by Kate Medina
‘And here’s another one. A letter.’
The proffered letter was addressed to Captain Ben Callan, and bore the insignia of the Ministry of Defence Hospital Unit, Frimley Park Hospital, in its top left-hand corner, the sight of it as painful as a punch in the stomach from a pro-boxer.
‘I’d better be getting on with my round, love.’
Jessie looked up. ‘Sorry, Clive, bit distracted.’
‘Bad news?’
She shook her head. ‘Oh God no, just another bill.’
Though she exchanged pleasantries with Clive on those days she was late to work, she had never shared private confidences and she wasn’t about to start now.
He grinned. ‘Bills are the only post I get these days too. I’ll soon be as popular as a traffic warden if I just deliver bills.’
Jessie held up the parcel. ‘You saved me a trip to the shops and you can always redeem yourself on birthdays and at Christmas.’ She smiled, a smile that she felt nowhere but in the stretch of her lips. ‘Take care and I’ll see you soon.’
Shutting the door, she dropped her hand to ruffle Lupo’s head. He looked up at her and for the first time ever – for her at least – wagged his tail. She almost felt like falling to her knees and flinging her arms around his neck, she was so ridiculously delighted. This was probably what a parent experienced when their child took their first steps.
‘Let’s get that lazy arse Captain Callan and me coffee and you breakfast, hey?’
Padding into the kitchen, Lupo at her heels, Jessie flicked the kettle on and heaped four large teaspoons of coffee into the cafetière. She needed a strong one to even begin to get her brain into gear. Then she needed to duck to the office – her proper office – for two private client sessions, before driving up to Frimley Park with Callan. Marilyn had given her the day off, though not with much grace.
Brilliant timing, Dr Flynn, he had said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
I don’t think the bullet in Callan’s brain consulted the resident psychic as to who was going to be out and about on a murder spree in Sussex before it decided to shift, Marilyn. Very remiss of it, I know – equally sarcastically and with a big dose of suppressed fury.
To his credit, Marilyn had looked suitably contrite. Sorry, sorry, Jessie. I was out of order. This case … He’d tailed off, raised his hands in surrender, then added, Please make sure you’re contactable at all times. And send my best wishes to Callan.
She rated Marilyn hugely, enjoyed working with him, but even his trademark calm-in-the-face-of-a-nuclear-storm had taken a battering on this case. Unsurprisingly. The whole team were ragged with exhaustion. She didn’t need to be physically present to contribute to the case anyway, could think just as well driving with Callan or pacing the reception area at Frimley Park Hospital.
While the kettle boiled, she grabbed Lupo’s bowl, tossed a couple of handfuls of dry dog food in it and added some mince that Callan had cooked for him.
‘How come he never cooks for me?’ she said, as she put it on the floor by the door, catching their twin reflections in the dark glass of the oven door as she did so. In reflection, they looked almost interchangeable, Lupo in his white pelt and her in her fluffy white dressing gown. Doppelgängers.
He’s not a great guard dog, though, is he?
Clive was right. Jessie had never heard Lupo bark, not once, for anything. Callan had let him out a couple of nights ago and he’d disappeared over the back fence into the farmer’s field, so Callan had shut the door and crashed out on the sofa, obviously feeling shit again. When Jessie got home, at some hideous time approaching dawn, she had thrown a blanket over the sleeping Callan, ducked into the kitchen to grab herself a snack and jumped out of her skin at the sight of Lupo’s pale face staring silently through the glass doors. The poor dog had been outside for hours, they’d worked out later, though he hadn’t seemed the worse for wear for his ordeal and, to be fair, he was very well adapted to cope with a forced sojourn in the cold.
Back upstairs, two coffees in her hand, she crawled back into bed.
‘Have you ever heard Lupo bark?’
‘No.’
Jessie frowned. ‘Never?’
‘Never. Huskies aren’t supposed to be great guard dogs. Why?’
‘The old lady who found Lupo tied to the lamp post outside her cottage said that she was woken by the sound of a dog barking in the street, by Lupo barking. But he never barks.’
