Close to Home (A DI Mitchell Yorkshire Crime Thriller Book 4)

by Oliver Davies

  I ran my fingers lightly through her blonde hair, spilt over my pillows, and just stayed with her for a moment, getting my breath back. I couldn’t clearly remember what I’d been dreaming of exactly, only that there had been the overpowering feeling of everything having gone completely and irredeemably wrong.

  I turned my head, wincing at the crick in my neck, to see the clock on the bedside table and sighed at the time.

  “I’d better get up,” I told Sam softly. Her eyes were still closed, her pale eyelashes brushing her pink cheeks. “I’ll fetch you some tea,” I said, leaning down to kiss her forehead before I swung my legs out of bed and shivered in the chill.

  I pottered around the kitchen, making hot drinks for Sam and me whilst waiting for the heating to kick in. It was pleasantly domestic to bring a tray of tea and toast up to her. She was still sweetly curled up, but she blinked herself awake and sat up when I came in.

  “You spoil me,” she said, her voice thick with sleep.

  I reached over to brush an eyelash from her cheek. “Thanks for coming over last night,” I told her.

  “Anytime.” She cupped her hands around her mug and gave me a soft smile.

  We got ready for work in easy synchronicity, moving around each other like we’d done this a dozen times before. I drove her into the station in my car and found out that she liked folksy music when she changed the radio channel and sang along quietly. We parted at the lift with a quick kiss that made her blush.

  “See you later,” she said, a hopeful note to her voice.

  “I’d like that.”

  She disappeared around the corner to take the stairs up, and I pressed the button on the lift to head up to my desk. My shins hadn’t been giving me much trouble these last few days, and I was desperate to get back to running. I was thinking about a short, gentle route I could take tonight to ease myself back into it, preferably somewhere with a soft surface I could run on, when I saw Keira go past.

  I stepped out of the lift and took a couple of quick steps after her. “Adams?”

  She turned, lifting her eyebrows at me. “Morning.”

  “Morning. Are you headed to your desk?” I gestured in the direction she’d been heading.

  “Yes. Did you want something?”

  “I’ll walk with you, if you don’t mind?” I said. She gave me a nod, and we headed over towards the tech team’s room. “I was hoping you’d be able to look into someone for me.”

  Her lips twitched into a wry smile. “Of course, you were.”

  “Sorry, I do know that you’re busy-”

  She sighed. “Who is it this time, Mitchell?”

  We moved into the warm room where all the tech team’s computers were kept, clustered together and with their fans whirring like the purring of electronic cats.

  “Her name’s Isabel Davies, or that’s her maiden name. She’s married to the suspect on our case, Alec Banks, who-”

  “-I already looked into for you,” Keira said with a sharp nod. “I remember. So now you want to know about the wife? Anything specific?”

  I paused. “No. Just anything that seems out of place, really.” I caught Keira’s slightly exasperated look. “That’s not very helpful, is it?” I said.

  Keira looked faintly amused. “No, it’s not. But nevermind. I’ll have a look when I find the time.”

  That was my cue to leave, and I took it. “Thank you, I appreciate it.”

  “I know, I know, I’m amazing,” she said, her expression serious but for the glint in her eyes that said she was teasing.

  I left her to her work and headed over to my own desk, where Stephen was taking off his coat and getting himself settled. He looked up as I approached and gave me a friendly smile.

  “You know what a little bird told me this morning?” he said.

  I inwardly groaned and sent him an exasperated look. “What?”

  He grinned. “Sam Rosanes arrived in your car, didn’t she? Did you two have a sleepover?”

  “God, you’re insufferable,” I grumbled. “Maybe her car was broken, and I offered to drive her in, did you think of that?”

  He looked at me for a moment, trying to tell whether I was truthful or not, then he cracked a smile. “Nah, I don’t believe it.”

  I rolled my eyes at him and went off to get myself a coffee before he could quiz me further. The man was the nosiest gossip I knew.

  I came back over with a cup of tea for Stephen, which he happily accepted. “What’s the plan for today, then, boss?” he asked.

