Dead Dream Girl Page 13

  ‘Did you give her money, Julia?’

  Her eyes rested on his. ‘Not for sleeping with her. Never for that. She’d not have taken it. She was too genuine, too caring. Sleeping together was simply part of our close friendship. But … yes, I did give her a little money now and then. I’m wealthy, she was poor. The family depended on what she made at the nursery. You’ll probably know her father’s too ill to work. She’d only ever take money, and so very reluctantly, to help her parents.’

  Her eyes began to well with tears once more. It struck Crane then what an incredible inspirer of dreams Donna had proved to be: a companion for Julia, a star model for Fletcher, a billboard queen for Hellewell. She seemed to embody dreams like those legendary actresses who appeared so sensitive, spiritual and pure, and yet, away from the screen, always seemed to live the raciest lives.

  ‘How did it end?’ He spoke with deliberate bluntness.

  There was a sudden brooding look in her eyes, startling in its intensity. ‘I thought it was just me,’ she said, in a low raw tone. ‘I accepted that we weren’t the same, knew she’d have to leave me one day. Some man, children, all that nonsense. All I asked, while we were together, was for it just to be me.’ She fell silent for seconds. ‘But … but she was seeing someone else. A man. A man!’ She ended on a note of near-anguish.

  ‘Any idea who the man was?’

  Another silence, her gaze unfocused. ‘We were … she was coming to me on Saturday after work. She cancelled, said Joe wanted her to work late, they were so busy. I was very upset. Couldn’t quite believe her. I drove to Leaf and Petal and waited in a corner of the car park the staff use. She came out at the usual time, but didn’t drive her car, took a taxi. I followed it. It took her to the Raven, out towards Kirby Overblow. He was waiting for her in the car park.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘I only saw him from a distance, and only from behind. I daren’t be seen, I might never have seen Donna again.’ Her face looked crumpled in the gathering dusk, as if she’d developed age lines. ‘He was fair, well-built, tallish. I took the number of his car when they’d gone inside, then came home. I don’t know why I took the number – to challenge her with it, I suppose. I never did, of course.’ Her voice had fallen to a whisper.

  ‘Have you still got it?’

  ‘You can have it, for what it’s worth.’

  It may not be worth spit now. Crane was beginning to feel very uneasy, was beginning to wonder if he’d possibly begun to get ahead of Anderson. She’d been crazy about Donna, like so many others, but it had begun to turn ugly at the point where a man had entered the equation.

  ‘Did you ever visit Tanglewood reservoir with Donna?’ he said flatly.

  She flushed. ‘What can you be thinking?’ she said. ‘What can you be thinking?’

  ‘Well, did you?’

  ‘You can’t imagine I had anything to do with—’

  ‘I’m asking if you went to Tanglewood with her.’

  Shaking now and agitated, she watched him again in one of her silences, bottom lip caught in teeth. ‘She … once came here by taxi,’ she muttered reluctantly. ‘Her motor wasn’t very reliable. She couldn’t stay over, it was mid-week. I drove her home. She didn’t want me to see where she lived, not that I’d have minded. We … we said our goodbyes at Tanglewood. Sitting on a bench near the lower one. Then I dropped her off on the outskirts of, what do they call it, the Willows?’ Her eyes brimmed with tears yet again.

  ‘Julia,’ he said, still bluntly, ‘Donna kept a diary.’

  Her mouth fell open, her moist eyes suddenly wide with shock. ‘Oh, no,’ she whispered. ‘Dear God, no …!’

  Crane let the silence roll. Then he said, ‘She didn’t enter names in it or how she spent her time, she just used single initials. The initial J occurs again and again. It gives the impression that up to the day she died she was here every weekend.’

  Mouth still open, the pupils of her eyes rimmed in white, she cried, ‘But she didn’t! She came a lot, perhaps one weekend in three, but not every week.’

  She spoke with a vehemence that threw Crane. ‘I … think you’ll find the police will put the same interpretation on the diary as me, Julia.’

