19

POOR PETER. He became intimately acquainted with panic that night. His first idea when he found the front door wide open, and no MacKenzie on the floor, was that he was about to be jumped again. His second was that Jess and I were probably dead. His third—not very sensible in view of the first two, as they suggested MacKenzie was hovering around with the axe—was to start hollering for us.

His voice was high-pitched and uneven, and I heard it in the kitchen. “Connie! Jess! Where are you? Are you all right?”

I called back that I was in the kitchen, but when it became obvious that he hadn’t heard me, I dried my hands and went down the corridor. Peter described me as behaving “with extraordinary calm.” Indeed, I was so relaxed that when I urged him “to get a grip,” he came to the strange decision that Jess and I had moved MacKenzie somewhere else.

“But you hadn’t?”

“Of course not. Peter told me to leave him where he was until the ambulance arrived. How could we have moved him, anyway, without releasing his feet? We couldn’t have carried him.”

“Two of you might have been able to.”

“Where to?” I asked reasonably. “You’ve searched the house three times, and he’s not here. And you’ve tracked every one of our footprints.”

“Those we can find. Blood dries quicker than you think, Ms. Burns. We’ve found your outward tracks through the kitchen when you went for Ms. Derbyshire’s clothes, but there’s nothing to show you returned.”

“Except that I must have done since she was wearing them by the time the first police car arrived.”

I think he found my composure as frustrating as Peter had done. They both felt that hand-wringing and breast-beating suited the mood better than hard-headed analysis. Peter lost it completely in the middle of the hall when he asked me what I’d done with MacKenzie. He even accused Jess and me of “doing something awful” since MacKenzie couldn’t have freed himself without assistance.

“And did you, Ms. Burns?”

“No.”

“Then how did he free himself?”

“I don’t know. At a guess, he used Jess’s Leatherman. She said he took it off her. If it was in his trouser pocket, he might have been able to move his arms enough to wriggle it out.”

“Hard to pull out a blade with broken fingers.”

“He had quite an incentive,” I said dryly. “He was about to be arrested.”

Bagley studied me for a moment. “Why weren’t you as worried as Dr. Coleman when you saw that MacKenzie was missing? He could have been anywhere…upstairs with Ms. Derbyshire for example.”

“Jess arrived on the landing about the same time as I came into the hall…and Peter’s voice was so far up the register that most of what he said was incomprehensible. I’m not sure I even realized MacKenzie was missing until Peter started to calm down…and then we heard the sirens. It was all very quick.”

“You’re an observant woman, Ms. Burns. You must have noticed the floor was empty.”

“I was looking at Peter.”

But Bagley couldn’t accept that. “As soon as you realized Dr. Coleman was frightened, you’d have checked on MacKenzie as a matter of priority.”

I shrugged. “This would be a lot easier if Peter hadn’t given you such an inflated opinion of me. You seem to think I have an immediate grasp of what’s going on in any situation. Well, I don’t. I may have seen Bertie out of the corner of my eye—a shape—and assumed it was MacKenzie…although I don’t remember doing it, and I don’t remember thinking about it.” I tugged a cigarette out of my pocket and lit it with relief. “Just out of interest, why isn’t Peter being put through the third degree? He’s far more likely to have freed MacKenzie than Jess or I.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because he was worried about MacKenzie’s hands. Perhaps he decided to loosen the duct tape when he came back in.”

“I don’t think so.”

I absorbed as much nicotine in one shot as I could, then blew the smoke in Bagley’s direction. “Is that a bloke thing, Inspector? The fact that you’re willing to believe a man, but not a woman?”

He took it in good part. “Ms. Derbyshire heard Dr. Coleman’s car come back. She says there was a few seconds’ time lapse between that and his shouting. I haven’t ruled out that he did what you suggest but it seems unlikely. He didn’t have a knife on him when we searched him, and he’d have needed one to cut through the duct tape.”

“Perhaps MacKenzie took it off him.”

