Dirty Secrets

by JANICE FROST

  “What were you doing on Monday evening?” Neal asked.

  “The night Dana was killed, right? I was here, alone, unfortunately, so no alibi. That’s bad, right?”

  Ava made a face. “Well, it’s not the best, to be frank. Especially as you were involved with Dana.” She paused. “But we’ll hold off arresting you for now.” She flashed him a beatific, blatantly insincere smile.

  Chapter Ten

  Fin was alone in the little terraced house he shared with Ruth and their son. He sat in the kitchen, missing his family and thinking about the past.

  He remembered the day he first met Ruth. Fin didn’t go for the lookers. He liked character in a woman, or a sense of mystery. So he noticed plain Jane Ruth immediately, and walked across the smoke-filled student bar to chat her up. She seemed wary for someone so young — nineteen, he found out later. She looked like she had a past, and Fin was curious.

  So he’d asked her outright. What was the terrible secret she was harbouring that made her look so haunted? Probably not the best opening gambit, but it certainly made Ruth notice him. After her initial surprise, she seemed interested in her turn. They spent the rest of the evening talking and dancing. Fin had walked her back to her college, and she agreed to meet him for coffee the following day.

  Their relationship blossomed. It hadn’t taken long for Fin to realise that Ruth was ‘the one.’ To his perpetual astonishment, she felt the same way about him.

  The next big shock had been Ruth’s pregnancy. When she made her declaration, Fin had been speechless, incapable of forming a single coherent thought. The only part of him that still seemed to function was his legs. He walked away.

  Then he came back. One hour later, bearing a huge bouquet of flowers and a bottle of champagne that he’d had to drink himself. Ruth refused to touch a drop for fear of harming the baby. Though he didn’t say as much to Ruth, Fin was worried about how they’d cope, money-wise. Ruth hadn’t yet graduated and he was embarking on a full-time PhD. He’d received funding, but it wasn’t enough to keep all three of them. Ruth did have money, of course. Plenty. A big fat bank account that she refused to touch, following her row with her father. Fin didn’t blame her father for having him checked out. Wealthy people had to be wary of gold-diggers.

  Russ Marsh’s PI hadn’t discovered anything about Fin’s past that Fin hadn’t already revealed to Ruth. She’d accepted that he wasn’t that person any more. Actually, he never had been that person. Nothing about his life as a runner for Liam Sharp had been of his choosing. He’d been trapped by circumstance. And fear, of course.

  There was no disputing that he knew the drugs trade. For a fraction of a second, it had crossed his mind that he could do well at Cambridge as a drug dealer. He’d lost count of the number of times he’d been approached for tips on where to buy, or been offered the stuff himself. The market was buoyant. Fin knew that a gram of coke in Cambridge sold for around double the asking price in London. Finding clients would be a piece of cake. His profit margin would be phenomenal. Within six months, he’d have more money than he knew what to do with.

  But Fin had a conscience, and an appreciation of the drug trade that he’d been ignorant of in his days as Liam’s lackey. He was aware that every drug dealer — and every user — was at the end of a chain of violence and misery that reached all the way to the backstreets of Columbia, where people were dying on a daily basis thanks to the activities of the greedy drug cartels. Fin wanted nothing more to do with it.

  But life threw him one of its curveballs.

  Fin and Ruth had collided with Hector Cornish and Dana Schell in the Grafton shopping centre. Ruth had already mentioned that her ex-classmate, son of her father’s business partner, was at Cambridge. She hadn’t seemed interested in socialising with him, until their chance meeting resulted in Ruth inviting Hector and Dana for dinner. Fin was less than enthusiastic.

  Ruth assumed he was jealous. She patted her stomach. “Did you hear that, little baby? Daddy’s jealous of Mummy’s friend.”

  It wasn’t that. It was Hector’s air of entitlement, of privilege. Ruth came from a similar background, but she had none of that arrogance so characteristic of her socioeconomic peers. Instead, there was sadness at her core, that aura of mystery.