  She fell silent yet again, giving an impression of some kind of mental struggle. Finally, she said, ‘Wait,’ in a voice of intense reluctance. She got up, crossed to a chiffonier, opened a drawer, returned. She held an inch-thick, leather-bound book. ‘If you won’t believe me … I kept a diary too.’ She held it out, but hesitantly, as if prepared to snatch it back if he tried to take it. ‘Look at it, if you must,’ she said sighing.

  He drew it slowly from her, turned to the Saturday Donna had last been seen alive. ‘Donna,’ the entry read, ‘didn’t come today …

  I wanted her to, of course but mustn’t be clingy. Have to accept that she does other things, sees that bloody man, I suppose. Oh God, how I miss her. Can’t stop thinking of when she was here last and we took a picnic basket along to the Wild Garden. She does love flowers so, begs me to fill the house with them, even though she seems not to know one from another. She was wearing a little blue dress and the sun made her hair shine, and she was the loveliest creature I’d ever seen. I spent most of the day helping Norman with the borders. Then I had a solitary dinner and watched an old film. I was in bed for half-ten. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t stop thinking of how she looked, laughing and chatting and sipping Muscadet. And how much I loved her.

  Crane said, ‘Do you mind if I look back for three months?’

  ‘Only … only to check out the weekends. As you can imagine, no one was ever intended to see it.’

  The diary provided a complete sheet for each day. He flicked back through the pages covering each Saturday and Sunday beneath her watchful gaze, to check the weekends Donna was present. If the diary was accurate, she really had seen her only about once every two or three weeks. In which case, who was the other J Donna had recorded? Hellewell? The entry for the Saturday Donna went missing was the last. He guessed she’d have written that on the Sunday before she’d heard the news.

  ‘I was too distraught to write anything at all when I was told the police were searching for her,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve never kept a diary since.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, in a gentler tone, ‘thank you for your time, Julia. I’m sorry for the distress I’ve had to cause you.’

  She showed him out. ‘Can I be allowed to put all this behind me?’ she said in an almost pleading tone, as they stood on the marble tiling beneath the front door’s portico.

  ‘I’m … sorry. I’m afraid, your involvement with her was such that the police will have to know about it.’

  She gave a fatalistic nod. She knew as well as he did she was now a suspect and would need to be formally eliminated. Assuming she was innocent. Crane knew he was getting mixed vibes. She could have written up a diary that absolved herself some time after the event.

  As he turned to go, she said quietly, ‘Frank?’

  He turned, waited. The light flowing from the hall outlined her sturdy figure. ‘Donna … one night she woke up trembling. She’d had a frightful dream. I sometimes wonder if it was a premonition. She was in a state. Normally she never spoke about her … other life. She was very discreet. It was something to do with the photography man, the one who wanted her to be a fashion model. In the dream she’d decided he wasn’t good enough, hadn’t got the connections. She told him she wanted to enrol with a professional agency. He went berserk. Said she’d never work for anyone but him. He’d … he’d discovered her. He made the most appalling threats. To her looks, to her …’

  ‘Go on, Julia.’

  ‘She calmed him down, said she hadn’t meant it, she’d just been silly. None of it was really as I’m telling you. She was utterly distraught, almost incoherent. It must have been the dream. She was usually so self-possessed. And she was sobbing her heart out, poor darling. Said she didn’t want to go away with him. Not now. She said he was tryi
ng to control her, make her into something she wasn’t. She wanted to live her own life. She was certain he’d try to change her …’

  Crane was becoming puzzled. ‘This was still the photographer?’

  ‘I don’t think so. It was all so very disjointed, but I think it was another man she was talking about then, who wanted her to go away with him. I think it was the man I saw at the Raven.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘I made her a warm drink. When I came back she was her usual self. Made light of it. Even began to giggle. It had just been a bad dream and I’d not to take any notice, she could handle it.’

  ‘Thanks for telling me. You didn’t think to pass it on to the police originally?’

  ‘I … I couldn’t face my life with her coming out, perhaps even getting in the papers. I’m a very private person. And it seemed so likely that this man Mahon …’

  He watched her, wondering if she might not have felt an overwhelming sense of relief when no police had come knocking on her own elegant door eight or nine months ago.

  Anderson was already at Patsy’s, scribbling on the flipchart, on the page devoted to Joe Hellewell, as wound up, it seemed, as Crane himself was. ‘Where have you been, you bugger, when it’s all happening?’