“Did Dr. Coleman look as if he’d been in a fight?”

“No…but if he had any sense he’d have relinquished the knife and run out the front door before he got slashed with it.”

“Leaving MacKenzie to collect his bag and disappear through the office window? Is that what you’re saying happened?”

“Why not? It’s what you’re suggesting Jess and I did, isn’t it?”

“We think he left through the front door…and, from the impressions on the floor, he appears to have been on bare feet.” Bagley smiled slightly. “We have a lot of bare feet, Ms. Burns. It’s quite confusing.”

“All different sizes…and with different toeprints.”

“Prints don’t register well on stone. There was a lot of skating done through the blood. It’s hard to say who went where when.”

“Only in the hall. Have you found MacKenzie’s prints anywhere else?”

He wasn’t going to answer my questions. “One line we’re pursuing is that he managed to ease his shoes off in order to slip out of the duct tape round his ankles. You told us you wrapped the tape round the bottom of his trousers. Do you recall how many turns you made and whether he was wearing socks?”

I thought back. “Not really. About four, perhaps. I just wound it till it seemed tight enough. I don’t remember seeing socks.”

“What sort of trousers were they?”

“Denims.”

“Do you remember Dr. Coleman undoing the fly to help him breathe?”

I nodded.

“So all MacKenzie had to do was slide out of the trousers to free himself?”

I saw criticism immediately. “I’m damned if I’ll take the blame for that,” I said indignantly. “It wasn’t me who unbuttoned his stupid trousers. Blame Peter. He could have worked it out just as well as I could.”

“I’m not blaming you, Ms. Burns, I’m pointing out what might have happened. Did you bind his hands in the same way? Was the duct tape over his cuffs or against his skin?”

I was very tempted to say it was over his cuffs but it wouldn’t have been true. “Against his skin. The cuffs were rolled back.”

He’d obviously been told the same by Peter because he nodded. “He had more opportunities once his feet were free, of course. Do you remember what happened to the flick knife?”

“I kicked it away from him. As far as I remember, it went under the stairs.”

“We haven’t found it.”

I shrugged, suspecting another trap. By his twisted logic, victims were probably required to retrieve all pieces of evidence and line them up for inspection when the police arrived.

“A flick knife would have been easier to manipulate than Ms. Derbyshire’s Leatherman…but, in either event, he seems to have taken them with him. We haven’t found the Leatherman either.”

I drew in a lungful of smoke. “Why didn’t you tell me this at the beginning? Why accuse me of murder if you’ve known all along how he freed himself?”

“No one’s accusing you of murder, Ms. Burns.”

“Well, it feels like it,” I said. “The only difference between you and one of Mugabe’s henchman is that I still have some fingernails left.”

He lost patience with me. “Interviewing witnesses is a necessary part of any criminal inquiry, and it’s not police policy to exempt women. I agree it can be a stressful experience…however, given your views, I’m surprised you feel unequal to it.”

I grinned. “Ouch!”

He took an irritated breath. “Did you or Ms. Derbyshire move MacKenzie’s canvas bag from the office to the hall, Ms. Burns?”

“My bag,” I corrected. “He stole it from me in Baghdad.”

“Did you move it?”

“Yes. I handed it to Jess on my way to collect her clothes so that she could check the pockets. He’d put her knickers in the flap, but I thought he might have taken her bra as well. He was that kind of pervert.”

“Do you remember what she did with it?”

“I think she left it on the chair.”

“Did either of you take anything out of it?”

“I can’t speak for Jess, but I didn’t.” I stubbed out my cigarette. “I should have done. My father’s binoculars and mobile were in it. Why do you ask?”

“Just tying up loose ends.” He saw my frown. “The SOCOs found your imprints on the office floor, but none that matched those by the front door. We wondered why, since you and Dr. Coleman both said the bag was by the desk.”

He was very thorough, I thought. “Have you found the bag? Why did you think we might have removed something?”

