A Deep Deceit Read online

  CONTENTS

  About the Author

  Also by Hilary Bonner

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Hilary Bonner is a former showbusiness editor of the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mirror. She now lives in Somerset, and continues to work as a freelance journalist, covering film, television and theatre. She is the author of four previous novels, The Cruelty of Morning, A Fancy to Kill For, A Passion So Deadly and For Death Comes Softly.

  Also by Hilary Bonner

  FICTION

  The Cruelty of Morning

  A Fancy to Kill For

  A Passion So Deadly

  For Death Comes Softly

  NON-FICTION

  Heartbeat – The Real Life Story

  Benny – A Biography of Benny Hill

  René and Me (with Gorden Kaye)

  Journeyman (with Clive Gunnell)

  A DEEP DECEIT

  Hilary Bonner

  For Lynne Drew

  With thanks to:

  Dr Paul Nathan, Dr John Griffin, Dr Arden Tomison, Home Office Pathologist Dr Hugh White, Barry Sullivan LL.B, Detective Sergeant Pat Pitts and Detective Constable Phil Diss of the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary, Chief Superintendent Steve Livings and Detective Sergeant Frank Waghorn of the Avon and Somerset Constabulary (again), the staff of St Ives Archive Centre, Library and Tourist Office, and the people of Cornwall and Key West who remain among the last great individuals in life and provided much of the inspiration for this book.

  I am so very grateful to them all.

  Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep

  And in his simple show he harbours treason

  The fox barks not when he would steal a lamb;

  No, no, my sovereign, Gloucester is a man

  Unsounded yet, and full of deep deceit.

  William Shakespeare

  Henry VI, Part Two, Act 3

  One

  The first blow split my lip and loosened my front teeth. I tasted the salt of my own blood filling my mouth. Somehow I managed to turn and run from the bedroom out on to the landing but I wasn’t nearly fast enough. He was after me at once. The second blow flattened my nose. I felt the bone turn into mush and more warm blood spurt from my torn nostrils. The next blow sliced my face open and cracked a cheekbone. Pain filled my head. I fell heavily on to the floor, clutching at my ruined face, struggling to catch my breath, desperate to escape.

  He stood above me, quite calm it seemed. Then he drew back his right leg and kicked me with all his might. He was wearing leather lace-up shoes with hard toes, the heavy old-fashioned kind. The kick caught me fully in the ribs with such force that I was half lifted off the ground and sent spiralling crazily down the stairs. I bounced my way down, stair by stair, the sharp edges digging into my already shattered rib cage, my arms and legs twisting impossibly beneath me, and landed with a sickening thump at the bottom.

  My wrist felt broken and I had twisted my ankle so badly that I knew, without trying, I would not be able to walk.

  I was aware of him standing at the top of the stairs. Quite still, silently watching.

  Tears mingled with the blood running down my smashed face. I half crawled, half dragged myself across the hall, and reached out with my one good arm in an attempt to open the front door. I grasped the handle and managed somehow to turn it, but the door didn’t budge. I assumed it must be locked. In defeat, I slumped into a heap again.

  Suddenly I realised he must have come down the stairs. He had an ability to move very quietly, uncannily so, even at the height of his furies. He was like a cat stalking his prey and I could feel his shadow looming over me. I could hear the rasp of his breath. I whimpered. I hated myself for my weakness but I had no defence against him. I didn’t look up. I couldn’t bear to look up. I knew what I would see.

  Instead, I summoned my strength to make my tortured way into the dining room, still half crawling, half dragging myself using my one good arm.

  I made it to the table and crawled underneath. I curled myself into a tight ball, desperate not to be hurt any more, hearing the tread of his feet as he followed me, without hurry, into the room. I knew that he had been drinking heavily again, alcohol and his abuse always went together, and maybe this slowed him a little, but there was, in any case, no urgency for him. He had total command of my very existence.

  He rested one hand on the table top and I could hear his fingers drumming. Tap tap tap, tappity tap. A rhythmic drumming. Then, quite abruptly, he lifted the table and tipped it so that it turned on to its side and I was revealed cowering there on the polished wooden floor, a frightened, whimpering thing.

  I was certain I was going to die. There had been other terrible frightening times. But this was the worst, the very worst.

  I could not run and I could not fight him. He was physically indomitable. It was not that he was a particularly big or strong man. It was more that his rages were so violent they gave him an almost unnatural power. And, of course, he believed he was God on Earth. Really, he did.

  He stood above me, laughing. There was a hammer in his right hand, a heavy lump hammer which I didn’t remember seeing before. It occurred to me that maybe he had acquired it specifically to kill me. He carried it loosely, letting it swing with his arm as if it were a cricket bat. He was still laughing. This really is the end, I thought. He could crush my skull with one blow from that. Eventually he raised his right arm. My terrified gaze rose with him, following the arc of the hammer, and I could no longer avoid looking into his face. My eyes were drawn there as if by a magnetic force.

