The House in the Woods (Atticus Priest Book 1) Read online

  “No, it is not—”

  Abernathy spoke over him again, anger vibrating through his voice. “I don’t believe you, Mr. Mallender. You shot them and then, if that wasn’t enough, you defiled the memory of your brother by making it look like he killed them. Isn’t that true?”

  “No. I did not.”

  “We’ve heard evidence from Cameron’s psychiatrist that he wasn’t violent, at least beyond his self-harm. You used his mental illness as a diversion. A diversion designed to take attention away from what you did.”

  “No, it’s not like that.”

  “No? Really? So what was it like, Mr. Mallender? Did you panic? You lost your temper for a moment and then, when you realised what you’d done, you panicked. You made it look like Cameron had killed them. You wiped the pistol down and put it down near to his body, although not near enough. You locked the doors so that it looked like the killer must have been inside the house. You went out through the coal hole, and then you called the police. Isn’t that what happened?”

  “No.”

  Mack had seen Ralph like this before, during the interviews that she had conducted with him before he had been charged. She had chipped away at him, asking the same questions over and over again, each repetition another drop of poison added to the mix. He was brim-full of anger and superciliousness and disdain, and, if handled just so, it was possible to lead him all the way to a place where he couldn’t stop that mixture from detonating. He was close to that place now. He had exploded once; another larger explosion was coming.

  Abernathy sensed it, too. He prodded and probed some more, provoking him, daring him to react, encouraging him to lose control. The barrister was ramrod straight, his eyes burning, staring at Ralph, almost taunting him.

  “You’ve told a pack of lies today, haven’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Everything you’ve told us about what happened on Christmas Eve is a lie.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s true. I didn’t do what they said I did.”

  “Lies, lies, lies.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Your father abused you for years.”

  “No…” Ralph paused, confused.

  “No?”

  “I mean yes. I’m not lying.”

  “He abused you for years.”

  “Yes.”

  “He stole your childhood from you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Your mother was complicit.”

  “Yes.”

  “A mother should protect her child, shouldn’t she?”

  Ralph was lost now, swept away. “Yes.”

  “But she didn’t. She made it all possible.”

  “Yes.”

  “You hated your mother and your father and you wanted them dead.”

  “Yes, I fucking did.”

  He shouted, a sudden eruption that echoed around the court. There were gasps from the public gallery. Mack leaned forward, avid, knowing full well that this was the fulcrum upon which the case would be decided. Lamza was suddenly no more than an inconvenience.

  The investigation, the trial… it all came down to this.

  Abernathy leaned in, too, a hawk ready to swoop. “You killed them.”

  “He was a bastard. The only thing that made him happy was making my life a living hell. They were both evil.”

  Abernathy let the moment hang and then, taking off his spectacles and slipping them into a pocket beneath his robes—letting the moment stretch out a little longer—he closed his folder and stood back.

  “I have no further questions.”

  72

  The atmosphere in the defence conference room was horrific. Atticus was in his usual position, leaning against the wall and, from there, he was able to look at the others ranged around the table: Crow looked stunned, trying to start a summing-up of the car crash that he had just witnessed but unable to find the diplomacy to do it; Cadogan looked bemused, jotting pointless notes on a legal pad so that he wouldn’t have to offer an opinion; Allegra was shocked, her mouth open, her right hand obsessively kneading her left. Ralph had been taken back down to the cells until the end of the lunchtime adjournment. Crow and Cadogan had been to see him and had reported that he was in a bad way. That, Atticus thought, was not surprising. He had allowed his temper to run away with him, and the potential cost of that momentary slip could be his liberty.

  “Right then,” Crow said, trying to sound cheery. “That didn’t go well, but it’s not the end of the world.”

  “Don’t sugar-coat it,” Allegra muttered. “That’s it, isn’t it? He’s done. We’re cooked.”

  “He didn’t do himself any favours. But…” Crow looked down at his notes. “Like I said, it’s not the end of the world. We can recover.”