“It was a hope, Ms. Burns. If you’d kept something of MacKenzie’s we’d have a better chance of extracting some DNA.”

“Oh, I see.”

“We have foot- and fingerprints but nothing else. There might have been saliva traces on your father’s mobile or an eyelash on the binoculars, although the most likely source would have been your clothes, since you came into contact with him when you tied him up. If Ms. Derbyshire’s dogs had drawn blood or the axe had broken his skin—” he shrugged.

“What about Jess’s clothes or Peter’s clothes?”

He shook his head. “If you’d left Ms. Derbyshire’s untouched, we might have found a rogue hair, but there was too much moving and handling…and Dr. Coleman lost anything on his way back to his house.”

“Do you need DNA evidence if you have his fingerprints? Peter and I can both identify him.”

Bagley smiled rather grimly. “It depends if he’s recognizable when we find him, Ms. Burns.”

 

CHAOS FOLLOWED hard on the arrival of the police and the ambulance. I remember the terrible clamour as the sirens wailed into the drive, and the ensuing confusion as Peter tried to explain that the “patient” had vanished. We all had different priorities. Mine was to find out what had happened to my parents, Jess’s was her dogs, and the police wanted a clear picture of events before they did anything at all.

In the first instance, they wanted to know whose blood was all over the floor and why it had been trodden in so freely, and they weren’t prepared to accept that it had all come from Bertie. Neither could I when I looked at it through the objective eyes of startled newcomers. What the dogs hadn’t flicked around in the immediate aftermath of Bertie’s death, Peter, Jess and I had tracked across the flagstones in our movements to and fro. It looked like a bloodbath and felt like a bloodbath, and the police chose to view it as one until tests proved different.

We learnt later that Bertie suffered massive haemorrhaging from his carotid artery where MacKenzie had slashed the flick knife across one side of his throat. Jess’s grief was that he didn’t die immediately but continued to pump blood until his heart gave up. Mine was that I hadn’t used the axe sooner to split MacKenzie’s head open. In the great scheme of things, Bertie’s contribution to life, liberty and happiness so outweighed MacKenzie’s that there was no contest between which of them deserved to live and which deserved to die.

Much to Jess’s and my annoyance, we were relegated to second place behind Peter. While he was invited into the dusty dining-room to give the first account of what had happened, we were instructed to wait in the kitchen under the eagle eyes of a WPC. By that time, several more police cars had arrived and the house and garden were being scoured for MacKenzie. I kept trying to raise the issue of my parents but no one wanted to hear. “One thing at a time,” I was told. In the end Jess threatened to punch the WPC if she didn’t whip up some action, and instructions were finally given to alert the Metropolitan police.

Inspector Bagley was curious about why I hadn’t used my mobile to contact my parents myself. If they were such a priority, he argued, I’d have headed for the attic as soon as Peter left the house. “You could have phoned Alan Collins,” he pointed out. “He knew the history, and he was already in contact with the Met.”

I did understand his dilemma. An obsessive need to clean seemed a poor excuse when the lives of well-loved parents were at stake. Predictably, we disagreed about how long Jess and I had been alone with MacKenzie—the Inspector favoured forty minutes (Peter’s assessment), while I favoured twenty. We compromised on thirty when police records showed that the time lapse between Peter’s 999 call and the arrival of the first police car was just over twenty-three minutes, allowing seven minutes for Peter to drive home from Barton House. But, in the Inspector’s view, even thirty minutes suggested I hadn’t accounted for all my actions.

“That’s a mighty lot of washing, Ms. Burns, and it doesn’t explain why you only remembered your parents when we arrived. You admit you saw your father’s binoculars in the bag. Why didn’t they prompt you to contact him?”

His suspicion wasn’t helped by the fact that I didn’t tell him DI Alan Collins of the Greater Manchester Police had a file on MacKenzie. Alan only entered the equation when he contacted Dorset police himself at lunchtime on Sunday, after hearing via the Met in London that my father had been rushed to hospital at three o’clock in the morning after being found, brutally attacked, in his sitting-room. With no details of what had happened at Barton House, the Met simply informed Alan that Keith MacKenzie was a suspect in the assault, and the request to check the flat had come from Dorset police.

