by Sibel Hodge
‘How did she fool Max, though? Their relationship would’ve been far more intimate than those she had with her friends. He must’ve noticed something different about her, surely.’
‘Maybe he didn’t know about Samantha? Maybe Alissa met her and kept it a secret for some reason so there was no reason to suspect an imposter. Or maybe Samantha and Alissa spent enough time with each other for Samantha to copy the way she walked and spoke and dressed.’ I finished my beer and opened another. ‘People see what they want to, don’t they? If their eyes were telling them it’s Alissa in front of them, they could put any little discrepancies down to her wedding nerves or being distracted because she was organising the reception.’
Ellie slid another slice of pizza on to her plate. ‘Perhaps he did start to realise something was wrong and that’s why she killed him. She did slip up a few times after all – the novel, the kiwi fruit she didn’t know she’d drunk, the rose bush. Even though she’s done a very good job of being Alissa, maybe it wasn’t good enough to convince Max long term. You can never know all the details of someone else’s life, no matter how much you get to know them.’
‘I think she was planning to kill him all along.’
‘And stitch up Russell.’
‘Yeah, it was very convenient for her that he’d been stalking Alissa and he had a previous history of violence.’
‘It sounds really far-fetched, doesn’t it?’
‘Yeah. Which is why I’ve got to be certain before I do anything about it.’
‘She’s very clever and calculating.’
‘Psychopaths are great liars.’ I glanced at the last slice of pizza. Ellie had polished off most of it. Hopefully that was a good sign.
‘Why kill him after only eight weeks of marriage? Why not wait? It would always look more suspicious, and we’d always look at the spouse closely.’
‘Not if you’re under her spell, like Wilmott is. He’s been blinded by her. She’s the kind of woman who could get under your skin. Manipulative but stunning.’
‘She’s got under your skin.’
‘Yeah, but not in the same way.’ The only woman who’d ever be under my skin was Denise. ‘But maybe you’re right and something happened that did tip off Max and he needed to be silenced quickly. So how can I prove all this?’ I had my own ideas, but I wanted to take Ellie’s mind off thinking about Spencer 24/7. Getting her involved in this was the only way I knew how to do that. ‘I need your help.’
‘You know, monozygotic twins have the same DNA.’
I quirked an eyebrow. ‘That would explain a lot.’
‘But.’ She held a finger up. ‘They don’t have the same fingerprints.’ She leaned forward, her eyes sparkling, but for once they weren’t filled with tears – it was excitement I saw in them. A hint of the old Ellie who sunk her teeth into a case. ‘You said there were some unidentified prints found all over the house, including the office and master bedroom. They have to be the real Alissa’s prints.’
I nodded with interest, as if it was the first time I’d thought of it.
She tilted her head, tapping her fingertips on the table, a far-off look in her eye. ‘So, if Samantha is pretending to be Alissa, then Alissa must be dead.’ She sat upright and gave me her full attention. ‘Unless Alissa is actually in on it, too, and she’s hiding out somewhere until this is all over and Max’s estate is passed on to her. Then she can split it all with Samantha.’
‘No. It doesn’t fit her character, does it? Everyone who knew Alissa said she was a lovely, sweet woman who was very much in love with Max.’
‘Anyone can commit a murder. You know that.’
‘No, that doesn’t feel right. I think Alissa, the real Alissa, is dead. And if she met Samantha in Australia, then that’s where it happened. Samantha kills Alissa, steps into Alissa’s shoes, and comes back to England with Max. Four weeks later, Max is dead.’
She pointed the tip of her beer bottle at me. ‘Whereabouts in Australia did they go on their honeymoon?’
‘The east coast.’
‘Was there anywhere they spent a significant amount of time?’
I retrieved the bank statements Becky had copied for me from my briefcase, looking for signs of credit-card bills.
Ellie cleared the table to make room and I slapped them down, searching through them. I flicked back to the dates in question and studied them in detail.
