Cambridge Blue - Alison Bruce [99]
‘The drug I’d been slipped left me with only bits of memory, and every day I tried to recall more about the attack. I had a vague picture of an alley littered with beer crates. Oil stains on the tarmac, grit and sludge in the puddles. And not looking at him, but turning my head away towards the narrow end of the alley, where it’s only wide enough for a bicycle, like I was pleading for someone to come and save me.
‘Every time I thought about it, I remembered looking towards that narrow end of the alley, not the other end where people actually might pass by. Why would I do that?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I’ll tell you, it was because I knew someone else was in that alley.
‘Then, after that thought, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that Lorna had been there. Hidden. Watching. And that’s been the greatest battle – having that idea in my head and not being able to get it out again.
‘I didn’t even know if I’d just invented that part, but I stewed on it. I had no proof and told myself I was being hysterical. But I couldn’t dismiss it. The feeling of those eyes on me . . . In the end, I accused her. She was outraged, of course, but she would have been, wouldn’t she? I didn’t see her again after that.’
‘So you had no real proof?’
She shook her head. ‘None. Women’s intuition, maybe.’
‘But why would she do it?’
‘Why would anyone want to watch their friend being raped? I don’t know, but it makes her worse than him. Can you imagine what this has done to my friendships since? I couldn’t get over this feeling that I was raped by her too, then I remembered everything she’d told me about her own rape. That’s when I started to wonder whether she’d made that up as well.’
It wasn’t anything to go on so far, and perhaps Thompson understood what Goodhew was thinking. ‘It may not sound much in the way of evidence, but when Hayley came to see me, I’d also spent months trying to grasp what had happened to me. I then realized she’d come with the answer.’
‘Where were you when Lorna died?’
‘Here at home, with Hayley.’
‘Just the two of you?’
‘You’re asking all the wrong questions. What you need to know is Lorna’s objective. What was she chasing, and who was she prepared to damage to get it?’ Thompson leant closer to Goodhew. ‘Lorna only did things for Lorna. She was the centre of her own universe. Everybody else just spun around her, and she made sure it happened that way.’
Thompson fell silent and the pair of them looked across at Goodhew. He didn’t know what he might have expected, but it definately hadn’t been this. Maybe they were lying, concocting it all to cover for whichever one had killed her, but he threw out that idea at once. Instead he saw the truth of the situation: a light had been shone into the dark corners of Lorna’s life, and there she stood, quietly manipulating all the people around her. The drugs found at Lorna’s flat fitted the picture. Lorna had already sent one man to prison and manipulated a social situation until a young woman had been brutally raped. How much further had her game-playing needed to go before it had become an extreme and deadly sport?
The only sound now came from the hand-me-down fridge freezer which gurgled and hummed from its cubby hole behind the door.
Goodhew suddenly shuddered.
‘Are you OK?’ Hayley looked genuinely concerned.
‘Just tired,’ he answered and stood up hastily, keen to leave behind the sense of foreboding which had just draped its leaden arm across his shoulders.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Goodhew had lost all track of time, and he had no idea how long he’d been awake. He wasn’t even sure when dawn was due, although he could see from the light seeping into the sky from the east that it was on its way.
The taxi hurried from Ely, past flat farmlands, and eventually into the fringes of Cambridge. There was one thing Goodhew had known earlier: he was too tired to drive.
As the cab approached his