Twisted (52 page)

‘Well everything sounds in order, but of course we would need to see Mr Fulford’s will.’

‘Certainly, the original is still with my solicitors and I know he had a copy,’ Lena said, thinking it highly unlikely Marcus would have made another will since they separated.

‘Let me just get the file out so I can have a quick look at the exact clauses.’

A few seconds later the clerk came back on the phone and said he’d found the file.

‘So with Marcus being deceased, and his will leaving everything to me, then I should be the natural beneficiary of Marcus’s bequest from Mr Boatly?’ Lena said.

‘Unfortunately that doesn’t appear to be the case as—’

‘What do you mean, unfortunately—?’

‘Please let me finish, Mrs Fulford. Mr Boatly stipulated a clause that Marcus had to be divorced to receive the money, therefore his bequest in the will is null and void. I am very sorry and please accept my sincere condolences at the loss of your husband and daughter.’

She slammed the receiver down and muttered angrily, ‘Fuck you, FUCK YOU!’

Lena took stock for a few moments but then began to wonder if she could contest the will on the grounds that she and Marcus had been about to be divorced. She went to the guest-room wardrobe and took out Marcus’s holdall, unzipping it to find it was full of papers and letters, old files and tax returns. She tipped everything onto the floor and began to search for the copy of his will, but instead of being able to concentrate on the job at hand she began to feel a terrible all-consuming weight of sadness. It was truly a pitiful array of his belongings. There were bundles of letters tied with elastic bands, some so old they were worn and torn and she sat on the floor opening one after another. Love letters from her to Marcus when they had first met, and letters from Amy to him, along with postcards and birthday cards, and numerous florid letters of adoration for Marcus from Simon Boatly. She knew more than ever now that Simon Boatly had always been trying to persuade Marcus to leave her. The letters to Marcus from Amy in her familiar looped childish handwriting made her break down in tears. Sweet, loving letters explaining how much she missed him, and some proudly describing her exam results.

Lena carried all the letters in a small plastic container into the garden, crossing the small path that led to the garage across the flagged paving stones towards the rear of the walled garden. She hopped from one paving stone to another as if playing a child’s game of hopscotch. The fir trees and the dense bushes hid the section of the garden that had once been a Victorian vegetable patch, where the old greenhouses, once used to cultivate lettuce and tender vegetables, still stood, although most of the glass panes were broken, and the interiors overrun with weeds and ferns. One part of the ground was blackened from the gardeners burning rubbish and the dark damp ground beside it nurtured the growing bed of mushrooms.

Chapter 37

D
I Reid was in the canteen having breakfast when DC Timothy Wey joined him.

‘I’ve just taken details for a new misper case, guv. Young lass in care that’s run away again. Work’s a bit slow now we are all off the Amy Fulford investigation.’

‘We were only ever temporary staff,’ Reid said. He loathed discussing the investigation, so said nothing to encourage Wey, who continued regardless between mouthfuls of toast and marmalade.

‘I know Marcus Fulford was a bit of a jack-the-lad with the hookers and girlfriends, but he seemed like a genuine bloke and was really cut up about his daughter going missing. If he was guilty, okay, he was a bloody deviant, but also one hell of an actor, because I would never have put him in the frame.’

‘It’s over and done with, Takeaway, so let it rest,’ Reid said, draining his coffee and eager to leave it there.

‘Well it won’t be until they find her body. If he did kill her then her whereabouts have gone to the grave with him.’

Reid made his excuses to get back to his desk, but the mention of the Fulford investigation made him unsettled all morning. At lunchtime, not wanting to get into any further discussions on the case, he decided to go out for a breath of fresh air. He bought a Starbucks Americano and a chicken wrap before heading down past Twickenham Bridge and took a leisurely stroll along the towpath. He was sitting on a bench watching some rowers go by and the youngsters feeding ducks with their parents when he saw Deirdre Standing walking along the towpath. She looked well and was wearing a pink cardigan and pretty floral summer dress.

‘Hey there, how are you?’ she asked, having spotted him too.

‘Fine and you?’ He thought she looked more relaxed than when they had last seen each other.

‘I have taken a sabbatical from Victim Support. After the pressures of the Fulford case I’m not sure it’s the right work for me, and besides I wanted to spend more time with my girls.’

