As Cleo swung the car into her drive, her headlights briefly illuminated the sitting room.
She felt a jolt of shock, but the image was gone as the lights swung to the right to glare on the garage door. She hadn’t imagined it, though.
Just for a second as she had spun the wheel she was certain she had seen the silhouette of a man standing in the window.
37
Stephanie was glad the day was over. Unfortunately it meant it was one day closer to the time when she would be back in uniform, but she was sure she had done a good job as a detective and hoped she might be able to apply for a permanent post in CID with Gus’s backing.
Of course when the trial finished she and Gus would have no reason to see each other. He kept talking about going for a drink and a chat before she left, but maybe it would be better for both of them if she got him out of her life completely and moved on. There were another couple of command units within the force that she could apply to without moving to a completely different part of the country. That had to be for the best.
As she headed out of the court, Stephanie was dismayed to see that it was starting to drizzle. She put her head down and ran through the streets back towards where her car was parked, but the rain was getting heavier, and she had forgotten her umbrella. There was nothing for it; she had no choice but to dodge into the wine bar and wait out the rain. Either that or ruin the new green silk shirt she had bought especially for the court appearance.
She pushed through the door into a virtually empty bar. It was that strange tranquil time before the onslaught of people popping in for an after-work drink to noisily celebrate the end of another day – people who probably didn’t have anyone to rush home to. Much like herself, really.
She let the door swing to behind her, but before it clicked shut it was pushed open again. For some reason it came as no surprise to Stephanie to see Gus come striding in.
He hadn’t been on the stand for long that day. He only had to give evidence about the arrest, but she had enjoyed listening to his confident voice and watching how well the jury responded to him. She had felt a stirring of pride, as if he was still hers.
‘I thought it was you,’ he said, following her to the bar.
‘You stalking me?’ she asked with a slight smile.
‘Yeah. You got me. What are you drinking?’
Gus put his hand under Stephanie’s elbow and guided her away from the bar and towards a quiet corner at the back. She looked at him and raised her eyebrows, but he merely grinned.
‘Well, as you’re buying,’ she said, ‘I’ll have large glass of Malbec please.’
Gus turned back to the bar and she watched him from behind. She had always thought that he walked like an Italian man – that slight swagger that came from the innate sense of confidence bred into them by their adoring mothers. There was a looseness about him that usually made others feel comfortable around him. It had the opposite effect on Stephanie, putting her on her guard.
She heard him laughing with the barman over something – he always knew what to say. But she also knew that this was his affable side. Anyone who had seen Gus angry would think twice before they crossed him. His face would freeze and those soft brown eyes – laughing now with relaxed ease – would turn hard, black and frankly terrifying.
Those were the eyes he turned on Evie Clarke each time he looked at her. There was something he could see that Stephanie couldn’t.
38
Cleo was still sitting in her car, not knowing what she should do. She was certain there was a man in her house – standing in the window. She’d seen him. Or had she imagined it?
For one wild, ridiculous moment, she had thought it was Mark, and the quiver of pleasure she felt for those milliseconds before logic kicked in left her weak with longing for her brother. She wanted to call Aminah to ask if Zahid would come to her aid, but it would be a while before she forgot the look of dismay on her friend’s face as she left earlier, and Zahid had looked appalled when Lulu had called her Mumma.
Should she call the police? She had seen the silhouette only for a second. It could have been the shadow of a tree reflected in the glass, and she would look such a fool. What if they thought she was becoming unhinged by the trial? She didn’t want to give any indication that she was emotionally unfit to look after Lulu. They could take the child away from her, and that didn’t bear thinking about.
She had nobody left to fall back on. She had to face this alone.
Much as she hated the thought of leaving Lulu in the car even for two minutes, she couldn’t risk walking into the house carrying a small child if there was someone in there.
‘Lulu, darling, Mummy’s going to leave you in the car for a minute.’ She turned round to look at the child she now thought of as her own, safely strapped into her seat. Her little head with its fine covering of wispy dark hair was resting on the wing of the chair and in the gloom Cleo could see she was asleep. Good. Lulu wouldn’t know she was alone.
She opened the car door and got out as quietly as she could, pressing the key fob to lock all the doors. Keeping herself close to the wall, she slid her door key into the lock and turned it slowly. Should she switch the lights on, or should she walk in the dark into the sitting room, to see if the man was still standing there? Perhaps she should pretend she hadn’t seen him and stroll confidently into the house, switching the lights on and going straight to the kitchen, leaving the front door open. If he was there, it would give him an opportunity to escape.
Her heart felt as if it was coming up through her chest and into her throat. Every inch of her body seemed to be beating in time to its fast thud – she could hear it as well as feel it.
Cleo couldn’t bring herself to do as she had planned. She didn’t want to see his face, whoever he was, because he would become the face of her nightmares.
She opened the door quietly. If she stayed where she was and shouted, maybe he would come to her.
With the door still open behind her so she could run out into the street and scream if it came to that, Cleo shouted, ‘Hello? I know you’re there. I saw you. Who are you? What do you want?’
For a moment there was nothing. Then she heard a thump coming from the sitting room. It sounded as if he had walked into the coffee table.
