‘Yes, difficult for him to keep his hands to himself,’ Stanley adds.
Agnes looks away, embarrassed.
‘Those vows meant nothing to someone like Robert.’
‘You were fond of Laurie?’ I address the question to Agnes.
She smiles faintly. ‘Yes, yes I was. We were excited when we found out about the twins. We thought… well, we really thought this might be the chance to be a normal family, didn’t we, Stan?’
Stanley Atkins gives his wife a look that immediately silences her.
‘It was tragic what happened to Laurie and those babies.’ Stanley Atkins’ voice is tinged with anger. ‘We couldn’t condone what Robert had done… the affair with the girl, the one who’s dead now.’
‘Claire Wright,’ I say. ‘Her name was Claire Wright.’
‘I never had Laurie down as the violent type, Detective,’ Agnes suddenly says. ‘Laurie wouldn’t say boo to a goose. She was a nice girl, decent. She loved Robert. We all did.’
I nod.
‘Are you familiar with someone called Monica Lewis? I believe she’s a long-standing friend of both Robert and Laurie, is that correct?’
I watch Agnes Atkins’ reaction carefully. I’m sure I see fear in her eyes, although she does not look at her husband.
‘Yes,’ she says measuredly. ‘We know who Monica is.’
‘She’s an old family friend from way back. We haven’t seen her in many years though,’ Stanley adds.
‘Laurie Mills was staying at Monica’s house following your son’s murder. They seem very close.’
Agnes looks away and I think I hear Stanley make a noise.
‘Yes. They were friends; I think they met at school,’ he says, his mouth forming a thin, grim line. ‘Is there anything else we can help you with, Detective?’
I want to say, You could start by telling me the truth, but instead I smile and thank them for their help, apologise for their loss once again and tell them I’ll be in touch.
Davis’s phone rings as Agnes shows us out and she goes ahead to the car, leaving us standing on the doorstep.
‘Thank you for your time, Agnes,’ I say, stalling. I feel like she wants to tell me something. I sense it from her body language. There’s an urgency behind her eyes. ‘If there’s anything else… if anything else comes to you, however insignificant you might think it is, please call me.’ I hand her my card and she accepts it with shaking fingers. ‘Day or night,’ I add, making direct eye contact with her.
‘Detective,’ she says, but Stanley appears at the doorway and she doesn’t get to finish the sentence before he closes the door.
Fifty-Three
Laurie stares at the smooth white-brick walls and listens to the thudding of her own rapid heartbeat. They’ve charged her with two counts of murder and one of attempted murder. Her husband, his mistress and their child. She will be vilified and hated, despised by people. The baby killer.
She has given in and called her mother, finally. She didn’t want her to hear the news via the media. Cynthia would hate being the last to know.
It had been oddly reassuring to hear her mother’s voice on the telephone. It’s different to how she remembers it as a child; it has a slight nasal US twang to it now that doesn’t really suit her. She imagines her mother as she has become today, bohemian and pseudo-intellectual, stuck in the 1960s, a cereal-box feminist who’d secretly always needed a man by her side to feel complete, and sometimes more than one. She lived near Venice Beach somewhere in California. Laurie has seen photographs of her condo surrounded by cacti and vintage metal signs. It has a small porch with one of those swinging chairs that American homes always have on TV shows, but she has never been there. Her mother has never invited her.
Robert had never liked Cynthia. And the feeling had always been mutual. Laurie’s mother had been a reluctant guest at their wedding, leaving as soon as it was safe enough not to raise eyebrows.
He may be easy on the eye, Laurie, but mark my words that man has secrets… He’s bad news. That’s what Cynthia had said to her on their wedding day. Laurie had wondered why her mother could never just be happy for her. Nothing and no one had ever been good enough, or even simply enough. When Laurie had told her she was pregnant with twins her mother’s response was to say, ‘Two! That’ll put years on you! That man will leave you to do all the work, you know. You’ll be left holding the babies while he’s off doing goodness knows what with goodness knows who…’ Her words had always stung, even though Cynthia had been right.