‘I think it affected all of us in one way or another,’ he said as he sipped at his coffee.

She asked if he had heard how Lena Fulford was, and he said that he had only spoken to her once and she seemed to want to get on with her life in her own way.

‘What about Miss Jordan?’

‘Not spoken to her.’

‘I didn’t like her very much.’

Reid smiled. ‘She was the one who suggested I take Amy’s journal to Professor Cornwall. She’s quite formidable, always goes on about patient confidentiality, yet still says things she shouldn’t.’

‘Yes, she did with me as well,’ Deirdre agreed, smiling ruefully, ‘and I thought it unprofessional when she told me things about Mrs Fulford. Once she started she couldn’t stop talking – patient confidentiality went right out the window – but I have to admit it helped me to understand some of Lena’s behaviour.’

Reid was paying more attention to the children who were now backing off from a hissing swan. While he didn’t want to appear rude, he definitely didn’t want to get drawn into going over old ground. ‘Well you did a good job under difficult circumstances and I for one appreciated your help. Anyway, I’d best be getting on.’ Easing himself to his feet he placed his empty coffee cup in the bin next to the bench.

‘Life must have been much more difficult for Lena, having been abused for all those years,’ Deirdre observed.

‘Well Marcus Fulford was not a very pleasant man.’

‘No, I’m talking about her father. His face was scribbled over or blacked out with a felt tip pen in her old family photo albums.’

This was new and surprising to Reid. ‘Where were those albums? I never saw them.’

‘In the drawing room in one of the bookcases; they were near or next to a big book with lots of little tabs and notes in it.’ She paused for a second, thinking. ‘The book was called
The Encyclopaedia of Mushrooms
.’

At once he sat back down on the bench, blinking rapidly while absorbing the information and its importance to the investigation. ‘Did it belong to Mrs Fulford or to Amy?’

‘Oh, it was Lena’s, as it had a sticker in the front with her name and that of some kind of research project.’

A knot was tightening in his stomach, as he said it was good to see her and thanked her again for her work on the investigation.

‘Are you working on anything interesting at the moment?’ she asked.

‘No, I’m back running the mispers office now and the usual run-of-the-mill cases.’

‘It was very nice to see you, DI Reid.’

‘Nice to see you too.’

Reid returned to the station, buzzing with a sense of urgency. Back in his office he went over everything that Deirdre had told him, before driving over to the murder incident room, where he asked for the files on the Fulford case. It was shortly after three o’clock when he returned to his flat and began re-reading the copy of the journal.

At first he skimmed through it, often turning back one page or another. He jotted down notes, all the while becoming more and more aware that throughout the journal there was no reference to it being written by Amy. The word ‘enemies’ was frequently used, and the repeated listing of everyone intended to be ‘got rid of’ and their so-called crimes, but there was never an ‘I’ or ‘me’. It was always initials, and the constant changes of handwriting added to the confusion, where a different alter took over.

Reid thought back to the first time he’d learnt about the journal. Lena had clutched it to her chest and said that she was very reluctant to release it because the contents were very private, and she had even explained that some of the pages referred to herself and her husband and did not show either of them in a good light.

Clearly included in it were details of Marcus Fulford’s behaviour, his promiscuity and sexual perversions, his prostitutes and girlfriends. The murder team had also discovered his bisexuality and intimate friendship with Simon Boatly.

What was slowly beginning to surface in Reid’s mind was his suspicion that the journal was not written by Amy at all, but her mother. He recalled Lena showing him the birthday card and the wish list of gifts, the neat looped handwriting in the schoolbooks and diaries, but as far as he could see little of the handwriting in the journal matched the known samples of Amy’s. He wondered how much Lena had helped Amy learn to write when she was younger and whether this had in some way created a slight similarity, but he was also aware that different alters would write in different styles.

He knew it was going to be difficult to prove, and without being given any official clearance to investigate further he needed to uncover more evidence on his own. He had now established that Lena Fulford, through her University studies, would have knowledge of deadly mushrooms, but he needed more than the possession of the
Encyclopaedia
to implicate her and prove his theory that it was she herself who had written the journal – and been the one who had poisoned the victims.

