The Couple on Cedar Close

by Anna-Lou Weatherley

  ‘What time did you return from the supermarket, Laurie?’ This is actually the question Delaney should’ve asked.

  ‘I can’t remember the exact time but—’

  ‘Roughly?’ Delaney chips in.

  ‘Oh God…’ She’s getting visibly more distressed as he presses her, tapping her feet nervously on the floor.

  ‘I don’t know… It was just getting dark, maybe around 4.30 p.m.? I don’t know… I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay.’ I give her what I hope is a reassuring nod. ‘Did you see anyone while you were out – a friend, a neighbour, anyone who would recognise you?’

  She runs her hands down her face, clawing at her skin as if this would somehow help her think. ‘No, no one… Well, actually, I saw one of the neighbours – I’m sorry, I can’t remember her name. She lives a few doors down from Monica.’

  ‘What did you do when you returned home?’

  ‘I had a shower, got ready and dressed. Then I started preparing the food, cooking the meal I had planned.’

  ‘Did he stand you up, Laurie? Did he turn up late? Was dinner ruined and did that make you angry?’

  She looks at Delaney nervously. ‘I was angry, yes… when he didn’t show up at 7.30 p.m. I felt… I felt let down.’

  ‘Let down and angry. That’s understandable, Mrs Mills,’ Delaney says. ‘He’d been unfaithful hadn’t he, your husband? Had an affair with a…’ He flips through his notepad. ‘With Claire. That’s right, isn’t it?’

  She visibly flinches at the sound of Claire’s name. ‘Yes. He did.’ Her voice is a low, hoarse whisper of a thousand emotions.

  ‘He left you, didn’t he, to be with Claire, his mistress?’

  I can see that this line of questioning is excruciatingly painful for Laurie Mills and I struggle not to reach out and comfort her.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Physically. But he never left me, not in the true sense of the word…’ She says this with such melancholy that it resonates in the interview room. And I understand. Rachel. She’s never really left me.

  ‘But you weren’t living together?’

  She swallows. Draws breath.

  ‘He came round that night to serve you with divorce papers, didn’t he? And that was too much, wasn’t it, Mrs Mills? That was the final straw, the final insult. You knew your marriage couldn’t be saved and that your husband was going to start a new life with his lover and their child so you—’

  ‘NO!’ she says, with much more conviction this time.

  ‘But we found the papers, the solicitor’s letter. It was underneath his body in the bedroom, still in the envelope, unopened.’

  Laurie looks at me as if for conformation of this, like she thinks Delaney is bluffing. So I nod at her and she starts to cry.

  ‘I… I thought… I thought that maybe… It crossed my mind he may want a divorce, but I didn’t think he’d ever go through with it. I didn’t see any papers, no solicitor’s letter.’

  Delaney sits back in his chair, pleased with himself.

  ‘What did you see, Laurie?’ I ask her gently.

  She pauses for a short moment that feels longer than it is. ‘I drank some vodka,’ she says, her head low. ‘I had a couple of drinks while I was preparing the meal. Then a couple more as I sat and waited for him and watched it all spoil. I thought he’d stood me up. That he’d changed his mind… Robert liked playing games… mind games—’

  ‘And you were rightly pissed off that you’d gone to so much trouble, yes?’ Delaney begins with the leading questions again.

  ‘Yes,’ she admits. ‘Yes I was.’

  ‘So, what did you do, Laurie?’ I cut in again. Softly, softly catchee monkey.

  ‘I drank some more,’ she answers, obviously ashamed as she drags her hand across her forehead, pulling at the skin on her cheeks once more. ‘The vodka… then the wine, the Prosecco. I… I think I fell asleep.’

  ‘That’s a fair bit of alcohol,’ Delaney remarks. ‘Do you drink like that a lot, Mrs Mills?’

  Michaels shifts in his chair, the fabric of his shiny suit catching the light. It really is a bad suit and I wonder if I should ask him where he got it so I can avoid that particular shop.

  ‘I drink more now,’ she says quietly. ‘Since the accident.’

  ‘The accident?’ Delaney asks.