‘It looks like they spent a few weeks in a place called Noosa.’
‘Then that’s where you need to start looking.’
THE DETECTIVE
Chapter 38
I set my alarm for 6 a.m., which would be 3 p.m. in Queensland. After being passed around a few times, I spoke to a detective and explained the situation so far, leaving out the fact that this was off my own back. He told me to email him the unknown fingerprints from our scene and he’d see if they could find a match. If Samantha had disposed of Alissa in a way that meant she’d never been found, then I’d be out of luck. If she hadn’t, they would probably have assumed the body was that of Samantha Folds, but hopefully they’d give me the evidence I needed. I also sent him the digital files of Samantha’s fingerprints, the ones taken from her at the hospital the night Max was murdered, which, luckily, I’d downloaded on to my own laptop before being suspended. If they’d found a crime scene for Alissa out there, I was praying Samantha’s prints would be all over it.
Now I had to sit back and wait.
I scarfed down a quick breakfast and headed to a local florist to pick up a bunch of pink and cream lilies. I’d hardly ever bought Denise flowers when she was alive. She didn’t really go in for random acts of romance. It was what you did on a daily basis that counted. All those actions and words that built up over the years showing you cared, that you loved someone, were far better than a one-off gift of impersonal flowers. But I’d taken to buying them since she’d gone because what else could I give her now?
As I drove to the cemetery, I tried to quell the gaping sense of loss again. Today we would’ve been married thirty years. Maybe I should’ve felt lucky that we’d had all that time together, but I was still far too bitter for that. I forced myself to think about the Burbeck case instead because I could feel the tears pulsing painfully behind my eyes, and if I let them fall, I didn’t know if I had the strength to ever stop them again.
I knew I was right about Samantha. I was so close now, and it would be worth it to watch Wilmott’s fall from grace when I presented my bombshell. When I got a result on this case, I’d be the one walking in the ADI’s shoes, delegating the crap out to Wilmott. Except . . . I’d only just been talking about retiring. So what did I want now?
I parked up and ripped off the cellophane from the flowers, leaving the plastic in a messy pile in the passenger footwell. Slowly, I walked to Denise’s grave. There was an elderly woman standing in front of a fresh headstone, clutching her handbag in front of her chest, weeping. I looked away and wondered if she ever felt like giving up, too.
I kneeled down in front of my wife’s grave and removed the previous flowers which were now dried and discoloured, replacing them with the fresh ones. I sat back on my heels and stared at the inscription: ‘In Loving Memory of Denise Carter. Tragically Taken Too Soon. Remembered Always.’ It sounded too inconsequential. How could you sum up the wonderful, warm, kind-hearted woman she’d been in just a few words? My soulmate. That one person in a million. I hadn’t had a clue what to put on there at the time. How was I supposed to decide that? It wasn’t meant to happen. There should’ve been plenty of time. We should’ve had more time.
‘I think I’m falling apart,’ I whispered to her, rubbing my hands over my face and letting them rest on my cheeks. ‘I need you here. I need you to tell me what to do with my future. I don’t know how to get through each day without you.’
A voice in my head said, You’ve got to let it go. But I didn’t believe it was a message from Denise. It was just my subconscious speaking, and it made no sense to me. Let wh
at go? Denise? The job? The Burbeck case?
Tears filled my eyes. I let them fall down my cheeks, tasting salt on my lips, and felt everything I’d held in for so long cracking open. I didn’t know if I believed in an afterlife. All I knew was that I desperately wanted to be with Denise again.
I left the cemetery an hour later and went home, forcing myself to eat something. I watched the clock to take my mind off my dead wife, the hands getting closer together and further apart, hoping that the Australian police would get back to me today, but knowing, because of the time difference, it was highly unlikely.
At 6.30 p.m., I was back at Ellie’s house with a Burger King takeaway.
‘I’m sick of eating all this rubbish,’ was the first thing she said to me. ‘Come in. I’ve got some pasta on the go.’
