by M K Farrar
She sighed. “Go and get your tablet, and I’ll see if I can figure out how to put the Robux on your account for you.”
Max punched the air. “Yes! Thanks, Mum. You’re the best.”
He ran off to retrieve the tablet.
She took the quiet moment to call Russell’s mobile again. Once more, it rang and rang. “You know who it is,” his voice said down the line. “Leave a message, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
“It’s me again. You were supposed to be home over an hour ago. Can you call me, please? I’m getting worried.”
She chewed at her thumbnail. It wasn’t as though he worked in an office and went out for drinks after work or anything like that. Sometimes he was late, especially if he’d had to make a call several counties over and had got stuck in traffic, but he always called her to let her know.
Max reappeared and shoved his tablet at her, demanding her attention. “Here you go, Mum.”
“You’re going to need to show me what to do.”
“You just put in the password. I’ve already done everything else.”
It amazed her how computer literate kids were these days. “Okay, give it here then.” She carried her son’s tablet over to the sofa.
At least she knew what the password was. Even though she was aware that you were supposed to have different ones for all the different sites, as a family, they tended to have a variation of the same one.
The buzz of her phone caught her attention, and she dropped the tablet to snatch it up. Russell?
But no, it was Caroline, one of the other mums from school. She let out a sigh and swiped to ignore the call. She didn’t need to get caught up in a gossipy chat right now. But what if Caroline knew something about Russ’s whereabouts, and that was why she was calling? What if he’d been in an accident, and Caroline was phoning because she’d spotted his car or something?
She picked up the phone again and swiped to bring up the last action.
“Muuuum,” Max whined, shoving the tablet back at her. She still hadn’t put the password in.
“In a minute, Max,” she snapped.
The phone rang, and Caroline picked up. “Oh, hi. I just wondered if you knew if Taekwondo was on tomorrow?”
The Saturday class both their boys attended.
“What?” Michelle’s head was spinning. Why was Caroline asking her about bloody Taekwondo?
“I couldn’t remember if it was this week that the instructor said he was on holiday? I don’t suppose you know?”
“No, no, I’m sorry, I don’t. I really have to go, Caroline, sorry.” She ended the call again, threw her phone back down and put her head in her hands. Was she overreacting? He was only a couple of hours late now. But in her gut, she knew something had happened to him.
Max nudged the tablet back at her. “The password, Mum.”
“Jesus Christ, there are more important things than your damned computer game!” she shouted.
Max stared, wide-eyed at her outburst, and she burst into tears.
Chapter Seven
“HOW DID YOU GET ON?” Ryan asked Erica as he left the house and approached his sergeant outside.
She pressed her lips together, her forehead knotted in a frown. “I haven’t found anyone who even saw what time Douglas Lloyd left the house this afternoon, but I have narrowed down the time of death to being between three-thirty, when they got back from school, and five p.m. That only gives whoever was driving the family car thirty minutes to get across the city and crash the car.”
“In rush-hour traffic?” he said. “I’d say we can narrow it down even more than that.”
“You think the attack must have happened sometime between three-thirty and four-thirty?”
Ryan nodded. “An hour is a good window for us to narrow things down further. With any luck, one of the neighbours’ houses will have CCTV or video camera doorbells. Someone must have seen something. A woman and child won’t have been murdered in the middle of the day, in a busy housing estate, without someone having seen something.”
“One of the neighbours, Maeve Pincher, mentioned that the BMW over there is Douglas Lloyd’s company car. We should have it searched, too.”
“Good spot.” Ryan chewed at a piece of dried skin on his lower lip. “I wonder why he took the wife’s car rather than that one?”
“Not sure.” She shrugged one shoulder. “If it was even him who took the car at all. If someone else was responsible and needed to make a quick getaway, they would have just taken whichever car they found the keys for.”
“Or it was a way to throw us off the scent. If he took his own company car to escape in, we would be more likely to pin this on him.”
“Maybe.” Erica glanced back over her shoulder to where the neighbours were still being held back by uniformed officers. “There was something else the neighbour mentioned. She said Douglas like to have the occasional flutter on the scratch cards.”
“Is that right? I wonder if it was more than that?”
“That’s what I thought. If he had gambling issues, perhaps there were also money worries. Maybe he borrowed from the wrong people and this was their revenge.”
Ryan thought for a moment. “The PCN check came back clean, though. I’d expect someone with problems of that level to have some kind of background. This guy doesn’t have so much as a parking ticket.”
Erica raised her eyebrows. “They always say it’s the quiet ones you need to watch out for.”
“Hmm, maybe. We mustn’t lose sight of the possibility that Douglas Lloyd is a victim in all of this as well, though. Until we find a murder weapon with his prints on it, we can’t know for sure.”
“Any sign of it yet?” she asked.
“Not yet, but it can’t just have vanished. There’s a chance we’ll find it around the woodland near the car, if the killer took it with them.”
“That’s a much bigger area to cover.”
“It doesn’t help that we’re out of daylight either. The dogs might have found something, but if not, it’ll have to be resumed in the morning.”