  ‘Look, I feel like we’re getting off track here,’ Michaels pipes up.

  I’m inclined to agree with him but the accident comment intrigues me. I make a mental note of it; we’ll get back to it later.

  ‘What time did you wake up, Laurie?’

  She looks at me; her lips are quivering and her hands are shaking uncontrollably. ‘I don’t know. It was dark. It was pitch black and I was lying upstairs on the bed,’ she says. ‘I don’t know how I got there—’

  ‘And what did you do next?’ I ask.

  Her brow is furrowed as she strains to recall the details.

  ‘I felt groggy,’ Laurie continues. ‘The lights weren’t working… I tried to turn them on but… I thought maybe there had been a power cut so I decided to go downstairs and look for—’

  ‘Look for what, Mrs Mills?’ Delaney keeps interjecting, won’t let her finish. He hasn’t learned the art of staying quiet and waiting for people to fill the silence.

  ‘Look for a torch. I felt wet, like my dress was wet. I was so disorientated. It was dark. I was upstairs and I didn’t know why. Robert had stood me up and—’

  ‘Was Robert already in the house then? Did you see him? Did he show up late and you had some kind of argument? Did things get out of hand?’ Delaney is pushing again. This is more like round-three questioning. This is not how I like to do things and I’ve half a mind to cut the interview there and then. Instead I shoot Delaney a look. One that says ease the fuck up in no uncertain terms. It seems to work because he sits back from the table.

  ‘In the house already? No… no… Well, I guess he must have been. But I didn’t know… I swear I didn’t know he was there until— And there was no argument because I didn’t see him.’ Her eyes are pleading with mine. ‘I didn’t know he was there. I thought he’d stood me up. I – I…’

  She’s babbling, distress coming off her in waves. Her eyes dart around the room before they rest on mine and I look directly into them. I know a thing or two about lying, and about liars too. Inevitably you learn in this game. You sure as shit hear enough of them and meet enough of them. They’re not always easy to spot without a trained eye though. Some liars, the psychos and seasoned manipulators, are so exceptionally adept at pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes that they can convince almost anyone: police, judges, therapists, their families and friends and co-workers. Psychopaths are such consummate liars because they believe their own lies. They lie to themselves first and foremost. And if you’ve convinced yourself that you’re telling the truth, well then, it’s not really a lie is it? I’ve even known some to pass polygraphs with flying colours. But as some clever sod once said, You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time… Jesus, now who was it who said that?

  Anyway, sometimes, even with the most skilful and practised psychopaths and liars, little things often give them away. It’s in the minutiae, in the ever-so-subtle details, if you know what to look for. Body language is key. A tilt of the head, the flicker of an eyelid, a brief downward turn of the mouth, the slightest shrug of a shoulder… All of us believe we are in control of our bodies, but they can betray us in subconscious ways. Guilty people often overcompensate; they mimic a reaction that they feel they should display. But you can’t mimic truth. It exists in itself and it has a way of exposing itself.

  Don’t listen to what people tell you, Riley, an old-school DCI I worked under once told me. Look at what they show you. And right now, Laurie Mills is showing me that she hasn’t really got a clue what Delaney is talking about.

  ‘I looked for the torch but it was too dark. I cou
ldn’t see a thing, so I went to the kitchen to find my phone and used the torch app on that. I saw that the switch had tripped so I flicked it up and the lights came on. That’s when I saw… that’s when I saw the blood.’ She starts whimpering again, shaking her head violently as if trying to erase the image, like an Etch A Sketch. ‘So much blood…’ she whispers. She’s pulling at her hair now, twisting it between her fingers until strands of it fall onto the table.

  ‘Did you know where the blood had come from, Laurie, the source?’ I ask the question tentatively because she’s talking now, opening up a little, remembering things, and I silently pray that Delaney doesn’t mess up and say anything that will shut her down. She’s as fragile as fine china, like she could break at any moment. And I’m concerned that if she does she won’t be able to put herself back together again.

  ‘I was in shock, to see that much blood… God…’ She exhales and inhales in a bid to regulate her breathing. ‘I thought it must have come from me. That I’d hurt myself somehow.’

