by Sherri Bryan
Nathan pulled her onto his lap. “Oh, Charlotte, I’m so sorry. That never even occurred to me. You should have said something.”
“What good would that have done? Anyway, doesn’t matter—I’m just telling you why I think I’m right.”
They sat in silence, going over the permutations of the situation until Charlotte suddenly gripped Nathan’s hand.
“And…that’s why Eddie didn’t want to give a DNA sample—not because he was afraid it would identify him as the person who tampered with the hot tub, like we originally thought, but because it would identify him as Adam’s son and he didn’t want anyone to know.”
Nathan kissed her gently. “Do you know what, Mrs Costello?”
“What?” Charlotte played with the hair at the nape of his neck.
“If you carry on like this, you’ll make Sergeant in no time.”
ººººººº
“Eddie. It’s DCI Costello and DS Dillon. Will you open the door, please?”
The sound of shuffling preceded Eddie’s gaunt, unshaven face peering around the edge of the open door.
“I’m sorry, can this wait? I’m really not in the mood to speak to you just now.”
“No, Eddie, it can’t. We’ve delayed questioning you because you’ve been too upset to speak to us but we can’t put it off any longer. Can we come in, please? Or you can come down to the station, if you’d prefer?”
With a sigh of resignation, Eddie moved back to let them in. “Living room’s the second on the right.”
He slumped down into an old leather chair. “So, what d’you want to talk to me about that’s so urgent?”
“Eddie. Did you murder Adam Pitt?” Nathan’s first question caught him off guard.
“What? No. God, no, I swear I didn’t. I couldn’t…you don’t understand.” He put his thumb in his mouth and began to chew the nail.
“I think I do…Adam Pitt was your father, wasn’t he?”
The look on Eddie’s face alone confirmed the answer to Nathan’s question.
“How do you know? How did you find out? Oh God! Did my mum tell you? I really don’t want to talk about it.”
Nathan sat down opposite him, his voice a little kinder. “No, your mum didn’t tell us but you’re going to have to sooner or later—why don’t you just tell us now?
Eddie shook his head. “I wish I’d told him now that I was his son…I should have told him and now it’s too late. I was going to wait until the end of the month to tell him—when he was frantic with worry that his blackmailer was about to spill his dirty little secret to the press, but…”
Nathan interrupted. “His blackmailer? You know about that?” The realisation dawned. “It was you who was blackmailing him, wasn’t it? You sent the email?”
Eddie looked terrified. “You didn’t know? I thought that’s why you were here.” He punched the arm of the chair. “Damn, I should have kept my mouth shut!”
“Eddie, you need to help me understand all this because I need to know.” Nathan took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. “I have a feeling we’re going to be here for a while. Now, please. Tell me everything.”
Eddie bit his bottom lip and blew out a deep sigh.
“My mum was pregnant with me when my dad left. She didn’t tell him because she didn’t want him to know anything about me. She wanted to keep me away from him. He never even knew I existed.
“Mum kept a diary about everything my dad did. She said she wrote it for cathartic reasons—to help ease her conscience. That diary became a record of every terrible thing he had ever done, from the way he treated her like crap to the part he played in the death of that guy, David Travis.
“When I was fourteen, I found the diary when I was looking for cigarettes in her room. She used to hide them from me, y’see. When I’d read it, I asked her to tell me everything about him—I wanted to know it all. Because she’d never bad-mouthed him to me, I had no idea what he was really like. I just assumed he was an ordinary guy who left home one day. Kids don’t analyse information so much when they’re young.
“I asked her to tell me about him and she did. He was pretty successful by then but I didn’t want to find him or anything like that, I just wanted to know about my dad. I thought it’d make me feel good, but the older I got, the angrier I got. D’you know, he left my mum without a penny? She didn’t want anything from him so she never asked him for money, but you’d have thought he’d have the decency to offer her something.” He smashed his fist down on the table.
“I knew I had to get back at him for what he’d done and I knew the best way to do that was to get close to him. So I read everything I could find about him. He was doing well for himself so it wasn’t hard to find articles about him in the business sections of the newspapers. I followed his every move and spent every spare minute learning about him. I studied hard to get good qualifications and, when I was ready, I contacted him to ask him to keep me in mind if he ever needed a personal assistant.
“I made sure the letter was really smarmy and complimentary—I told him I’d be honoured to work for him, blah, blah, blah. I knew how vain he was and Mum had told me that cossetting his ego was the way to get his attention. She never thought I’d get the job but I knew I would—because I knew what made him tick. Flattery. I flattered him until he felt so good he couldn’t not give me the assistant’s job.
“Anyway, it obviously worked because he contacted me personally and told me to come for an interview. My surname is Lewis, which is my mum’s maiden name, but it’s a common enough name not to have rung any alarm bells with him. So I went for the interview and he offered me the job on the spot. That was five years ago. It was just a matter of time before I put my plan to ruin him into place.”
“But why did you wait so long? Why didn’t you blackmail him before? Why wait all these years?” asked Nathan.
“Because I wanted to lull him into a false sense of security. I wanted him to get to know me and trust me—I wanted to be the last person on earth he’d suspect of trying to bring him down. And it was working. He didn’t suspect me for a minute. He was paying me overtime to find out who was sending the emails.