‘I’m going to go back out to my car. I’m going to lock myself in. You can leave then. Take anything you want.’
She had started to reverse up to the door when she heard a voice speaking softly – little more than a whisper. ‘Cleo?’
Cleo stood still, frozen to the spot. She knew that voice – she would know it anywhere.
39
Stephanie had never imagined that she would end the day having a drink with Gus, but he was being relatively well behaved and had talked only about the case. He hadn’t yet strayed into personal territory.
‘The defence are putting up a good fight. I’ve come across Boyd Simmonds before, and he fools everyone into believing he’s benign, then he floors them – like I hear he did with Cleo North. But despite his cunning, I still say that Evie Clarke is going down for life.’
‘I get it that charging her with murder was our only option given that she clearly didn’t kill him in self-defence, but would it be the end of the world if her partial defence is successful and she’s sentenced on the voluntary manslaughter charge? Don’t you think you’re being a bit harsh, wanting her to be convicted of murder? Mark was abusing her for months, Gus. It’s not surprising that she lost it.’
Gus took a sip of his beer and shook his head slowly.
‘Steph, you know full well that I think abusers are the scum of the earth. They should be locked up – every last one of them. It sickens me when I hear of the shit some women have to put up with. But that’s not the point here. We’re not arguing about whether she was or wasn’t abused. We’re arguing about her state of mind when she killed him. There’s something about Evie and I just think there’s more to it. She seems too emotionally controlled
to have lost it. Too smart to have put herself at risk of going to prison for life.’
Stephanie sighed. She found it hard to believe that Gus was so intransigent; it was unlike him. He’d really got a bee in his bonnet about Evie Clarke.
‘You see Evie as a controlled, intelligent woman, Gus. I see someone who’s suffered enormously. And anyway, being smart doesn’t preclude her from being in an abusive relationship – it’s not a situation that’s confined to the weak and needy.’
Gus put his beer glass down on the table and leaned back in his chair. ‘I know that. That’s not what I meant. But Mark North’s not the one on trial here, although that’s not how it feels. You’re saying that effectively his guilt proves her innocence. But that’s not true, and he’s not here to speak for himself. We’re trying to determine if she planned to kill him – if it was murder. Think of the consequences if Evie is found not guilty. Will it persuade other victims of abuse to plan a murder and say it was a rush of blood to the head?’
It was pointless arguing. It didn’t matter how many times they discussed it, because Gus was adamant that Evie didn’t fit into his idea of a woman who would lose control.
‘There’s something about her, Steph. A kind of quiet assurance that doesn’t sit comfortably with a person who could lash out in a moment of madness.’
Stephanie understood what he was saying, but Gus hadn’t been the first officer on the scene to see the broken body of Mia North less than four years previously and she knew her discomfort about the coroner’s verdict on that death was influencing her judgement on this one. She had always believed there was more to it.
Stephanie clearly remembered that day. She had been at the house since the body was discovered, and it was several hours later that she heard Mark burst through the front door, shouting for his sister.
‘Cleo – what’s happened to Mia? What is it?’
Mark had been recalled from his business trip, but by the time he arrived home Mia’s body had been removed from the scene. Stephanie had watched the interaction between brother and sister, and had felt then that something was slightly off. There was nothing she could put her finger on, but it had felt odd. Cleo had been the one to discover Mia’s body at the bottom of the basement steps and she seemed agitated rather than upset.
‘I’m so sorry, Mark,’ she had said, putting her arms round him and hugging him close to her. ‘I did check her pulse – I didn’t know if I should or not, but I had to be sure.’
In Stephanie’s view there was nothing to be unsure about as Mia’s eyes were wide open, staring unseeing at the ceiling. Then Stephanie had heard Cleo begging Mark not to talk to the police until he had spoken to a solicitor. She remembered glancing into the master bedroom and seeing him with his head bent, his shoulders shaking, and Cleo pacing anxiously, telling him repeatedly that it was okay. She was there for him.
Mia’s death had been ruled an accident, but as part of the pre-trial investigation in the Evie Clarke case Gus had given Stephanie the go-ahead to take another look. If Mark had been abusing Evie, he could have been doing the same to his wife and they needed to be aware of anything the defence might bring to court. When she finally acknowledged that there was nothing to find, Stephanie realised she had been hoping to discover evidence of a succession of injuries to Mia North before her death, and she’d had to admit to herself that there was only one possible reason for her disappointment. She wanted to believe in Evie’s innocence.
‘I know you weren’t in court when I was giving my evidence,’ she said, deciding it was time to steer the conversation on to a less controversial subject, ‘but there was a man in the gallery who caught my eye.’
Gus raised his eyebrows.
‘Oh not like that,’ she said with a tut. ‘He was staring at Evie as if he wanted to burrow inside her head and extract whatever was lurking there. It was intense. I went up to the gallery for a closer look, but I’ve no idea who he was. Something rattled him, though, and he ended up tearing up a sheet of paper and scattering the pieces all over the floor.’
She fished the paper scraps from her pocket and dumped them on the table.
‘You picked them up? How very tidy of you. Do you want me to find a bin?’ Gus asked.
