He reached out and smoothed a strand of her hair behind her ear.
‘You know I’d do anything for you, don’t you,’ he said, his voice little more than a whisper.
She nodded. ‘I know.’
Mortimer’s breathing slowed as he fell back to sleep. She rolled over onto her back, warm now, but wanting to keep the jumper on. It smelt of him – of his skin, of freshly ground coffee – and it reassured her.
Everyone left her, everyone. Only her twin sister had been a constant, but that hadn’t been true for a very long time. Her parents had left her, Harry was angry; people were transient and not to be relied upon. The police had said Mortimer had been there, yet he’d acted like he’d known nothing about Thea’s attack. Was he lying? Had he seen something that night?
She closed her eyes, hearing the thunder recede into the distance, getting quieter until she could no longer make out the noise above the rain. But before the storm disappeared, she asked herself a question: should she trust him?
Perhaps he wouldn’t leave her; perhaps he was telling the truth. Perhaps Mortimer was exactly who he said he was. He muttered in his sleep and rolled onto his other side. She wanted to move next to him, to curl her body round his, but in the darkness something stopped her.
The lightning may already have flashed, but she knew the thunder was still to come.
Friday
29
‘Thank you for coming back in to see us, Mr Holmes,’ Kate said, closing the door to the interview room.
‘I’m not sure I had much choice in the matter,’ Ryan muttered.
Yates rattled through the formal warnings, Ryan shaking his head at the mention of legal counsel. Kate watched him while he signed the paperwork at the bottom – right-handed. But that wasn’t necessarily a deal breaker, she told herself.
And he did look nervous. He crossed and uncrossed his legs under the table, then knitted his fingers together in front of him. A visible sheen of perspiration was forming across his forehead.
‘We appreciate you bringing in the CCTV from the club,’ Kate began. ‘We’ve been looking through the many disks you gave us – you were very thorough.’ Yates huffed next to her, only too aware of the wasted hours she had spent watching them, Briggs left in the office to continue working through the pile. Kate went on: ‘But we found something we wanted your opinion on.’
Yates pulled the laptop out next to her and pressed play. Ryan stayed silent, squinting through his glasses.
‘I’m not sure what I’m looking at,’ he said.
‘I’ll describe it,’ Kate said. ‘For the benefit of the video and Mr Holmes, the laptop is showing the upstairs bar in the nightclub, Heaven. Would you agree?’
Ryan nodded. ‘And here …’ said Kate, jabbing at the screen, ‘here’s you, and here’s Miss Patterson. You seem to be arguing. And now …’ The three of them watched the slap play out in grainy black and white. ‘Why did Miss Patterson hit you, Mr Holmes?’
Ryan took his glasses off and placed them on the table in front of him.
‘It’s last Saturday, nineteenth of January.’
‘I remember.’
‘So what was the argument about?’
Ryan sighed and leaned back in his chair. ‘Gabriella had been acting weird, and I was sick of it. She’d been at the club that Tuesday night and she’d been the life and soul of the party – bubbly, friendly, fun – but she’d practically ignored me. Hadn’t even acknowledged what had happened the Saturday before.’ Kate noticed his cheeks colouring slightly, but stayed quiet, waiting for him to carry on. ‘Then she came back on the Saturday night …’
‘The night of the attack?’ Kate asked, and Ryan nodded.
‘Yes, the nineteenth, and she was quieter again. More …’ he shrugged. ‘Herself. So I mentioned Tuesday night and asked her what was wrong. Told her every time I saw her she was like a different person, and that’s when she slapped me. Said something about me wanting her to be someone else, I don’t know, I couldn’t make it out.’
‘And then she left?’
‘She stormed off. I didn’t see her after that as I started to feel odd and went to lie down. As I said the other day,’ he added, pointedly.
‘And that’s where you were for the rest of the night?’ Kate asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Asleep?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where nobody saw you? Where no one can vouch for you? Awfully convenient, don’t you think?’
‘Not really,’ Ryan said, his face serious. ‘Given you’ve pulled me back here today.’