‘Do you think she’s lying?’
‘No, she’s an old person.’
Callan laughed. ‘You don’t get a dose of the truth drug just because you’ve hit seventy.’
Jessie smiled reluctantly. ‘Yes, all right, but why the hell would she have lied? She had no reason to, did she?’
‘You’re asking the wrong person, Jessie. My experience of old people is limited to my mother and Ahmose.’
Jessie nodded, thinking. She was the wrong person too. The oldest person she knew was Ahmose, but he was ludicrously switched-on and self-sufficient for his age. Her mind fumbled for more information and landed in a tiny flat in Farnham, a year ago now, grime coating the windows from the busy road outside, washing-up piled in the sink from a lack of motivation to do anything but mourn the missing and the dead. An old lady who had lost her son and grandson.
Old age is not for the faint-hearted. There’s nothing glamorous about us.
‘Maybe she was embarrassed,’ she said.
‘About what?’
‘About being old.’
‘Why would she be embarrassed about being old?’
Jessie didn’t answer. Something Cara had said was niggling her. Laying her coffee cup on the bedside table, she picked up her mobile.
65
‘Nice to see you again so soon, Mr Lewin,’ Marilyn said, with blatant sarcasm.
Gazing at a point somewhere on the wall between Marilyn’s left shoulder and Workman’s right, Lewin squirmed in the hard plastic chair, his discomfort nothing to do with the unyieldingness of his seat. He looked wretched: red-eyed and dishevelled.
‘Can I have a coffee, please?’
‘No,’ Marilyn said. Picking up his own cup, he took a sip. Workman glanced over, suppressing a smile; she had almost expected her boss to enhance the pantomime with an appreciative ‘Mmmm.’ Though Lewin’s mouth had thinned to a tense, angry line, he remained silent, seeming to sense that he had run out of road. Road and fight.
‘Yesterday, you told me and my colleague, Dr Jessica Flynn, that you had been on a last-minute work trip to Wiltshire while your wife, Denise, was being murdered,’ Marilyn began.
‘I was on a last-minute work trip to Wiltshire,’ Lewin muttered, his voice strangled.
‘Mr James Carter, the CEO of Classic Collection, was most disconcerted to be dragged from a dinner party yesterday evening by my detective constable to answer questions on his former employee.’
Lewin’s eyes widened, but he didn’t respond. The silence stretched.
‘Mr Carter informed my DC that you were made redundant four weeks ago and that your last day working with Classic Collection was the day you were given notice. He stated that you were an effective sales and marketing manager and that the reasons for letting you go were purely economic. He did, however, feel that you seemed excessively aggrieved at your dismissal and so he decided that it would be better to pay you to stay at home, rather than to let you work out your notice period.’ Marilyn took another sip of coffee, eyeballing Lewin over the rim of the cup as he lowered it. ‘Would you care to enlighten me as to why you claimed to have been visiting tourism clients in Wiltshire the two days before and the day of your wife’s murder?’
He had more information up his sleeve, from other telephone conversations that DC Cara had conducted with Lewin’s so-called ‘Wiltshire tourism clients’, but he had given Lewin enough rope. Would he hang himself or use it to haul himself to safety?
66
It was raining. DC Cara drove to a steady beat on the car ro
of and the tinny tunes of Heart FM fading in and out as the radio suffered at the mercy of the South Downs’ patchy reception. He was so exhausted that his eyes felt as if they were on stalks, and that thought brought to his mind, in full horrific technicolour, an image of Hugo Fuller’s ravaged eye sockets. Then another image, this one imaginary, but feeling just as gut-churningly real: an eyeball pierced and stretched from its socket by a razor-sharp claw until its optic nerve thinned and snapped like over-stressed elastic. Shit. He needed to get control, needed some sleep, couldn’t remember the last time he had wanted to crawl into bed this badly. Welcome to a multiple murder investigation, kiddo.
