‘Felicity?’ It is impossible to read the expression that has taken hold of his face.
‘That’s what’s going to happen. We’re going back to King Edward Point, you’re getting on board that ship, you’ll agree to a divorce and we’ll never see each other again. Agree to that now, or I’m leaving you up here.’
‘Felicity.’ He is shaking his head, and finally she recognises that look. He is bewildered. He leans back against the ice wall, as though exhausted. ‘I’m not your husband,’ he says. ‘I’m your father.’
75
Joe
Joe is dozing on a sofa when the door opens.
‘This came through for your mother.’ Frank, the BAS scientist, holds out several sheets of paper. ‘I didn’t like to wake her up but it looks important.’
Rubbing his eyes, Joe takes a print-out of an email from one of Delilah’s colleagues in the Cambridge police station. Before leaving England, she’d asked her team to do some digging into the twenty-five-year-old Salisbury murder. Joe scans the covering note and turns to the attachment to see the front page of the Salisbury Gazette dated Saturday 20 May 1994.
* * *
Mother Killed in Horror House. Husband Suspected.
A nationwide hunt is underway for the chief suspect in the murder of a young Salisbury mother. Wilfred Lloyd is believed to be on the run after killing his wife, Faye, and subjecting both her and their three-year-old daughter, Felicity, to a sustained period of torture and abuse.
The body of Faye Lloyd was found by local police on Friday night, after neighbours reported a disturbance at 22 Clockhouse Road. The couple’s little girl was found, injured and dehydrated, in a cupboard, where it is feared she may have spent some days. She is currently in the care of social services.
People are warned not to approach Lloyd, but to report any sightings to the police.
Joe needs a moment to take it in. Felicity’s father was Wilfred Lloyd. Freddie Lloyd. The man who has followed her to South Georgia, the man who, according to what he’s just read, she has every reason to fear, isn’t her husband, but her father.
The story was still front page news on the following Monday.
* * *
Wilfred Lloyd is still at large nearly forty-eight hours after he is believed to have killed his wife Faye in a vicious attack at their home in Clockhouse Road, Salisbury. Sightings in Andover, Basingstoke and London have proved inconclusive and police believe he may be attempting to leave the country.
Police have refused to confirm that luggage and travel papers found in the Lloyd family house indicate that Lloyd arrived back in the country from where he was working in Brazil on Friday afternoon. A source who declined to be named, though, told the Gazette that the findings threw doubt on the previous belief that Lloyd had subjected his wife and daughter to a prolonged period of abuse, before murdering his wife.
‘He’d only just got back,’ neighbour Mrs Singer told the Gazette. ‘He couldn’t have hurt his wife and kiddy.’
The couple’s daughter, three-year-old Felicity, is recovering in hospital. It is believed her maternal grandmother is travelling to Salisbury from North Wales to take care of her granddaughter.
* * *
The story was covered again in both the Tuesday and Wednesday editions of the papers, slipping to the inside page and then to page four, as no further news emerged. Then, on the Thursday, it was back on the front page.
* * *
In a grim twist to the Lloyd murder investigation, Wilfred Lloyd handed himself into police custody at Basingstoke Police Station in the early hours of this morning and was immediately arrested. Police spokesman, Detective Chief Superintendent Allan Edwards would neither confirm nor deny that Lloyd’s arrest is linked to the discovery, yesterday, of the remains of three men in a house in the Shepherd’s Hill district of the town.
* * *
Once again, the story went quiet. The paper carried picture-stories of friends and neighbours leaving flowers and gifts for the dead woman and her daughter, and there was a small piece that was mainly speculation on the part of neighbours and friends, most of whom believed the young couple to be very happy and devoted to their daughter. Finally, on 29 May, an update.
* * *
In a statement given today at 2 p.m. this afternoon, Detective Chief Superintendent Edwards told waiting reporters that Wilfred Lloyd has been charged with three counts of murder, of Thomas Lee, 35, Ron Lovell, 29 and Jake Ellery, 34. All three men were known to have carried out work on the Lloyds’ property in recent months. Edwards went on to confirm that Lloyd would not now be facing charges for the murder of his wife, or for the abuse of his daughter. The police are not seeking anyone else in connection with those crimes.
* * *
The next day, a very brief piece.
* * *
Wilfred Lloyd pleaded guilty yesterday at Salisbury Magistrates Court to three charges of murder. The magistrate referred the case to the Crown Court and remanded Lloyd in custody. The trial is expected in the summer.
* * *
The door opens again and Jack appears. Without speaking, Joe hands over the articles before turning back to the email from Delilah’s detective sergeant. The detective wrote:
Faye Lloyd hired three men to help her clear the garden before the summer. If she’d known that two of them had convictions for sex offences and the third for GBH she probably wouldn’t have. They realised she and the little girl were alone in the house and decided to move in.
They kept her as a sex slave, subjecting her to abuse and torture, for three days before her husband arrived back on extended leave. He got in, arms full of souvenirs, looking forward to a marital reunion, to find his wife dead in the bedroom. Felicity had been locked in the under-stairs cupboard for God knows how long.
* * *
‘Did these blokes hurt Felicity too?’ Jack asks, when he’s caught up.
Joe nods. ‘Medical evidence suggested she’d been raped and beaten too. The public were hugely sympathetic to Lloyd, but he’d deliberately hunted down his wife’s killers and murdered them in cold blood. And showed no remorse. The judge had no choice but to send him down. He got a whole life tariff.’
All colour seems to have drained from Jack’s face. ‘Does Felicity know any of this?’
‘She was three years old. People retain very few memories from being so young. She did recall some of it under hypnosis one time but it was very confused.’
‘How so?’
‘She remembered her mother screaming and being locked in the cupboard. And she talked about the bad men coming to get her out of the cupboard and hurting her.’
Jack is looking through the newspaper reports again. ‘According to this, her father found her.’
‘Found her and then fled, never to reappear in her life. So, her terrified, toddler brain confused him with the bad men. All Felicity’s fears of a man she knew as Freddie stem from inaccurate recollections of when she was three years old.’