No Escape (27 page)

‘Yesterday morning,’ Novak answered.

‘Why then?’

‘Because my client wanted to get in touch with Mrs Patston, and she didn’t seem to be home.’ Novak paused. ‘Because he was concerned about her.’

‘And the child?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you reported this alleged violence to anyone?’ Reed asked.

‘Not yet.’

‘Has your client—’ Reed glanced at his notes ‘—Mr Allbeury – reported it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Novak said. ‘It might all have been nothing.’

‘That doesn’t seem very likely now, does it?’ Reed said.

Novak didn’t answer, picturing Joanne Patston again.

‘Who brought this allegation of violence to your client’s attention, Mr Novak?’

‘I don’t know,’ Novak said, conscious that it was the first outright lie he’d told.

‘Are you sure about that, Mr Novak?’ Reed asked.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

‘How are you doing?’

Jim Keenan, having been called out of the living room by Karen Dean to report a call from DS Reed, had gone back in to see that Patston had gone out into the garden, so, feeling it an
appropriate moment for a break in the questioning, he’d come into the kitchen where Sandra Finch was sitting at the table.

The window, he saw, overlooked the small garden, the light from within cast right across it so that even in the dusk, in the unlikely event that Patston tried to leg it over the back fence, he
or Dean would certainly notice.

‘I know what a foolish question that is, Mrs Finch,’ he said, with sincerity. ‘I don’t think any of us ever learns the right things to say at a time like this.’

‘It can’t be easy,’ Sandra said, kindly.

She was very pale, but quite composed. It wasn’t real composure, of course, Keenan knew that. It was in place partly because the truth had probably not yet fully penetrated, but mostly, he
thought, because of the child.

‘When you feel,’ he ventured carefully, ‘the time has come to tell Irina about her mother, and if you need a little support, I know Karen – DC Dean – might be a
good person to have around.’

Karen Dean left the kettle she’d been filling, came closer to the table. ‘I won’t intrude, Mrs Finch,’ she said, ‘unless you want me to.’

‘Sandra,’ the bereaved woman said. ‘If you don’t mind.’

‘Not at all,’ Dean said.

‘Do you mind if I sit down?’ Keenan asked. ‘Talk for a bit?’

‘Why would I mind?’ Sandra said. ‘I want to help, don’t I?’

Keenan glanced towards the ceiling. ‘Is Irina a good sleeper?’

‘I’m not sure,’ the grandmother answered. ‘Usually, I think.’

‘She’s a very beautiful little girl,’ Keenan said.

The woman smiled, tears springing into her eyes. ‘She was adopted, you know. When she was three months old. She was an orphan, from Romania.’

‘Irina,’ Keenan said, understanding the exotic name and almost black eyes.

‘What a wonderful thing to do,’ Karen Dean said.

Sandra nodded, struggled against tears, failed, and pressed an already sodden tissue to her eyes. ‘Joanne waited such a long time to have Irina,’ she said after a moment, wiping her
face, then clenching the tissue in her right fist. ‘She was desperate to have a baby, but they couldn’t.’

‘Adoption’s a big decision for most couples,’ Keenan said. ‘I know it can be tough for some dads, bringing up another man’s child.’

Karen Dean strolled back towards the kettle, closer to the window.

‘I wouldn’t say my—’ Sandra stopped.

‘What wouldn’t you say, Mrs Finch?’ Keenan asked benignly.

Her voice was lower. ‘I was going to say that I never thought of my son-in-law as a very paternal man, but he was completely behind Joanne about the adoption.’ She shook her head,
remembering. ‘They saw one of those programmes about the orphans over there, you know, and after that, it was all they wanted to do.’

‘Can’t have been easy.’ Dean dropped tea bags into the blue and white pot.

‘It wasn’t,’ Sandra said. ‘Joanne wouldn’t talk about it much – she was superstitious, afraid if she said too much it wouldn’t happen – but she
was always telling me how Tony just wouldn’t give up.’ She paused. ‘Four and a half years since they brought Irina home.’ Her voice caught. ‘It made Joanne so happy
– she was such a wonderful mother.’

