Stephen hummed, reaching over to pat my shoulder, before he stood up. “I’ll go then,” he said gently. “And if she’s on her own, I’ll let her know you’re thinking of her, alright?”
“Thanks, mate.”
I settled back into what I’d been doing while Stephen went to speak to Sam, or whichever of the lab technicians was there today. Sam might not even be there; we weren’t at the stage in our relationship where we updated each other on where we were all the time.
I couldn’t help but look up eagerly when Stephen returned, though, and I was glad to see the pleased expression on his face.
“Good news?” I asked hopefully.
He grinned. “Sam was there, and she said to tell you she’s thinking of you too,” he told me, avoiding my question.
I was impatient to hear about the case, but I smiled all the same. “She’s a sweetheart,” I said, before giving Stephen an expectant look. “Now tell me if there are any results, will you?”
He snorted. “Alright, alright. Sam’s had a look at those earrings you brought her. They’re old but not antique- well, you can see what she said on them, she’s sent you an email-”
I was already clicking into my emails. “What does she say? Are they a match?”
Stephen chuckled at my impatience. “She thinks so, yeah. They’re pretty weird looking. And there were some traces of skin flakes caught in both of them that she can test for DNA, to be sure.”
I blew out a breath in part-relief and part-excitement. “Good, okay, that’s good. And the blood in the kitchen?”
I looked from my computer up to his face and found him looking triumphant. “It’s Isabel’s,” he confirmed.
I swore quietly and dragged a hand through my hair. I’d thought and hoped that it would be a match, of course, and I would’ve been shocked as well as frustrated if it hadn’t been, but it was still a huge boost to hear it confirmed.
“Sam had been working on the earrings last night, and the blood DNA only came back just now. She was about to email the results over to us when I went over.”
I shook my head. “It’s coming together,” I said.
We weren’t quite there yet, but Alec’s story was seeming more and more likely. The evidence didn’t need to be one great rock. It could also be a mountain made up of pebbles, all piled up into something substantial. And all the pieces of evidence that we’d collected were pointing in the same direction.
I checked my watch. “Time to go and see Maddie,” I said, hopping to my feet. My legs ached from my run, but in a healthy, well-used way, not the sharp stab of an injury or pulled muscle.
We made our way over to the hospital, getting briefly caught in traffic. The day was dismal and drab, the clouds hanging low overhead and spitting down intermittent bouts of rain. It didn’t affect my hopeful mood, and I hummed along to the radio as Stephen parked up in the hospital car park.
I settled into a more serious mindset as we stepped into the hospital. The smell of the place, of rigorous chemical cleanliness, brought back the times we’d spent here in the past, and the majority hadn’t been positive. I focused on what we could ask Maddie, unsure exactly how willing she’d be to talk to us further. We’d spent long enough with this case that I had the sense that I knew Maddie, but I didn’t, really. We’d not spoken more than a few words, and I only knew of her character second-hand, from her mother and others.
We were directed to Maddie’s new bed, which was on a ward and not private, as it had been before. To the pleasure of both of us, Maddie was sitting up in her bed and was playing with her phone. A woman I didn’t recognise was sitting with her, reading a book, and they looked so relaxed that I was reluctant to disturb them. After all, we’d be asking Maddie to dredge up where were perhaps the very worst memories she had, or ever would have.
“Hello, Maddie,” Stephen stepped forwards to say.
He was a bulky guy, and he could certainly use that to intimidate when he wanted to, but equally, he had a way of softening himself into a friendliness that I admired. I imagined that it was the face and mannerisms he used when he interacted with his kids, though I’d never actually seen him do so.
Maddie looked up as we approached, and a look of confusion passed over her face.
“I’m DCI Darren Mitchell,” I told her, thinking that it wouldn’t be surprising if she’d forgotten our brief meeting only minutes after she first woke up. “This is DI Stephen Huxley. We met briefly, a couple of days ago.”
Her expression cleared, and her gaze sharpened as she nodded. “I remember now.”
