Chapter 56
Helen opened her eyes and felt the heaviness of her body. Even turning her head was an effort.
She appeared to be in a hospital ward. A numbness in her leg signalled that she had some sort of injury. She stress-tested her other joints and found to her relief that she could move everything else.
Looking up at the drip entering her arm, she wondered how she could attract a nurse’s attention.
Ten minutes later, the door to the room opened. ‘Sleeping Beauty has awoken.’ The matronly nurse checked the drip.
‘What’s happened to me?’
‘You had an operation to remove a bullet from your left thigh. The anaesthetic has made you drowsy, that’s all.
You were awake when you came in here, carrying on about Peggy and .
. . Desmond or someone. Anyway, you’re going to be fine.
By tomorrow you should be off the drip and onto food, so I’ll leave you a dinner-choice card to fill in when you feel like it.
Your friend’s still here. I’ll let her know you’ve woken up. ’
The nurse bustled out.
Helen wondered who she meant by ‘friend’. By her reckoning she didn’t have any.
‘Hello, how are you?’
Lulu was pale and make-up-less.
‘I don’t know really. Is everyone else okay?’
‘Yes. It was a close-run thing, though. They reckon she would have killed Derek if you hadn’t done your heroic dive. How did you get on to her?’
Helen sighed. ‘It’s a long, long story.’
‘Well, everyone wants to hear it. We’ve pieced some of it together ourselves of course. Maggie was your secretary at the time, which meant she had access to your gun and could move around the building with ease. We think that she must have mistaken Con for Derek that day in the studio.’
‘Con was wearing Derek’s cardigan and he was in the studio Derek was meant to be using. I always knew it wasn’t Sorcha the murderer was after. It turns out it wasn’t Con either,’ sighed Helen.
‘Yeah, well, as I said, when you’re feeling a bit stronger, perhaps you can go through it slowly for us idiots who are slow on the uptake.
I tell you one thing, Helen, you’re off the hook now.
She confessed last night to shooting Sorcha, even if it was a mistake.
Seventeen years for something you didn’t do. God, you must be bitter.’
Helen bit her lip as tears came to her eyes.
‘Of course I am. But I’m also relieved that it’s over at last.’
‘We’re all feeling devastated that we thought it was you. I hope you’ll be able to forgive us.’
Helen nodded. ‘How was last night?’
‘Well, apart from the little, er, incident, sensational. Totally sensational. I wish you could have seen the boys. It was like they’d never been away. The crowd went wild, especially for Con, of course. There were ten encores. I think The Fishermen could have a whole new career if they wanted it.’
Helen’s eyelids began to droop.
‘Look, if you don’t mind, I’ll leave you for a bit. I could do with getting home and having a shower.’
‘Of course. You go home.’
‘Can I bring the boys to see you later? I think they all want a word. And Derek is yours any time you want him, he’s so grateful.’
Helen smiled and closed her eyes.
By six that evening, she was feeling much better. The drip had been removed and she was sitting upright.
The nurse bustled in, her eyes filled with a sudden look of respect for Helen.
‘You, my lady, have a special guest. I was only watching him on TV last night. Shall I show him in?’
Helen nodded.
Con filed in looking tired and sheepish, his arms filled with an enormous bouquet. He put the flowers into Helen’s arms. ‘From the boys and me.’
‘Thank you. Could you put them over there?’
‘I’ll take them.’ The nurse hovered in the background. ‘Who’s a lucky girl then?’ she smiled.
Con sat down. ‘The band all wanted to come, Helen, but we decided it might be too tiring for you.’
Helen nodded. ‘Probably would be. I do feel a bit exhausted.’
‘And . . . I wanted to see you, to say thank you. I hear you told Todd you thought Maggie was after me last night. You were there to try and save me.’
‘Well, I was there to try and save myself. It was the only way I could prove my innocence.’
‘But it wasn’t me after all.’
‘No, but I didn’t realise right until the last minute who she was after.’
