He passed the Majestic and noticed a brand new Mercedes open top sports car with personalised number plates in the park. BG1. So Grealish had changed his motor. Perhaps he was celebrating the acquisition of Stirrup Wines. Harry wondered how long Stephanie would last before her lover tired of her lissom charms and traded her in for a new model too.
Hordes of kids shrieked around the paddling pool and formed a straggly queue outside the kiosk that sold ice cream. A little farther on a shop was doing a roaring trade in Kiss-me-quick hats. A couple of young women were trying them on, giggling all the while.
Harry leaned over the sea wall, remembering the sickness he had felt at the news of Claire Stirrup’s death. She ought to be here now, exchanging silly jokes with other girls of her own age. Her murder had been a waste of life and the senselessness of it appalled him, made him sad and angry both at the same time.
Watching the waves, he realised that he felt much the same about Claire’s killer, The Beast; that figure, enlarged into a nightmarish giant in the public imagination by lurid news stories, was in real life a man people would pass without a second glance. How else had he escaped the law’s net for so long? In attacking blondes, did he think he was taking revenge on them for being alive when the girl he loved was dead? Did he gain pleasure from either the sex or the violence? Harry didn’t try to answer himself. He didn’t want to get inside the man’s head, when all he was likely to find there was a tangled web of frustrations, jealousies and pain.
He kicked a pebble along the promenade. The sky had become overcast: one or two passers-by were looking up anxiously, making calculations about how long it would take to get back home.
The two giggling women had overtaken him. They were chattering together on the other side of the road. Both were leggy blondes; one had long hair, the other a tight perm. The girl with shoulder-length hair waved goodbye to her companion and sauntered off past the Floral Hall in the direction of The Wreckers. Standing with his back to the sea, Harry idly followed her progress. Her denim shorts were very short, her bare legs and arms richly tanned.
Suddenly a movement across the road caught his eye. A man coming out of an amusement arcade. A man in a pale grey tracksuit and trainers. A slightly built man with neat brown hair and a pleasant but anonymous face, a man easily overlooked in a seaside town.
Except that Harry recognised him as the man he had come to New Brighton for. The man he now believed to be The Beast.
“Could be anyone,” Bernard Gladwin had said of The Beast. But the killer had proved to be someone Harry had known for years. Someone Claire had indeed recognized when accompanying her father to Balliol Chambers.
David Base glanced to his right and began to quicken his pace. The blonde girl was fifty yards ahead of him. Harry realised that, like Gina Jean-Jacques, she bore a faint resemblance — something in the bone structure, perhaps — to Emma. Emma of the photograph at David’s home and in Balliol Chambers.
Fear trickled down Harry’s spine. There was only one reason for David to follow the girl. The hunger must have seized him again. Harry began to move briskly too. He must not let them get out of sight.
The girl swung her hips without a trace of self-consciousness. From behind she looked very good to Harry. He didn’t know what ideas were flowing through David’s mind. Did not want to know.
He felt something strange and unfamiliar touch his face. Yes, a drop of rain. People here and there were beginning to unfurl umbrellas. He felt another drop and another and another.
The girl strolled past The Wreckers. David Base was keeping the same distance between them. Feeling sick, Harry recognised that David was tracking his prey with an ease born of long practice.
As David walked, he took a peppermint from his trouser pocket and absent-mindedly tossed it from hand to hand before popping it into his mouth. That habit of his had been a giveaway. Claire must have noticed it when she spotted him close to Prospect House on the Wirral Way, minutes before he came upon Gina and raped her. No doubt she had seen him repeat the trick at Balliol Chambers before Harry arrived for the conference. Why else ask Gina about the taste of The Beast’s kisses? Why else sound so excited when Gina said the man had not kissed her, but his breath had smelt of peppermint?
She hadn’t been mooning over David, as her father thought. After the first shock of recognition, her moodiness had concealed the working of her mind as she devised a way to exploit her suspicion of his guilt. She wanted to savour having him in her power. Have him bring her roses. Presumably she’d phoned him and arranged a rendezvous in West Kirby. But she’d underestimated his desperation and had too much faith in her own skill at self-defence.
As the road came to an end and the riverside walkway began, Harry fell in directly behind the barristers’ clerk. He was only thirty yards ahead. What if he turned round and saw Harry in pursuit? He did not have any idea what he should do or say.
The girl came to the gate marking the entrance to Vale Park. There she paused, as if uncertain what to do. David Base slowed at once. So did Harry. No need to worry. The clerk was intent on the object of his quest.
She turned into the park. David Base went after her. Harry reached the gate, then hesitated. Vale Park was as quiet as usual, a small oasis of trees, neatly tended flower beds and grass parched from the long drought. A place for relaxation and reflection, not for clandestine and cruel crime. Harry saw the rose garden was deserted. There wasn’t even anyone exercising a dog.
The girl had taken refuge from the rain under the old bandstand with its domed roof and Doric columns. She was nibbling at her fingernails. She glanced upwards and caught sight of Harry. Then she turned her head quickly away.
David Base was nowhere in sight. Where had he gone?
The girl looked round carefully. She seemed to be wondering whether to make a run for it and risk getting wet until the worst was over.
She made up her mind and stepped out from underneath the shelter. But she did not hurry. Instead, she strolled, as if in slow motion. Almost inviting trouble. Harry was tempted to shout about the danger she faced. But instinct told him to wait until David showed himself again.
Numb with apprehension, he watched her follow the path towards the exit at the far end of the park. Suddenly she ducked and disappeared beneath a thick clump of bushes. Then he began to stride rapidly down the path. His heart was thudding. He was afraid of what David Base might be about to do. He cursed himself for waiting too long. Now he must get to her first.
What happened next was never entirely clear in his mind, no matter how many times he replayed the scene. Within seconds he was conscious of a girl’s scream and a blur of action as she staggered back into his line of vision. She stumbled as her pursuer, wearing the mask of a snarling panther, leaped forward and caught hold of her. But then she cried out not in terror, it seemed to Harry, but in exultation. For all at once the park was full of people and a voice of command was bellowing: “Police!”
Chapter Thirty
“Are you a Believer?”
The well-scrubbed young man sitting next to Harry had a face as pink as the carnation in his buttonhole. TRUST IN THE LORD exhorted the badge which adorned his other lapel. On the top table Brenda Rixton — sorry, Redpath, Harry mentally corrected himself — and her new husband exchanged smiles, oblivious to the bit-part players at their reception.
“‘Fraid not.”
This was the first dry day since the storm which had signalled the end of the long hot spell. But Harry’s stock of weather small talk was limited and he was glad when the toastmaster demanded silence for the best man’s speech.