Lost Hours

by Alex Walters

  Even in the brief time Wentworth had been inside, the clouds had thickened across the sky. The air felt heavy and humid, charged with the threat of an impending storm. ‘Feels like it could rain at any moment,’ she said. ‘Amazing how it can change. You’d better come in.’

  She led Zoe back through the house to the kitchen. ‘Can I get you a drink? I’m thinking of a glass of wine, but I’m guessing you’re not allowed that.’

  ‘Better not. Not on duty, and not when I’m driving. Anything cold’s fine.’

  Wentworth poured a glass of white wine for herself and an orange juice for Zoe. Outside, just as she had predicted, the first fat drops of rain were beginning to fall. ‘I guess sitting by the pool’s out of the question. We’d better make ourselves comfortable in here.’ She’d been intending to keep the meeting as short as possible, but now Zoe was here, Wentworth felt quite glad of the company.

  Zoe had placed her slim case of papers on the table between them. ‘I’ll try not to keep you too long,’ she said. ‘This is really just an opportunity to catch up with progress in the inquiry.’

  ‘I take there’ve been no major developments? With regard to Justin, I mean.’

  ‘There is one thing. Not directly connected to your son, but I just wanted to discuss it with you in case it throws any new light on the inquiry. But I’ll come back to that in a second.’

  Wentworth frowned, wondering at the significance of this enigmatic statement. Perhaps it was intended in some way to wrong-foot her. ‘Whatever you think best.’ She paused, deciding that in the circumstances it might be better to take the lead in the discussion. ‘Are you assuming that Keith Chalmers’ death is linked to Justin’s?’

  ‘We’re treating them as part of the same investigation, but we’re keeping an open mind about any link between the two cases. Obviously, we can’t disregard Chalmers’ connections with you and your business, not to mention where his body was found, but otherwise the links seem rather tenuous.’

  Wentworth nodded. ‘That’s very much my feeling. It may just be a dreadful coincidence.’

  She sat back and listened as Zoe ran through her update on the investigation. It was still mostly routine stuff, although there was plenty of it. Wentworth’s conclusion was that the police still had few genuinely compelling leads, and were compensating through sheer diligence and hard work. At least that was preferable to them poking about in her business. ‘That’s all very reassuring,’ Wentworth said when Zoe had finished. ‘You seem to be throwing a lot at the case.’

  ‘We’re deploying all the resource we have available, yes. But if you think there’s anything we’re missing or if there are other lines of enquiry we should be following up, please do tell us. You know more about Justin than we do.’

  That sounded almost like a jibe, Wentworth thought. Although Zoe had talked volubly, Wentworth had had the sense she wasn’t being told everything. Perhaps this was a test, she thought. Perhaps they’d discovered the truth about Justin’s university life, and they wanted to see whether she would be prepared to reveal it before they did. ‘I’m not at all sure that’s true,’ Wentworth said. ‘There are times when I felt I hardly knew Justin at all. He spent years at boarding school, and then went straight off to university without really looking back.’

  ‘But he’d been here over the summer?’

  ‘Justin wasn’t exactly the talkative sort. He didn’t give much away, and I didn’t feel it was my business to pry into his affairs.’ Zoe’s questions definitely suggested she knew more than she was saying. But if it came to it, Wentworth would claim she’d been embarrassed and ashamed about what Justin had done and that she’d simply wanted to protect his reputation. After all, that wasn’t far from the truth.

  ‘I can imagine,’ Zoe said. ‘I’ve got a young nephew who’s a bit like that.’

  Michelle was keen to move on. ‘You said you had something else you wanted to raise with me?’

  ‘Yes. It’s not public knowledge yet, so I’d ask you to treat this as confidential. We’ve had another unlawful killing reported today.’

  ‘And you think this might be connected with Justin’s death?’

  ‘There’s no direct reason to believe so,’ Zoe said. ‘In that sense, it’s a little like Mr Chalmers’ death.’

  ‘I’m not sure I entirely understand.’

  ‘It was a young man named Sammy Nolan. Does the name mean anything to you?’

