by Sibel Hodge
It would be a celebration of sorts. I’d picked out a fruity, crisp white wine that I knew she liked. You couldn’t say I never thought of others! I’d already cleaned her wineglass, and wiped off any of my prints before putting it on the worktop with my gloved hands, leaving it ready to fill. She was the only one going to touch that glass.
‘I wish I could stay here forever,’ she called out from the lounge.
Oh, but you are, my sweet sister. You absolutely are. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll see each other soon,’ I said as I put the finely crushed up sleeping tablets in her glass with my gloved hand, followed by a generous helping of wine. I stirred the liquid, waiting for all the tiny flecks to dissolve, then took off the rubber gloves before throwing them by the sink and carrying my own wineglass and a bowl of tortilla chips into the lounge. ‘Could you grab your glass from the kitchen and the bottle? I’ve got my hands full.’
‘Of course.’ She leaped up to retrieve hers.
When we were settled, we chatted again in the easy way we’d grown used to in such a short space of time. You might think I’d have had second thoughts, pangs of guilt, or, at the very least, anxiety about what was going to happen, but no. Alissa was a means to an end. Alissa had what I should’ve had all along. Alissa was the reason I’d suffered. I didn’t feel guilty. I didn’t feel anything.
‘I feel . . . a bit . . . woozy.’ Her words began to slur as the tablets infiltrated her system. She reached out to put her glass on the coffee table and missed it completely, sending the glass bouncing on to the rug, spraying wine everywhere.
‘Don’t worry, you’re probably tired with all the excitement over the last few weeks. Have a nap if you like.’ I swallowed my wine and watched as her eyes eventually closed and she slumped to the side, unconscious, her head on the arm of the sofa, her breathing relaxed and even.
I grabbed the rubber gloves and slapped them on. Then I took a cushion from the sofa and pressed it against her face until her chest stopped moving. A quick check of her pulse confirmed she was dead.
I put my own wineglass and the bowl in the dishwasher and turned it on, before undressing and dropping my clothes into a plastic bag, along with the rubber gloves. Next, I undressed her, leaving her in just her bra and knickers, and put her clothes on me. I lifted the edge of her knickers up and had a look. I couldn’t leave anything to chance. No way was I going to mess this up. Every little detail had to be thought about.
Well, well, well, she waxes down there. Everything was off. Not even a strip. I’d have to shave it all quickly at the hotel room before Max returned.
I took one last look around the apartment before picking up her handbag, stuffing the plastic bag with my old clothes inside it to be dumped in the nearest bin.
I shut the door behind me and stepped out into the sunshine, tucking my hair behind my ears as I walked back to her hotel, humming to myself.
Goodbye, Sam Folds.
Hello, Mrs Burbeck!
PART THREE
DUPLICITY
THE DETECTIVE
Chapter 30
I stood on the periphery of the mourners at Max’s grave, concentrating on Alissa, taking a mental note of everything. She was at the centre, dressed in the usual black outfit – a loose-fitting dress with long sleeves, black pumps, a black hat with a net veil that obscured her face. Leo stood on one side of her, seeming to hold her up. Vicky was on the other, clutching Alissa’s arm tight. Sasha was next to Vicky, dressed garishly in a multicoloured skirt and top with purples, pinks, and greens splashed over them. Whereas Alissa’s tears were discreet, shown only by the repeated wiping of her face with delicately lace-gloved hands and the shuddering of her shoulders, Sasha’s were full on, with a bit of wailing thrown in. She hadn’t seemed that distraught when I’d told her about Max’s death at Leo’s house, but she could’ve still been in shock at that stage. Maybe it had taken a while to sink in. Was she purposely trying to upstage Alissa, or was she as distraught as she seemed? She’d been friends with Max for as long as Leo had, but was it more than that? Had she been in love with him, like Vicky suspected? Had she killed Max for the simple reason of unrequited love? Compared with Alissa, I doubted Max would’ve looked twice at Sasha. The only similarity between them was their height. Did Sasha think that if she couldn’t have Max, no one else could? But if so, why had Alissa been allowed to get away that night? If Sasha was crazy with jealousy, why not kill Alissa, too? Or why not just kill Alissa?
