by Clare Chase
‘What is it?’
Tara took a deep breath. ‘Nothing important compared to the case – just frustration at my erstwhile colleagues at Not Now.’
‘Ah. Say no more.’ Max gave her a fleeting smile, then indicated to turn into the Crosses’ road.
Not many people on the force had much time for Not Now. The exception had been Tara’s now-suspended boss, DS Patrick Wilkins. It transpired that he’d had a whole load of time for the reporter Shona Kennedy, in particular, both in the bedroom and outside it. He’d indulged in pillow talk and also leaked information directly to Not Now’s editor, Giles Troy.
The weather outside matched Tara’s mood. Although the temperature had struggled up to a few degrees above freezing, the sky had been darkening all day and the rain had started just after they’d set off from the station. Max had got the wipers going at maximum speed now, and still the water ran in rivulets over the windscreen faster than it was pushed away.
Tara glanced sideways at Max. ‘How was Shona this morning? You and Blake managed to send her packing pretty quickly.’ She was still wondering what had been said.
Max shrugged. ‘Just her usual poisonous self.’
He didn’t want to go into details, she could see that – but she found she really wanted to know. It was like picking off a scab – you knew it would probably hurt, but it was irresistible. ‘Blake looked cross when he came back into the nature reserve.’
‘Just irritated by her interference, I guess.’ Max’s voice was calm as usual. ‘That and the fact that he had to take his overalls off and put them back on again thanks to her. You know how he hates fiddling about when there’s something important going on.’ He’d paused next to a tight-looking space between two other cars parked on the road: a Jaguar and a BMW. Not many of Cambridge’s Victorian houses had garages.
Blake’s impatience rang true, but she bet there was more to it than that. ‘Did Shona say anything about me?’
Max pulled a face before glancing over his shoulder to judge the angle he needed to reverse into the parking space. ‘Why would you take any notice of what she says? I didn’t.’
That was a yes then. ‘But just out of interest…’
‘Really?’ He cocked an eyebrow and his look was sympathetic. ‘You know what she’s like. She just said the first thing she could think of to stick the knife in.’
‘Which was…?’
He sighed. ‘That it was touching that DI Blake was so protective of you. She implied he was keeping you out of sight on purpose and running the gauntlet of the press himself, out of gallantry.’
And from a liking for Tara too, she was willing to bet. Max wasn’t spelling it out, but Shona probably had. No wonder Blake had been tight-lipped. Shona had tried to imply there was something going on between them when she’d written that last foul article in December too. She’d paid no attention to the lack of facts, or to Blake’s wife and daughter’s feelings. It would be all the worse if she went for the same angle again now Babette was so obviously pregnant. Maybe Shona hoped members of the public would start abusing Tara in the street if she spread enough rumours. Nice…
She longed to reassure Max that nothing had ever happened between her and their boss. But it was no good; it would look as though she was protesting too much. And of course Max had seen Blake holding her when she’d narrowly escaped death at the tail end of last year. A natural reaction from the head of a team perhaps, but Max might have noticed her clinging to him too. In the heat of the moment she’d reacted on instinct. If he’d noticed at all, she guessed he probably had a good idea of her feelings; he was sensitive to that sort of thing. His perceptive nature was one of the many reasons she liked him, but it was a bit of a double-edged sword…
As if to prove her right he turned to her now and gave her a smile. ‘Don’t take it to heart. We all know what Shona and Giles are like.’
She took in his friendly brown eyes – no judgement there. For a second she felt her nose itching – a sure-fire warning of oncoming emotion. She’d been a loner for so long. Working with Max made her realise you didn’t have to keep everyone at arm’s length. For one second, she wondered what might have happened if she’d met him under other circumstances. Circumstances where Blake didn’t exist… They got on well together, and objectively she knew Max was good-looking.
‘Thanks.’ Time to move the conversation swiftly on. ‘Bloody hell, I can’t believe you managed to get the car into this space.’