For the first time, she broke down, her sobs deep and bereft, her face in her hands, as Patston’s had been earlier, shoulders heaving.

From upstairs, as if her grandmother’s pain might have woken her, they heard the sound of Irina crying too.

Sandra lifted her head, got quickly to her feet, tugged a couple of tissues from the box on the table and dried her eyes. ‘I’d better go to her.’ She blew her nose, went across
to throw them into the pedal bin and saw Tony outside, kicking disconsolately at a grass verge. ‘He gets very upset when Irina cries.’

‘Really?’ Keenan asked. ‘All children cry, after all.’

‘Of course.’ Sandra paused to listen, but there was no sound now from above. ‘Joanne never said much about it, but it was obvious all the same because she was always making
sure Irina wasn’t left to cry for more than a minute. She was always giving her an extra bottle when she was little, or picking her up when it might have been fine to leave her for just a
bit, you know?’

‘Does Tony get angry when she cries?’ Keenan asked, casually.

‘I don’t know about angry,’ Sandra said, awkward suddenly. ‘I’d better go up.’

‘You mustn’t worry,’ Keenan said, ‘about saying the wrong thing.’

‘I’m not,’ Sandra said, still uncomfortable.

‘All that matters now,’ Keenan pressed on, ‘is telling us anything at all that might help us find out what happened to Joanne, and why.’

Sandra Finch’s face visibly changed, went even paler, her eyes widening in new shock. ‘You’re surely not suggesting that Tony . . .’

‘No one’s suggesting anything, Mrs Finch. These are just routine questions, to help us get to the bottom—’

‘How can you use words like that?’ Sandra exclaimed. ‘My daughter – that little girl’s mother—’ she glanced up at the ceiling ‘—has just
been
murdered.
How can anything be
routine
?’

Clare was already up on her feet as Novak came through the door of their flat shortly after seven, and he saw instantly from her face that she knew.

‘Robin told me,’ she said. ‘He phoned to give me your message, and I could hear from his voice that something was wrong.’

‘I wanted to be the one to tell you,’ Novak said.

‘He tried not to tell me, but I got it out of him.’

‘You’re good at that.’ Novak went to put his arms around her.

‘Poor woman.’ She burst into tears. ‘And that
poor
little girl.’

‘She’ll be okay,’ Novak said, knowing that was a lie.

‘But she’s not
safe
.’ Clare’s voice was muffled against his jacket. ‘Not while she’s living with that monster.’

‘The grandmother’s been looking after her,’ Novak said soothingly, ‘so it stands to reason she’ll probably move in with Patston now.’ He drew back, looked
into his wife’s face. ‘And after what I just told one rather sharp DS, it’s pretty likely they’ll be looking at Tony Patston very hard indeed.’

‘What did you say?’ Clare wiped her eyes.

‘Just enough.’ Novak fished in his pocket for a handkerchief, dabbed at her face, then handed it to her. ‘I didn’t mention you or Maureen or the hospital. But I did say
that Joanne had been very unhappy, and that there was a suspicion that Patston had been violent against the child.’

‘Good.’ Clare blew her nose. ‘If it weren’t for Maureen, I’d go to the police myself, this minute.’

‘No need, sweetheart,’ Novak said. ‘They’ll get there without you.’

Both Tony Patston and Sandra Finch had been fingerprinted, and Tony had elected to give a hair rather than a mouth swab for DNA – all strictly for purposes of
elimination, Keenan had assured them. But after that, the awareness that just a few miles away a police team was searching his own house began to weigh on Patston heavily.

‘I want to go home,’ he said to Keenan in the kitchen while Sandra was upstairs checking on Irina. ‘Isn’t this all terrible enough without being made to stay away while
strangers make Christ knows what kind of a mess in my house?’

‘I can assure you—’ Keenan remained gentle ‘—that no one will be treating your property with anything but respect. As I’ve told you, it’s all simply
part of the routine.’

