‘Mel was in her early twenties and was more than capable of taking care of herself. My third marriage to Paul was on the rocks, so I didn’t feel like I had anything to hold me back. I left Wales three months later, moved in with Liam and divorced my husband. My brother helped us buy a place. Mel was living with Norman in his three-storey on the Caerphilly Road in Bassaleg when I moved to Spain. She went off the rails when Brandon died, got into drugs and started hanging out in seedy bars so I was glad she’d calmed down after Danny had got her into rehab, despite the fact she was settling with a man old enough to be her grandfather.’
Sam didn’t worry when she hadn’t heard from her daughter. ‘I assumed she’d put the past behind her, made a new life for herself just as I had done. I hoped she’d finally stopped playing games with married men and had found someone to settle down with.’
No guesses as to where she learned that from.
I sip the final dregs of my coffee and stuff the last chunk of the breakfast roll that’s stunk out the cabin into my mouth before I exit the car and walk towards Johnno. He’s sat listening to the radio with the engine idling when I approach.
He smiles as I open the passenger door, the wind slamming it shut behind me. ‘Are you prepared for the biggest case you’ve ever fought?’
He’s talking about the Special Educational Needs meeting we’re about to attend concerning Jaxon’s schooling, for which we’ve been advised to seek alternative arrangements.
‘Sure.’
‘Hey,’ he says, nudging then cupping my chin between his thumb and forefinger to plant a soggy kiss on my dry lips. ‘We’re crime partners.’
‘You’re a journalist.’ I shrug him off.
‘I meant, if they refuse to give our son his right to an education, I’ll expose them, and you can cover my tracks.’
I give him a weak smile in appeasement.
‘We’ve got this,’ he says, putting a hand on my shoulder.
I’m feeling homicidal when we leave the building forty-five minutes later. Time I feel I’ve wasted trying to convince two professionals that I cannot home-school and provide my son with a roof over his head if I leave a career in policing I spent years training for and a lot of money working towards. I had to restrain the impulse to rip up the Education and Health Care Plan and stuff it into their tea when they blank-stared me after I told them I had no intention of leaving my job to educate my son.
Johnno pulls me against him, and I rub my cheek against his stubbly face.
‘We’re never going to stop having to fight for his right to the same education and healthcare services as his peers.’
‘That’s why I chose you to be his mother.’
‘It’s so tiring.’
‘I’m proud of you,’ he says.
My phone rings.
I withdraw from his embrace to answer it.
‘Jones. What have you got?’
‘Norman was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2014. When he discovered it was terminal in 2016, he requested his GP write Do Not Resuscitate on his medical notes. I also managed to speak to his daughter, Karin. She told me that her father stopped speaking to her when he made Bethan his next of kin. Norman died in 2017, leaving his entire estate to Karin, who relished kicking Bethan out onto the street.’
We know she vacated the two-bedroom townhouse that Brandon bequeathed to his parents and that Danny purchased after her brief return from St Cadoc’s. Because when Kirsty disappeared, she changed her name by deed poll and skipped town.
‘Okay, thanks. Can you find out where Bethan was for the next two years?’
It’s possible Bethan killed before she left Humphrey to die. She had a large enough window of opportunity to do so and people rarely go from being law-abiding citizens to committing murder. There has to be some evidence of a prior attempt at someone’s life.
I’m back in my office, seated at my desk, drinking percolated coffee – my second hit of caffeine in less than three hours – from the staffroom cafetière and scrolling through my emails when Jones enters the room to dump an incident report relating to another case on my desk, and our mobile phones beep simultaneously. He reads his Instant Message Alert first. We release a synchronised gasp and brush arms as we slip through the door to head upstairs.
We follow the tapping of fingertips on a keyboard to the desk at the far end of the forensic technician’s room.
Kate swivels her chair round at the sound of our entrance. ‘Lavender oil. It’s great for insomnia.’
Do I look that bad?
‘Your text message said you had a face.’
She nods. ‘The image is grainy. The zoom’s distorted the pixels. But the night Bethan claims Humphrey took his tumble a man driving a black Jaguar displaying a number plate containing the letters GTY drove to a petrol station in Rhayader.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘A historic market town in Radnorshire, Powys. Do you want the population total?’
I glare at her.
‘Who’s the Jag registered to?’ says Jones.
‘Mr Cecil Montfort. He lives in one of those static homes on the Lighthouse Park Estate in St Brides.’
A retirement village eleven miles away, replete with coastal path walks, and a sandbank beach.
‘His car was stolen last month. Cecil suspects it was taken on a Wednesday, but it wasn’t reported missing until the Sunday afternoon because he keeps it locked up in a rented garage. According to the crime report, he drives to the supermarket once a week or to his daughter’s once a fortnight. But she’s been away and before she left stocked his cupboards. There’s a small shop on-site he uses for bread and butter, his ham, eggs and milk get delivered to his door weekly from a local farm, and he’s recently recovered from a cold, so he’s had no need to leave the house or felt well enough to drive anywhere. His grandson offered to collect the car for him so he could go to St Bridget’s church to leave flowers on his wife’s grave. When he got there the car was gone.’
