by Gytha Lodge
“Just send another message,” Jonah said, as evenly as he could. “Say we’ve got a bit of a situation with a suspect and you need him to head back as soon as he can. Best not to alert her if she can see his phone screen.”
“OK.” Jonah could see her hands were shaking as she typed, and he remembered driving through infuriating rush-hour traffic a few months ago to try to protect Hanson herself. “It’ll be OK,” he said. “She doesn’t know anything, and Ben’s got a calm head on him.”
* * *
—
LIGHTMAN ALMOST WALKED into a rack full of drying clothes, and heard Greta shout, “Sorry. I should have sent you to the other one. Aidan’s always on at me about it.”
He edged inside and turned to shut the door. It clicked in place, but there was no lock on it. Just an unpainted wooden space where a lock had once been.
He was absolutely still for a few moments, his hand on the handle. His phone, back in his pocket, buzzed, but he didn’t pull it out.
I should have sent you to the other one…
He took a breath and then very quietly he opened the door again.
She was waiting for him, a look of mingled grief and anger on her face. Resting against her leg in a tight grip was a long, pointed kitchen knife.
* * *
—
“HE’S NOT READ it,” Hanson said after a minute.
“Give him time,” Jonah replied. “And he might have seen it on his home screen, anyway.”
“What if he doesn’t read it?”
“Then he’ll probably just call up with his evidence and leave, and then we can move in,” Jonah soothed. Though he had to admit that there was a trickle of worry running through him, too. Greta had fooled him for days, and her husband for months. She was bloody smart. And she was also strong and unpredictable. Jonah didn’t like any of those things in a killer.
* * *
—
“FUCK,” GRETA SAID. And then she gave a tearful laugh. “What an idiot. I’m…I’m sorry. I’ve done this to you. It wasn’t your fault. I just had a moment…” She gave a sniff. “I guess I was just too much into the tearful-wife act and got sloppy. Though…you know, it isn’t all an act. It’s a year’s worth of pain, too. All built up and waiting to come out.”
“It’s all right,” he said, and gave her a smile that was as calm and reassuring as he could make it. He knew that Greta meant to kill him. She was a strong woman with a knife. She had a good chance of injuring him. Yet he didn’t feel particularly scared. Not after the sterile hospital he’d left his father in, and the thought of a slow, painful dwindling.
“It isn’t all right, though, really,” Greta said. “I’m going to have to do what I did to her, only you don’t deserve it.” Her brow creased with worry. “I don’t feel like I have a choice.”
“Of course you do,” Lightman said, and he gave a short laugh. “Knowing what you’ve done isn’t the same as successfully convicting you of it. A whole lot happens during a court case, and it’s hard to really prove what someone’s done. Particularly when they’ve been careful.”
Greta seemed to consider this for a moment, and Lightman thought about his phone, still tucked away in his pocket.
“It’s a lot harder to get away with two murders than one,” he added quietly. “And my DCI knows where I am.”
She nodded. “So you’d have to have obviously left here. I’d have to use your car, and make sure I drove past enough cameras.”
Lightman felt a cold sort of admiration for her. She was so quick to understand and to plan. It wasn’t just about taking care, he thought. It was about having the sort of mind that could take a problem apart and find a solution in moments.
“A camera might well pick up that it was you driving,” he said.
“I’d need your clothes,” she said, looking him over.
“Or we could go and look at the proof of what Aidan did,” he said with a meaningful look. “You’ve got plenty enough there to convict him, or at least to cast significant doubt.”
“And spend months in court trying to win the sympathy vote in order to get out of jail? You think I want to be crying in front of them all about how he was a terrible person, and admitting to the world that I was weak enough to let him do it? I’d have to play the wronged wife, and I did everything I could—everything not to be her.” Greta shook her head and raised her chin. “I’d rather go down fighting.”
“Maybe you should fight the right person,” a quiet voice said from behind Lightman’s left shoulder.
It was such a shock that he actually turned away from Greta and the knife. And it was very lucky that Greta was just as startled by her husband’s arrival as he was.
* * *
—
“TWENTY-TWO MINUTES,” HANSON said, reading the time off Jonah’s GPS.
He glanced at her. “Nothing from Ben yet?”
“No.”
“I’m sure he’s fine,” he said reassuringly, but he still squeezed his foot down harder on the accelerator.
* * *
—
“WHAT ARE YOU doing here?” Greta asked, and as she spoke to her husband, her voice lost all of its warmth. It was cold now. Furious. Disgusted.
“I came to talk to you,” Aidan said. “Because I realized what had happened. And after that, after initially being angry, I realized that I’d done it to you.”
“Why do you have to be here?” she asked. “Just go to hell and burn!”
“I need to tell you how sorry I am.” He stepped forward, and she was immediately on alert. She lifted the kitchen knife and held it out in front of her with a noise like a wildcat.
“I’m not going to listen to anything you say!” she said. “I’m done with listening. You have lied and lied to me. You couldn’t even love me enough when she’d dumped you. You wanted her so much that you had to…to…to perv on her. I’ve never felt so humiliated in my life.”