Con stared at her. ‘I really came to ask your forgiveness for being so quick to accuse you. I was so devastated about losing Sorcha I wanted someone punished.’
‘I understand why you believed it was me, Con. Both you and that Inspector Garratt thought Sorcha said it was me she saw in the studio that afternoon. In fact, reading through Garratt’s notes, what Sorcha actually said was that she couldn’t remember Maggie’s name, that you were to ask Helen, that she was an old friend of mine. ’
‘And was she?’
‘Yes. I was at college with her when I first came to London. I had a brief affair with our tutor, Tony Bryant, one summer. He’d told me that his girlfriend was away, that he loved her and that our affair would be over when she came back.
I never knew the girlfriend was Maggie until Garratt wrote and told me her name.
I suppose they kept their relationship quiet because she was a student and he was a tutor.
She must have found out that Tony and I had an affair while she was away.
Perhaps that’s why she set me up,’ she mused.
‘And Derek’s Peggy and your Maggie turned out to be one and the same woman,’ sighed Con.
‘Both abbreviations for Margaret,’ Helen replied.
Con nodded. ‘He was always mad about her. She turned him down because she’d said she was in love with someone else. The someone else must have been this Tony. I remember it well.’
‘Obviously Maggie thought Derek was the one who killed Tony.’
Con looked surprised. ‘Tony died?’
‘Yes. He was murdered. They never discovered who did it.’ Helen looked at Con. ‘You say that Derek was obsessed with his Peggy, but do you think he was obsessed enough to kill Tony for stealing her from him?’
Con inhaled deeply. ‘He did sink into a bad depression . . . but Derek doesn’t strike me as a murderer.
He’s called “Derek”, for God’s sake.’ He rubbed his tired eyes.
‘The desperate thing is that Todd doesn’t believe Derek and Peggy ever had a proper relationship.
He blew it all up in his mind. In any case, Tony’s death must have done something screwy to Maggie’s head. ’
‘Oh, it certainly did,’ Helen agreed. ‘I found out in the last few days that she had a nervous breakdown after Tony’s murder.
The woman was in a psychiatric hospital for three years.
’ Helen shook her head. ‘I obviously had no idea when I employed her as my secretary at Metropolitan. She was only there briefly, but she always declined invites to gigs and made herself scarce every time The Fishermen were at Metropolitan. Clearly she didn’t want Derek or any of you to recognise her.
When she came to me asking for a job she must have already been planning this. ’
‘I was wondering last night why Sorcha said hello to Maggie when she appeared at the door with the gun. I’d no idea they’d ever met. I never saw her at Metropolitan.’
‘Maggie delivered an envelope to my house while Sorcha was staying there.’
Con nodded, trying to take it all in. ‘So where’s she been for the past seventeen years?’
‘In and out of institutions. I saw the matron of her most recent one. She said Maggie would play a song over and over. It was “Losing You”.’
‘Oh. Well, let’s hope she’ll be staying institutionalised permanently from now on.’
Helen sighed. ‘Oh, Con, the worst thing about all of this is that Sorcha died. And none of it was anything to do with her.’
‘I know. She must have seen Maggie pointing the gun at me and thrown herself forward to try and protect me. And after all I’d put her through . . . I’ll live with that for the rest of my life.’
‘So will I. That was one of the hardest things to swallow, thinking that Sorcha had accused me of shooting her. Any acrimony there was between us way back when had disappeared.’ Tears pricked the back of Helen’s eyes. ‘We’d become friends.’
‘Well, you can comfort yourself that Derek would have died too, if you hadn’t have persevered. Helen, can you forgive me and all the others who were so quick to accuse you?’
‘I can understand it, certainly. Forgiveness for seventeen lost years will take longer.’
‘I know what you mean,’ sighed Con.
‘After last night is there talk of the band re-forming?’
‘Absolutely. You can imagine how it is.’
‘Yes.’
‘What about you? You must think of your future. There has to be some kind of compensation for being wrongly jailed for all this time.’