No, it didn’t make sense that Alissa had escaped. The intruder could’ve shouldered the door quite easily, even if it was a female. It was fairly flimsy, and it had taken the police constable half a minute, a minute at the most, to break through it when he’d arrived on the scene. Or why not wait for her outside, beneath the orangery, which was her only escape route? Why even kill Max when there was a ninety-nine per cent chance Alissa would be in the house if they weren’t intending to go after her?
Because it was staged. The killer wasn’t after Alissa all along. They were only ever after Max.
I tuned out the vicar’s words and thought about the murder scene. I’d gone through the statements and photos, videoed interviews, and forensic reports repeatedly since Stiles had been arrested and remanded in custody by the court pending his trial, and though there was no evidence to contradict Alissa’s story about what happened that night, I didn’t believe her. Something about her felt off.
Several theories had floated around in my head. The first was that Alissa and Russell had been working together and she was protecting him. Maybe they were still in love with each other, and if Alissa got Max out of the way, she could be with Russell again, with the extra bonus of being about ten million pounds richer. I’d dismissed that, though, because if they were working together, why would she implicate him during the second interview as being at the scene? Surely she’d have described someone else. Unless she was double-crossing him, getting him to do the dirty work for her, and had never had any intention of being with him. But if that was the case, why hadn’t Russell implicated her? Did he love her so much that he was prepared to risk a life in prison for her? It was unlikely, but not impossible.
I’d stayed on the accomplice theme, wondering if Leo was involved. He’d struck me as maybe in love with Alissa himself, rising to her defence a little too emphatically. Had Alissa been having an affair with him? Had she got him to kill Max? But, no, Leo’s alibi of being at a late dinner that night with some colleagues checked out, and he had five other witnesses to vouch for him.
That led me to the unknown fingerprints found in the office. That same set of prints had also now been matched to others found in the rest of the house, including the master bedroom. Who did they belong to? An unknown accomplice? Someone who wasn’t in the system and who didn’t match any of their closest friends who’d attended the reception? Wilmott had dismissed them as inconsequential, citing Alissa’s vague recollection of a removal man who’d helped transfer some of her furniture from her mum’s house into The Orchard when she’d moved in with Max a year ago. But, conveniently, she’d said Max had arranged it all and that she couldn’t remember which company he’d used, and there was no record of it in Max’s financial papers. According to SOCO, though, the prints had been recent. Were they an unimportant little detail, like Wilmott thought, or were they the key to this whole thing? I was inclined to think the latter, but I wondered why, if there was an accomplice, they hadn’t worn gloves.
Whether or not there was an accomplice involved, I was now convinced Alissa had killed Max, with or without help, and set up Russell. But if I couldn’t find a discrepancy, anything that disproved Alissa’s version of events, she was going to get away with it, and I didn’t want another sodding Lord Mackenzie case happening again.
The vicar’s voice dragged my thoughts back to the ceremony. Vicky handed Alissa a red rose and she took a shaky step forward, closer to the edge of the grave. Her lips moved as she spoke quietly to her dead husband of two short months. Vicky rubbed
Alissa’s shoulders, tears streaking down her own cheeks. One minute later, Alissa threw the rose on to Max’s coffin and then broke down, turning into Leo’s shoulder and clutching on to him. Leo spoke words I couldn’t hear into her hair as Vicky continued rubbing her back.
Sasha took her own rose and threw it on to the coffin. She glanced up and her gaze met mine. She smiled, not a sad, half-smile that seemed polite. It was more excited, greedy.
She was a bloody oddment. There was something not quite right about her, too.
As others in the crowd began to toss their own roses in final tribute, I turned to Wilmott at my side. ‘Are you going to the wake?’
‘Of course.’ He was staring at Alissa with a barely concealed expression of lust.
