Chapter 110
She keeps them in storage, John,” says Elizabeth, holding the manila file. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been? It’s files of all her old cases. You’re not supposed to keep them, but you know Penny. She made copies of everything, just in case.”
“In case they might help catch a killer many years later,” says Joyce.
“Anyway, John, after Karen Playfair recognized you, it got me thinking, and I just needed one final thing checking in one of the files.”
John’s eyes are on Elizabeth as she begins to read from the file.
“There was a case in Rye, in nineteen seventy-three. Penny must have been very junior. I can’t imagine Penny ever having been junior, but you must remember it clearly. Probably seems like yesterday. The case concerned a girl named Annie Madeley. You remember Annie Madeley, Penny?”
Elizabeth looks over to where her friend is lying. Listening? Not listening?
“Stabbed during a burglary, and bled to death in the arms of her boyfriend. Around came the police, including Penny; that’s in the file.
Found broken glass on the floor where our burglar had got in, but nothing stolen.
The burglar had been surprised by Annie Madeley, panicked, picked up a kitchen knife, stabbed her, and fled.
That’s the official account, if you want to read it.
Case closed. But Ron was the first to sniff it out. He didn’t like it one bit.”
“It stunk, Johnny,” says Ron. “A burglar in the middle of the day, on a busy estate? With people at home? You might burgle on a Sunday morning while everyone is at church, but not Sunday afternoon, not the done thing.”
Elizabeth looks over to her friend. “You must have thought that too, Penny? You must have known the boyfriend had stabbed her, waited for her to die, then called the police?”
She dabs Penny’s dry lips.
“We started looking into it months ago, John. The Thursday Murder Club. No Penny, but we carried on. I was surprised we’d never looked at the case before, surprised Penny had never brought it in.
We started looking at it, John, seeing if the police had got it wrong all those years ago.
I read the report on the knife wound and it didn’t seem right to me, so I asked Joyce about it.
In fact, it might have been the first thing I ever asked you, Joyce. ”
“It was,” remembers Joyce.
“I described the wound and asked her how long it would take to die, and she said around forty-five minutes or so, which didn’t fit the boyfriend’s account at all.
He had chased the burglar—no one saw this, John—rushed back to the kitchen, held Annie Madeley in his arms, and rang the police immediately.
I then asked Joyce if someone with any medical training could have saved her, and what did you say, Joyce? ”
“I was certain it would have been easy. You’ll know that too, John, with your training.”
“Now, the boyfriend had been a soldier, John, invalided out a few years before. So he could have saved her, no question. But that’s not the way the investigation went.
I’d like to say that things were different in these cases back then, but no doubt he’d get away with it today too.
They searched for the burglar, but with no luck.
Poor Annie Madeley was buried, and the world kept turning.
The boyfriend disappeared after running from Penny’s squad car, and we come to the end of the file. ”
“So we were looking into all of this, but then events took over, of course,” says Ibrahim. “Mr. Curran, Mr. Ventham, the body in the graveyard. We put the case to one side while we had a real murder right in front of us.”
“But we all know we don’t come to the end of the story, don’t we, John?” says Ron.
Elizabeth taps the manila file. “And so I sent Ibrahim off to look at the file, with one question. Can you guess what it was, John?”
John stares at her. Elizabeth looks at Penny.
“Penny, if you can hear, I bet you know the question. Peter Mercer. That was the name of the boyfriend, Peter Mercer. I asked Ibrahim to find out why Peter Mercer had been invalided from the army. And if you hadn’t guessed the question, I bet you can guess the answer, John. Have a go; it’s all too late anyway.”
John buries his head in his hands, drags them down his face, and looks up. “I assume, Elizabeth, it was a gunshot wound to the leg?”
“It was just that.”
Elizabeth pulls her chair nearer to Penny, takes her hand, and speaks to her quietly and directly.
“Nearly fifty years ago Peter Mercer murdered his girlfriend, then vanished into thin air. And everyone thought he’d got away with it.
But it’s really not all that easy to get away with murder, is it, Penny?
