by Amy Cross
“Where did you get that?” he asked.
“That's not something I can tell you right now. I just -”
Before she could finish, Harry stepped over to her and took the phone, quickly swiping through the rest of the photos. Some were fairly tame, but a few were explicit and Harry's hands seemed to be trembling slightly as he finally swiped back to the beginning of the album.
“I'm sorry to have to ask,” Jo continued, “but did Deborah ever send you photos like these?”
He stared at the phone for a moment, before turning to her.
“No,” he said finally. “She sent me these exact photos, a couple of months before she died. And then I lost them when my phone was nicked. So where the bloody hell did you get them from?”
Chapter Eighteen
Six months ago
“What the hell?”
Turning quickly, Deborah looked across the darkened kitchen and stared at the window. She'd heard a noise, she was sure of it, but now the cottage was silent again. Quickly heading to the door, she turned the hall light off, leaving herself in complete darkness before heading to the window and peering out at the yard. She waited a moment, her heart pounding faster than ever, and then a few seconds later she heard a distant creaking sound.
“It's just the cat,” she muttered under her breath, “it's just -”
Before she could finish, she heard a bump coming from outside in the dark yard, and this time she couldn't contain her panic. Hurrying into the front room, she grabbed her phone and brought up a number.
“Harry!” she said as soon as he answered. “I need you to come over right now!”
***
“There's no-one out there,” Harry said with a sigh as he stepped into the cottage a while later. “It's a windy night, Debbie. That's all.”
“Did you check the shed?”
“I checked the shed.”
“Did you check the place where the wood goes?”
“I checked the place where the wood goes.”
“Did you -”
“There's no-one there! There's no-one within a mile and a half of this bloody place!”
She opened her mouth to ask again, before hesitating for a moment. At the same time, as if to underline Harry's point, a gust of wind caused the front door to shudder slightly in its frame.
“I shouldn't have called you,” she said finally, turning to him.
“And I shouldn't have come,” he replied. “It's just... You sounded so scared on the phone.”
“I'm fine.”
“You're jumpy as hell.” He sighed again. “Do you have any idea how many men would come rushing over to help, after what you said earlier? Anyone else would've left you to stew in your own juices, but I came running because...” He paused for a moment. “Debbie, what's going on? You broke up with me, and now you're a nervous wreck. I want to help you.”
Reaching toward her, he tried to touch the side of her face, but she immediately pulled back.
“Don't tell me it's nothing,” he continued, “because even I'm not stupid enough to believe that.”
“What about the stone wall?” she asked, hurrying past him and looking out the window again. “What if someone was hiding behind there?”
“I looked behind the wall, Debbie.”
“But -”
“I looked everywhere!” he said firmly. “You're acting all paranoid. What's going on?”
Ignoring him, as if she was so wrapped up in her fears that she hadn't heard a word of his question, she continued to look out the window. A moment later another gust of wind caused the roof tiles to rattle slightly, and she immediately took a step back as if she was convinced that somebody was up there.
“You can talk to me, you know,” Harry continued.
“I should never have called you,” she replied, before turning to him. “I need you to leave.”
“Who did you think was out there?”
“Harry, please just -”
“It's not some random burglar, is it?” he continued. “There's someone specific, someone you think is after you. Why don't you just tell me? Then maybe we can go to the police and tell them, and they'll do something about it.” He stepped closer, and this time Deborah didn't pull away when he put a hand on her arm. “Is it an ex-boyfriend? An ex-husband, even? Debbie, I've been trying to find a way to ask this for a while, but are you running from an abusive relationship?”
“What?” She stared her him with barely-disguised incredulity, before pulling her arm away. “You don't know what you're talking about. You need to leave right now!”
“But -”
“You don't know me!” she continued. “You don't know anything about me, and if you did...”
“If I did what?”
“You'd hate me.”
“I couldn't hate you, even if I tried.” He paused for a moment, watching the fear in her eyes, and then he stepped closer again as the wind howled through the yard. “Debbie, I love you.”
“No, you don't.”
“I'm sorry?”
“You don't love me. Not the real me. You don't even know the real me.”
“Well,” he said with a sigh, “that's not exactly the response I was hoping for but -”
“Leave!”
He sighed.
“Get out of here!” she hissed, grabbing his arm and starting to drag him toward the door, which she quickly pulled open, letting the wind blow into the cottage. “I mean it, Harry! I'm sorry I called you, it was a moment of weakness but it won't happen again! I need you to leave and never come back. Don't even think about me again, okay?”
“Debbie, I love -”
“Don't say that again!” Pushing him outside, she quickly slammed the door shut and turned the key in the lock.
“What the hell is going on with you?” he called out from the other side of the glass. “Debbie, I meant what I said, but you can't act like this! One minute you're telling me to leave, then you're calling in the middle of the night and begging me to come back, and then -”
“I won't call you again!” she said firmly, with tears in her eyes. “I swear! And if I do call you, just ignore me! Promise you'll ignore anything I ever say again! Even if I come banging on your door, screaming blue murder, you have to ignore me!”
