The young woman shuddered suddenly, hugging her arms around herself as if against the cold. ‘That bloody pendant,’ she said, and began to sob, big tears running down her cheeks.
‘Stop it!’ her mother said sharply.‘Don’t say another word.’
‘You got it from Dee-Ann’s neck.You pulled it off so hard it left a small lesion.’
‘Yes.’ Magdalen bowed her head, her whole body rocking back and forth.‘Yes,yes,yes.’
Adonia turned on Kathy.‘Get out! Get out this minute!’
‘Vexx phoned Magdalen that night,’ Kathy said.‘I’ve traced the call. And there are CCTV pictures.’
Adonia fell silent, staring in horror at Kathy.
And there would be other evidence,Kathy guessed.It had been so cold the night the girls died, and Magdalen would have worn gloves, which now would carry microscopic traces of barium, lead and antimony from the firing of Brown Bread.
‘I asked Teddy Vexx to find out who’d hurt Mum and stolen her pendant.’ Magdalen spoke in a gulping rush, as if wanting to bring up something unpleasant she’d swallowed. ‘The pendant that meant so much to her.’ She gave a bitter shake of her head. ‘He phoned me late Thursday night to say he and Jay had found them. I drove to the place they said, next to the school on Cockpit Lane. I took a gun I got from Grandpa’s cabinet. I didn’t even know if it was loaded, but I wanted to frighten them. I was very angry at what they’d done to Mum. I wanted to scare them to death. Teddy and Vexx had them on their knees. I was shocked when I saw they were girls, but still . . .’
Adonia moved to her daughter’s side and put an arm around her. It was the same protective gesture that Magdalen had made to comfort her mother, Kathy remembered, that first time she had spoken to them in this room.‘That’s enough, darling,’ Adonia said, but Magdalen continued.
‘Teddy had found Mum’s bag there in the squat, but not the pendant, and the girls refused to say where it was. I screamed at them, but they just sort of laughed, even when Teddy smacked them. So I took out the gun. I had no idea how to cock it and Teddy had to show me what to do. I pointed it to the head of the bigger one. My hand was shaking. But she wouldn’t tell me where it was.’ Magdalen stared at Kathy as if she still couldn’t quite believe it.‘They didn’t care, you see. They really didn’t care what I did. My finger pressed on the trigger, and then suddenly there was this huge bang and the girl fell over. The other one started screaming, and Teddy took the gun out of my hand.He said he’d have to finish her off too. It was only later that he found the pendant under the scarf around her neck, and he pulled it off for me.’
‘Did you tell Ivor?’
‘Teddy did. He said he’d contact Da-Ivor the next day and explain what had happened.He said I had to get rid of the gun,and told me a place in Deptford, on the way home, to throw it in the river. But I was so shaken up I forgot, and when I got home I hid it in my cupboard. The next day Ivor went berserk when he heard from Teddy. I was scared and told him I’d got rid of the gun, and he calmed down a bit. Then you started digging up the bodies on the railway land and he started on at me again.I didn’t understand why. Later he told me I had to do that stuff with Tom to put things right. That’s the truth.’
Kathy didn’t doubt it. It had always seemed so implausible for Ivor or his brothers to have risked so much, at that stage in their negotiations with the authorities, by becoming involved in the girls’murders,far less to have failed afterwards to dispose of the gun and then to have left it lying around where Adonia could find it.
‘You knew all this, Adonia?’ Kathy asked.
The woman nodded. ‘I heard Ivor shouting at Magdalen the day after it happened. Of course, I didn’t understand all the implications that he saw. It was a judgement on him, a judgement on us all . . . But it was an accident, what Magdalen did.You heard her …’
Magdalen had turned into her mother’s arms. ‘I can’t think any more,’she mumbled.‘I just want to sleep.’
‘You will,’Kathy said.‘It’ll be much easier when all this is out in the open.’
It was the only lie she’d told that evening, Kathy thought. They sat there in silence for a while, the three of them under the chandelier, weighed down by the burden that the past had placed on them. Finally, Kathy roused herself. She cautioned Magdalen and led the two women out to her car.