The Body in the Marsh
Page 35
‘You were just a child,’ Gillard said.
‘Ah, but the child is mother to the woman, to misquote Wordsworth.’
‘You were loved, Liz. By your parents, by your kids, even by Martin. And by me. Each of those loves you have thrown away. It was never enough, was it?’
Liz looked at him anxiously, scanning his face.
‘It’s not true,’ she said quietly. ‘Think about it. I had accomplished the perfect crime, and was safely abroad. But I came back for Chloe, just as you hoped I would. I risked it all for love.’
‘That’s true.’
‘So I’m not a terrible mother, am I?’
‘I don’t know, Liz. I don’t know.’ He got up to leave, and she felt for his hand.
‘I love you, Craig,’ she said.
‘No, you don’t. It’s taken me a lifetime to come to terms with, but no, you don’t love me. You never did.’
He got up from the table, and walked away.
He didn’t look back as he passed through one security door after another, finally emerging into the car park. There, on time and waiting for him, was an old green Renault. ‘It’s done, Sam. It’s finished,’ he said, as he slid into the passenger seat beside his wife of three months.
Sam Phillips smiled, and kissed him. ‘Good. Now, finally, there’ll only be the two of us.’
* * *
DCI Craig Gillard never saw Liz again. But he did return to HMP Bronzefield once more. It was two days after news of Liz’s suicide. She had stolen a DVD from the recreation room, smuggled it back into her room, snapped it, and used the sharp edges to slash her wrists. She had known how to do it effectively: deep parallel strokes along the inside of each arm, not across the wrist. She was found dead on the morning of her daughter’s 21st birthday.
The prison governor showed Craig the neat and tidy room that Liz had inhabited. On the wall were two fading cuttings from The Times. The first was from the day after she had been sentenced.
Wife Sentenced Over Top Criminologist’s Murder
Thwarted academic Elizabeth Knight was yesterday sentenced by an Old Bailey judge to 18 years for the premeditated and calculated killing of her criminologist husband Professor Martin Knight. Mr Justice Kemp described Knight as one of the most ‘malevolent and cunning’ individuals to come before him, having faked her own death so well that the police and forensic services had been ‘completely taken in’. The jury heard how she cheated the entire family out of a multimillion-pound inheritance before fleeing abroad, intending to start a new life having framed her wholly innocent husband for her supposed murder. Professor Knight, an academic star who advised several UK governments, was found dead in a car boot in France in February. (See p.2 for more details: ‘Best criminologist of his generation’; Obituary p.10.)
The second cutting was from the day when her death had first been erroneously announced back in 2016.
Mrs Elizabeth Knight
Elizabeth Knight always seemed destined for great things, but her life was overshadowed by her brutal and still unsolved murder in October 2016, when she was 48. Born Elizabeth Bishopsford in 1968, she was already a promising pianist at the age of nine, a runner-up in the BBC Young Musician of the Year aged 13, and a chess prodigy who represented England Girls in the 1984 Budapest Olympiad. She made her way to Cambridge where, by the age of 20, she had established herself as a notable historian of the Spanish Civil War. Her interviews with the last remaining Republican survivors of Franco’s jails, later published as Enemies of God, won the 1988 A. J. P. Taylor prize for undergraduate European history, and she was offered an Eleanor Roosevelt bursary and research fellowship at Harvard. Married the following year, she decided to remain at Cambridge with her husband, the noted criminologist Martin Knight. Hugely popular at university, one of her contemporaries, Gerald (later Lord Justice) Cunliffe said: ‘Everybody adored her. Always the smartest person in the room, her brains were always tempered with a self-deprecating wit that men found irresistible.’ A lectureship at Oxford followed, though ill-health hindered her academic progress. She went on to become head of history at King Edward VII school in Surrey and later deputy head. Her disappearance and murder led to one of the biggest manhunts that Surrey Police had ever run. She is survived by a son and daughter.
Acknowledgements
A great deal of research goes into a police procedural thriller. I would like to thank Greg Miles and his colleagues at Surrey Police, and particularly retired detective inspector Kim Booth, and his former colleagues in Lincolnshire Police for their considerable help. LSE Professor of Criminology Jenny Brown, and LSE visiting fellow Marianne Colbran steered me on policing policy and criminology. Home Office forensic consultant Dr Stuart Hamilton, DNA expert Hazel Mitchell and Dr Jennifer Ward all helped with the ‘body’, while Shane Jones of Kent Wildlife Trust and Owen Leyshon of The Romney Marsh Countryside Partnership were invaluable with the ‘marsh.’ Any remaining mistakes I claim for myself.
I am also indebted to my readers panel, particularly Sara Wescott and Cheryl Cullingford. I would particularly like to thank Sam Phillips and Helen Jennings, who asked to have a characters named after them. I hope they are not too displeased with the outcome! Particular thanks to Canelo’s Michael Bhaskar for seeking me out, and my former agent Alex Christofi for recommending me. I would like to thank everyone at Canelo for their energy and enthusiasm in production and promotion, and Séan Costello for copy editing. Above all, I would like to thank my wife Louise, who helped me hatch the plot while on a very long car journey down to southern Spain in 2016, and who took care of everything else while I gradually knocked it into shape over the following year.
About the author
Nick Louth is a best-selling thriller writer and an award-winning financial journalist. A 1979 graduate of the London School of Economics, he went on to become a Reuters foreign correspondent in 1987. He was for many years a Financial Times columnist, and a regular contributor to Investors Chronicle, Money Observer, and MSN Money. It was an experience at a medical conference in Amsterdam in 1992, while working for Reuters, that gave him the inspiration for Bite, which was published in paperback in 2007 and in 2014 went on to become a UK No. 1 ebook bestseller. The Body in the Marsh is his fourth thriller. Nick Louth is married and lives in Lincolnshire.
www.nicklouth.com
Also by Nick Louth
Thrillers by Nick Louth
Bite
Heartbreaker
Mirror Mirror
The Body in the Marsh
Financial titles
Funny Money
Bernard Jones and the Temple of Mammon
Dunces with Wolves
Multiply your Money
How to Double Your Money Every Ten Years
First published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by Canelo
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by
Canelo Digital Publishing Limited
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Beaconsfield, Bucks HP9 2DU
United Kingdom
Copyright © Nick Louth, 2017
The moral right of Nick Louth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781911591771
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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the Marsh