by Lodge, Gytha
Aidan Poole’s face was pale but set. “Yes,” he said. “I understand that. I don’t need a solicitor because I had absolutely fuck-all to do with Zoe’s death.”
“Then why did you lie to us?” Jonah asked.
“About what?” There was something in Aidan’s expression that told Jonah he knew that he’d lied. He knew damn well.
“About not knowing where her flat was,” Jonah said.
Aidan glanced at Hanson, and then back at Jonah. “What? I didn’t know where her flat was! What the hell?”
“It was a pretty complex bit of deception,” Hanson chimed in. “Deliberately not providing an address either time you spoke to the police, and then waiting for it to be brought up.”
Aidan’s expression was dumbstruck. “I didn’t know it,” he said, after a moment. “I really didn’t.”
“It was always a bit of a stretch,” Jonah said. “The idea that you didn’t know where your own girlfriend lived.”
“I told you,” he said, a shake in his voice. “She kept her distance after the last breakup. Maybe that’s because I’d acted like an idiot before, or maybe she just wasn’t sure she’d made the right decision taking me back. I don’t know. But she didn’t tell me, and she’d told everyone not to let on.”
“So how did your fingerprints come to be found in the bathroom?” Jonah asked.
There was a total silence, and Aidan’s face had the expression of someone who’d just been shot.
“What? They couldn’t have been.”
“Because you thought you’d been too careful?” Jonah asked.
“Or because you wore gloves that day?” Hanson said. “Was there another time you’d forgotten about, when you went to see her and stayed awhile?”
Aidan shook his head slowly and then with a gradually increasing tempo. “I didn’t,” he said. “I’ve never been there. Not once. I still don’t know where it is.”
“Perhaps you forgot that you’d locked the bathroom door when you killed her?” Jonah said. “Was it one of those instinctive actions that you didn’t even think about? Because you didn’t want to get caught murdering your girlfriend?”
“I didn’t murder her,” Aidan said, and there was an awful, pleading note in his voice. “I didn’t touch her. I called you because someone else killed her and I heard.” He looked between them. “I showed you the Skype call, didn’t I? Look, I would have said on the call if I’d had the address.”
“Maybe you had other reasons for not giving the address,” Hanson said. “Maybe you wanted some time to go by, so it was less clear when she died. So the window included the time when you called her instead of the time when you killed her.”
“No,” he said, a little more aggressively. “This is total crap. I didn’t know where her flat was.”
“And yet you’d been there,” Jonah said, not shifting an inch. “You’d not only been there, but been in the bathroom where she died.”
“Oh my God, please stop saying that,” Aidan said, and he shoved the heels of each hand into his eyes, the fingers curled into fists. “I hadn’t. I hadn’t been there. And I don’t understand.”
“What happened?” Jonah asked. “An argument? Did she break up with you? Did it sound like it was for good this time?” He paused. “Or did she threaten to tell your wife? To tell the university? Was she going after your job?”
“Shut up!” Aidan said suddenly. It was whip-sharp. For a moment he looked at Jonah with a hatred as intense as any he could remember. And then he took a big breath. “It doesn’t matter how many times you say that crap. It didn’t happen. None of it happened.”
There was a pause, then Hanson said softly, “Maybe we’re being unfair. Maybe you’ve convinced yourself, too. If it all went wrong and you were desperate, maybe afterward you talked yourself around. Started to believe that you saw what you claimed you did.”
“Jesus,” Aidan said. “What’s wrong with you? I was never there. I never hurt her. I’m not fucking insane.” And then he suddenly straightened up, his face becoming set and hard. “All right. I want that solicitor now.”
* * *
—
HANSON CAME TO find Jonah a short while after Aidan Poole had been escorted out to make his phone call. Jonah had balled up a piece of Blu-Tack and was throwing and catching it, then rolling it a little more perfectly into a sphere before throwing it again.
“What do you think?”
“I think he’s lying,” Jonah said. “I think he’s been lying from the beginning. But what’s interesting is that he thought we were going to ask about something else.”
“I thought that, too,” Hanson agreed. “What else are we missing?”
“And are we right in thinking he’s lying about the flat?” Jonah said quietly.
Hanson rubbed the back of her neck for a moment, and then said, “So what if he’s lying in one sense but not another? What if he really didn’t know the address?”
Jonah gave her a considering gaze. “You think he followed her home, but then never worked out what the actual address was? Or didn’t write it down?”
“Could be,” Hanson said slowly, “or someone else could have taken him there and let him in. Maybe he was nervous because he thought that person had talked to us.”
Jonah nodded, but wondered if they were being too convoluted about this. Both of those theories felt off to him somehow.
“It’s possible,” he said in the end, “but I feel like he was worried about something else.” He saw Hanson’s expression and gave a small smile. “I know. Verging on an assumption. And you don’t have to agree. But a few things occur to me. The first is that Zoe was away from her flat from five-twenty until eight-thirty that evening. If she came home at eight-thirty, why did Aidan Poole have to wait until eleven to Skype her?”
He could see Hanson thinking this over. “You think she’d arranged for someone else to visit once she was home. The person who was waiting for her.”
“Possibly. She then argued with someone,” Jonah said.
“But that’s several hours before the Skype call, so there’s still a lot of unaccounted-for time. We know the Skype call was at eleven,” Hanson replied. “Though…we don’t know for sure whether that call showed anything at all, do we? If he’d killed her, he could have been in the flat and just made a call from his mobile to her Skype and accepted the call himself.” She paused. “Can we get a location from his mobile?”
“Yes and no,” Jonah said. “We can only get the nearest mast, but that should at least tell us if he was near the flat or at home.”
