'Til Death (DI Steven Marr Book 1) - UK Crime Fiction Whodunnit Thriller

by SP Edwards

  The question, then, was just how much he was bottling up…

  CHAPTER NINE

  Marr’s mobile rang just as he was getting out of his car. It was Yovanovitch.

  ‘Doc’.

  ‘That’s a nice blue shirt you’re wearing, Detective’.

  The doctor’s tone was chirpy, which worried Marr. The last thing he needed was a happy pathologist. Normally, it meant a complication, and the good doctor loved nothing more than a bit of schadenfreude – especially when it related to a case.

  ‘Liz bought the shirt, and yes I like scary movies’ Marr replied. ‘Where are you and what do you want?’

  ‘Step into my parlour’

  Marr turned his head. On the other side of the car park, the doctor was standing by his car, nursing a takeaway cup.

  ‘Hope there’s no whisky in that,’ Marr said.

  ‘I should be so lucky. I thought you might want to hear some interesting news.’

  ‘Go on’.

  ‘Anna Markham wasn’t strangled.’

  ‘That was some weird blue make-up she had on.’

  ‘No, you idiot, I mean she didn’t die by being strangled. That was pre-mortem; the killer must have choked her unconscious before he stabbed her.’

  ‘Stabbed?’

  ‘A thin blade. Probably a kitchen knife, no longer than five inches. Which is enough to get the job done, as my wife likes to tell me’.

  ‘Thanks for the horrifying image. Why didn’t we see the wound before?’

  ‘It didn’t look any more than a nasty scratch, even when she was on the table. Deep, though: he hit the abdominal aorta. He must have thrown her in the river straight away: a few hours in the water would have been more than enough time for any blood to wash away, and as I said, it was a thin blade. And before you ask, no, the SOCOs haven’t had any joy finding a murder weapon.’

  Marr nodded.

  ‘He either took it with him, or he threw it in any one of the hundreds of thousands of bins or streams in Essex.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure you and your team will get through them all by the time the next ice age rolls around.’

  Marr was halfway through an expletive when a thought occurred.

  ‘Hang on. If it was one stab wound...’

  ‘Which it was.’

  ‘Then it must have been deliberate.’

  ‘I doubt he tripped and fell into her, Steve’

  ‘Shut up. I mean deliberate as in trained. How many stabbings a year end up in nothing but stitches? People see horror films and think that cutting through skin is like cutting through melted butter, and that it doesn’t matter where the knife goes in. So if you kill someone, first time, with a smallish blade…’

  Yovanovitch nodded.

  ‘Cold blood. Intentional, and impressively accurate. This was pre-meditated, and if I had to guess I’d say that whoever killed her has probably killed before.’

  Marr raised his eyebrows.

  ‘An ex-soldier, maybe?’ he said, retrieving his phone from his pocket.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Stanic had given up on work, for the day at least. It didn’t seem right to be working. It didn’t seem right to be doing anything. He was meant to be on his honeymoon, in bed with Anna.

  He definitely wasn’t meant to be staring at a spreadsheet.

  He checked his phone. Half past eleven. Not even half the day gone. He’d told his clients that he’d be unavailable, and they hadn’t really seemed bothered. The yearly accounts were all done, the bad panic of tax returns over for another eleven months.

  Freelancing meant no safety net: that was the only downside to it, really. If you couldn’t work, you didn’t earn. End of. And clients came and went, on a whim a lot of the time. You couldn’t truly know where you’d be at the end of the month, let alone the end of the year.

  Stanic’s thoughts were interrupted by the doorbell. At first, he thought it might be the cop, the second one who’d come round. The Inspector.

  Maybe he’d had a breakthrough.

  When Stanic got to his front door, though, he could see the outline of the visitor through the glass. It wasn’t the inspector.

  His first thought was to not let her in. What if there was someone watching the house? What if the cops were watching the house?

  Pausing, Stanic took a deep breath in, reminding himself that this wasn’t American TV, and there was virtually no chance he was being watched. He leaned forward and opened the door.

