The Hanging Tree Read online

  Anyway, why would Stubbs or any other copper leave it till ten years after the case to help Massey get his revenge? The man had been out of prison for eight years. Long enough to trace Smith himself if he'd still been set on it. But, Rafferty reminded himself, Massey was broke. And even if he had managed to trace Smith, he had already nerved himself up to give him one beating; Smith would hardly have opened his door to him.

  Massey may have got older, thinner and unkempt, but he hadn't changed so much that Smith would have been unable to recognise him through his spyhole. Massey, thin to the point of emaciation, looked as if he wouldn't have the strength to tear open a milk carton, yet, from somewhere had found the strength, of mind and muscle, to beat Smith to a bloody pulp ten years earlier. You don't forget the face of the man who does that to you.

  As, for the moment, Massey seemed disinclined to add anything further, Rafferty asked, 'Still drive the same car, Mr Massey?'

  Massey's lashes, long, dark, girlishly beautiful, began to flutter above the still-frantic tic as he nodded. 'A white Cortina.' He looked at Rafferty, then quickly away, before adding, 'Some of your boys picked me up and brought me to the station. That would have been around s—seven, seven-thirty Thursday night. I spent the rest of the night in a cell.' He stumbled to a halt.

  Rafferty looked sharply at him. Massey wore an air half-hangdog and half-triumphant. He couldn't decide if Massey was lying or playing with him, deliberately holding back the alibi that would put him in the clear in order to get some sort of revenge.

  Outwardly, he didn't look capable of such tactics, but then Rafferty glanced again at the mass of well-used highbrow books and realised that the intelligence that read such heavy novels for pleasure was still there.

  If Massey was telling the truth, he couldn't have killed Smith. They had the testimony of several witnesses, Smith's landlady among them, to say that Smith had certainly still been alive at seven-thirty that evening.

  Rafferty stood up. 'Your story will be checked out, Mr Massey. If you were picked up by the police, it'll be on record.'

  He let himself out and breathed the scarcely less malodorous air on the landing with relief. Poor bastard, he thought again. Poor stupid bastard. You should have got yourself that alibi all those years ago. But at least, Rafferty consoled his uneasy conscience, if his story checked out, he was in the clear this time.

  Mrs Massey and her daughter still lived in the London house the family had moved to from Burleigh. After stopping for a bite to eat, Rafferty pulled up in the quiet suburban street. Aware the next half-hour was likely to be even more trying than the last, he lingered in the car for a few minutes, steeling himself for the interview in a short review of the facts.

  Alice, Massey's daughter, was only eighteen now, but she had been through a lot; the rape, the trial and Smith's release, her father's trial and imprisonment, and then the divorce. He was worried about her likely reaction to being questioned about Smith.

  He had left Detective Sergeant Mary Carmody in the car during Massey's interview, but he knew he would need her moral support for this one and finally, he turned to her and asked, 'Ready?'

  Mary nodded.

  Suddenly, Rafferty was even more relieved he had brought her. At thirty-four, she had a motherly air, as well as a lot of experience with rape victims. Rafferty had telephoned Mrs Massey the day before, so they were expected. In the circumstances, he felt it was a necessary courtesy. It gave her a chance to get a friend to be with her and her daughter.

  Alice Massey let them in. She was small, slender, and looked much younger than her eighteen years. But, given her dreadful experiences, she seemed remarkably composed, self-contained, if reserved. Her clothes were dowdy, mouse brown and dingy khaki and came nearly to her ankles at one end and just under her chin at the other as though she was determined to make herself as unattractive to men as possible.

  After inviting them in, she offered tea or coffee and, after calling her mother, served it very efficiently.

  Alice and her mother seemed to have exchanged roles, Rafferty noted with surprise. It was extraordinary, but Alice treated her middle-aged mother as if she were a child, explaining who they were and mopping her up and calming her down when she spilled her coffee and became upset.

  'I'm afraid my mother hasn't been well for some time, Inspector,' Alice quietly explained her mother's clumsiness, easy tears and general air of not quite being with them. 'I had hoped to keep this business from her.'

