by Lisa Cutts
‘Did you murder Linda Bowman?’ asked Pierre.
‘No, of course I didn’t,’ said Aiden. ‘I was crazy about her. I didn’t murder her and I certainly wouldn’t hurt her in any way.’
He looked across the interview-room table to where the two detectives sat, his brief on the same side of the table as him. He guessed it was supposed to be a show of solidarity that his solicitor had chosen to position herself shoulder to shoulder with him. He probably smelled, so she might well come to regret that as the night wore on.
‘I had a bit of a thing for her,’ he said, hands raised in front of him to stress his point. ‘When we were kids, me and Travis used to mess around and say how nice-looking each other’s mums were. You know how kids do.’
Neither Sophia nor Pierre could relate to what he was saying, but their job wasn’t to judge. Not outwardly anyway.
‘Well, it went a bit too far,’ said Aiden, giving a small laugh. ‘It’d probably be fairly funny if Linda wasn’t dead. That’s the thing though, she is dead ’cept I swear to you, I didn’t kill her.’
‘When did you last see her?’ asked Pierre.
Aiden leaned forward and put his head in his hands.
‘That morning.’ He looked up at Pierre whose face was impossible to read. ‘I saw her that morning. She told me the night before that Milton was going out early and if I wanted to see her, if I was serious about her, I needed to get over as soon as I could.’
Aiden picked up the paper cup next to him and took a sip of water.
‘I don’t think she had any intention of taking it further, you know. I’m not totally stupid. I realize that not only is she – was she – much older than me, but married and my best friend’s mum. It doesn’t get messier than that, well at least not until someone killed her.’
‘What happened when you got to her house?’ said Pierre.
‘I got up early, walked over there, knocked on the front door and she let me in. It was a bit awkward really but we started kissing and . . . Will Travis get to find out about this?’
‘Don’t worry about that. What happened?’
Aiden rubbed both hands across his face. ‘We were in the kitchen. We kissed, and then she said it was wrong, she’d never been unfaithful to her husband in all the years they’d been together, despite the things he’d got up to. She started saying that two wrongs didn’t make a right. She was messing with my head.’
He stopped speaking and after a few seconds, Pierre said, ‘So how did you feel?’
‘Yeah, good one. You want me to say how angry I was. Of course I felt stupid. She’d told me to come to her house at six in the morning when she knew she’d be alone. Her husband was on his way to work and her only son sleeping off a big night out at my house. I’m a nineteen-year-old fella, for Christ’s sake. I thought my luck was well in. I’d even bought condoms the night before from the bogs in the Three Blackbirds. That’s how much I thought things were going to happen.
‘Now, in the cold light of day, I can see that she was leading me on. And before you try to make out that I lost my temper with her and bashed her on the head, when I left her, she was still very much alive. She told me to go because someone else knocked at the front door. We were in the kitchen and you can’t see the street from that room. She panicked and thought that it might be Milton come home for something without his keys to let himself in. Who else was going to knock on the door at 6.30 in the morning? Even the milkman doesn’t make a noise at that time.’
‘Who was it?’ asked Pierre.
‘I don’t know. I went out the back gate once I heard the front door shut. I didn’t see anyone and there were no other cars parked outside. Milton’s definitely wasn’t there. It made me start to think that she’d asked some other bloke over to make a mug of me, so I went home, got back into bed and waited until I heard Travis get up and crash about in the shower. Then I did the same and had a cup of tea with my mum.’
It could have been a plausible story. Only problem was, no one had told Aiden or his solicitor what the cause of death was, and certainly no one had mentioned Linda had died from head injuries.
Chapter 36
When Hazel pulled into the Lazy Bullock’s car park, she made a point of looking for Harry’s car and choosing a space as far from it as she could manage. If he decided at the end of the night he wanted to kiss her goodbye, she wanted to give him as much distance across the tarmac as possible for him to pluck up the courage.
He’d got there before her which was a good sign, and she was five minutes early. Hazel didn’t want to appear too keen so she sat for three minutes checking her messages on her phone before walking across to the door.
At one minute to nine, she made her entrance.
Harry sat at a table laid for dinner, close enough to the bar that they wouldn’t have to go too far for their order, yet far enough away from other customers that they wouldn’t be overheard. It was the same table she’d have chosen, had she got there first.
He stood up and pulled out another chair for her.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘You look nice. I’m glad you could make it.’
‘Thanks,’ she said, ‘it’s exactly what I need at the moment.’
‘How do you know?’ he said. ‘I might be getting on your tits by the end of the night. Oh, good God. I didn’t mean – I wasn’t . . .’
She felt herself start to laugh. The only time in the last couple of days she had managed to find anything funny was when she was talking to Harry.
‘You’re quite the tonic,’ she said.
‘Talking of drinks, what can I get you?’
‘Half a lager. I’m taking no chances in case I get called back to work. And, sorry, but I’ll have to keep my phone next to me on the table in case I’m needed. I took a risk leaving when I did.’
She watched Harry walk up to the almost empty bar, chat briefly to the barmaid, get their drinks and menus, and walk back over.