  Caroline looked exhausted, and the skin around her eyes was red.

  ‘Hey’ Stanic said, trying to sound friendly without being too welcoming. The truth was that right now, Caroline was the last person he wanted anywhere near him.

  ‘Can I come in?’ Caroline asked.

  Christ, she sounded defeated already. Not good. Stanic looked past her, up and down the road. There were no cars. It was a normal, quiet mid-week morning.

  ‘OK,’ he said, eventually.

  Caroline walked in and sat straight down on the nearest armchair; the one that Stanic had been sitting on earlier.

  ‘That’s my chair’ he said, his cold tone even surprising him.

  Caroline turned and looked at him, her face twisted in a snarl, her eyes wild.

  ‘Your fucking chair?’ she said, ‘Your fucking chair?’

  She got up, her voice raising. Stanic tried to put up his hands to calm her down, knowing he’d made a mistakes, but it was too late. He really hoped that the nosey old boy next door didn’t have his hearing aid in.

  ‘FUCK YOUR CHAIR, GREG, WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO? WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE GOING TO DO? THEY’LL FIND OUT, YOU KNOW!’

  Stanic knew that she was right. They would find out, eventually.

  But the one thing he couldn’t do was panic, because what would that achieve? It was better to be calm and rational. To deal with the problem.

  He could worry about closure later.

  But could Caroline ever be calm? She didn’t look it right now. She was hysterical and disbelieving: a woman who’d lost her best friend, her support network. Stanic tried to remind himself that hysteria always died off, eventually. Caroline would calm down.

  And then, she would be brave. She would have to be very brave.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Anna Markham’s parents lived in Needham Market, a small town around twenty-five miles from Colchester. Marr decided he had more than enough time to get there and back before the end of the day, so he set off, heading east on the A12.

  The drive was uneventful, the journey ten minutes quicker than he’d expected. Marr called ahead to make sure the Markhams would be in, and sure enough, someone was waiting for him as he pulled up outside the house.

  Michelle Markham was in her late-forties, but she didn’t look any older than thirty-five. She was trim, dressed in a plain white t-shirt and black jeans, her blonde hair cut short.

  She invited Marr into the living room, where he took a seat on a comfortable looking sofa. Within seconds, he knew he’d been had: the sofa was shallow. He felt like he was sitting on a bus-seat.

  He must have grimaced slightly, because Michelle gave him a sympathetic smile, then flashed the offending sofa a look of irritation.

  ‘Yes; it is a bit like being in a dentist’s chair’ she said, before heading off to make some tea.

  Marr looked around the living room, searching for anything out of the ordinary, but finding nothing. Aside from the other chairs, there was a dark wood bookshelf piled high with romances and thrillers, any spare spaces filled up with silver sports trophies. Judging by the shiny figurines of bowlers mid-way through their action, Anna’s dad had been a keen cricketer in his youth.

  The only other noticeable thing was the pile of bridal magazines on the coffee table. Magazines that Marr guessed hadn’t been read recently.

  Marr had been dealt his share of grim cases, but he’d never been able to adjust to being around parents who’d lost their children. It was so against nature. Fathers shouldn’t bury da
ughters, mothers shouldn’t bury sons. All that time, and nothing to fill it with.

  There was a picture of Anna on the wall; Marr guessed from her graduation. Michelle and a man that Marr assumed was Anna’s father. A happy and smiling trio. Looking at John and having seen Michelle, it was obvious where Anna’s looks had come from. John’s hair was already greying in the photo, but his jaw was square and his eyes a fierce blue.

  Throw Gregor Stanic into the picture and you had one attractive wedding party. Was jealousy the motive? It wouldn’t have been the first time.

  When Michelle returned, accompanied by her husband, Marr could tell immediately that Anna had definitely been a daddy’s girl. Though he’d found out about the death of his daughter less than twenty-four hours ago, John Markham looked like he hadn’t slept for weeks. There were dark bags beneath his eyes, and he looked unsteady on his feet. He looked so different to the man in the photo.

