‘Are we about done?’ Finnegan asked. He tossed his fag end into the bushes. ‘If I’m going to whack my prices up, I need to crack on.’
They walked back towards the house. The wind was up and a few leaves skittered about on the shitty lawn. A pace or two behind him, Jenny thrust her hands into the pockets of her jacket and said, ‘Can you tell me where you were a week ago today? Last Monday. Late afternoon …’
Finnegan turned to look at her but kept walking. He stopped at the doors to the extension and waited for her to catch up. She saw the question on his face. ‘I’m sorry, but I just need you to tell me where you were.’
‘I’ll check,’ he said, finally. ‘God knows what it’s got to do with anything, but far as I can remember I was in the office. Me and my brother had a business meeting. Yeah, I reckon …’
‘Thanks,’ Jenny said. ‘I’ll talk to Adrian.’
He nodded, looked away for a few seconds. ‘Listen, I should probably tell you me and my brother haven’t exactly been seeing eye to eye lately. A few silly rows, that’s all, nothing major. Anyway, that’s why I was in such an arsey mood when you came round before. A bit of a ding-dong, you know? Just wanted to let you know that … say sorry for being out of order.’ He reached for his cigarettes again. ‘I got a right ear-bending from the missus when you’d gone.’
She told him it was fine, that she’d known worse. All the same, she wondered why he was telling her. Was it a genuine apology, or was he making it clear that he and his brother were not close; providing a reason in advance if his brother failed to back up his story? Then again, alibis from family were usually treated with a degree of scepticism anyway, so perhaps she was reading too much into it.
‘You going to talk to Angie?’
‘Yes, I’ll be calling her,’ Jenny said. She clocked his expression, guessed that the minute she was out of there, he would be calling her first.
They stepped inside. It was quieter and, looking through into the kitchen area, she could see that the workmen were taking a tea break.
‘What have you got?’ Finnegan asked. ‘A flat or something?’
‘Yeah, a flat.’
‘Renting?’
‘For now,’ she said.
‘Well, as soon as you get your own place, if you need any work doing, you know where to come. I was being straight with you before. We don’t rip anybody off …’
Walking back to the car, Jenny asked herself if Barry Finnegan was just supremely confident or a bit thick. Or so completely innocent of anything that it hadn’t seemed remotely inappropriate. It was certainly an odd moment to be touting for business. Then again, she had once had a sex offender try to advise her on where to buy clothes that would make her look a bit sexier.
She supposed she shouldn’t be too surprised by anything any more.
FORTY-SEVEN
It wasn’t easy doing the normal things and I wasn’t sleeping too well either. You never know how good you’re going to be at something like that, I mean, how can you? All that pretending and carrying on like none of it means anything, and even though I turned out to be a damn sight better at it than I would have guessed, it was definitely a strain. It got a lot worse, of course, after the police came sniffing around again, and I’d known that they would. I’d taken all that into account before I’d made that first drive out to Sevenoaks, but there was no backing out, not once I’d sat and watched that playground for a while.
Two decisions at once, one leading straight to the other. Once I’d decided I was going to take the girl, I’d started making plans.
I knew I needed to think ahead, because it was pretty obvious they’d be putting things together once I’d done it again. I know they talk to each other, police force to police force or whatever, and these days, with the internet and everything, the connection was likely to get made very bloody quickly.
I’m not denying I was lucky because I was stupidly lucky. The people I needed to behave in particular ways behaved in exactly the ways I thought they would, said the right thing. Said the wrong thing. Of course, luckiest of all, there’d been so many of us out there enjoying the Florida sunshine to begin with. Let’s hear it for the crappy British weather. Plus, once the connection was made between the two girls, they widened the investigation out and started looking into all the British holidaymakers who had been in the area at the time. That silly cow, WPC Smartarse … Quinlan … thought she was being entrusted with chasing up on the, what do you call them, prime suspects or something. She probably never clicked that they were running about like chickens with their heads cut off on the other side of the pond, desperately trying to track down all the Brits who’d been anywhere near Sarasota when Amber-Marie was taken. A waste of time obviously, and you’d think they’d have worked that out for themselves, wouldn’t you? I mean, it’s not rocket science to figure out she would only have got into a car with someone she recognised.
