by Gytha Lodge
‘What about Step Conti?’
‘No,’ she said, pulling the hands away and scrabbling in her handbag until she found a tissue. Her eyes looked raw and red. Perhaps the tears had been real this time. ‘Definitely not.’ She looked towards Patrick, and then asked, ‘Why? Who are they?’
‘Alex Plaskitt’s husband and his best friend.’
There was a profound silence for a moment, while Louise stared at Jonah, her mouth ever so slightly ajar. And then she said, ‘His husband?’ at the same moment that her solicitor said, ‘Are you serious?’
‘Indeed,’ Jonah said, answering both of them with a very small smile.
‘Let me just clarify this,’ Patrick said. ‘You are attempting to suggest that my client was involved in some sort of one-night stand with a gay man, and … what? I’m not quite clear. Decided to stab him? Without motive?’
‘What your client and Alex Plaskitt were doing in her marital bed remains unclear,’ Jonah said, his voice and expression hard. ‘The outcome is, however, exceptionally clear.’
There was a slight pause, and then Louise said, ‘Do you think … he might have been trying – to rob me?’
Jonah glanced at her in surprise. The theft angle was on his list of possibilities, but he hadn’t expected Louise Reakes to think of it. Unless, perhaps, Louise remembered more than she was letting on.
‘What makes you ask that?’
‘I suppose we have money and … the only thing I remember about the later part of the night is that at some point I was afraid. I have this … fragment of a memory, and there’s a man’s voice in it, hushing me.’ Her eyes took on a slight sheen. ‘It might have been him.’
Jonah looked at her expression, which seemed halfway between eager and agonised. As if Louise both wanted to believe this and desperately didn’t all at once.
The highly anticipated data from Alex’s phone arrived just after they’d left Louise to eat sandwiches with her solicitor. Jonah forwarded it to Lightman and, before leaving to speak to Issa, asked his sergeant to run a quick check for Louise Reakes’s phone number.
‘Nothing,’ Lightman said, after running a search. ‘And no Louise listed in his contacts.’
‘OK. Any messages sent last night?’
Lightman scrolled through the records. ‘Quite a few to and from his husband, plus one two-minute phone call at a bit before midnight. A couple between him and Step Conti, but that’s it.’
‘OK.’ Jonah put a hand on his shoulder. ‘I’d like a full report, if you’re OK to wade through.’
‘Sure.’
Of course he was OK. Ben Lightman was always OK with the kind of in-depth, laborious work that would have driven most people mad. There was a reason two of the new Intelligence staff had now nicknamed him the Cyborg. Though there was another related reason, too. One of them had been infatuated with him and had made a move on him at a retirement party a couple of months ago, but Ben hadn’t been interested. He never was.
Jonah turned to Hanson and nodded towards the door. His constable rose readily, grabbing her jacket and handbag.
‘Issa is at home and ready to talk. I’m stopping at Costa on the way,’ he added. ‘In case you need anything.’
‘God, yes,’ Hanson replied. ‘I could murder a ham and cheese melt.’
The traffic was still heavy. Travelling back and forth across the city was a time-consuming element that Jonah could have done without, but he specifically wanted to talk to Issa at home. He wanted access to any recent videos Alex had made and to his email accounts, if possible. Anything that might contain some form of contact between him and Louise.
‘What went on with Louise Reakes in the interview room?’ Hanson asked between mouthfuls, once they were back on the road and attempting to eat hot sandwiches without letting any cheese ooze anywhere.
‘She’s not admitting to anything except moving the body,’ Jonah replied. ‘And even then, she says she thought he was alive and was dragging him to the neighbours’ for help.’
Hanson gave a slight laugh. ‘I’m sure we’d all immediately try to lift a ninety-kilo man down the stairs.’
‘My thoughts entirely,’ Jonah agreed.
‘Has she told us anything about last night?’
‘She claims she remembers nothing at all beyond talking to her friend April.’ Jonah tried to squeeze the rest of his sandwich further up the cardboard pack and then swore as one of the pieces of bread slid up and out, landing in his lap.
