She looked surprised when I stood up, but I didn’t wait around to hear any more from her. Somehow the police had to be persuaded to search her house for her other phone, and then they would find the missing photos. I still didn’t understand what motive she could have possibly had for taking so much trouble to convince me that Nick was unfaithful. The truth must lie somewhere in the past, in a meeting between Rosie and Nick. Maybe they had once had a fling, or perhaps she suffered from Stockholm syndrome, that strange mental condition in which people believed they had a relationship with a stranger. Whatever the truth, the key to the mystery lay with Rosie. I was going to get to the bottom of her interest in my husband, but lacked the resources do so on my own.
On leaving the pub, I went directly to the police station and asked for DI Jarvis. The inspector kept me waiting for a long time, but at last a constable escorted me to a small room and a few moments later the detective appeared, accompanied by his dark-haired sergeant.
The inspector stared at me with his cold hard eyes. ‘You asked to see me?’
‘I had a thought.’
Although his features didn’t alter, a frown seemed to flit across his face, faint as a shadow cast by a passing cloud. I could almost hear his thoughts: Stop wasting my valuable time with your nonsense, but he nodded politely and invited me to continue.
‘Rosie had another phone,’ I blurted out.
‘Excuse me?’
His expression remained fixed, but his voice conveyed his impatience.
‘Do you remember the reporter, the one who showed me photos of my husband with Sue?’
‘Rosie White, yes, the woman you alleged showed you some images on her phone.’
This time his voice sounded smug, as though he wished to convince me he remembered everything. The man wasn’t a machine; he had an ego.
‘The reason you didn’t find those photos on either of her phones was that she’s got another one. She must have!’ I paused, aware that I was shouting in my excitement.
The inspector watched me, unmoved. At his side, the sergeant sat, equally impassive.
‘Don’t you understand what I’m telling you? The fact that you were unable to find the photos she showed me on her phone proves nothing. She took them on a different phone!’
‘You think she had another phone? A third one?’
I couldn’t have said why, but I had the impression the detective was toying with me.
‘Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. We need to find her other phone.’
The inspector gave an icy smile. ‘Yes, you’re quite right. She did have another phone, one for work and a second one for her own personal use. A lot of people do.’
I fought off my disappointment that he had deliberately misunderstood me. ‘I mean,’ I stuttered, ‘I mean there must be another one.’
‘The thought occurred to us too, yes.’ He paused. ‘We checked both phones, of course, but we found nothing.’
‘No, I mean there was another phone...’ I faltered, ‘a third one...’
The inspector stood up and his sergeant followed suit. ‘Is that everything, Mrs Kelly?’ he enquired politely.
‘It’s just that, if I was storing something controversial, I’d get hold of a secret phone–’
‘A secret phone?’ he repeated, raising one eyebrow.
It did sound silly on his lips but I nodded, trying to look as though what we were talking about was a perfectly sensible idea. The inspector was wrong to dismiss it so swiftly anyway.
‘People can own more than one phone,’ I said. ‘More than two… ’
But the inspector was already moving towards the door and either didn’t hear what I said, or else chose to ignore me. I was on my own with my suspicions.
Chapter 31
The police had left me no choice but to investigate what had happened for myself. Somewhere in Rosie’s flat lay the answer to my question, because only an examination of her private third phone would confirm whether or not the photos she had shown me were genuine. I could live without the truth about Sue’s death ever coming to light, but I couldn’t spend the rest of my life in my current uncertainty, wondering whether my husband had been unfaithful.
It was half past three, which gave me enough time to drive to the magazine office and sit in the car waiting for Rosie to appear. While I waited, I googled how to pick a lock. It required specialist tools which I didn’t possess, but I was able to grasp the principles. Basically, a lock comprised a series of wards that had to be aligned before a key would turn. The notches on the key had to match the position of the wards when the door was locked. From watching films, I was under the impression that it was possible to open a locked door using only a thin metal spike, but of course something that appeared plausible in fiction might not be practicable in the real world. After all, if it was easy to break into a house using only a hairpin, or something similar, locks wouldn’t be much use.
It might be possible to obtain a set of tools specifically designed to pick locks, but such a purchase was bound to leave a trace and I was already in enough trouble with the police without adding to my problems. I would have to make do with a seemingly innocent tool, like a hairpin or a very thin crochet hook. It was four o’clock. There was enough time to check out the shops and see what I could get hold of and still be back in position outside the Hertfordshire Style offices before Rosie left for the day.
By five I was back, armed with several long nails, a set of luridly coloured metal crochet hooks, a packet of hairpins, and several pairs of rubber gloves.
The day was overcast and threatening rain as I drew into the kerb near Rosie’s office block, just in time to see her walking out of the building. Easing my foot off the brake, I drew out into the slow-moving traffic as she reached the corner where she halted at a bus stop. Cursing my lack of foresight, I drove past and parked half on the pavement to avoid blocking the road. Keeping my eyes on my rear view mirror, I watched Rosie board a bus. Driving behind it, I waited as it pulled in at stops, or else drove further on and drew into the kerb when I could, to wait for it to pass me again. It was a tricky pursuit.