  ‘So you don’t remember cutting your wrists, Laurie?’ Delaney chips in.

  Where is Lucy Davis when you need her? I swear Woods has done this on purpose, put me with Delaney on this case to deliberately antagonise me. But I do need to find a way to work cohesively with him. And by cohesively, I mean without wanting to knock his teeth down his throat.

  ‘No! No I don’t.’ She looks at me and Delaney, then down at her tiny bandaged wrists. ‘I swear I don’t remember cutting my own wrists at all. I just… I just don’t think I would do that… I wouldn’t—’

  Delaney looks at his notes. ‘You suffer from depression – that’s right, isn’t it, Laurie?’

  Laurie is staring at her wrists now. There’s a pause. ‘Yes. Since… Yes, I do.’ Her voice is laced with so much sadness I can almost taste it. ‘If I was ever going to commit suicide it would have been then, after the accident,’ she adds quietly. I think about asking her about the accident but Delaney cuts in before the question reaches my lips.

  ‘Were you stalking your husband, Mrs Mills?’

  I catch the look on Michaels’ face; I can see he’s trying to stop himself from burying his head in his hands.

  ‘Stalking him? No! No, not stalking… I wasn’t… Oh God, look, you don’t understand what he was like, what the relationship was like—’

  ‘What was it like?’ Delaney pushes further.

  ‘So you called his phone?’ I say, cutting in over Delaney. I need to establish the events of that day and night, get the interview back on track. ‘When you saw the blood, you called your husband’s phone. Why did you do that, Laurie?’

  Her decision to phone Robert strikes me as odd. Why would Laurie Mills, having just committed a vicious and brutal murder, call her husband’s phone knowing he was dead? Agreed, she could’ve wanted it to look like some kind of alibi, throw us off the scent; make it look like she didn’t know he was dead at that point. It could have been a careful, calculated move on her part, but I’m not getting that from her at all, not from the poor bewildered wretch sat shivering with fear in front of me. If Laurie Mills is lying, then she’s one of the best I’ve ever come across – Oscar-worthy in fact.

  Laurie wipes her nose with a tissue that she takes from the box on the table. Her face looks red raw from crying. ‘Yes. I rang his phone. I wanted to know why he hadn’t shown up. I was scared… confused—’

  ‘Can you remember what time this was?’ Delaney is back, leaning forward on the table now. It’s like he’s been taking lessons in police work by watching old episodes of The Sweeney.

  Laurie rubs her forehead again. She looks drained and exhausted. I know the feeling.

  ‘Really, I have no idea. I didn’t look at the time. I didn’t think to. The blood, the dark… I was panicking – nothing made sense. It rang out I think, his phone. I tried it again. That’s when I heard the noise – the ring—’

  ‘You heard the phone ringing?’ A rush of adrenaline causes my pulse to quicken.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I realised a phone was ringing… I was calling Robert’s number and I could hear a phone ringing. I didn’t understand, didn’t know what was going on, so I followed it. It sounded like it was coming from upstairs—’

  Delaney opens his mouth to speak and I have to stop myself from physically pulling him backwards. I am in charge here. Best Delaney knows it. I suddenly think of Fi again. The press will be all over this by now of course. A man dead in his own home, found by his estranged wife – who attempted to cut her own wrists, albeit superficially. It’s got all the elements of a front-pager: passion, jealousy, betrayal, rejection, attempted suicide… So far so good, and yet I’m unconvinced.

  ‘I heard the phone ring,’ she says, again. ‘And then I went upstairs.’

  Fourteen

  Laurie holds her head in her hands and feels her fingernails digging into her forehead. The full reality of the situation she finds herself in has not yet fully penetrated her rational brain. It’s as if she’s having an out-of-body experience; as if she’s a spectator in her own life, watching herself as though she were the audience in some tense stage drama, or having a particularly vivid nightmare from which she’s sure she will wake. Her cortisol levels are off the scale as her fight-or-flight instincts propel her into a heightened state of alert. She’s used to this feeling: it’s familiar, comforting almost.