‘Oh, Laurie… what a mess.’ Her mother’s strained voice displayed a mix of worry tinged with, she thought, disappointment. ‘It’s those meds you’re taking isn’t it, with the booze… Look, we’ll get you a good brief. I will get you a good brief, pay for the best there is. Maybe if you plead insanity you’ll get a lenient sentence—’
‘But I’m not insane, Cynthia!’ Laurie had said, incredulous that her mother could be so blasé about it. ‘I didn’t kill them! I didn’t kill Claire or try to kill the baby… and I don’t think I killed Robert.’ But she hardly had any energy left to protest. It was an effort just to raise her voice.
Her mother had remained quiet for a moment as the line crackled and Laurie had felt compelled to fill the silence.
‘They tell me I blacked out. That the PTSD causes me to experience these moments where I don’t remember things…’ She’d looked down at her shaking hands and wondered if they belonged to a murderer, if there was blood on them. But there was a third person – she’s absolutely sure of it.
‘I’ll get a plane over as soon as I can, Laurie.’ Her mother’s voice sounded weary now, resigned, like it used to when she was a child and she needed something from her. Laurie had always felt like a burden and that Cynthia found her presence an irritation.
‘I always knew that man would be your downfall,’ she’d added before hanging up.
Laurie thinks of the images the detective had shown her of Claire, blue and mottled and dead on the sofa, a plastic bag over her face, and starts to cry. She’d had a pretty face really, Claire. It wasn’t her fault. None of it was, or Matilda’s. Robert, he was responsible for all of this; he was to blame. But now she will take the fall. Somehow, even in his death, he was still managing to punish her. She wonders if she can speak to that detective again, the one with the kind eyes: Detective Riley. He had believed her when she’d told him about being carried up the stairs by someone – she could see it in his eyes, his body language. He believed she was telling the truth. Someone has set her up, but who and why remained a mystery.
She will be able to prove this, won’t she? They claim she was seen by a neighbour. That Jessica Bartlett woman from next door. She told the police that she had seen Laurie leaving and getting into her car, alone, and driving off on the night of Claire’s murder. But she knows she would never get into a car alone. That she can’t. Not anymore. Not since the accident. There’s DNA and CCTV footage too, so the male detective had said; hair belonging to her was recovered at the scene and there were images of her buzzing Claire’s intercom and entering her apartment building. They had grilled her for what felt like hours, until she wasn’t sure which way was up. They’ve told her she’s calculated, a cold-blooded killer; a mad, bad, possessed woman, consumed with rage and hell-bent on revenge; a baby killer.
Laurie shakes her head as a guard opens the hatch and places a small, white plastic dish filled with something that she assumes is food but that does not look identifiable, let alone edible. She can’t eat. She can’t accept what they’re trying to tell her she’s done and what that makes her. She’s tired but lucid, the Valium having long since worn off. Perhaps Monica will slip her some more in when she visits: mother’s little helpers. Monica. Surely Mon would’ve heard her coming and going the night of Claire’s murder? She was sleeping in the next room. She would have heard her get up and go downstairs, get into her car, the engine starting up… And then something comes back to her, startling her so much t
hat she bolts upright with a gasp.
Fifty-Four
‘Now that was not normal,’ Davis comments as she buckles up. ‘They’re definitely hiding something.’
‘Your powers of deduction are second to none, Ms Davis. You’d make an excellent copper, do you know that?’
Davis shoots me a snarky grin.
‘So, what do you reckon then? What’s the story?’ I want Davis’s take on things. Sometimes she sees nuances I miss.
‘Well, for starters they didn’t seem too upset about the fact their only son has just been savagely murdered.’
‘Hmm, they didn’t, did they? But why?’
Davis shrugs. ‘Family feud? Not exactly uncommon, is it?’
‘It’s more than that,’ I say. ‘I think they know who Kiki Mills is. Agnes’s reaction – she recognised the name.
‘But Mills wasn’t Robert’s real surname, was it? He changed it by deed poll from Atkins.’
