‘And Magda Hollingsworth had called as well. She knew about the rumours that the child had been killed. She’d put it in her diary and my guess is she was going to tell the police, to clear her conscience before she left the Ferry. And if they’d interviewed Kathryn she’d have told them the truth, that you and Walter had helped her kill the baby – to kill Jude.’
Neate stood, staggering to the blown-out window and looking out over the village.
‘Magda,’ he said, spitting the word out. ‘We told her to go, to keep out of other people’s lives, told her she didn’t belong, that she’d never belonged. An outsider. A gyppo. A fucking pikey. She didn’t like that, didn’t like it one bit. Coming round sticking her nose in our business. We told her to go – she wouldn’t be missed. She cried.’ He laughed at the memory. ‘Said she wanted to do right by the baby, said it over and over again. The police tracked me down after she went missing – they’d seen the diary and worked out it must be about Kathryn. I told them the truth – so did George – that we turfed her out and that was that.’
Suddenly blood trickled in a stream from the wound. He raised a hand but it had reached his eye, so he sank to his knees, cradling his skull.
‘I found Kathryn on the towpath.’ His voice thick with the phlegm and blood in his throat.
‘We’d started searching when she didn’t come back from Tholy’s cottage. I took a knife, I knew there’d be trouble. She was sat on the bank, the bruises on her neck black in the moonlight. So I asked her who’d done it and she said it was Tholy. Another lie.’
‘So it was a perfect opportunity to kill her,’ said Dryden, knowing time was running out. ‘But she had to die with Peter’s hands round her neck, not from the knife. That’s why you hid the truth about her wound. What you didn’t know was that it wasn’t Tholy at all – but Jason Imber.’
Neate blinked, and Dryden thought he was trying not to see something, something which had haunted him for seventeen years.
‘She said I’d killed the child. That she’d been ill, depressed, and that we’d tricked her into it. She was going to tell – that she’d told Tholy already. It’s true I showed her the stuff, the poison, that it was quick.’
Dryden risked the accusation again. ‘So you killed her with the knife – and then led the mob to Tholy.’
‘And Jason Imber stood by and watched,’ he said, some spit showing white by the corner of his mouth. He touched the wound again. ‘He was waiting for me, in the garage. I was packing the stuff. I’d fought with Julie so she’d taken some pills and gone to sleep. He hit me with a wrench before I’d realized it was him. But I got hold of his hand, then his arm. I dragged him to the vehicle well and got a tyre chain round his legs. He said I’d killed Kathryn, and stolen his son’s bones. Said I’d stolen his life too, making him believe for all those years that he’d strangled the life out of her. He wanted to know why I did what I did. I told him, then I hit his head on the floor, against the concrete, hard until I heard the bone crack and then I poured petrol over him. It was a way out, the only one I could see – if the police found a body, burnt out, then they might not be sure it was me. I could have just faded away. So I lit it – but he wasn’t dead.’
Matter-of-fact, devoid of emotion.
‘He ran to the woods, blindly, and then he saw the water beyond the wire and tried to get to it. When I got there he’d stopped climbing and the body was still, so I let him burn.’
‘And then you cut the wire,’ said Dryden. ‘Where did you go?’
Neate’s hand returned to the wound on his head. ‘I took some food and clothes. There’s an old sheepfold out on the mere where we played as kids. I wanted this to heal, but it won’t.’ He dropped his hand and examined the blood on his palm.
Dryden nodded. ‘What you didn’t know was that he’d set light to the trees as he ran through, the fire spread to the bungalow.’
Dryden watched Neate’s eyes; a single blink, a slight jerk of the chin.
‘She’ll live,’ he said. ‘But no thanks to you.’
Neate looked out again. ‘Go, or you’ll die,’ he said, and Dryden knew then that he hadn’t told the whole truth, that he was going to let that perish with him on Telegraph Hill. ‘It might as well end here,’ said Neate, not turning away from the light.
Dryden dropped swiftly down the flights of stairs out into the now brilliant sunshine.
He stood for a second considering his options. A thick pall of smoke rose from the old factory, drifting low over the village towards the church. He ran west and then down the hill to The Dring, turning north along the old Whittlesea Road. When he got to the cattery where the Smith girl had worked he cut off the road into the open fields, finding a low ditch to take cover. Looking back he was in time to see a gout of black earth springing up from a spark of red flame just thirty feet from the old water tower, then came the percussion, the thud felt through the earth. The second shell found its mark, punching a hole beside one of the windows on the second floor and exploding within the room. The blast blew all the remaining windows out and smoke, like milk, filled the interior. The third shell fell into the roof and Dryden heard the unmistakable scream of steel being twisted out of shape, and the hiss of water falling down through the burning rooms below.
Wednesday, 1 August
41
They let the villagers back one last time to bury the bones of Kathryn Neate and her son Jude. Crowded into St Swithun’s they could hear the rain which still fell on the grey stones of the graveyard. At the lych-gate a gaggle of press photographers held a line set down by the police, shutters whirring. And over Whittlesea Mere a single tenor bell rang out sixteen times for Kathryn, once for her son, the ringers struggling with the rotten ropes and the falling dust in the bell chamber.
Inside, the villagers edged forward down the nave, past the rows of plastic seats, seeing in each other’s faces the joy and despair which had filled the years they’d been away from Jude’s Ferry, the years in which Peter Tholy’s bones had hung in the lightless cellar. Dryden sat on a stone bench by the ossuary watching them, Humph beside him, tiny hands held in a prayer over his stomach.
Matthew Smith and Paul Cobley stood together, pale beneath their summer tans, their shoulders close but never touching. Jan Cobley was with them, alone, trying to be proud of the son who had torn her family apart. Smith’s twin, Mark, stood with his wife on the other side of the nave, a lifetime apart from his brother, his eyes set on the remains of the stained-glass figure of St Swithun above the altar in the east window. And Ken Woodruffe held back, in the side aisle near the Peyton tomb, an uncertain hand pushing his thin hair over his skull, nodding to those who were prepared to acknowledge him.
And then the Reverend Fred Lake climbed the charred pulpit and looked down on the two coffins set on trestles in the nave, below the patched hole in the roof punched out by the stray artillery shell.
‘Let us pray,’ he said, and what was left of Jude’s Ferry fell to its knees.
Dryden, suddenly suffocated by a sense of being too close to a past he no longer wished to share, slipped out through the warped oak doors into the rain. The press had retreated beneath a sycamore where they huddled under umbrellas, waiting for the service to end. Laughter, barely suppressed, rippled through the group. Dryden recognized faces, a few from his Fleet Street past, and felt uneasy again, finding himself part of the story. The gruesome death of Jason Imber on the perimeter wire of the range, the identification of the bones of Kathryn Neate and the suicide of her brother had been enough to bring the Fleet Street pack to Whittlesea Mere; they had a few facts, but as yet no story to link them all together.