Without my sat nav to direct me home again, I wouldn’t have travelled so far out of my way, up and down side streets, through small parades of shops, traversing residential estates, where the bus stopped frequently to lose and gain passengers. Some of the stops were busier than others. The bus travelled across the town, on a route that twisted and turned until I no longer knew in which direction we were heading, or where I was going. At each stop, I watched for the grey beret and finally saw Rosie step down from the bus.
Following her proved even more difficult. Eventually I parked the car and continued the journey on foot, staying as close behind her as I dared. We probably only walked a few hundred yards, but it felt like miles. Had I not been able to find my way back to the car, I would have really been in trouble searching around for it later on in the gathering dusk, but fortunately for me Rosie kept on the same road. At last she vanished into a block of flats on the outskirts of the town. I waited for about fifteen minutes, wondering what to do, before I turned and retraced my steps back to the car, planning to return the next day when Rosie was at work. Somehow I would gain access to her flat and search for her missing phone.
As I was setting my sat nav to direct me back to Edleybury, I glanced up and caught a glimpse of Rosie speeding past me in the passenger seat of a car. I had no time to see who was driving, but that didn’t matter. My luck was turning. It was likely her neighbours would enter the block of flats at around that time, coming home from work. I couldn’t afford to let this chance slip. Not stopping to think what I was doing, I drove off and pulled up right outside the block where Rosie lived. I didn’t have long to wait before a man strode up the path and entered the building, barely noticing me as I slipped through the street door behind him, my tools concealed in my bag.
Once again, luck was with me. There was a row of metal mailboxes fixed to one wall in the communal
hall. I studied them and found R White printed on the label of box number 17. Assuming the numbers on the mailboxes tallied with the numbers of the flats, I had identified where Rosie lived.
Number 17 was on the third floor. I took the stairs and found the corridor on the top floor empty. I wanted to enter the flat without leaving a trace, but was desperate enough to break the lock if that was the only way to gain access to her apartment. There was no one around, but I didn’t know how long Rosie would be away. I could only hope she was out for the evening.
Working as quickly as I could, it still took me over an hour to open the door. At one point, I was interrupted by the arrival of a neighbour. I turned aside and pretended to be talking on my phone and the man entered his own flat without giving me a second look. With a sigh of relief, I resumed fiddling with the lock, twisting a crochet hook, then a hairpin, pushing and stroking the inner workings, and cursing whoever had invented keys. But at last there was a click, and I was in.
Praying that Rosie didn’t have a burglar alarm, I pushed the door gingerly. At the first sound of an alarm, I would shut the door and flee. As long as the door was closed, and I remained on the outside, hopefully there would be no evidence of my attempted break in. Burglar alarms sometimes went off in error. The flight of an insect could set off a sensor, or even a sudden change in temperature could disturb a sensitive system.
Tensed to run, I pushed the door very cautiously, just enough to set off an alarm, but was met with silence. Another second saw me safely inside. Having spent so long gaining access to the flat, I had to work quickly. I closed the door behind me and began my search. The bedroom or the kitchen seemed the most likely places to find something that was hidden. Hurriedly, I found the bedroom. It wasn’t easy, searching with only the dim light from outside, but I was afraid to switch on an overhead light. There was a double bed with a lumpy duvet thrown carelessly over it, bunched up on one side as though the sleeper had dragged it over to that half of the mattress. On the side of the bed with the lion’s share of the duvet stood a small pine cabinet, on top of which was a lamp and a phone charger.
With trembling fingers, I opened the cupboard door. In the pale light from the window, my hands looked ghostly in their rubber gloves. Inside the cupboard, I found a packet of contraceptive pills, a bottle of aspirin, a Penguin book of short stories, a few combs, a pair of nail scissors, a pack of emery boards, dental floss, and a sheet of small photographs of Rosie herself, with two missing. Her severe expression suggested they had been taken for a passport. There was nothing else in there. Closing the bedside cupboard, I turned my attention to the floor to ceiling wardrobes fitted along one wall of the room. It would take a long time to search them all, top to bottom, but the phone might be concealed somewhere in there.
As I looked around, wondering where to search next, I heard the scraping of a key in a lock and the muffled sound of voices and faint laughter. A light was turned on in the hall. Rosie had returned, and she was not alone. I listened, but the pounding of my heart seemed to drown out every other sound.
I was trapped.
Chapter 32
Once again I had run out of options. My plight was desperate and entirely of my own making, but there was no time for self recrimination. With no possibility of escaping through a window on the third floor, my only hope was to conceal myself somewhere inside the flat until Rosie left for work the next morning. If she found me hiding, along with tools for breaking in, it would be obvious what had happened. What made it worse was that she worked for a magazine so she was bound to have contacts with the local papers. Before long everyone in the region, if not the whole country, would know I had forced an entry into her private residence. It was hard to see how Nick’s position could remain tenable after that. The headmaster of Edleybury must be a role model for young people. He couldn’t possibly survive the scandal of being married to a burglar.