‘So, do you think it could be an alias for Laurie, or a coincidence maybe?’
I shake my head. ‘It would seem odd to use your married name as an alias, but too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence, if that makes sense. Anyway, I think Agnes wanted to tell me something but stopped short when Stanley appeared.’
‘That was Murray on the phone by the way,’ Davis says.
‘And…?’ What is it with women? They all seem to enjoy playing guessing games.
Laurie Mills doesn’t have any marking on her foot. She doesn’t have any tattoos – nothing at all.’
I nod. I knew it.
‘And the other DNA they found on Robert Mills, it’s not a match for Laurie’s. It belongs to someone else. There’s nothing on the database though. They’ve run it through.’
I can’t help smiling. Woods is going to go spare. And Delaney is going to look like a right chump. ‘She’s not our killer, Davis,’ I say with confidence.
‘You’ve said as much from the beginning, boss. But if Laurie Mills isn’t our woman, then who is?’
‘Kiki Mills,’ I say.
‘Yes, but who the hell is Kiki Mills? The Atkinses deny knowing anyone of that name and nothing has come up on the database either.’
‘That’s because it’s not her real name,’ I say.
Davis looks sideways at me. ‘So what is?’ she asks.
Two can play at guessing games. I stay silent for a moment.
‘Come on, Gov, tell me who you think our killer is.’
I grin at her. I can’t help it. ‘I’ll do better than tell you, Davis,’ I say, cocksure now. ‘I’ll show you.’
Fifty-Five
Monica turns the radio up as she makes her way along the M23 towards Gatwick and hums along to Alanis Morissette’s ‘Ironic’. She likes this song. She glances at the expensive handbag next to her; her passport pokes out of the top. She’s booked on a 5 p.m. flight to Cannes where she’ll check into the Hotel Roberto. Now that is ironic, don’t you think? She almost laughs out loud. Everyone has been dealt with now: Dougie, Robert, Claire, Laurie… The child had been a different matter; she had planned to smother little Matilda, send her off to join her parents so they could all live happily ever after in death. Only the baby had begun to coo at her, kicking her little legs up in the air and grabbing her toes. She had found herself watching the child for some time, lying there next to her dead mother on the sofa, transfixed by her. She had fantasised about being her mother, imagined bringing her up as her own daughter, the child she had never had by the man she had spent a lifetime loving and waiting for. All those abortions, all those dead babies, their babies, murdered by the doctors who had ripped them from her womb until her womb had stopped working…
Next year, Kiki, I promise. We’ll have a baby next year, be a proper family, just like I’ve always said… Robert’s voice resonates inside her mind like he’s standing next to her. She had thought about taking the baby with her, the last connection she had to Bertie, but common sense told her not to. Killing Claire was one thing, but snatching a baby? They would close the borders – they’d be looking for a woman with a child and she’d be conspicuous. So instead she had left her untouched, half of her hoping that the little mite would starve to death and half of her hoping she would survive and be saved, go on to lead a happy, healthy normal life. She really did have her daddy’s eyes…
Monica had tied up the loose ends. The estate agents would be putting her house on the market ASAP. She’s not left any forwarding address and she’s insisted on cash buyers only. She doesn’t want a sign outside alerting those nosy neighbours of her intentions. She’ll be long since gone by then. When it’s sold, she’ll get them to transfer the money into a French bank account, one she plans to open in her real name. They might try to find her, subpoena her when it comes to Laurie’s trial. Perhaps it will even be okay for her to attend, but she will have to play that one by ear.
She lights a cigarette and opens the electric window a crack to let the smoke out. They might want to know why she’s left the country. She’ll tell them she is simply on holiday, having a well-earned break after all the dreadful business of the last few months. She’ll keep her mobile alive for a week or two then dispose of it. She has a new passport, a new identity and a new life to lead. All her ducks are in order now.
