Dying Fall Read online

  Then I thought for one crazy moment that he was. When he saw me, his face broke into a charming, delighted smile. He opened his arms wide, palms out, inviting me. I retreated to the far side of my bench.

  ‘You’ll be glad to know Dean might live,’ I began.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  I could have sworn the bewilderment was genuine.

  ‘Dean. The young man you had beaten up.’

  ‘Sophie, what the hell are you talking about?’

  I explained, very tersely. And mentioned Jools’s part. At that point his face changed.

  ‘Jools. You know she was handling drugs, Sophie? I’m sorry, I know you were a friend of hers. But she was a bad lady.’

  ‘Drugs and blackmail – a pretty lethal combination,’ I agreed.

  At the word ‘blackmail’ his face did change. For a second. Then he had it under control. If not his voice.

  ‘Blackmail?’ His lips seemed stiff.

  ‘She blackmailed Tony. What about that pianist who tried to fly? Or was that badly cut drugs? Have those she sold you been all right? Pure enough?’

  ‘Nothing wrong with coke for personal use.’

  I agreed. ‘Until someone tries to blackmail you. And the pressure grows until you try to kill her. You lure her into the open – just there, see! – by changing the notices on the doors. Only it’s George, isn’t it? George who gets –’ My voice had started to shake. I took a deep breath and waited. His face was so still I could guess the effort he was making not to react. ‘And Jools. A very messy death. I suppose it was convenient.’

  ‘I didn’t mean –’

  At last!

  ‘You didn’t mean to kill Jools then. Quite lucky for you she was carrying a pretty unstable burden to the university. Where was she to take it to? The room where Khalid was to do his hacking? And why try to stop us hacking? You weren’t implicated. There wasn’t a list of Jools’s customers.’

  His mouth moved slightly.

  ‘Do you know what I think you ought to do now?’ I asked conversationally. ‘I think you ought to have a nice long talk with Chris Groom. I’m sure you get a shorter sentence if you confess before they get round to asking you. And they say, don’t they, that confession is good for the soul.’

  We stood staring at each other. Neither of us moved. My hands were clamped on the bench-back. His stayed as fists in his pockets. I didn’t dare look round for Chris. I held him where he was as long as our eyes were locked. This time I wouldn’t panic. I wouldn’t run. There was nowhere to run, anyhow. If I took off down the canal towpath he’d be able to pick me off like a rabbit. Because that was what he was going to do. Use that gun. There was a faint click. Metallic. From his right pocket.

  I ran.

  I ducked and wove my way through the last of the lunchtime loiterers. Surely he wouldn’t risk hitting someone perfectly innocent.

  I had run. And got myself cornered. Remembered all those muscles of his: he was going to catch me any moment. No darkness. No tricky footpaths. And a wonderful story for him to tell the coroner. I was so disturbed by the deaths of my friends I was going to jump from the Music Centre. He’d tried to talk me out of it, tried to catch me as I ran. But he’d been too late. A quick push, then. Much better than a gun. I cursed my week’s inactivity. I was tiring already. But I was past the dumper truck. All I needed was a way into the Music Centre. Whatever level. The lower the better. Or a workman. British workmen wouldn’t take kindly to people settling their differences on their site, not when they were so far behind schedule. I could hear someone yelling at me already. And another.

  I risked looking back. A man trying to intercept Stobbard fell frontwards on to a pile of concrete. Stobbard was shoving his gun back into his pocket. I prayed he’d just used the butt to sock him below the line of his hard hat. There was a lot of yelling now. And Stobbard was yards nearer. I threw down my shoulder bag and started up the nearest ladder. As I clambered I had a wistful vision of myself swinging the bag at him and knocking him backwards into that cement. But it was too late. At least I had both hands free. Another level up, or risk this catwalk?

  My hands and feet took me up. Someone was trying to grab my ankle. I kicked hard, and swung on to the uneven planks of the catwalk. I started to run. There was so much noise from my heart and ears I couldn’t hear anything else.