‘I’ve not eaten in this pub for a while,’ he said, putting the drinks down and handing her a menu. ‘It’s like a bloody morgue in here tonight.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve done it again, haven’t I? I can guess where you were today. I don’t want to talk job all night, but how’s Travis bearing up?’
‘Under the circumstances, he’s OK,’ she said, noisily peeling the plastic pages of her menu apart.
Harry sat watching her. He took a sip of his pint.
‘The beer’s good,’ he said, ‘so good it looks like they glued the menu pages together with it. Are you happy to eat here? It used to be a really busy boozer until the landlord ran off with the takings a while back and it’s never been the same since.’
‘We’re here now,’ she said, pulling her fingers off the tacky surface of the menu, and laying her hand on top of Harry’s.
He sat up a little straighter in his chair, smoothed his jacket and said, ‘Starters?’
‘You can’t go wrong with vegetable soup.’
Twenty minutes later, they were both working their way through bowls of soup that neither of them was enjoying.
‘How’s your starter?’ Harry asked.
‘I didn’t think it was possible to burn soup.’
‘Yeah, it’s a bit shit, isn’t it? You want me to send them back?’
‘No, it’s fine. It’s an improvement on driving whilst trying to eat a sandwich. How was your day?’
He shrugged and buttered his bread roll. ‘It was all right except I’d rather be back in our incident room. Completely understand why I’m not, being a friend of Linda’s and all that, but a murder investigation can take months. One of the reasons I tried so hard for promotion was because I wanted to work at East Rise Major Crime, now I’ve been sent away with my tail between my legs. As if everything else wasn’t bad enough.’
‘Do you mind if I ask you something?’ said Hazel.
She paused and took a sip of her lager while the waitress cleared their bowls.
They both said a polite British ‘Thank you�
�, even though the food had been passable and nothing more, and waited until she was out of earshot.
‘Why are you now single?’
‘The promotion I mentioned earlier?’
She nodded a ‘Go on’ at him.
‘I took my eye off the ball. For a long time, I thought that the two of us were fine, we’d been through the grief of the early years, struggling financially, having kids, sleepless nights, all that bollocks. As far as I was concerned, we were steady and we were about to reap the rewards, despite the usual bickering all couples do. I thought if I got promoted to DI, with only five years left to go until I could retire, we’d have our future mapped out and it’d all be rosy.’
He took a long pull on his drink and finished it off.
‘Turned out, she’d had enough of me and never paying her enough attention. Fate intervened, her dad died, leaving her mum alone in a huge house in Dorset. She took the kids and left six months ago. They’re not coming back.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. She was a miserable fucker.’
The waitress returned with their main courses and got them more drinks, Hazel opting for lemonade.
‘How’s your chicken?’ asked Harry. ‘And be truthful. Mine’s awful, so I doubt yours is any better.’
‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I came out more for the company than the food and drink.’
‘This steak’s a disgrace. I hope this hasn’t put you off coming out again with me.’
‘Can I choose the location next time?’
‘Next time? Certainly.’
He smiled at her, and then followed it with a frown aimed at his dinner.
‘You know I’d like to tell you more about Linda and how things are going,’ said Hazel.
‘I know, and I’m not asking, though I’d love to know. That’s not why I asked you to come to dinner with me.’
They halted their conversation as the waitress returned to clear the table.
‘Was everything OK with your meal?’ she asked, picking up Harry’s plate.
‘Tell the chef it’s a draw,’ said Harry. ‘He couldn’t cook it and I couldn’t eat it.’
Without another word, the rest of the dirty plates were cleared away and they were alone once more.
‘Perhaps I’ll be able to tell you more over the weekend,’ Hazel said.
‘The weekend?’
‘It’s my weekend off. I won’t get two days off now but if I can get an evening off perhaps we could go somewhere else.’
‘You’re on,’ he said, pulling out her chair for her as she got up to leave.
Harry held the door open for her and said, ‘Where’s your car?’
She pointed to the farthest, darkest part of the car park, and felt Harry fall in step beside her.
As she opened her car door, Harry bent down to kiss her on the cheek and wish her goodnight.
Even though she’d enjoyed the evening, and liked the feel of the warmth of Harry’s lips as they brushed her face, it conjured up images of Linda Bowman’s last kiss.
Something she couldn’t get out of her head the entire journey home.
Chapter 37
Doug Philbert waited until most of the staff in the incident room had either gone home for the evening or back out on enquiries before he made his way to Barbara Venice’s office.
She looked up at him as he stood in the doorway, smiled and gestured for him to come in.
‘You look as concerned as I feel, Doug,’ she said. Something was weighing heavy on his mind and it was time to share it with her.
‘I need to speak to you about a couple of things.’ He sat down, cleared his throat, crossed his legs.
She waited a few seconds before she said, ‘If this is about Linda’s past, you don’t need to look so worried. Since you called me on Monday morning, I’ve not been sitting idle. Things are in motion, not to mention what Hazel found out at Ealing Hospital.’
Doug could tell that Barbara was giving him her most winning smile, being everything he could hope for in a detective chief inspector. He was determined not to get up and leave the room before he unburdened his mind with his confession.
