Again, because of what had happened the year before, she knew exactly what Tom Thorne would have to say about it. The annoying face he’d pull while he was letting her know what he thought. Something snarky about how forgetting to pack a spare pair of pants was fairly unimportant, you know … in the scheme of things.
As soon as she sat down, Mrs Slocombe jumped up next to her and Tanner was reaching for the phone before the cat had settled. She sent a text to remind her next-door neighbour where the cat food was, to fill the water bowl and to post the keys back through the letterbox the following day.
Tanner’s spare keys. Susan’s keys …
She sat and thought how bizarre it was; how funny even, sometimes. The stupid things you missed about someone.
Their absence was there all the time, of course. A hollow, inside. It was something Tanner had become used to, an ache that had perhaps already begun to ease, but then one of those little things would pounce and start to prick when she least expected it.
When she was standing on a chair, for God’s sake, because she had to.
Susan had been just those couple of inches taller than she was and had been able to reach the overnight bag in its usual place on top of the wardrobe. Sitting on the bed afterwards and watching as neatly folded clothes were arranged in the same order as always. Waiting until Tanner had finished, so that she could try to answer the inevitable question.
‘Have I forgotten anything?’
Alone in the bedroom earlier, Tanner had checked her list, then asked herself the question anyway.
She called Thorne, but got the answerphone and left a message, reminding him exactly where at Euston station they had arranged to meet at nine o’clock the following morning.
She carried what was left of her tea upstairs.
Brushing her teeth, she stared at herself and considered again the narrow escape she had recently been granted. Sexual proclivities aside, had she really thought that teacher would have been the slightest bit interested? She was relieved she had been spared the chance to find out, to make another mistake to learn from.
She said, ‘Fucking idiot,’ and smiled at the way it had sounded, her mouth full of toothpaste. She spat then rinsed and wiped spots from the mirror with a flannel.
Then she walked into her bedroom and left Thorne another message.
‘There are two branches of Smiths,’ she said. ‘And we’re meeting outside the bigger one, OK? It’s the one nearest the platforms. The one that sells books. I’ll be there from about quarter to nine.’
‘I had a missed call from you,’ Helen said.
Thorne took a few seconds, then remembered calling her a couple of nights earlier. The same night he’d called Melita Perera. ‘Yeah …’
‘Why didn’t you leave a message?’
‘I don’t know,’ Thorne said. ‘Didn’t seem much point. It wasn’t anything urgent.’
‘I had a late shift,’ she said.
‘That’s what I thought.’ Thorne lifted his legs up on to the sofa and let his head drop back. He heard Helen cough. Was it just the situation making things seem awkward, or were they really running out of things to say to each other? ‘How’s Alfie?’
‘He’s good. Could be doing a bit better at school, mind you.’
‘Listen, how well do you know the other parents, d’you reckon?’ Helen was nothing like any of those women Thorne had met at Brooklands Hill, but he thought it was worth asking. ‘When you drop Alfie off or pick him up?’
‘Well, I know some of them. The ones with kids in Alfie’s class. Why?’
Thorne laid out the bare bones of the case.
‘How come you always get the freaky ones?’ she said.
‘Didn’t start off like that,’ he said. ‘Just going after a con-artist in my spare time and it all went mental.’
‘You are a bit of a nutter-magnet, though.’
‘So, what do you think? About her?’
‘You reckon she’s the nutter?’
‘No idea,’ Thorne said. ‘Just thinking out loud, really.’
‘I don’t know … lost a child, maybe? Lost a couple?’
‘Yeah, I can see how that might lead to pretending you’ve got a kid when you haven’t, but does it explain two murders?’
‘Best I can come up with right now,’ Helen said.
‘Just wanted to see what you thought.’ It was no more than conversation, truth be told. Too much time spent thinking about why anyone committed murder always left Thorne feeling that explanations were for the likes of Melita Perera. It was his job to catch them, simple as that. ‘Get another take on it, you know?’