All his previous unanswered questions that he had put aside now began to haunt him again, and above all he knew he needed to prove that Amy was of perfectly sound mind and therefore not the real author of the journal. He started to work out a list of people he needed to re-interview and one name he ringed as being of prime interest was Miss Josephine Polka.

By now it was after eleven and pointless to try and arrange anything, so he went to bed, determined that the following day he would, with or without permission, begin his own investigation. His present case could easily be handled by DS Lane or DC Wey.

He knew with dreadful certainty that if he was correct, then the enemies still alive – Agnes Moors, her daughter Natalie, Serena Newman and Miss Polka – would be in the most terrible danger.

Chapter 38

I
t was ten p.m. when her mobile rang and she was unable to tell the caller’s identity as it was withheld. When she answered she did not at first recognize the voice, but then immediately became fully alert.

‘I think we really need to have a private meeting as I have something I want to discuss with you.’

‘Who is this?’

‘It’s Mrs Fulford, Agnes.’

‘I am so pleased you have called, Mrs Fulford, as I have been bereft since I left and feeling really ashamed about what happened,’ Agnes gushed. ‘Mr Fulford’s death must have been heartbreaking for you to have to deal with.’

‘Yes, but I’m keeping myself busy,’ Lena said briskly. ‘I will be in Weybridge tomorrow at a big antiques fair at Sandown; there is a coffee stall not far from the entrance so we can meet there at three. I was wrong in the way I treated you and I want to make it up to you financially.’

Agnes agreed to the meeting and after shutting off the call, shed a few tears of relief. She was certain that she could get her old position back and a large sum of cash – it would be more than she could have hoped for, and she was determined she would make up for her betrayal.

Reid was at his desk by eight, and started the day by calling the school to enquire if they had a forwarding address or contact number for Miss Polka. The headmistress Miss Harrington gave him a mobile number but did not know where Miss Polka had moved to, though she had said she might go travelling abroad. The mobile phone number was no longer active. He contacted his friend Agent Morgan from the National Crime Agency to see if he could give him a heads-up on the whereabouts of a Josephine Polka. Morgan said he needed some more information but Reid told him that all he had was her date of birth, her description and that she might have left the UK any time since the date she finished teaching at the school.

Reid knew that if his theory was correct he would need a search warrant for Lena Fulford’s house. To get one, along with enough officers to carry out the search, he would have to confront DCI Jackson and explain his reasons. This all meant he desperately needed evidence, as everything was still without foundation and his suspicions alone were not enough.

He had arranged to meet Gail Summers at her two-bedroom Putney flat. She was still unemployed and deeply upset by the revelations about and accusations against Marcus Fulford.

‘As far as I’m concerned, Marcus was a marvellous and caring father. He adored Amy and would never have abused her either sexually or violently.’

‘Do you not feel he used you to get what he wanted . . . ?’

‘No, and I don’t deny I was underhand in providing him with Lena’s financial situation, but at the time he was living on benefits and was certain that Lena would attempt to hide her wealth.’

‘Did he say much about his wife to you?’

‘No. It was the other way round. At work Lena was always vitriolic and horrible about him, and would say he was a bad father and role model for Amy. I knew a totally different Marcus and when Lena found out about me it was hideous,’ she informed him. ‘She was very frightening and I was relieved to quit working for her.’

‘When you say she was frightening, describe how she behaved,’ Reid said, conscious that he had up to now excused this side of Lena.

‘Well, phoning me and being threatening and abusive. She said I would never find work and she would make sure I had no recommendation from her when I applied for a job.’

When Reid went to see Justine Hyde at her flat she was equally shocked by the accusations levelled at Marcus and was still coming to terms with the fact he had died. She was adamant that he had never abused his daughter. She had never met Lena, socially or otherwise, but obviously was very aware of her existence as she said that often when she and Marcus were together Lena would make persistent calls to his mobile about Amy and how he let her do what she wanted. He was also certain that Lena was often outside the flat in Green Street, as if she was stalking him. She had met Amy, and like Gail Summers claimed that she had only ever seen a loving and doting father who she believed put his daughter first. Justine also said she was aware that Marcus had a very strong friendship with Simon Boatly, but just how deep the relationship had gone in the past had not been discussed.