‘It’s routine to suspect husbands, isn’t it?’ Tony said. ‘You always read it, don’t you, but it’s different when it happens to you.’

‘It’s true to say that in all such cases, it’s normal procedure to try to rule out close relatives and colleagues.’

‘Jo didn’t have any colleagues,’ Tony said. ‘And you wouldn’t think her mum killed her, so that’s just me left, isn’t it?’ He began to weep again.
‘Oh, God,’ he said. ‘Oh, my God, this is
unbelievable.
I’ve just lost my wife, and instead of leaving me in peace so I can grieve, I have to put up with this
shit
.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Patston,’ Keenan said, immovably. ‘I can assure you that the last thing we want to do is harass an innocent man who’s—’

‘But you don’t think I’m innocent,’ Tony interrupted, distraught, ‘do you?’

‘Why don’t you sit down for a bit?’ Keenan suggested. ‘Have a cup of tea.’

Tony sank down onto one of the kitchen chairs and stared up at the detective inspector. ‘You think I did it, don’t you? You think I killed my own
wife
.’

Shortly after eight-thirty on Wednesday morning, as Helen Shipley was eating a doughnut at her desk prior to seeing Trevor Kirby before he left for a meeting in Victoria, Geoff
Gregory came into her office.

‘I’ve just heard something that might interest you.’

Mouth still full, Shipley licked sugar off her fingers and raised her eyebrows in response.

‘About the Epping Forest murder,’ Gregory said.

‘What about it?’

‘Word is they’re looking hard at the husband, but—’

‘But what?’

‘But another bloke got hauled into Theydon Bois yesterday for keeping watch on the victim’s house.’

‘For God’s sake, Geoff.’

‘Private investigator,’ Gregory said. ‘Name of Novak.’

‘Jesus,’ Shipley said.

In the blue study at the eastern end of Allbeury’s apartment, sitting in one of the plush black leather armchairs, Novak decided that he’d never seen the lawyer
look as grim as he did now.

‘I know it was my fault for getting myself picked up,’ Novak said, ‘but Clare’s really wound up about the little girl now her mother’s gone, and—’

‘You’d like her kept out,’ Allbeury finished for him.

‘Obviously, I want to help them nail the scum who did this, whether it’s the husband or not, but all Clare did was pass on some information, and—’

‘I get the picture, Mike,’ Allbeury cut in again. ‘And I can’t see any good being served by involving either Clare or her friend, and the police are already checking
Irina’s hospital records as we speak, so . . .’ He picked up a gold pen, rolled it between his fingers. ‘The only shred of good news in this bloody awful mess is that at least now
they know the child’s at risk, they’re bound to bring Patston in quite quickly.’

‘What if it isn’t him?’ Novak said. ‘What if his violence against Irina’s a red herring, and because of what I said, the police don’t bother looking for
anyone else?’

‘They’re not fools, Mike,’ Allbeury said. ‘You know that better than most.’

‘They’re human,’ Novak said. ‘They like results.’

‘With a bit of luck,’ the solicitor said, ‘Patston will break down and confess.’

Novak looked morose and said nothing.

‘Anyway,’ Allbeury added, ‘probably not the world’s greatest injustice if they do set their sights for a while on a man who hits his four-year-old daughter.’ He
stood up, went over to the picture window behind the granite desk, gazed out at the river. ‘To be honest, I’ve my own reasons for hoping they prove Patston’s their man, and
swiftly. I don’t want or need too many questions about how I might have been planning to help Joanne.’

‘My damned fault if they do ask questions.’ Novak was bleak.

‘You weren’t to know you’d parked your car slap bang in the middle of a murder enquiry.’ Allbeury turned back, sat down again. ‘It’s not just me, Mike. There
are others involved in these operations.’

‘I appreciate that,’ Novak said.

‘I’m not telling you what to say if MIS comes knocking – it’s your choice – but I can tell you that if they come to me, I’ll be keeping it simple. When I met
Joanne, she was unsure of what to do, scared of divorce, and, as you said, I was concerned not to be able to reach her and asked you to take a look.’