I glanced over at the woman sitting in a chair beside Maddie’s bed, her book resting on her knees. She saw me looking and stood up to hold her hand out to me.
“Fiona Packham,” she told me. “I’m Dan’s sister.”
“Pleasure to meet you,” I said as I shook her hand. Fiona settled back into her seat, and Stephen and I turned our attention back to Maddie. “We’d like to have a chat with you, if you’re feeling up to it.”
She looked at us for a moment. “A chat, or an interview?” she asked hesitantly.
I paused briefly. “An interview, preferably, but if you’d feel more comfortable with something less formal, we can arrange that. For the sake of our records, we prefer to record our meetings.”
Maddie pressed her lips together before she gave a tight nod. “Fine.”
Fiona reached over and put her hand over the top of Maddie. “Do you want me to stay or go, love?”
Maddie swallowed. “I’ll be alright on my own.”
Fiona gave her a nod and a smile and stood up, setting her book down on the side. “I’ll go and fetch us some fresh tea and snacks.”
She left us alone, and I took Fiona’s vacated seat while Stephen brought one over from nearby.
“What do you want to talk to me about?” Maddie asked as we got settled. “I already told you who hurt me. You arrested her, didn’t you?”
“I’ll answer that in a moment,” I said, before holding up a recording device. “First, I’d like to turn this on, would that be alright? What you tell us could be valuable evidence in the future.”
Maddie looked at the small electronic book nervously before she said, “Well, okay.”
I turned it on and opened up my notebook to a fresh page. “To answer your question about Ms Davies,” I started, “she’s currently being held in custody at Hewford Station. We’re investigating fully what happened that evening, and we’d like to hear it from you, too.”
Maddie twisted her hands in the bedsheets, frowning down at her lap. “She pushed me.”
I gave her a sympathetic look. “And how did that come to happen?” I asked gently. “Can you start at the beginning?”
Maddie fidgeted, delaying having to reply by reaching for the glass of water on the bedside table and taking a drink. She seemed to gather herself after a moment.
“Alec and I were having a date night,” she started slowly.
She spoke about how she’d heard Alec on the phone, arguing with someone on the other end, and how his mood had gone sour afterwards. She told us about how they got into an argument about Alec using her for her money and not paying his fair share.
“Then his wife, his ex, turned up,” Maddie said bitterly. “She didn’t even knock. She was- she was scary. She was angry at Alec, angrier than I’ve ever seen anyone, and she went at him. And at me, telling me I was stupid, an idiot girl.” Her mouth twisted. “I just wanted to go home, then. I ran out, only she grabbed me and-” She broke off abruptly and took a breath, turning her head away from us. “She pushed me,” she finished firmly.
“I see,” I said as I tried to put my thoughts in order. Maddie was sweating slightly, and she looked distressed, and I didn’t want to push her. But the end of her story didn’t match Alec’s, and we needed to know which one of them wasn’t telling the whole truth.
“Maddie,” Stephen said carefully. “Are you… certain that’s how things played out? At the end?”
Maddie stared at him. “Are you telling me you don’t believe me?” she snapped, a pulse of anger making her tense.
I put up a hand. “Easy. We’re not saying that. If that’s what you say happened, we’ll set that down in the record,” I tried to reassure her. “But we’ve heard a different account from someone else and we, well, we want to be certain that you’re clear with us.”
I carefully didn’t use the word ‘lying’. Maddie didn’t need to be pushed into anger in the way that Alec had, I thought. A gentle coaxing would work better with her.
She opened her mouth and shut it again. “I- what exactly do you mean?”
She seemed to be clearly stalling for time, but I repeated myself using different words and let her process that. Tears suddenly filled her eyes as she looked blankly down at her hands, and one fell down into her lap, landing on her phone screen.
“Maddie?” I asked. “Do you want me to get your aunt?”
She shook her head. “I just-” she started shakily. “I didn’t want her to get away with it, that’s all. I didn’t mean to-to be dishonest. I didn’t know if you’d believe me.” She hiccuped on a quiet sob.
