Henderson Manor

by Emma L. Clapperton

  “So, any thoughts on this?” Lang asked as they proceeded to cross the lower end of Sauchiehall Street and then turned left onto Argyll Street.

  “Aye, I think that Sam Leonard will be able to help us out with this. Even if the relationship had gone sour and the girl was so devastated that she had killed herself, it would still put an end to the enquiry.”

  Lang nodded, “Maybe you’re right.”

  Preston pulled up outside the station and killed the engine. “Ok, let’s see what we can find on this Sam Leonard.”

  The sun made another break in the clouds and shone down as they walked into the station.

  12

  Sam Leonard stood in front of the mirror as he brushed his teeth and watched the paste foam up and spill over his lips. He thought about what to do with his day off and wondered if he should contact his agent to see if any of the theatre productions coming up had shown an interest in him since his last performance. The bathroom smelled like men’s shower gel and the condensation from the hot water in the shower ran down the gleaming white tiles. Sam felt good and was happy that he finally felt like his personal life was getting back to normal. Deep in his daydream, he heard Jenny call out for him from the end of the hall. He wrapped a towel around himself and popped his head out of the en suite shower room. “What’s up?”

  “There are some people here who want to talk to you,” Jenny replied, her voice uneasy.

  Sam frowned. “Who is it?”

  “It’s the police.”

  Without warning, Sam’s stomach flipped making him feel instantly nauseous. What would the police want? He quickly dried himself off and threw on a pair of stonewash denims and a black t-shirt. He reached for the handle on the bedroom door and made his way into the hallway, where he observed two men, each dressed in a suit. One was taller than the other and slimmer, the short one was plump, a size Sam did not care to think about for when he reached middle aged himself. Putting on his most confident gleaming smile he said, “What can I do you for gentlemen?”

  Lang (the plump one) replied, “We would like to talk to you about a Miss Sarah Henderson.”

  “Can we sit down?” Preston asked.

  Sam felt another lurch in his stomach. “Yes, let’s go through to the sitting room.”

  Jenny followed Sam and the two officers into the sitting room and sat down beside Sam, ready and waiting to offer support, lacking care for whatever the reason was as to why the officers were in their home in the first place.

  “I’m D.S Preston and this is D.C Lang.” Preston paused as Sam nodded, as if accepting their introduction. “Can you confirm that you know Sarah Henderson?”

  “Yes, she’s my ex-girlfriend.”

  Sam swallowed hard. He was quite sure that he knew what was coming next from the officer but he didn’t want to hear it.

  “We were called out to a property in Winton Drive earlier this morning, where Sarah Henderson was found dead.”

  Sam’s stomach contents were like a demon trying to break free from hell. He made it to the bathroom just in time, spilling his guts like someone who had just eaten a dead animal. The violent wretches caused pain to his sides and temples but he managed to control his breathing and compose himself before returning to the sitting room.

  “Are you ok?” asked Jenny, who was white with shock.

  “Yeah, sorry about that.” Sam felt ashamed with his reaction; he really had thought that Sarah couldn’t affect him anymore. He guessed he was wrong.

  “Mr Leonard, we would like to ask you some questions about your involvement with Sarah Henderson,” Preston said.

  Sam placed his hand over his abdomen again, as if trying to control his stomach reflex. “Of course.”

  Lang retrieved his trusty notebook from the breast pocket of his jacket and flipped it open. He allowed Preston to do most of the questioning, giving him time to write everything down.

  “So, Mr Leonard can you confirm the last time you saw Sarah Henderson?”

  Sam cast his mind back to the day that he ended their relationship; they hadn’t parted on particularly good terms. “Around a month ago, maybe more; I’m not sure.”

  Lang scribbled away, trying to avoid missing anything that Sam was saying.

  “Maybe more?” Preston asked.

  “I don’t keep a list of dates and times if that’s what you mean,” Sam replied, annoyed by Preston’s tone.

  “Ok, and could you tell us about the content of conversation that took place on that day?”

  Sam hadn’t allowed himself to think about Sarah at all since their break-up, let alone think about the day that he left the only woman who he ever had feelings for. “We broke up the last time I saw her.” The sentence hung in the air, hovering over everyone in the room. Sam understood that Preston wasn’t going to allow it to hang over them for any length of time, so he carried on, “She had become a little, shall we say obsessed. I couldn’t cope with it so I ended it.”

  The room would have been silent, if it wasn’t for the scraping of Lang’s pen. He looked up from the notebook. “Obsessed with what?”

  “Me. She was obsessed with me.”

  Lang glanced at Preston, unsure of what Sam meant when he used the word obsessed, so he went on. “Please elaborate Mr Leonard.”

  “She was stalking me!” Sam said with a raised tone.

  Preston’s brow furrowed. “Your own girlfriend was stalking you?”

  “She was always a little jealous that my best friend happened to be female and so from the offset she and Jenny never really got on.”

  “Jenny?”

  “That’s me, Jenny Lawson,” Jenny replied, offering support.

  Preston glanced at Jenny, taking in the information that Sam had expressed. “So you never got along with Sarah; why was that?”