‘I’ve got baby wipes,’ Hanson said. ‘You can have some once we get there.’
‘Thanks,’ Jonah said, with a wry grin. ‘I clearly need some kind of nanny.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about it,’ Hanson answered, cheerfully. ‘I’m the same. You’d be amazed how much a baby wipe will clean off. I actually sometimes worry about what they put in them.’ She took another mouthful, chewed thoughtfully and said, ‘She remembers nothing? As in, there’s a complete blank?’
‘Yes. From when she was at the club with April, who snogged some other guy, until the morning, or so she says.’ Jonah shook his head. ‘There’s clearly a lot she’s hiding. I need to find some way of pushing her, but it’s going to be hard getting anything past her solicitor.’
There was a brief silence from Hanson, and then she said, ‘But maybe she really can’t remember anything.’
Jonah glanced at her. ‘Because of how drunk she was?’
‘Yes, or because her drink was spiked.’ She was gazing somewhere towards the dashboard, obviously thinking this over. ‘What if it was nothing to do with Alex, and he just walked her home? Then somewhere down the line she freaked out and thought he was trying to attack her.’
Jonah considered. ‘There’s some point to that.’ He nodded. ‘Let’s get a blood test.’
He put a call through to Lightman, asking him to get Louise Reakes’s consent to blood testing.
‘Sure,’ Lightman replied. ‘And while you’re on the line, you might want to ask Issa Benhawy about the messages he sent his husband in the early hours of the morning.’
‘Are they aggressive?’
‘I’d say so,’ Lightman replied. ‘And one of them strongly implies that Alex had form for going home with other people. I’ll send Juliette some screenshots. I’m not surprised he was keen to get Alex’s phone back untouched.’
He heard a quiet ‘Wow,’ from Hanson a few moments later as the screenshots arrived on her phone.
‘Interesting stuff?’
She read out three messages in turn, the last Issa’s vicious threat to end it if Alex had gone home with a ‘slut’.
Jonah took this in, lining it up with everything else they had so far. Alex had died in Louise’s bed. That much was certain. Issa had accused his husband of sleeping with somebody else. In isolation Jonah would have assumed he meant another man. But the term ‘slut’ could be applied to someone of either gender.
Was it worth seriously considering Alex’s husband as a suspect? They couldn’t be certain that Louise had been the one to kill Alex, even taking into account her frantic efforts to cover things up. As Hanson had suggested, Alex could have walked Louise home, an action that was open to misinterpretation. Or he could, in fact, have gone home with Louise for sex. There was no reason to assume that Alex was only interested in men.
The question was whether his jealous husband could have made his way to Saints Close. Could he have tracked Alex through his phone? Or gone to the club to confront his husband, and then followed them to Louise’s house? Killed him, assuming he was being unfaithful, and then … what? Left him in her bed to punish her?
It was one solution to the bizarre discovery, but it was still all a bit of a stretch, Jonah thought. And proving any of that theory to be true was highly unlikely to be easy.
Lightman was alone in CID when the team’s phone rang. The duty sergeant, whose voice Lightman didn’t recognise, sounded a little harassed as he explained, ‘I’ve got a Niall Reakes here. I believe you’re interviewing
his wife. He’d like to see the senior investigating officer immediately.’
‘I’ll come and get him,’ Lightman said, before adding, ‘but he’s going to have to make do with me for the moment. The chief’s out on an interview.’
There was a pause, and Lightman could imagine the sergeant asking why, exactly, a DCI felt it necessary to go out and interview people. But after the pause he just said, ‘OK. Not sure that’s going to go down well.’
Lightman made his way down to reception quickly, fully expecting a tirade from Niall Reakes once he got there. But Mr Reakes looked stressed out rather than angry. He was pacing the waiting area with clear agitation, looking strangely like a fair-haired, neurotic version of his wife’s lawyer. Niall, too, had boyish good looks, and was slightly running to fat. He was also impeccably dressed in a blue-grey suit and a white shirt. Despite having been travelling for half the day, they showed very few creases.