  Relieved that Alice hadn't dissolved into hysterics as he had half-feared, Rafferty saw no reason why they couldn't at least spare her mother the upset of questioning. All he needed to do was to check a few facts and Alice could supply answers for both of them. He told her this and suggested her mother might like to return to whatever she had been doing before their arrival.

  As though she feared he might change his mind, Alice had her mother on her feet straight away and steered her firmly through the door, shutting it gently behind them.

  'Poor girl,' Rafferty commented when he and Sergeant Carmody were alone. 'Don't you think her mother ought to be in a nursing home where they have the facilities to treat her?'

  Mary Carmody shook her head. 'I imagine looking after her mother is the only thing that's keeping young Alice together. I think she'd go to pieces if her mother was taken away. She probably blames herself for everything, from the rape through to her parents' divorce; rape victims often do. Can't you see how brittle, how unnatural that calm manner of hers is? It's as if she's got such a tight hold on herself because she's frightened of what might happen if she were to let go.' Sergeant Carmody glanced carefully at Rafferty. 'I think it might be a good idea if I questioned her.'

  Alice came back then. 'We can talk now,' she told them. The unnatural stiffness of her smile made Rafferty realise that Mary Carmody had been right. Alice was stretched as taut as an anchor chain. She sat as far away from him as possible, perching on a hard chair against the wall rather than share the sofa with him.

  He gave Sergeant Carmody the nod to begin. He listened hard as she began to question Alice.

  Alice told them she and her mother had taken a planned trip to the East Coast the previous Thursday, when her father had turned up on their holiday doorstep unexpectedly.

  'He upset mother. He always does. He gets so angry.' For the first time, there were signs of anger in Alice's face. Two pink spots of colour brightened her cheeks, making her appear more alive than at any time since their arrival.

  'I suppose he gets upset, too, Alice,' Mary Carmody told her gently. 'I'm sure he must be concerned about you.'

  'He's only concerned about himself.' Alice's voice was cold. 'He feels what-what happened to me reflects on him. It makes him feel weak, unmanly. His ego can't take that.' Her gaze hard, her expression scornful, she looked utterly unforgiving. In a girl so young, it was quite chilling. 'But he couldn't even protect himself. He was stupid. That's why he got caught when he attacked the-the man. The policeman told him what he should have done.'

  'I'm sorry he upset you.'

  'He didn't upset me. I told you. It was mother he upset by bringing it all back again.'

  She seemed determined to make herself appear calm, as though such untidy things as human emotions had nothing to do with her. It merely emphasised all the more how unnatural her behaviour was.

  'I asked him to leave. Things got a bit heated.'

  Rafferty had taken it for granted that when Frank Massey had said he'd had a row and left, he had assumed he meant he had rowed with Mrs Massey, not Alice. It was interesting that she didn't always cling to her emotionless stance.

  'So, where did you go, you and your mother? You said you went to the seaside?' He might as well get confirmation of where they had been while he was here, he thought.

  'We went to Jaywick, along the coast from Clacton. A quiet place.' And no distance at all from Elmhurst, Rafferty thought again as he met Mary Carmody's eye. 'We stayed in a boarding house.'

  'Bit ch
illy at this time of the year,' Mary remarked with a bright smile. 'Or are you one of these hardy types who swim in winter?'

  Alice didn't return the smile. Her face, gut-wrenchingly solemn for such a young girl, she told them, 'I never swim. Not since the man.' She paused and when she went on her voice was less like that of an automaton and more that of a young woman. 'Mother had been sleeping badly here at home. If we can afford it, I always try to take her to the coast when she has a spell like that. She seems to sleep so much better beside the ocean. Sometimes, I can hardly get her to wake the next morning.'

