“Caught?”
“By the—brown-skinned bloke,” mumbled Billy, with a half-glance back at the female psychiatrist. “I was scared of him, I thought he was a terrorist and he was going to kill me, but then he told me he was working for the government, so I thought the government wanted me kept there in his house and the doors and windows were wired with explosives… but I don’t think they were, really. That was just me. He probably didn’t want me in his bathroom. Probably wanted to get rid of me all along,” said Billy, with a sad smile. “And I wouldn’t go, because I thought I’d get blown up.”
His right hand crept absently back to his nose and chest.
“I think I tried to call you again, but you didn’t answer.”
“You did call. You left a message on my answering machine.”
“Did I? Yeah… I thought you’d help me get out of there… sorry,” said Billy, rubbing his eyes. “When I’m like that, I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“But you’re sure you saw a child strangled, Billy?” asked Strike quietly.
“Oh yeah,” said Billy bleakly, raising his face. “Yeah, that never goes away. I know I saw it.”
“Did you ever try and dig where you thought—?”
“Christ, no,” said Billy. “Go digging right by my dad’s house? No. I was scared,” he said weakly. “I didn’t want to see it again. After they buried her, they let it grow over, nettles and weeds. I used to have dreams like you wouldn’t believe. That she climbed up out of the dell in the dark, all rotting, and tried to climb in my bedroom window.”
The psychiatrists’ pens moved scratchily across their papers.
Strike moved down to the category of “Things” that he had written on his notebook. There were only two questions left.
“Did you ever put a cross in the ground where you saw the body buried, Billy?”
“No,” said Billy, scared at the very idea. “I never went near the dell if I could avoid it, I never wanted to.”
“Last question,” Strike said. “Billy, did your father do anything unusual for the Chiswells? I know he was a handyman, but can you think of anything else he—?”
“What d’you mean?” said Billy.
He seemed suddenly more frightened than he had seemed all interview.
“I don’t know,” said Strike carefully, watching his reaction. “I just wondered—”
“Jimmy warned me about this! He told me you were snooping around Dad. You can’t blame us for that, we had nothing to do with it, we were kids!”
“I’m not blaming you for anything,” said Strike, but there was a clatter of chairs: Billy and the two psychiatrists had got to their feet, the female’s hand hovering over a discreet button beside the door that Strike knew must be an alarm.
“Has this all been to get me to talk? You trying to get me and Jimmy in trouble?”
“No,” said Strike, hoisting himself to his feet, too. “I’m here because I believe you saw a child strangled, Billy.”
Agitated, mistrustful, Billy’s unbandaged hand touched his nose and chest twice in quick succession.
“So why’re you asking what Dad did?” he whispered. “That’s not how she died, it was nothing to do with that! Jimmy’ll fucking tan me,” he said in a broken voice. “He told me you were after him for what Dad did.”
“Nobody’s going to tan anyone,” said the male psychiatrist firmly. “Time’s up, I think,” he said briskly to Strike, pushing open the door. “Go on, Billy, out you go.”
But Billy didn’t move. The skin and bone might have aged, but his face betrayed the fear and hopelessness of a small, motherless child whose sanity had been broken by the men who were supposed to protect him. Strike, who had met countless rootless and neglected children during his rackety, unstable childhood, recognized in Billy’s imploring expression a last plea to the adult world, to do what grown-ups were meant to do, and impose order on chaos, substitute sanity for brutality. Face to face, he felt a strange kinship with the emaciated, shaven-headed psychiatric patient, because he recognized the same craving for order in himself. In his case, it had led him to the official side of the desk, but perhaps the only difference between the two of them was that Strike’s mother had lived long enough, and loved him well enough, to stop him breaking when life threw terrible things at him.
“I’m going to find out what happened to the kid you saw strangled, Billy. That’s a promise.”
The psychiatrists looked surprised, even disapproving. It was not part of their profession, Strike knew, to make definitive statements or guarantee resolutions. He put his notebook back into his pocket, moved from behind the desk and held out his hand. After a few long moments’ consideration, the animosity seemed to seep out of Billy. He shuffled back to Strike, took his proffered hand and held it overlong, his eyes filling with tears.
In a whisper, so that neither of the doctors could hear, he said:
“I hated putting the horse on them, Mr. Strike. I hated it.”
57
Have you the courage and the strength of will for that, Rebecca?
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Vanessa’s one-bedroomed flat occupied the ground floor of a detached house a short distance from Wembley Stadium. Before leaving for work that morning, she had given Robin a spare key to her flat, along with a kindly assurance that she knew that it would take Robin longer than a couple of days to find a new place to live, and that she didn’t mind her staying until she managed to do so.
They had sat up late drinking the night before. Vanessa had told Robin the full story of finding out that her ex-fiancé had cheated on her, a story full of twists and counter-twists that Vanessa had never told before, which included the setting up of two fake Facebook pages as bait for both her ex and his lover, which had resulted, after three months of patient coaxing, in Vanessa receiving nude pictures from both of them. As impressed as she was shocked, Robin had laughed as Vanessa reenacted the scene in which she passed her ex the pictures, hidden inside the Valentine card she had handed across a table for two in their favorite restaurant.
“You’re too nice, girl,” said Vanessa, steely-eyed over her Pinot Grigio. “At a bare minimum I’d have kept her bleeding earring and turned it into a pendant.”
Vanessa was now at work. A spare duvet sat neatly folded at the end of the sofa on which Robin was sitting, with her laptop open in front of her. She had spent the entire afternoon scanning available rooms in shared properties, which were all she could possibly afford on the salary that Strike was paying her. The memory of the bunk bed in Flick’s flat kept recurring as she scanned the adverts in her price range, some of which featured stark, barrack-like rooms with multiple beds inside them, others with photographs that looked as though they ought to feature attached to news stories about reclusive hoarders discovered dead by neighbors. Last night’s laughter seemed remote now. Robin was ignoring the painful, hard lump in her throat that refused to dissolve, no matter how many cups of tea she consumed.
Matthew had tried to contact her twice that day. Neither time had she picked up and he hadn’t left a message. She would need to contact a lawyer about divorce soon, and that would cost money she didn’t have, but her first priority had to be finding herself a place to live and continuing to put in the usual number of hours on the Chiswell case, because if Strike had cause to feel she wasn’t pulling her weight she would be endangering the only part of her life that currently had worth.