The night before last, he had been closing his eyes after a sleepless twenty-four hours at the hospital, when Marilyn had called with an instruction to get over to Sheiks in Bognor and interview the staff, see if anyone had seen Sophie Whitehead getting into a small dark hatchback that might or might not have been an official or unofficial ‘moonlighting’ taxi. Though the visit had brought back fond memories of his own teenaged drunken nights in seedy clubs, downing Jägerbombs with his mates and fumbling with girls in dark corners, it had been fruitless from a policing point of view. The only CCTV was directed at the strip of road directly outside their front door and none of the doormen had bothered to stand outside in the cold at one a.m. when they could hang around in the club’s foyer, chatting.
Cara had spent most of last night working through Marilyn’s texted list, though that had been fruitful, at least, and now he was on his way to East Meon, Google having been unable to find the petrol station that Lewin claimed to have filled up at.
The petrol station, which he finally found on Workhouse Lane, a quiet road in the back of beyond, on the outskirts of East Meon, was tiny – just a couple of pumps that looked as if they had been lifted from the set of a 1960s film, and a kiosk so small and ramshackle it could have doubled as an elderly couple’s potting shed. Pulling to the side of the road, Cara pressed stop on his mobile’s stopwatch function. Twenty-six minutes – during the day, without breaking the speed limit and with five minutes of circling East Meon to find the petrol station. At Marilyn’s request, he had driven here via Paws for Thought, pressing start as he’d passed the gate. He texted Marilyn – 27 min – then, leaving his hazard lights flashing so that he wasn’t back-ended by some elderly, hard-of-sight country dweller while he was in the petrol station, he cut his engine and climbed out, just as his mobile rang.
At the sight of the name flashing on its screen – Dr Jessie Flynn – Cara’s heart did a flip. He had enjoyed the time they’d spent together on the knock earlier this week, even if they had ended up interviewing poor bloody Denise Lewin. If he were five years older, he’d have tried his luck with Jessie. Christ, even if he weren’t five years older, and she didn’t have a boyfriend, he’d have tried his luck. She was beautiful, intelligent, fun, his perfect woman, just out of reach. His practised thumb found the answer symbol.
67
‘Jessie,’ DC Cara said in his most professional tone. ‘How can I help you?’
‘Hi Darren. Sorry to bother you, but I have a quick question about the case.’
‘I didn’t realize you were working today.’
‘I’m not. But I still have a question.’
‘OK. Ask away.’
‘The old lady who found Lupo tied up outside her house. Remind me exactly what she said to the dog team who attended, please.’
‘She said that she had been woken by barking. That she’d gone to her bedroom window, looked out and seen Lupo.’
‘She definitely said that she was woken by barking?’
‘Yes.’
‘And did the dog team believe her?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK. You went to her cottage and interviewed her, didn’t you, Darren?’
‘Yes. Later on Sunday.’
‘What did she say to you?’
‘She said that—’ he broke off. Jessie could hear the knock of his mobile against his ear; he must be walking. ‘She said that she’d been reading by her bedroom window, opened the curtains and seen him.’
‘Which isn’t what she told the dog team.’
A moment of silence. Jessie waited, chewing her lip.
‘No.’
‘Didn’t you think about the inconsistency?’
Another long moment before he answered. ‘She just found the dog, Jessie. I was only there for five minutes, getting a brief statement for the files.’ His tone was defensive. ‘Does it really matter?’
‘Can I go and have a chat with her? Can you give me her address?’
Cara sighed heavily. ‘Look, it’s probably a moot point anyway.’ Just as my hike to East Meon is probably a moot point. ‘That hair Burrows found trapped in the mask that Leo Lewin was wearing is being DNA-tested, expedited as we speak. If we’re lucky the results will be back today.’
‘It definitely wasn’t Leo’s hair then?’
‘No. Hopefully it’s one from the perp.’
‘Hopefully—’
‘Probably—’
‘Give me her address anyway, please, if you don’t mind.’
‘Sure. I’ll text it to you.’
‘Thank you. Send my—’ she broke off. She was about to say – Send my love to Marilyn – but that would have sounded ridiculous. He was her work colleague, nominally her boss. ‘Say hello to Marilyn for me,’ she finished. ‘And tell him that I’ll have my mobile with me all day if he needs to speak to me.’