‘No. I wondered if there was anything on there that might be interesting.’ She ignored Gus’s withering glance. ‘When someone behaves like that, I want to know why. Call me nosy.’
Unfortunately, the rain had soaked through the pockets of her jacket, and as Stephanie started to separate the soggy pieces while Gus went to get another drink, she realised that it was going to be difficult to make any sense out of them.
‘They got wet in my pocket,’ she said as he put the drinks down on the table. ‘The writing’s all run together. I can’t send them to the lab, though, because I’ve no idea whether they’re relevant or not. It’s just that if he knew Evie, he might be someone else to talk to.’
Gus picked up a few of the scraps that Stephanie had successfully separated. The blue ink had been reduced to little more than a series of disconnected smudges.
‘Obviously a letter of some type. But we’ve got no proof this man has got anything to do with the case, so I don’t think you should worry about it.’
Stephanie ignored him and tried to match the pieces together. The letter had been folded when he had torn it, so several of the pieces were identical shapes. It was hard to work out how they fitted together with the smudged ink blurring the letters.
‘Listen to this, Gus. It starts, “My darling,” although there is no name after it, which isn’t helpful. It then seems to say something about someone dying. I can just about read the words “already dead”.’ Stephanie peered closer to the paper. ‘Don’t you think that makes it interesting?’
‘Let’s have a look,’ Gus said, moving round to look over her shoulder. ‘You’ve got these two pieces in the wrong place. See – here.’ He moved two scraps around.
Stephanie stared at the rearranged pieces. ‘That bit now says, “I am already dead.” That’s a bit weird, isn’t it?’
Between them, they managed to pick out a few words and phrases, but it still wasn’t clear.
‘It’s obvious that this is a farewell message from someone who was expecting to die. But I can’t see why it matters,’ Gus said. ‘The signature is “With love always, S x.” Sorry, Steph. I admire your detecting skills, but I don’t think this is going to lead you anywhere.’
Stephanie couldn’t help feeling disappointed. She gathered up the scraps of paper and pushed them back in her pocket.
40
Cleo was still reeling from the shock of hearing that voice – the voice that had once meant the world to her.
She stood still, waiting to hear if he would speak again – maybe the stress of the day was causing her to imagine things.
‘Cleo, it’s me,’ he said.
This time, she saw a shadow emerge from the sitting room and stand in the doorway, clearly uncertain of the reception he would get.
‘Sorry if I scared you.’ His voice was quiet, almost nervous.
‘Scared me – I was bloody terrified,’ she said, her voice coming out as a high-pitched squeak. ‘What are you doing here?’
Cleo glanced over her shoulder towards the car. Now that she knew there was no danger, she should go and get Lulu.
‘I was in court today, sitting in the gallery, behind you. I needed to see if you were coping, and I’m not sure you are.’
She sighed and leaned against the wall by the front door, ready to run for Lulu if she woke and started to cry.
‘Joe, we agreed not to see each other again. It’s good of you to care, but this isn’t helpful.’
‘I wrote to you, though. Pen, paper – the whole shebang.’ She could hear the slight smile in his voice. She had always loved to receive letters – they could be kept safe to reread in the future, unlike the more transient emails and texts. But she also wasn’t stupid and knew why Joe had chosen to write. Anythi
ng committed to his phone or his computer could easily be tracked by his wife.
‘I got your letter, and I appreciate it. But I could hardly respond, could I?’
She heard him breathe out slowly. ‘I suppose not. Can we talk though, now that I’m here? I want to be sure you’re okay. I can’t stand to see you suffering.’
Joe had no idea. How could she explain to him that she felt as if her body was in a vice, the pressure no less than it was four months ago? There was only one thing keeping her going.
‘You know I’ve got Lulu, don’t you?’
‘Of course. Just because I don’t see you any more doesn’t mean I don’t know what’s happening in your life.’
Cleo felt a vague shudder of unease. Had he been watching her?
‘Do you want me to get Lulu out of the car for you?’ he asked.
‘She doesn’t know you – she’d be scared. Look, go in the sitting room, shut the curtains and put the lamps on. I’ll take her straight up to bed. She’s been playing with Aminah’s kids all day so she’ll be shattered. I’ll be with you in a minute.’
She could almost feel Joe’s body tense as he forced himself not to look at his watch. Throughout all the time they had spent together, it had been the one thing that had driven her mad. He was forever checking the time to see if he was supposed to be home, or whether it was still safe to continue peddling the myth that he was working late.
It shouldn’t matter to her any more, but it did. She turned her back on him and ran out to the car, the rain now falling heavily. Leaning in to unstrap Lulu she felt the cold drops hit her back and slither under the waistband of her skirt.
‘Come on, baby girl. Let’s get you inside.’
Lulu started to object to being woken, grizzling and saying two of the few words she could manage. ‘No, Mumma, no.’
Cleo kissed her soft cheek and lifted her out, protecting the top of her head with her hand. She ran up the couple of steps and in through the front door. She could see the sitting room light was on now, but she didn’t pause, continuing up the stairs with Lulu, who was starting to nod off again.
And So It Begins Page 17