Lightman was more caught up by their conversation than he should have been. He needed to move. He needed to get Aidan and himself out of there or find a way of disabling Greta. But it was hard to move when he couldn’t look away from the two of them, hanging there in a moment of hurt and hatred and almost violence.
“I know,” Aidan said. “I know how much that must have hurt. I’ve done awful things. Because I’m a loser. You were right.” He took another step, but Greta didn’t move, and he was now only inches from the knife. “I wanted to be with you because you’re strong and you’re beautiful, and then I couldn’t cope with it. I was looking for your approval when I could never get a word of it from my mum, and that wasn’t your fault.”
Lightman forced himself to take stock of the situation properly. Greta was blocking the kitchen doorway, and he didn’t think he could make it to the stairs. Aidan was unfortunately blocking his access to the front door. But if he would just step a few feet farther into the room, Lightman would be able to run for the open front door behind him.
The only obstacle was Greta, who was holding the knife out toward Aidan and doing everything to discourage him from walking forward.
“I gave you approval,” Greta spat. “I gave you constant pride in yourself. Even though you could never be proud of me in case it somehow emasculated you. I gave you bloody everything a person could and instead you chose that…that…that whore. And you told her that I was cold to you.”
Lightman took a step farther away from Greta, and closer to the front door.
He might, he thought, be able to get past Aidan, just. Ideally, he needed to shove Aidan out of the door with him. He thought it through as he took another slight step to the left. Lunge. Grab. Drag. All before Greta had a chance to do any damage with that knife.
The question was whether he’d be putting Aidan Poole in too much danger.
“I told myself over and ove
r that you were cold and unappreciative and uninterested,” Aidan said quietly. Tears started tracking down his face. “It was my one defense for being a…a shit to you. And I know it was unfair. But it was the only thing I had to level at you. That sometimes you didn’t pander to my ego as much as I wanted. But I had you all wrong, didn’t I? Just unbelievably wrong. You were thinking of me all the time. And you weren’t this straightforward open book, either. You were hiding so much hurt and carrying on anyway.”
“Stop doing that!” she said.
“Stop what?”
“You’re saying what I want to hear! You’re just…you’re just lying all over again.”
Aidan shook his head. “I’m not saying it because I hope you’ll take me back, even though I don’t think I’m ever going to stop wanting that. I’m saying it because it’s what you deserve to hear and I should have said it a bloody year ago and grown up enough to save the two of us.” He raised a hand to rub at his cheeks. “I’ve never not been obsessed with you. With the way other men look at you, and with the way everyone is drawn to you. I only managed to stop thinking about you by pretending you were someone else.”
Lightman was almost in position. Aidan was doing a good job of holding her interest.
He was going to have to act and risk getting it wrong. He could see that. Greta wasn’t backing down.
“Stop moving!” Greta said suddenly. She was speaking to Lightman this time. She’d seen the danger.
“Greta,” Aidan said, his hand up, “you don’t need to hurt him. You don’t need to hurt anyone. I love you. I love you so much. And I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”
“If you love me,” she said, a shake to her voice that hadn’t been there before, “then you’ll get the hell out of here and let me deal with this. You’ll leave, and then maybe you’ll help me to cover it up if I need you to.”
Aidan gave her a funny little smile. “Darling, neither of us is getting out of here. That’s not how this ends, is it?” And with that smile still on his face, he stepped forward.
Lightman totally failed to take advantage and get out. He was convinced he’d just seen Aidan walk into the point of a knife.
But somehow the knife was by Greta’s side again, and then behind Aidan’s back as she clung to her husband. They were lost to him in a fierce embrace that made him want to edge out of the room.
Instead he gently removed the knife from Greta’s hand and walked outside.
Jonah saw the first of the flashing lights at the same moment Hanson drew in a gasp of air next to him. It was hard not to floor the accelerator for the last hundred yards, but he drew up carefully behind the squad car at the curb. There was no ambulance, he saw. No ambulance, at least yet.
Hanson had her door open before the car had stopped and was moving at almost a run up to the house.
“Ma’am!” one of the two police officers who were standing near the driveway called.
“Where’s Ben? Where’s Sergeant Lightman?” Jonah heard her ask as he opened his door to follow her.
“Juliette.” It was Lightman’s voice, speaking from somewhere out of sight. Jonah hotfooted it around until he could see Ben. He was just inside the front door, with a paper cup of tea in his hand. He also, by that time, had Juliette Hanson folded into a hug.
Jonah gave him a brief grin and then raised his eyebrows at the nearest uniform. “Any chance of a sitrep?”
* * *
—
GRETA HAD BEEN driven away from the scene a few minutes before, and Aidan had begged to go with her. Unsure whether they ought to be arresting him as well, the uniforms ended up agreeing.
They had wound up in two different interview rooms, and Aidan had already told the arresting sergeant twice that it was all his fault and he should be the one going to jail.
“It’s pretty fucked up, isn’t it?” Hanson had muttered from her position in the corridor as they watched Aidan being brought a cup of coffee. The four of them—including O’Malley, who had refused to be left out—were preparing themselves to start the process of charging Greta Poole. “Does he really still love her after she killed his mistress?”