  “Abernathy took advantage of him,” Allegra said. “He goaded him.”

  “That’s his job,” Crow said.

  Allegra looked up from her lap, her eyes flashing. “So Ralph should’ve taken a deep breath. We told him, didn’t we? We said ‘You can’t lose your temper.’ Jesus. Toddlers react like he did. He knew what Abernathy wanted him to say, and then he said it anyway.”

  “Let’s not panic,” Crow said, his hands raised. “What’s done is done. It didn’t go well, but it’s just a setback. We can recover from it.”

  Allegra looked as if she was going to say something more, but decided against it and went back to an examination of her hands.

  “We’ll put it to one side,” Crow said. “I’ll work on a way to minimise it. I get to re-examine Ralph after lunch. I’ll try to repair as much of the damage as I can. And then we’ve got Cameron. We’ll put the focus back on him. His anger. When he got in trouble with the police and Ralph had to go and bail him out. The violence. We’ll focus on that, just like before, just like we said.”

  “They’ve already undermined all that,” Allegra said. “Sandeau said Cameron wasn’t violent.”

  “I know she did,” Crow said. “And we have plenty of witnesses who will say otherwise. He was arrested for beating someone up—that’s not speculation, it’s not professional opinion, it’s recorded fact. The jury will decide which story is the most credible. I think we’ll win this one.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We can add in the abuse now, too,” Cadogan said. He turned to Crow. “Right?”

  “We can,” Crow said with a nod. “It cuts both ways—what Hugo did is a motive for both brothers. Ralph and Cameron.”

  Atticus felt his phone buzz in his pocket. He took it out and saw that he had a Facebook message. He opened the app and navigated to Messenger.

  It was from George, Cassandra’s ex-boyfriend.

  He opened it.

  I found a picture of the man I mentioned.

  Atticus scrolled down and waited for the picture to download. He tapped it to bring it up to full size.

  He stared at it for a moment, too stunned to think.

  “Atticus?” Allegra said.

  It was a group shot: Cassandra and a group of six others. It looked as if they were out on the town, all of them dressed up in party clothes and some of them holding drinks up for the camera. Cassandra was in the middle of the group, and a man—older than the rest of them—had his arm looped around her waist.

  “Atticus? What is it?”

  He took a moment to consider how best to reply.

  The others were all looking at him.

  “I’ve been going over the evidence, like I said,” he explained, his tone vague as he ran the angles through his head. “I wanted to approach it from a different direction, so I started looking into Cassandra. It felt like everyone had ignored her, and I had a feeling there might be something there. I reviewed her social media history for the last three years and contacted some of her older friends. A lot of them disappeared between the first and second years of university—they were there; then they weren’t.”

  “She dropped them,” Allegra said. “Ralph told me.”

  “Did he tell you w
hy?”

  “She went off the rails. Juliet got her into the church, and she decided that she needed a clean break from the people she had been seeing.”

  “That’s what I heard,” Atticus said.

  “How did you find them?” Allegra asked.

  “Facebook.” He shrugged. “It wasn’t difficult. One of the old group got back to me—this lad, George. He’s an ex-boyfriend from the first year.”

  “You’ve spoken to him?”

  “I went to Bath last week to see him. It turns out Cassandra wasn’t always clean living. Drink and drugs.”

  “Usual student stuff,” Cadogan said. “Kids being kids.”

  Atticus turned to him. “Why didn’t you make reference to it in the defence?”

  “Like I said—student stuff. It’s hardly unusual.”

  “No,” Atticus said, “it isn’t. But by saying nothing, we’ve let the prosecution paint her as if she was an angel, and she wasn’t. There were four people in that house who might have had something to do with what happened. Hugo, Juliet, Cameron and Cassandra. You’ve only focused on Cameron. What about the others?”

  “Because he’s the most likely to have done it,” Cadogan said.

  Atticus could have retorted, argued that the strategy had ignored three potential sources of reasonable doubt, but there was no point now; that ship had sailed. Recrimination could come later. He had to work with the hand that he had been dealt.