‘Why hasn’t the car been flagged up on ANPR cameras?’
Why wasn’t the man caught driving the stolen vehicle arrested? Why wasn’t the car returned to Cecil?
‘Cecil mistakenly gave his grandson – when he was on the phone to the police – the vehicle registration to an old car he owned, which he traded in for this newer model. It was the same colour as well as make. He found the logbook in a drawer yesterday.’
I restrain the impulse to raise an eyebrow.
‘Let’s see what this bloke looks like.’
‘I printed you off a copy of the CCTV image.’
She hands it to me.
Recognition sparks.
Sleep deprivation and excitement cause me to stutter. ‘It’s Garrett.’
He’s alive.
BETHAN
Now
My body turns to ice. I drop the glass of wine in my hand and it smashes in half, shatters at my feet, the plum coloured liquid sloshing over my shimmering nude tights.
Garrett is slouched at one end of the chaise longue, a large whiskey in his hand. He swirls the liquid inside, pours it down his throat, then slams the glass onto the arched unit above his seat and glues his eyes to mine.
My heart feels like it’s convulsing.
He stands, walks towards me, crushing the glass beneath the thick rubber soles of his loafers.
‘You have Humphrey’s key.’
The one he had on him when he died.
He sneers, comes to stand in front of me, tilts my chin up to meet his cold, hard gaze, and my stomach does a backflip. ‘Ga—’
‘Shush.’ He presses a thumb against my mouth.
I gag from the strength of his aftershave.
‘Listen.’ His voice bounces off the bare walls.
I grab his wrist, try to jerk his hand away from my face, but his shoulder tenses with barely contained aggression.
‘Your husband was worth a lot of money.’
‘He made some bad decisions and lost most of it.�
��
‘I’m not talking about the house,’ he says. ‘I’ve checked the land registry. It belongs to his ex-sister-in-law. Who’s married to Rupert, who owns the croft next door to the cottage in Llanberis you and Humphrey stayed in. It was the first timeshare property he invested in.’
‘You’ve done your research.’
‘That I have.’
‘What do you want?’
‘Enough to make my silence worthwhile.’ He laughs and squeezes my jaw, digging his fingers into my cheeks until I’m sure they’ll bruise.
I cross my arms to hide the fact they’re trembling.
His eyebrow twitches. ‘That’s right, my little murderess. I saw him knock himself out, when he fell. I saw you check his pulse, attempt to bury him in a shallow grave then leave him to die.’
‘You’re the man in my photo?’
He nods, strokes my jaw with his thumb. ‘I waited until you’d gone before I dragged him up off the bed of slate you left him on.’
‘What?’
‘His pulse was faint, but he was talking. He coughed and spluttered, choking on dirt, said he’d tried to get up when he heard you walking away but that he couldn’t using only one arm.’
‘He’s alive?’ My breath snags.
‘I got him walking but he was delirious, wheezy and staggering, and his arm was broken. He kept moaning about the pain.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I told him what I’d witnessed at the quarry, how long I’d been following you, that you stole my wife’s ID, and that you’d killed Kirsty and the boys.’
‘No.’ My hand reaches for my mouth and I shake my head.
‘He told me you’d plotted to kill him, that Gerald suspected something was amiss from the beginning of your relationship. He said it was Gerald’s idea to implicate you for Humphrey’s murder in case you somehow went through with it.’
By advising Humphrey to change his life insurance policy and his last will and testament to include me as his sole beneficiary, and writing a note claiming I would be responsible if he died in suspicious circumstances.
‘Why would he tell you all this?’
He shrugs. ‘Because he knew he was about to die? He also told me that he sent someone to your house, Rick? Patrick? To offer to buy some paintings from you to clear a debt or something. He said he used the money from their sale to hire Derek to provide you with legal protection, for some reason. Which you snubbed, apparently.’
I assumed Derek had come to my rescue as fast as he could because he cared about me, because I was his friend’s wife, until I learned he knew she was cheating on him with me. But that doesn’t explain why Humphrey would ask Derek to represent me should I be charged with his murder.
Unless it was a ploy to increase a jury’s sympathy with the man whose adored wife was responsible for his murder, to cover the fact it was really intended that Derek lose the case to ensure I was convicted.
‘Where’s Humphrey?’
‘He passed out shortly after our conversation.’
‘Did you check his pulse?’
‘He stopped breathing.’
Like he had when I thought he’d died?
He studies my reaction, but I’m too incensed to express the emotions that are swarming inside me like enraged wasps.
‘What have you done with him?’
‘I left him where he lay, just as you did.’
So why haven’t the police been able to find him?
‘When your fellow inmates learn you killed two kids, you’ll wish you could join him.’
I should have killed Garrett when I had the chance. I should have pulled that vegetable knife from the rack and ploughed it through his neck just as I imagined. But I couldn’t. Not until I could prove what I was convinced he’d done to his wife and the twins.
DI LOCKE
Now
Jones straightens, while I continue staring at the image of Garrett Richardson.
‘Fancy a trip to Goldcliff before our shift ends?’
