فصل 77

77

PATRICK

He had loved her a long time, but never so much as in the moment when she flew to his defence.

“That is not what happened!” Helen sprang to her feet. “That is not . . . Don’t! Don’t you take the blame for this, Dad, that is not what happened. You didn’t . . . you didn’t even . . .”

Patrick smiled at her, reaching out a hand. She took it and he pulled her closer. She was soft but not weak, her modesty, her unashamed plainness more stirring than any facile beauty. It moved him now—he felt his blood rising, the pump of his weakened old heart.

No one spoke. The sister was crying silently, mouthing words without any sound. The detective watched him, watched Helen, something knowing in her face.

“Are you . . .?” She shook her head, lost for words. “Mr. Townsend, I . . .”

“Come on, then!” He felt suddenly irritable, desperate to get away from the woman’s evident distress. “For Christ’s sake, you’re a police officer, do what you have to do.”

Erin took a deep breath and stepped towards him. “Patrick Townsend, I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Danielle Abbott. You do not have to say anything—”

“Yes, yes, yes, all right,” he said wearily. “I know, I know all that. God. Women like you, you don’t ever know when to stop talking.” Then he turned to Helen. “But you, darling, you do. You know when to speak and when to be quiet. You tell the truth, my girl.”

She started to cry, and he wanted more than anything to be beside her, in the room upstairs, just one last time, before he was taken away from her. He kissed her forehead then, and before he followed the detective out of the door, bid her goodbye.

• • •

PATRICK HAD NEVER BEEN one for mysticism, for gut feelings or hunches, but if he was honest, he’d felt this coming: the reckoning. The endgame. He’d felt it long before they’d dragged Nel Abbott’s cold corpse out of the water, only he’d dismissed it as a symptom of age. His mind had been playing a lot of tricks lately, boosting the colour and the sound in his old memories, blurring the edges of his new ones. He knew it was the start of it, the long goodbye, that he would be eaten from the inside out, core to husk. He could be grateful, at least, that he still had time to tie up the loose ends, to seize control. It was, he realized now, the only way to salvage something of the life they’d built, though he knew that not everyone could be spared.

When they sat him in the interview room at Beckford station, he thought at first that the humiliation was more than he could bear, but bear it he did. What made it easier, he found, was the surprising sensation of relief. He wanted to tell his story. If it was going to come out, then he should be the one to tell it, while he still had time, while his mind was still his own. More than just relief, there was pride. All his life, there had been a part of him that had wanted to tell what had happened the night Lauren died, but he hadn’t been able to. He had held back, out of love for his son.

He spoke in short, simple sentences. He was very clear. He expressed his intention to make a full confession to the murders of Lauren Slater in 1983 and Danielle Abbott in 2015.

Lauren was easier, of course. It was a straightforward tale. They had argued at the house. She had attacked him, and he had defended himself, and in the course of that defence she had been seriously wounded, too grievously to save. So, in an effort to spare his son the truth, and—he admitted—to spare himself a prison sentence, he drove her to the river, carried her body to the top of the cliff, and threw her, lifeless now, into the water.

DS Morgan listened politely, but she stopped him there. “Was your son with you at this time, Mr. Townsend?” she asked.

“He didn’t see anything,” Patrick replied. “He was too little and too frightened to understand what was happening. He didn’t see his mother get hurt, and he didn’t see her fall.”

“He didn’t watch you throw her from the cliff?”

It took every ounce of his strength not to leap across the table and smack her. “He didn’t see anything. I had to put him in the car because I couldn’t leave a six-year-old alone in the house during a thunderstorm. If you had children, you would understand that. He didn’t see anything. He was confused, and so I told him . . . a version of the truth that would make sense to him. That he could make sense of.”

“A version of the truth?”

“I told him a story—that’s what you do with children, with things they won’t be able to understand. I told him a story he could live with, one which would make his life liveable. Don’t you see that?” Try as he might, he couldn’t stop his voice from rising. “I wasn’t going to leave him alone, was I? His mother was gone, and if I went to prison, what would have happened to him then? What sort of life would he have had? He would have been put in care. I’ve seen what happens to kids who grow up in care, there’s not one of them who doesn’t come out damaged and perverted. I have protected him,” Patrick said, pride swelling his chest, “all his life.”

The story of Nel Abbott was, inevitably, less easy to recount. When he discovered that she had been speaking to Nickie Sage and taking her allegations about Lauren seriously, he became concerned. Not that she would go to the police, no. She wasn’t interested in justice or anything like that, she was only interested in sensationalizing her worthless art. What concerned him was that she might say something upsetting to Sean. Once again, he was protecting his son. “It’s what fathers do,” he pointed out. “Though you might not be aware of that. I’m told yours was a boozer.” He smiled at Erin Morgan, watching her flinch as that punch landed. “I’m told he had a temper.”

He said that he arranged to meet Nel Abbott late one evening to speak about the allegations.

“And she went to meet you at the cliff?” DS Morgan was incredulous.

Patrick smiled. “You never met her. You have no idea of the extent of her vanity, her self-importance. All I had to do was suggest to her that I would take her through exactly what happened between Lauren and me. I would show her how the terrible events of that night unfolded right there, on the spot where they took place. I would tell her the story as it had never been told before; she would be the first to hear it. Then, once I had her up there, it was easy. She’d been drinking, she was unsteady on her feet.”

“And the bracelet?”

Patrick shifted in his seat and forced himself to look DS Morgan directly in the eye. “There was a bit of a struggle, and I grabbed her arm as she was trying to pull away from me. Her bracelet came off her wrist.”

“You ripped it off—that’s what you told me earlier, isn’t it?” She looked down at her notes. “You ‘ripped it off that whore’s wrist’?”

Patrick nodded. “Yes. I was angry, I’ll admit. I was angry that she had been carrying on with my son, threatening his marriage. She seduced him. Even the strongest and most moral of men can find themselves in thrall to a woman who offers herself in that way.”

“In what way?”

Patrick ground his teeth. “Offering a sort of sexual abandon he might not find at home. It’s sad, I know. It happens. I was angry about it. My son’s marriage is very strong.” Patrick saw DS Morgan’s eyebrows shoot up, and again he had to steel himself. “I was angry about that. I ripped the bracelet from her wrist. I pushed her.”