A Good day to die

32

Aldermaston was one of those quintessential English villages that you see in all the guidebooks. Situated on the edge of the Berkshire downs, and surrounded by green fields and pretty copses of oak and beech trees, it was little more than a collection of houses and converted barns, with the odd thatched roof thrown in, nestling on either side of a road that somehow seemed more suited to a horse and cart than the steady procession of cars that passed up and down it. There was a top-secret establishment that allegedly contained many of the country's nuclear weapons somewhere round here but I didn't see any evidence of it on the way in, and even on a grey, sullen day like this one, the village stood out like a tranquil oasis after the intensity of London.

I drove down what passed for the high street: a narrow road with terraced red-brick buildings on either side, some of which clearly dated back hundreds of years, that contained a handful of antiques shops and estate agents. There was an Elizabethan-style pub on the corner, where the road forked at a near right-angle as it came to a mini-roundabout. A notice board outside advertised high-quality food. I was early so I stopped there for a pint and a steak and kidney pie, which was indeed high-quality but also high-priced. While I was there, I asked the barman — who had a very pink face and a drinker's nose — for directions to the Cheney practice. He obviously knew her business, because he gave me them but conspicuously avoided me after that. I don't think he liked the thought of having the mentally ill dining on his high-quality food. Dr Cheney's practice was in a large, modern house that I assumed was a combination of home and office, situated a few hundred yards down the right-hand fork in the road. It wasn't quite an eyesore, but you could argue it came close, with a brand new tarmac driveway out the front that would have amply parked a dozen cars. Today, however, there were only two: a Range Rover and a Fiat Punto. I pulled up alongside the Range Rover and got out. It was ten to three.

There were two doors at the front of the house. A sign on the main one asked all callers to the practice to use the other, so I rang on the buzzer and was let in without preamble. I found myself in a small wood-panelled foyer that bore more than a passing resemblance to the inside of a Scandinavian sauna. An attractive young receptionist sat at a desk in front of me, wearing a white coat and a welcoming smile that showed a lot of teeth.

I introduced myself with a smile of my own, and announced my business.

'Please take a seat, Mr Kane. I'll let Dr Cheney know you're here.' She stood up and disappeared through a door behind the desk, while I admired the certificates from various psychiatric bodies testifying to Dr Cheney's high standards in the field. I know any idiot could buy these sort of things over the Internet and there was no guarantee that they meant anything, but I had a feeling that in Dr Cheney's case, they did.

The secretary emerged a few seconds later to inform me that, if I'd like to go through, the doctor would see me now. The words immediately brought back terrible memories of visiting the medical profession in my youth, and I was glad I had nothing wrong with me. Or nothing Dr Cheney could cure, anyway. The secretary asked if I'd like a coffee, and I thanked her and said that I would. Milk, one sugar. It was all very civilized.

I stepped inside Dr Cheney's huge office, which was decorated in the same style as the reception area but on a significantly bigger scale, complete with a number of chairs and several desks, but no sign of that old classic, the couch. A slim, tanned woman with a well-worn face and wide brown eyes stepped seemingly out of nowhere and shook my hand with a powerful grip. Her eyes appraised me coolly from behind a pair of fashionable black-rimmed glasses, but the smile itself was warm.

We exchanged pleasantries and she invited me to take a seat in front of her desk, which was at the far end of the room. It was immaculately tidy.

'What is it I can do for you, Mr Kane?' she asked, sitting down with her back ramrod straight and folding her hands slowly and carefully across her lap. It was a disconcerting gesture, and if it was meant to put her patients at ease it didn't work, but then I assumed it was being done specially for me.

I briefly explained the facts of the case, as they concerned her. 'Three people are dead: Mr Khan, Mr Malik and Miss Taylor, all of whom are connected with each other. There is, as you're no doubt aware, a major police investigation going on into the murders, but Mr Malik's uncle wants a second opinion.'

'And one private detective's work is better than the combined expertise of the Metropolitan Police?'

'At the moment, the combined expertise of the Metropolitan Police isn't getting very far. The investigation's been going for close to six weeks, and they've yet to make an arrest, let alone bring a charge of murder against anyone. And until Miss Neilson brought up the subject, Ann Taylor's death wasn't even being treated as part of the inquiry. As far as I'm aware, it still isn't. I'm certainly not suggesting that I can do any better than the officers involved in the case, but I'm hoping I can come at it from a different perspective, and get somewhere that way.'