Ryan stifled a yawn. He was tired, and it was well past his official knocking off time, but he wouldn’t be going home yet. There was still far too much work to be done.
Movement came from the front door of the house. “Detective,” a male voice called.
Ryan turned to see the lead Scenes of Crime Officer standing there. “What did you find?”
He held up a clear evidence bag containing a phone—a Samsung of some kind. “A mobile phone hidden in the house.”
Ryan left Erica and walked back up the path to the house. “Where was it?”
“Taped down the back of the husband’s sock drawer.”
That perked Ryan up. Decent husbands didn’t need to hide mobile phones in their own homes. “I assume it’s locked.”
“You assume correctly.”
“Get it to Digital Forensics. They should be able to get it unlocked.”
Would the reason a man would kill his own family be on that phone?
He went back to Erica to discover her on the phone. She lifted her hand to him and mouthed Fortum. He gave her a minute to finish the call, hoping that whatever Fortum had to say, it was positive.
“Any news from the other crime scene?” he asked when she’d finished.
“Not yet. They’re still searching. The dogs picked up a scent but only managed to follow it to the road, and then it vanished.”
“He might have been picked up then. Dogs don’t lose a trail unless something drastic has happened like the person they’re tracking gets into a vehicle.”
Erica nodded. “Yes, but by who?”
“The same person he’s been calling on the secret mobile?” Of course, Lloyd might not have been able to call that person if he didn’t have the phone, unless he had a backup. “People tend not to conceal phones in their own homes unless they’re hiding something.
“Something to do with the gambling, perhaps?”
<
br /> “Possibly. We’ll know more once we get it open.”
“I want to interview the boys in more detail,” Erica said. “The younger of the two seemed anxious earlier.”
“That’s hardly surprising, considering what they found.”
“Maybe, but it’s an instinct, and I think it would be best to speak to them while everything is fresh in their minds. I was going to swing by and pick up Liam and his mother on the way back to the station.”
“Okay. Get DC Penn to pick up the other one.” They had several detective constables in the team, and he intended on making use of them. “It’s probably best we keep them apart until we get the chance to speak to them properly.”
Erica gave a curt nod. “Agreed.”
Chapter Eight
ERICA STOPPED OUTSIDE of the Vulnerable Interview Suite where Liam Gilbert sat inside with his mother. She keyed in the code on the pad on the outside of the door, waited until it buzzed to tell her it was open, and then stepped inside. They both fixed their attention on her as she entered, and she pasted on a smile.
“Sorry to keep you waiting.”
Marie Gilbert shook her head. “It’s okay. We know you’re busy.”
“Have you got everything you need? You’re comfortable?” Erica asked.
Liam’s mother shot a look to her son and then offered him a smile. “Yes, we’re fine. Thank you. Just keen to get home, you know. It’s getting late.”
Erica had stopped by the Gilbert household on her way back from the second crime scene. Marie Gilbert was right, it was getting late, so late in fact, that Erica had needed to phone her husband, Chris. He wouldn’t be happy that she wouldn’t be making it home for dinner that night, and most likely wouldn’t be home for bedtime either. She hated missing Poppy’s bedtimes, but what could she do? It wasn’t as though she could just pretend there hadn’t been a double murder and the husband—and current main suspect—was missing.
“Yes, of course. I’ll try to be as quick as I can. I do have some questions to ask you, Liam, and we do have microphones in the room to record what I’m asking you and what your responses are. It just helps us when we go back over what’s been said. I’d say I’d write it all down instead, but my handwriting is terrible, and I can never read it.”
The boy’s lips tweaked in a smile. “My handwriting is terrible, too.”
“Well, you’ve got plenty of years left in school to improve yours. I’m afraid I’m a lost cause.”
That won her a wider smile.
“So,” she sat in the comfortable chair opposite, “let’s start earlier that day, shall we? What did you do after you got up this morning?”
Liam shrugged. “I went to school, like I always do.”
“And how is school? Do you enjoy it?”
“It’s all right. I like my friends and playing football at lunchtime.”
“Friends like Conner?”
He ducked his head as he nodded and didn’t meet her eye. “Yeah, friends like Conner.”
“Then what happened after school was over?” she asked.
“Conner said we should hang out, so we did.”
His mother interrupted, hurriedly. “The boys often hang out after school. So long as they’re back before dark, we let them have their independence. I mean, they’re going to secondary school later this year, so they need to learn how to be on their own a bit more. I do think we mollycoddle kids these days, and I’d rather they were outside than sitting in, playing on their computer games.”
It was clear Marie was worried about her parenting being judged. That was the last thing Erica was going to do. She had a baby at home who was mostly being taken care of by her husband, not that there should be anything wrong with that in this day and age. Chris was Poppy’s father, after all, but she still felt as though people thought there was something wrong with her for not wanting to be at home with her daughter and instead being out catching criminals.
“Oh, I agree,” she said instead. “It’s good for boys to burn off some energy.”