‘It’s, er, it’s not only about her identity, you see.’ He shifted in his seat, loosened his tie. Took a deep breath. ‘There were other things I was aware of, and I did nothing.’
From Barbara’s posture, he could tell he had her full attention.
‘When I called you the other morning to tell you that I knew Linda Bowman wasn’t in fact Linda Bowman, but was Karen McCall, what I didn’t fully explain was how I knew her real identity.’
When he paused and saw Barbara open her mouth to comment, he gave a small shake of his head and held his palm out to stop her. He knew if he didn’t get this off his chest, he never would.
‘Whatever you think of me, please believe me, Barbara, when I say I did it for the right reasons.’
He watched her shift her expression to neutral, non-judgemental, and lean back in her chair, elbows resting on the chair’s arms.
‘Several years ago, I was working here late one night. I can’t remember what for, and that’s not important. I was the last one here and when I went downstairs to my car, I saw a woman wandering around the car park. As you know, the outer part of the car park nearest to the road is accessible by foot so I went to find out why a member of the public was walking about between the staff cars.’
He pushed his glasses back up his nose, a nervous gesture he was well aware of, before he continued.
‘It was Linda. I could see she’d been crying and wanted to know where Milton was. He’d told her he was working late and was somewhere at East Rise. Of course, I hadn’t seen him and knowing that despicable man – I know I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead – he was probably off somewhere with a woman. We all know what he was like.’
The sound of an ‘Mmm’ came from Barbara but there was no stopping Doug now.
‘I didn’t have the heart to tell her what I suspected he was up to, although she was never a stupid woman. I made up something about him probably being at North Downs or Riverstone Police Station. I didn’t fool her for one minute. Regardless of all that, she’d been drinking and was starting to get hysterical. I did the only decent thing I could think of; I took her home.’
He watched Barbara’s jaw drop before he hastily added, ‘This isn’t me confessing to an affair: I took her home with the intention of dropping her at the door but she got more and more morose as the journey went on. I took her inside to sober her up.’
Doug massaged his temples, took another deep breath and said, ‘Linda wanted another drink when we got inside the house. She’d gone out and left Travis in bed. He could only have been about eight or nine at the time and I went and checked on him, firstly to make sure he hadn’t woken up and walked out into the night looking for his mum, and secondly, I was worried she might have hurt him.’
‘What makes you think she’d have hurt him?’ said Barbara.
‘The things she was saying unnerved me. At one point, she said, “You think you know me, Milton thinks he knows me, no one actually knows me and what I’m capable of.” Wouldn’t you have checked on the boy?’
‘Was Travis OK?’ Barbara asked.
‘He was fine, slept through the whole thing, fortunately. I went back downstairs and Linda had poured herself a drink, vodka or something. I knew that I couldn’t stay all night and got the impression that this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. I wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on her indefinitely. This was when she told me that her name was really Karen McCall and her family were put in Witness Protection in 1987.’
When Doug stopped rubbing the sides of his head, Barbara said, ‘Since we spoke about this a couple of days ago, I’ve been in contact with Witness Protection. As you already know, Karen, her brother and her parents were all moved from the East End overnight and relocated to Plymouth, told never to come back.’
‘Except she did co
me back,’ said Doug. ‘She met Milton when he was on holiday, moved back here. She told me that she didn’t see the harm in it, after all, her mother Gladys hated it in Plymouth, missed the East End and went back, bold as brass. The extended McCall family all knew that she was back but never touched a hair on her head. I think that was one of the things that irritated Linda. She’d done what she was told whilst her mother went back home. The old man, Alec, he died some years ago too. I’m sure that by now you know as much as I do about the whys and wherefores of her midnight flit with her family several decades ago. The stuff I need to tell you is something different.’
Barbara waited. Doug confessed.
‘Linda lifted her jumper up. She had bruises to her stomach. More on her arms. She told me Milton did it.’
‘What did you do?’ said Barbara. It was a straightforward question asked without judgement.
‘Nothing. I did absolutely nothing.’
‘You—’
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘There’s no excuse for standing by and allowing anyone to suffer at the hands of a domestic abuser. I went one step further than ignoring it, I was a DI at the time and Milton was a DC. I decided to take him under my wing and keep an eye on him. I did it because I thought if I got to know him, understand what he was about, perhaps I could find out if Linda was telling the truth. You see, the problem was, I didn’t actually believe her. Or perhaps if I’m honest with myself, I didn’t want to believe her. Things were different then, attitudes were different. Partly, I suppose, I didn’t want to do anything because I didn’t want to take action against one of our own. Shameful.’
‘You’re not to blame for any of this,’ said Barbara. ‘Too true that you should have done something about her abuse if she was being beaten by Milton. Even so, you’re not responsible for her death. We really don’t think Milton killed her.’
For the first time since the news on Monday morning, Doug felt the pressure lifting from his shoulders. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘It took a while to get Milton’s clothes back from the hospital and then off to the lab. The blood pattern distribution expert’s taken a look at them, she can’t find any traces of Linda’s blood, no blood splatters consistent with her injuries, and as luck would have it, it was a new suit. Milton hadn’t even got around to cutting the tags out. From his bank account, he only bought it on Saturday.’