Aftermath, page 31
The flat, desolate landscape went on and on. How on earth could anybody live in such a remote and backward spot? Jenny wondered. She saw the sign pointing east—ALDERTHORPE 1/2 MILE—and set off down the narrow unpaved track hoping to hell there was no one coming the other way. Still, the landscape was so open—hardly a tree in sight—that she could easily see someone coming from a long way away.
The half-mile seemed to go on forever, as short distances often do on country roads. Then she saw a huddle of houses ahead, and she could smell the sea through her open window, though she couldn’t see it yet. When she found herself turning left on to a paved street with bungalows on one side and rows of redbrick terrace houses on the other, she realized this must be Alderthorpe. She saw a small post office-cum–general store with a rack of newspapers fluttering in the breeze, a greengrocer’s and a butcher’s, a squat gospel hall and a mean-looking pub called the Lord Nelson, and that was it.
Jenny pulled up behind a blue Citroën outside the post office and when she got out of the car she thought she could see curtains twitching over the road, feel curious eyes on her back as she opened the post-office door. No one comes here, she imagined the people thinking. What could she possibly want? Jenny felt as if she had walked into one of those lost-village stories, the place that time forgot, and she had the illogical sense that by walking into it she was lost too, and all memory of her in the real world was gone. Silly fool, she told herself, but she shivered, and it wasn’t cold.
The bell pinged above her head, and she found herself in the kind of shop that she guessed had ceased to exist even before she was born, where jars of barley sugar rubbed shoulders with shoelaces and patent medicines on high shelves, and birthday cards stood on a rack next to the half-inch nails and tins of evaporated milk. It smelled both musty and fruity—pear drops, Jenny thought—and the light that filtered in from the street was dim and cast strips of shadow on the sales counter. There was a small post-office wicket, and the woman standing there in a threadbare brown coat turned and stared at Jenny when she entered. The postmistress herself peered around her customer and adjusted her glasses. They had clearly been having a good natter and were none too thrilled at being interrupted.
“Can I help you?” the postmistress asked.
“I wondered if you could tell me where the old Murray and Godwin houses are,” Jenny asked.
“Why would you be wanting to know that?”
“It’s to do with a job I’m doing.”
“Newspaper reporter, are you?”
“As a matter of fact, no. I’m a forensic psychologist.”
This stopped the woman in her tracks. “It’s Spurn Lane you want. Just over the street and down the lane to the sea. Last two semis. You can’t miss them. Nobody’s lived there for years.”
“Do you know if any of the children still live around here?”
“I’ve not seen hide nor hair of any of ’em since it happened.”
“What about the teacher, Maureen Nesbitt?”
“Lives in Easington. There’s no school here.”
“Thank you very much.”
As she left, she heard the customer whisper, “Forensic psychologist? Whatever’s that when it’s at home?”
“Sightseer,” muttered the postmistress. “Ghoul, just like all the rest. Anyway, you were saying about Mary Wallace’s husband . . .”
Jenny wondered how they would react when the media descended en masse, which they surely would do before long. It’s not often a place such as Alderthorpe sees fame more than once in a lifetime.
She crossed the High Street, still feeling as if she were being watched, and found the unpaved lane that led east to the North Sea. Though there was a chill in the wind, the cloudless sky was such a bright piercing blue that she put on her sunglasses, remembering with a flutter of anger the day she bought them on Santa Monica Pier, with Randy, the two-timing bastard.
There were about five or six bungalows on each side of Spurn Lane near the High Street, but about fifty yards along, there was only rough ground. Jenny could see two dirty brick semis another fifty yards beyond that. They were certainly isolated from the village, which itself was isolated enough to begin with. She imagined that once the reporters and the television cameras had gone ten years ago, the silence and loneliness and sense of grief must have been devastating for the community, the questions and accusations screaming out loud in the air. Even the residents around The Hill, part of a suburb of a large, modern city, would be struggling to understand what had happened there for years, and many of the residents would need counseling. Jenny could only imagine what Alderthorpe folk probably thought of counseling.
As she approached the houses, she became more and more aware of the salt smell of the sea breeze and realized that it was out there, only yards away beyond the low dunes and marram grass. Villages along this coast had disappeared into the sea, Jenny had read; the sandy coastline was always shifting, and maybe in ten or twenty years’ time Alderthorpe would have vanished underwater, too. It was a spooky thought.
The houses were beyond repair. The roofs had caved in and the broken windows and doors were boarded up. Here and there, people had spray-painted graffiti: ROT IN HELL, BRING BACK HANGING and the simple, touching, KATHLEEN: WE WILL NOT FORGET. Jenny found herself oddly moved as she stood there playing the voyeur.