Sometimes justice is waiting just around the corner, as it was for Peter Mercer one dark night when you paid him a visit.
And sometimes justice waits fifty years and sits beside a hospital bed holding the hand of a friend.
Had you just seen one too many of these cases, Penny?
Tired of it? And tired of no one listening? ”
“When did she tell you, John?” asks Joyce.
John starts to cry.
“When she was first ill?”
John nods slowly. “She didn’t mean to tell me. You remember how she was, Elizabeth. The ministrokes?”
“Yes,” replies Elizabeth. They were very gentle at first. Nothing too alarming, unless you knew what they were. But poor John had known exactly what they were.
“She would say all sorts of things. See all sorts of things. Plenty of make-believe, and then the present sort of disappeared, and her mind would go further and further back. Kept spooling back until it found something familiar, I suppose. Just looking for something that made sense, because the world around her had stopped making sense. So she’d tell me stories, sometimes from her childhood, sometimes from when we first met. ”
“And sometimes from her early days in the police?” prompts Elizabeth.
“All things I’d heard before at first. Things I remember from the time—old bosses, little scams they’d pull, fiddling expenses, pub instead of court, the sorts of things we’d always laughed about. I knew she was adrift, and I wanted to hold on to her as long as I could. Do you understand?”
“We all do, John,” says Ron. And they do.
“So I would keep her talking. The same stories over and over again sometimes. One reminding her of another, reminding her of another, reminding her of the first one again, and round we’d go. But then . . .”
John pauses and looks at his wife.
“You say you don’t really think Penny can hear you, John?” says Elizabeth.
John shakes his head slowly. “No.”
“And yet every day, you come here. You sit with her. You talk to her.”
“What else is there for me to do, Elizabeth?”
She understands. “So, she was telling you stories. Stories you knew. And then one day?”
“Yes, and then one day it was stories I didn’t know.”
“Secrets,” says Ron.
“Secrets. Nothing awful, only little things. She’d taken money once. A bribe. Everyone else had taken it, and she felt she’d had to. She told me that as if she had told me many times before, but she hadn’t. We all have secrets, don’t we?”
“We do, John,” agrees Elizabeth.
“She’d forgotten what was a funny story and what was a secret. But there must have been something still working, a final lock on a final gate. The last thing to give.”
“The worst secret of all?”
John nods. “By God, she held on to it. She was already in here. You remember when they moved her in?”
Elizabeth remembers. Penny had gone by this time. Conversations were snippets, incoherent, sometimes angry. When would Stephen come in here? She needed to get back to him. Just get this done, and go home and kiss her beautiful husband.
“She didn’t even recognize me by then. Well, she recognized me, but she couldn’t place me.
I came in one morning, about two months ago, you know, and she was sitting up.
It was the last time I remember her sitting up.
And she saw me, and she knew me. She asked me what we were going to do, and I didn’t understand the question, so I asked her, ‘Do about what?’”
Elizabeth nods.
“And she started to tell me, and she was very matter-of-fact. As if there was something in the loft and she needed me to get it down. Nothing more than that. You know I couldn’t let people find out what she’d done, Elizabeth. You know that. I had to try something.”
Elizabeth nods.
“We’d picnicked up on the hill a few times,” John continues. “It really was very beautiful. I’d always wondered why we stopped.”
They sit in silence, broken only be the quiet electronic beeps by Penny’s bedside. All that remained of her, like a lighthouse blinking far out to sea.
Elizabeth gently breaks the silence. “Here’s what I think we should do, John.
I’m going to get the others to take you home.
It’s late—have a sleep in your own bed. If you have letters to write, then write them.
I’ll come with the police in the morning; I know you’ll be here.
We’ll step outside for a moment so you can say good-bye to Penny. ”
The four friends leave, and Elizabeth watches through the clear border of the frosted window in Penny’s door as John holds his wife in his arms. She looks away.
“You’ll see John back safely, won’t you? If I stay with Penny for a moment?” she asks the others. They nod in return.
She opens the door again. John is putting on his coat.
“Time to go, John.”