Dead Dream Girl Read online

  ‘You were wrong!’ he said, almost in desperation. ‘She wanted to be made over, you wouldn’t believe how much she longed—’

  ‘She wanted a ticket to London, Geoff,’ Crane cut him off. ‘She knew exactly which buttons to press to get herself there.’

  His slight flush could be seen, even in the bleaching glare of the high-powered lamps. ‘She wanted to be a different woman in a different milieu,’ he said angrily.

  ‘The National Gallery and the Albert Hall and Covent Garden? Is that really what she was pining for? Sure it wasn’t Stringfellows and the Hard Rock Café?’

  ‘She just needed guidance!’ he cried.

  ‘For a ticket to ride. She told you what you wanted to hear, like she told everyone. Think she gave a tinker’s toss about your London? The only use she had for you was to get her there.’

  ‘What can you know, you never even met her!’

  ‘I’ve learnt plenty about her. I know what she’d do for money, which was just about anything. Know what I think? I think she knew she could make it as a class A model and knew Fletcher wasn’t up to it. So it had to be London, where she knew she’d be properly managed. Only London’s a big, scary place to a Bradford teenager and she knew all about kids from the provinces being sucked into King’s Cross rat holes overnight. So she needed someone to lean on till she found her feet. Someone she could trust to find his way around and show her the way.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ he shouted, face a deeper red. ‘She wanted my career to come first and she was going to train for a decent career of her own.’

  ‘You must have seen through that,’ Julia said in a low, tremulous voice. ‘There were things about her even I couldn’t accept and I was blind to almost everything. She … she said she’d be my companion if we could live in London. Yes, she’d already tried it on with me, you see. But I knew that once we were there it would be men. Modelling and men. I knew it could only bring more heartache than I already had.’

  Crane said, ‘Julia’s right. And where do you think you’d have been once she’d got the West End sussed? A woman with her looks and stamina could earn £10,000 a day as a top model. What could you earn, even on the Sunday Times? Sixty, seventy grand a year? That would be makeup money to Donna.’

  ‘But it couldn’t have lasted! It would only be for a few short years till her looks—’

  ‘By which time she’d have married a multi-millionaire. We both know how carefully she looked to her future.’

  ‘You don’t get it, do you? It was me she wanted. She said I was the only man who’d seen her as a complete person, with a mind as well as a body.’

  ‘Geoff, the reason other men didn’t see her as a complete person was because she was a bear of very little brain. Far-sighted and cunning, yes. She could have graduated in cunning.’

  ‘And no one minded, you bastard!’ Julia gave a half-sob. ‘It was enough just to be with her.’

  ‘When did the knocking begin?’ Crane said. ‘When did she decide you were boring her senseless about your London and your future? Was it when she twigged it could be months before you could get her to London anyway, seeing as you’d not even got the promise of a job yet? How soon was it before she began telling you you could stuff the opera and the Royal Court and the two-room flat south of the river on a salary that wouldn’t keep her in shoes?’

  ‘Shut it, Crane! Just shut it!’

  ‘It’s what she did to Bobby Mahon, right? Wound him up rotten, so that in the end he’d lay one on her. Patsy was positive she liked the buzz of driving Bobby to the end of his tether. Drew the line at being throttled though.’

  Pallor suddenly wiped away the flush. He looked past Crane with unfocused eyes. ‘I did everything for that bitch. The dinners I paid for. The promises I made. I knew I could fix her up with a respectable job: PA, gofer, public relations, God knows she had the makings. I’d pay for everything till she started working. We’d be able to dine out on my talents and her looks. But she had to put the past behind her: modelling, other men, all that shit. I had to be the only man in her life …’ His voice trailed off and they stood silent again in the lamps’ steady glare, the water of the pool as dark as oil behind them, the façade of the great old house forming a backdrop. Crane was now certain Julia’s mastery of the gun had become even more unreliable with the tears that now blurred her vision.

  ‘That’s what really did it, eh, Geoff? There’d never been a woman in your entire life who’d not thought you were Mr Wonderful. And Donna had exactly the same problem, no one could resist her. You couldn’t cope with anything being the slightest bit different, could you, the pair of you? You both took it for granted you were always to be the star. Neither of you was ever going to accept the other’s ego, having your own way was a God-given right. It had absolutely nothing to do with love, but neither of you knew anything about that either, did you?’

