by Hunter, Cara
She looks round, hoping someone else will do the decent, and eventually Asante picks it up.
‘CID, DC Asante.’
She sees him nod then look over towards her. ‘Line two. Asking for you.’
She sighs, slides her bag back on to her desk and picks up the phone. But she is not sitting back down, she is not sitting back down –
‘Miss Everett? It’s Elaine Baylis again.’ There’s just the slightest stress on that last word.
‘Look, I’m sorry I haven’t been back to you –’
‘It’s not that,’ she says crisply. ‘I’m afraid there’s been another incident with your father.’
Ev grips the phone, turns away from Asante’s discreetly quizzical glance. ‘What sort of “incident”?’
‘An altercation with another resident. Nothing to be worried about, but in a community like this, even small disagreements can be very disruptive. I’m sure you can appreciate that –’
‘I do, I’m just not sure what I can do about –’
‘Could you come in tomorrow? Two thirty?’
Ev’s heart sinks. She had her Sunday all planned. A lie-in, brunch at Gail’s, a walk round Christ Church meadow. Not a twenty-mile round trip in thirty-degree heat and another dressing-down by matron in an office that smells of pee.
‘I appreciate you have a demanding job,’ says Baylis in a tone that rings with don’t we all, ‘but this is about your father’s welfare and that of the other residents in our care.’ A heavy, self-righteous pause. ‘It’s important.’
‘OK,’ says Ev, gritting her teeth and reminding herself that Baylis will be working on Sunday too. ‘Two thirty. I’ll see you then.’
She puts down the phone and turns to see Asante still looking at her.
‘Line three,’ he says.
‘You’re taking the piss.’
But Asante doesn’t take the piss.
He shrugs. ‘Sorry. I did try. But it’s you he wants.’
‘Someone down here to see you,’ says one of the desk officers when she picks up.
‘Oh yes?’
‘Won’t give her name,’ he says, slightly more loudly, as if he wants the visitor, whoever they are, to hear quite how hacked off he is.
Ev frowns. ‘So why –?’
‘Has to be someone on the Fisher case, she says. And it has to be a woman.’
* * *
‘Show it to me again?’
Gis rewinds the footage and presses play. ‘See – where we ask him about the tattoo? He seems to almost stop breathing.’
Gow nods slowly. ‘It’s a textbook anxiety response. I suspect that was a question he hadn’t prepared for.’ He glances up at Gis, who has his arms folded, thoughtful. ‘Does that help?’
Gis starts a little; he was miles away.
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘It does.’
Gow gets up and reaches for his briefcase. ‘Well, if there’s nothing else, I shall return to my weekend.’
Gis grins. ‘Hot date with a steam locomotive?’
Gow winks at him. ‘Well, let’s just say you’re half right.’
He edges round the table towards the door, but just as he gets there Gislingham calls him back.
‘Did he do it?’
Gow turns, frowns. ‘I just told you –’
Gis shakes his head. ‘I’m not talking about Morgan. I’m talking about Fawley.’
Gow takes hold of the door handle. ‘No,’ he says after a moment. ‘I don’t think he did.’
* * *
The coffee shop the girl chooses isn’t one students usually go to and Ev suspects she picked it for exactly that reason. An old-style caff down one of the narrow passages leading off the High Street, with a nail bar one side and a Chinese takeaway the other, lino on the floor and a fad-free menu board where the only sort of coffee started life in a jar.
Ev sends the girl to a table in the far corner – largely so she can’t turn tail and scarper without her seeing – and queues up at the counter for two mugs of tea, shooting surreptitious glances at the girl all the while. She must be twenty-two or -three, with green eyes and soft auburn hair that’s only just long enough for the tiny ponytail at the nape of her neck. She was picking at her nails at the station and she’s fretting with the bowl of sugar now; Ev suspects it took a long time for her to make up her mind to come here at all.