  “One of Cassandra’s friends died,” Atticus said.

  “I remember,” Allegra said. “Ralph mentioned it. Drugs?”

  “Her name was Stacey Dickinson. It was on the news—she took ecstasy and then basically hydrated herself to death. George told me about it and I looked it up. Cassandra came straight home after it happened. She started going to church around that time. It seems like the experience changed her. She decided everything in her life had to be different. Church every Sunday, no more drinking, no more drugs, no more going out. When she went back to university for the second year, she didn’t want anything to do with her old friends.”

  Allegra frowned. “I don’t get it.”

  “Neither do I,” Cadogan said. “How does this have anything to do with the murders?”

  “George and Cassandra were seeing each other for the first six months they were at university,” Atticus said, “but then she finished with him and started seeing someone from home.”

  Allegra shook her head. “Ralph never told me that. Who?”

  Atticus turned the phone around and held it up so that the others could look at the screen.

  Allegra’s mouth fell open. “What?”

  “Show me,” Crow said.

  Atticus angled the phone in his direction.

  “That’s Jimmy Robson.”

  Atticus nodded. “The last person to see Hugo alive on Christmas Eve.”

  Allegra took the phone, stared at it and then handed it to Crow. “Robson was seeing Cassie?”

  “That’s what George told me,” Atticus said. “You didn’t know?”

  She shook her head. “I had no idea. Ralph never said—I doubt he knew. But it’s relevant. Right?”

  “It is,” Crow said. “Very.”

  Atticus collected the phone and put it back into his pocket. “George told me that it was Robson who got Cassandra into drugs. He was selling to all of them. Including Stacey. George says that he never saw Robson again when Cassandra came back for the second year. It seemed like he was out of her life, just like the rest of them were. So that got me to thinking: why would the relationship stop like that? And why would she start going to church? Then he told me about Stacey Dickinson and it made sense. Let’s say Robson supplied the pill that killed Stacey. What if Cassandra confided everything to Hugo and Juliet? That seems likely. He was working for the family then. It’s not that hard to imagine how Hugo would have reacted.”

  “He would’ve lost his shit,” Allegra said.

  “Perhaps he confronted Robson?”

  Cadogan had opened the trial bundle and had flipped back to the chronology of agreed facts. “That was around the time that he stopped working at the farm.”

  “So let’s put it together. Maybe Robson has a grudge against Hugo and Juliet. They stopped him from seeing Cassandra and fired him from his job. Maybe he had a grudge against Cassandra, too, for not standing up to them. Who knows? But what we do know, because he has given evidence on it, is that he was near the house on Christmas Eve. He was there twice—once in the evening when he says he saw Hugo, and then the police have him on the log that night, too, when he said he came to check out what was going on. We know he doesn’t have an alibi—he said that he was at home on his own. So he had the means and the opportunity to do it. He might have had the motive, too.”

  “He probably knows the house,” Allegra said, talking over him with excited animation. “He worked for the family for years.”

  “So maybe he knows about the way out through the coal cellar.”

  “Would he fit through it?” Crow asked. “He’s big.”

  “We’d have to check,” Atticus said.

  Allegra’s cheeks were steadily reddening. “Why didn’t the police find out about any of this?”

  “Their resources are stretched,” Atticus said. “They have to prioritise where the assets they do have are deployed. They would have started with the people who knew Cassandra immediately before she was killed.”

  “And then they just stopped?”

  “I’m not surprised, especially if they’d decided Ralph was guilty. Why else would they keep digging deeper and deeper into her past when there was no obvious reason to do it?”

  “Because they might have realised that Ralph didn’t do it?”

  “No,” Atticus said. “It doesn’t work like that. Look—I’m not ready to jump to conclusions. I’d like to know a little more about Robson first.”

  “What are you going to do?” she said.

  “I’ll go and have a nose around. If I think there might be something there, I think we have to tell DCI Jones. They’ll want to bring him in for an interview.”

  Allegra grimaced. “Really? We have to trust her?”