  ‘She was a scrubber!’ he screamed. ‘A slag! Before I took her up she was just disco fodder. I was saving her from middle-aged swingers ready to shell out a fistful of tenners for a night’s arm candy. I was the best chance she was ever going to have. A life, a career, with a man who was going somewhere in journalism. Only she’d not stop whoring! She was very clever, oh yes, very discreet, always a little mobile tucked away in her frillies, set to vibrate, not ring, so she could go to the loo to arrange another seventy-sov jump. But she didn’t fool me, not with my experience of human trash.’ He suddenly gazed at Crane with wild, staring eyes, as if a totally different man now lived inside his head. ‘Then one night I told her, told her straight: it had to stop.’

  He was visibly shaking. Crane had always sensed the rigid self-control he concealed behind the jokes, the smiles, the easy manner. But Crane had learnt to be very wary of people with too much control. It could mean they were bottling emotion that might be distilling itself the longer it found no outlet, and if the valve ever did blow it could cause disproportionate damage. Julia looked on stunned, mouth falling open, the gun forgotten and pointing once more towards the ground.

  ‘What happened, Geoff,’ he said quietly, ‘the night you went for a walk at Tanglewood to have it all out for once and for all?’

  ‘You can’t believe,’ he almost whispered, and then he shouted, ‘you can’t believe the sheer filth she could come out with someone who looked the way she did. You can’t believe the viciousness! That I didn’t earn shit and I’d never earn more than shit, not in newspapers. I bored her arse off and I was rubbish in bed, and she’d either find someone else to go to London with or she’d go on her own, and all I’d ever see of her then, if I ever got there myself, would be someone driving along Park Lane in a chauffeured limo, giving me the finger and shouting “Up yours!”’

  The last words were like a scream of anguish. Comedy seemed to blend absurdly with tragedy, as it sometimes did, like the two masks that symbolized the theatre. They stood in yet another silence, both he and Julia, sharing, Crane felt, the same sense of profound shock.

  ‘Give yourself up, Geoff,’ Crane said finally, as calmly as he could. ‘They’ll get you now, whatever you do. It was a crime of passion. They’ll be lenient with a man of your clean record. Ten years top whack. An open prison. You’ll still be young enough to make a new start.’

  He looked about him, seeming almost stupefied, as if he’d emerged from a sort of fit that had briefly blanked his mind. When he spoke again it was with the old engaging smile, which Crane now found unbearable. ‘Frank, you don’t seriously believe I’d go inside for a trick-artist like Donna Jackson? I shall clear off, vanish, give myself a new identity. I shall go to America or Australia. Big places to lose yourself in. Come back to London when the dust has settled.’

  ‘You’re not going to walk away, Geoff. Julia has you covered and I’m going to ring Benson.’

  ‘The only problem with that is that Julia’s gun isn’t loaded. When I was trying to find a way out of her mansion I stumbled over a cloakroom where the gun lives. It was the work of sec
onds to knock out the shells.’

  Julia’s shoulders sagged, as did Crane’s spirits. It had never paid to underestimate Anderson’s resourcefulness, and he’d felt all along that he’d have one final trick up his sleeve or he’d surely not have confessed to Donna’s killing.

  ‘Couldn’t afford to get myself shot,’ he said, faintly contemptuous. ‘She may only be a scatty dyke, but she might just have got lucky and hit me by mistake. Should have provided yourself with a MAC10, dear. Quite small, easily concealed, get off twelve hundred rounds a minute.’

  ‘You’d have got the full minute’s worth, you murdering swine,’ she said in a raw, bitter voice.

  ‘You’ll not get away,’ Crane told him. ‘Your car lights are smashed.’

  ‘I’d not thought of using it. I’m a fast runner. I’ll find a car in a side street I can hotwire. You mustn’t worry about that.’

  ‘And if I follow you?’

  ‘On that leg? You can barely walk man. And I disabled your car too, when you ran off into the undergrowth.’