“Debbie -”
Pulling the curtain across the window, she turned and dropped down onto the mat, leaning back against the door as she began to sob. A moment later, she heard Harry trudging away through the mud, before finally his car started and she listened to the sound of him driving away.
“I'm sorry,” she whispered through the tears, “but that doesn't matter. I'm only -”
Suddenly the house creaked again in the late-night wind, and she looked up toward the ceiling. Filled with fear, she told herself that there was no-one around, that her fears were just getting the better of her. Still, she knew it was going to be a long night, and that she had to keep working. Getting to her feet, she poured herself a glass of wine in an attempt to steady her nerves, before carrying the bottle over to the coffee table where her laptop was waiting.
And still the storm hammered against the house, as she finally got back to work.
Chapter Nineteen
Today
“There's no way in hell Deborah was sending these pictures to Phillip bloody Chesleford!” Harry said firmly as he stepped out of Jo's car in the hotel's parking lot. “I mean, the idea's...”
He paused, clearly struggling for the right word.
“It's sick” he added finally. “Phillip Chesleford has the mind of a child!”
“The pictures weren't being sent from Deborah's phone,” Jo pointed out, swinging her door shut before stepping around and leading Harry toward the hotel's main entrance. “When exactly did you lose your phone?”
“A few weeks before Deborah was murdered.”
“I think someone else was sending the pictures to Phillip,” she explained. “Someone who wanted him to believe that Deborah liked hi
m. It probably wasn't too hard to trick the poor guy, but what would be the point?”
“The whole thing's disgusting!”
“Did Deborah ever talk to you about Phillip?” Jo asked. “I know he had a habit of showing up at the cottage.”
“You don't think Phillip's the one who killed her, do you?”
“No, I don't think he's capable of that, but I'm starting to think that Deborah's murder was a little more carefully planned than I'd initially realized. Someone must have been plotting for quite a while, in which case -”
Stopping suddenly, she spotted a familiar figure in the distance. As Detective Inspector Jack Byron emerged from the front of the hotel, flanked by two uniformed officers, Jo stepped behind an old red telephone box.
“Great,” Harry muttered, stopping as soon as he saw Byron. “That's the asshole who kept questioning me over Debbie's death and -”
Before he could finish, he saw Byron turn and glance in his direction, and he immediately realized he'd been recognized.
“He's seen me.”
“You have to talk to him some time,” Jo replied, still keeping out of sight behind the phone box. “I'd rather stay out of his way, but this is a murder investigation. It's natural for you to be a suspect.”
“But -”
“Get it over with.”
“Harry Morgan!” Byron called out, heading toward him. “I'm gonna take a wild stab and assume that you remember me. I was just about to come out to your place and pay you a visit, but it looks like fate has intervened and served you up to me on a platter. What's up, did you decide to pop down and take another look at the scene of the crime?”
“Just tell the truth,” Jo continued. “Stick to the facts.”
“I think we'll do this down the station,” Byron said as he reached Harry, stopping just a couple of feet from Jo as she waited out of sight around the corner of the box. “Harry Morgan, your pals seem to have a habit of dropping dead, don't they? To lose one friend is unfortunate, but losing two in the space of six months? I think maybe you've got some explaining to do.”
“I didn't do anything to Susannah,” Harry replied defensively.
“A little dickie-bird tells me you were doing something to her about twice a week,” Byron said with a satisfied grin, as if he was already convinced that he'd caught his man. “Susannah Marriott was killed with a knife. Did you know that? Seems rather similar to the fate that befell poor Deborah six months ago. I wouldn't be surprised if the same bastard was behind both attacks. Now, who around these parts was intimately involved with Deborah Dean and Susannah Marriott? Oh, that's right. You were!”
“I didn't hurt anyone,” Harry stammered. “You can't -”
“Are you coming down the station under your own steam,” Byron asked, “or do I have to ask Constable Sykes and Lady Constable Mortimer to assist?”
Harry glanced at Jo, his eyes filled with fear, before turning back to Byron.
“I'll answer your questions,” he said with a sigh, “but I want a lawyer, and I'm telling you right now that you're wasting your time. You'll never -”
“No, you're wasting my time,” Byron replied as he gestured for Harry to follow him to a nearby patrol car. “Fortunately, you'll have a chance to fix that by telling the truth once we're at the nick. Come on, move.”
Harry looked at Jo again, before following the police.
Still keeping out of sight behind the phone box, Jo listened as Jack Byron continued to make insinuations about Harry's guilt. After a moment, she peered around the corner just in time to see Harry getting into the back of the car, and then she waited as Byron and the officers drove away. Once they were out of view, she stepped around the phone box and made her way toward the hotel, quickly hurrying up the steps and into the reception area. With the police having taken the body away and completed their sweeps of the building, the hotel's employees were trying to get things back to normal, although shocked guests were still milling about in the lobby and it was clear that nobody knew how to handle the situation now that Susannah was gone.