  Once she’d asked Fin, “Do you ever wonder how your whole life can change in an instant because of one stupid act?” When he asked her to explain, she laughed it off. Fin was a romantic at heart, but he was realistic enough to know that the source of her sadness might turn out to be something quite mundane.

  Something else bothered Fin about Hector. A look in Hector’s eyes that reminded him of Liam Sharp.

  Maybe Ruth’s pregnancy was making her feel unattractive? So he played along with the jealousy thing because it seemed to cheer her up, make her feel more desirable.

  Hector and Dana duly turned up on their doorstep on a chilly January evening bearing a six pack of lager, and a bunch of pink peonies for Ruth. Earlier in the day, Fin had cooked a big pot of chilli, and he served this up on a bed of rice with some crusty bread that Ruth had bought from what she called an ‘artisanal’ bakers.

  Ruth and Hector talked a lot about their shared past. Fin was glad to be able to just listen, and nod occasionally without having to contribute much to the conversation. He found Hector’s presence in their home unsettling. It had nothing to do with sexual jealousy.

  Excluded from the conversation, Fin began to drink steadily. Tongue loosened, he told them about the night he and Ruth met. Hector seemed particularly interested in Fin’s reference to Ruth’s ‘air of mystery.’

  “Like she has some secret in her past?” He’d been teasing, but Ruth didn’t seem amused. Suddenly the atmosphere became charged with things unsaid. Dangerous things.

  Ruth, her face drained of colour, excused herself, saying she felt nauseous. She laughed it off. “Morning sickness in the evening.” Dana accompanied her upstairs.

  Left alone at the table with Hector, Fin had looked him in the eye, and asked, “What was that all about?”

  Hector’s gaze was like a searchlight, forcing Fin to look away. And then he said, “I know Ruth’s secret.”

  * * *

  “So, talk to me about Dana Schell,” Neal said, his eyes roving across the faces of Ava, PJ and Tom, who were his key officers in the Russ Marsh and Dana Schell inquiries. For now, they were treating these murders as discrete cases, but keeping an open mind on how the investigations might develop.

  “Twenty-four years old. Not from Stromford, She met a Stromford lad, Nathan Brewer, at a music festival and came back here with him. They were together for a while afterwards. Dana lived at his house share. Originally she’s from somewhere down south, er . . .” Tom floundered.

  “Braintree, in Essex,” PJ chipped in.

  “That’s the one. Left school at sixteen and attended her local FE college where she upgraded her GCSEs and then did an accounting qualification.”

  “. . . Got a job with Colchester City Council and stayed there for a couple of years,” PJ added.

  “Her line manager at the council said she was a competent worker, but she took a lot of time off sick . . .” Tom said.

  “. . . In inverted commas,” PJ chorused.

  Neal felt he was watching a tennis match.

  “Actually, she was disciplined over the amount of time she took off. She was on a final warning.” Advantage PJ.

  “Not the most dependable character, then. How did she end up working for the Cornish family?” Neal asked.

  But Tom wasn’t done yet. “She answered an ad in the Courier after doing a series of temping jobs in Stromford.”

  “What do we know about this Nathan Brewer, the boyfriend, if that’s what he was?” Neal now felt like a referee.

  Ball in PJ’s court. “He works in Tesco’s. Actually, I think I know him.” This was unsurprising. Unlike the rest of them, PJ had lived all her life in Stromford and seemed to know everyone. She turned to Ava. “Bet you do
too, Ava. Young bloke on chilled foods? With the ginger coif?”

  Ava looked blank.

  “Anyway, according to Dana’s mum, the relationship didn’t last long. But Dana decided to stay on in Stromford and save money to go travelling.”

  “How long since they split up?” Neal asked.

  “Don’t know exactly, but more than a year, boss.” Tom said. “Want us to question him?”

  “Yes. He’s a potential suspect.”

  “On it, boss.”

  Neal ran his fingers through his hair. It felt like there was more to tug through than usual. Time for a trip to the barber’s. When he got entrenched in a case, there never seemed time for that sort of thing.

