Jackson had an uncomfortable vision of himself on the mortuary slab with Julia weighing his heart in her hand. Healthy male. No sign of heart problems. According to that seafront clairvoyant, his future was in his hands. But it wasn’t, it was in Vince Ives’s hands.
‘Sorry,’ Vince said, lowering the arm that held the gun, having the grace to look shamefaced. ‘Didn’t mean to scare you.’
‘That’s okay, Vince,’ Jackson said. Keep the guy calm, keep him focussed. Get the gun off him.
‘It’s a mess,’ Vince said.
‘I know, but it’ll be all right,’ Jackson mollified. ‘You can come back from this’ (a Collier cliché) ‘you just need to put the gun down.’ He was searching his memory for a suitable country lyric or even another helpful phrase from Collier, but Vince said impatiently, ‘No, not me, I’m not the mess, I mean this place. What’s happening here.’
‘What is happening here?’
‘See for yourself.’
Vince conducted a tour of the downstairs for Jackson’s benefit – the cell-like rooms, the stained mattresses, the foetid atmosphere of despair. Vince seemed detached, like an impartial estate agent. Jackson suspected he was in shock.
The normally placid Dido, who had accompanied Jackson inside Silver Birches – dogs die in hot Toyotas, and so on – was twitching like an agitated sniffer dog. He decided to tie her up in the reception area. She’d seen enough, and whatever was happening here wasn’t her business.
When he returned to Vince, he found him standing in one of the rooms, lost in thought. There had been a dead girl here yesterday, he said. No girl now, dead or alive. No girls at all. Jackson began to wonder if this whole thing had been produced by Vince’s overwrought imagination.
‘Maybe they’ve moved them,’ Vince said. ‘One of the girls escaped, they’ll be worried that she’s able to identify this place. They don’t keep the girls here for long anyway, apparently.’
They? Anderson Price Associates, Vince explained. There was no Anderson and no Price, it was run by people he knew. ‘Friends,’ he added grimly. ‘Tommy and Andy and Steve.’
Sounded like children’s TV presenters, Jackson thought, but then the antennae on his little grey cells twitched. ‘That wouldn’t be Tommy Holroyd, would it? Crystal’s husband?’
‘Yeah,’ Vince said. ‘Crystal deserves better. Do you know her? Have you met her?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Tommy Holroyd, Andy Bragg, Steve Mellors,’ Vince said. ‘The Three Musketeers,’ he added sarcastically.
‘Steve Mellors? Stephen Mellors? A solicitor in Leeds?’
‘You know him as well?’ Vince said suspiciously. ‘You’re not in cahoots with them, are you?’ Jackson noticed him tightening his grip on the gun. Was it just for show? The man had been in the Signals, for heaven’s sake, had he ever fired a gun in combat? More to the point, did he really have the nerve to shoot someone in cold blood?
‘Christ, no, Vince,’ he said. ‘Relax, will you? It’s just a coincidence. I do some work for him occasionally. Fact-checking.’ He wasn’t entirely surprised. There was a narrow line between the wrong and right side of the law and Stephen Mellors was the type who managed to straddle it successfully.
‘Pretty big coincidence,’ Vince muttered.
It was, wasn’t it? Jackson thought. Even in a lifetime of coincidences this one was outlandish. He wondered if he had somehow been unwittingly pulled into this hellish conspiracy. But then he never needed to look for trouble, as Julia frequently reminded him, trouble would always find him.
‘And where are they now? he asked Vince. ‘Tommy and Andy and Steve?’
‘I don’t know where Steve is. I just saw Tommy leaving. Andy’s somewhere in the building. He can’t have got far. I shot him.’
‘You shot him?’
‘I did.’
Not for show, then. ‘I’d feel much better if you put the gun down, Vince.’
‘I’d feel much better if I didn’t, to be honest.’
As they walked along the corridor Jackson noticed occasional smears of blood on the walls, and as they started up the stairs he saw a bloody hand-print on the wall, hardly a good augur. In Marlee’s nursery class the children had made a tree that had been hung on the wall. The leaves were the prints from their hands, dipped in different shades of green paint and with their names written on them by their teacher, Miss Carter. ‘The Tree of Life’ she had titled it. He wondered if Marlee remembered that. She was part of his tree of life. And now she was starting her own tree, putting down roots, growing branches. He sensed himself getting lost in a tangled