Ev collects her order, goes over to the table and sits down. The red-and-white oilskin cloth is slightly sticky and the ketchup comes in a large plastic tomato. It’s like being inside an Alan Bennett.
She’s going to give the girl as much time as she needs to broach this her own way, but there’s only so much fiddling with the milk sachet she can do. Eventually, just as she’s about to give up –
‘My name’s Zoe. Zoe Longworth.’
Ev nods. ‘OK.’
She flickers a look up at Ev, then stares doggedly back at her tea. ‘I saw it online.’
‘The story about Professor Fisher?’
The girl nods. ‘I mean, it didn’t actually name her but it was pretty bloody obvious who it was. At least to me.’
‘You know her?’ says Ev.
There’s a pause.
‘Did she teach you?’
A longer pause then another nod. ‘She used to. I’m in London now. But I was here before, a couple of years ago. If I hadn’t seen it on Twitter I’d never have realized – I had no idea she’d done this to someone else.’
Ev nods. Every time there’s a controversy about identifying people charged with sexual offences the same rationale is trotted out: disclosing perpetrators’ names means other victims come forward – victims who might otherwise have remained silent. Or ignorant. But this girl can’t be a victim. Can she?
‘So why did you want to talk to us, Zoe?’
She’s stirring the tea now, almost obsessively. The clang of the spoon is setting Ev’s teeth on edge.
‘It was great to start with – having Marina as a supervisor. She was really supportive, got really involved. I couldn’t believe my luck.’
Caleb Morgan, remembers Ev, said exactly the same thing.
‘We both thought so.’
Ev frowns. ‘We?’
Longworth looks up briefly. ‘My boyfriend, Seb. Seb Young.’
So that’s it, thinks Ev. But she keeps it from her face. ‘Go on.’
‘One Friday night, out of the blue, she invited us for drinks at her house. We thought all her grad students were going but when we turned up it was only us.’
‘I see.’
‘Her little boy was there. Must have been ages after his bedtime but she didn’t make him go upstairs. She kept saying how well he took to us – how he was really shy with most people, but he’d taken to us straight away. You could have fooled me – he barely opened his mouth, but she kept going on and on about it.’
‘Let me guess – she started asking you to babysit?’
She bites her lip, nods. ‘And to start with, it was fine. Better than fine. She’d leave out wine and tell us we could raid the fridge, watch her Sky. We had sod-all money so it was like a night out.’
There’s a silence.
‘So what changed?’ says Ev eventually.
She sighs. ‘I didn’t realize it had, not at first. And then I started noticing that we seemed to be round there every Friday, and sometimes two or three other nights as well. It was all just a bit full-on. And when we did actually babysit, she wasn’t paying. Like she didn’t need to bother offering us money any more, and of course we were too embarrassed to ask. I felt like we were being used.’ She hesitates, puts down the spoon, looks up. ‘And then there was the thing with Tobin.’
‘What thing, Zoe?’
‘She had this huge vase in the sitting room – an ugly purple thing. I thought it looked like something out of some sleazy seventies cocktail bar, but apparently it was worth, like, a grand. Anyway, one afternoon we were there babysitting while she was at some event in London and Tobin had one of his
meltdowns and it got broken.’
‘So?’
‘When she got back we told her what happened and she was actually quite nice about it – she said she knew Tobin could be a bit “lively” and it was OK, she was insured and they’d pay for it. Then she went upstairs to talk to him, and I just happened to go to the loo at the same time and I overheard them. He was telling her we’d done it. And he was really convincing. It completely freaked me out.’
Ev frowns. ‘You didn’t confront her – tell her the truth?’
‘I was going to,’ says the girl, ‘but Seb said to forget it. That it would be embarrassing to admit I’d been eavesdropping and, in any case, I probably got the wrong end of the stick because kids his age just aren’t that good at lying.’ She makes a grim face. ‘Yeah, right.’
* * *
‘I’m glad I caught you before you left. Someone dropped this in for you earlier. I did call up at the time but you were engaged.’ The woman on the front desk smiles at Asante, not unkindly. ‘I think she was a bit upset to miss you.’
