No Mercy (29 page)

This time Maddie knew exactly who she was looking out for as she impatiently drummed her fingers on the Formica-topped table and waited for Jay Cato to appear. The visiting room was much quieter than the last occasion she’d been here, midweek visits clearly not being as popular as the weekend ones. There were hardly any children, for which she was grateful. She didn’t want any distractions. Today she needed answers, and she wasn’t leaving until she got them.

It was a long ten minutes before the door at the back finally opened and Cato walked in. There was no hesitation this afternoon. He came straight over, pulled out a chair and sat down. He looked tired. His skin was sallow, and there were dark shadows under his eyes. ‘How are you?’ He searched her face for a moment. ‘Or are you sick to death of hearing that question?’

‘I’m fine – and yes, I’m pretty sick of it.’ She paused and then added, ‘But thanks for asking.’

Cato grimaced and raked his fingers through his greying hair. ‘I owe you an apology. I should never have got you involved in all this. If I’d known —’

‘If you’d known what?’ she asked. ‘That Lena Gissing was a bitter, vengeful woman? That Adam Vasser was as vicious as his father? Except you did. You knew all that and you were still perfectly happy to stick me right in the middle of your crazy war.’

He briefly raised his hands and then dropped them again. ‘“Happy” might be too strong a word, but I take your point. And you’re right. I haven’t got any excuses. I didn’t think it through. I just wanted to wind Lena up, get under her skin, make her think about what she’d done to me.’

‘No, it was more than that. You wanted to push her buttons and make her react. And she did. Delia Shields is dead, and I ended up with my head caved in.’ She left a short silence, sighed and then carried on. ‘Anyway, that’s not why I’m here.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I kind of guessed that.’

‘I need to know why all this happened, to make some sense of it. Can you do that for me at least?’

‘I can do that,’ he said, ‘although a coffee would help.’

Maddie stood up. ‘Black, right?’

‘Thank you.’

The queue at the counter was a short one and she was back within a couple of minutes. She pushed one plastic cup of coffee across the table and sipped the other one. Her eyes met his and she gave a nod. ‘Whenever you’re ready.’

Cato took a deep breath as if preparing himself for an ordeal. ‘You want to know about Lucy Rivers, right?’

‘I just want to understand.’

‘Okay. Well… where to start?’ He glanced around the room as if searching for inspiration. A few seconds ticked by before his gaze slipped back to her and he began his story. ‘I suppose what you need to know is that I didn’t meet Lena for the first time ten years ago. It was way before then. It was when I was twenty-one and she was eighteen, when she was Lena Bell. I’d never come across anyone like her before. She was sweet and smart and beautiful. It was… We were…’ He gave a shrug, a faint flush rising to his cheeks. ‘Anyway, you get the picture. Young love and all the rest of it. We wanted to be together, but…’

Maddie peered at him over the rim of her cup. ‘But?’

‘Her parents had other plans for her. We knew they’d have a fit if they found out about us and so we decided to do a bunk, run off and never come back.’

‘Sounds extreme.’

‘You never met her father. Charlie Bell was a drunk, a womaniser, a gambler. He’d have sold Lena to the Devil for a pint of mild and twenty fags. And her stepmother wasn’t much better.’

‘She was eighteen. She could have just left home, couldn’t she?’

‘It was more complicated than that. A local thug had taken a fancy to her, more than a fancy. He was obsessed. He wanted to marry her and he was the sort of guy who wouldn’t take no for an answer. Charlie owed him money and didn’t mind settling the debt by pimping out his daughter. And this guy – Brendan Vasser, in case you hadn’t already guessed – wasn’t going to sit back and watch the object of his affections stroll off into the sunset with another man.’

Maddie knew how this story ended – and it wasn’t with a happy ever after. But she sat quietly while he went on to explain.

‘Anyway, Lena was convinced that wherever we went, Vasser would hunt her down. So we needed a plan, a way to cover our tracks and put him off the scent. It was Delia Shields who came up with the idea. Lena and I often used to meet in the cemetery – Charlie kept her on a tight leash and it was the only place locally where we could be pretty sure of not being seen together – and one of the graves there was for a girl called Lucy Rivers. She’d died when she was nineteen, only a year older than Lena. The rumour was that she’d drowned herself because of some man.’

‘Owen Vickery,’ Maddie murmured.