‘Losing a child is always traumatic,’ Helen said. ‘And if there are underlying psychological problems as well …’
There was a long silence.
‘Tom …?’
Thorne was thinking about a woman called Louise Porter who had lost a child several years before, two months into the pregnancy. His child. The relationship had not survived it, or, if Thorne was being honest, had not survived his own reaction to it. Emotions to which he had stupidly refused to give rein at the time; sadness and rage bottled up to his own cost and to the cost of those he would be involved with later.
Unresolved issues, was what Melita Perera would probably call them.
Louise Porter had been a copper, too.
Maybe that was the problem.
He said, ‘Why don’t you bring Alfie over here one day? We could go to the heath or something.’ He waited. ‘What about Sunday?’
‘Sunday’s not going to work,’ Helen said, eventually.
‘If you’ve got something on, I could always come down and pick him up.’
‘Like I said, it’s tricky on Sunday. Maybe another time, though.’
There wasn’t very much to say, after that.
When the call had ended, Thorne listened to two messages from Nicola Tanner which did a little to improve his mood. There were some nutters he could handle …
He leaned down for the can of lager on the floor and polished off what was left, scrolling through to the Control Centre on his phone, thinking that he should set an alarm for the morning while he remembered. He smiled, guessing that Tanner had probably set several. It was only two stops on the Tube from Kentish Town to Euston, but he decided to get up that little bit earlier than he might otherwise have done.
Give himself ten minutes to throw a few things into a bag.
FORTY-SEVEN
Denise Fry worked as an HR administrator for a large insurance company in Glasgow city centre. Thorne and Tanner had called up from reception then waited for her to come down, the woman having made it clear on the phone to Tanner the day before that she would rather not talk to them at her place of work. They stood up when she stepped, a little tentatively, from the lift and, after the briefest of introductions, followed her across the lobby towards Sauchiehall Street.
‘It’s not that cold out there, is it?’ she asked.
Thorne was surprised at the absence of the expected accent, having presumed that the woman was Glaswegian. She was clearly no more Scottish than he was, with a voice was that was high and light, a hint of nervousness in it. He was equally taken aback when Tanner told her that the weather was actually surprisingly mild, as Thorne had frozen his nuts off on the ten-minute walk from their hotel. He’d been hoping they could escort her to the nearest café or possibly a pub.
‘So, maybe we can go to the park. It’s not very far.’
Overweight, in a smart black business suit, the woman looked a little older than her forty-six years, and as they walked Thorne found himself wondering if she’d looked any different three years earlier, when she’d become involved with a man calling himself Paul Jenner. His victims had all suffered financial losses, of course, but there could be little doubt that being duped so flagrantly would inflict as much damage to their confidence and self-esteem as it did to their bank accounts.
Damage that had proved ultimately fatal for Philippa Goodwin.
&n
bsp; Denise was chatty as they walked north. She indicated a few local landmarks, asked Thorne and Tanner about their train journey, and apologised again, as she had done the previous day, for her reluctance to be seen talking to the police anywhere near her office.
‘Obviously I never told anyone at work,’ she said. ‘About what happened.’
‘Understandable,’ Tanner said.
‘Well, I can’t imagine anyone would.’
‘It’s really not a problem,’ Tanner said.
Thorne just nodded. It was a longer walk than he had anticipated, Denise Fry wasn’t moving terribly fast, and he wasn’t getting any warmer.
‘It’s … embarrassing,’ she said. ‘I’m good at my job, you know? So I wouldn’t want anyone there thinking I can be taken for a ride. Again, I mean.’
At the end of Sauchiehall Street they cut right up into Kelvingrove Park and found a bench at the edge of a play area. Denise sat between Thorne and Tanner. ‘I come here a lot,’ she said. While she eagerly pointed out the bandstand and amphitheatre to one side of them, then the Gothic towers of the Art Gallery and Museum rising beyond the bowling green on the other, Tanner was removing a folder from her plastic bag. ‘It’s nice to get away sometimes, you know?’