  The detective sitting opposite her, the one with the cold eyes and expressionless face, frightens her. He believes that she’s killed Robert. It’s evident in his body language, in the directness of his speech and its delivery. He’s trying to push her into making a confession. She needs to be stronger. She always needed to be stronger, didn’t she? She should have been stronger. None of this would’ve happened if only she hadn’t been so weak, so filled with self-loathing, guilt and shame.

  She’s trying to answer the detective’s questions as best she can through the pea-soup-like fog in her mind. The antidepressants she’s been on don’t help her memory too much. It’s as though there’s a thin layer of dust that has blanketed it, like looking through a smeared windowpane.

  Laurie attempts to comfort herself, to ‘show up’ for herself as her therapist would say, by focusing on her breathing, regulating it, stemming the panic rising up through her small diaphragm. Forensics will prove that she didn’t kill Robert, won’t they? She must put faith in the system. Faith. Hope. She had never given up hoping. Hoping that he would change, hoping that he would see how much he was hurting her, hoping that if she hung on just this one last time then things might be right again…

  Laurie knows she will have to talk about the accident. They have already touched on it. And she will be obliged to answer them. Even at the thought of this she can feel the fresh, flimsy stitches of those gaping emotional wounds begin to unpick.

  ‘You followed the sound of the phone, Laurie? You went to locate it?’

  The other detective is speaking now, the nice one. Nicer, anyway. She suspects this is their modus operandi: good cop, bad cop, a cliché reserved for those TV police shows she sometimes used to watch back when she could concentrate on anything long enough. His eyes are definitely kinder than the other man’s, and she is naturally more easily drawn to them. She thinks she can see empathy in them, perhaps even sadness itself. It’s a small reassurance. He’s just another human being. She wonders if Monica has arrived yet.

  ‘Yes. I kept calling his number and it kept ringing out, going to voicemail. I could hear that it was coming from somewhere upstairs and—’

  ‘Was it not a little odd that you could hear your husband’s phone ringing inside your house? Did he still have a key to the property?’ The not-so-nice detective doesn’t let her finish.

  ‘Yes… yes I think he still had a key. It is – was – still his home. Our home. But he’d never just let himself in before, not since… I thought— Well, I initially thought that he’d turned up while I was sleeping, though I’m sure he would’ve woken me. He hated me d
rinki—’ She stops herself short.

  ‘He didn’t like you drinking?’

  Laurie shakes her head. She doesn’t want to elaborate; she feels so much shame already.

  ‘I thought that he’d probably gone upstairs for some reason – to lie down, take a shower or something… I don’t know. I thought maybe he must’ve fallen asleep. I didn’t know what was going on… I was covered in blood, it was dark—’

  ‘Seems a bit odd, don’t you think? That your ex-husband would just turn up, not wake you when you were supposed to be having dinner together, and then decide to go upstairs and lie down?’

  ‘No, no… I mean yes… and he’s not my ex-husband. And he didn’t know I was preparing dinner. But yes, I was confused… I didn’t understand it myself.’ She’s shivering. It’s cold in this room, or perhaps it’s just her shredded nerves. She has trouble keeping warm these days. She always feels cold. Her mother says it’s because she’s too thin and there’s not enough meat on her bones. But she thinks it’s because she feels dead inside.

  ‘Just tell us what happened next, Laurie.’ The nice detective speaks again and his voice is soothing.

  ‘I looked in the bedroom… I was still calling his number and it was ringing, but I couldn’t locate it immediately. I was searching, frantic, but he wasn’t there, in the bedroom. I kept calling… and then I stopped on the landing and listened, and it sounded like the ring was coming from the guest room so I went in. I saw he wasn’t on the bed but the noise was closer so I looked in the en suite and that’s when…’ Laurie feels horror crash into her as the image of her husband, of Robert, lying on the bathroom floor, confronts her again.

  ‘What was the first thing you noticed, Laurie?’ Nice Detective says, almost too quickly, like he’s trying to ask the question before Bad Detective gets a chance to.

  In spite of Laurie’s predicament she still senses tension between the two men. She’s an expert on picking up tension. Her therapist told her this was because of her own state of hypersensitivity, part of her PTSD.