‘Huh?’

She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter. Go on. Delia Shields?’

‘Yeah, so Delia came up with this idea that Lena could take on Lucy’s identity. If we got hold of the birth certificate, we could go up to Gretna and get married with Lena using Lucy’s name. Delia reckoned we’d get away with it, that they wouldn’t check the death records. And if Vasser tried to track her down, he’d come up against a brick wall. He wouldn’t be looking for a Lucy Rivers… or Lucy Cato, as she was going to become.’

Maddie smiled thinly, beginning to understand.

Cato had a strained look on his face as if the effort of recounting the past was all too much for him. He played with the cup, twisting it round in his fingers. ‘So that’s what we decided to do. And from that point on, I started calling her Lucy so we could get used to it, so we wouldn’t make any stupid mistakes when we did do a runner. For the last few weeks before the date we’d chosen to leave, she became Lucy Rivers. She told me that she practised at home, repeating the name over and over until it was second nature to her.’

‘So what went wrong?’

‘Everything,’ he said. ‘A few days before we were due to go, I got a letter from Lena saying she’d changed her mind and couldn’t go through with it. She said it was over and asked me not to contact her again.’

‘Oh,’ Maddie said. ‘And you didn’t – try to see her again, I mean? Didn’t try and persuade her to change her mind?’

‘I should have, but I was young and stupid and hurt. I should have fought for her, but I didn’t. I took the letter at face value and made up my mind that she’d never really loved me, couldn’t have. It didn’t occur to me that she might not have written it, that it wasn’t from her at all.’

Maddie’s eyes widened. ‘What?’

‘No, it looked like her writing from what little I knew – a birthday card and a couple of notes – but actually it was from someone else. Took me a long time to figure out who, but I’ll get to that later. To cut a long story short, I took off, got a flight to Madrid and spent the next few years licking my wounds.’

‘And then?’

Cato gave a shrug. ‘I tried to get on with my life. I worked in Europe and the States, moved around, did okay. And then I made the fatal mistake of coming home. We’re talking twenty years later here. I should have been over her, but I wasn’t. I couldn’t resist the temptation of seeing her again. And it didn’t take long to track her down – she was still in Kellston and married to Brendan Vasser.’

Maddie drank the dregs of her coffee and put the cup down on the table. He must have read the expression on her face, because his lips slipped into a wry smile.

‘Yeah, I should have left well alone. I know that now. But I couldn’t and I didn’t. And you know what happened next, so I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice to say that we took up where we left off and it was all downhill from there. It wasn’t the same. How could it be? We’d both changed, and I’m not sure if she ever believed me about the letter – she thought I’d got cold feet and done a runner. She thought I’d dumped her, left her to face Vasser on her own. I hadn’t kept it, so I couldn’t prove anything.’

‘So who did send it?’

‘Well, I eventually figured out that it had to have been either Delia Shields or Lena’s parents. But even if it was the parents, someone must have tipped them off and provided them with my address, and the only person that could have been was Delia.’

Maddie felt a shiver run through her. ‘But why would she do that? I thought she was Lena’s friend.’

‘Yeah, she was that all right, her thoroughly adoring friend. And at the beginning she was completely on side – anything to help Lena, anything to ingratiate herself. But then she probably realised what it all actually meant: Lena was going to go away and she was never coming back. I don’t think she could bear that thought and so she decided to put a spanner in the works.’

‘Does Lena know about it?’

‘I told her what I thought. I don’t think she went for it. Well, not back then at least.’

A silence fell between them. Maddie wondered if he was thinking what she was thinking – that Lena had maybe reconsidered and come to the same conclusion. Delia Shields was gone, murdered, bludgeoned to death by someone who was full of hate. She understood now why Delia had been so worried about Cato being back on the scene. The woman must have been terrified that the truth would finally come out.

Cato sat back and then sat forward again as if he wasn’t sure what to do with himself. ‘I guess that’s it, the whole sordid story – unless there’s anything else you want to know.’

‘Only one thing,’ she said. ‘The gold ring, the wedding ring.’

‘“For ever,”’ he murmured.

She nodded. ‘That’s the one.’

Cato shifted in his seat again. ‘I’d already bought the rings before I received the letter. I’d shown them to Lena, got her to try hers on to make sure it fitted. Perhaps I should have thrown them away too, but I didn’t. I kept them for all these years. Anyway, I decided it was time to let go, to bury the ring along with the past.’