She nodded slowly, as if accepting my answer, while continuing to appraise me. 'You are aware that what is said between a doctor and her patient is entirely confidential. Therefore, I can only repeat to you what Ann wanted brought out into the open, nothing else.'

She paused for a moment while her secretary came in with the coffee, and I told her that I was fine with that.

'How much of the history do you know?' she asked.

'I know the basics. That she was referred to you by another doctor, who felt she had a possible personality disorder that might have been the cause of the violent attack she committed. And that you got her to remember aspects of her past, which led to her father being arrested and charged with offences of child abuse. But I know very little about the details of the abuse, other than that it was very serious.'

Dr Cheney gave me a thin smile. 'Let me explain something to you, Mr Kane. I'm not a great believer in what in most circles these days is called repressed memory syndrome.' I think I must have looked a bit blank, because she continued, 'Repressed memory is when a patient is considered to have undergone a trauma or traumas so intense that the brain's only coping mechanism is to wipe the memories clean. Effectively, the patient forgets what has happened and carries on with life. It's believed by some within the psychiatric field that these memories can be returned to the conscious mind by certain types of treatment, particularly hypnotherapy. Naturally, it's an area of huge controversy, since it allows for accusations to be made where there is no corroborating evidence, and therefore perfectly innocent people can find themselves facing criminal charges for acts they never committed. But this wasn't the situation with Ann. You see, I wouldn't describe her memories as wholly repressed. I think she knew perfectly well what had happened to her, but created a veneer of toughness to try to cope with it. However, when I uncovered what had happened in her past, the accusations she made were not, I felt, taken seriously enough by the police, because of the controversy surrounding this issue of repressed memory. Although the jury at her trial believed her and she was found innocent of the charge against her by reason of diminished responsibility, the police took a more cynical view of her claims, and their investigation into the allegations was wholly inadequate.'

'But they arrested her father, Richard Blacklip.'

'Yes, they did that. They had little choice but to do that. However, his abuse was what might euphemistically be called the tip of the iceberg.'

'So what were they? The claims she made?'

'That she was introduced to sex at the age of four by her father, shortly after her mother died. That at first the abuse simply involved him touching Ann intimately, then steadily became more serious as she grew older. Intercourse, both vaginal and anal. Oral sex. For years, she slept in his bed every night and believed that what was happening to her was normal, although Blacklip constantly reminded her never to tell a soul, and during the whole time she spent with him, she never did. Her schoolwork was below average, but not significantly so, and she went through the schooling system without any of her teachers becoming unduly concerned, although as time went by, her attendance levels began to drop off.

'Ann described to me how the relationship between her and her father began to change when she was about nine years old. For the first time, he began involving other people — men he described as her uncles, although she'd never seen any of them before. He would take her to different houses, to what he called "parties", where his friends — these men he called her uncles — would sexually assault her, usually in a group setting. She wasn't sure of their exact number — she said somewhere between five and eight, and the majority of them wore masks. Her descriptions of the events that took place, and how things were organized, had the very real ring of authenticity.'

'But, given her background, it's possible she could have made them up?'

Her expression suggested very strongly that it wasn't. 'In my professional opinion, and this is exactly what I told the investigating officers more than a year ago, she was not making these allegations up. She was telling the truth. And this was evidenced by the fact that on further investigation, it transpired that her father had child-abuse convictions dating back many years and under several different names.'

'Christ,' I said. 'Poor girl.' Once again I was reminded of the empty, directionless and ultimately short life of Ann Taylor. Without a father like Blacklip, I wondered how different things could have been. Could she have grown up into a well-adjusted and happy young woman? Of course she could have done. As far as I was concerned, Blacklip had killed her just the same as if it had been his fingers round the syringe that had pumped her full of drugs. If ever I'd needed justification for what I'd done to him back in Manila, then this was it.

'Poor girl, indeed,' repeated Dr Cheney. 'Her life was an absolute tragedy, made worse by the fact that no one else has ever been charged in connection with any of the crimes against her, and now that her father has also died in mysterious circumstances… You heard about that, didn't you?'