‘And this,’ Kate rewound the file again, and pointed to the grainy figure in the dress on the screen. ‘Is this the person you know as Gabriella?’
Ryan put his glasses back on, then nodded. ‘Yes.’
Kate drummed her fingers on the table for a moment, pretending to think. ‘Because, Mr Holmes, we now know this isn’t Gabriella. And we think you knew that too.’
Ryan sat up straight in his seat. She felt his blue eyes lock on hers.
‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘This is Thea Patterson, her twin sister.’
He looked at the screen, then back at Kate. ‘So the woman in the hospital …’
‘Is Thea, yes.’
‘So where is Gabriella?’ Ryan asked.
‘Roaming Southampton, as healthy as can be,’ Kate said. ‘That was probably the real Gabriella on Tuesday night.’ She noticed a blush starting to creep up his neck, his cheeks turning red. He was still mute, looking at the laptop screen, his mouth open. ‘But you knew that, Mr Holmes. You realised what was going on that night, and you confronted Thea about it. She slapped you, and you were angry. Furious, even. Thea and her sister had been playing you for a fool, swapping round, both pretending to be Gabriella.’ Kate paused, watching his expression. ‘So you followed her when she left the club, all the way to the common, where you hit her over the head. Isn’t that right?’
Ryan looked at her. He shook his head. ‘No, not at all. I didn’t know. I hadn’t realised.’ He put both hands over his face, pushing his fingers under his glasses, then taking them off and putting them on the table. He looked up at the ceiling. ‘Oh, fuck. What a fucking idiot,’ he said, more to himself than to them.
He shook his head again. ‘I didn’t know,’ he said.
Half an hour later, Yates and Kate hadn’t got any further so they’d terminated the interview, letting him go. He hadn’t said anything else of use; he hadn’t changed his story.
‘I honestly don’t think he knew,’ Yates said, pushing open the door to the office where Briggs sat, bleary-eyed, still glued to the CCTV footage. ‘Did you see his face when he realised they were two different people?’
‘He looked mortified,’ Kate agreed.
‘So what now?’ Yates asked, sitting back behind her computer. ‘Should we get Harry Becker in for questioning?’
Kate frowned. ‘And ask him what?’ She picked up the silver button abandoned among the paperclips on her desk and rolled it around in her hand. ‘We’d just be fishing. No, let’s wait. We need something more before we get him in here.’
Briggs looked up from his screen, interrupting their conversation. ‘The chief called. Wants to see you,’ he said.
Kate winced. ‘That can’t be good,’ she muttered. ‘Did you manage to get an answer out of forensics?’
‘Today. Or next week,’ Briggs said, and Kate swore under her breath as she started up the stairs to the detective chief inspector’s office.
Bloody vague as usual. Bloody forensics. They could do with something coming back from them soon. As much as she didn’t want to admit it, she did believe Ryan Holmes when he said he hadn’t known about the twins’ deception. Kate wondered who actually had known.
She’d seen herself how convincing the twins had been. When they’d met Gabriella the day before, she had looked different: more groomed, better put together. She stood up straight, while as Thea, she had co
wered. It was as if Gabi had consciously tried to mimic her sister in the police station. It hadn’t been a simple case of mistaken identity; while she was Thea, she had assumed her persona.
As Kate approached the DCI’s office, the door opened and the man himself swung out into the corridor. DCI Jennings looked over his glasses at her. He was short and round, with stubby, fat fingers and a bald head with two tufts of hair sticking out either side. He had his coat in one hand and his phone in the other, clearly on the way home.
‘I can come back tomorrow …’ she started, but he stopped and beckoned her to the side of the corridor.
‘Ah, DC Munro, just the girl. No, no, let’s talk now.’ The chief inspector was sweating through his shirt and Kate swallowed down the condescension. ‘I’ve had to do a bit of rebalancing in the department, regarding the Patterson case.’
‘Rebalancing, sir?’ Kate asked.
‘Yes, moving things around. I assume you heard about the burglary last night, the house of one of our prominent councillors?’
Kate nodded; she already didn’t like where this was going.