In the belief that MacKenzie would head straight for me, but unable to warn me because he didn’t have my address or number, he rang Dorset’s Winfrith headquarters. What he told them subsequently of my history with MacKenzie, which was a great deal more detailed than anything I’d said, persuaded Bagley that I was not only well-practised at withholding information but also made a habit of it.

“Why didn’t you tell me that you failed to report this man to the Iraqi authorities, Ms. Burns? Or that it’s only in the last two weeks that you’ve divulged any information at all about your captivity?”

I toyed with saying, “You didn’t ask,” but decided he wasn’t in the mood for flippancy. “There hasn’t been time. I’ve tried to fill in some of the gaps, but most of your questioning has been about what happened here.” I looked him straight in the eyes. “I suppose I could have insisted on talking about Baghdad, but wouldn’t that have made you more suspicious?”

His eyes didn’t drop, but a perplexed frown puckered his forehead. “I can’t make you out at all,” he said. “From Dr. Coleman’s description of the video, you suffered the most appalling abuse at this man’s hands…Alan Collins says you were so frightened of him you wouldn’t divulge his identity and went into hiding…Ms. Derbyshire says you haven’t eaten or been out for a week…your parents are in hospital…MacKenzie’s still free…yet you’re sitting here in front of me as cool as a cucumber.”

“Is that a question?”

He smiled in spite of himself. “Yes. Why are you so calm?”

“I’m not sure a man would understand.”

“Try me.”

“In the first place, my parents aren’t dead,” I said.

There was no mystery about how they both ended up at the flat as MacKenzie’s prisoners. My father did exactly as Jess described, set out to lure MacKenzie into a trap, using himself as bait. Afterwards, he was given the same lecture I received about vigilantism and revenge but, as Dad took most of the punishment, no charges were brought despite question marks over his purchase of wood and nails on Friday morning.

He wasn’t very forthcoming about the details of his plan—claiming only that his intention was to confine MacKenzie and call the police—and denied knowledge or responsibility for the homemade “stingers” that ended up in Barton House. Of course Jess and I did, too, which left MacKenzie as the guilty party. I told Alan privately that my father had made them, and MacKenzie had brought them to Barton House; but, with the law as it was, none of us was going to admit to it publicly.

Initially, my father had some difficulty agreeing with Met detectives that his idea of an ambush was ill-considered and naïve, but under pressure from my mother he ate humble pie. Perhaps it was a mercy he could only nod his agreement, because the air would have turned blue if he’d been able to speak. The only detail he genuinely conceded was that, had he entered the flat accompanied by a police officer, MacKenzie wouldn’t have taken him prisoner so easily.

It’s unclear how long MacKenzie had been there—several hours if his intensive search of the place was anything to go by—but my father had no inkling of danger when he let himself in on the Friday evening. The last thing he remembered was stooping to collect the post; the next, waking up trussed and helpless in the sitting-room. He’s even less communicative about this experience than he is about Mugabe’s thugs, but when he reached hospital sixty hours later, he had five fractured ribs, a dislocated jaw and so many bruises his skin was a uniform purple.

My mother says he refused to tell MacKenzie anything and would probably have allowed himself to be punched and kicked to death if she hadn’t decided to go back to the flat herself on Saturday afternoon. “I knew something was wrong,” she said. “I tried phoning him at the flat and on his mobile, but both went straight to voice messaging. Then I called you and the same thing happened.” She smiled rather ruefully. “I could have murdered you that morning, Connie. I was so worried.”

“Sorry.”

She squeezed my hand. “It all worked out for the best in the end. If you had answered…or if Jess had passed on my message a little more promptly…you’d have persuaded me to stay in the hotel. And where would your father be then?”