So, as it turned out, that jumped-up trainee detective cuntstable was closer than she knew all the time. She’d been almost spot on from the word go. Big things predicted for that one, future commissioner I shouldn’t wonder, blah blah.
Luck and lies then, that’s about the size of it. The other thing, the ‘why’, well that’s not really for me to say, is it? Anyway, I’m not sure I could put it into words that made sense and how could anybody? Whatever it is that makes your blood race and puts your hands where you know they really shouldn’t be.
The thing that opens the cage.
FORTY-EIGHT
‘There’s something different,’ Jenny said. The three of them were seated at the same table as before in the Dunnings’ living room; mid-afternoon sun cutting in through the windows on to the polished pine. The weather was better than it had been first time round and the small garden had more colour in it, or seemed to.
Sue Dunning looked around, shrugged. ‘I think it’s just because I had the chance to tidy up a bit,’ she said, laughing. ‘School hadn’t broken up when you were here before.’
Jenny nodded. ‘Well, thanks for sparing me the time, anyway.’
‘Tell you the truth it’s nice to talk to anybody who’s not making up some story about why they haven’t done their homework.’
‘Dog ate it, that always did the trick for me.’
‘We’re not quite as gullible these days.’
Jenny looked at Ed Dunning. ‘And thanks for taking the time off work.’
Ed gave a small nod. Said, ‘Why do people tidy up when the police are coming round?’ He quickly answered his own question, which was clearly just the set-up for a punchline of some description. ‘I mean obviously it’s a good idea to get the body out of the way. The bottle of poison and the bag marked swag.’
Sue laughed a little and rolled her eyes, but Jenny just looked down at her notes. She did not feel inclined to humour either of them at this stage.
‘So, how can we help you?’
Moving things along was fine with Jenny. ‘You could start by telling me why you lied about going shopping that day.’
‘Sorry?’ Ed looked at his wife.
‘We checked the CCTV at the shopping mall,’ Jenny said, enjoying the we rather than the they. She looked at Ed. ‘We know you weren’t there.’ They didn’t know any such thing of course; the absence of Ed Dunning on four sets of CCTV pictures being far from conclusive and Gardner having said as much.
Jenny could see straight away, though, that they’d been right.
‘So, I don’t particularly like being dragged around shopping centres looking at candles and cushions,’ Ed said. ‘I don’t think that’s grounds for arrest, but maybe they’ve brought in some new law.’
‘I’m not a big fan of shopping either,’ Jenny said. ‘It’s not just a bloke thing. I’m just a bit confused as to why you felt the need to tell the police in Sarasota that’s what you were doing.’
‘We had a flight the next day.’
‘I’m still not—’
‘We didn’t want to get held
up, that’s all. I know what they’re like over there and I didn’t fancy giving them any reason why they might want to keep us hanging around.’
‘Ed dropped me off,’ Sue said. Her hand moved reflexively across the table towards her husband’s, stopped just short of it.
‘Yeah, I dropped her off. I went off on my own for a bit then came back to pick her up.’
‘A couple of hours later,’ she said. ‘Something like that.’ She watched Jenny taking notes. ‘For the record, I didn’t buy any candles or cushions.’
‘Where did you go?’ Jenny caught movement out of the corner of her eye and turned to see a skinny ginger cat in the doorway, watching her. ‘I didn’t see him last time either,’ she said.
‘Her,’ Sue said. ‘She’s not very sociable.’ She pursed her lips, made kissing noises. ‘She’s old …’
The cat turned round and padded out. Jenny turned back to Ed. Perhaps the distraction had given him time to gather his thoughts, she could not be sure.