‘I’ve asked forensics to prioritise the evidence there,’ Jennings said. ‘So there’ll be a little delay on your GBH for the time being.’ He patted her arm with a sweaty hand.
‘We’re investigating it as an attempted murder.’ Kate paused, measuring her words carefully. ‘A young woman was attacked, left for dead, sir. We have a duty to do everything we can to get this guy off the streets.’
‘Yes, yes, carry on, do your stuff.’ The chief pulled a face and waved his chubby hand in the air. ‘You’ll just have to be a bit creative with what you have until we get this burglary sorted.’
Kate watched him bumble off down the corridor, round body rolling on top of two little cone-shaped legs. She couldn’t imagine the last time her DCI had been on the front line, let alone completed the bleep fitness test.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ she muttered under her breath. Be a bit creative? What the fuck did that mean?
She knew exactly what was going on. Some poor little rich guy had been broken into and pulled a few strings with his powerful mates to get it looked at sooner. Meanwhile, their guy went free. It made her want to scream with frustration, rage at the injustices in the system. But whatever she did, she knew nothing was going to change today.
She sighed and made her way back to the ops room. Jennings may be done for the day, but for her there was work to do.
As she walked her phone beeped in her pocket and she pulled it out. A text from an unfamiliar number. She glanced down the now-empty corridor, feeling her cheeks redden.
What a night! Let’s do it again. Xx
She put the phone away quickly, cringing but feeling something else. An undercurrent of excitement.
Kate didn’t remember giving him her number, but she knew she should go back with a curt No, thank you and put an end to this stupidity. But something stopped her. That sudden jolt. A kick of expectation.
Despite the risk, she left the text there, a part of her wanting to feel the thrill again.
30
Thea heard footsteps behind her on the gravel, but didn’t turn. They were delicate, considered, slow. She knew who they belonged to.
‘They said you’d gone home.’
Thea turned to her sister. She took in her nose, her eyes, her chin. The face she saw every day in the mirror. But today, Gabriella looked different. Younger. She had minimal make-up on and her hair was natural, the wind pushing it around her face. Thea saw Gabi’s reticence, her worry; it matched her own trepidation.
Thea looked up at the house. The sky was a dull concrete grey; drizzle clung to her coat. She shifted the small bag of belongings in her hand.
The doctors had been adamant she couldn’t leave the hospital. She was seriously ill; she’d only just woken up from a coma. But she signed the forms and walked away, determined to escape. She had been stuck in the hospital too long, where monitors beeped and nurses chatted as they walked down the corridor. Where it was never quiet. She needed the quiet.
But now she was here, she wasn’t sure. She did feel awful: her head rattled, her arm and her fingers ached; she could barely stand. The house watched her, quiet and overbearing. She knew what to expect when she turned the handle and let herself in: the smell of damp, the cold, the draughts. For the first time, she yearned for something sleek and modern, a place nondescript and unemotional to lay her head.
But her sister was here. Gabriella was back home, where she belonged.
Thea went first, walking into the gloom then up the stairs to her bedroom. Gabriella followed her, hesitant and silent. Thea’s headache was back, and her skin was itching under the bandage as her stitches adjusted from the cold to the warmth inside. She looked at her bed – the crumpled duvet, the pillows askew. It was a welcome sight and she climbed in, her feet, in their muddy boots, poking out the side.
She closed her eyes and heard Gabi’s footsteps. She felt Gabi pull the boots from her feet and drop them on the floor. Then the bed moved and her sister climbed in next to her.
She felt Gabi’s breathing calm and slow. Thea listened to her sister, and dropped off to sleep.
When Thea woke the sky was dark. She looked over in the bed at her twin. Gabi was already awake, staring at the ceiling.
‘Harry said you stayed here,’ Thea said, and Gabi looked over quickly.
‘Yes.’
‘You said you never wanted to come here again. You said you couldn’t bear it.’
‘It’s been a long time.’ Gabi hesitated. ‘What do you remember from that night? Do you know who attacked you?’