“The thing is, as much as I wanted to hate him, over the years I grew to respect him. He would get everything and anything he wanted. He was so powerful; I began to feel proud that he was my dad.
“All the feelings I’d had about wanting to deprive him of knowing he had a son, changed to wanting to tell him he had one. So I decided to teach him a lesson. I was going to make him think his dirty little secrets were going to be made public at the end of the month, just to make him sweat, and then I was going to tell him all about me and that the blackmail attempt had just been my way of getting back at him.”
“And Amy? Did she know about the blackmail attempt?”
Eddie looked surprised. “So you know about me and Amy?” He rubbed his hand over his stubbled chin. “No, she didn’t know anything about it, I swear she didn’t. No one knew anything about it apart from me and mum.
“You know, when it became obvious how much he loved Amy, I knew I was going to try to steal her away from him—just because I knew how much it would hurt him.
“The thing is I didn’t expect to like her, let alone fall in love with her. Taking Amy away from him on my terms was one thing, but falling in love with the woman he loved was another thing altogether. He would have killed me if he’d found out—and possibly Amy, too. Even after she left him he was so possessive—it’s ironic that his possessiveness was one of the reasons she left him in the first place.”
“Tell me about the trip to London,” said Nathan.
“Ah, yeah, London. Well, that was supposed to be just me and Amy and the rest of the gang. We’d been looking forward to it for ages—our first real time away together and we were going to tell everyone about us—but all of a sudden, Adam decided to come along, and me and Amy had to pretend we were just friends.
“You know, Adam wanted to go to London to
kill Frankie—can you believe it? Or, should I say, he wanted me to kill Frankie—“make it look like an accident,” he said. I told him not to be so ridiculous. He was convinced that Frankie and Amy were having a thing because he’d seen her tattoo on the CCTV he thought it said AB & FI. I’ll never forget the day he showed me that video—I thought he’d rumbled us. Thank God he never knew what the tattoo really said. That’s why Amy had to stay covered up in London.”
“So, did he kill Frankie?” Nathan was hopeful.
“No, he didn’t. But you remember me telling you how he always got what he wanted? That was Adam for you—everything always seemed to go his way.
“When he realised I wanted no part of murdering Frankie, he backed down. He had no intention of doing the deed himself—not when there were so many of us staying at the house and he could so easily have been found out—so, instead, he just hung around, watching Amy’s every move. When Frankie ended up dead, we were all devastated but he was over the moon.”
Eddie wrung his clammy hands.
“Look, I never meant for anyone to get hurt…I might have wanted to once, but I swear I didn’t kill anyone. Not Frankie or Adam.
“If you’re looking for a murderer, you’re not going to find one here.”
Chapter 11
“Yooohooo, only me!”
“We’re in here, Ava.” Jess looked over the top of the swing door of the kitchen.
“Hello, dears. I wanted to give you this book, Charlotte. I just found it in the charity shop in town.”
“Oh, thank you, Ava.” Charlotte went out into the café. “You shouldn’t have.” She took the book, her smile fading as she read the title.
“What’s it called?” said Jess.
Charlotte forced the smile back on her face. “It’s called, Fifty Ways Not to Be a Pain in the Butt When You’re Expecting.”
“I assume it’s an American book,” said Ava, looking very pleased with herself. “Otherwise it would say bottom, not butt. No matter, dear, I’m sure the advice translates to all nationalities.”
Jess threw her head back and roared with laughter. “Ava, you’re an absolute gem! I don’t know what we’d do without you but I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t laugh half as much as we do now!”
As Charlotte saw the funny side, she started to giggle. “Thank you, Ava. I’m sure it’ll be very interesting.” She gave her old friend a hug and thought for the millionth time how fortunate she was to have her in her life. No matter how inappropriate her comments or her gifts, her heart was always in the right place and her intentions were always good. Jess was right: Ava was a gem.
“So, are you staying for a coffee or is this just a flying visit?”
“I’m meeting Harriett at three and we’ve got some friends joining us.” Ava looked at her watch. “I don’t think you’ve ever met Cindy and Brenda, have you? They’re the founding members of ‘The Pittettes’—you know, the Adam Pitt appreciation society. As you can imagine, they’ve been distraught following recent events, so Harriett and I thought we’d invite them out, you know, to see if we can lift their spirits a little.
“Anyway, dears, I’ll have a cup of tea, today, I think. Just a little milk, please, Jess. And I’ll go and grab that table in the shade before someone else nabs it. It’s terribly hot out there this afternoon and I don’t want my makeup to melt.”
ººººººº
“The one in the green jumpsuit keeps calling me Tess. I keep correcting her but she keeps doing it,” Jess whispered to Charlotte. “And they’re very intense, aren’t they?”
“You can say that again—especially the one with the perm and the pearls. Leo was right, they really do have an encyclopaedic knowledge—dates, times, places, what happened and when—I don’t know how they remember it all.”
Charlotte had just spent fifteen minutes trying to politely excuse herself from the company of Brenda Tatum, who, following a visit to the ladies room, had insisted on sharing her memories of Adam Pitt throughout the years.