‘Could you take a look at this?’ Tanner passed her the e-fit based on descriptions given by Ella and Helen Fulton.
Denise looked at the picture. Said, ‘Ah …’
‘That’s a man who called himself Patrick Jennings,’ Thorne said. ‘This was over a month ago.’
‘Same initials,’ Denise said. ‘Patrick Jennings, Paul Jenner.’
Thorne nodded. He had clocked it during the conversation with the team from ActionFraud two days earlier and had asked them to keep looking through their files for suspected fraudsters with the initials PJ. ‘Now, this one …’
Tanner passed a second e-fit across; the one compiled by several of the parents from Brooklands Hill school.
‘… is a bit more recent. A man who’s currently calling himself Conrad.’
Denise stared at it, then held both pictures up together and looked from one to the other. ‘Yeah, well, it’s definitely him.’ She handed the printouts back to Tanner. ‘That’s Paul … or Patrick, or whatever. His hair was longer when I knew him and his face wasn’t quite as thin. He had glasses, too and he didn’t have a beard.’ She looked at Tanner, shook her head. ‘I thought he was handsome.’
‘Tell us what happened.’ Tanner softened her voice. ‘If you wouldn’t mind.’
Denise nodded. ‘I’d done my best to forget it until you called. Or to not think about it quite as much, at any rate.’
‘Whatever you can tell us,’ Thorne said.
Fifty feet or so away, a few children were making good use of the swings and monkey bars. Slightly closer, a boy of nine or ten was practising fancy skateboard moves on the path and swearing loudly in a thick Glaswegian accent, like someone well versed in the art, whenever they failed to come off.
‘I met him in a bar in town about eighteen months ago,’ Denise said. ‘Out with some girlfriends, you know? I wasn’t on the pull or anything … just having a good night, and we just got talking. It wasn’t like he was pushy or trying it on … he seemed quite shy, actually, but he said how nice I looked, something like that. He sat there and listened to me droning on about work or whatever it was, and he bought me a drink, and …’ She looked at Tanner. ‘I wasn’t as … heavy as I am now.’
Tanner nodded.
The boy with the skateboard said, ‘Fucking twat.’
‘So, at the end of the night, I asked him for his number. I think I was pretty tipsy by that time.’
Thorne already knew that they were talking about someone who, before turning to murder, had been very good at what he did, but allowing his target to make the running like that marked ‘Paul’ out as a seriously skilled operator. He guessed that it also increased the feelings of stupidity and self-loathing that his victim would be left with once he had done his job. Thorne imagined that ‘Patrick’ had played things much the same way with Philippa Goodwin that night in the Blacksmith and Toffeemaker.
Stalking his prey, then letting them come to him.
‘It was all pretty fast after that,’ Denise said. ‘We went on a few dates and he told me he was divorced, that he was renting some crappy little flat until he got himself sorted out. So I told him he could move into my place. It was like he wasn’t sure about it at first, like he thought he’d be imposing, but I persuaded him.’ She looked at Tanner again. ‘I persuaded him, can you believe that?’
‘He was working you,’ Thorne said. ‘It’s what he does.’
What he did. Before a rock replaced a pick-up line as his weapon of choice.
Denise blinked several times and took a few fast breaths. ‘Once he’d moved in, he told me all about his family … his ex-wife and his daughter, and for a couple of months everything was fine. I was happy. I was really happy.’
‘What did he say he did for a living?’ Tanner asked.
‘He told me he was some kind of recruitment consultant. Said he worked for all sorts of companies, spent a few weeks at a time with different ones, you know? We’d meet in town for lunch sometimes and he’d tell me all about whichever office he was working in … stories about the people. He’d do impressions of them, that kind of thing. He was funny, you know?’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ The boy shouted after the skateboard he’d lost control of as it rolled away from him. He kicked at a discarded Irn-Bru can. ‘You fucking bell-end …’
‘Like I say, it was fine. And then one day he just broke down and told me his daughter was really sick. Told me she had this rare form of leukaemia and I swear, he was properly in bits. Just sobbing and sobbing and saying how him and his ex-wife were trying to raise the money to send her to America for treatment. He showed me a picture … this little girl who looked terrible, but she had this big grin on her face. He showed me all the flyers for sponsored runs and all that … things he was doing to try and raise the cash.’