Asante registers the smile but doesn’t return it. He slits open the envelope and drops the contents on to the counter. A comps slip from the adoption service, with a couple of lines from Beth Monroe to say that the enclosed arrived at the office for Emma, and she didn’t know if it might be important. Asante picks it up. It’s a postcard of Verona, with a short message on the back in a big confident hand.
Asante’s detective antennae flare for a moment, only to sag again when he sees from the postmark that it was sent the same day Emma died. All the same, he should probably pass it on to Gallagher’s team. Just for completeness.
‘Thanks,’ he says absent-mindedly as he turns back towards the stairs. When he gets up to the Major Crimes office the only person there is Simon Farrow. Asante taps on the glass and Farrow looks up with a frown, then pushes back his chair and comes over.
‘Yeah, what is it?’ he says, wedging the door open with one foot.
Asante hands him the postcard. ‘This arrived at the adoption service for Emma Smith. It’s clearly personal, though given it was sent to her office, it doesn’t suggest anyone particularly close. But I guess you never know.’
Farrow scans it, then looks up. ‘Probably Amanda Haskell – she’s the woman Smith was seeing.’
Asante raises an eyebrow. ‘Woman? Sorry, I had no idea she was gay.’
Farrow glances up. ‘No, we only just found out too. Haskell came forward – she didn’t see the news before because she’d been away.’ He holds up the card. ‘Which this rather proves.’
‘Sorry – I just thought, you know.’
‘No, no, you were right. I’ll pass it on to DC Carroway. It’ll make a nice change from the assorted loonies, nosey parkers and nutters on the tip line.’
Asante grins. ‘Or forty-eight hours of CCTV.’
Farrow grimaces. ‘If only. If they’d put some sodding cameras on that bridge I wouldn’t be spending my Saturday going squared-eyed at traffic cams. There must be hundreds of bloody Mondeos in this town –’ He stops, flushes a little, realizes he’s said too much.
Asante frowns. ‘You’re looking for Fawley’s car? You’ve ruled out everyone else?’
Farrow looks a little embarrassed. ‘Pretty much. The boss ain’t interested in Hugh Cleland any more, that’s for sure.’
And the boss in question isn’t Gallagher. That’s pretty clear too.
Farrow lets the door go and it starts to close. ‘Thanks for this, anyway.’
‘No problem,’ says Asante. But when the door clicks shut he’s still standing there, his face thoughtful.
* * *
‘So what happened, Zoe? Why did you come all the way from London to talk to us?’
The girl takes a deep breath. She’s put the spoon down but the tea is still untouched.
‘It was that summer. She messaged Seb one Saturday morning saying there was some light bulb or other that needed changing, and she didn’t like going up stepladders, so could he pop round later and do it for her. I think she assumed he’d go on his own – she had a funny look on her face when she saw me on the doorstep and I hadn’t been there five minutes when she turns round and asks me to take Tobin to the pictures.’
Ev sighs. ‘She wanted you out of the house.’
She makes a bitter face. ‘It was Despicable Me. Ironic, huh? So anyway, off we go, leaving Seb there with her, and of course the light bulb is in her bedroom, isn’t it. So he gets up the ladder to change it and when he comes back down she’s standing there in the doorway behind him, all tarted up in stilettos and a red silk number that looked like Ann Summers, but knowing her was probably more like bloody Agent Provocateur.’ She bites her lip, looks away. ‘I mean, what a fucking cliché.’
‘How did he react to that?’
‘He laughed.’
‘Ah,’ says Ev. ‘I don’t imagine she took that very well, did she?’
‘No, she bloody well didn’t.’ There’s a harshness in her voice now. ‘She told him he ought to think very carefully because he had precisely three minutes to make a decision and it had better be the right one. She was his supervisor – she could make him or break him. She could get him stuck in some shithole for the rest of his career.’