I smiled inwardly. Another sign of improvement.
‘Any news from Australia?’ She glanced over her shoulder as she stirred the bubbling tomato sauce.
‘Not yet.’ I looked at my watch for the hundredth time that day and leaned against the worktop as she drained the tagliatelle.
‘If you get something positive, what’s your plan? You know you should go to Wilmott first with it. He is SIO on this.’
‘And let him take all the glory? Actually, I was hoping you’d come back and then I wouldn’t have to.’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t think I am coming back.’ She put her hand on her hip, the steam from the boiling water swirling in the air. She glanced at me cautiously.
‘You can’t leave me there with bloody Wilmott! You have to come back.’
‘For you or for me?’
‘For you, of course.’ I paused sheepishly. ‘Well, OK, for me, too.’
‘Anyway, you said you were going to retire.’
I slumped down on the chair and tried to make sense of all the confusion in my head.
‘I need a change,’ Ellie continued. ‘I can’t go back to the same nick Spencer worked at. I can’t face all the memories. It’s too much. There are so many ghosts of him here, all over the house. I can’t have those ghosts at work, too. I’d never get through this. I’d never move on.’ She dumped pasta into two bowls and spooned on the sauce without looking up. I got the feeling she was also talking about me.
I sat at the table, shook salt over my dinner, and just stared at it, the realisation suddenly kicking in. I couldn’t go on like I had been, wallowing in grief, trying to take my mind off it with work, hardly ever sleeping because I was afraid to close my eyes and see my wife’s face and know I couldn’t touch her again, hold her, keep her safe. I needed something else in my life, but I had no idea what. I’d thought work would heal me, keep me occupied, stop me thinking about her, help me move on. But that hadn’t been working out too well.
‘I’m not giving up. I’m just . . .’ She waved her fork around in the air. ‘I just need something different. I need a challenge. Things have changed now, and I need to change with them, or I’m going to fall apart. Surely if anyone can understand that, it’s you.’
‘Right now, I can understand that completely.’
‘I need to fix myself. Do something other than mope around the house.’
‘But what are you going to do? You’ve been a copper for twenty-five years.’
‘What are you going to do if you retire?’
I shrugged.
‘Take up sudoku? Cooking? Crochet?’
‘I couldn’t think of anything worse,’ I said.
‘Exactly. You’re a copper, too. It’s in your blood. It’s who you are. You’ve never known anything else.’
‘But the way things are at work . . . the likes of Wilmott being promoted, the chief constable putting pressure on Greene to quash investigations into people like Mackenzie, it’s just wrong.’
She put her fork down on the edge of the plate, rested her elbows on the table, and laced her fingers together. ‘I’ve been headhunted for another job.’
‘That was quick.’ I raised my eyebrows.
‘Quick? It’s been three months since I went on compassionate leave.’
‘God, yes, it has. It feels like yesterday still.’
‘It feels like a lifetime since he’s been gone, but you’ve made me realise that I need work more than ever now. To stop me going mad.’
‘Well, it’s not working out so well for me, is it? Maybe you should take a good look at my situation.’ As soon as it was out of my mouth, I held my hands up in appeasement. ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. I’m just an angry old man. Ignore me. What’s the new job?’
‘I’d still be a DI. It’s just in another unit. The government are setting up a National Wildlife Crime Enforcement Unit. I think it’s something completely different that I can get my teeth into.’
‘Wildlife crime? How will a bit of poaching and fox hunting be a challenge?’
‘No, that’s the stuff the rural officers will still deal with. This is the big stuff. Illegal wildlife trafficking, endangered species. It’s a huge enterprise now – the third biggest criminal industry in the world, worth billions every year. And a lot of it goes to fund terrorism and other types of organised crime. After they called me about it, I started doing some research – there’s some seriously nasty stuff going on out there. It would blow your mind. Before I came into CID, I worked with the guy who’s been tasked with setting it up. He thinks I’d do a good job, and I think I would, too. I need something completely different, away from this place, but where I can still be a DI. It sounds like exactly what I need right now.’