‘I drove to the harbour,’ he said. ‘Wandered about looking at the boats for a while. Watched a couple of the charters come back, tourists thinking they’re what’s-his-name … Ernest Hemingway or something.’
‘Did you talk to anybody?’
He shook his head. ‘Just wandered around, keeping the tan topped up. It’s one of our favourite places over there, isn’t it?’ His wife nodded. ‘We’ve taken a little boat out ourselves occasionally, rented kayaks, all that.’
Jenny wrote down what Ed had said and thanked him. ‘I also need to know where you were rather more … recently.’ She turned back a page or two to check the date she had written. Like it was just a small thing. ‘A week ago yesterday. Monday … the eleventh?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
It was a reasonable enough question. While a detailed description of Samantha Gold had been circulated, together with photographs, no mention had been made of the girl’s learning difficulties, which were not considered relevant to the hunt for her. There was no reason for anyone – if they were innocent – to have made any connection to the murder of Amber-Marie Wilson. Still, reasonable or not, innocent or not, Jenny wanted none of these people anywhere but on the back foot.
‘Can you just answer the question, please?’
‘How should I know?’
He looked to his wife and when Jenny did the same she saw Sue Dunning smile and nod; saw that she had got it. A look to her husband. Isn’t it obvious? ‘That girl who went missing last week. In Kent, wasn’t it?’
‘You’re kidding,’ Ed said.
‘Can you tell me where you were that afternoon?’
He raised his hands, opened his mouth and closed it again. ‘At work. Obviously. I was at work …’
‘So …?’
‘God, I had calls all over the place, same as always.’ He shook his head, thinking. ‘Size of the territories these days, you know? Maidenhead, Reading, High Wycombe, out that way. Might even have gone as far as Swindon. I’ll have to check the diary.’
‘I think I spoke to you on the phone at lunchtime,’ Sue said. ‘Yeah, I think you told me you’d just finished in Reading.’ When she saw Jenny looking at her, Sue said, ‘I was almost certainly lying around on my fat arse watching Loose Women.’ She blushed slightly. ‘Making the most of the school holidays.’
‘I can send you the names of the bookshops,’ Ed said.
Jenny said, ‘That would be helpful.’ She checked that he still had her number then closed her notebook. This was going to be the good bit. ‘What you said before, about knowing what the police were like …’
Ed blinked.
‘That’s presumably got something to do with the way they’ve treated you before. The police over here, I mean.’
Ed began shaking his head. ‘Here we go.’
‘Something to do with a woman called Annette Bailey.’
He turned to his wife with a look that was almost triumphant. ‘You see?’
‘Relax,’ Sue said.
‘Fucking Annette Bailey?’
‘Anything you’d like to say about that?’ Jenny asked.
‘Not a damn thing.’
‘You might be doing yourself a favour in the long run.’
‘A favour? Is this some kind of a wind-up?’
‘Look.’ Jenny was pitching for ‘trustworthy’ but worried as she spoke that her tone was closer to downright patronising. ‘I can understand why you might have thought it would be held against you in some way, if the police in Florida had done some digging and found out about it, but I’m giving you a chance to tell me—’
‘I’m telling you bugger all.’
‘Your prerogative,’ Jenny said.
‘What the hell d’you need me to tell you anyway? You obviously know all about it.’
Jenny knew no more than the basic details. The PNC gave the names, dates and little else. She would not know any more until the file she had requested arrived from the General Registry. She gathered her things together, dipped for her handbag.
‘Maybe I should be calling a solicitor,’ Ed said.
‘Maybe you should,’ Jenny said.
She stood up and stepped away from the table. Sue moved quickly to join her and at the doorway they both cast a look back to Ed, who had not moved and was not bothering to watch them leave. He rubbed the back of his neck, stared out towards the garden. There had been agitation certainly but he had not raised his voice and now he looked calm enough. Jenny felt sure there would be shouting after she had left.