  They left shortly after. They didn't trouble Alice for the name of the boarding house. As she had said, Jaywick was a small place. It should be easy enough to trace. Rafferty was half-afraid of what they might discover. Alice looked a lot younger than her years, small and slenderly-made, unthreatening. Smith might easily have opened the door to her. But now, Rafferty felt certain that her outward composure concealed more emotions than she had wanted them to see. He had sensed her anger; she was full of it. An anger that she appeared to bottle up. An anger that only the cork of determination kept bottled. Had something shaken her up so the cork had briefly popped? If so, he felt certain her rage would be all the more powerful once it escaped that unnatural hold she kept on it.

  'I'd like you to go along to Jaywick when we get back,' Rafferty said to Mary Carmody, when they were in the car and pulling away. 'Check out her story. There can't be much bed and breakfast business in Jaywick in December, so if Alice and her mother were there, they would likely be remembered.'

  Mary Carmody nodded and glanced across at him. 'Do you think she might have killed Smith?'

  Rafferty prevaricated. 'Do you?'

  She didn't answer and Rafferty reluctantly admitted, 'She's a possible. She admits she was in the general area. Of course, she didn't have any transport, but I've one or two ideas about that and it would have been easy enough for her to dose her mother with something to keep her quiet so she could slip out.'

  As though determined to push him to examine the evidence against Alice, she asked, 'But how would she know where to find Smith?'

  'If ex-Inspector Stubbs or Thompson became friendly enough with Frank Massey, as, at least to a certain degree, Stubbs must have done to offer to stand as a character witness at his trial, he may well have tipped Massey off about Maurice Smith's address on the quiet. Easy enough for her to get it out of her father when he was on one of his drinking binges.'

  'Even if she managed to gain access to Smith's flat and kill him, how would she get him from his flat to the woods? She doesn't have a car. Can't even drive, as far as we know.'

  'All right,' Rafferty snapped. 'So she had help.' He jammed his lips tightly together, aware he was being unprofessional and feeling doubly-annoyed because of it. Why was it, he asked himself, that when other people tried to manipulate him into facing up to unpleasant possibilities, he reacted so unreasonably?

  Conscious he could evade the issue no longer, he saved Mary Carmody the trouble of dragging the rest of his conjectures out of him. 'Sinead Fay and her friends were watching Smith – parked outside his flat in a car. To my mind, there's damn all doubt about that, even though we're still waiting for proof of it. From where they were parked on the other corner, they had a clear view front and back. They could have seen anyone using the fire stairs at the back of Smith's flat. There was a full moon that night and there's a street lamp right on the corner, so they'd have had no trouble seeing her. I reckon they'd have been only too delighted to help her.'

  'But I understood that they didn't know her,' Mary Carmody objected. 'Why should they help her? Why should they even care what she did?'

  Rafferty was cheered a little at the reminder.

  'Sergeant Llewellyn told me that none of them had ever counselled her, so how would they, ten years later, recognise her as one of Smith's victims?'

  Unfortunately, Rafferty's brain raced ahead of her and reluctantly, he added, 'Even if they consider men far from being the greatest thing since sliced bread, I don't suppose they elect to remain in purdah. I imagine they visit other Rape Support Groups from time to time. For all we know or are likely to be able to find out after all this time, one of them met her on a visit to Burleigh and befriended her. Ellen Kemp's the most likely. She's the right age to have done so. And even if they didn't help her, there's always her father. He has a car.'

  'But according to you, by that time he'd been picked up by the police.'

  'According to Massey he'd been picked up by then. We've yet to check it out. But did you notice — his car's got two aerials? The betting is he's got a car phone. God knows why or how he affords it. But there's a phone box on the corner of Smith's road; maybe, if she killed Smith, she contacted her father from there and told him what she'd done. Do you really think her own father would have left her to take the consequences? Especially after he'd made such a hash of things ten years ago. He'd have helped her get rid of the body.'

  Mary Carmody called a halt to her questioning for long enough to filter her way on to the M25, the ring road around London. It was busy. The rush hour started earlier and earlier, particularly in the lead-up to Christmas. Rafferty was thankful to have a respite from her prodding questions. But, the respite didn't last long and five minutes’ later, they resumed.

