‘Surely not?’
‘Why do you think he was so opposed to the Fletchers buying this land? He knew they had a daughter. He knows this town isn’t safe for little girls.’
Evi was struggling to take it in. ‘But his own daughters?’
‘He sent me away to school when I was thirteen, just after Heather was born. He couldn’t turn a blind eye after that. It was too late for Christiana, of course, she was too old for school.’
Evi reached out her hand, touched the other woman on the arm. ‘Jenny, we need to tell the police all this,’ she said. ‘They have to stop him before another child gets killed. I should phone them again. Get them here sooner.’ She took a step down.
‘Wait, please.’ Now Evi’s arm was caught in a tight grip. ‘I haven’t told you everything.’
Christ, what more could there be? Evi glanced at the window that overlooked the street, hoping to see the flickering of police lights. ‘What do you need to tell me?’ she asked.
Jenny dropped her head. ‘It’s so difficult,’ she said. ‘I never thought I’d tell anyone this.’
‘How do we get him out?’ repeated Tom. Ebba’s expression didn’t change, or give any hint she’d understood him. Tom turned back to his brother and tried again to pull at least part of him up. Joe wasn’t moving and Tom realized why. The ropes that bound his brother were also securing him to the tower itself.
‘Joe, I have to go and get help,’ he said. ‘There’s a policeman downstairs. I’ll be five minutes, Joe, I promise.’
Joe’s eyes had closed. Leaving his brother in the tower was the hardest thing Tom had ever done, but somehow he made himself turn and crawl back along the roof guttering. He couldn’t hear Ebba behind him and hoped that perhaps she’d stayed to comfort Joe.
He was back at the real bell tower that led down into the church. His foot found the top step and a hand closed around his bare ankle.
The two women were sitting on the stairs. Jenny had sunk down, taking Evi with her. They were both shaking.
‘When did it all stop?’ asked Evi. ‘When you went to school?’
Jenny shook her head. ‘Things got a bit better before that. He’d found someone else to pique his interest, you see. Our housekeeper’s daughter. She was blonde and pretty and very young, just what he liked.’
‘Gillian?’ said Evi. ‘He abused Gillian too?’ Was there something at least she’d been right about?
Jenny shrugged, then nodded. ‘I think Gwen Bannister guessed what was going on,’ she said. ‘She’d never have challenged my grandfather, but she got her daughter out of harm’s reach. More than anyone did for me.’
‘Did he start on you again, after Gillian left?’
‘When I was home from school, yes. And then when I was nineteen, his luck ran out. I got pregnant too. By the time I plucked up the courage to tell Dad, it was too late to get rid of the baby so he talked Mike into taking me on. And he persuaded Tobias to sign over control of the estate to him.’
‘I can’t believe your father colluded with all this. You must have felt so betrayed.’
Jenny dropped Evi’s hands. ‘Evi, men have been selling their daughters for wealth and power for thousands of years,’ she said. ‘You think it all stopped when we got to the twentieth century? But it was good for me too. I got out. And I got Lucy.’
Tobias’s daughter. Lucy had been the incestuous child of her great-grandfather.
‘What happened to Lucy?’ asked Evi in a small voice. ‘How did she really die?’
‘I loved her so much, Evi.’
‘I’m sure you did. Did he do it? Did Tobias kill her?’
‘She was only two when he started to look at her, Evi. She was blonde and gorgeous, just like Christiana and me when we were tiny. I’d watch his eyes going over her body. He could still drive back then, he’d come up to the house all the time. I would never change her or bathe her anywhere near him, but he always seemed to be hanging around her. I knew I couldn’t let it happen again, not to Lucy.’
‘But Lucy was different. She had you to protect her. And Mike.’
‘But I knew how clever he was. I knew he’d get to her in the end. So I started planning ways to kill him. It seemed like the only way. Does that shock you?’
Evi thought she was way beyond being shocked. ‘I think it’s very understandable that you should be so angry,’ she said.
‘I thought about smothering him in his sleep, putting something in his food, pushing him down the stairs, tricking him to come up to the Tor with me and shoving him off. But then, one day, I realized. I didn’t have to kill him to stop him getting what he wanted.’
‘You didn’t?’
‘No. I could kill her instead.’
Tom was being tugged downwards, his back jarring painfully on the stone steps.
‘What the fuck are you doin’?’ said a voice he knew. Two large hands grasped his waist and pulled him down more steps. ‘Back off, let us get down,’ the same voice instructed. Tom heard several pairs of footsteps retreating behind them and then he was in the church gallery once more.
‘Joe’s on the roof,’ he managed. ‘In the other bell tower, the one that everyone thinks is empty, but it’s not. He’s in there and he’s freezing and we have to get him down now.’
The four boys stared back at him, as if they’d captured an alien that had suddenly started giving them orders.
‘Your brother?’ Jake Knowles was the first to speak. ‘The one we’ve been looking for all day?’
‘On the roof?’ repeated Jake’s older brother, whose name Tom couldn’t remember.
Tom looked back at the four faces and felt like his heart had stopped beating. ‘You did it,’ he said. ‘You put him there.’
The older boy’s face twisted. ‘What the fuck do you think we are?’ he said. ‘Fuckin’ psychos?’
‘He’s actually up there?’ said Billy Aspin. ‘Alive?’
Tom nodded. ‘He’s tied up,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t get him out. I need to get my dad. What are you doing here? If you didn’t put him there, why are you here?’
‘We followed you in,’ said Jake. ‘We saw you and that Renshaw cretin running through the graveyard and we followed. Got fuckin’ lost in that cellar. Where’d she go?’
‘We have to get help. There’s a police…’ said Tom, realizing he had no idea what had happened to Ebba.
‘Come on,’ interrupted the eldest Knowles boy. ‘Let’s see what he’s on about.’
Evi felt like she was burning up. Funny, she’d heard patients talk about feeling terror many times. None of them had ever told her how hot it was. Or how it seemed to throw your brain into slow motion. Jenny? Jenny was the one who’d been after Millie the whole time. No, that couldn’t be right. She’d misunderstood something. She was overtired.
‘And the really ironic thing was, Tobias did love her.’ Jenny was clutching Evi again, making it impossible for her to move. Her face was flushed, her eyes unnaturally bright. Evi had to get up somehow. Then what? Upstairs, to Millie’s room, or outside to the phone?
‘He was absolutely devastated,’ Jenny went on. ‘I made him watch, you see. I knew he was going to the church – he was churchwarden for years – and I followed him there with Lucy in my arms. I climbed up to the gallery and then I shouted for him.’
Sweat was trickling down between Evi’s shoulder blades. The police weren’t coming. Jenny hadn’t called them. And why did she have to be so close?
‘I’ll never forget it,’ she was saying. ‘He came out of the vestry and I was dangling her from her ankles, the way he used to do to me, and she was screaming and screaming and I could see him shouting at me, yelling at me to stop. He started running forward and I let her go, just like that.’
The smell of the woman was almost worse than the heat: alcohol and perspiration and exotic flowers. Evi knew it was going to make her retch if she didn’t move. Hands down, push hard, ignore the pain; she had strong arms, it would work.