  I sighed. I’d been thinking about our next steps last night, when even Sam’s gently relaxing presence hadn’t been enough to draw my thoughts completely from the case at hand.

  “Much as I’d like to leave the Packhams to themselves, I think we need to speak to them.”

  Stephen gave a solemn nod. “That sounds fair. Do you want to give them a call or shall I?”

  “I’ll do it,” I told him.

  It didn’t take long to get through to Annabel Packham, whose voice sounded faintly strained over the phone. She agreed to talk to us, though there was weariness in her tone as she said it.

  “Thank you,” I said genuinely.

  We drove over to their house immediately afterwards. Annabel had taken time off work to spend more time at the hospital, and she wanted to speak to us this morning before she went off to be with Maddie. Dan Packham hadn’t been able to get the time off from his work and, Annabel told me in a flat voice, they couldn’t afford for him to lose his job, as much as he wanted to be with Maddie too.

  “Come in.” She stepped aside so that we could move into the small hallway. I toed off my shoes to not leave muck on the carpets and Stephen did the same.

  “Thank you for seeing us,” he said.

  Annabel bobbed her head in acknowledgement. “Anything to help.”

  Lindsey was at school, Annabel told us, so with Dan at work, she was home on her own. She seemed smaller and greyer than when we’d first met her, before she’d known that her eldest child was seriously ill and in a coma. I had to swallow around a lump in my throat as I thought about it and turned away from Maddie’s mother to look around the room.

  It was pleasantly and clearly lived in. There was a half-finished jigsaw spilt across the floor, a collection of used mugs on the coffee table, and a book had been left upturned on the sofa arm. A throw blanket covered the sofa, rucked up at the side to show a slice of the cracked faux-leather beneath.

  Annabel had fetched us cups of tea as I looked around and I cleared my throat after she’d returned to her seat on the armchair, Stephen and I sat on the sofa.

  “What can you tell us about Maddie?” I asked. “We’d like to build up more of an idea of what she's like.”

  Annabel took a breath and released it. She looked down at her tea mug as she spoke, and whilst her voice was steady, her hands trembled.

  “She’s determined, full of energy. There’s always something bigger she’s set her eyes on. She’s a solicitor, you know? She does very well for herself.” Annabel gave a small nod, seemingly in approval.

  “And her boyfriend?” Stephen asked, his head tilted to the side.

  Annabel looked over at him in apparent surprise, before she frowned slightly. “Boyfriend?”

  Stephen and I glanced at each other. “Alec Banks,” I told her. “Perhaps boyfriend is too strong a word, though,” I hazarded. “They appeared to be seeing each other.” From what Eloise had said, the two were definitely involved and had been for some time, but I didn’t want to upset Annabel anymore than we already were.

  Maddie’s mother blinked and slowly shook her head. “She didn’t mention that she was involved with anyone,” she said quietly. “Work was keeping her busy, she said.”

  I nodded at that, and we didn’t press it.

  “Did you notice any change in her recently?” I asked.

  “Any change in her?” Annabel took a sip of her tea, her fingers clutching her mug tightly. “No, no, not really.”r />
  I waited for a moment to see if she’d say anything more, but Annabel only looked silently down at her lap.

  “No change in her manner? Or what she was doing?” I asked hesitantly.

  Annabel’s lips parted and then closed again. “She said she was occupied at work,” she said again, but with more uncertainty this time. “She wasn’t visiting so often, it’s true, but that’s not unusual for a young professional, is it?” She looked between Stephen and me with a sort of desperate hope, and I couldn’t refuse her.

  “No,” I said, “it’s not unusual.”

  Annabel looked away, out of the window. “You think someone did this to her,” she said softly.

  I opened my mouth and shut it again, looking to Stephen, who looked as uncomfortable as I felt.

  “We’re looking into all possibilities,” I said finally.

  Annabel sent me a tired look, like she was disappointed in me for giving her nothing more than a rote answer and I cringed inwardly.