  John reached out to shake Marr’s had, mumbling his name before sitting down in one of the armchairs. Michelle leant her arm around his shoulders.

  ‘Thanks for agreeing to see me, both.’ Said Marr ‘I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to come around yesterday.’

  John said nothing, but Michelle gave Marr a smile as she poured out the tea for all three of them. Cups of tea in the face of the worst that life had to offer.

  ‘I’ve just been to talk to Gregor Stanic…’ Mar said, noting that John Markham reacted to the name with a slight shake of the head.

  ‘Poor lad…’ he said. Marr didn’t think John was trying to contribute to the conversation. He seemed removed from what he said: an impartial observer, miles away from his real life.

  ‘What did you think of Greg?’ Marr asked.

  The question was more towards John, but it was Michelle that replied.

  ‘I found him a bit difficult to get used to, I suppose’ she said, gently stroking her husband’s shoulder as she talked. ‘In the early days, at least. He was a bit of a Jack the Lad: flirting with other girls, messing around, trying to make Anna jealous. I thought he was just a dumb playboy, and Anna did too, I think. But after a while he became more serious. The games stopped. He seemed to grow up a bit: I think Anna was good for him. He was always really attentive, buying her presents, spoiling her.’

  ‘Was he ever possessive?’ Marr asked.

  ‘No, not at all. Whether he had it in him, I don’t know, but it’s not like Anna would have taken any of that nonsense anyway. I always remember when she was about thirteen, she brought this boy round to watch TV. They were holding hands, playing boyfriend and girlfriend. Anyway, he asked Anna – no, he told Anna, no please or thank you – to fetch him a drink.’

  ‘I’m guessing he didn’t get it’, Marr said.

  ‘No he got it, if by ‘it’ you mean a mouthful of language I won’t repeat and a swift kick out the door.’

  Michelle looked down at the carpet, though by the slight smile on her face it was obvious she wasn’t really seeing the pattern. Michelle was seeing her head-strong girl tearing some thirteen year old idiot a new one. Stanic had described Anna as brave, strong – take no prisoners. Seeing the proud look on Michelle’s face, Marr wondered if those characteristics hadn’t come from her mother, rather than her father.

  ‘Greg said that you’d helped them a lot with the wedding?’

  Michelle nodded.

  ‘We did what we could. John’s early retirement meant a good pension, and the money we inherited after his mum died a couple of years ago, we don’t have a mortgage anymore. It was just nice to be able to help, especially with Greg and Anna saving up for their own house.’

  ‘They didn’t own it already?’

  Michelle shook her head.

  ‘I know Anna thought about moving back here to help them save quicker, but I don’t think either she or Greg would have liked that. Understandably so; if John had asked me to live with his parents I’d have run a mile, especially if we had no clue when we’d be able to leave.’

  Michelle sighed.

  ‘It’s tough for them, the next generation. We bought this house for £60,000, and that was only twenty years or so ago. It’s worth four times that now, and not because of any work we did.’

  John nodded slightly. He’d been so still, the movement almost made Marr jump, but Michelle continued, hardly seeming to notice.

  ‘I read in the paper about a woman who bought a three bed maisonette in London, she got it for £40,000 about thirty years ago. Just sold it for something like £650,000. She wasn’t playing the market or anything, she just lucked out. There’s hundreds of twenty year olds out there who’ll never own their own homes; they’ll just inherit ours.’

  Marr nodded. That much was true. He still counted his blessings that he and Lizzie had bought their own house a year before the crash. They’d thought about waiting: if they had, they definitely couldn’t have gotten the mortgage they did. Not without paying stupid interest rates and crippling themselves.

  In some ways, it was hard not to understand why some kids made the wrong decisions. The frustration. The anger. He saw it all the time in shoplifters, pub fighters, muggings. Twenty-one year olds who’d been told that if they got their grades, went to college and got a degree, the world would give them a comfortable life.

  Fat chance. They did what they were told, and got nothing. So what did they owe the world?

  ‘Anna’s friend Caroline, did you talk to her much?’ Marr asked.

  Michelle smiled.