  ‘What about the siege?’

  ‘All over in an hour.’ He grinned. ‘I told the desk to hold two inches at the bottom of page nine unless something really big had broken like a cat up a tree. The gun was an imitation and he was so gone on skunk I don’t think he knew which century it was, let alone day.’ He turned to Crane with a look of triumph. ‘There’s your killer, sunshine.’

  ‘Hellewell?’

  ‘Don’t bother with the flip chart just yet. Listen to this.’ He put a micro-cassette recorder on the table. Crane glanced at Patsy, who shrugged, drawing down her mouth at the corners.

  He said, ‘Just before you begin, how come you know Kirsty so well?’

  ‘Last summer Leaf and Petal had a lot of saplings destroyed. The police nailed someone from another nursery trying to damage their trade. I went to report on it with a camera man. Hellewell was away on business at the time and I spoke to Kirsty. I think she took a bit of a shine to me.’ He smiled with a faux modesty as carefully honed as his charm. ‘One of their runabouts is a Scenic and I casually mentioned I fancied one myself. She made me borrow it for a couple of days to see if I liked it. Really nice woman. And then, when Donna’s body was found, I was along there again, talking to her and Hellewell and the rest of the staff.’

  Crane recalled Carol at the Glass-house, acting a giggle, and asking him had there been any woman involved in the Donna affair who might have caught Anderson’s eye. Well, maybe there had been.

  Anderson said, ‘I asked her if she’d mind if I used this; she said she actually wanted it on record.’

  He pressed the PLAY button. They heard Kirsty say, ‘I’m very, very worried, Geoff. I should have told the police at the start. He was seeing Donna.’

  ‘Joe? We’d thought he might have been.’

  ‘I began to suspect when he wanted to keep her on for that first winter. She was quite useless for any of the real work we do in winter, all the preparation for the new season. It meant we paid her virtually to do nothing. But he wanted to be certain of having her in place the following spring.’ She gave a sigh. ‘He had a point, she really did seem to pull in the customers. She was a right little charmer. But then he couldn’t keep away from her. I knew perfectly well there was something going on. I should have had it out with him, threatened divorce, but … well, we’re not simply married, we’re married to Leaf and Petal. We have two kids, they’re keen to come into it one day.’ There was a lengthy pause. ‘I should have told the police at the time.’

  ‘Why didn’t you, Kirsty?’

  ‘Because I simply couldn’t believe it could be him who … he was so gone on her. It broke him up when they found the body. I just couldn’t believe … Not Adrian.’

  ‘Adrian?’ Anderson’s voice repeated, high with surprise. ‘But … but we’re talking Joe here.’

  ‘Oh, dear, I sometimes forget. His names are Adrian Joseph, but he always felt Joe sounded more friendly with customers and staff. We call him Adrian at home: family, close friends.’ She gave a hollow chuckle. ‘A bit like the Royal family, official and unofficial names, King George being called Bertie behind the scenes.’

  Anderson paused the recorder. ‘Adrian, guys!’ he cried gleefully. ‘Adrian! The first piece in the jigsaw. But it gets better, a whole lot better. Stay tuned!’

  He pressed PLAY again, to the sound of his own voice. ‘I see. Two different names. Do you think he was Adrian to Donna?’

  ‘Probably. I think he felt it made him two separate people. I was genuinely sorry about Donna, truly, and though he was so dreadfully upset I felt we had a chance to get our own lives on track again, Ade and me, only …’ There was another lengthy silence. ‘And then … and then I found out he was bisexual. I overheard two of the girls talking in one of the greenhouses about a wealthy customer of ours, Clement Hebden. One of them said, “All that lolly and those cool looks, why does he have to be one of them?” It gave me such a shock. I’d no idea he was gay. Adrian spent an awful lot of time with him, but he was supposed to be helping him landscape his garden. But the night Donna went missing Adrian said he’d stayed the same night at Clement’s. Said he’d had a drink too many.’

  ‘That’s what he told us earlier.’