‘I’m heading back, then. I’ll see you later.’
He waved a hand at me dismissively, as if he couldn’t care less what I was doing, and walked around to where Alissa stood. He said something. She pulled away from Leo and touched Wilmott’s arm in a grateful gesture.
I left Wilmott to fuss around Alissa at the wake, which was being held at Leo’s house, and walked back to the unmarked Ford Mondeo on the road outside the graveyard. I was just about to open the door when I heard my name being called.
I turned and Sasha was heading my way, wobbling on the grass in her red stilettos.
‘Hi.’ She caught up with me. ‘I was just wondering if there was any more news on the case.’
I studied her for a moment. That twinkling in her eye. The air of desperation, her outrageous and inappropriate clothes. ‘Well, you know Russell Stiles has been charged and remanded without bail.’
She licked her crimson lips. ‘Yes, I know that. But I thought there might be something more.’ She glanced over to where Alissa stood and her eyes narrowed slightly.
‘What are you getting at, Sasha?’ I had the feeling that she was good at playing games.
She drew her gaze back to me and smiled again, exposing canines with a smudge of lipstick on them. ‘I saw you watching her during the service. You think she was in on it, don’t you?’
‘Do you think she was involved?’
‘Well, don’t they say most times it’s the spouse? And they had only been married a couple of months.’
‘I thought you were supposed to be her friend.’
She snorted. ‘Well, I am! But I was Max’s friend before I knew Alissa. And I don’t want to be friends with a killer, do I? I want to make sure I’m safe. And Leo, too. I think he’s secretly in love with her, you know. I’m just looking after my big brother.’
‘And what about you? Were you secretly in love with anyone?’
She laughed again, but it was more nervous than confident. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Where were you between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. on the night Max was killed?’
She pointed a finger at her chest. ‘Me?!’
I nodded.
She pulled her shoulders back in a haughty display. ‘I was at my art gallery, actually, hosting an exhibition. It finished at one-thirty in the morning, and I’ve got about twenty-five people who can vouch for me. You can check. Anyway, I was only trying to be helpful. There’s no need to be so rude to me.’ She turned around and stalked back towards the grave.
I shook my head as I got in the car. She had some kind of agenda with Alissa, but I didn’t think she was involved in Max’s murder. She was weird, sure, but unfortunately being a weirdo wasn’t an arrestable offence. If it was, the prison system would never be able to cope.
I often thought that being a good detective was like being a good actor. To find the offender, you had to get inside their skin and try to think like them, act like them. Which is why I wanted to run through the scene again and see it through the killer’s eyes.
I parked in the driveway of The Orchard and took the spare set of keys I’d pilfered from Wilmott’s desk out of my pocket. Alissa had told Wilmott she wouldn’t be going back to the house in the foreseeable future, that she was going to put it up for sale, and Wilmott had forgotten to hand the keys back to her now that SOCO had finished.
I took the crime-scene photos from the glove box and opened the front door, breathing in a musty, unlived-in smell. I walked down the large, elegant hallway with black-and-white chequerboard tiles, pausing by the door to the lounge, where some of the guests had been during the wedding reception. It was a huge room that overlooked the front of the property, with high ceilings, intricate coving, and a ceiling rose. There were three large grey satin sofas arranged around an open fireplace with an oil painting of a fox hunt in a gilt frame above it. A mahogany sideboard sat underneath the window and a few occasional tables were next to the sofas. It looked like a room that was hardly used and just for show. Nothing looked disturbed apart from the surfaces, covered with fingerprint powder.