‘Probably,’ Helen smiled. ‘I might consult a lawyer, but I doubt it. I’ve had money all my life and it’s never made me happy. I have my houses in London and Ireland and enough to keep me going for a while until I consider where my future lies.’
Con let out a weary chuckle. ‘Your Irish house needs a lick of paint. I’ve been holed up there for a good while.’
Helen raised an eyebrow. ‘So that’s where you were. You must be worth untold millions with all those royalty cheques piling up for the past seventeen years. You can buy me a new bathroom.’
‘I could probably buy a small island in the Caribbean if the mood so took me,’ he grinned.
Then he reached for her hand. ‘Helen McCarthy, I’ve known you since you were a small girl.
We have a shared history. And I’m thinking now that you have more balls than any man I’ve ever met.
You lost a friend in Sorcha. I’d be honoured if you’d consider me as her replacement. ’
Helen’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Do you know, Con, you’ve just offered me the one thing that I need more than anything else.’
He put his arms around her shoulders and the two of them embraced.
‘So, are we on for this then or what?’ Freddy asked as he poured them each a cup of tea in his sitting room. ‘It’s a hell of a deal. A worldwide tour for six months. A record deal with Metropolitan worth almost twenty million. We need to grab it now, while it’s on the table.’
Ian shrugged. ‘I dunno. I’d have to either leave the wife and kids behind or drag them around the world for six months.’
‘I have commitments to my bands,’ said Todd.
‘Jesus, guys. You’re being offered the deal of the century and you talk about incidentals.’ Derek shook his head in frustration. ‘Well, you know I’m all for it. Just remember that adrenalin rush in front of all those people ten days ago.’
‘What a note to close on,’ said Todd.
‘And I object to you referring to my wife and kids as incidentals,’ put in Ian.
‘What about you, Con?’
Con sipped his tea slowly. ‘I’d have to think about it for a while.’
‘But you’ve had the past two days. We have to give an answer by tomorrow,’ urged Derek.
‘If they want us tomorrow, they’ll want us the day after, Derek.’
‘Con’s right. Let’s take another forty-eight hours to think about it. With that kind of money, Metropolitan will be wanting one-hundred-per-cent commitment. I want you all to be sure.’
‘Okay. We’ll reconvene in a couple of days.’ Todd put his cup down. ‘Are you coming, Con? I have an appointment at five.’
‘Sure. See you, chaps.’
Todd went out for the night. Con paced around his old partner’s house, pondering the situation.
The past had been resolved now. It was time at last to look to the future.
Ian went home and discussed the situation with Virginia. They’d miss each other, but with that kind of money, they could buy their organic farm somewhere in the Kent countryside, live a blissful life and never have to think of finances again.
Derek went home and sat up all night. If the rest of the boys didn’t agree, there was no doubt he was up shit creek without a paddle. He’d be destitute within six months.
On the other hand, had he not been lucky?
He was still a free man. Every day since the concert he’d waited for the police to turn up on his doorstep.
If they started reinvestigating . . . Derek broke out in a mucksweat.
That night, he had totally lost control.
He’d fuelled himself on booze and powder, and .
. . The memory of his actions made his stomach churn and bile rise.
If the boys agreed to the tour and he collected his share of the twenty million, then he might move abroad, just to be on the safe side.
That night he prayed for one last chance.
Freddy put down the telephone from Con and punched the air. All four had agreed. Twenty per cent of twenty million was . . . Jesus, an awful lot of money.
The Fishermen were back.
Helen sat on the Aer Lingus Fokker 50 and watched as it banked over the lush green fields of County Cork.
The sight sent a tingle up her spine. It was odd that while she had lain incarcerated night after night, her thoughts had flown not to her London house, or her comfortable office at Metropolitan, but to the clean, clear, wind-drenched beaches and crisp, bracing air of the country in which she had been born.
As the aircraft touched down on the runway of Cork airport, Helen experienced a sense of elation.
She knew she’d made the right decision.
She was coming home.