  “Hector Cornish was reluctant to admit to a relationship, if you can call it that, with Dana. We know she visited him in Cambridge and according to Ruth Marsh — and Hector — she was dealing.”

  “More intertangling,” remarked PJ. “Sorry for interrupting, sir.”

  “Given the internecine affairs of these two families, the word is curiously . . . apt,” Neal said. He thought for a moment. “Dana was transferring a couple of hundred pounds a month into her savings account from her salary, presumably to save for her travels. She would have had very little left to live on, certainly not enough to purchase that amount of cocaine.”

  “Hector could easily have stashed the coke in Dana’s room after her death. He would have been expecting a police visit,” Tom said.

  “Why bother hiding it in Dana’s room, instead of just getting rid of it?” Ava said. “There’s always the possibility that Paul Cornish was paying Dana for sex. His wife was pretty convinced he and Dana were at it, wasn’t she, sir?”

  Neal nodded. “Not sure he’d be paying her enough to buy a kilo of coke though.”

  He recalled Hector’s suggestion that Dana could have been paid for sex. He’d practically accused her of prostitution. Surely, he couldn’t have meant his father was the one paying her?

  “Tomorrow morning, I’d like you to accompany me on a trip to Cambridge, Ava. I want to see what this Fin O’Shea has to say for himself. Background in drugs or not, I’m having a hard time believing he sussed out Dana’s drug credentials like a bloody sniffer dog.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now,” Neal said. “Let’s discuss where we are with Russ Marsh’s murder.”

  “If you ask me, it’s all connected,” Tom said. “I’ve seen this before in Hertfordshire. Drugs at the root of everything.” He looked around the room expectantly, as if he’d just made an earth-shattering pronouncement. No one seemed impressed. “Just putting it out there.”

  “Yes, well, we’ve all considered that the deaths might be linked,” Neal pointed out impatiently. There was a lengthy silence.

  “My money’s on Paul Cornish,” Ava said. “His alibi is weak. Admittedly, we don’t have much evidence against him. And not a lot in the way of motive, despite his row with Russ. It’s got to be something to do with the business.”

  “Maybe Paul had been bottling up his resentment over Gail’s affair with Russ Marsh and it just exploded,” PJ said. “Maybe Russ lending Hector that money was the last straw.”

  “Yeah, seems like that really pissed Paul off,” Tom said. “Though Russ was the one who warned Paul to ‘watch his back.’”

  “It seems likely that Russell Marsh knew his killer and let him or her in. The burglar alarm wasn’t triggered. We’re still checking into non-residents admitted to Crystal Lakes from the day before Russ’s murder. There were plenty of tradespeople of course, visitors calling on friends and relatives, employees of the various recreational facilities and shops at Crystal Lakes. It’s a gated community, which means it has enhanced security measures, but it’s not impregnable. Obviously,” Neal said. “And there might be some forensic evidence when we get the results back. I’m interested in why Russell Marsh agreed to bail Hector Cornish out.” Neal was thinking of something Ava had hinted at during their interview with Hector. “When we interviewed Hector, Ava, you asked him something along the lines of, was there something he could offer Russell in return for his generosity. He was rattled by the question even though he made light of it.”

  “I was stabbing in the dark,” Ava admitted. “But if Dana overheard stuff in the Cornish household, why not Hector too? Something to do with the business, perhaps? He might have been listening in when Paul and Russ were discussing something confidential with a client.”

  Neal frowned. “Hmm.” All of these were possibilities.

  “Yeah, or what if Hector found out that Russ was cheating on his father with Gail again, and was blackmailing him?” Tom’s words tumbled out in his excitement.

  Neal raised an eyebrow. “Not bad, Tom.” He thought for a moment, interested by the comment. “Coming back to that argument between Russ and Paul, I’m not convinced it was simply over Russ bailing Hector out of his gambling debts. If Ava’s right and Russ died because of something to do with the business, that row they had might have been because Russ had his suspicions and decided to confront Paul.”

  They were all silent for a moment as they contemplated the possibilities that spun out from that.

