Oh my goodness. Had she heard that right?
Andy was looking down at his hands, clutched in fists on his lap. ‘You know who Dean Reid was? One of the disadvantaged youngsters Duncan mentored at The Phoenix Centre in Langholm? Nick set the whole thing up in an attempt to frame Maggie. He had it timed to the second. He’d texted Dean, pretending to be Duncan, saying he’d pay him the money Dean was trying to blackmail out of him and telling him to be at The Phoenix Centre at eight-thirty on Thursday night and wait till he got there. We had a rehearsal for the school play that night. In the interval, Nick used my bike to get to The Phoenix Centre, stabbed Dean, got back to the school in time to be back on stage. When the police questioned me, I said I’d been with him for part of the interval. That meant there was no time for him to have got to The Phoenix Centre and back. Rock solid alibi. He used a knife from Sunnyside with Maggie’s fingerprints on it to frame her. He called her from a phone box on his way back to the school from the Centre, pretending to be a concerned neighbour worried about what was going on in there. Then he called the police. Maggie hot-footed it over there, presumably. But she was streetwise. Former young offender. She must have found Dean dead, realised what Nick was trying to do, and legged it before the police turned up. There were no fingerprints on the knife, so she must have wiped it.’ He looked up at her at last, focusing somewhere around her left shoulder. ‘Oh, Nick was not happy about that at all. Particularly when Duncan was arrested for the murder. Duncan was charged, but then it turned out there was CCTV footage proving he was miles away at the time.’
The poor, poor guy.
All these years, he had really been convinced that this had all happened, that Nick had committed a murder? Could she make him see that he was wrong, that what he was saying didn’t add up? If he’d really thought Nick had murdered someone, would he have continued hanging out with him? The day the family had disappeared, Nick had been returning from a nice day out in Edinburgh with Andy and Carol. At some level, the teenage Andy must have known it was all nonsense, Nick’s wind-up about the murder of this boy.
She had to tap into that part of his brain now.
‘So you lied to the police to give Nick an alibi, even though you knew he’d done it?’
‘I’m not proud of it.’
‘Isn’t it possible, Andy, that that’s what you told the police because you really were with Nick?’
‘No! I wasn’t! But Nick said if I didn’t give him an alibi, he’d tell the cops I did it. He said –’ Andy suddenly leapt from the chair as something crashed through the doorway behind Lulu, and Lulu was up on her feet too as a pigeon flapped around the room before exiting into the back hall and out through the half-open door.
Andy was breathing fast. ‘I’m just going to check, okay? Check there’s no one out there. Stay here.’
When he came back, he didn’t sit down. ‘I need to make this quick. I don’t like it, being here, so close to Sunnyside.’ He went to stand by the window and stayed there looking out as he spoke. ‘So – Nick told me he’d dob me in to the cops for Dean’s murder if I didn’t cooperate. He said the tyre tracks on the muddy path leading to the back door of The Phoenix Centre would confirm that my bike was at the scene of the crime. He threatened to tell the cops I had made him give me an alibi. He had it all worked out. He even engineered an altercation between me and Dean a week or so earlier. Dean was always on a short fuse, so that wasn’t difficult. He made sure there were witnesses. Ironically, a similar incident between Dean and Duncan was what pointed the cops in Duncan’s direction.’
Lulu felt suddenly very conscious of the wet material of her jeans leaching the warmth from her shins, her calves.
‘Andy,’ she said slowly. ‘Obviously, I didn’t know Nick then, but I know him now. I know he could never have done what you think he did. He must have been winding you up. Nick admits himself that he was a real wind-up merchant as a teenager. Like the prank with the severed arm at the farm? It’s pretty sick, but he was obviously pretending that he’d killed this boy and seeing if he could get you to believe him.’
‘He did kill Dean. And he killed Duncan and Maggie and Isla. And now probably Yvonne. Yvonne was onto him. She never liked him. Maybe he was worried she might know too much? Maybe he decided to take the opportunity to eliminate that risk while he was up here.’
Lulu’s heart sank. This wasn’t just mild Asperger’s – this was some sort of paranoid disorder. Maybe with an element of delusion. Far beyond what she was qualified to deal with. Had Andy ever seen a psychiatrist? Surely his family, his mother and father, must have realised something was wrong and got help for him?
How much of what he’d told her about Nick claiming to have murdered that boy was even true? After the police had questioned Andy, had Andy constructed a whole scenario in which Nick sped about the town on his bike with murderous intent? And Andy had been at Sunnyside a few weeks later when they’d discovered that Nick’s family had gone. Had that triggered a fresh bout of delusion? And now Yvonne’s disappearance had churned it all up again?
‘You’re in danger too,’ said Andy.
There was no point in trying to challenge any of this now. She needed to speak to Carol. How much did Carol know about what was going on with her son? Often the family were the last to realise something was amiss or downplayed the extent of the issue.
‘I can see that you’re very concerned about Nick,’ she said carefully. ‘And worried about me. Thank you for that. I really appreciate it. I –’
‘You need to be very, very careful.’
‘I will be.’
‘Okay, I’m going now,’ said Andy. ‘You obviously shouldn’t tell Nick you talked to me.’
And without saying goodbye, he walked out of the room.
20
Maggie - October 1997