. ‘Geoff, I’m doing everything I can to help you here—’

‘How do you
know
he never knew her?’ Julia cut in doggedly.

Crane watched her. Well, how did he know? He wished he could think more clearly through the fog of pain. He supposed he knew because he trusted what Anderson had told him. He’d seen her around, you couldn’t miss her if you trawled the city’s night scene. But he’d never known her.

Or said he hadn’t.

A cold hand seemed to touch the nape of his neck. It couldn’t be, it couldn’t! He’d worked with Anderson, seen the dedication, the drive, the obsessive determination to see a killer nailed. He was trusted by everyone, none more than Connie and Malc for the kindness and sympathy he’d shown them in their distress. Could Anderson himself be somehow involved in Donna’s death? It was too
ridiculous
. And yet … why had Julia been so viciously attacked? Two or three more blows like the one she’d had and she could now be dead, or a vegetable. How could that be unless it was for something she might know?

‘
Did
you know Donna, Geoff?’

No answer. Still the faint superior smile. Did he think he had a chance of escaping? That could only make his
situation
worse. If he had to be hunted down he’d be virtually admitting to some kind of guilt, if he was guilty of
something
more than the attack on Julia.

‘Geoff,’ he said, ‘I’ll do everything I can to help you, but you’ve got to explain yourself. It’s the only way, you know it is.’

But he smiled calmly and silently on, though shifting his gaze to Julia, up on the terrace, still carefully holding him covered. Crane wondered if he was thinking she
might not be too skilled in the use of a big gun. If so, Crane had similar misgivings. It could be that she kept one in the house to scare off any possible intruder, but had perhaps never fired one in her life. Another complication.

‘Geoff,’ he said flatly, ‘if you’re not going to say anything at all to us I’ll just have to subject your actions to rigorous analysis. That’s one of your phrases, yes? The thing is, I’ve had to accept that you were in a lot of control of the investigation because no one knew more about the case than you, not even the police in the end. And you knew everything I was doing. You could have covered your own tracks because you had the inside track.’

Anderson’s eyes came slowly back to Crane’s. Had they become watchful behind the fixed smile?

‘Let’s hypothesize, say, about Ollie Stringer. Now, we were certain Adrian or one of his pals had attacked him, right, but it could just as easily have been you. You could have been lying about being out of town. You knew the day and the time I’d be meeting Ollie. You could have lured him into the hollow yourself. And the reason for that could have been that if Ollie had been able to put me on to Adrian I might have been able to eliminate him as a suspect, because he might not have done it, might he, even though it certainly began to look as if he had when Kirsty told you who and what Adrian really was. You can see how things can be shown in a different light, can’t you, unless you give us the real story?’

Crane’s head felt as if it were splitting with the effort of putting together this version of events, which he couldn’t convince himself could be anything near the real truth. The woman looked on, mouth slightly open, bewildered. ‘I’ll explain later, Julia. Let’s just say that the trouble with
this case has always been the way it could be seen in so many different lights.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘all I can say is that the more I see of him the more he looks like the man I saw with Donna at the Raven, even if I was a good way off.’

‘But that had to have been Hellewell. The number you gave me was checked by the police as a Leaf and Petal car.’

Anderson’s smile looked to be almost taunting now. It was becoming obvious why he wouldn’t speak. It was a maze of ifs and buts and had to be nearly impossible to prove anything. There was only a single, undisputed fact: he’d attacked Julia. He’d tried to attack him too but Crane left that aside. If he
had
been involved in Donna’s death, two good brains, Anderson’s and a lawyer’s, could surely get him off a charge which could probably only be based on paper-thin circumstantial evidence. And Julia, he was certain, was too private a person to want to bring any charge of her own against him for a blow to the head.

‘Are they
sure
it was a Leaf and Petal car, Frank?’ Julia said. ‘The one at the Raven?’

Crane sighed, the sound leg that was having to bear the bulk of his weight beginning to ache as much as the one Anderson had struck. ‘They’re hardly ever wrong, Julia, they have access to a computer which stores every vehicle registration number in the country with details of the owner. It was a Renault Scenic, one of the garden centre’s runabouts.’