Hurling myself through the bedroom door into the living room, I flung myself down behind the sofa. Had it not been placed just to one side of the door to the bedroom, it would have been impossible to hide behind it in time to avoid being seen, because a second later I heard the door open. The voices grew louder as they approached my hiding place but they were muffled through the sofa so that, although I could tell a man and a woman were talking, I was unable to distinguish a single word until the woman said, quite clearly, ‘Let’s go to bed.’ It sounded as though they were just the other side of the sofa. Not daring to breathe, I froze, praying they would not see me. If they sat down and the sofa shifted backwards, it would crush me. Tensing myself, I waited. Whatever happened, I must not cry out.
Cursing my stupidity, I realised that I should have revealed my presence as soon as the front door opened, inventing some story about finding the door ajar when I had arrived to speak to Rosie. She would almost certainly have been annoyed at my intrusion, but that would have preferable to being discovered hiding there. It was too late to reveal myself, and too late for regrets. I dared not turn my head to look, but heard them going into the bedroom. Silently I begged them to close the door but it remained open. Any sound I made might alert them to my presence. What I had to concentrate on was extricating myself from this potentially ruinous situation. Rosie had only to return to her living room and as she came through her bedroom doorway she would see me cowering on the floor. There could be no talking my way out of that. Nothing short of an invisibility cloak could help me.
As my eyes grew acclimatised to the low lighting, I stared at the back of the sofa, praying for a miracle to rescue me. The sofa was thankfully a large three seater, upholstered in brown and cream fabric. Craning my neck past one end of it, I could see the door that would take me to the hall and out of the flat. But first I had to cross the living room, and once I had clambered out from my hiding place, I would be exposed. The light went out in the bedroom.
It was fortunate for me that Rosie and her companion were more interested in each other than in what else might be going on inside the flat. I heard a faint rustling and plopping as they dropped their clothes on the floor and fell into bed, their laughter and inconsequential chatter quickly replaced by grunts and gasps. Had I not known better, I might have interpreted the noises they were making as the dying breaths of some hunted animal. Fiercely restraining an impulse to giggle, I told myself that discovery would not only lead to intense embarrassment, the consequences would be catastrophic. The heavy breathing continued. If my situation had not been so precarious, it would have been farcical.
My problem demanded an immediate resolution. Either I could try to sneak away while they were busy under the duvet, or else I could wait it out until they fell asleep. But they might go back in the living room to drink and talk or watch television for hours, while I remained behind the sofa, not daring to stir, while my muscles grew stiff from keeping to one position and I struggled not to cough or sneeze or betray my presence by the slightest movement. Besides, as long as I remained skulking behind the sofa, sooner or later Rosie was going to look out through the bedroom door and discover me hiding there. Once again, I was left with no choice. One way or another, my only hope of escaping detection lay in getting out of there.
Cautiously I dragged myself forwards. Beneath me, the floorboards creaked. I held my breath. The noises in the bed stopped for a second, then resumed. It wasn’t clear whether they had heard my stealthy movement, but the pipework in buildings often rumbles and squeaks and, besides, if they had heard anything, they would probably assume it was the noise of the bed shifting beneath them.
Pulling myself up onto my hands and knees, I stole around the sofa, doing my best to move silently. With the sofa between me and the bedroom door, I lowered myself to the floor once more and slithered forwards on my front, trying to keep my head below the top of the sofa while inching my way towards the front door. Rosie and her visitor had turned out the light in the bedroom, but light from the hall helped me to find the door. It also increased the risk of my being spotted crawling acr
oss the room.
They were still occupied between the sheets when I reached the hall. Scrambling silently to my feet, I ran lightly to the front door. Thankfully the man with Rosie didn’t suffer from premature ejaculation or my escape plan might have been scuppered. Offering up a silent prayer of gratitude for his prowess, I reached for the handle. Only then did it occur to me that if the door was double locked it would be impossible to open without a key. I tried to remember whether the door had been locked after it was slammed shut, but at the time I had been too focused on avoiding capture to notice what was happening elsewhere.
My head swam as my hand slid up to the handle and turned it. The hinges groaned when the door swung open. Summoning all my remaining energy, I threw myself out of the flat and closed the door behind me as quietly as I could. I was alone. Leaning against the wall, I pulled myself up onto my feet but my legs were shaking so hard I could scarcely walk. It was foolish to linger right outside Rosie’s flat, shaking and crying, but my legs refused to move.
Only a few minutes could have passed but it felt like hours before I managed to stagger to the lift and summon it. If I hadn’t been trembling so violently I would have hurled myself down the stairs, but I couldn’t trust my legs to carry me. Another age seemed to pass until, finally, the lift arrived to carry me down to the ground floor and freedom.
Safely in my car, I leant my head on the steering wheel and sat there for a while, trembling and sobbing with relief.
By the time I reached home, it was nearly ten o’clock. Luckily, Nick was not yet back. Hurrying indoors, I went straight to the bathroom and took a long shower. It was hard to believe I had succeeded in breaking into a virtual stranger’s flat, escaping almost certain discovery. The fact that I was still no further ahead in my investigation seemed unimportant. All that mattered was to be home and safe. No one suspected where I had been, or what I had been doing, that evening. Once again I couldn’t control my tears; they were carried away by the shower.
Suspicion Page 16