Thea felt Gabi’s eyes on her. She knew she looked dreadful. Dark bags under her eyes, her hair matted, the bandage round her head stained and bloody.
‘I remember going to the club, I remember speaking to Ryan but after that, not much.’ Thea pulled the duvet up to her chin, reluctant to leave the warmth of the bed. ‘I’m not used to drinking. I think the alcohol went to my head.’
Gabi took a deep breath in, and let it out slowly. ‘And how long have you been pretending to be me?’ she asked.
Thea stared at the ceiling, silent.
‘How long, Thea? It’s been at least a week, because Mortimer says he followed me to the club last Saturday and I know I wasn’t there.’
Thea sighed. ‘A few weeks,’ she said quietly. ‘I first went to try and talk to you and then they thought I was you, and …’
‘You nicked my driving licence!’ Gabi said, incredulously.
‘You dropped it on Wednesday. I was going to give it back …’ Thea said, but Gabi interrupted her.
‘That’s why the police thought you were me, you know? And they’re blaming me for the deceit.’ Gabi stopped and thought for a moment. ‘And what about Ryan? Have you been sleeping with him?’
‘Once. That Saturday night,’ Thea replied.
‘Thea!’ Gabi cried out.
‘I wanted to feel a little bit what you felt,’ Thea said quietly. ‘I wanted to feel special and wanted. And desired.’
Gabi sighed. ‘That’s not how I feel.’
‘I know that now,’ Thea said. She paused, and slowly pulled herself up to sit. ‘They said nobody came to visit you in the hospital, nobody except Harry and Mortimer.’
Gabi turned round quickly. ‘Don’t you go feeling sorry for me. Your life isn’t so perfect …’
‘I never said it was …’
‘I’ve stayed here these past few days, in this house. Your life isn’t exactly a whirlwind of joy and happiness. Nobody ever comes here. Nobody ever calls you. What do you do all day?’ Gabi shouted, jumping out of the bed.
‘I don’t need people around me all the time, hanging off my every word. I do all right for myself.’ Thea threw the duvet off and stood up on the bare floorboards, turning on the overhead light. Her legs felt uncertain and wobbly; the sudden movement made her head pound. ‘You left me. I was never scared when we were growing up
because I always knew I had you. Even when we fought, we always had each other,’ Thea said defiantly, facing her sister, feeling the anger from fifteen years ago return. ‘And then you left and I had to work out how to survive without you. And I did. I have a successful business – I make a living for myself rather than cadging off desperate men.’
Gabi prodded a finger in her direction. ‘You hide. That’s what you do, you hide. In this cold, run-down house that should have been demolished years ago. At least I get out there and experience life.’
‘And all the mind-altering substances you can get your hands on, right?’ Thea picked up some clothes from the floor, then turned to face Gabi again. ‘Why did you come back? Everything was fine with you on the other side of the world.’
‘Harrison’s dying!’ Gabi shouted. She turned towards her sister, taking a deep, shuddering breath in, letting it out slowly. ‘I saw a newspaper article. It said he’d been denied compassionate release because of the violent nature of the murders,’ she said, softly. ‘Harry’s dad will be dead, and he’ll never forgive himself. Harrison will be gone and we’ll never be able to put this right.’
Thea paused. ‘Is that such a bad thing?’ she asked.
Gabi stared at her, her mouth open, then went to walk past her, trying to get to the door. Thea blocked her.
‘Let me through, Thea.’ Gabi went to push her out of the way, but Thea was surprisingly strong. ‘Let me past.’
‘Leave it alone, Gabi,’ Thea said, then stopped, making the connection in her head. ‘Is that why you stayed here? You were looking for the gun?’
Gabi shook her head and shoved her sister out of the way.
‘You couldn’t find it, could you?’ Thea shouted at Gabriella’s back as she clattered down the stairs. ‘What were you planning on doing with it? Giving it to the police? Telling them what happened? There’s no reason why you have to do this. The right person is in jail. What difference would it make?’
Gabi’s footsteps stopped. Thea heard her sister pause, catching her breath.
Ask Me No Questions Page 12