For some ridiculous reason she felt bereft that the day they had what might prove to be a real break in the case she was off-games. Since this case had begun, all she had wanted was for it to end. But now, with it gathering pace in her absence, she realized how emotionally invested she was, how deeply she wanted to see it through. And how she could do with burying herself in work, today of all days, to take her mind off Callan’s appointment. D-Day.
The phone clicked off. Silence. Just the beating of her heart, hard in her ears, and an unsettling sense that something was wrong. Something more than the everything she already knew was wrong.
68
Eyes fixed on the table, Lewin nodded slowly. He seemed to have shrunk to a half his previous size and aged ten years in the fourteen hours since Marilyn had last seen him.
‘I was made redundant four weeks ago.’
‘What were you doing in Wiltshire? Or were you not in Wiltshire at all?’ Marilyn already knew the answer to both these questions, but he wanted to see if Simon Lewin had a truthful bone in his body.
‘I was interviewing for a new job.’
‘With whom?’
‘Kids-Go-Too.’
‘Which is?’
‘A travel company specializing in holidays for families with young children. I feel that I have, uh, I have expertise in that area.’
Marilyn resisted the temptation to roll his eyes. He had no interest in Lewin’s fitness or not to take up a role with Kids-Go-Too. ‘And the interviews took the best part of three days?’
Lewin nodded. ‘I was sales and marketing manager at Classic Collection, so I’m going for a senior job – director of sales and marketing. I had a dinner on the first evening, six interviews and a load of psychometric tests. The assessment finished with an informal drink in the Fox Goes Free with the CEO, as I said yesterday.’
Marilyn nodded. ‘As you said yesterday,’ he echoed, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
‘Why did you tell your wife – and us – that you were meeting with Classic Collection’s Wiltshire tourism clients?’
Lewin rolled his gaze up from the table to meet Marilyn’s. ‘I was meeting with a tourism company based in Wiltshire.’
Marilyn didn’t credit his response with a comment. Lewin squirmed in his seat as the silence ballooned awkwardly, filling the room.
‘Denise didn’t know that I’d been made redundant,’ Lewin said finally.
‘Why?’
‘What I told you yesterday – about the abusive boyfri
end – that was true.’
Marilyn raised a cynical eyebrow.
‘Denise did have an abusive boyfriend …’ A whine in his tone.
‘Mr Lewin, may I remind you that everything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. DS Workman read you your rights before I entered the room, did she not?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘And as we currently stand, you are, at an absolute minimum, responsible for perverting the course of justice.’
‘What the fuck?’ It was the first time Lewin had seemed truly animated since Workman had collected him from his son’s bedside at St Richard’s Hospital at seven a.m. and brought him in to be interviewed. ‘You can’t fucking charge me with—’
Marilyn slapped a flat hand hard on the table, cutting him off.
‘I strongly advise you that you have told enough lies and I suggest that you play it straight with us from now on, for your own good.’
Lewin scrubbed agitated fingers through his hair. ‘She did have an abusive boyfriend. She did.’
‘But she wasn’t frightened of him now, was she?’ Workman asked in a gentle tone.
‘She trusts me …’ He raised his hands to shield his face. Workman slid a plastic-wrapped packet of pocket handkerchiefs across the table and she and Marilyn sat in silence while Lewin sniffed and pressed a tissue to his red-rimmed eyes.
‘She trusted me completely, with everything,’ he said, after a few minutes, his voice thick with emotion. ‘To look after her, to provide for her and Leo, to keep them safe. She gave up her secretarial job the day she found out that she was pregnant and I knew that she’d never work again. It was all down to me and I didn’t want to worry her.’ A pause, while he sucked back a sob. ‘We overextended ourselves with the mortgage on the house and we’re in debt. I couldn’t tell her that I’d lost my job. I couldn’t.’
Marilyn sighed wearily. ‘Have you been moonlighting as a taxi driver since you lost your job, by any chance, Mr Lewin?’