  “Val Marsh did say that Russ was worried about some aspect of the business,” Ava said. “They were going to talk about it when she got home from Ruth’s.”

  “We need more information,” Neal said. “Tom, contact Lesley Curran directly after the briefing and see if she’s got anything useful for us yet.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Coming back to Hector again, maybe there’s some personal element involved,” PJ suggested quietly. They all looked at her. “Hector was at Cambridge with Ruth, right? Maybe he was blackmailing Russ Marsh over something to do with Ruth. It seemed so odd Ruth coming to us with that story about Dana being a drug dealer. Almost as though Hector put her up to it.”

  “What are you thinking, PJ?” Ava asked.

  PJ coloured. “It’s just . . . well . . . I was just thinking, fathers will go to great lengths to protect their daughters, won’t they? I didn’t really have something specific in mind. Sorry, I should have given it a bit more thought.”

  “No need to apologise,” Ava reassured her quickly. “It’s always good to get ideas on the table.”

  Neal noticed how supportive of PJ Ava was. She always made PJ feel like a valued member of the team. He was aware that PJ had some personal issues at the moment concerning her boyfriend, Steve. Probably her confidence was in need of a boost.

  “That’s an interesting angle, PJ. See what you can find out,” he said, though he doubted it would throw up any lead.

  “Ava, I propose we make an early start tomorrow. Tom, PJ, I’d like you two to interview this Nathan Brewer, Dana Schell’s ex, as soon as possible.”

  “A couple of PCs have taken a statement from him already,” Tom said. “He has an alibi for the approximate time of Dana’s death.”

  Neal was aware of this. He gave a brief nod. “Everyone clear on what they’re doing?”

  Neal returned to his office and closed the door. Through the glass partition he could see Ava, PJ and Tom talking together. Ava touched PJ on the arm, and he guessed they were discussing Steve. He should probably say something. He would ask Ava in the morning if there was any support he could offer PJ. She was a good officer. His present team gelled well, unlike other teams he’d worked with, where petty jealousies and rivalries got in the way of their work. If people just basically didn’t get along, it made his job impossible.

  Ava and Tom were driven individuals. Both were leaders, and they’d go far. Tom, who was of mixed race, had endured racial prejudice in Hertfordshire. It was admirable that he’d chosen to move to largely white Stromfordshire, where people with his skin colour still attracted the wrong sort of looks.

  PJ was no less dedicated, but Neal sensed that she was less ambitious. She derived her satisfaction from dealing with people and doing her job well, not from any burning ambition to move up through the
ranks. Of them all, she was the most skilled at communicating with others. They responded to her warmth and sympathy. Neal realised that he was actually becoming fond of this team.

  Since he’d entered the force, he’d kept colleagues at a distance, saving the warmer side of his nature for his family, and his close childhood friend, Jock Dodds, whom he’d always regarded as a brother, and who was about to become his brother-in-law.

  He shook himself. If he carried on like this he was in danger of becoming sentimental.

  Chapter Eleven

  Come on, Ollie. Ava drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. It was six thirty, earlier than they usually set off, and Ollie didn’t take kindly to being rushed. He had his routines in the morning, and these took an allotted amount of time. Last night, Ava’s suggestion that he get up half an hour earlier had been met with stony disapproval.

  Sure enough, he emerged from the cottage looking dishevelled, jacket half on, bag slung over his shoulder with the straps gaping open, books just waiting to spill out all over the path. He slumped into the seat next to her, hand on the door, ready to slam it shut.

  “Did you lock up?” Ava asked. Ollie scowled at her and threw his bag into the backseat. He got out of the car and stomped back to the front door. He returned, dangling the door keys in front of him.

  “Sandwiches?” Ava asked, closing her eyes. Ollie pointed to the back seat. Knowing the journey was likely to be passed in silence, Ava turned the radio on and listened to the news.

  Ollie’s mood still hadn’t brightened by the time Ava dropped him off at the school gates. She hoped the disruption to his morning wouldn’t throw him off kilter for the entire day. To her relief, he thanked her for the lift and said, “You too,” when she wished him a good day.