  “This… boyfriend of hers? Do you think it was him?” she pressed, her gaze sharper now.

  I hesitated. I couldn’t tell her much, but I couldn’t bear to give her another scripted reply. “We’re not sure,” I conceded. “But yes, we’re looking into him.”

  “The last time we met up properly,” she said, taking another sip of tea, “we went shopping in town. We had lunch together. It was a lovely afternoon.” Her voice became thin and tight at the end, and she had to pause. “But she said something that worried me. I tried to ask her more about it, but she wouldn’t talk to me about it. She dismissed it.”

  I had straightened up at that. My notebook was already on my lap, and my pen hovered over it.

  “What did she say?” I prompted.

  Annabel’s brows moved together into a frown. “She said that someone was following her.”

  “Following her?” Stephen said, his eyes wide with obvious surprise.

  Annabel gave a small nod. “She didn’t seem concerned at all, not like I was, just annoyed. She wouldn’t tell me who it was, and I didn’t see them.” She sighed, pressed her hand to her forehead. “I should have pressed her for an answer,” she said quietly, “but we’d had such a nice time, and I didn’t want to ruin it. We’re too similar, we tend to argue.”

  “Thank you for telling us that,” I told her, making a quick note. The information didn’t help us identify whether it had been Alec who’d hurt Maddie or not, but it confirmed that there was someone with malevolent intent who’d stalked Maddie. That suggested something of an obsession, and that Maddie’s accident may have been premeditated, and not the work of a moment’s anger.

  “Did she say whether the person was a man or a woman?” Stephen asked.

  “No,” Annabel said, with a touch of apology in her tone. “She only said there was someone following her and pulled me into a shop.”

  Stephen and I quizzed Maddie’s mother for another twenty minutes or so, being as gentle as we could whilst still having to ask the difficult questions. We came to the end of what we needed to ask, and Annabel was clearly keen to go to her daughter, so we took our leave.

  “Thank you for talking to us,” I told her as we stood in the hall, pushing my feet back into my shoes. I handed her my card from my pocket. “Please do call if you think of anything else, or if you have any questions or concerns.”

  She accepted it with delicate fingers. “Thank you.”

  I pulled my coat back on. “Give Maddie our best when you go,” I said quietly, before we saw ourselves out, heading back to the car.

  The drive back to the station wasn’t long, but it gave me time to think.

  “Do you think the stalker was Alec?” I asked Stephen as he drove us.

  He hummed. “Could well be. Maybe he and Maddie had had some kind of brief falling out, and he was obsessing over her. She probably saw him as harmless, which is why she wasn’t alarmed when she saw him.”

  “Maybe so,” I agreed. It was another piece of information that complicated the picture more than clarifying it, but I hoped that soon enough we’d find the case’s keystone; the piece that held the whole thing up and made it all clear.

  Back at our desks, Stephen wrote up our notes on what Maddie’s mother had told us while I looked over our reports. My desk phone rang and, my attention still on my computer screen, I absently picked it up.

  “DCI Mitchell,” I said.

  “Darren, it’s me,” Sam said, a touch shyly, and I blinked, turning my whole attention to her voice.

  “Hi,” I said warmly, unable to keep the small smile off my face. “How’re you doing?”

  “Not too badly. I have some news for you that I think you’ll find interesting.”

  If there was something I liked even more than hearing from Sam, it was her telling me that she had information for me.

  “Aye?” I said eagerly.

  I could hear the smile in her voice as she said, “Yeah. I’d come up to show you, but we’ve had a bit of a rush, and I’m in the middle of something.”

  I could hear other voices in the background, and Sam’s voice was slightly muffled, like she’d put the phone on speaker, or had it pressed between her chin and shoulder.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “the pictures of those footprints you brought in for us?”

  “Aye?”

  “They’re not the cleanest, and a plaster cast of them would’ve been better, but we estimate they’re between a size five and seven.”

  “Really?” I said, taken aback. I fumbled for a post-it note to write that down, though I didn’t think I’d forget it anytime soon.