Six feet under, I thought. There’s a limit to how much punishment anyone can take, and MacKenzie’s frustration would have killed him eventually. He’s a good old boy, my Dad—a tough old boy—but he’s lucky one of his ribs didn’t snap completely and puncture a lung. I asked my mother why she hadn’t called the police, instead of going to the rescue herself, and she said it would have required too much explanation.

“Did you get the vigilante lecture?” I asked her.

She shook her head with a twinkle in her eyes. “I burst into tears and said how foolish I’d been…but then I’m not as bullheaded as you and your father.”

In fact, despite a gut-feeling that Dad was in trouble, she was more inclined to think there was a rational explanation for the phones not being answered. As I had done, she wondered if he’d gone out for food or was refusing to answer because he’d instructed her not to contact him.

“I expected to have my head bitten off for meddling,” she admitted, “but I couldn’t let the nonsense go on. You must have known he’d do something silly when you refused to talk to him. There isn’t a cut-off point when a man like your father stops trying to prove himself, Connie…any more than there is for you. I wish you’d learn that caring what others think is a form of slavery.”

Her safety net in the event of trouble—a little simplistic as things turned out—was to ask the taxi driver to wait while she went inside for his money. As he wouldn’t leave until she paid him, she must either return with her wallet or force him to come knocking on the door. “I was as naïve as your father,” she said. “I should have realized the driver wouldn’t care who handed over the money as long as he got it.”

MacKenzie must have been watching from the window because he was waiting behind the front door when Mum opened it. As soon as she was over the threshhold with her suitcase, he slammed it shut and had her mouth and hands bound with duct tape before she even reached the sitting-room. When the knocking began and an angry voice demanded payment, he calmly bundled her out of sight, took her wallet from her bag and paid up. “He’s not stupid,” she said reluctantly. “Most people would have panicked.”

“Did you?” I asked her.

“I did when I saw your father. He looked terrible—face all bruised and misshapen—body curled into a ball to protect himself. He started crying when MacKenzie threw me on the carpet beside him.” She shook her head. “That’s the only time I felt I shouldn’t have gone back. Poor love. He was devastated. He’d tried so hard to protect me…and there I was.”

She had no qualms about bargaining my address against their lives. “It would have been madness to do anything else,” she said. “While there’s life there’s hope, and I knew you’d worry if you couldn’t get me at the hotel. I prayed you’d phone that policeman friend of yours in Manchester. Your father was unhappy about it…but”—she squeezed my hand again—“I was sure you’d understand.”

I did. I do. Whatever nightmares I still have would be a thousand times worse if I were carrying my parents’ deaths on my conscience. My mother believes my father’s “unhappiness” related entirely to his fears for me, but his concerns were rather more practical. He was appalled at her naïve assumption that a man like MacKenzie would honour a promise to leave them alive if she gave him the information he wanted.

He tried to dissuade her, but his dislocated jaw had seized the muscles in his face, making speaking difficult. To stop any further attempts, MacKenzie muzzled him completely by winding several turns of duct tape round his head. The ironic upside was that, with his jaw supported, my father’s pain lessened, and he survived the next twelve hours in considerably more comfort than he would otherwise have done. The downside was that it increased my mother’s concern for him, thereby encouraging compliance.

“Weren’t you worried that MacKenzie would kill you anyway?” I asked her.

“Of course…but what could I do? He threatened to strangle your father in front of me if I refused. At least there were slivers of hope if I betrayed you…none at all if I betrayed Brian.” A small crease of doubt furrowed her brow. “You do see that, don’t you, darling? It was a card game…and you were my only trump. I had to use you.”

I didn’t know how to answer. Absolutely…? Don’t worry about it…? I’d have done the same…? They were all just anodyne forms of words that meant nothing if she didn’t believe them. “Thank God you had enough faith in me,” I said bluntly. “Dad wouldn’t have done. He still thinks of me as a little girl in pigtails who screams every time she finds a spider in the shower.”

“Only because he loves you.”