She picks up her spoon again, starts drawing circles in the droplets of water on the tablecloth.
‘She was going on about how she could offer him so much more than I could. That I was just a stupid little girl who was not only an also-ran in the brains department but probably didn’t have a bloody clue when it came to sex either. Whereas she –’ She stops, takes a breath that buckles into a sob.
‘It’s OK,’ says Ev gently. ‘Take your time.’
She reaches for a napkin, wipes her eyes. ‘Anyway, I’d taken Tobin to the bloody film but we’d only been there about ten minutes when he started screaming the place down and I had to take him home.’
Ev shakes her head. ‘I think I know what’s coming next.’
She gives a fierce nod. ‘Right. I could tell what was going on the minute we came through the door. I mean, the bloody noise they were making.’ She tosses the spoon back down on the table with a clatter. ‘I told Tobin to go down to the kitchen and I went straight up there. And there she was. On top of him, naked, screwing him.’
Ev takes a breath. ‘What did you do?’
Zoe gives a contemptuous snort. ‘What do you think I did? I took a fucking picture, didn’t I.’
* * *
Oxford Mail online
Saturday 14 July 2018 Last updated at 18:12
BREAKING: Man arrested in murder of Headington woman
By Richard Yates
The Oxford Mail has learned that a 46-year-old man has been arrested in connection with the murder and suspected sexual assault of local Headington resident Emma Smith, 44, whose body was discovered in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly.
Do you have information about this story? Email me at [email protected]
* * *
‘And what happened then?’
‘I just walked out. Went back to my flat. Seb came round about half an hour later. He was in a terrible state.’
‘That’s when he told you that she’d coerced him?’
She nods. ‘He was crying – he knew what it must’ve looked like – he knew what I’d think.’
No shit, Sherlock, thinks Ev. I’d have had his balls for the barbecue.
‘But you believed him.’
‘Not to start with. But yeah. In the end.’
‘And that was the end of it?’
Zoe shakes her head slowly. ‘No, that was only the beginning. Later that week Seb has a supervision with her and she asks him when they’re going to “meet up” again. So he tells her no way – that it should never have happened –’
Ev sighs. ‘Let me guess.’
‘Right. She tried to persua
de him but he kept saying no, and in the end he thought she’d backed off.’
Ev waits.
She swallows. ‘Two days after that I got a phone call. From her.’
‘What did she say?’
The girl’s gone very pale. ‘That Tobin had been having nightmares, and when she talked to him about it he told her that I’d been grooming him. He didn’t use that word but that’s what she meant. Grooming him.’ She’s shaking her head. ‘He was six, for fuck’s sake. If it wasn’t so horrific it’d be totally hilarious.’
But Ev isn’t laughing. ‘She must have had some evidence to make an accusation like that.’
‘She had nothing,’ she says, shrill now – so shrill that a couple of other customers turn and look at them. ‘She claimed I’d been having an “inappropriate” relationship with him – that I’d been showing him “unsuitable material” on TV behind her back – it was David fucking Attenborough, for Christ’s sake, when I was looking after her kid when she couldn’t be fucking bothered –’
She must realize that people are staring, because she drops her voice. Her cheeks are flushed now and there’s a red stain reaching up her neck like a rash. She takes a deep breath, and then another. ‘I realized there was absolutely nothing I could do – it would just be her word against mine.’
Here we go again, thinks Ev. Only now it’s she said/she said.
‘She could say anything she liked, accuse me of the most vile and horrible things, because Tobin would say exactly what she told him to. He used to trail around after her like some sort of lovesick puppy. He’d do anything, just to please her.’
‘I suspect,’ says Ev, ‘that she was getting her defence in first. A pre-emptive move – just in case Sebastian decided to make a complaint against her.’
Zoe nods. ‘That’s what he said too. So he went to see her, to try to sort it out. I wanted to go too but he said that would make things worse. And he was probably right. I’d have just ended up screaming the place down.’