  Except someone yelling, ‘No! You’ll have to stop. No!’

  And I saw why. At the end of the planks was nothing. I exaggerate. There was nothing for five feet.

  Nothing below, of course, for about – no, I didn’t want to know how many feet. Death by an awkward fall or death at Stobbard’s hands? A very public death.

  And then I decided I didn’t want any sort of death. Not yet. I was young and I could jump. Even five feet. Suddenly my brain clicked up a gear.

  To clear the gap I’d have to take it at a run. If I hesitated – no, I wouldn’t hesitate. He nearly had me in his grasp.

  I ran. I jumped.

  There was wood beneath my feet. I fell on to the planks, clutching at the boards, netting and metal poles, and waited. There was no more I could do. He’d clear it far more easily that I had.

  I pulled myself to my elbow to look back.

  He was running now, gathering himself. He sprang. And then as he flew, an avenging angel, between the pieces of wood, he stopped and doubled in mid-flight. And dropped from my sight.

  The scream stopped abruptly.

  But it rang on in my ears, on and on, until I realised the scream came from me.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  ‘Loves me, loves me not,’ the nurse was saying, laying a little log trail of splinters on a piece of kitchen towel.

  In the next cubicle, I could hear them trying to reason with a hysterical Winston. Rationally he could understand that he’d saved me: emotionally he couldn’t cope with the knowledge that it was his well-aimed stone that had brought about Stobbard Mayou’s death.

  I wasn’t sure that I could deal with my part in his death, either.

  By the time I’d come down, they’d taken away his body. They’d had plenty of time.

  Vertigo.

  I suffer from vertigo.

  Why the hell I’d gone shooting up those bloody ladders and leaping around on rocking planks, I’d no idea. How the hell I’d get down I’d less idea. I’d sat like a garden gnome and contemplated. Chris, white-faced, urged me from the far side of the gap. A couple of scaffolders watched him with considerable irritation. They wanted to fill the gap. I couldn’t have walked across it if they’d filled it with the Severn Bridge. At last, I found I could look about me a little, provided I held on with both hands and stayed put. I knew I’d fall if I stood up. Below they’d acquired television cameras, several fire appliances, and a bearded man yelling at me he could teach me to abseil.

  A fire appliance won. Or at least the fireman who shinned up this enormous ladder as easily as I run up stairs and offered to carry me down.

  ‘Fireman’s lift, see,’ he said encouragingly. ‘You could close your eyes.’

  I stood up, drew myself to my full five foot one inch, and reached for the ladder.

  ‘If you’d be so kind as to hold my skirt,’ I said with dignity, ‘I’ll bring myself down.’

  Jaunty. Chirpy. A good performance. The people at the bottom had applauded. And I was buggered if I was going to cry my eyes out in front of the cameras.

  Without a doubt it was the splinters under the fingernails that hurt the most. By the time the nurse had finished those, Philomena had come to sort out Winston, had remonstrated with the doctor over her choice of drugs, and had taken him home to sleep everything off. Someone would be coming for me, too. I hoped to God it wouldn’t be Chris.

  Oddly enough it was Richard. And he took me to his home where Sheila ladled home-made soup and exchanged recipes and told me that Shahida had lost her baby.

  ‘There,’ Chris says, raising his voice a little: the Tannoy’s just announcing a flight. ‘Al
l checked in.’

  ‘Good.’ I shuffle the magazines I’ve bought him for the flight.

  ‘Quite convenient, really. Everything being neatly tied up before I left. Not that – not if – you do believe me – I wouldn’t have agreed –’

  ‘No. Thank you. I’m glad you were there to see it through.’

  I don’t know why I agreed to see him off. I don’t like airports very much. Apart from their inherent nastiness, they remind me how little I’ve travelled. I’ve always dreamt of India, and here is Chris actually on his way.

  ‘Sophie, tell me something.’

  As if I haven’t been over it three or four times, not just with him but with people from the Fraud Squad and from the Drugs Squad, not to mention a quick dalliance with Customs and Excise.