“I think he might,” Lightman said. “When he started in on all that apologetic stuff, I thought he was bullshitting to give me time to get out. I thought he was being clever. And then he went and invited her to stab him…and I can’t see any reason why he’d do that, or sit and defend her, if he didn’t love her in some weird way.”
“It’s funny,” Jonah muttered. “Every move of his has been characterized by weakness. Even his strongest one. Theirs is a pretty screwed-up story.”
Hanson turned to look at him and frowned. “I don’t agree. It’s not their story. It’s Zoe’s story. However weirdly romantic this end-of-it-all stuff is, Greta murdered her. It was Zoe who was the bloody victim, not Greta Poole.”
“Amen to that,” Jonah said, and then he sighed. “Shall we get started?”
* * *
—
“I COULD TELL the day after he first slept with her,” Greta said, her voice as strong and as measured as it had been before all this. She sat with her arms out in a triangle on the table in front of her, the tips of her fingers together and her thumbs moving ever so slightly to brush past each other. “He was jumping every time his phone buzzed and trying to look at messages without me seeing. It was painfully clear.”
“But you didn’t confront him about it?” Lightman asked her.
“I didn’t know how to begin addressing it until I had proof,” she said. “Which turned out to be easy to get. I got up early on the Saturday morning and took his phone downstairs instead of mine. I looked at his messages, and then on WhatsApp, and I found out everything I needed to know.”
There was a shake in her voice, and it was clear to Jonah that this was still an awful memory for her. A single point of trauma from which everything else had spread. And it hadn’t been necessary for it to go like this, he thought. She could have done a very different thing and just left him.
“What stopped you walking out on him then?”
Greta hesitated. “A few things. I don’t know exactly which was the strongest. It was humiliation partly. My initial reaction was to scream at him, but I realized that meant I’d have to throw him out. And if I threw him out, then everyone would know. They would know what he’d done, and they’d judge me.”
“Don’t you think they would have judged him?” Jonah asked gently.
Greta fixed him with a withering gaze. “Have you ever seen what happens when a marriage breaks down like that? Like it did for my mother? Have you seen how it’s never, ever the man’s fault? No, it must be because she’d let herself go, or was too boring, or wasn’t pleasing him in the bedroom…” She put her hands flat on the table and curled her fingers up until the knuckles went white. “I learned pretty young how that one goes. And I wasn’t going to let that shit happen to me. I’d put too much into being this perfect wife. Did you know that I’ve never gone a day of this marriage without putting makeup on?”
Jonah nodded, and it seemed to take a little of the anger out of her.
“So you hoped that he would stop the affair?”
“Yes,” Greta said. “I hoped he would see reason. How could he not, when I was just perfect? I spent more time on cooking, and I ate less myself. I pumped poison into my face to get rid of the lines, and I gave him more fucking head than any man has ever had and survived.”
It was awful, and it was funny, and Jonah tried not to give in to laughter. That kind of thing never sounded good on a recording. Though he thought Greta might have appreciated it. He let out a breath instead, and said, “But he kept on with the affair.”
“Yes,” Greta said, and her voice was suddenly thick. “He did. And I knew, because he’s no good at deception, for all he thinks he is. He had his phone synched to his
other computers, and sometimes when I was at home, the messages would flash up on the desktop. I didn’t even need to log on to see them.”
He thought about how she had seen many of Zoe’s messages and only some of Aidan’s. Had that setup been part of what had driven her to kill? Because all she could see was the other woman flirting or sexting, and not his replies that had played an equal part in their dialogue?
“When did you make the decision to kill Zoe?” he asked quietly.
“It wasn’t an instant decision,” Greta told them hesitantly. “It was a culmination of a lot of things. After I tagged him in a photo on Facebook to make sure she knew about me, she dumped him. I could tell from Aidan’s face after he read her message. I thought it was done.”
“But it wasn’t?” Jonah asked.
“No, it wasn’t.” Greta’s voice was hard. “She took him back in under a month. There’s no way she could claim ignorance after that. She knew about me, and she chose to keep on doing it. It got harder and harder to forgive her.”
“But they were no longer together when you killed her,” Jonah said. “Aidan had ended it. Wasn’t that enough?”
Greta shook her head. “She’d done too good a job on him. He was still…fixated. I went through his machine, and I found images of her that he’d screen-shotted. Images taken long after they broke up, when she didn’t even know he was watching. And God, that felt worse than anything has ever felt.” She took a sudden breath. It was part inhalation and part sob.
“Tell us about that night,” Lightman said. “Thursday night. It was meticulously planned, wasn’t it?”
“Of course it was,” Greta said. “I had to be free of her. I wanted Aidan not…not to be…” She shook her head again and breathed in, and was suddenly the strong woman again. The woman who had acted. “I went to her flat twice that day. The first time, I took clothes with me, which I left in a locker at the DW gym near the station. I needed to check that she had an art knife I could use, one that was unquestionably hers, and I decided to avoid later hassle by taking it with me.”