The gardens were overgrown with weeds and shrubs, but she could make her way through the tangled undergrowth closer to the buildings. There wasn’t much to see, and the doors had been so securely boarded up that she couldn’t get inside even if she wanted to. In there, she told herself, Lucy Payne and six other children had been terrorized, raped, humiliated, tormented and tortured for God knew how many years before the death of one of them—Kathleen Murray—led the authorities to the door. Now the place was just a silent ruin. Jenny felt like a bit of a fraud standing there, the way she had in the cellar of The Hill. What could she possibly do or say to make sense of the horrors that had occurred here? Her science, like all the rest, was inadequate.
Even so, she stood there for some time, then she walked around the buildings, noting that the back gardens were even more overgrown than the front. An empty clothesline hung suspended between two rusty poles in one of the gardens.
As she was leaving, Jenny almost tripped over something in the undergrowth. At first she thought it was a root, but when she bent down and pulled aside the leaves and twigs, she saw a small teddy bear. It looked so disheveled it could have been out there for years, could even have belonged to one of the Alderthorpe Seven, though Jenny doubted it. The police or the social services would have taken everything like that away, so it had probably been left as a sort of tribute later by a local child. When she picked it up it felt soggy, and a beetle crawled out from a rip in its back on to her hand. Jenny let out a sharp gasp, dropped the teddy bear and headed quickly back to the village. She had intended to knock on a few doors and ask about the Godwins and the Murrays, but Alderthorpe had spooked her so much that she decided instead to head for Easington to talk to Maureen Nesbitt.
“Right, Lucy. Shall we start?”
Banks had turned on the tape recorders and tested them. This time they were in a slightly bigger and more salubrious interview room. In addition to Lucy and Julia Ford, Banks had invited DC Jackman along too, though it wasn’t her case, mostly to get her impressions of Lucy afterward.
“I suppose so,” Lucy said in a resigned, sulky voice. She looked tired and shaken by her night in the cell, Banks thought, even though the cells were the most modern part of the station. The duty officer said she’d asked to have the light left on all night, so she couldn’t have slept much.
“I hope you were comfortable last night,” he asked.
“What do you care?”
“It’s not my intention to cause you discomfort, Lucy.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.”
Julia Ford tapped her watch. “Can we get on with this, Superintendent Banks?”
Banks paused, then looked at Lucy. “Let’s talk a bit more about your background, shall we?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” Julia Ford butted in.
“If you’ll allow me to ask my questions, you might find out.”
“If it distresses my client—”
“Distresses your client! The parents of five young girls are more than distressed.”
“That’s irrelevant,” said Julia. “It’s nothing to do with Lucy.”
Banks ignored the lawyer and turned back to Lucy, who seemed disinterested by the discussion. “Will you describe the cellar at Alderthorpe for me, Lucy?”
“The cellar?”
“Yes. Don’t you remember it?”
“It was just a cellar,” Lucy said. “Dark and cold.”
“Was there anything else down there?”
“I don’t know. What?”
“Black candles, incense, a pentagram, robes. Wasn’t there a lot of dancing and chanting down there, Lucy?”
Lucy closed her eyes. “I don’t remember. That wasn’t me. That was Linda.”
“Oh, come on, Lucy. You can do better than that. Why is it that whenever we come to something you don’t want to talk about, you always conveniently lose your memory?”
“Superintendent,” Julia Ford said. “Remember my client has suffered retrograde amnesia due to post-traumatic shock.”
“Yes, yes, I remember. Impressive words.” Banks turned back to Lucy. “You don’t remember going into the cellar at The Hill, and you don’t remember the dancing and chanting in the cellar at Alderthorpe. Do you remember the cage?”
Lucy seemed to draw in on herself.
“Do you?” Banks persisted. “The old Morrison shelter.”
“I remember it,” Lucy whispered. “It was where they put us when we were bad.”
“How were you bad, Lucy?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Why were you in the cage when the police came? You and Tom. What had you done to get yourselves put there?”
“I don’t know. It was never much. You never had to do much. If you didn’t clean your plate—not that there was ever much on it to clean—or if you talked back or said no when they . . . when they wanted to . . . It was easy to get locked in the cage.”
“Do you remember Kathleen Murray?”
“I remember Kathleen. She was my cousin.”
“What happened to her?”
“They killed her.”
“Who did?”
“The grown-ups.”
“Why did they kill her?”
“I don’t know. They just . . . she just died . . .”
“They said your brother Tom killed her.”
“That’s ridiculous. Tom wouldn’t kill anybody. Tom’s gentle.”
“Do you remember how it happened?”
“I wasn’t there. Just one day they told us Kathleen had gone away and she wouldn’t be coming back. I knew she was dead.”
“How did you know?”
“I just knew. She cried all the time, she said she was going to tell. They always said they’d kill any of us if they thought we were going to tell.”
“Kathleen was strangled, Lucy.”
“Was she?”