  ‘I’ll spare you the details of how I proved to myself he was … that way, but I just had to. It had already been too much trying to cope with his affair with Donna, but, well, if there were men involved too … I knew I couldn’t handle it, Geoff. He was making what he thought were secret trips to Tanglewood. I … got it together. For months now I’ve been trying to decide the best way to break with him. It was when I read about that poor man called Ollie being almost battered to death that I began to get really, really frightened, because he was just thought to be a harmless gossip. I couldn’t help wondering if he’d somehow found out too much. And then I began to wonder if Adrian really had something to do with … Donna’s death, and his gay friends were perhaps …’

  ‘Covering for him?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said flatly. ‘And with Bobby Mahon out of it …’

  Anderson flicked off the recorder, almost shaking with excitement. ‘You see? You see? She’s reached exactly the same conclusion we did, from the inside!’

  ‘That really is one clever lady!’ Crane forced himself to look as jubilant as he sounded. ‘Well done, Geoff! It’s all circumstantial, but once the police have a chance to interview them separately, Hellewell and Hebden, they could be home and dry. If Hellewell really is in the frame I reckon Hebden’s going to crack about that alibi.’

  ‘Oh, Geoff, I’m so glad!’ Patsy said. ‘It’s going to mean so much to Mam and Dad if they can see an end to it.’

  Crane wished he could feel genuinely pleased. He was certain the reporter had got there. And he was equally certain Kirsty Hellewell would never have talked to him as she’d talked to Anderson. Anderson had had an incredible stroke of luck, and though Crane was exasperated with himself he knew he was going to feel upset about the Donna Jackson case whenever it came into his mind, even though all that mattered was nailing the killer. Amateurs, one, pros, nil, he thought bitterly, behind his smile.

  ‘Well,’ he said wryly, ‘while you were writing up all this gold-plated stuff from Kirsty, I was in Ilkley talking to a Miss Julia Gregson. She’s one of the Js in Donna’s diary. There seem to be two Js, but I doubt if the second one’s relevant.’

  He gave them an outline of what he’d been told at Cheyney Hall, writing up the key points on a sheet of the chart he’d set aside for Julia. Anderson became unusually silent as he talked and scribbled, and when he turned back to them he’d begun to go pale with what looked to be barely controllable anger, an anger so powerful he seemed almost to be quivering. But he quickly for
ced his usual amiable smile and bantering tone, though Crane sensed it was not without considerable effort.

  ‘Christ, Crane, is there anyone your equal for turning up jokers?’

  ‘I’m not with you,’ he said, genuinely puzzled.

  ‘Well, from where I’m standing it now looks as if the killer could be any one of three.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Gregson’s not in the same league as Hellewell. Nor is Fletcher. Why the frustration, you’ve brought the bacon home? Gregson was genuinely heartbroken and she’d kept what looks to be a genuine diary.’

  ‘They’re all heartbroken. And the diary could have been written after the event, as you said yourself. And why didn’t she tell the police? She’d been with Donna at Tanglewood, just like Hellewell.’

  Crane watched him in a surprised and uncertain silence. The intensely competitive animal that Anderson was still thought he was outclassing him. Only that could explain the barely concealed fury. But his powerful reactions were raising fresh doubts in Crane’s own mind. He’d virtually ruled out Julia on hearing the tape, but she’d had a long time to make her story authentic, even if her emotions had to have been totally genuine. But then he saw he was overlooking the crucial aspect of this very complex case. ‘Ollie Stringer!’ he said. ‘Don’t forget Ollie. I ask him about Adrian and two days later he’s lying in a hollow left for dead.’

  ‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that Hellewell and Gregson might have colluded, Frank? You say Gregson’s sturdy, so she’d have had the strength to see off a small woman like Donna. But what if she was seen the night they sat on the bench? What if one of the gays told Adrian, out of spite? Adrian certainly knew Donna was with Gregson a lot. What if he twigs Gregson did it and puts the bite on her for some of her loot? He’d still have the motivation to duff up Ollie if he thought Ollie was asking too many of the wrong kinds of questions.’

  It hadn’t occurred to him that Adrian and Julia might be in it together. The cocky, quick-thinking beggar had him there. At one time he’d not have thought a woman like Julia Gregson could possibly have been involved in such a scene, but having been in the police he’d quickly come to accept that almost anyone could be involved in almost any bloody thing.