  Jenny shook her head. “Sam just told you why: she didn’t like the fact that Sam and I are best friends. She couldn’t accept that he had another female in his life and that we lived together. She was always nice to my face and I never had any qualms that she would come between Sam and I, so I just tried to be nice and let her see that I wasn’t a threat.”

  Sam was grateful that Jenny was aiding the interview, if in fact that’s what it was: an interview. He couldn’t get his head around the fact that Sarah was dead. She was actually dead and the police were questioning, he guessed, his involvement.

  “It didn’t bother you that your best friend’s partner had a problem with you?” Lang asked.

  “I didn’t say that it didn’t bother me. I said that I tried to be nice and prove that I wasn’t a threat.”

  Lang regarded this, unsure as to whether or not Jenny had been a threat. “So what happened when you were nice to her?”

  Jenny took a deep breath, allowing the intake of oxygen to calm her quivering nerves. She admitted to herself that she felt guilty that Sarah had passed away but she knew that it had nothing to do with her or Sam. Having the officers question them in their own home was what made her nervous. “Nothing happened. When I was nice or pleasant or kind or anything else that may be interpreted as friendly, she would either completely ignore me or just put on a sarcastic smile. She was always careful not to do it in front of Sam.”

  “And why was that?” Preston replied.

  Sam interrupted. “If she was to do it in front of me then she would have known that I wouldn’t stand for it. Jenny has been in my life since we were little and I’m not the sort to let a relationship with a woman tear apart my friendships.”

  All four fell silent for a few moments and the only sound to be heard was, once again, the scribble of Lang’s pen. Lang noted everything that had been said by Jenny and Sam.

  Sam hung his head low, his chin almost touching the top of his chest. “Are we done here?”

  Preston nodded. “I’d say we’re almost done here. I know that this must be very difficult for you but if you could just answer a few more questions we’ll be able to eliminate you from our enquiries.”


  Sam lifted his head. “You’re saying I’m a suspect in Sarah’s death?”

  Jenny got to her feet. “That’s bloody ridiculous.”

  “I’m saying that this is procedure and we are trying to establish Sarah’s last few hours before she died. We’re not saying whether her death was intentional or not,” Preston reassured them.

  “Ok, but please make it quick,” Sam said, accepting Preston’s words.

  Lang couldn’t make up his mind about Sam and Jenny however, he had looked a murderer in the face on several occasions in his career and he was certain that these people were not killers — not intentional killers anyway. “So Sam, can you tell us what your relationship was like with Sarah before you split?”

  Sam cast his mind back to the very beginning and remembered how much he had adored her, and how she was always smiling and laughing, but then things changed quickly. She was always quiet around Jenny and never made an effort to speak to her or at least be civil. “Things were fine in the beginning, like a normal relationship is. We were always going out for dinner, drinks: that sort of thing. Then I introduced her to Jenny and she went weird.”

  “Weird, in what way?” Lang pressed.

  “She would never want to speak to Jenny or about her. She was jealous and I confronted her about it. Of course she denied it but she never did anything to change the way she was around her.”

  “I tried to make things better between us,” Jenny added. “But she just wasn’t interested. I didn’t want Sam to feel awkward when Sarah was in the flat and I was there. In the end I realised it wasn’t me who had to change. She was an odd ball if you ask me.”

  “Jenny and I were getting anonymous text messages, phone calls and letters, among other things.”

  “What do you mean you were getting messages and letters? From whom?” Preston asked.

  “Well, we couldn’t prove it but we were pretty certain that it was Sarah. We were getting typed letters through the door saying things like, ‘I hate you Jenny Lawson,’ and ‘you’re a home wrecker,’” Sam said.

  “Sounds like someone was jealous, but does that necessarily mean it was Sarah?” Lang commented.

  “That’s what I thought at first but there was no one else I could think of,” Sam replied.

  “There were also photographs with the letters, of us together having coffee, or at the pub. It was starting to freak me out so Sam said he was going to end things with her. I said that doing so would make things worse but he went ahead and did it anyway.”

  Lang noted everything down, coming closer to his own opinions on the innocence of Sam and Jenny. “So, how did Sarah react when you ended the relationship?”

  “As you can imagine, she didn’t take it too well. She was incredibly upset and swore blind that she hadn’t sent any of the hate mail to us. Then as I was leaving, she started to shout something about Jenny being the one who was sending the letters and making the phone calls, which is ridiculous. To be honest, by that point I didn’t care if it was Sarah or not; our relationship was doomed from the first moment she shared her dislike and jealousy for Jenny. It had to end regardless of the hate mail or not. What made the whole situation worse was that I had fallen for her. Apart from all the crazy behaviour, she was actually a good laugh. We got on so well and I was genuinely sad when I decided that the best thing to do was to end it.”

  Both officers nodded as they listened. “I think that we have everything that we need here. Thank you for you co-operation. We’ll be in touch if we have any developments.” Preston said as he stood up. Sam and Jenny joined him in stance.