'Yes, I did. I would have called it good riddance if it wasn't for the fact that there are a lot of questions he could answer if he was still alive. Like who else was involved.'

'It sounds to me as if you think that Ann's death and the deaths of the other people you mentioned — the boyfriend and the police officer — have something to do with these events in her past?'

'I like to take things one step at a time,' I answered carefully. 'At the moment it's only one avenue of inquiry, but it's certainly one that's worth pursuing. Was that the full extent of Ann's allegations, or was there more?'

For a moment Dr Cheney was silent, her eyes boring into mine.

'If there is,' I said, prompting her, 'it's important that I know.'

'Yes,' she said eventually. 'There was more.'

The room suddenly felt very quiet. I wanted a smoke, but I also knew better than to ask in here. There was no way Dr Cheney was a smoker. Sometimes you can just tell.

'I felt, you see, that Ann was holding something back,' she continued. 'But I wasn't sure what it could be. What she'd told me already had been horrifying enough, but somehow it didn't quite fit with the girl I had sitting in front of me. When Ann came to me she had deep-seated emotional problems, and a propensity for extreme violence towards those whom she believed had done her wrong, and during our sessions it became increasingly clear that there was violence in her past, something she'd experienced that wasn't explained by what she'd told me already. That acted as the catalyst for her finally leaving her home and father. After all, she'd been used to the treatment she was receiving; she saw it as normal. I therefore became convinced that something else had happened, something that she desperately wanted to repress because it was simply too traumatic. We had a number of sessions together, and slowly, and as gently as I could, I finally extracted from her what it was.'

Again, silence filled the room. This time I made no prompt. I waited. I knew she'd tell me.

She cleared her throat. 'Because Ann repeated these allegations to the police, and because I believed what she said and would like something done about it, if indeed after all this time it's still possible, I will tell you. But only because of that. According to what Ann told me, the reason she left was because she witnessed a murder.'

I tensed, my mouth feeling dry. 'Whose?'

'A young girl's.'

I exhaled more loudly than I'd expected, remembering Blacklip back in that hotel room. Requesting a little girl to kill.

'What happened?'

'The "parties" that Ann was forced to attend by her father became, she said, progressively nastier. The participants started to be much rougher with her than they had been originally. A new participant also became involved, a man who always wore a black leather mask and whom the others tended to defer to. This man was apparently the most violent of them all. Also, for the first time, other young girls were present. She remembered two being there who were slightly older — twelve or thirteen — although she didn't recognize them.'

Dr Cheney stopped for a moment and took a deep breath. 'Later, at another party at which Ann said there were five men including her father present, there was also another girl there, about the same age as Ann. Again, Ann didn't recognize her, but she remembered that the girl was in great distress. She was sobbing and begging her tormentors to stop, but, according to Ann, this simply served to spur them on even more. The violence got more and more out of hand. They started hitting her as they had sex with her, and the abuser with the black mask produced a knife and held it to her throat while she was forced to commit certain acts with him.' Her voice, which up until that point had been dispassionate, cracked a little. 'Ann remembers the girl choking and the man in the black mask cutting her face with the knife, and then someone — she couldn't remember who — ushered her — Ann — out and locked her in an adjoining room. She was made to sit there in darkness for an indeterminate period of time, hearing the muffled and desperate screams of the other girl, until finally they stopped altogether.

'Some time after that, her father came for her. By now he was fully dressed, but Ann said that he looked tired and had several blood spots on his neck. He told her to forget what she'd seen, then led her out of the house, but as they were going past the room where the assault had taken place, the door opened and she saw inside for a few seconds. There were two men on the sofa, both still naked, their masks now removed. They turned away as soon as they saw her and she didn't get much of a look at them because it was what was on the floor that caught her attention. There was a large sack tied at one end, which, by the way it was stretched, looked as if it contained a body. There were several large bloodstains showing through and no sign of the other girl. Whoever had opened the door then shut it very quickly, and Ann said her father became agitated and hurried her out, telling her once again to forget what she'd seen, because if she ever repeated it, the man in the black mask would come back for her. She was eleven years old at the time, Mr Kane. She believed him.'

'And you believed her? I'm not suggesting that she made it up, but if she was truly keen to see her father suffer, is it not possible that she could have told you this just to make sure?'