Stephen reached over to the bedside table and pulled a couple of tissues from the box, pressing them into Maddie’s hands.
“We’re listening,” I told her while she dried her eyes, her shoulders still shaking. “We want the right person to go away for this, okay? We’re on your side here. But you’ve got to help us help you.”
She gave a small nod, looking younger than she was. There was guilt in her expression, and pain and fear. She was silent for a long few minutes.
“You can tell us,” I said, looking at her with compassion.
She took a steadying breath and blew her nose on a tissue. “I don’t know for sure,” she said finally, her voice soft. “We were all struggling, and Alec was telling us to stop. You didn’t see her face. She was so angry, so so angry.” She shook her head, her shoulders curled up. “We were on the landing, near the stairs. I didn’t realise they were so close.” Her jaw clenched, and I could see in the flicker of awful fear that went across her face that she remembered falling.
“Alec was pulling us apart, pulling Isabel, really. And he did. He pulled her back, and she’d been grabbing me, and she let go.” Her voice hitched. “I’d been trying really hard to get free of her, pulling away. I just- I… fell.” She choked on a breath and pressed her fingers against her mouth, staring blankly past us at the hospital wall.
The ward wasn’t the quietest place, but I didn’t hear any of the surrounding chatter as I listened to Maddie tell her story. Sickness stirred in my stomach to hear her memory of it, and I couldn’t imagine how painful it must have been for her.
“Maddie,” I said gently, pulling her attention back to me. It took me repeating her name several times before she turned to face me, looking pale and drained.
She looked a great deal like Alec had, in fact, after he’d recounted his side of things, only she’d already been hurt and looked worse for it. Both of them would need therapy, I thought. They’d been through a trauma, though of very different kinds, and you didn’t shrug off an event like that. It made an impression on a person’s soul as surely as Isabel had left her footprints in the mud.
“You didn’t see her face,” Maddie said, her eyes fixed on mine. Her expression was pleading with me to believe her. “Alec looked scared. I’ve never seen him like that. But she- she looked so pleased. I couldn’t stop myself falling, and she was s-standing there, watching me fall and smiling. She was smiling.” She hiccoughed, breaking into fresh tears.
“Okay, easy,” I said quietly. “Take a breath.” I turned to Stephen to say quietly, “Can you go and find her aunt?” and he nodded and slipped away.
It took a while for Maddie to calm herself down and get her breathing back under control, but she had just about managed it by the time her aunt came back over. I stood up and moved away to allow Fiona to go to her niece’s side.
But Maddie’s attention wasn’t on her aunt, who looked worried when she saw Maddie’s pained expression, but on Stephen and I.
“Do you believe me?” she wanted to know. “She did it. She hurt me. She meant it, I know she did.”
“I believe you,” I said quietly. “We’ll have to see what we can prove in court, but we’ll do our best, alright? We’re right grateful to you for talking to us and telling us what happened.”
She gave a small nod. “Thank you,” she said, before turning to her aunt, who wrapped her up in a tight hug.
Stephen and I gathered our things and left them alone, walking back down the hospital corridors and out to the car.
“That fitted Alec’s story,” Stephen noted as we were driving back to the station.
“Aye. Almost exactly.”
“What do you think now, then?”
I was silent for a second. “I believe Alec and Maddie. There was a scuffle, and Isabel, somehow, deliberately hurt Maddie.”
“Do you still think it was planned? That Isabel plotted it out?”
I hummed. “If it wasn’t, it was a hell of a coincidence that she decided to run out the back, through the fire door.” I shook my head. “I can’t think how she knew that. And what Maddie was saying, too…” I trailed off, lost in thought.
“What?” Stephen prompted. “What did she say?”
“Oh. That she heard Alec on the phone, arguing with someone. We could try to see Alec’s phone records, but I bet that was Isabel. And I reckon he was telling her that he was spending time with Maddie-”
“So Isabel knew that Maddie and Alec were both at home in the flat,” Stephen finished.