  He was right. Crane’s leg was so swollen and painful he’d have trouble even controlling the clutch for the next two or three days. He glanced at Julia. She shrugged apathetically. ‘Give yourself up, Geoff,’ he said again. ‘I’m begging you. I’ll do everything in my power to help you. A good counsel …’

  ‘No chance, Frank.’ There seemed to be a genuine warmth in his eyes as they rested on Crane’s. ‘She did enough damage to my life just by living. It was good knowing you, even though you had me running shitless half the time. Sorry about your gammy leg and all that other stuff back there. Goodbye each.’

  He suddenly turned then to make his dash for freedom. Equally suddenly the gun went off, with a deafening report in the silence.

  THIRTEEN

  Anderson lay quite still in the film-set brilliance. Crane clutched his head with both hands. It had been his worst fear, that she might shoot at random and hit him by mistake. He didn’t understand how she’d made the gun fire at all when Anderson was supposed to have knocked out the shells. Maybe he’d been bluffing, as always. He knew she’d killed him. What a mess. What a bloody mess.

  But then Anderson began to move. Began writhing in agony. Began cursing and yelping. Crane limped painfully to his side, got down awkwardly on one knee, yelping softly himself. Blood was seeping through Anderson’s trousers from wound in his left thigh. Julia came up behind them. She picked up the thick stick Anderson had abandoned when he’d turned to run off. She held it by the tip, with a hand wrapped in a handkerchief, tossed it at the wounded man’s side. ‘He was attacking you with that, right? He’d have killed you if I’d not brought him down.’ She smiled thinly. ‘Just so we’re both reading from the same script. He’ll survive, unfortunately. I should have killed him. God knows, I wanted to kill him, but it’s a simple flesh wound that’ll cause no lasting damage.’ She spoke with total, clipped assurance.

  ‘But he’d fixed it, the gun.’

  ‘He had indeed, but an experienced shot, Frank, always checks the state of the gun. I’d reloaded.’

  ‘You could have fooled me.’

  ‘Quite. I wanted him to go on thinking what a superior type he was and what a silly little featherhead I was.’

  ‘I’ll get the emergency services. For both of you.’

  ‘Bring a tea towel from the kitchen and I’ll make a tourniquet. I’ll watch him. Doesn’t seem quite the big confident Jack the Lad he thought he was now, does he?’

  Anderson was rolling about in agony, still yelping, his expression a mixture of pain and irritation. Crane felt he was angrier about being unable to react with any kind of stoicism than being stopped from escaping.

  Crane got himself up slowly. ‘You’re an incredible shot.’

  ‘My father taught me. Taught me how to shoot cleanly. I’ve shot over dogs with some of the best in the land. You see, having a daughter instead of a son was the biggest disappointment of my father’s life. So he liked to pretend I was a boy. Shooting, fishing, riding, fast cars. The stiff upper lip at all times, even when you fell off your horse … or someone clonks you over the head with a priceless piece of bronze.’

  She ran a hand through her tousled, blood-matted hair and gazed despondently towards her fine old house. ‘He made a jolly good job of it. I’ve had problems with my gender ever since.’

  Benson shook his head, grimaced. ‘All those statements, all those public appeals, the sheer man hours. And that arsehole, on the phone every verse end: any news, any developments, has Mahon coughed? No wonder coppers end up distrusting everything that moves.’

  ‘What’s the form?’

  ‘Knows his rights, you bet. Won’t admit to anything. But he will.’

  ‘How’s the leg?’

  ‘Uncomplicated flesh wound; she was spot on. Pity she didn’t let her finger slip and blow the sod away. Save the taxpayer another load of moolah.’ Benson lit a new cigarette. ‘Anyway, we can nail him for being at the Raven with her the actual night she disappeared. We’ve had sight of a Barclay-card docket signed by him. And one of the waitresses recognized Donna from a photo as being with him around that time. It wasn’t a face you forgot. She doesn’t read the Standard or she might have picked up on it before.’

  ‘The sod had incredible luck, apart from anything else,’ Crane said. ‘Just managing to be in a Leaf and Petal vehicle Kirsty Hellewell had lent him the night Julia followed Donna and took the number of the Scenic. It seemed it had to be Hellewell then. And with him and Anderson having a bit of a resemblance.’