  Lang put his notepad back into his breast pocket and stood up. He shook Sam and Jenny’s hands and followed his colleague to the front door of the flat.

  Sam closed the door and Jenny hugged him tight. “Are you ok?”

  “I think I’m in shock. She was fine when I left her, well not fine but you know what I mean.”

  “Sam, I don’t think that Sarah would have killed herself because you ended things with her she didn’t seem like that sort of person, despite everything else,” Jenny said.

  “I am not sure of anything. I mean, we will never really know if she was the one sending all of those photos and messages and making the silent phone calls but everything that had happened leading up to our split said that it probably was her. Maybe she killed herself to show me that she wasn’t done with terrorizing us.”

  Jenny laughed gently. “I’d hardly say she was terrorizing us. She sent a few unsettling items but I’d say that’s as far as she would’ve gone.”

  Sam made his way into the kitchen and took the whisky out of the alcohol cabinet on the wall. “Do you want one?”

  “No, it’s a tad early for me. You go ahead; it might help the shock.”

  He poured the whisky into a glass tumbler and threw it down his throat. It warmed him instantly.

  How could Sarah be dead? She was the same age as Sam and had her whole life ahead of her. Surely she wouldn’t want to kill herself over something like this?

  “Do you think someone killed her?” Jenny suddenly asked.

  “I have no idea Jenny and to be honest, I don’t want to know. I split from Sarah for a reason and I still can’t get away from her even though she’s now dead. I thought that I could get over her quickly and now this happens.”

  They were quiet as Sam poured another whisky into his tumbler and with curiosity getting the better of him he wondered, if Sarah had been murdered, then who the hell killed her?

  Jenny didn’t mention Sarah’s name again for the rest of that day.

  13

  “So, do you think he killed her?” Lang asked as they sat outside Sam and Jenny’s flat.

  Preston shook his head. “I don’t think he did. Did you see his face? He looked like he’d been hit by a truck when we told him.”

  Lang agreed with Preston. He could see it in Sam’s eyes that he was no killer. “I’m not so sure about that Jenny one — she seemed annoyed at our visit. You think maybe she had something to do with it?”

  “No, I don’t think Jenny had anything to do with Sarah’s death either. I think that she disliked Sarah, for the reasons which she specified. Perhaps she feels differently about her relationship with Sam and Sarah picked up on it. Maybe Jenny knew this and that’s where the problems started.”

  Lang shook his head as he reached down for a water bottle at his feet. “Nah, I don’t think so. They’re too close; their friendship is solid. I think that’s probably where the threat lay in Sarah’s mind and that’s why she took a dislike to Jenny. Probably didn’t want Sam having such a close relationship with another woman, even if it was innocent.”

  Preston massaged his temples, the stress of the case already getting to him. “You know I love this job but I can’t wait for my retirement next year.”

  Lang laughed, “You and me both. Before we dream of long days in the sun, we need to get back to Henderson Manor and get a search started, see if we can find anything that points to how she came to her death at the bottom of those stairs.”

  Preston had already started the car, desperate for the day to be over. “Aye, unfortunately the sun loungers are just out of our reach.”

  The journey back to the manor was quiet, each officer dreaming of their retirement days. Preston had hoped that his last year would be easy; it wasn’t looking that way. Glasgow had bred a society of junkies and murderers and in a lot of cases, each breed of scum had crossed paths. He was sick of dealing with them but was thankful that his days of being a beat officer and having to deal with them in the first instance were far behind him. Preston sometimes wondered how he had managed to climb the ranks over the years considering that on many occasions he had thought of giving it all up. He had seen people waste away on the streets of Glasgow: junkies lying in shop doors, prostitutes selling themselves to anyone who would take them so that they could pay for their next fix, newly legal drinkers getting so drunk that they would pass out on the pavement. Yes, he was p
ast all that now and was now working to finding the real criminals of Glasgow, but he couldn’t help but wonder where the years had gone and how he had managed to get past all of the grit and grime of the job. Preston knew that he was good at his job but his body was telling him that it was time to start winding down and make some time for him and the family.

  “You good over there, Paul?” Lang interrupted his daydream.

  “Eh?”

  “You’re miles away.”

  Preston put his dreams of retirement to the back of his mind; he had a while to go before he would be there. They were driving up to the manor and the forensics team were still in and around the house. “Still busy I see?”

  “Looks like it — maybe they’ve found something.”

  Pulling up outside the front door, they could see into the main hallway and the body of Sarah Henderson lay in its place of death.

  “Isn’t this job glamorous?” Lang said with sarcasm.

  They entered the hall and took in the surroundings again. By now the team should have collected most of the evidence that they needed to decipher if the house was a crime scene or the scene of a tragic accident.

  One of the head investigators approached Preston and Lang. “Hi, I’m Allan,” he said. “I’m head of the forensics team today and you’ll be glad to know we’re almost done here. However one of our team found something that you may be of interest to you both.”

  “What is it?” Lang asked.

  “Follow me,” Allan said as he led them up the stairs.

  Preston walked up with his back to the wall, trying to see the landing above. “Is it evidence of another person having been here?”