  Wentworth stared at Zoe for a moment, trying to process what she was hearing. The real question was if she should simply take Zoe’s question at face value, or whether the police knew more than they were revealing. But if that were the case, she told herself, it would surely be that DI Delamere sitting here, not her sidekick Family Liaison Officer.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Wentworth said, conscious she’d hesitated too long. ‘Should it?’

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Stuart Jennings had been finishing off a meeting with the Assistant Chief, and it was some minutes before he was able to join them. Colin Palmer spent the time setting up a projector to his laptop, so they could present the material as clearly as possible. ‘I bagged up the letters,’ he said, ‘because I thought we might want forensics to check them over, but I took pictures of some of the salient pages.’

  ‘I’m assuming “salient” isn’t just a smart way of saying “smutty”?’ Jennings said as he took a seat at the table. Annie had given him a brief outline of the find over the phone, though she’d held back on the most interesting facts.

  ‘This better be good, too,’ Jennings went on. ‘I’ve just cut short a meeting with the ACC. Told him we’ve had an important development in the case. So you’ve raised his hopes as well.’ He grinned, but Annie wasn’t at all clear whether he was actually joking.

  ‘You talk us through this, Colin,’ Annie said. ‘You’ve read the whole bundle. I’ve only seen snippets.’

  Colin Palmer stood up, looking awkward in Jennings’ presence. Annie had wanted to give Colin his deserved moment in the limelight, but she hoped now that she wasn’t just throwing him in the deep end.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what we’ve got here is a set of letters. There are twelve here in total, but it reads as if there are others that are missing. There seem to be some gaps in the chronology, and there are references to previous letters that aren’t here.’

  ‘So one question,’ Annie added, ‘is whether the others have just become lost over time. Or whether for some reason Chalmers deliberately chose to hang on to these ones, either for sentimental or some other reason.’ She paused, thinking. ‘Or whether he deliberately destroyed some of the others.’

  ‘I’ll come back to that point,’ Colin continued. ‘These are obviously responses to letters from Chalmers himself. So again we don’t know what was in his letters, though obviously in some cases you can infer the content from the response.’

  Jennings had closed his eyes. ‘Okay, cut to the chase. I can see you’re all dying to tell me. Who’s this mysterious other party?’

  Annie gestured for Colin to provide the answer.

  ‘Michelle Wentworth,’ he said. ‘These are love letters from Michelle Wentworth.’

  Jennings opened his eyes and blinked. ‘Wentworth? You’re sure?’

  Colin looked uncomfortable for a moment, as if he’d been caught out by an unexpected question. ‘Definitely. It didn’t occur to me at first. The letters are all handwritten and mostly signed Mickey, which obviously didn’t ring any bells, but then I found a few that were scribbled on Wentworth’s headed paper.’ He blushed slightly. ‘I’m not quite sure how to put this, but she seems to have got something of a kick out of writing the – well, the steamier stuff on business paper. There are a couple of references to Chalmers doing the same on the trade union’s notepaper.’

  Jennings snorted. ‘Bloody hell. One for Sigmund Freud right there, isn’t there?’ He paused. ‘But, seriously, you’re absolutely certain about this. That these were letters written by Michelle Wentwo
rth to Keith Chalmers?’

  ‘Have a look.’ Colin pulled up the relevant image on to the screen. The notepaper was clearly headed ‘Wentworth Holdings’. ‘The address isn’t their current one,’ Colin added, ‘but I’ve checked and it was their company address at the time. I’ve also looked at a couple of examples of Wentworth’s handwriting on the statements she’s signed for us. I’m no expert, but the style of the signature looks the same. In any case, there are several references in the letters that don’t leave much doubt that the author is Wentworth. I’ll come back to those, because they’re interesting in themselves.’

  ‘Okay,’ Jennings said, ‘let’s take this step by step. Wentworth told us that her only dealings with Chalmers had been professional ones. Is that right?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Annie said. ‘She gave us the impression that she’d had a number of dealings with him over the years but didn’t know him well. That basically the main contact had been over the negotiating table.’