He spoke almost mechanically, his fogged brain still grappling with other details. And then something about the car’s make rang a distant bell. He thought back to when he and Anderson had gone to Leaf and Petal to talk to Hellewell, the interview Anderson had taped with
Kirsty, because Kirsty had fancied and trusted him. She’d lent him a Leaf and Petal runabout one weekend to see how he liked it.

A Renault Scenic! That was the car she’d lent him. The shock was like being given another blow.

‘There could be a definite answer as to who was driving the car you saw, Julia,’ he said slowly. ‘I’ll not go into details, but Joe Hellewell’s wife lent Anderson a Leaf and Petal Renault one weekend, to try out as he was thinking of buying one.’

Anderson couldn’t control a sudden intake of breath. The smile had gone and Crane seemed to see in his eyes traces of that old exasperation when Crane had picked up on something he’d overlooked. Sickened, Crane wondered if those earlier bursts of exasperation could also be seen in a different light; maybe the more things Crane had dug up that he’d not thought of the more covering up he’d been forced to do. But it
couldn’t
be possible. Could it?

He said, ‘I need only check with Mrs Hellewell exactly when she lent him the Scenic to see if it checks out with the night you followed Donna to the Raven.’ He glanced from him to her, who seemed such a worryingly vulnerable figure with her bloodstained forehead and her dishevelled clothes. ‘Think carefully, Julia, did Donna ever tell you of anything she’d done that might have involved Anderson?’

‘Frank, you know I couldn’t bear to hear about—’

‘I know,’ he said, more gently, ‘but search your mind. You talked a lot together and she trusted you.’

‘She was … so very discreet, poor darling.’ She couldn’t stop her lips quivering. ‘There was only the bad dream, the photography man.’

‘I’m certain he can be ruled out. But you seemed to
think she was talking about
two
men. Someone who wanted her to go away with him, that she felt was almost trying to control her, stop her living her own life.’

‘I’m … sorry, I can’t add anything to that. She was crying so hard, seemed so confused. I
know
it was a
premonition
now.’

Crane said, ‘Well, Anderson, you were aiming for Fleet Street. It must have seemed a nice idea to have gone along with someone looking like Donna.’

His smile suddenly twisted into a sneer. ‘A common prostitute? You can’t think I’d want to go to London with a provincial slag in tow.’

It was only the second time he’d spoken and Crane was certain it had been involuntary. ‘But you couldn’t have known what type of woman she was when you first got to know her. Not with someone as secretive as Donna.’

‘Think a talented reporter couldn’t get a trollop like her together inside a week?’

‘And that’s what you did?’

‘I’m commenting, Frank,’ he said quietly, ‘not admitting.’

‘What are you saying?’ Julia suddenly cried, looking even more distraught, the gun-barrel shaking. ‘How dare you? Donna wasn’t a prostitute. She was a good, kind-hearted, hard-working girl, who looked after her family. How
dare
you?’

‘What planet have you been living on?’ Anderson flung back.

‘I’m … sorry, Julia,’ Crane said reluctantly. ‘Donna really wasn’t what she seemed. Like this man, she could put on a polished act. It fooled almost everyone.’

She gazed down at them in a lengthy despondent
silence. They stood as if acting out a play beneath the glare of the powerful lamps, with a crowd of hushed spectators in the darkness beyond the hard-edged pool of light. Then she said, in a voice so low it barely carried, ‘Well, I don’t care. I’d not have cared what she did as long as she had time for me. That’s all I ever really asked of her, to be able to go on seeing her. I could never have harmed her, whatever she did. Never, ever … and how some
man
, some piece of human rubbish …’ She couldn’t go on.

Despite Anderson’s mastery of his features, he couldn’t control a wince of pain. ‘She was humping around!’ he suddenly shouted. ‘She was humping around, for Christ’s sake! Money down, knickers off,
that
was your pure precious little angel!’

‘And you warned her it had to stop?’ Crane said.

The blunt words checked him like a slapped face. He began to smile in his usual detached way, as if warning himself that silence was still the best policy.

‘Can you guard him, Julia, while I call the police?’

‘Have you not got a mobile?’

‘He threw it in the fountain.’

‘The … drawing room. You know the one.’

But she spoke hesitantly, eyes troubled, as if uneasy about Crane leaving the scene. Crane was certain now she had no real mastery of the gun. What if Anderson made a run for it? Would she dare open fire in case she killed him? He knew that Anderson, with his split-second reactions, would also have picked up on her lack of confidence.