He grinned. ‘You don’t spend years in this job in central Cambridge without learning to park like a demon.’
They were going door to door. At mid-afternoon on a Tuesday they might not find many people in, but Tara was reasonably hopeful. The neighbourhood was moneyed, and the residents would probably include several people who’d retired, as well as some that were senior enough to work from home when they felt like it.
They were going to get wet, that was for sure. The volume of water running down the street and into the drains was increased by the remaining meltwater from the snow. Up above, the grey slates on the street’s roofs were awash with rain that streamed into the gutters.
Max made short work of some final straightening up and a moment later he and Tara were out on the street. Tara turned up her collar and shivered as she fumbled with her umbrella.
They started from the villa next to the Crosses’ house, with no luck, but two doors down they got a reply.
When they showed their IDs, the woman with iron-grey hair who’d opened up nodded. ‘You’re here about Freya Cross, I presume? The item’s just come up on the local section of the BBC News site. You’d better come in.’
Max glanced at Tara and they followed the woman past her smartly painted red front door and into a corridor lined with bookshelves.
‘I’m Cindy Musgrove,’ the woman said, turning to them part way down the hall, which was long, leading right through to a back door at the end. ‘Emeritus Professor of English. I don’t have much contact with Zach Cross in the academic world – different departments, and we’re attached to different colleges – but you know how it is with neighbours, one builds quite a bond over time.’
She didn’t look like a Cindy somehow. She was dressed in jeans and a loose-fitting blue denim top. Her grey hair was close cropped and she wore large dangly earrings decorated with multicoloured beads. Her fingers were adorned with several silver rings.
‘Come through here, into the kitchen,’ she said. ‘Coffee?’
Tara and Max both thanked her but said no. Tara didn’t want to get to the point when she had to knock on doors primarily to ask to use the occupant’s loo.
‘How can I help you?’ Cindy Musgrove said. ‘You want to know when I last saw Freya?’
Tara had the urge to take back control. Though, in fairness, it was a reasonable place to start. ‘That would be useful.’
Cindy Musgrove frowned. ‘I saw her very briefly in the street about a week and a half ago. I’m sorry – I can’t be precise about the date. She was getting into her car and, I assume, going off to work. But the last time I met her properly, to talk to, was on Saturday tenth of February at a drinks party in Owlstone Road. It was in celebration of an anniversary and the couple there, Moira and Tony, had invited a wide group of people locally. Wine, sherry, nibbles – all that sort of thing. Early evening.’
‘Did she seem happy, when you saw her?’ Tara asked. Not that you’d probably give much away at that sort of do – but Cindy Musgrove seemed incisive, and if there was anything to spot, Tara guessed she’d have noticed.
Once again, the emeritus professor frowned with concentration. ‘She was perfectly sociable. I remember that she made her way round the room, talking to most of the people there. She was the public face of that gallery she worked for, so she was used to networking, I suppose. I spoke to her myself for a while.’
‘Can you remember what you talked about?’
‘I asked her about her job – she said the gallery was doing well, but s
he didn’t elaborate. Thinking back, she said it rather quickly, possibly to shut the topic down. And then we moved onto the plans for redevelopment around Mill Lane and Silver Street. Everyone’s worried about the effect it will have on Coe Fen. It’s so rare to have such a rural spot in the centre of the city and the extra visitors will surely change the character of the place. There’s precious little opportunity for peace and quiet anywhere these days.’ Then she paused. ‘I still can’t take it in that Freya’s dead. And killed in such a beautiful, tranquil spot.’ She took a deep breath and then sat up straight suddenly. ‘But this isn’t helping.’
‘What you’ve told us about the drinks party is useful background information,’ Max said.
The woman’s account fitted with the suggestion Blake had relayed to Tara back at the station, that Freya Cross might have had problems at work. ‘Was there anything else you noticed?’ she asked.
Cindy Musgrove chewed her lip. She looked as though she was going through some kind of inner battle. At last she said: ‘I’m sure it’s not relevant, but it struck me that she and Zach didn’t interact at the party. Not until the end, when they left together. But up until that point it occurred to me that a stranger wouldn’t have known they were husband and wife.’