  ‘I’m still trying to make sense of all this,’ said Jennings. ‘So she told us that she hardly knew Chalmers, when in reality twenty years ago they were going at it hammer and tongs?’

  ‘Delicately put, Stuart,’ Annie said. ‘But yes. She was lying to us. Which raises the question of why. It might be embarrassing but there’s nothing illegal about her having had an affair with Chalmers.’

  ‘She’d have been married at this point, presumably?’ Jennings said.

  ‘Yes, but this would have been in the dying days of her marriage to Ronnie Donahue.’

  ‘Is this why they split up?’

  ‘Not according to her or to Donahue. She walked out on him, accusing him of unreasonable behaviour. She later claimed he was having an affair, though he denies that. But Donahue did say that if anyone was playing away, to use his words, it was her. But she doesn’t leave Donahue for Chalmers. It’s clear from the last couple of letters here that she splits up with Chalmers at roughly the same time as she leaves her husband.’

  ‘Does she say why?’

  ‘It’s not clear from the letters,’ Colin said. ‘The sense I get is that she just thought the relationship had reached the end of the road.’

  ‘Donahue reckons she dumped him basically because he ceased to be of use to her,’ Annie said. ‘Admittedly, his probably isn’t the most dispassionate view, but he felt she took what she needed from him and then tossed him aside. From what Colin’s shown me, there’s a similar sense here. That she’s used Chalmers and then thrown him aside.’

  ‘So how’s she used Chalmers?’ Jennings was still peering at the screen.

  ‘That’s one of the other interesting things in the letters,’ Colin said. ‘It’s not particularly clear, so I may be jumping to conclusions. But the impression is that she used Chalmers to open doors for her, particularly in the public sector. The implication is that she was paying backhanders to various individuals to bend procurement rules on contracts, and also that she was paying off Chalmers to help smooth passage in terms of any dealings with the trade unions. At that time, the unions would still have held a lot of influence in some of those organisations.’

  ‘That’s what Chalmers was being accused of by some of his union colleagues,’ Annie added. ‘That he was basically signing sweetheart deals that weren’t in the best interests of his members.’

  Jennings remained intent on the screen. ‘Judging from the language of these letters, sweetheart seems an understatement. But why would she dump Chalmers if he was giving her what she wanted?’ He coughed. ‘As it were.’

  ‘Maybe because it was becoming a bit too personal. A bit too intense. There’s nothing to say she didn’t continue paying off Chalmers. But maybe she just didn’t want him in her bed any more. She seems to value her independence.’

  ‘There’s one other thing,’ Colin said. ‘Quite an important thing.’

  ‘Go on,’ Jennings said. It was difficult to tell from his expression whether he was depressed or exhilarated by what he was hearing.

  ‘The letters were written sometime in the year after Justin Wentworth was born. There are various references to the challenges of balancing the business, not to mention the affair with Chalmers, with childcare.’ Colin smiled. ‘Though she seems to have largely solved that by outsourcing the childcare to a succession of nannies.’

  ‘With respect, Colin,’ Jennings said. ‘I’m not that interested in Michelle Wentworth’s childcare problems twenty years ago.’

  ‘No, sorry. That wasn’t the point. The point is that, although the letters don’t quite say so explicitly, it looks as if there was doubt about – well, about Justin’s paternity.’

  Jennings stared at Colin, his expression now one of definite excitement. ‘You’re kidding?’

  Annie smiled. ‘No, Stuart. I’m still not sure if it’s the breakthrough you were looking for. But it’s definitely an unexpected step forward. It turns out that our first two murder victims might well have been father and son.’

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The storm had arrived almost before they’d realised. When Zoe had first arrived, the first drops of rain had begun to fall. Now, as they sat in the kitchen, they could see it coming down heavily outside, the air from the open doorway growing rich with the scent of the damp grass and the trees.

  ‘I can’t say I’m entirely sorry,’ Zoe said. ‘The heat was beginning to get to me.’