'I don't think so. She never wanted her father prosecuted; she just wanted to be left alone so that she could forget the whole thing. However, I advised her to tell the police, because I was concerned about what Richard Blacklip might still be doing. Also, I knew that it would help her case if she allowed me to tell the court about what had come out in our sessions, particularly if she was then seen to be co-operating with the police in building a case against him.'

'But the police never followed it up? About the murder, I mean?'

'Not at the time, no. They said they'd looked into it, but without a body, a location for the crime, any other corroborating witnesses or even an exact date, there wasn't a great deal they could do. Obviously they questioned Blacklip, but he denied all knowledge of such a thing. In fact, he denied everything and claimed he was a doting father, but a search of the house uncovered pornographic material involving young children, and further investigation revealed that he'd had these other convictions in the past. And now, of course, he can't be questioned any further.'

'Did Ann give you a description of this girl?'

Dr Cheney gave a little shake of her head. 'Only that she was about her own age, and that she had shortish brown hair.'

I wrote this down in my notebook. 'Have you heard from the police recently?'

She nodded, finishing her coffee. I hadn't touched mine. 'Yes. I had a visit from a policeman a few weeks ago, not long after the shootings you're investigating.'

I was surprised that Dr Cheney hadn't mentioned this earlier. 'Really? About Ann? What did he want to know?'

'He asked similar questions to you. He wanted to know the specifics of Ann's claims. I explained to him that I'd told the police everything at the time, but they'd chosen to do nothing. He apologized and said he was from the murder investigation…'

'The one into the deaths of Asif Malik and Jason Khan?'

'That's right. He said he hadn't been a part of the original inquiry into Ann's claims, and asked me to repeat everything. So I did.'

'What was the detective's name?'

'DCI Simon Barron, if I remember rightly.'

'You do.'

'You've met him, then?'

In a manner of speaking. 'Yes,' I said, 'I have.'

'I'm surprised he didn't say anything to you about our meeting.'

I was surprised he hadn't said very much to anyone about their meeting. If he was so interested in what had happened to Ann, why wasn't her death being treated as suspicious? Had he not shared the information he'd received from Dr Cheney with his colleagues? And if not, why not? Maybe Emma could find out.

But I was satisfied with what I'd heard because it meant I was onto something. The scent was getting stronger. I still wasn't 100 per cent sure that Ann Taylor's word could be entirely trusted (after all, she'd been an impressionable eleven-year-old girl), but something had happened, something that someone wanted suppressed very badly. And that someone had a lot of clout.

One thing I've learned down the years is that you don't get answers by asking a few big questions. You have to ask a lot of small ones. It's the only way you'll ever finish the puzzle.

'How long ago, roughly, did the murder of this little girl happen?'

'Ann had just turned seventeen when she came to me last year. At that point she'd been in care for approximately six years, so it would have been about seven years ago. But I can't give you an exact date, because she didn't leave home immediately after witnessing the incident. I think she was too shocked and, frankly, too scared. She thought it might have been a few weeks, even months, later that she finally plucked up the courage to run away. She did say, however, that there had been no more parties. They stopped altogether after that one.'

'But there can't have been many children go missing over that period. Not children that age. Did you ever look into Ann's claims yourself?'

Her expression tightened, the skin stretching with difficulty. I guessed that, like me, she'd had plastic surgery, although I don't think her surgeon was as good as mine.

'No,' she said. 'I assumed the police would do that. I did try to think back seven years to see if I could remember a child-abduction case that made the headlines, but nothing came to mind. DCI Barron said he'd look into it.'

I put my notebook away and drank my coffee down in one. It was tepid. 'Thank you very much for your help and your time, Dr Cheney. It's very much appreciated.'

'But is it helpful? Without real evidence, it's going to be hard to prove anything, isn't it?'

I stood up. 'If what happened to Ann's true, then there'll be evidence somewhere. If I find out anything, I'll make sure I let you know.'

She stood up as well. 'That's what DCI Barron said, but I never heard another word.'

'I expect he never got anywhere,' I told her as we shook hands. 'Or that he didn't have the time to pursue it.'

'But you will, won't you?'

I nodded firmly. 'If the answer to my case is there, I'll find it.'

And I would. I'd come a long way for this. I wasn't going to let it go.

Not now.