‘So you offered to give him the money,’ Thorne said.
The woman nodded, close to tears. ‘He didn’t want to take it at first. He kept saying it was too much, but all the time he was telling me how great I was, how much his little girl would love me if we ever got the chance to meet. I insisted in the end … made him give me the details of his bank and transferred the money.’ She turned and looked at them both. ‘Like why wouldn’t I? She was Paul’s daughter and we were together and I wanted to do it for him.
‘I remember how he was that night, the look on his face. How he couldn’t believe it. I was there when he rang his ex-wife in tears and told her that he’d got the money, that his little girl was going to be able to make the trip.’ She shrugged and sniffed. ‘He was gone the next day.’
The woman began rummaging in her bag for tissues, but Tanner had one ready and passed it across.
‘Sorry,’ Denise said.
‘Did you speak to anyone afterwards?’ Tanner asked. ‘I don’t mean the police. Did you get any help?’
Denise shook her head. ‘Just wanted to pretend it had never happened. I certainly didn’t want to tell anyone. Like when you fall over in the street and the first thing you do is look round because you’re scared to death someone might have seen it, you know?’
‘You weren’t his only victim,’ Thorne said. ‘That’s why we’re here.’
She nodded.
‘I’m really sorry we’ve asked you to dredge all this up again,’ Tanner said. ‘But I promise you it’s important.’
‘Is there anything else you can remember about him you think might be helpful?’ Thorne asked. ‘Something he might have said …’ He stopped, seeing that the woman had something to say.
‘I’m pretty sure I told the police this after he vanished … or maybe I just mentioned it to one of them, but some of the time me and Paul were together, I had this weird feeling there was another woman.’ Denise managed a sm
ile. ‘I mean, I’ve always been a bit jealous with men … not like there’ve been very many of them … but it was a bit more than that. I never said anything because I didn’t want him to think I was being clingy. I didn’t want to scare him off.’
‘You don’t mean the ex-wife?’ Tanner said.
She scoffed. ‘The non-existent ex-wife? Yeah, I thought that to begin with, but not for very long. It felt like he was seeing someone else.’
‘What made you think that?’ Thorne asked.
‘I don’t know … getting odd text messages in the evening, that kind of stuff. I mean he always told me it was a work thing and like I said, I didn’t want to push him.’ She clutched her bag to her stomach and stared off towards the playground. ‘I remember one night, I heard a text arrive … you know, the tone … and I checked his phone when he was in the bathroom and this message he’d got ten minutes before wasn’t there. Like he must have deleted it.’
The boy’s skateboard flew from beneath his feet and he stomped after it.
‘Could have been anything, I suppose, but I couldn’t shake the idea there was a woman he was keeping secret.’
Thorne and Tanner exchanged a look.
‘I don’t know if that’s remotely helpful, but—’
‘You stupid cunt!’ the boy shouted.
‘We can move if you want.’ Tanner stood up and glared at the boy as she marched across to pick up the empty can. ‘We’re about done, anyway.’
‘It’s fine,’ Denise said. ‘I know exactly how he feels.’
FORTY-EIGHT
The woman had begun ranting at him the moment Conrad had answered the call, had spoken her name.
‘She’s threatened my life, for Christ’s sake.’
‘What?’
‘Didn’t you hear me? My fucking life.’
He listened as the woman twice read out the contents of the note that had been shoved under her front door. He said, ‘OK …’
‘OK? Is that the best you can come up with?’
He moved further away from the house, his voice barely more than a whisper. ‘You need to calm down—’
‘What are you going to do about it?’
Their Little Secret Page 21