  The men who attacked Dean – well-known heavies – have been identified by the woman at the bus stop. Dean can’t corroborate. They say his coma is much less deep, that he’ll be moved into an ordinary ward soon. But it’ll take him maybe a year to learn to walk and talk again.

  ‘Sophie?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Chris, I was just thinking.’ As if I’ve done anything else. Round and round in unproductive circles, I’ve been going. Phil says what I need is a good cry. I’ve had flowers and chocolates and a nasty crop of offers from the gutter press to tell my story –‘My lover tried to kill me’ – and a request to coach someone through his GCSE. What I haven’t had is a good cry. I’m weighed down with a constant dull ache and I get angry very quickly, but I can’t cry.

  ‘When did you first suspect him? Stobbard. The first moment?’

  I can tell from the way the words rush out that this was not what Chris wanted to ask, but I will reply as if it were. I talk about the evening when Stobbard took his baton to the loo, leaving that dusting of white grains behind. I remind Chris that he came round when I’d got photocopies all over the floor, that Stobbard took the sheet under the one I’d written down the details of Khalid’s university room. They never did establish exactly where he was the night Wajid was killed. I reckon he was in Birmingham with a car that he told Winston wouldn’t start. Certainly his flight to Munich had been at 6.00 a.m. on the Sunday after I’d been attacked. But they never found make-up or contact lenses in his effects.

  Jools: perhaps I can talk about her instead. A blackmailer. Not the nicest thing to believe of a friend. But then, I think she killed Wajid. She’d be strong enough. And maybe she’d learned about anatomy for her body building. She’d have reached Lichfield on her bike in time for the concert. The orchestra were so used to her bad timekeeping they wouldn’t have turned a hair if she was only slightly late.

  Why should she handle drugs? Power, I suppose. Or money. The David Cox wasn’t the only painting in her flat. What I’d always thought was a very fine print turned out to be a genuine Bonnard. Starting to take steroids – they found plenty when they did the postmortem – made her less stable, I suppose. All that temper waiting to flare up. And goodness knows how much she was trying to screw out of Stobbard. Or maybe she kept upping the price for his fixes. Enough to make him want to kill her.

  ‘And Wajid,’ I conclude. ‘Need his family know? They all looked up to him so much. And after Iqbal’s disgrace –’

  ‘Well, they’ll never find anything he stashed in ICB. They got there before the Fraud Squad did. Practically all the computer records wiped. And literally bonfires of paper records all over the country: must have been like the coming of the Armada.’

  ‘So his family needn’t –?’

  ‘Well, the DPP have got other things to worry about.’

  ‘And isn’t there some fund for the victims of crime? They’re not very well off, remember.’

  ‘I don’t know. He wasn’t exactly –’

  ‘A victim of poverty. A victim of a racist system that stopped his dad doing the well-paid job you do.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, you sound like a fucking sociologist.’

  That’s better. The last thing I want to hear is him tenderly breathing ‘Sophie’ at me. But I am surprised by the force of the adjective. Perhaps he’s found his time at William Murdock more stressful than I realised. Maybe nearly as stressful as teaching there.

  ‘Hi! Chris! Chris! Over here!’

  I’ve never welcomed the sight of Tina as much as now. She and Ian Dale bustle over, she with a duplicate pile of magazines, he with a Boots carrier bag. ‘Brought you some tummy pills. And a spot of the old kaolin and morph. Foreign food.’

  ‘Poor Ian,’ I say, tucking my hand into the crook of his arm. ‘Your face on the supermarket run. When I made you buy okra and chillies.’

  ‘Come on, they’re making the last call,’ says Tina. ‘Stir your bloody stumps. Anyone’d think you’d rather not go.’

  ‘Sophie –’ he’s trying again, in a desperate undervoice.

  I find it easier to ignore it. I think he wants to know if I loved Stobbard Mayou. And maybe he wants to know if I’ll see him when he gets back.

  And I don’t know. I just don’t know.