Mrs Jennings takes her time. ‘She reacted badly,’ she says eventually. ‘Went off the rails. Started skipping school, hanging around with other troubled kids; under-age drinking, shoplifting, usual stuff.’
‘We see it a lot.’ Delilah has a sympathetic smile on her face. Joe isn’t fooled. His mother’s tapping foot is a sure sign of her impatience. And her phone has been quietly beeping away for several minutes.
‘Felicity was terrified at the thought of seeing her father again,’ Mrs Jennings says. ‘She exhibited an unusual and completely irrational fear of him. He’d done a terrible thing, no one’s saying he hadn’t, but he hadn’t hurt Felicity herself.’
He’s opening the door. He’s opening the door. No, no, no, Daddy, don’t give me to the bad men.
Joe says, ‘During hypnotherapy, Felicity regressed to being a very young child and she was frightened of someone she called “Daddy”.’
‘Memories from when we’re very young are notoriously unreliable,’ Mrs Jennings says. ‘If she associated her father with her mother’s killers, even on some deep level that she couldn’t bring to mind, it would help to account for her terror of him.’
Delilah sighs. Joe deliberately turns his back on his mother. ‘And her confusion could have led to her irrational and uncharacteristic behaviour. Were you able to reassure her at all?’
‘I think so. We told her he wouldn’t know her new address, that we wouldn’t forward any more correspondence without her permission and that there was no possibility of him getting out for years. If ever.’
‘Did it work?’
‘Yes, it did. She settled down and got a place at Cambridge. She even started volunteering with the homeless. She was a bright girl. One of our success stories.’
Delilah doesn’t look impressed. ‘We need to get back. Thanks for your time, Mrs Jennings.’
* * *
‘We’re talking about when she was fifteen,’ Delilah says when they are back in the car. ‘It doesn’t help us now.’ She flicks through her phone messages.
‘It establishes a pattern,’ Joe says. ‘When Felicity feels threatened, she acts out of character. She becomes someone else. Oh—’
Is it possible? He starts going through Felicity’s symptoms in his head.
‘Damn,’ Delilah’s expletive disrupts his train of thought.
‘What’s up?’
‘The excavation at Silver Street has stopped. Some twat wittering on about the tomb of one of the founders.’
‘What does that mean?’
She bangs a hand down on the steering wheel in frustration. ‘It means we can’t dig out the rest of the drain until the Indiana Jones squad have been through it. It could take weeks.’
Months, Joe thinks. ‘You found Dora,’ he says. ‘That’s the important thing.’
Delilah snorts as she scrolls through her messages. ‘Oh, that’s a bit more like it. ‘Her face brightens. ‘We’ve had a call from a businessman in Strasbourg. He was staying in the Hilton by Silver Street towards the end of July. His room overlooked the river and he thinks he saw the old dear the night she died.’
While his mother is reading the message in full, Joe thinks back to Felicity’s symptoms. Fugue states. Amnesia. Hearing voices. The belief that she was being stalked. He remembers how she changed under hypnosis and again, when the two of them met in the restaurant. He remembers a phrase in her journal. The others.
Delilah looks up. ‘He’ll be back in the UK in a few days,’ she says. ‘We need to talk to him properly.’
He can’t say anything yet. He needs to be sure. He needs to talk to Torquil.
Delilah puts her phone away. ‘He also mentions seeing a young woman in a white dress.’
Joe wonders when the bad news will stop coming. Even so, if he’s right …
‘Mum, things are becoming a bit clearer,’ he says. ‘Felicity is a very damaged woman, but the damage is buried so deep even she doesn’t know it’s there most of the time. The important thing is, she can be cured.’
His mother starts the car. ‘She’s a killer, Joe. You can cure her in prison.’
64
Joe
Joe and his supervisor are the last to be shown into the meeting room at the police station. It is a large, low-ceilinged room, with windows running the length of one wall. Seven people are sitting around a table. The room smells of coffee but most of the cups he can see are empty. These people have been here for some time.
A man in uniform introduces himself as Assistant Chief Constable Elton Downey and runs through the introductions at speed. Delilah catches Joe’s eye and gives him a tight-lipped smile that could either be meant to convey reassurance, or warn him to behave.
‘To sum up where we are.’ Downey remains standing after Joe and Torquil have taken their chairs. ‘Dr Felicity Lloyd, currently living on the island of South Georgia, is our prime suspect in the murders of Dora Hardwick and Bella Barnes last summer. Our initial suspect was a person known as Shane. DI Jones, can you remind us why Shane was wanted in connection with the murders?’
Delilah taps her pen on the notebook in front of her, a sure sign that she is nervous.
‘Bella Barnes was sleeping alone in the Grand Arcade car park on the night she was killed,’ she says. ‘Round about the estimated time of death, we have CCTV footage of a person leaving the car park, wearing a black hooded sweatshirt with a distinctive logo. Other homeless people identified this individual as a man they knew as Shane. No one knew much about him, and efforts to track him down came to nothing, but he remained someone we very much wanted to speak to.’
‘If I remember correctly, your experts confirmed that Shane was male,’ Joe interrupts. ‘He walked like a man, stood like a man, carried himself like a man.’
‘He was believed at that time to be male, yes,’ Delilah confirms. ‘You yourself, Joe said the other rough sleepers were afraid of him. They thought him creepy, that he watched them while they were asleep. They believed him to have murdered Bella.’
Joe can remember saying exactly this to his mum.
‘Time went by, and we couldn’t find him,’ Delilah goes on. ‘Then, on the thirtieth of June, someone broke into my son’s flat. Fingerprints on and around the fire escape suggested an intruder, but they didn’t match any we had on the system. His identity remained a mystery. Joe installed extra security and nothing else happened.
‘On the eleventh of July, a patrol car spotted someone answering Shane’s description on New Park Street. They gave chase, but he got away. He had, though, left behind a knife. Fingerprints on the knife matched fingerprints found in Joe’s flat. We knew beyond any doubt that Shane was the intruder.’
Around the table, people look at Joe as though expecting him to argue. He doesn’t.
‘The case went cold,’ Delilah says. ‘Then, a week ago, we found the body of Dora Hardwick, another homeless person, in a drain near Silver Street. From the last sighting of her alive, the finding of her belongings in the river, and from an appointment that she didn’t keep, we assumed her most likely date of death was Friday the twenty-sixth of July. That same evening, Felicity Lloyd not only crashed her car and fled the scene of the accident, but was seen running around the streets of Cambridge, in some distress, and wearing a dress that appeared to be severely bloodstained.’