‘We don’t need Bethan to identify him,’ he says. ‘Kate did that from the photograph printed in the newspaper.’
The article that was published five years ago when Garrett was suspected of having been killed along with his children.
‘I don’t think Bethan’s aware that Garrett’s been stalking her, or for how long.’
‘What reason would he have for doing so though?’ he says.
I shrug. ‘I don’t know for certain that he has but Cecil’s Jag has been caught on ANPR cameras in Tesco’s car park on Spytty Road and it was flagged up at the petrol station in Rhayader.’
Garrett was travelling alone.
‘Did he follow them there and back or was he invited by Bethan to help dispose of Humphrey?’ he says.
I tap the top of my computer. ‘He travelled up to north Wales before them.’
‘Where are the boys?’ he says.
‘He could have harmed his children.’
And his wife.
‘Stalkers don’t stop until they get whatever it is that they want from their victim,’ he says.
The stalking process occurs in five stages: enjoyment watching someone who’s unaware they’re being followed; the victim’s acknowledgement that they’re being followed; pleasure intimidating their victim; confrontation; elimination.
‘If Garrett is responsible for his family’s disappearance, he might be intending to hurt Bethan.’
*
I drive while Jones directs me along the three merging A-roads onto Nash Road. The countryside route takes us past rows of dead corn, acres of rain trampled wheat fields, a farmhouse, a couple of cottages, and some bungalows dotted between scrubland.
‘Take the next right onto Goldcliff Road.’
We pass a stream that runs alongside a small hamlet where a lone duck floats on the surface of the water, scanning for fish.
‘Take the next left,’ says Jones, almost too late.
The road narrows into a lane that branches off onto two dirt tracks, both extending upwards. The smell of wet seaweed filters through the vents blowing hot air into the car.
He directs me left again. The private road curves gently at a bend then dips suddenly.
I brake with a squeal to avoid two deep potholes and tut.
‘Sorry, I should’ve warned you,’ says Jones. ‘But in my defence, I wasn’t behind the wheel when directing the search team after Bethan’s arrest.’
I reverse then drive cautiously around the potholes but the concrete gives way beneath the tyre causing me to swerve to avoid a sudden drop in the verge and a damaged ball joint from a kerbed wheel.
Most of the frost has thawed, leaving the meadow that’s visible behind the property through a wrought iron gate, boggy.
The hire car’s parked sidelong, directly in front of the porch. And about fifty yards behind it, fronting the gables, is another vehicle.
One I wasn’t expecting to see here.
‘Call for back-up.’
BETHAN
Now
Garrett pushes his nose into mine, his breath hot on my mouth, then retracts, circles the room and stops in the doorway.
He’s blocking my only exit from the drawing room. The house phone is in the morning room. I’m at his mercy and I can’t call for help.
‘You killed your wife. You murdered your own children. Kirsty was a good person. She was my friend. She only wanted to get away from you.’ A sob erupts from my throat.
‘The police can’t prove anything without Kirsty’s body. And they’ll never find it.’
‘It. Are you so completely emotionless you view the woman who gave you children no different to an object?’
‘She was a fucking bitch. She took those kids off me. No one fucking does that to me.’
‘They weren’t possessions. They didn’t belong to you.’
He takes a step towards me. I take two steps back.
‘You’re no better than her. You think you know everything.
You think you can get what you want from us men, then fucking leave us to pick up the pieces.’
‘She didn’t steal anything from you. She gave you two beautiful little boys and you punished her for wanting to protect them.’
‘I would never have hurt them,’ he says, closing in on me.
‘But you did.’
I don’t consider the consequences.
I barge past him, surprised he doesn’t try to stop me, and run down the hall into the morning room.
I tug out the key to the gun cabinet from the box inside the mahogany desk drawer.
‘Excellent,’ says Garrett, from the doorway.
I open the framed glass door, withdraw the middle rifle, which I know is the only air gun that’s loaded, and aim it to fire like Humphrey did when he was about to press the trigger. Except this isn’t clay pigeon shooting. I zone in on Garrett, point the barrel at him, and prepare to strike.
Then comes the sound of wheels on gravel, a car door slamming, footsteps crunching across the stones, voices: one male, one female, drawing my attention to the bay window.
I keep the gun trained on Garrett to investigate who is talking through a slat between the curtains.
The blood in my veins cools instantly. DI Locke and DS Jones are walking towards the front door. Behind their parked unmarked car is the glossy Jag I saw in Snowdonia I now know was being driven by Garrett. And a little further back Derek’s black Range Rover.
I forgot Kim said Derek was going to return the spare key.
The knocking on the front door is so hard I can hear the rattle of the old oak vibrating the wooden waggon wheel rested against the side of the porch.
‘Go on,’ says Garrett, edging closer. ‘Do it. Shoot me.’
That’s what he wants.
Whoever it is that’s responsible knocks again, louder this time.
‘Hit me in the stomach, the chest, anywhere. Prove yourself the psycho they think you are.’
Impatient, and having obtained the key from Derek, one of the detectives presses it into the lock and pushes the front door open.
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