‘Was that unusual?’ Tara said.
The professor put her head on one side and frowned. ‘Well, they were certainly very attentive towards each other in the beginning. I suppose it’s natural for things to become less intense as a marriage wears on, but they’d only been together for a couple of years, and it was marked enough for me to notice it.’
‘How long have you known them both?’ Max put in.
‘Zach, for years – I was already living on this street when he moved in with his first wife and their son, Oscar. Oscar was a small boy then – around six or seven perhaps? – and he must be twenty or twenty-one by now. He’s most of the way through his degree.’
‘So you must have seen that relationship come apart,’ Tara said. ‘I wonder if you could tell us the background?’
For a moment the woman hesitated.
‘It’s probably not relevant, but we want to know as much as possible about the context of Mrs Cross’s life.’
Cindy nodded. ‘I rather think Zach had taken up with Freya before things were over with Eliza – his first wife. Hard on Oscar, of course. Freya moved in very soon after Eliza moved out.’ She shook her head. ‘And then later on there was the wedding – Freya and Zach’s I mean. Eliza didn’t come – unsurprisingly – but Oscar was there, under sufferance by the look on his face. I’ve never seen such a scowl. He’d just finished his A levels, I remember, so all the upheaval must have been going on whilst he was still studying for them. I overheard someone who didn’t know them well asking if Oscar was Freya’s brother. There were only eight or nine years between them in age. Oscar was angry – I could see that. And although Freya was radiant that day, I couldn’t help feeling…’ Suddenly she seemed to realise she was speaking rather freely about her neighbour and paused.
‘Professor Musgrove?’
The woman sighed sharply. ‘I just wondered how long it would last. I felt the odds were stacked against them, because she’d hardly lived life yet and he was already so settled. And Oscar looked full of ire, and – oh I’m just being cynical. I like them both – liked I should say in Freya’s case – I liked them a lot. Zach’s first wife was the wronged woman, of course – but my goodness she was difficult. She made lots of enemies in the neighbourhood – physically beautiful but the personality of a viper. And as I say, Zach and Freya looked like the perfect couple, the day they married.’
But two years could be a long time in a relationship.
After they’d left the professor’s house, Max said: ‘It’ll be interesting to hear what Oscar Cross has to say.’
‘You’re right there.’ Tara wondered just how many people had a potential motive for killing his stepmother.
Most of the other doors they knocked on went unanswered, or were opened by people who couldn’t expand on what they already knew, but an hour into proceedings they struck lucky. Diana Johnson hadn’t yet heard the news about Freya. Unlike Cindy Musgrove, who’d been sad but matter-of-fact, Ms Johnson went pale and shaky. Tara and Max followed her inside, and Max made her some tea.
‘I saw her not long ago, out in the street,’ the woman said. ‘I was taking Henry, my dachshund, out for his final walk before bed. It was bitterly cold, so I didn’t go far. But I saw Freya across the road. I shouted “hello” or “good evening” or something like that, but she barely replied, which was unlike her. I actually wondered if she was upset. She was looking down at the ground, almost as though she didn’t want me to see her face.’
‘Can you remember when this was?’ Tara asked.
The woman put her hand to her head. ‘I can’t think. A week ago maybe? Hang on a minute.’ She frowned. ‘When did the snow start?’
‘A week ago last Thursday, I think,’ Max said.
Ms Johnson nodded. ‘Then I think it was the Friday. I remember how treacherous the pavements were. The day before, after the first fall, they hadn’t been too bad. I’d put on my boots and crunched my way round the block. But on the Friday the snow had got compacted and frozen hard. I remember stopping even sooner than I’d meant to because it was so slippery.’ She nodded now, slowly. ‘Of course, yes, that’s right. Because then, on the Saturday, I took the car out and drove Henry over to Fen Ditton, so I could take him out for a proper airing on the meadows. It was so much easier to walk across the fields without falling over.’