  “She’ll investigate it thoroughly,” he said, instinctively feeling the need to uphold Mack’s reputation even though this wasn’t a friendly venue in which to defend her so volubly. “I’ll find out if there’s any scope for more, and, if there is, I’ll call. You can decide what you want to do, but that would be my very strong recommendation.”

  “You’ll need to move quickly,” Crow said. “Our evidence is not going to last more than another couple of days, and that’s only if I spin it out. If there’s anything to use, we need it before I sit down. Otherwise there’s a chance he will be found guilty. If that happens, we’d have to wait for an appeal, and that could take months.”

  Atticus pushed himself away from the wall. “I’ll get on to it now.”

  “This is good work,” Crow said approvingly. “Very good.”

  Allegra smiled hopefully. “Well done.”

  “I’ll let you know if I find anything,” he said.

  Atticus saw Mack talking with Gordon Abernathy as he exited the building. The prosecution silk looked happy and he laughed uproariously at something Mack said. Atticus did up his jacket and strode on, Mack noticing him as he headed towards the car park.

  Their eyes locked for a moment.

  Atticus gave her a nod of acknowledgement and continued on his way.

  73

  Atticus drove around the ring road until he reached the turn-off for Wilton. It was coming up to three in the afternoon when he passed beneath the railway bridge and headed out towards Great Wishford. He reached the village, drove through it and turned onto the one-lane track that led to the parking space at the fringe of Grovely Wood.

  The car park was empty; Atticus reverse parked and got out. He took out his phone, navigating to the mapping application. He selected the satellite view and zoomed in until he could see
the farmhouse. There was a track that ran to the south alongside the eastern boundary of the property, travelling for around half a mile through a heavily wooded area until it ended at another house. The second house was where Jimmy Robson lived. Atticus spread his fingers to zoom in. The house was modest, with a series of outbuildings nestled around it. There was a collection of vehicles near to the entrance from the track and a wide stretch of garden that ended at the boundary of a large field.

  Atticus put the phone in his pocket. Bandit had been with him the last time that he had visited the woods, and he found that he wished he was here now, too. The sky was leaden and the air pressure had dropped; it felt as if rain was on the way. Atticus looked down the track that led to the Mallender house. It was gloomy and uninviting, and, as he zipped up his jacket, he realised that the birds were quiet, too.

  He gave a shiver and set off.

  The trail was muddy, and the slop stuck to Atticus’s boots as he trudged into the forest. The light dimmed as he went deeper inside, the canopy of leaves thickening overhead. He walked on, crossing the Roman road and continuing along the narrower track that led to the farmhouse.

  The place looked still and sombre, the sole witness to the murderous events of almost a year ago. The curtains were closed and the chimneys were cold and lifeless. Atticus knew that the house and its land were worth millions of pounds, but he couldn’t imagine it ever being lived in again. He wasn’t prone to superstitious thought, but out here, miles from anyone and surrounded by the enveloping wood, it was difficult not to imagine that the blood of the Mallenders had soaked into the fabric of the building, and that their screams would echo inside forever.

  Atticus continued, following the track around the large agricultural barn. There was an open field sown with crops on his left and another field full of sheep to his right; he pressed on until he was surrounded by thick trees on both sides once again.

  He walked the track until he reached the boundary of Robson’s property. The track ended in a metal gate that had been fastened with a padlock. Atticus walked up to it and looked into the space beyond. A muddy track led through an overgrown front garden that was littered with the rusting hulks of old vehicles and pieces of farm machinery. The place was in a state of some disrepair. It was a large two-storey construction and had, most likely, been a farmhouse at some point in its past. Those days were gone. The downstairs windows had been boarded up, and the windows upstairs were obscured by vertical blinds, the fabric slats of which were stained yellow. The roof was missing a number of slates and the others were covered with a carpet of moss. Wispy tendrils of smoke drifted up from the chimney. An old and battered Land Rover was parked on a patch of muddy ground just off the track. He could hear the sound of an engine from behind the property; it sounded like a generator.