Only there’s one thing, or rather one person, who’s bothering her, a loose end that needs tying up: Leanna George. She would never have known about Leanna George if the silly bitch hadn’t gone whingeing to the press. The ones she didn’t know about, they didn’t matter – what Monica didn’t know couldn’t hurt her – but now that she knew about this woman, well, that was a game changer.
Leanna’s image flashes up in her mind; the picture of her from the newspaper, all tits and teeth and bouncy blonde hair, calling herself an actress and model. She’d been incensed by it: brazen slut. Who did she think she was? She was no one, nothing, just another slag in Robert’s harem of whores. She had thought she was special, just like they all had. Only they weren’t. None of them. Not one. Not even Laurie, in fact – especially not Laurie. Laurie may have lasted the longest, been given the privilege of marriage, but that was simply because she provided the best decoy and had been the greatest ruse. Monica had even selected her for him. She’d told them as much as well, Agnes and Stan, pair of treacherous bastards that they were.
‘You can’t keep us apart!’ she’d whispered in her mother’s ear at the wedding. ‘It’s all a facade. It will always be me… it will always be us! You can’t stop it!’ It had been the very last thing she had ever said to them. They had tried to drive a wedge between them by threatening to disinherit Bertie, tried to keep them apart, but nothing and no one could. They thought they’d been the ones calling the shots, ostracising her, banishing her and cutting her off as they had. They despised her, and what they believed she’d done to their son. They had called her evil, said that she was Satan’s work, all the while protecting their darling boy. But they had betrayed her, just as Robert had. She wishes she could’ve killed them both too. Only that would have been too easy. This way they suffered in silence. Hiding behind their religious beliefs and middle-class aspirations.
And now their only son was dead because of their refusal to accept what was meant to be. Now they had no one but each other to wallow in their collective misery with, guilt-stricken, filled with remorse and regret. They blamed her. They always had. Robert could do no wrong in their eyes. She had been the temptress, Eve to his Adam. They could not, would not accept it any other way. And so now they’d paid the price. They’d all paid for what they’d done to her: Agnes and Stanley; Robert, Claire and their bastard offspring; Laurie and those unborn twins…
She thinks about Leanna George again then, the tits and teeth, and feels a familiar rage spreading up through her diaphragm, burning through her chest like poison. She wants to silence her, to punish her, punish them all. She weighs up the risks. Her fall guy is in custody so she can’t pin anything on Laurie, not this time. But Leann
a strikes her as the kind of woman with a murky past, one which would take a bit of investigating. Ex-boyfriends, disgruntled wives of men she’d slept with, no doubt plenty of people in the running who may want to cause her harm. Putting herself out there in the press like that was practically inviting old skeletons to come out of the closet, not to mention stalkers –that’s where they’d be looking first, not at her. She had no connection to Leanna George; she wasn’t a suspect in any of this and there were no links back to her. If she was quick, she could get the job done and be out of there.
‘Fuck it!’ Monica says aloud, indicating to come off at the next turning. She had to turn back and finish this. She would get a later flight.
Fifty-Six
‘Why are we here, boss?’ Davis looks up at the house on Cedar Close.
‘DNA,’ I say. ‘And a blanket.’
‘But forensics already have everything.’
‘From the Millses’ house, yes,’ I say cryptically. ‘It’s Monica Lewis I want to speak to.’
‘Monica Lewis?’
I ring the doorbell. We wait.
‘No one’s home, boss. And it looks like her car is gone too.’
‘Uh-huh.’ I covertly glance to my left and then to my right. ‘Cover me, Davis.’ I say, only half-joking as I boot the front door in.
* * *
‘Woods is going to have your guts for garters, you know that?’
‘What’s new?’ We walk through the hallway.
‘Can you at least tell me what we’re looking for?’
I don’t answer because the truth is, I don’t really know myself. But something, that instinct of mine, is telling me that the missing link has been staring me in the face the whole time. Monica Lewis. Mon-ik-ca. Kiki. It came to me in the car, the lizard tattoo. I finally remembered where I’d seen it – on Monica Lewis’s foot.
The Couple on Cedar Close Page 25