  “Using the picture where Huxley has his foot next to it for comparison, yes.”

  I hadn’t known Stephen had put his boot next to one of the prints, but it was good thinking, giving the folk in the lab some reference for the shoe size. “How did you know how big Stephen’s feet are?” I asked curiously.

  Stephen looked over at the sound of his name and looked curious about what we were talking about, since he couldn’t hear Sam’s side of things. I smiled at him and focused back on what Sam was saying.

  “He’s got police issue boots, doesn’t he?” she said. “I had a look at the system to see what size he had.”

  “You didn’t think to just send him an email?”

  She laughed quietly. “My way was faster,” she protested. “I’d have had to wait for him to respond and you two are always roaming about the place, not at your desks.”

  “Aye, that’s fair,” I conceded. “Your way was cleverer, anyway.” I paused, frowning slightly as I turned over what she’d told me. “So it’s more likely to have a woman’s footprint.”

  Sam was silent for a second. “That’d be my best guess,” she agreed. “That or a young man.”

  I rubbed a hand over my jaw and wondered how this fitted into everything else we knew. “Thanks, Sam, we really appreciate it.”

  “Of course,” she said warmly. “Talk to you later.”

  “I’ll look forward to it,” I assured her, before we hung up.

  “That was Rosanes, I’m guessing,” Stephen said.

  I pointed at him. “Don’t you start, or I won’t tell you what she said.” He mimed zipping his lips closed, and I shook my head at his antics, before I filled him in on what Sam had told me about the footprints we’d found out the back of my apartment block.

  “I was wondering why you were talking about my feet,” he said, looking amused. After a moment, though, his expression grew serious. “How does this fit then? Who was this woman?”

  I’d been thinking it over since Sam had first broken the news and the simplest answer seemed to make the most sense to me.

  “It has to Isabel Davies, doesn’t it?”

  Stephen looked at me for a long moment, and I could see him turning it over in his head. “I guess she’s the only other big player in all this, other than Eloise, of course.”

  “Eloise?” I raised my eyebrows. “You think she could have be
en there?”

  “Well, she’s been persistently proclaiming her brother’s innocence, hasn’t she?” Stephen straightened up slightly. “Maybe she did it, and was smart enough to run off around the back, while Alec panicked and ran out the front.”

  “What reason would she have to do that?” I frowned, not entirely convinced by the theory, but we couldn’t rule it out.

  “You heard her talk. She didn’t like Maddie much, did she?” Stephen shrugged. “Perhaps she was jealous of how much time Alec was spending with her. Maybe it was something of an accident.”

  “That wouldn’t explain why Alec went running off to Isabel’s to have an argument with her,” I pointed out.

  Stephen nodded in acknowledgement. “True. But maybe he wanted her help.”

  I sighed. “As it stands, I don’t think we can be certain of them. We could do with getting Eloise and Isabel both into questioning, but we’ve nowt to hold them here.”

  Stephen grimaced. “Yeah. We could bring them in regardless, but we’d have to hope to get some solid evidence before they had to be set loose again.”

  “So we won’t move yet,” I decided. “Alec’s still the top suspect in my mind, with his history and his relationship with Maddie, not to mention the state of his flat. A woman was most likely there too, we know that now, but who it was remains to be seen.”

  “What now then?” Stephen wondered aloud.

  I paused a moment before answering. “We can’t bring Eloise or Isabel in for questioning yet, but there’s one person we can talk to. One who might have something useful to say, now that we know much more than we did before.”

  Stephen gave me a querying look. “Who’s that then?”

  “Alec Banks.”

  Fourteen

  Speaking to Alec Banks, at least in person, couldn’t be achieved immediately. Stephen and I booked in to visit him tomorrow, Friday, but in the meantime, we were stuck at the station.

  The only thing that kept my spirits up through the dull, frustrating afternoon was that I was due to meet Sam that evening. And on top of that, I’d decided to permit myself a small run, to see how my shins fared and whether they healed properly.