“I know.” We exchanged smiles. “He was very brave, Mum. Is his tail wagging now? It damn well ought to be.”

Her smile played around her eyes. “You’re so alike, you two. You both assume the only way to win is to show no weakness. You should have played bridge with Geraldine Summers. I’ve never known anyone conjure so many triumphs out of hands that contained nothing.”

“By bluffing? Is that what you did with MacKenzie?”

“I couldn’t do anything until he removed my gag because he wanted the password to your father’s laptop. Before that, he went through my suitcase. I told him he wouldn’t find your address in the computer, but I suggested he read the email you sent to Alan Collins. I hoped he’d realize how pointless it would be to kill any of us.”

“What did he say?”

“That you’d chosen a good parallel in the story of the death-ray and the Chinaman. The only point of killing was to gain from it. He wasn’t very talkative—I doubt he spoke more than twenty sentences from the moment I arrived—and he became extremely agitated when I asked what he gained from killing. That’s when he said he’d strangle your father if I didn’t tell him what he wanted…and the gain would be the look on both our faces when it happened.” She shook her head. “And I’m sure he was telling the truth…I’m sure that’s why he does it.”

I felt a shiver of goosebumps on my arms. “Then why didn’t he go ahead with it?”

“Because your address was my trump card, darling. Supposing I was lying? He had no way of checking unless he phoned you—which would have alerted you—so I persuaded him to take me along as security. It was the only bargaining chip I had…and it meant your father and I stayed alive for a few more hours. I felt I’d won the trick when he produced the car keys and demanded to know where the car was parked.” She laughed suddenly. “Poor Brian! I don’t know which offended him more…my pandering to the brute or the brute driving his precious BMW.”

“You know damn well,” I said severely. “He was worried sick for you.”

Again, my father never speaks about the hours he lay on the sitting-room floor, except to say that his lowest moment was when I left my message and he couldn’t answer. I know he imagined the worst—we all do when situations are outside our control—but it wasn’t until the police broke into the flat in the early hours that the search began for my mother. She doesn’t dwell on those hours either, several of which were spent in the BMW’s boot, but her cramps were so severe by the time she was found that she had to be given morphine before her back and legs could be straightened out.

“It’s only when the bidding starts that you realize how many cards you have,” she went on. “The wretched man had to free me to walk to the car, and my price for not attempting to escape or draw attention to myself was that we left your father alive. If he could have put me in the boot immediately, I’m sure he’d have gone back to finish Dad off, but”—another laugh—“I’ve never been so glad of street parking before. You can’t mistreat women with half of Kentish Town watching.”

There wasn’t much else she could tell. She recalled MacKenzie tucking my father’s mobile and binoculars, together with their two wallets, into a canvas knapsack, which he tossed on to the back seat of the BMW. Then he taped her hands and feet again and told her he was going to move her to the boot as soon as they were clear of built-up areas. He warned her to keep her mouth shut until he did or he’d tie her up so tight she wouldn’t be able to breathe, but it wasn’t until they’d passed the Fleet service station on the M3 that he left the motorway and made the transfer on a quiet country road.

He must have rejoined the motorway because my mother remembered constant traffic noise but, as happened to me in the cellar, she quickly lost track of time. She remembered one other stop of about ten minutes, which was probably when he sent me the text, and her last contact with him was five minutes after the engine died for good. She’d been in darkness for so long that, when the boot suddenly opened, she had to close her eyes against the daylight.

“He apologized,” she said. “It was very strange.”

“For shutting you in?”

“No. For the fact that, if I’d given him the right address, he was going to come back and burn the car with me in it.” She gave a muted laugh. “I presume he wanted me to panic but, you know, I was so tired by then I fell asleep…and the next thing I knew, the alarm was going like the clappers, and a rather jolly policeman was wrenching the boot open with a crowbar.”

It was all lies. She couldn’t possibly have slept with the level of cramp she had when she was found, any more than my father could have passed “a halfway reasonable night.”