The woman’s shoulders dropped, and she smiled. “Yes, they’re a bit like dogs. Feed them and walk them and they’ll be fine.” Her cheeks flushed. “Not that I’m calling my son a dog,” she added.
“No, of course not.” Erica turned her attention back to Liam. “So, you finished school, but I noticed you weren’t wearing your school clothes earlier. Did you change?”
“Yeah, we both went home and got changed and then came out again.”
“You were quite a long way from home—almost two miles, actually. Is that a normal distance for you to walk?”
He glanced down at his lap. “I suppose. We don’t really keep track.”
The mother stepped in again. “I’d rather they walked through the fields than hung out on the estate. I know there’s fewer people around, but it feels safer.”
“Of course. I just wanted to make sure that this was normal for the boys and they hadn’t altered their route for any reason.”
Marie’s eyes widened. “You mean in case someone wanted them to find the car?”
“I’d say that’s highly unlikely, but we have to take all these things into consideration.”
“I didn’t want to go into the woods,” Liam said, “but Conner did. He said we could cut through and then go to the shop down the road and he’d buy us some sweets.”
“It was Conner’s idea then?”
DC Penn was interviewing the other boy. The interviews were being recorded to compare later to make sure the boys’ stories matched. Erica got the impression from Liam that Conner was the ringleader out of the two, but that might have been Liam trying to push the blame onto his friend.
“Maybe. It was getting dark, and I didn’t want Mum to worry.” He shot his mother a look, and she reached out and patted the back of his hand.
“Okay, tell me a little about what happened when you found the car. Who saw it first, you or Conner?”
“It was Conner, I think. I noticed where the tree and bushes were all flattened from where the car must have come off the road, but the car was to our left and almost behind us, so I didn’t see that until after Conner spotted it.”
“Do you remember seeing anyone else around at the time? Or hearing anyone or anything?”
He shook his head. “No, nothing. It was just the two of us.”
“You’re doing really well,” she encouraged him. “We’re nearly done. After you saw the car, who approached it first?”
“Conner did,” he said with certainty. “I was worried it might blow up—” his mother sucked in a sharp breath and closed her eyes briefly, clearly picturing that exact thing happening—“but it didn’t, so I walked up to where Conner was standing at the door.”
“The driver’s door, or the passenger door?” she checked.
He wrinkled his forehead as he thought. “The passenger door.”
“And this is really important, Liam. Do you remember if the doors were open or shut when you got there?”
“Umm, I think it was shut, but it might have been open a little bit.”
“Is there any way Conner might have touched the door while you weren’t looking? Perhaps pushed it shut, or anything like that?”
“No, I don’t think so. We didn’t touch anything.”
Her gaze flitted to her notes “That’s not quite true, is it, Liam? When we spoke to you at the scene, you said you put your hands against the glass, cupping your face so you could see inside better.”
His cheeks reddened, and she saw the resemblance to his mother.
“Oh, yeah. We just wanted to make sure there was no one hurt inside.”
“It’s okay. You’re not in any trouble. It’s just important for us to get the real picture about what happened in the time leading up to the car being found, and sometimes it’s those little details that can make the big difference in finding out what happened to the driver.”
“Do you think he’s dead?”
“I’m afraid we simply don�
�t have that information, Liam.”
The boy nodded.
“The car they found,” Marie said, chewing on her lower lip, “it was linked to that other...thing...that happened in the city today, wasn’t it?”
Erica gave her a polite smile. “I’m sorry, I can’t disclose that information.”
“No, of course not. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.”
“Not a problem.” Erica glanced back down at her notes. “Now, where were we?” Unfortunately, she wasn’t going to let them go so soon. “How about we just go back over what happened when you first saw the car?”
ERICA OPENED HER FRONT door with the key in the lock, moving slowly and carefully in the hope of not waking anyone up. Sometimes it could take hours to get Poppy settled, and she knew her husband, Chris, wouldn’t appreciate it if he’d just got her to sleep only for Erica to come home and wake her up again.
Truthfully, Erica also didn’t want to deal with trying to get Poppy back down again either, and she experienced a twang of guilt at the thought. That poor mother and daughter at the house today. The mother must have put her daughter to bed last night, possibly having the same thoughts, overtired and stressed and just wanting an hour to herself, completely unaware that it would be the last time she’d ever get to kiss her daughter goodnight. Erica blinked back a sudden prick of tears and sucked in a breath. She’d been in this job a good few years now but hadn’t figured out how to switch off the empathy button just yet. Maybe that was a good thing.
She closed the door softly behind her and tiptoed into the kitchen, dropping her bag, shrugging off her jacket, and kicking away her shoes as she went. She flicked on the kitchen light. Chris had left her a note.
Dinner in the microwave. C. X
She pushed the button and opened the microwave door. Sure enough, sitting on a plate and covered in cling film was a portion of lasagne. He was too good to her. She put it on to warm through and went to the fridge and poured herself a glass of white wine from the bottle that was already open. She took a good gulp, and the microwave pinged to signal her food was ready.