Maddie didn’t entirely believe this part of the story. She reckoned he’d wanted it found, wanted a fuss so that Lena would eventually get to hear about it. ‘So who put it on Lucy’s grave?’

‘Hayley Whittaker.’

‘Your solicitor?’

‘Well, she’s a little more than that. She was part of my legal team during the trial. She thought I was innocent even if the jury didn’t. We’ve stayed in touch ever since, got close.’ His eyes lit up in a way that Maddie hadn’t seen before. ‘Everyone needs someone to believe in them, especially in a place like this.’

Maddie glanced away, not wanting to be reminded of love. It had stabbed her in the back and she was still reeling from the blow. She was glad that Cato had some hope in his life, but she hadn’t been so lucky. Thinking of Rick made her stomach twist into that familiar painful knot.

‘I’m sorry I dragged you into this,’ he said. ‘I really am.’

Maddie met his eyes again and shook her head. ‘Don’t be. I’ve spent the last six years wondering about Greta – why she died, what happened, the whole sorry mess. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d never have known the half of it. If nothing else, I’ve finally got some answers.’

‘Even if they weren’t the ones you wanted to hear?’

‘Even then.’

They both knew there was nothing left to say. Cato rose to his feet and held out his hand. ‘Take care. Have a happy life, Maddie. Make the most of it.’

She took his hand – his palm was warm – and shook it. ‘Thank you. I’ll try.’

Eli Glass unlocked the door to the cemetery chapel and slipped inside the abandoned building. Thin slivers of sunlight slid through the stained-glass windows, casting a glow over the old tiled floor and the dusty pews. He walked slowly up the central aisle, pausing only to gaze at the cross before taking a seat.

This morning he had heard that the body in the mausoleum had been identified as Owen Vickery. He had always known that it would happen one day; secrets never remained hidden for ever. But he wasn’t afraid. Not now. Lucy had spoken and that was all that mattered. After all these years of silence, she had finally forgiven him.

A smile played around the corners of his mouth as his thoughts slid back through time to those hot summer afternoons when she had come to grieve at her mother’s grave. Like a bride, she had walked up the thoroughfare with a posy of flowers clutched in her hands. Her beauty had been almost ethereal, as if an angel had been let loose amid the great grey tombs and the gleaming white headstones.

He had never talked to her, not once, but he had always been watching out for her. Was that what love was – the urge to protect, to take care of another? He had guarded her from a distance, but with a fierce loyalty. And yet, in the final reckoning, he had not been able to protect her from
him.

Eli’s smile quickly faded. Owen Vickery should have left well alone. But men like that had no self-control. They had to take what was pure, what was sweet and innocent, and deliberately defile it. The bastard had taken her heart and thrown it away. It was only right that he should pay the price.

It had been two years after her death before Vickery had turned up at the cemetery again. Had his nights been sleepless, his conscience niggling away at him? Perhaps her face rose up in his dreams, distraught and accusing. Well, whatever the reason, he had come to kneel by her grave, to place a paltry bunch of flowers at the foot of her headstone.

When he’d seen him there, Eli had felt a rage he had never felt before, an anger that washed through his body and made his heart race. An eye for an eye – wasn’t that what the Old Testament demanded? He had never been one for God, but in that moment he had been overwhelmed by an almost religious fervour. Quietly, softly, he had crept up on the man. The chunk of marble, broken off from a fallen gravestone, had been lying on the ground. He had bent down to pick it up, feeling its coolness in his hand.

It had all been over in a matter of seconds. Vickery had slumped forward without a sound, the blow shattering the side of his skull. Eli had stared down at him. How fast it had been, how simple. Not like Lucy’s suffering. There was blood on the marble, blood and tissue. He had thrown the stone into the long grass.

And then what? There was a blurry quality to what he’d done next. He remembered dragging the body down the narrow path, his hands under the dead man’s arms. Taking him where? He hadn’t known, hadn’t thought until he saw the mausoleum. It was as good a place as anywhere to hide him. But first he needed to get hold of the key. He must have walked back to the office, but he had no memory of it. He must have walked through the back door and along the corridor to the small room with its rows of hooks. He must have found the right key and put it in his pocket.