I sat back and eyed the spark of excitement on her face. An overwhelming rush of jealousy hit me in the sternum. How come Ellie could move on so quickly and I couldn’t? I swallowed it down. I had no right to be jealous of her. I was being irrational and selfish. I should be pleased for her. What the hell kind of person was I turning into? Denise would’ve severely kicked me up the arse.
‘And you know what the best bit is?’ she asked, grinning slightly.
‘You get free safaris?’
‘I get to pick my own team. I want you to come with me.’
THE DETECTIVE
Chapter 39
I tossed and turned again, fluffing up my pillow, huffing to myself. There was too much running around in my head to sleep. Again. I gave up at 3 a.m. and turned on the TV, flicking through channels just for a bit of company.
I could understand why Ellie needed a change. A challenge. And now that she’d put that thought in my brain, I was starting to want one, too. I’d been slowly turning into a sad, lonely old bastard. Not that I’d ever admit it to anyone except her, of course. Yeah, a change of scenery could be a good thing.
I picked up the photo of Denise that I kept by my bed and touched my fingertip to her face, tracing the lines around her eyes. She’d thought they made her look old, but I disagreed. She’d only grown more beautiful to me as she got older. They were just marks of all the times we’d laughed together over the years. Like the rings in a tree trunk, they were evidence of the life we’d had. We’d always talked major decisions through. She was the first person I went to. The last person I spoke to at night. A memory flashed in my head. I was twenty-five, and I’d been involved in a long and complicated investigation into a child murder, one of my early cases as a detective. The prime suspect had always been the father, but the evidence against him was flimsy and the CPS declined to prosecute. I’d been down after that, an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness and anger taking over me, so it affected our home life in the end. Denise was her usual sympathetic, supportive, and helpful self, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the child. How we’d failed her, let her down. How justice hadn’t prevailed. Denise had sat me down one day and said, ‘You’re an amazing detective. Never doubt that. You can’t fail because you never give up! You have to accept what you can’t change, and change what you can’t accept.’ She was right, of course. I couldn’t accept that the father would get away with it, so when everyone else gave up, I kept digging an
d digging, and eventually found the evidence we needed to convict him.
Even at that young age, before she’d blossomed and grown, Denise was a special woman. My rock. My inspiration when things were hard. No wonder she’d been an amazing nurse.
But that was over now. There was just a gaping hole in my life, and sometimes it felt like I was slipping through it. I’d wanted to stay in the same house after her death, even though the memories were too much to bear sometimes, but at least it had meant I was closer to her. Ellie was right about the ghosts, though. But if Ellie got this job and brought me into her team, I could move to London, where the National Wildlife Crime Enforcement Unit was being set up. It would be too much of a pain in the arse to commute every day.
It’s what I needed, too. Finally. A fresh start. A new chapter. I’d hated the thought of change. It felt like a betrayal to Denise of some kind. But now I thought it was the only thing I could do to fix myself. And maybe all good changes were preceded by heart-crushing devastation, by soul-destroying loss. Now I listened to Denise’s words anew. I couldn’t give up. I had to change what I couldn’t accept any more.
If I went with Ellie, I thought her enthusiasm and strength could start to rub off on me. Help me to move on instead of festering away. CID hadn’t been the right place for me for a long time, but I hadn’t known what to do with myself in the last year. Hadn’t thought about the new possibilities that really could be out there. Now I thought, finally, there was an answer.
‘What do you think, Denise?’ I asked her photo. ‘Should I go with Ellie?’
She didn’t answer, but my mobile phone rang instead.
I looked at the screen and saw the international dialling code for Australia. ‘DS Carter speaking.’
‘Hi, this is DS Warwick. I hope I didn’t wake you up. I’m not sure what the time is over there.’
‘Nah. I wasn’t sleeping.’ I put Denise’s photo back on the table. ‘Have you got something for me?’