“Aye.” I sighed. “Look, it’s a reach, I know. But it feels too smooth to me. Alec said several times that he knew how it would look; the girlfriend of a proved domestic abuse getting pushed down the stairs. Open and shut case, right?”
Stephen made a noise in his throat. “She thought it wouldn’t get closely looked into. And she’d have known that people wouldn’t really take Alec’s claims of innocence seriously, with his history.”
“Exactly.”
Stephen looked to be considering it, his expression thoughtful. I caught the moment where he decided that it was too much of a reach. “It still might’ve been an accident,” he said. “We’ve got no proof that Maddie didn’t just slip in the tussling.”
“Except Maddie and Alec both-”
“They’re not the most reliable of people, are they? I mean, in terms of their not coming clean sooner. Maddie simplified her account, lied really, when she said that Isabel pushed her. For understandable reasons, of course, but still. And Alec wouldn’t speak at all, till we pushed him, and he ran from the police.”
I grimaced. “Yeah, unfortunately, you’re right.”
I chewed on a loose hangnail and thought it over. I was still thinking about it as we were pulling up outside the station. My stomach was starting to complain about lack of food, and Stephen and I headed over to the shops to grab lunch.
“What would be better than Alec and Maddie’s testimonies,” I decided, when we were back at our desks and eating our sandwiches, “would be a confession from Isabel. That would be incontrovertible, when put together with all the other evidence.”
Stephen swallowed his mouthful. “Yeah, but how would we get that, exactly? She lied and lied in the last interview.”
I twisted my lip. “Aye, she did,” I grunted.
I continued eating as I turned the problem over, trying to see it from Isabel’s point of view. I took a swig of coffee to wash down the bread and wiped my mouth on a napkin.
“She thinks she’s in the right,” I said, thinking aloud. “We need to bring that out. She had a reason for why she did it, right? I don’t think- she doesn’t strike me as someone who’d act like that without serious provocation, and Alec certainly gave her that.”
“Why did she wait so long to do something?”
I shrugged at that. “Anoth
er thing we could ask her. She’s not like Alec, driven into passionate anger when you press the right buttons, but I think she’d be livid if we suggested that she- if we said that her actions didn’t mean anything? Does that make sense?”
Stephen was nodding. “Yeah. She’s driven.” He gave a little shrug. “Look, I’m not totally convinced that she somehow planned it or whatever. I think it was more luck and fast-thinking on her part, but I’ll follow where you lead. We’ll see what she’ll say, if anything.”
I gave him a small smile. “Good. We’ll give it a go, then.”
Maybe we could’ve had Isabel convicted on the piecemeal evidence we had now, especially with the blood in the kitchen, and the cameras at the shop down the road proving that she was there that night. But this would be the icing on the cake, and I didn’t want to leave any room for chance. Maddie didn’t deserve being dragged into a prolonged court case just because Stephen and I couldn’t seal the evidence tight enough. After the horror she’d already been through and survived, she deserved better.
Twenty-One
Speaking to Maddie, and seeing her in such distress, had left me feeling drained, but we weren’t at the end of the day yet. The case felt so close to being completed, and that gave me a renewed sense of purpose.
Stephen, sitting at his desk beside me, set his phone down. “They’ll bring her into a room for us.”
“Good.”
I was both looking forward to and dreading speaking to Isabel. I’d been planning what I’d say to her, and how I could get her to tell her the whole, unedited truth, even though it looked very badly for her. I wasn’t confident that we’d be able to, but I still hoped for it, because it would help so much with clinching the evidence.
I wished, briefly but strongly, that I could visit Sam. Seeing her, even only for a minute or two, would’ve set me at ease again, I was sure. She had a quiet way of making me feel both renewed and invincible and I could’ve done with a little of that just now. But seeing her would have to wait, and I couldn’t help but feel a stab of resentment towards Gaskell and the higher-ups that we had to hide it like this. It was what it was.
Close to Home (A DI Mitchell Yorkshire Crime Thriller Book 4) Page 23