  ‘I love the warmth,’ Wentworth said. ‘I don’t even know why I stick around in Britain. I’ve been wondering lately if I should just sell up and go and live out the rest of my days somewhere with better weather than this.’ She made her way across the kitchen and began to fill the kettle. ‘Coffee to warm yourself up?’

  ‘Not sure I need warming up,’ Zoe said. ‘But coffee would be good.’ She’d had the sense, from the moment she’d first mentioned Sammy Nolan’s name, that Wentworth had been rattled. She’d tried hard to hide it, but Zoe had had little doubt that the reference to Nolan had come as a shock to her. Zoe had expected that Wentworth might try to hurry her out of the house at the point, but instead the opposite had happened. In an apparent effort to conceal her initial reaction to Nolan’s name, Wentworth had carried on talking, chattering about inconsequential nonsense as if trying to steer Zoe away from discussing any further what might have happened to Nolan.

  Zoe had decided simply to go with the flow of Wentworth’s conversation. There was no point in trying to interrogate her about Nolan. She would simply deny any knowledge of the young man, and Zoe would have no justification for pressing further. It was better to let Wentworth talk, in the hope that she might relax enough to let something slip.

  For her own part, Zoe had largely completed her briefing. She’d run through all the work-streams that were under way, and tried to give Wentworth a sense of their progress. She was all too conscious that as yet there was still little of substance she could offer. There was a lot of work going on, but so far relatively little to show for it. Wentworth, though, seemed largely unconcerned.

  That was odd in itself, Zoe thought. Even though Wentworth had come across from the start as not being one for showing emotion, Zoe would have expected her to take a greater interest in the pursuit of her son’s killer.

  Wentworth finished making the coffee, pouring boiling water on to ground coffee in a cafetière, and then brought it over to the table where Zoe was sitting. ‘Have you ever thought about going into the business world?’

  ‘Me?’ Zoe said. ‘God, no. I’ve got no business brains at all. I’d be a disaster.’

  ‘I suspect you wouldn’t be. It’s all stuff you can learn and you’d make a lot more money.’

  ‘Or lose a lot more.’ Zoe smiled, sensing an opportunity. ‘You must have a real nose for it, though. Business, I mean, not money.’

  ‘I’ve got a nose for both, I suppose. I’m not sure it’s anything to be proud of.’

  ‘It’s bought you a place like this.’

  ‘And that’s nice. But I sometimes wonder if
there isn’t more to life.’

  ‘It’s easier to wonder that if you don’t have to worry about the necessities,’ Zoe pointed out.

  ‘Oh, I know that only too well. When I was a child, we could barely scrape by. That’s one of the things that’s always driven me. I’ve no desire to go back to living like that, believe me. But I do wonder whether there could have been more of a balance.’

  Zoe was content to let Wentworth talk. This was the kind of conversation she’d been hoping to initiate since she’d first taken on this role. Something that would help her build up a relationship with Wentworth. Zoe knew that generally this was one of her skills. It was partly, she suspected, because she tended to be self-effacing. She contributed enough to the conversation to keep it going, without trying too hard to impose her own personality on it. People seemed almost to forget she was there, or at least that she was a living, thinking person who might have opinions and interests of her own. It meant that people tended to talk freely and openly in her presence, sometimes saying more than they’d intended. This was all something that came naturally to her – it was simply the kind of person she was – but it was also a skill she’d tried to cultivate during her time in the force. ‘Would you have done things differently?’ she asked Wentworth. ‘Looking back, I mean.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Wentworth stopped. ‘I mean, the honest answer is no. That wouldn’t have been me. Making money’s what I do. I don’t really do it for things like this house, though I won’t deny that’s a bonus. I do it because I have to. It’s the only thing that excites me, really. It’s the only thing I want to do.’ She sounded now as if she was primarily talking to herself. ‘I don’t know if it ever could really have been different. But I do sometimes wonder if I could at least have done it differently. Left fewer bodies in my wake, as it were.’ She sounded almost as if she intended the phrase literally, Zoe thought.