Slipping through the crowd, Jo managed to slip unnoticed past the reception desk, and she quickly made her way through the unlocked door that led into Susannah's empty office. Once she'd gently pushed the door shut behind her, she paused and saw that the drawers of the desk had been left open, which she knew meant that Byron's officers had already conducted a full search.
As full as they ever managed, at least.
Stepping forward, she made her way over to the desk and saw an assortment of hotel documents. Picking up one of the many print-outs, she saw that it contained a guest list for the previous night, which she folded and slipped into her pocket before making her way around the desk and crouching down to take a closer look at the open drawers, which had clearly been stripped of anything that Jack Byron and his team had considered useful or relevant. Still, reaching inside, Jo felt to make sure nothing was taped to the top of each opening, just in case Susannah might have hidden something that had been missed.
There was nothing.
Getting to her feet, she headed over to the bookcase and saw that most of the titles were related to the hotel and catering industries. She pulled one out and began to flick through, before realizing she was wasting her time. Slipping the book back into place, she turned and looked across the office, and she was already starting to think that perhaps she wasn't going to find anything useful. For once, perhaps Jack Byron and his men had done a halfway decent job and had scoured the place thoroughly, although she couldn't ignore the nagging thought that Byron was notorious for always screwing up a case somewhere along the way.
Always missing something.
Always overlooking things that others later noticed.
After all, Byron had a reputation for rushing his investigations, and for trying to get everything figured out by shouting at people. That included his officers, who were usually being harangued and rushed by their boss to such an extent that they never had time to really examine a crime scene properly. Sure, Byron had a decent case closure rate, and he fairly often stumbled to the right answer, but Jo knew that along the way there'd surely be a collection of missed opportunities. At that moment, for example, Byron was surely interrogating Harry Morgan with unmatched ferocity.
And while she still didn't know who'd killed Deborah Dean or Susannah Marriott, she was fairly sure that Harry Morgan was not responsible for either death.
Still, after searching the office for a few more minutes, she found nothing of interest. Out of sheer desperation, she began to sift through the rest of the documents on the desk, although deep down she already figured that she was unlikely to strike gold in a bunch of paperwork about the day-to-day life of a hotel. Finally, telling herself that it had been worth a shot but that she needed to get going, she made her way around the desk, only to bump her foot against the wastepaper basket.
Looking down, she saw that the basket was filled with dumped pieces of paper. Byron's men would certainly have gone through it, but they'd obviously not seen fit to take very much away. Crouching down, she started looking through the various scrunched-up pieces of paper, finding nothing of interest until finally she pulled out a thick, folded wad of pages that had been stapled together. Taking a look at the first page, she realized to her surprise that she'd found what appeared to be the first few chapters of a novel.
At the bottom of each page, a printed date-stamp showed that the chapters had been printed out a little over six months earlier, just a few days before Deborah Dean's death.
“Seriously?” she muttered, flicking through the pages as she began to consider the possibility that she'd located at least a portion of Deborah's manuscript. She knew that Susannah had once seen a copy, but that didn't explain why it was suddenly in the bin now, half a year later.
Suddenly the door opened and the receptionist stepped into the room, stopping as soon as she saw Jo.
“Who are you? Are you with the police?”
“I wa
s promoted to the rank of Detective Sergeant a few years ago,” Jo said, not strictly lying as she got to her feet and slipped the novel pages into her jacket pocket. “Sorry, I just wanted to nose around.”
“I thought the police had all left.”
“That is certainly the case at this particular moment,” Jo replied carefully as she headed over to the door.
“So we can start cleaning up?” the receptionist asked. “I'm sorry, it's just that everything's so chaotic this morning and we don't know where to start.”
“Did Detective Inspector Byron not give you any instructions?”
“Not really. He just sort of yelled at me when I asked.”
“I think that means he's done here,” Jo replied. “I think he thinks he's got his man. Feel free to start tidying up.”
Stepping back out into the crowded reception area, she began to make her way over to the front door. People were still milling about, still talking excitedly about the morning's awful events, and Jo wasn't entirely surprised to find that the people of Chelmsbury were already gossiping about Susannah Marriot's death. She overheard half a dozen theories about the murder before she even reached the door, and then she felt someone nudge her arm as she was about to head outside.
“Your boss is a right tosser,” the man from the off-license said grumpily.
“Oh, he's not my -”
Jo hesitated for a moment, before realizing that there was no point admitting to anything that wasn't strictly necessary.
“Sorry about that,” she continued. “Detective Inspector Byron doesn't have a very good bedside manner.”
“I was only trying to tell him what I'd seen,” the man continued, “but he said it wasn't relevant. Wouldn't even let me finish a sentence.”
“And what did you see?” Jo asked.
“It's probably nothing,” he replied, “but do you remember when you were in my shop the other day, and I told you that some guy had freaked Deborah Dean out one night?”