“Yes. Just like the girls we found in your cellar. Ligature strangulation. Remember, those yellow fibers we found under you fingernails, along with Kimberley’s blood.”
“Where are you going with this, Superintendent?” Julia Ford asked.
“There are a lot of similarities between the crimes. That’s all.”
“But surely the killers of Kathleen Murray are behind bars?” Julia argued. “It’s got nothing to do with Lucy.”
“She was involved.”
“She was a victim.”
“Always the victim, eh, Lucy? The victim with the bad memory. How does it feel?”
“That’s enough,” said Julia.
“It feels awful,” Lucy said in a small voice.
“What?”
“You asked how it feels, to be a victim with a bad memory. It feels awful. It feels like I have no self, like I’m lost, I have no control, like I don’t count. I can’t even remember the bad things that happened to me.”
“Let me ask you once more, Lucy: Did you ever help your husband to abduct a young girl?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Did you ever harm any of the girls he brought home?”
“I never knew about them, not until last week.”
“Why did you get up and go down in the cellar on that particular night? Why not on any of the previous occasions when your husband was entertaining a young girl in the cellar of your house?”
“I never heard anything before. He must have drugged me.”
“We found no sleeping tablets in our search of the house, nor do either of you have a prescription for any.”
“He must have got them illegally. He must have run out. That’s why I woke up.”
“Where would he get them?”
“School. There’s all sorts of drugs in schools.”
“Lucy, did you know that your husband was a rapist when you met him?”
“Did I . . . what?”
“You heard me.” Banks opened the file in front of him. “By our count he had already raped four women we know of before he met you at that pub in Seacroft. Terence Payne was the Seacroft Rapist. His DNA matches that left in the victims.”
“I—I—”
“You don’t know what to say?”
“No.”
“How did you meet him, Lucy? None of your friends remember seeing you talk to him in the pub that night.”
“I told you. I was on my way out. It was a big pub, with lots of rooms. We went into another bar.”
“Why should you be any different, Lucy?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean, why didn’t he follow you out into the street and rape you like he did with the others?”
“I don’t know. How should I know?”
“You’ve got to admit it’s strange, though, isn’t it?”
“I told you, I don’t know. He liked me. Loved me.”
“Yet he still continued to rape other young women after he’d met you.” Banks consulted his file again. “At least two more times, according to our account. And they’re only the ones who reported it. Some women don’t report it, you know. Too upset or too ashamed. See, they blame themselves.” Banks thought of Annie Cabbot, and what she’d been through over two years ago.
“What’s that got to do with me?”
“Why didn’t he rape you?”
Lucy gave him an unfathomable look. “Maybe he did.”
“Don’t be absurd. No woman likes being raped, and she’s certainly not going to marry her rapist.”
“You’d be surprised what you can get used to if you’ve got no choice.”
“What do you mean, no choice?”
“What I say.”
“It was your choice to marry Terry, wasn’t it? Nobody forced you to.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Then what do you mean?”
“Never mind.”
“Come on.”
“Never mind.”
Banks shuffled his papers. “What was it, Lucy? Did he tell you about what he’d done? Did it excite you? Did he recognize a kindred spirit? Your Hindley to his Brady?”
Julia Ford shot to her feet. “That’s enough, Superintendent. One more remark like that and this interview’s over and I’ll be reporting you.”
Banks ran his hand over his closely cropped hair. It felt spiky.
Winsome picked up the questioning. “Did he rape you, Lucy?” she asked, in her lilting Jamaican accent. “Did your husband rape you?”
Lucy turned to look at Winsome and seemed to Banks to be calculating how to deal with this new factor in the equation.
“Of course not. I would never have married a rapist.”
“So you didn’t know about him?”
“Of course I didn’t.”
“Didn’t you find anything odd about Terry? I mean, I never knew him, but it sounds to me as if there’s enough there to give a person cause for concern.”
“He could be very charming.”
“Did he do or say nothing to make you suspicious in all the time you were together?”
“No.”
“But, somehow, you ended up married to a man who was not only a rapist but also an abductor and murderer of young girls. How can you explain that, Lucy? You’ve got to admit it’s highly unusual, hard to believe.”
“I can’t help that. And I can’t explain it. That’s just how it happened.”
“Did he like to play games, sexual games?”
“Like what?”
“Did he like tying you up? Did he like to pretend he was raping you?”
“We didn’t do anything like that.”
Winsome gave Banks a signal to take over again, and her look mirrored his feelings; they were getting nowhere, and Lucy Payne was probably lying.
“Where’s the camcorder?” Banks asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We found evidence in the cellar. A camcorder had been set up at the end of the bed. I think you liked to video what you were doing to the girls.”
“I didn’t do anything to them. I’ve told you, I didn’t go down there, except maybe the once. I know nothing about any camcorder.”