At the front door, she turned to Sue Dunning. Over the woman’s shoulder she could see the ginger cat perched halfway up the stairs, licking itself. Jenny said, ‘You really shouldn’t have bothered to tidy up.’
FORTY-NINE
Marina said that she needed a large glass of wine and Angie had no problem keeping her company. The good weather was holding, so they sat outside a Pizza Express in Crystal Palace. It was only ten minutes from the practice where Marina worked in South Norwood and Angie had been happy enough to drive up from Crawley.
‘Diary’s not exactly packed,’ she’d said on the phone.
When she’d got there and they’d ordered, Angie explained that they were going to have company. Marina seemed a little shaken.
‘Sorry, but there wasn’t a lot I could do,’ Angie said. ‘I told her I was meeting you for lunch and she said how much easier that would be for her. Two birds with one stone sort of thing.’
‘It’s not fair,’ Marina said. She turned her mobile phone over and over in her hand, then laid it on the table. ‘Like it’s being sprung on us.’
‘She’s already spoken to Barry. So, you know, I think they want to talk to us all again.’
‘Talk to us about what?’
‘No idea,’ Angie said. She seemed perfectly at ease with it, happy even, and, as the waiter laid their pizzas down, Marina decided that being spoken to by a police officer was probably as exciting as Angie’s life got. Being married to Barry was hardly going to be a rollercoaster ride, after all.
‘This is lovely,’ Angie said.
Marina grunted her agreement, mouth full.
‘I mean the two of us having lunch like this. I know you and Sue have been getting together, so …’
‘Just once.’ Marina swallowed fast.
‘It’s fine.’
‘We just met that one time. Just for an hour or something. Sue thought it would be a bit far for you to come.’
Angie smiled. ‘We haven’t really had a chance for a proper girlie chat, have we?’
Marina shook her head.
‘I love what you’re wearing, by the way.’
Marina wore a thin white cardigan over a fifties-style, floral-print dress. The tips of her hair were still dyed red, though most of it had been gathered up beneath an oversized tweed cap.
‘Sue’s got one like that,’ Angie said.
‘Has she?’
‘Don’t you remember? We saw it when we were in her b
edroom. I don’t know, maybe it was Ed’s. I’m sure it looks better on you.’
‘Your bracelet’s gorgeous,’ Marina said, reaching towards it.
Angie stretched her arm across the table. ‘Got it from Barry for Christmas.’
‘So, how is your old man, anyway?’
For some reason, Marina had asked the question with more than a trace of a cockney accent. If Angie noticed, she didn’t seem to mind and she told Marina all about the problems Barry had been having with his brother and his ex-wife. Marina made sympathetic noises and they both agreed that families could be a nightmare.
‘Dave and I are lucky,’ Marina said. ‘Neither of us has anything at all to do with ours, for one reason or another.’
‘Oh, that’s a shame.’
She shook her head. ‘Like Dave says, we’re self-contained. Better off that way.’
Angie cocked her head, considering it. ‘Different things work for different people, I suppose.’ She was about to say something else, then saw the woman walking towards the table. She leaned towards Marina and whispered, ‘Here we go.’
A few seconds later, Jenny Quinlan was pulling a chair across and joining them without a trace of awkwardness. As though she were simply a friend who had not been able to make it in time for the main course.
‘God, wine would be nice,’ she said, eyeing their glasses. ‘But I’d better not. Those boys on traffic would love nothing more than to pull over a female detective with a couple of glasses of Chardonnay inside her. Make their bloody day, that would. Major stiffies all round, I promise you.’ She smiled at Angie then turned to Marina. ‘So, how was work this morning?’
‘Same as usual,’ Marina said.
‘I bloody hate the dentist,’ Jenny said. ‘Well, I don’t suppose anybody likes it very much, do they?’
‘I’m a receptionist,’ Marina said. ‘Part-time.’
‘Right.’
‘Leaves the afternoons free for auditions. Or to get some writing done.’
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