Harry found himself describing the contretemps in the Law Courts that morning. His partner listened as if to nothing more melodramatic than a discourse on the law of registered title.
“It all seemed to make sense,” said Harry, reflecting on the logical steps he had taken on the road to his conclusion about Julian Hamer’s guilt. “The way the girl behaved at the con. Her interrogation of Gina Jean-Jacques. The secret rendezvous last Saturday — presumably with the man who killed her.”
“It might still make sense.” Jim was trying to let him down lightly. “Stand back for a moment. Your clues may have more than one meaning. Remember that old case about the interpretation of a will? The man who left his estate ‘all to mother’? It wasn’t the gift it seemed. ‘Mother’ was his name for his wife.”
Harry nodded. In his mind, suspicions began to reform like patterns in the fireside blaze.
Tolerantly, Jim said, “The look on your face tells me I’ve started you off again. Just try not to pin anything on the Bishop of Liverpool this afternoon, old son. We can use all the divine assistance we can get just now.”
Harry glanced heavenwards. “This time, I’ll be glad to be wrong.”
He hurried to his own room and dialled a Wirral number. At last he’d remembered the question he had meant to put to Gina Jean-Jacques.
“Gina, is that you? This is Harry Devlin. No, it doesn’t matter that your mother’s out. I wanted to ask you one more question. When Claire asked you what it was like being kissed by The Beast… what did you tell her?”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“I never knew a boy so quiet,” said Mrs. Warner. “He was never any trouble to either Hubert or me.”
She sat back in her floral-patterned armchair and sipped her tea contentedly. A large, comfortable widow with white hair, varicose veins and nothing to be ashamed of. Harry was sure she had done her best for her nephew after his mother’s death a dozen years ago and that she had not the slightest inkling of the dark thoughts that must lurk deep within his brain.
When she learned that the quiet boy had become The Beast she had read and gossiped about, her life would disintegrate like an old dock warehouse attacked by a demolition gang.
Harry finished his tea, uttering a silent prayer that his suspicion should prove as unjust and absurd as in the case of Julian Hamer. He cringed when he thought of the accusation he had levelled at a sick man — was it only four hours earlier? Valerie was right to feel disgust.
Yet now he dreaded the prospect of another mistake far less than the possibility that for once he might be right. It seemed like an act of cruelty to sit in this well-kept room, engaging Elsie Warner in friendly conversation, letting her believe his cock-and-bull story. He had said this was no more than a casual call on a professional acquaintance’s home, whilst passing through New Brighton, on the off-chance that her nephew might be around. Guileless, she had invited him in. In truth he was seeking corroboration for the theory he had reconstructed about the identity of Claire Stirrup’s murderer.
Gina Jean-Jacques’s puzzled answer to his intrusive question had confirmed Jim’s point. The fatal sequence of events became clear when you stood back and looked at it afresh. But he knew that this piece of guesswork, like the last, could bring nothing but misery. If only it were untrue. And yet everything Mrs. Warner willingly told him about her nephew helped to paint a picture that she herself could never recognise. A portrait of a murderer.
According to Mrs. Warner, her nephew had always been a lonely young man with very few friends. His parents’ marriage had broken down when he was still in short trousers. The father had been violent, a drunkard and a womaniser whose wife had been prepared to tolerate his blows and infidelities for the sake of the child. But when, in a final beery rage, the man had thrashed the boy, she could take no more. She walked out with her son and they had lived in a scruffy council flat until one day the boy had come home from school and found his mother lying on the bedroom floor in her underclothes, dead after a massive stroke.
“We took him in, of course, Hubert and me,” Mrs. Warner reminisced. “We never had children of our own. I was already turned fifty, but there was no one else to look after him. Of course, there was a what-you-call-it — a generation gap. But we did our best.”
Harry wondered what it is that turns a man sour against women, against life. Of all the inadequates he had defended, he’d never found one common factor to unite them all, to mark them as men whom society should spot and lock away before they could do harm. There had been no lack of love in this household. Perhaps in the boy’s life it had simply come too late.
A gilt-framed photograph on the scrupulously dusted sideboard caught his eye. A head and shoulders shot of a small-featured woman with curly blonde hair, smiling shyly at the camera. A picture Harry had seen before.
Mrs. Warner followed his glance.
“That’s poor Emma, of course.”
Harry looked inquiringly and the story soon came out. Emma had been a girlfriend, the one and only so far as Mrs. Warner knew. A pleasant girl from Liscard Village. The couple had got engaged on her twenty-first birthday; a wedding had been planned for the following June. A month later she was dead. She had suffered from anorexia nervosa since her early teens; the doctors reckoned it put the strain on her heart which had killed her.
“A tragedy, it was. Such a bolt from the blue. No one could believe it. And of course, he would never talk about it afterwards. Just bottled it all up inside. It’s not the best way, Mr. Devlin, it’s not the best way.”
“No.”
“I keep hoping he’ll find someone else. He’s not a bad-looking young chap, though I say so myself as shouldn’t. But he seems somehow to have lost all interest in girls.”
If only he had, thought Harry.
“Ah, well. It’s a pity you missed him,” said Mrs. Warner, not for the first time.
“You said he’d gone out for a walk,” prompted Harry.
“Yes, he often goes out on his own like that. Says he likes to be alone with his thoughts. I’m not sure it’s a good thing, but what can you say? He’s upgrown now, it’s none of my business how he spends his time. Probably he’s just set off for a stroll on the front. Though it’s so muggy I wouldn’t be surprised if we were in for a storm.”
“Might stretch my legs myself before it pours. Any idea where I’d most likely bump into him?”
“You could try the prom.”
“I will.” He stood up and cast another glance at the photograph of the dead girl. “Thank you for the tea. It was kind of you.”
“Think nothing of it, Mr…. Devlin, was it? Nice to meet one of his business friends and have a chat, it makes a change for me. Might see you again some day if you care to pop in. Though normally of course he’s working on a weekday. He’ll be sorry he was out when you called.”
Harry bit his lip. Even sorrier when he finds out that I know the truth.
“Goodbye,” he said and averted his gaze from the old woman’s kind eyes.
Outside the heat had become oppressive, like a threat of war. Harry sensed a feverishness in the air, as if the passers-by expected thunder and were scurrying madly, trying to make the most of the sunshine before the rain pelted down. When he came to the seafront he slackened his pace, looking for any sign of the man he was hunting.
Should he tell the police what he knew? In principle, yes — but what exactly did he know? He had no proof, no hard facts, nothing much other than surmise. Thank God he had said nothing about Julian Hamer; to have disgraced himself in front of Valerie was disaster enough. No, for the time being it made sense to keep his suspicions to himself. But what if he did catch up with his man? After the debacle of the morning, Harry simply did not know what he would do.