He shook Lightman by the hand when he introduced himself, and said, ‘Sorry for blazing in here, but this has all really … It’s knocked me back. You know?’ He looked over at the duty sergeant. ‘I’ve not been able to talk to Louise and my – her solicitor says there might be a murder charge.’
‘It’s clearly a very stressful situation,’ Lightman said. ‘I’ll do what I can to help. Do you want to come on up to CID?’
‘I … guess so.’
Once they were in the stairwell and out of earshot of the duty sergeant, Niall asked in a quiet voice, ‘Why has she been arrested?’
‘You’re aware that a young man was found dead in the garden of your home,’ Lightman said, sticking to the rule of giving away as little as possible at any given moment.
‘Yeah, but she said it was a stranger,’ Niall said, as he waited for Lightman to use his swipe card on the door of CID. ‘Nobody she knew.’
Lightman glanced at him, able to divine that this was as much a question as it was a statement. Niall Reakes was looking for reassurance, and Lightman would not be giving it to him.
‘We need to clear up a few things with both of you,’ he said, evenly, keeping his expression absolutely neutral. ‘I’m sure the DCI can tell you more as soon as he’s back.’
He opened the door, and was surprised to feel Niall’s hand on his upper arm in a clumsy grab.
‘Please,’ Louise’s husband said in a desperate voice, ‘please tell me if she was screwing someone else. I need to know.’
A narrow garden with a high fence ran from the back door of Alex Plaskitt’s terraced house down to a blue-painted single-storey building at the far end. The green-brown skeletons of climbing plants and a few rhododendrons gave the only signs of life. The rest of the garden looked bleak in the spotlight over the back door. Half-melted snow lay over patches of grass and mud, and the rest showed no sign of disappearing.
‘It’s a lot nicer in daylight, and in summer,’ Issa said, with a note of apology. ‘Alex spent half of last summer out here, either filming or doing … workouts.’ He faltered, his eyes fixed on the widest part of the grass, as if seeing Alex there. His expression was desolate.
‘So that was his studio?’ Jonah asked, gently, nodding towards the building at the end.
‘Yes.’ Issa looked up at it. ‘His gym. I’ve got the key …’
He led Jonah and Hanson to the side of the building, planting his feet carefully on each of the slippery moss-covered stepping stones that meandered down towards it. The door was locked by a simple padlock through a ring with a metal flap. ‘It’s not a real building,’ Issa said, apparently still feeling the need to apologise. ‘We just bought a really big summer house for a grand and a half and assembled it. Alex did most of it on his own.’
Issa leaned in to flick a light switch. Jonah stepped in first, and said, ‘It’s impressive,’ in part to make Issa feel better. But also in part because it was. Along one wall were racks containing stacks of free weights. At the rear were a rowing machine, treadmill and spinning bike. The centre of the space was covered in rubberised matting, and sported two fit-balls of different sizes.
The desk occupied the wall nearest the house, and had windows on two sides that presumably gave quite a bit of light during the day. Perched on top were a desktop computer and a freestanding webcam with a tripod. It was pointed towards the centre of the shed.
‘Did he edit his videos in here, too?’ Jonah asked, glancing at the desktop. It was cold enough in the studio that his breath fogged in the air, strikingly lit by the two overhead lights.
‘Yes,’ Issa said.
‘Would you be happy for us to look through the hard drive?’ Hanson asked, with a sympathetic smile.
‘I don’t … mind.’ Issa gave a tearful shrug. ‘But why do you want to?’
‘His YouTube videos often include mentions of what he’s been doing that day, or is planning on doing later,’ she explained. ‘They also show some of his clients. Though the ones with them in are normally filmed at a public gym, I think?’
‘It’s the SimpleGym,’ Issa told her. ‘When he goes, he takes the camera with him and plugs in his laptop. You might need to look on there for anything recent.’ His gaze wandered, and then came to rest on Hanson again. ‘Do you think this wasn’t random, then? That it was someone he knew?’
Jonah nodded to Hanson, a sign that he would take over again. It was only fair that he should be the one to break the news to Alex’s husband.