  Except, of course, that he had no face. I knew that already. But the shock of seeing it was always just as great as the first time. That was what I dreaded most of all, more even than the very worst of the violence. The horror of his facelessness was somehow greater than the pain he inflicted. I gazed into the empty black hole where his face should have been, and I could not look away. My eyes were riveted on the awful nothingness of him . . .

  I heard myself screaming – terrible, frantic, piercing screams. And then it was all over.

  I woke in Carl’s arms, as I always did. I woke to the soothing sound of his lovely gentle voice and he held me close to him, even though I was a screaming, hysterical thing, pummelling his broad chest with my fists, kicking out desperately.

  Slowly my hysteria lessened. Eventually I stopped punching and kicking, but it was a while before I could stop screaming. It always was.

  ‘Shh, shh, my darling,’ he soothed, in that soft American accent I had fallen in love with all those years before. ‘It’s all right, Suzanne,’ he said. ‘You’re at home with me. It was just a dream, honey. Everything’s fine. I won’t let anybody hurt you.’

  As I listened to his reassurances I felt the awful tension drift from my body. The pain had been so real. Cautiously I touched my lip and my nose. They were both undamaged. I was not bleeding. I did not have cracked ribs, a broken wrist or a twisted ankle, but I checked each part of my
body carefully, just as I did every time.

  Carl stroked my hair, then my face with one hand, and kept the other arm wrapped round me. He knew so well how to calm me.

  The tears still poured down my face. He touched them, tenderly, and then he kissed them, still whispering reassurance. It was several minutes before I was able to stop crying. Carl carried on kissing my eyes and stroking me.

  He knew my nightmares as well as I did. He was so vividly aware of them that it was almost as if he too suffered what I suffered. Sometimes I could feel his body trembling as he comforted me. He understood completely how to help me recover, how to help us both recover.

  He would not try to make love to me, he never did at these times, because he knew as well as I did myself that I just couldn’t, much as I adored him, not then. At any other time I responded to Carl’s touch with the same loving arousal that he had first excited in me almost seven years previously. I loved him to pieces and we were blissfully happy together. Our home was a tiny cottage high above St Ives harbour and I had grown to love the little Cornish seaside town almost as much as I loved Carl.

  Yet I could not stop the nightmares. Nothing could. Not even Carl. He could help me overcome them, but he could not stop them happening. At first I had been afraid to go to bed and had worn myself out pacing our tiny house, unable to bear the thought of sleep. They were not so frequent now. In the last year there had been just five. And always I prayed, as I knew Carl did, that this one would be the last.

  ‘Will they ever stop?’ I asked him for the umpteenth time. They were my first coherent words. They were invariably my first coherent words.

  ‘One day,’ he whispered, his lips very close to my ear. ‘One day, I promise you.’

  He was so kind. I knew he would not let himself sleep now. He never did. He realised that I needed him awake and loving me. And he knew that for at least the next week, maybe two weeks, the fear would be all around me again. And that some nights I would not dare to sleep. He would stay up with me until exhaustion overcame me. He always did.

  He was my rock.

  Two

  Often, when I was trying to get over a nightmare I would make myself think happy thoughts. Try to remember the good times.

  The very best memory of all was the day I first met Carl, the day everything changed. The day I began to believe that maybe, just maybe, I would find happiness.

  I was crying when he first appeared by my side, almost by magic. I was desperate and so badly needed someone I could trust and lean upon. Then, out of nowhere, along came Carl.

  I had gone to the Isabella Garden in Richmond Park because I needed to be alone. I was twenty years old. I had been married at eighteen, and I was desperately unhappy.

  I was orphaned when I was just a toddler and my grandmother brought me up. It was a very sheltered childhood, unhealthily so, I suppose, although I had not known that at the time. Gran even contrived to teach me at home through most of what should have been my school years – and that suited me just fine. My one brief spell at primary school had been torture. Indeed, I never learned to cope with much of the world outside the home I shared with Gran.

  I was certainly totally ill prepared for marriage so young – particularly to a strong, domineering man who turned out to have none of the kindness about him that Gran had always shown me, and which I had somehow expected to receive automatically from someone I was to share my life with. Instead, he turned out to be both cruel and violent.

  Gran was long dead by the time I met Carl, and I felt completely alone in the world. Even though I was only twenty, I honestly believed that my life was over, that I would be forever trapped in a vicious, loveless marriage.

  The Isabella was one of my hiding places, one of my sanctuaries. It’s famous for its wonderful shows of spring shrubs, when the blooming rhododendrons and azaleas and camellias display themselves in all their blazing multicoloured glory. The autumn can also be glorious there, but not the winter. And this was a particularly unpleasant December Wednesday, cold, damp and relentlessly grey. But even so, I was grateful for the peace of the place.

  I sat by a murky-looking pond weeping silently, and I thought I had the garden more or less to myself. Even the ducks seemed to have found somewhere more pleasantly hospitable. I was certainly not aware that there was another person nearby as I perched on an old, dead, moss-covered tree trunk, oblivious to its soggy wetness, lost in my own misery.

