The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [97]
“Yes.”
He didn’t like that, yet how strange that it was the truth that made him uneasy. I think he wanted me to bluster and pretend, because no one in my position would admit so readily that help was unavailable. I don’t even know why I did it, since my hope had been to persuade him the police were on their way.
He darted a suspicious look at the hall behind me. “You’d better not be lying.”
“I’m not,” I said with as much sincerity as I could muster. “How could I have called them without a signal? The landline’s not working. You know that.”
It was the smallest of hits—a nervous toying with my father’s mobile as he confirmed the lack of signal—but it seemed to hand me an advantage. A fear that he hadn’t read the situation as well as he believed. My difficulty was that I couldn’t see how to exploit it, as I had no idea how long he’d been in the house or what he knew, and his doubts would vanish, anyway, when the cavalry failed to appear.
“They know about you,” I said. “Your mother’s made a statement.”
He stared at me. “You’re lying.”
Was there doubt in his voice?
“If you go into my inbox, you’ll find it as an attachment to the last email from DI Alan Collins.” I could hear the clicks as my tongue rasped against my dry palate. “I remembered her name from the letter you asked me to post.”
The flicker of recognition, brief though it was, was unmistakable.
“I told Alan Collins she was called Mary MacKenzie, and had probably been…or still was…a prostitute. He passed the information to Glasgow and they found her quite easily.”
I wasn’t committing myself to much. If he denied his mother was a prostitute, or that Mary MacKenzie was her name, I’d say my information had been wrong and the police had located her another way. He didn’t. He was more interested in the axe. “You’d better not take me for an idiot, Connie. Do you think I’ll turn my back on you? It’s no matter, anyway. My bitch of a mother’s been dead to me for years. Tell me what her statement says.”
Oh God! Such tiny steps and each one had to be understood and profited from immediately or MacKenzie would smell a rat. I shouldn’t need thinking time to recall a statement. It helped that I’d given some thought to his mother, helped that I’d trawled the net for information on sadists and rapists. I’d even had the idea of trying to find her myself, either by using a private detective agency or going to Glasgow and searching through the local newspaper archives. It seemed incredible to me that a man of his violence hadn’t shown up in the courts before he left his native city, or that his hatred of women was unassociated with his mother.
I gave a passable attempt at a shrug. “She blames herself for the way you are…says it was her being on the game that started you off. You found school difficult and started truanting…and she talks about thieving and drunken fights.” There was enough of a reaction to make it worth trying something I’d found on a website—the term Glasgow prostitutes use for the red light district. “She says she was more frightened of you than going on the drag.”
“That’s crap,” he grated angrily.
“It’s what she says. There’ve been seven unsolved prostitute murders in Glasgow since 1991, and she’s told Strathclyde police she thinks you’re responsible. It’s all in her statement.”
He didn’t know whether to believe me or not. Would a Zimbabwean know that Strathclyde police was the over-arching force for Glasgow or that files were still open on seven prostitutes from the drag? The murders had happened, although they weren’t thought to be linked to a single individual. Did MacKenzie know that?
He sent a darting glance towards the computer screen. I kept my eyes on his face, but at the edge of my range I could see Peter struggling to release his hands. I knew from experience that it was wasted effort but I prayed for a miracle, anyway. “It’s your mother who provided the photograph,” I said.
I was afraid that might be a step too far. Would Mary MacKenzie have a recent picture of