Charlotte wondered how popular he would have been if ‘The Pittettes’ had known about his secret past.
“Charlotte! Jess! Oh, you must come and look at these photos. They’re priceless!” Ava beckoned them from the table outside. “Come and see!”
Charlotte and Jess looked at each other.
“Well, I can’t go out, I’ve got prep in the kitchen to get on with,” said Charlotte.
“And I can’t go because I’ve got…um, I’ve got…customers to serve! Yippee! I win!” Jess picked up her tray and skipped out to tend to a family of four who had just settled themselves at a table.
Charlotte sighed. She’d never been particularly interested in Adam Pitt, but recent revelations had made her even less so. Nevertheless, the ladies outside were customers.
Putting the smile back on her face, she called out, “Coming, Ava!”
ººººººº
“So the neighbour’s sticking to her story?”
“Not only is she sticking to her story but she’s got a date now. Until yesterday, all she could tell us was that she was sure she saw someone at the Baker house in March. But yesterday, she called to let me know it was the third weekend in March.”
“And you think that’s reliable information?”
“Well, between you and me, she’s too much of a busybody for my liking, but those are the people who very often give the most reliable info; because they’ve got their nose into everything, they don’t miss much.”
“So why did she only just remember about it being the third weekend in March?”
“Because she had some dental work done on the Friday of that weekend. She said she didn’t immediately make the connection between the couple arriving at the house being on the same date she had her teeth fixed, because the anaesthetic had made her drowsy and she spent most of the weekend in bed. Her daughter had dropped her home from the orthodontist that evening at around six-thirty and that’s when she saw the couple arriving at the house but, because it was dark, and she was still groggy, she didn’t notice anything other than it was two people.
“It wasn’t until the Sunday afternoon that she caught sight of the couple from an upstairs window, albeit from a distance but, because they were wrapped up so well against the cold, she couldn’t see much. She’s adamant, though, that she saw some strands of blonde hair coming out from under the woman’s hat. She said the woman was wearing a black coat and a black hat, so the blonde hair was very noticeable.”
“Have you told the Baker sisters?”
“Yeah, I just spoke to Penny and she said she and her sister took the baby to visit their parents who were on holiday in France that weekend, and her partner, Owen, went clay pigeon shooting from Friday until Sunday afternoon with Adam Pitt and Eddie Lewis. She’s adamant that no one was at the house that weekend and our witness is mistaken.”
“I see. I take it you’ve not had the DNA results back yet?”
“No, but it should be any day now. I’ll let you know when I have any news. So, how are things going with the Adam Pitt case?”
Nathan had called Toby Carter for an update on the Frankie Ingram investigation. The two cases had become so intertwined, he’d hoped that the detective would have some new information that would shed new light on Adam Pitt’s murder.
“Well, there have been a few developments but nothing that points to the identity of the killer. It’s as frustrating as hell.”
“Tell me about it.” Toby Carter chuckled. “Well, I’d better be going, places to go, people to see…you know how it is.”
“Yeah, I do. Okay, keep in touch and I’ll do likewise. Speak to you soon.”
Nathan had a hunch. He tried to ignore it but it kept niggling and niggling until he couldn’t ignore it any longer.
Picking up his keys, he called out to Amanda. “I’ll be back in an hour or so. Call me with anything urgent.”
The hunch didn’t directly concern the investigation into Adam Pitt’s murder. It was more to do
with the investigation into Frankie Ingram’s death.
If it was right, it wouldn’t reveal the person responsible but Nathan had a feeling that it would reveal a significant piece of the puzzle which had, so far, eluded them.
Might as well solve part of someone else’s mystery while we’re waiting to get a result on the Pitt murder, thought Nathan as he drove out of the police car park. At least it’ll put a smile on Toby Carter’s face.
ººººººº
“Be quiet, Beau.”
Penny Baker’s Labrador, Beau, announced Nathan’s arrival before sloping off in search of a cool place to flop down.
“Oh, hello. I spoke to your sidekick in London just a while ago.” Penny stood to one side to let Nathan pass. “Is this quick? It’s just that I’m getting ready for the memorial and I’ve got a lot to do.”
“It’s okay, I don’t need to come in; I just want to ask you a question.”
“Oh, right. Regarding Adam’s death?
“More to do with Frankie’s, actually—I’m just following up on a hunch.”
“Hmmm, interesting. Okay, what is it?”
“Your house in London. Who has keys?”
“Owen and I both have a set. Why?”
Nathan ignored the question. “And where do you keep them?”
“Owen keeps his on his keyring and I keep mine on a hook behind the front door with everyone else’s house keys. Why?”
“What do you mean “everyone else’s house keys”? Who’s everyone else?”
“Our next door neighbour, the woman over the road who looks after the dogs while we’re away, Amy, Eddie, Ruby.”
“You’ve got keys to their houses?”
“Yes, and they’ve all got a key to this house. Why?”
“Can’t tell you anything, I’m afraid, but thanks for the info—you’ve been very helpful!”
ººººººº
‘Ingram’s Ink’ was in a side street in a quiet neighbourhood just outside town.