  'So who moved the body from the wood?'

  'Who else but Sinead Fay and her friends? We know full well where their sympathies lie – certainly not with the police. They'd have been only too happy to muddy the waters of the police investigation into Smith's death. Even if they didn't help Alice herself, they must have seen it all, as it's pretty certain that it was them watching Smith's flat. They were probably hoping to make sure he didn't do a bunk after he received their “outing” threat and elude their punishment. If, as I think most likely, Frank Massey helped his daughter shift the body to the wood, those women would have followed and removed it.'

  'So why would they — presuming it was them — string it up again?'

  God knows, Rafferty thought. I certainly don ‘t. But, just in time, instinct came to his aid. ‘'Because they'd acted on impulse, hadn't really thought through the consequences. Then cold, hard, common sense set in and they got scared.' Rafferty, aware his thoughts were still muddled, fought for answers. 'It would only be later that they would have been likely to appreciate what they’d done; that they had a corpse on their hands, or rather, in Sinead Fay's car boot. They could hardly leave it there. As Smith was strung up again, I imagine they decided that Massey and his daughter had had the right idea in the first place. Smith was dead. They might as well get some useful publicity from his death. Hiding his body served no purpose so they decided to put it back where they found it. They just took the precaution of removing his wrist ties and the hood in an attempt to confuse us and protect his killer.

  'Unfortunately for them, they didn't realise we already had a description of how the body had originally been left. Though, even if we hadn't known, the cord on his wrists had left recognisable marks. I don't suppose they noticed those as they must have done the necessary in a great hasty panic. I doubt they even looked at him much. Easy to miss such a giveaway in the circumstances. Easy too, to miss the fact that he was stabbed, as most of the bleeding was internal and his tracksuit, being dark, would have meant the blood wouldn't have shown up too well.'

  He glanced quickly across at her, almost asked how he was doing, but decided such a question was beneath his dignity. Instead, he said, 'Shame we've no proof one way or the other; no prints, no nothing. Smith's visitor didn't even shed a hair, according to forensic.'

  Carmody glanced quickly back at him. 'But Alice doesn't necessarily know that.'

  Rafferty stared at her as her quiet comment penetrated. 'Are you suggesting we deliberately try to entrap a young girl into admitting she was there, that she killed him? After what he did to her?' He frowned. 'Hardly seems sporting.'

  'But we're not involved in a friendly soccer match, s
ir,' she reminded him. 'Admittedly, it wouldn't make you the most popular boy in the school, but the question is, do you want to catch Smith's killer or not?'

  Rafferty didn't answer her question. Unfortunately it was one he had already asked himself several times. And even though, during the course of the slow, stop-start journey, he had plenty of time to think about it, he still didn't have an answer when they finally reached Elmhurst.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Liz Green and Llewellyn had still not returned by the time Rafferty and Mary Carmody got back to the station. After a quick refreshments break in the canteen, Sergeant Carmody set off for Jaywick to check out what Alice Massey had told them.

  Rafferty, left alone with his troubling thoughts, tried to keep busy. He got on the phone to Great Mannleigh station to corroborate Frank Massey's statement but the two officers who had picked him up were off duty and the Custody Sergeant to whom he was put through was interrupted by wild, drunken shouting before he could check his records. Yelling down the line, 'I'll get back to you,' the officer put the phone down.

  Rafferty sighed and glanced at the clock. He'd chosen a bad time to call. Christmas drinking started early and like Elmhurst, Great Mannleigh’s charge room would be cluttered with the human detritus of pub brawls and domestic violence, their numbers swelled by the seasonal revellers. He sighed again as he realised it might be some time before the Mannleigh Custody Sergeant was able to get back to him.

  He reached in his pocket for the bag of boiled sweets that had earlier that year taken the place of the habitual cigarettes. However, the bag was empty. Aware that if his urge for lemon sherbets wasn't quickly appeased the older habit might resurface, he pulled on his coat and headed for the sweet shop round the corner from the High Street.