Hen felt she was being used in a way she didn’t understand and was irritated rather than angry. She had just about lost the habit of being angry. How upset could he really be? It wasn’t his sister who had died last year. He had never been mauled by Ms Shearer in court.
‘You’re upset, and everyone else you know is bored with you talking about it, is that it?’ she said, jeeringly. ‘So you mug someone on a train, just because you think you’ve seen a fellow obsessive who’ll listen to you for the price of a bottle of wine? Not particularly sensitive, Mr Friel, especially if that someone is me, sister of the first deceased, on her way home from a visit to still-grieving parents who can’t bear the sight of me, because I remind them of her and they blame the whole thing on me, and oh, shit… I’m going to cry. And I’ve got no money, and my business is on the rocks, and what the fucking hell, you want to discuss it like it was something for a thesis? Just because that harridan jumped to her death and you feel guilty about something? Oh, get a life, what do you really want?’
She thought for a dreadful moment that he was going to clasp her in his arms, or seize the hand which was delving into the carpet bag for a cigarette, forgetting no-smoking laws. Instead, she could see through the mist that he was looking crestfallen and holding out a capacious handkerchief which she seized from him. She could tell by the feel that the cloth was fine linen and could see that it was an interesting shade of blue. It was nice to the touch; she would have accepted it as a gift, anytime, and she sniffed it, instinctively, the way she always did with cloth. There was a smell of lavender.
‘What the hell’s this?’
‘Sorry. One of my sister’s table napkins. I’ve just been to her kid’s party, didn’t know I’d got it. Must have put it in my pocket.’
Kid’s birthday party? A young uncle.
The mist cleared and she wiped her eyes on sweet-smelling linen, drained the glass of wine and watched him pour the next. No more apologies from him; if he had not had any plan for this conversation in the first place, he had one now, without room for sentiment or sympathy.
‘I want to get rid of a ghost,’ he said. ‘And I did want to apologise for the magnificent cock-up we made of that case. And I do have a professional interest, but basically, I want to know what happened, and that’s all really. I hate getting part of the truth and not all of it, as if one ever could. There was so much evidence we couldn’t use, for instance. There was so much missing evidence. They couldn’t call all sorts of stuff after so much evidence was disallowed, and I can’t bear only knowing half of it, and yes, I do want to write a thesis. And I’m probably in the wrong job. Not my business to know about the background, but I do want to know what really happened. And all the stuff that Angel suppressed. Stuff that he’d hinted at and thought that she might have had, only she didn’t. You must know more than I do. I only know what I saw on paper. It isn’t over, you know, because he’s out there, doing it again, just like he did before.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Raping, debasing, stealing. Kidnapping, disfiguring if necessary. Life-poisoning. Another victim. There were three before Angel, two running alongside. He’s a con man, that’s what he does and he isn’t anything like old yet.’
He sat back, embarrassed by his own gabbling, but not enough to stop.
‘And you thought you might discuss it with Marianne Shearer,’ she said. ‘Only now, you can’t. So that leaves me.’
‘His modus operandi is this,’ Peter went on. ‘He finds a vulnerable, self-conscious woman, flatters her, seduces her, makes up a story of poor, poor me, gets her to part with her money and then keeps her prisoner, working for him, because she’s too weak to run for cover. Once she’s down, she’s down. In the hands of a competent Defence Counsel, the story’s reversed, so that it’s she who’s the predator, she who gives him no alternative but to leave her obsessive self; she who is the unreasonable tyrant. He was so credible, I could have believed him, if it weren’t for the others. We got a bit bogged down in similar facts, didn’t we? Sorry, how would you know, you weren’t in the room during the legal arguments. Shearer and that spineless judge won them all. I want to learn. It does tend to make one ruthless. I want to know what Angel was like and what evidence you suppressed. I really, really want to know. And, since you’re never going to be a witness ever again in a case involving your own sister, you might feel free to tell me.’
‘Can I keep this?’ she said, folding the sweet-smelling napkin into her fist.
‘Please do,’ he said.
She sipped the wine, clutching the napkin as if it was a lucky charm. She quite liked this insensitive objectivity and she was sick of people not wanting to know. Sick of hiding things from Mum and Dad. It made her talk as if a dam had burst.
‘So many lies get told when people are feeling guilty,’ she said. ‘Is there ever such a thing as an entirely innocent victim? Angel was sweet, but she wasn’t perfect, nobody is. She was amazingly affectionate and everyone loved her, but she found it difficult to stick at things. She was my little sister and I was the bruiser. I left home as soon as I could; Angel tried one thing and another and kept going back. She always needed reassurance about everything, all the time, it was as if there was a big hole in the middle of her. Angel was always picked up and hugged and she got to rely on it. It was a kind of spoiling, really, because she was always treated as if she was special until she knew, not so deep down, that she wasn’t. It’s pointless trying to analyse her, but she was a whole mass of insecurities by the time she met Rick Boyd. She’d been on half a dozen training courses, failed the lot and this one was for learning how to be a carer. Boyd worked for the taxi firm the college used. He brought her home a few times… well, you know the rest.’
‘Not what made her into a victim.’
She crumpled the napkin in her hand, then straightened it out and folded it neatly, trying not to cry, brushing away tears before they fell, hating him and wanting to tell him he knew she could sew, and then saying something else.
‘Angel was always hung up about her appearance. She hated almost every aspect of it, with the surprising exceptions of her hands and feet and she was very vain about those. Anyway, she was always trying to change the way she looked. She thought she was ugly and fat, but she wasn’t really, she was just ordinary with an ordinary weight problem. Rick cured that, didn’t he? She wasn’t so fat by the time he’d finished with her. She never had an ounce of dress sense, and she wouldn’t be told. She should have stuck to sewing, like me. She was waiting all the time for someone to wave a magic wand and make her feel beautiful. I guess he did that. She was… needy.’
He waited but she said no more.
‘I see. Just his type, then. Like the others who wouldn’t talk. Insecure, immature.’
She nodded, miserably, cross that he might imagine she had not thought of that, when she thought of it all the time. She closed her hand into a fist.
‘I wish I understood him,’ she said. ‘I can understand being a con man, making a woman adore you, getting sex and adoration for nothing, extracting money from credulous parents for his so-called business, doing all that. Mum and Dad have a storage business, they’d done all right. They were so pleased she’d found someone personable, they would have given him anything, and did. I can see the money angle, but why did he have to be so cruel? Why this power kick, why debase her, why put her in prison and disfigure her, when she would have done anything he wanted for another promise? Why didn’t he just leave her?’