  ‘Oh yes, Caroline and Anna were very close. They’d known each other for years. When they were still at university togehter they’d come here for the weekend sometimes, I’d do Anna’s laundry, give them a home cooked meal. Then a big breakfast the next morning if they had a hangover. The usual student thing. We haven’t seen Caroline quite as much over the last couple of years, but I think that’s more down to the fact that Anna was so busy. She probably didn’t see Caroline much herself.’

  ‘Gregor said that he thought Anna looked after her?’

  Again, a nod from John seemed to come out of nowhere. It looked like it took considerable effort.

  ‘Caroline had problems,’ he said, quietly. ‘She was a good girl, don’t get me wrong, but she just seemed…well, troubled. She could be really quiet one day, and the life and soul the next. Really up and down.’

  ‘She was always polite’ added Michelle ‘but some weekends it was a bit like getting blood from a stone.’

  ‘Could Caroline have killed Anna?’ Marr asked.

  They both shook their heads.

  ‘No,’ Michelle said. ‘No, I don’t think Caroline would have been capable of hurting anyone, let alone Anna. It was tough to see her so down sometimes. I always got the impression she was a really caring person, but that she just found life a bit difficult.’

  Marr nodded, not quite sure that caring had much to do with anything. Being caring didn’t mean you weren’t capable of violence. Caring could be a mask. Thousands of domestic violence cases started off with a ‘caring’ partner, a partner who only wanted their boy or girlfriend to be ‘safe’. And then ‘safe’ became ‘indoors’, and so on…

  ‘Anna’s friend, Thomas Coulthard. Did you have much to do with him?’

  Michelle looked at her husband for a moment. Marr could tell that she was struggling to place the name. After a moment, though, her face relaxed and the smile returned.

  ‘Oh, of course, Tom’ she said, nudging John in the arm as if to pass on the memory. ‘Don’t you remember him, John? The overweight lad, he used to come round sometimes after school.’

  John closed his eyes and nodded.

  ‘Oh of course, yes. No, I didn’t know Anna still saw him. She never mentioned him, not to me anyway.’

  Michelle nodded her agreement.

  ‘That’s true, Inspector, Tom never came up in conversation. I suppose he might have been planning to come to the wedding. In fact, I think I remember seeing his name on the invitations, now you’ve reminded m
e.’

  ‘Caroline had mentioned him. She seemed to think he and Anna were still quite close.’

  Michelle looked surprised.

  ‘Well, I suppose it’s not impossible. Most of the time Anna would be by herself if she came to see us – unless Greg was with her, of course - so we never really saw much of her friends. They all had their own lives to live. I’ve always thought that was one of the sadder things about getting older: you still have friends, of course, but you’re never as tight-knight as when you were younger.’

  Marr thought about when he’d last seen James, the best man at his wedding. Two years, at least. They still exchanged texts here and there, of course. But actually organising spending time together was tough. Work, love, travel: life was full of things happy to get in the way.

  ‘Do you remember much about Thomas, even from when he was younger?’

  Michelle shook her head.

  ‘No, not really. I thought he probably had a bit of a crush on Anna. A schoolboy crush, that is: he was probably about ten at the time. He was very polite, quite shy but always well-mannered. I’m not sure what his home life was like. In a way, I wondered why he and Anna were friends: she was so headstrong, even then. Maybe he just liked being around someone who could be in charge.’

  ‘What was Anna’s romantic life like before she met Greg?’

  This time, it was John’s turn to smile.

  ‘It was what she wanted it to be’ he said. ‘I’ll say this much: being a father to a pretty girl can be scary. Especially when she started to get older, and you saw the boys drooling after her. Anna…well, there never seemed to be any problems. She went out with boys, I’m sure, but she never seemed that bothered by them. Understandable: Anna was always clever, even at that age, and we both know that teenage boys are idiots.’

  Marr smiled.

  ‘Very true’ he said..

  ‘I’m not naïve enough to assume nothing happened in the twenty-one years before she officially moved out, and I don’t doubt university was what university is, but until she met Greg we never got the sense of anything serious.’