  He must have approached very quietly because he was standing quite close to me before I noticed him. My head was bowed. My eyes were filled with tears. I saw his feet first, clad in Wellington boots. Then a hand reached out to me, offering a red-spotted handkerchief, the kind I had only seen before in films tied round a cowboy’s neck.

  He didn’t startle me. There was nothing threatening about his presence and somehow I knew that immediately.

  I looked up at him, seeing his face for the first time. It was a broad, unevenly featured face, but nevertheless quite pleasing. He had a big craggy chin, a reddish complexion emphasised by his cropped pale-blond hair, a wide, full-lipped mouth and the brightest, kindest blue eyes I had ever seen. But then, it was a long time since I had known any kindness at all.

  I was aware at once of the gentleness in him. And there was concern in those blue eyes too, concern for a stranger. He had the look of someone who knew what pain was when he saw it.

  He did not say anything at first, just continued to hold that spotted handkerchief in front of me. Eventually I took it, blew my nose and did my best to dry my eyes.

  Only then did he speak, with that slight stammer which, I would learn later, occurred just when he was nervous. ‘A-are are you all r-right?’

  I didn’t answer. It was, after all, pretty obvious that I wasn’t all right.

  He shook his head and made a kind of tutting sound. ‘S-sorry, silly question,’ he said.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I replied. ‘I’ll be fine in a minute.’

  He stood silently for a while as I sniffed inelegantly into his handkerchief, struggling desperately to stem the tears and regain control. ‘I’m s-sorry,’ he said again. ‘Would you like me to leave you? I d-don’t want to intrude?’

  He took a couple of steps backwards towards the pond, without looking where he was going. His left foot sank deeply into the thick, gooey mud around the edge of the water. He stumbled and for a moment I thought he was going to fall, then he recovered himself and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Typical,’ he said.

  He was unsure of himself, and hesitant and clumsy in his movements, but there was humour in his eyes. And even at that moment he managed to coax a smile out of me.

  Immediately he grinned back. I reckoned he was in his early thirties, maybe twelve or thirteen years my senior, but in spite of the lines etched quite deeply round his mouth and across his forehead the grin was a boyish one. He positively beamed at me and his mouth stretched so wide that it seemed as if his face might crack. His teeth were perfect: bright, white and wonderfully even. His accent had already told me that he was American. I didn’t know much of the world, but I had read somewhere that being American and having good teeth went together. Involuntarily I felt my own smile widen.

  ‘That’s b-better,’ he remarked. He ran the fingers of one hand through his stubbly blond hair, stepped towards me again and reached out with the other for his handkerchief. ‘Finished with that?’ he asked.

  I glanced at the now damp and soiled piece of cotton with horror. ‘I can’t give you it back in that state . . .’ I began.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he murmured, interrupting me. He took the handkerchief, put it back in his pocket and sat down next to me on the moss-covered tree trunk.

  Although I had barely noticed its cold wetness until then, suddenly I was concerned for him. He wasn’t wearing a long coat like me, just a short leather jacket over blue jeans.

  ‘The moss is sodden,’ I warned.

  ‘Oh right.’ He glanced down at the tree trunk beneath him as if seeing
it for the first time, then jumped to his feet, pulling at his jeans, which were already very wet and had stuck to him. ‘Y-yuk,’ he stammered.

  Somewhat to my surprise, I burst out laughing. I could barely remember when I had last laughed.

  As though reading my mind, he said: ‘You have a lovely laugh, you should try it m-more often.’

  It was gone three o’clock and the day was starting to grow even colder and more unpleasant. All too soon it would be dark. That’s England in December for you. He shivered and thrust his hands into the pockets of his jacket. He had big, capable hands, scrubbed scrupulously clean but rough-skinned and battered-looking, the kind of hands that were accustomed to working for their living.

  ‘Horrible weather,’ I remarked, falling back in true English fashion on the safest conversation topic of them all.

  He nodded.

  I was suddenly curious about him. ‘It’s really ghastly, so what brought you here today?’ I asked.

  He removed his right hand from his jacket pocket and I saw that he was clutching a small sketch pad and a pencil. ‘Just l-looking for a few ideas,’ he said.

  ‘You’re an artist?’ I enquired.

  ‘Trying to be,’ he said easily.

  I took the pad from him, surprisingly forward for me back then, and leafed through it. He was being modest. Books and painting were my one solace in life. The ultimate escape. Along with exploring the parks and gardens of west London, they were all that made life worth living for me. If I wasn’t at the Isabella or Kew Gardens, or strolling through the grounds of Chiswick House, whenever I could get out of the house for long enough I would be browsing in one of the local libraries or a bookshop or wandering around an art gallery just staring and dreaming. It was almost like running away. One way and another books and paintings were everything to me, and I was pretty sure that this stranger’s drawings were exceptionally good.

  His sketches of the cowering shrubs and skeletal trees of winter were bleak and angular, only vaguely representational and totally individual.