  ‘Ollie Stringer will be our star witness,’ Benson told him. ‘He still can’t speak, but we showed him a picture of Anderson and told him we’d got him banged up and would he identify him? He was nodding so hard fit to make his bloody head drop off. And if Ollie identifies him in court I reckon we’re home and dry.’ He ground out the cigarette angrily. ‘Christ, the last person in the frame was always going to be the Standard’s sodding crime reporter!’

  ‘His luck kicked in from day one,’ said Crane. ‘You lot were certain Mahon had killed her. Me too. At the start I just felt it was my job to try and prove he’d killed her. Anderson’s off the hook, even though he was never really on it. He knows perfectly well Mahon must have had some other reason to stick with the story he was home that night. He gets so confident Mahon will always stick to it that he can even take me to the Goose and Guinea and pretend to ruffle his feathers a bit.

  ‘But he loathes Mahon personally, like all the men Donna had known, and makes his only real mistake. He feeds Mahon the stuff about the Willows pointing the bone. That blew the door open. Mahon confesses but you could clear him. I reckon that’s got to be Anderson’s worst hour. And then I get Adrian’s name from Ollie and he knows that if I get through to Adrian and put you on to him it’ll be Bobby Mahon all over again, in fact anyone I can turn up who just might have done it. He’s shitting bricks by now and terrified that sooner or later I might get through to him. He knows I don’t give in too easily and I bring a fresh mind. But then the luck’s with him again. Kirsty tells him Joe Hellewell is also known as Adrian. And Adrian’s dodgy lifestyle makes him seem so guilty as to almost rule out anyone else. So he makes Hellewell appear to leg it, which means he’s virtually admitting his guilt. Anderson’s home and dry. Except that now I’d turned up Julia Gregson.’

  Crane drank some of his G and T. ‘Julia was the wild card and this really spooks him. She keeps a proper diary and he’s terrified his name might crop up in it, in the parts she’d not wanted me to read.’

  ‘And it’s him who breaks into Patsy’s?’

  ‘He’s got a good fix on the way my mind works now and he gambles on me spotting the flip chart’s been tampered with. He’s certain I’ll decide it must have been Hellewell. Hellewell reads the chart, realizes he’s the chief suspect, and he too believes he has to get his hands on that diary. So he tries to steal it, only Julia surprises him, and in the struggle he accidentally kills her. He has
to leg it for good then, because if he’s not nailed for one killing he’ll be nailed for another. That’s what we’re meant to think when Julia’s body’s found. What Anderson didn’t bargain for was me picking up on how crucial the diary could be before he’d managed to see off Julia. Well, you can’t think of everything, not even Anderson, who can have few equals for tying up loose ends. I was certain Julia might be in danger, and she was, but not from Hellewell.’

  Benson lit another cigarette, inhaled deeply. ‘What we can’t figure is why Hellewell went off with Anderson the night he disappeared. We’ve enhanced the CCTV footage. Still can’t get the number but know it’s definitely a Honda Accord.’

  ‘I’ve not stopped kicking it around. We know why Anderson and Donna ended up at Tanglewood that night. He’d bought her a fancy meal, she’d be staying the night at his flat probably, but he wanted a neutral place in between where he could read her the riot act about sleeping around. Well, that’s where he lost it, throttled the poor kid and bunged her in the reservoir, where she’d be now if it hadn’t been for the youngster finding her. Well, I’m certain it was a crime of passion, but quick thinker that he is he knew how to make sure the body was weighted before he dumped it. But it must have struck him later that reservoirs make handy burial grounds. I began to wonder if maybe he took Hellewell to the next reservoir along the line. That would be Scamworth. It’s very, very quiet and too far out for kids to get there on foot and use as a swimming pool.’

  Benson’s mouth went down sceptically at the corners. ‘Can’t see it myself. Hellewell was a tough bloke, like Anderson. How’s he going to let himself be lured from Leaf and Petal?’

  ‘Lure’s a good word. It took me a while to get there, but we have to remember that Hellewell was a fiver each way, and that Anderson’s tall and good looking with a well made body. What if he told Hellewell he’d always fancied him, couldn’t get him off his mind, how did he feel about going somewhere quiet and doing something about it? Like a beauty spot with a reservoir attached? That’s only a theory, I’m trying to think like Anderson might have done.’