‘It seems that Alex didn’t die in the garden, as we at first thought,’ he said. ‘He was inside when he died, and his body was removed to the garden to mislead our team.’
Issa’s mouth moved, an involuntary twitch. ‘What was he doing there?’
‘We don’t know, but it’s clear that he died in bed. The woman who lived there with her husband was with him, though we don’t know in what capacity.’
Issa turned his head away, and the twitching of his mouth became a chewing on his lip that looked hard enough to hurt.
‘Would you have any reason to expect Alex to have been in bed with a woman?’
Issa’s voice was half choked as he said, ‘He’s done it before.’
16
Louise
I hid my gradual slide down the slope of alcoholism for some while. I would save it for when you were away. I’d get obliterated, and then set alarms for myself that went off at seven in the morning, just so I could send you a cheery message proving I was up and at ’em. The irony being that you, in most cases, were hungover as anything following conference dinners or client piss-ups. That didn’t count, did it? You didn’t have previous form for terrible drunken behaviour.
I would also delete every message that might have incriminated me, and scour my phone for new contacts or apps each morning. There was always something that needed deleting. A harsh message about you to April. A mortifying website I’d visited. A really grim meme I’d shared. I began to feel like Drunk Louise was working as hard as she could to fuck my life up.
I have a video somewhere of the two of us, me and April, on one of our nights out. Except of course it’s not me. It’s Her. Anyway, I found it on my phone the next day and it’s just April and Drunk Louise with the phone held overhead in what I think is Drunk Louise’s hand, shouting, ‘We hate you, Sober Louise!’ And watching it made me feel ill, like I was seeing my friend and my worst enemy united. Stabbing me in the back.
And then there was the time I found the Tinder app on my phone one morning, which felt like a trap laid especially for me by Her. There’s a chance she downloaded it for innocent reasons. It might have been so April could show me some guy she was sleeping with. It might even have been a bizarre moment of curiosity, just a way of understanding what so many people talked about. But it might also have been for a much worse reason. I deleted it, googled whether it might show up in my phone’s history, and then deleted my searches, too.
But you grew wise to me in the end. When you walked in late in the afternoon after a trip, and found me looking drawn and fragile, I could see that
you knew. It was during this time that you started to make cutting remarks about April, or to grow angry whenever she was brought up. I knew you’d never really liked her, but the animosity stepped up and up, until I stopped mentioning her at all. But your silent, icy disapproval spread to encompass everything I did after that. It became, in fact, the one constant in our marriage.
The neurotic side to my personality got completely out of control during this time, too. I became unable to stop cleaning. Tidying. Perfecting. And I could see that you hated this just as much. You saw it as another character flaw, one that you’d failed to fix.
And so we come, inevitably, to last Friday. To the night when every one of my worst nightmares came true.
I thought it would be safe enough. I’d talked April into coming over to the house, because I was tired and hadn’t quite shaken off the cold that had been lingering since Valentine’s Day. The other thing that had lingered was depression. Another festival of romance had come and gone with the two of us barely talking. It had felt, for most of our dinner out, like you would have preferred to be elsewhere.
April arrived all made up, caffeine-psyched and chewing on bubblegum. The bubblegum was a surprise, even for April. When she ‘Hey, sistered’ me at the front door in full-on Tennessee drawl, with the candy-pink gum rolling over her tongue, I wondered for a moment how she was going to fit in the talking and the chewing at once. But of course she managed it.
She talked, and I lined up wine glasses and bowls of nuts and olives while I laughed at her. I’m sure you can imagine the swiftness with which the plastic cork came out of the grim Rioja she’d brought with her. God knows why she can’t spend some of her streams of alimony on something nice to drink. But for some reason that’s just not her style.
I remember her asking about you.
‘He behaving, that old Niall?’
She was leaning on the breakfast bar across from me. Her gauzy black top drooped low enough to show a line of hot-pink bra and the scrawled tattoo across her left breast. I didn’t bother telling her she was flashing. She always knows exactly how much tit she’s got on show. She must have got dressed up to meet someone for lunch.