I walked through into the spacious kitchen and stood at the window, looking into the vast garden. From here, I had a good view of the carp pond at the bottom with a vibrant pink rose bush at its edge, and the post-and-rail fence that signalled the property’s border with the dense wood beyond. I pictured the scene of Alissa standing by the pond at her reception, getting some air, a glass of champagne in her hand as she looked back at the house. Russell appearing behind her, climbing over the fence, approaching her, pleading with her, telling her she was making a mistake. Max coming out and spotting them. The argument that ensued. Russell telling Max he’d get what he deserved and should watch his back. Was Alissa telling the truth about that? Although Vicky and Leo had witnessed some of the altercation, they hadn’t heard what had been said first-hand. And Russell couldn’t remember because he’d been too drunk. Even if he had said those words, I didn’t think it was a threat, not really. Yes, Russell wasn’t squeaky clean himself, but I didn’t think he was a murderer.
Is that when Alissa came up with a plan to frame him? Or had she calculated it long before that?
I walked up the stairs and turned left, going down the hall and into the office. The chair Max had been sitting at had been moved by SOCO, so I took out the photos, putting them on the desk as I rifled through them to find the ones of Max’s body. I repositioned the chair where it had been that night and sat down, staring out of the window in front of the desk, imagining what really happened that night, running through Alissa’s story again in my head.
Of course, she’d had to say she’d come into the office and kissed his cheek. If she’d leaned over him, it would explain away the transfer of any hair or DNA on to his body. The music was a plausible reason why Max hadn’t heard the attacker, but stabbing someone in the back of the neck also suggested that the victim may have been comfortable enough with the killer to turn his back on them.
What I couldn’t work out was how Russell’s hair had wound up on Max’s body if he really was innocent, like I suspected. He’d never been inside the house. He hadn’t seen Alissa or Max since the wedding reception. So where did it come from? I put that thought away for the moment and walked into the master bedroom. The unknown fingerprints found there, as well as in the office and the rest of the house, niggled at me, too. To have access to all areas meant that the prints had to belong to someone who was very close to Max or Alissa, but all of the people they invited to the reception had had their prints compared to the unknown ones and been eliminated. It was another inconsistency that I brushed away for now. I walked into the en-suite and looked around, then leaned over to open the window Alissa had allegedly used as her escape route that night. I hoisted myself up on to the ledge and climbed through, hearing a ripping noise.
When I swung my legs down on to the orangery roof, I inspected my trousers. The catch on the window had torn a three-inch hole in the pocket. I glanced back at the catch. It was what Alissa had apparently snagged her towel on, leaving her naked.
I walked to the edge of the flat roof extension and glanced down, taking in the four-metre drop to the ground. I sat on the edge, then turned around and gripped the edge of the roof with my hands, my ch
est pressing into the building as my body dangled in mid-air.
Then I let go, landing with a thud on my feet, sending a jolt of pain up into my knees. They gave way and I rolled over, landing on my side, staring up at the roof. It wasn’t that difficult, especially if you were younger and lighter than me, as Alissa was.
I stood up, lifting up my heels one at a time as I flexed my legs, checking for any damage. Everything present and correct. Nothing broken.
I rounded the orangery and walked past the side of the kitchen, down towards the pond. I climbed the post-and-rail fence into the woods and looked left. If I ran that way, I’d reach Mrs Downes’ house next door where Alissa ended up that night. If I ran right, I’d reach Russell’s house a mile away at the edge of the village.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and turned on the timer app. Then I started running right. The trees were sparser here, so as I pounded over the twigs and decaying leaves, I could avoid getting scratched in the face. Alissa had received no abrasions to her face that night, either. My heart pounded in my chest, my lungs complaining, unused to the burst of exercise, and my back twinged annoyingly.
A short while later, I’d reached the rear of Russell’s house. I climbed over the fence, jogged to the shed, and opened it. I crouched down in the area where the knife had been hidden and heard my knees crack. Then I mimed placing a knife there, came out, shut the door, and jogged back to the fence. In the woods again, I ran back the way I’d come. All the way to Mrs Downes’ house, stopping at her fence. I pulled my phone from my pocket.
Eighteen minutes and thirty-nine seconds. It wasn’t that long, and Alissa was fit and light and could’ve done it quicker than me.
The forensic pathologist had put the time of death at between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. Alissa had arrived at Mrs Downes’ house shortly before she made the emergency call at 12.58.