Tara made a note. ‘So a week ago Friday was when you last saw Freya Cross. That would have been the twenty-third of February. That’s very useful, Ms Johnson. And you’re confident of the date now?’ If she was, she might have been the last person to see Mrs Cross alive. Apart from her killer, of course.
‘I’m sure, now that I’ve remembered the sequence of events.’ She was still very pale but her tone was firm.
Tara nodded. ‘Thank you. And did you notice anything else about Mrs Cross that night? How she was dressed, for instance? Or what she had with her?’
Ms Johnson frowned. ‘She must have been wearing what you’d expect, I suppose – dressed for the weather, I mean.’ For a second, her eyes were far away. ‘She was walking under one of the streetlights. Yes, that’s right – she had her coat pulled around her quite tightly, as though she was holding it in place, and maybe hadn’t yet done it up, and as I say, looking down.’
‘So she used her hands to hold her coat closed,’ Tara said. If she hadn’t done it up, it sounded as though she’d left in a hurry. ‘She must have had anything she was carrying slung over her shoulder, presumably?’
To her surprise, Ms Johnson nodded. ‘Yes, of course. That’s right. She did have some kind of holdall. I didn’t think too much about it at the time, but I suppose it struck me as a little odd that she was setting out on foot with luggage at that time of night. I’d almost forgotten in the interim – none of my business. But it’s coming back to me now.’ She sniffed. ‘I can’t believe she’s dead. I wish I’d asked her what was wrong, but it would have felt like interfering.’
Back in Max’s car, Tara looked at her fellow DC.
‘I didn’t expect that. Professor Cross said she’d taken an overnight bag but I didn’t believe him. Why would the killer take that and not her handbag? And why did the friend she was supposedly visiting know nothing about her plans?’ She thought hard. ‘Maybe she was genuinely going away but not with the friend, and Zach Cross believed the line she spun him? Perhaps she was really heading off with Luke Cope instead – and he killed her. Or Zach Cross saw through her story, followed her out and did for her and Luke Cope too? But either way, why the hell would Luke and Freya arrange to meet in the nature reserve? If you were planning to go away somewhere it’s not exactly the logical place to start.’
Max rubbed his chin. ‘True. It’s more somewhere for doing something secret.’ H
e turned the key in the ignition.
Tara frowned. He was right. It was the sort of place where a low-level drug dealer might conduct a quick transaction, or teenagers might head, intent on an illicit fumble. What did that tell them?
She pushed her seatbelt home and glanced at her watch. ‘Blake ought to have finished at the post-mortem by now. And we should get straight back anyway.’ The briefing meeting at the station had been scheduled for five thirty. ‘I really want to know what Freya Cross’s mobile shows us – if anything.’ She was hoping for some nice, revealing texts. But of course if there were any, the killer would have taken the phone with them. That presumably meant their perpetrator was happy for them to have all the information it held, which might be a clue in itself.
Nine
DS Patrick Wilkins’ skin crawled as he left the meeting room and walked down a corridor that smelt of carpet cleaner. Each of his disciplinary hearings had been worse than the last. No one was in any mood to listen to him. Not that he should be surprised; they were fools, the lot of them. Today had been especially galling as he could see DCI Fleming’s attention had been wandering. He’d caught the breaking news about the body in the Paradise Nature Reserve on his phone, just before he’d entered the station. She was probably eager to catch up with her remaining team; Wilkins simply wasn’t a priority. And so she, and the other powers that be, would miss what was under their noses. He shook his head.
But the upside of the incident out in Newnham was that most of his closest colleagues were absent. He didn’t have to run the risk of coming face to—
He’d rejoiced too soon. DC Megan Maloney was standing there right in front of him. On the way to the coffee machine or wasting time in some other way probably. She saw him in an instant and blushed. No one knew what to say to him; they were embarrassed for him, for what he’d done. Adrenaline shot round his system. How could they be so blinkered?