“Which would help a lot,” Hanson said. “Shall I go and request it?”
“Yes,” Jonah said. “It’d be good to rule him out.” At Hanson’s sigh, he added, “Sorry. I’m not saying you’re wrong, it’s just…if I had to put my finger on the one bit of truth we’ve had from Aidan Poole, it was his account of the murder.”
Hanson gave a slightly frustrated shrug. “Well, we’ve got to start somewhere.” She turned away and then faltered in the doorway, and turned back. “Sir, in Aidan Poole’s account, he never saw her, did he? He never actually saw Zoe on the screen.”
“No,” Jonah said, going back over Aidan’s account in his mind. “No, he didn’t.”
“So what if you were Zoe’s killer, and you knew Aidan was going to talk to Zoe. Say you’d killed her earlier in the evening,” Hanson said, “and you wanted to give yourself an alibi.”
“You could fake a scene in the bathroom,” Jonah agreed slowly.
“You could even record audio of the real scene and play it back when he called,” Hanson said.
“But how would you know Aidan was calling at that point?” Jonah asked. “And, more significantly, how would you pick up the Skype call unless you were waiting there? If you sat and waited and picked up, you’d be setting up an incredibl
y complex alibi for a time you were actually in the flat, which makes no sense.”
“No, true,” she said. “Unless there were two of you…”
* * *
—
HANSON RETURNED TO her desk wondering whether they’d been looking at everything all wrong. Of course it would be possible to fake the time of the murder, if your only witness was watching through a screen that had a limited viewing range. The forensics had only placed her death between late afternoon and the early hours of the morning. Zoe could have been dead hours before.
She knew the DCI hadn’t been sold on the theory. She’d seen it in his expression and in his cautious responses. But that was his job, she thought. He was meant to keep an open mind. It was up to his team to work with every unlikely theory, in case one of them turned out to be right.
Wondering how much precedence there was for a pair of murderers, she pulled her keyboard closer and opened Google, then searched for “murdering couples.” She’d just pressed the Enter key when DI Walker emerged from the kitchen. In response to her glance in his direction, he gave her a smile and ambled over, carrying his coffee cup.
“Are you any less soaked today?”
“Yes, thank God,” she said, grinning. “Hey, can you think of any famous couples who’ve murdered people? As a pair, you know?”
“Sure,” Walker said. “Bonnie and Clyde, Homolka and Bernardo, Faye and Ray Copeland…the Birnies…”
“Whoa,” Hanson said, grabbing a pen. “That’s loads. Which is helpful but also…concerning.”
The DI laughed. “I did a criminal psychology paper on group killers. A lot of couples featured.”
“You did criminal psychology?” Hanson asked, pausing to look at him. “Where was that?”
“Winchester.”
“Ooh, local boy.”
“What about you?” he asked.
“Oh, I did straight psychology,” Hanson said. “Which was great, and I’ve used it a lot since. But I sometimes wonder about going back and specializing in the criminal side. I keep thinking it might help.”
“Well, I’ve definitely found it useful,” Walker said, lifting his mug thoughtfully. “I mean, I only have to be in a room with a killer to know they did it.”
“Really?” Hanson said, and then realized that he was joking. “All right, yeah. Maybe it’s not vital.”
“Sorry,” Walker said, laughing. “You should definitely think about it. I think it all helps, and if your style is to get inside the heads of your suspects, then it’s even better.”
Hanson gave him a grin, and went back to her work with that in mind. She supposed that probably was her style. Whenever she wasn’t involved with simple fact-finding, she generally thought about why people might have acted in a certain way.
And maybe that was what she should be thinking about with Zoe’s case. What would the motivation be for a couple killing her together? And why would you want to fake the time of the death, if her thoughts were right? One of them had to have an alibi for 11 P.M., otherwise what was the point? But it also had to be someone who had been free to commit murder earlier on, working with someone else who was free at eleven to create an elaborate cover-up for their accomplice.
Maeve, she remembered, had been busy up until a little before ten, and then free. Maeve also had a track record of letting Aidan into Zoe’s house, and Hanson decided to start looking at her more intently. She loaded up the transcript of Maeve’s interview and began to read. She was just getting into her stride when the phone on her desk rang.
She sighed as she realized it was the crime desk transferring a member of the public with information about Zoe’s death. She’d hoped that anyone who was going to provide information on Zoe would have called in over the weekend.
The call handler told her that they had someone who seemed credible.
“I think you should talk to him,” he said.
“OK. Put him through.”
There was a click, and then a young man’s voice said, “I think I saw the girl, the one on the news this morning. It’s hard to be sure, but she looked very like her.”
“OK, thanks. Can you tell me when and where this was?”
“So this was on Thursday night,” he said. “At my local.”
“Where’s that?” Hanson asked, wondering whether he was just about to overthrow all of her theories. If he’d seen Zoe later on the night she’d died, she couldn’t have been murdered by the person shouting at nine. She moved the handset so she could take notes.
“It’s the Bridge. It’s on North Road, near the uni campus.”
Hanson scribbled this down, and then said, “Great. So when did you see her?”
“This would be lateish. Ten maybe. She came to meet a guy who was already there and look after him.”
Hanson felt one of the strange drops in her spirits that always came when a pet theory was overturned. If this was true, then Zoe really had died at eleven or later.
“Was he drunk?” she asked.
“Pretty paralytic,” he said. “She came in, and then he pretty much fell off his seat at the bar, so she took him outside.”
The little Hanson knew of Zoe tied in with someone who would go and look after a drunk friend. Or one who was pretending to be drunk. “Could you describe him?”
“Well, ish…He was an older guy. A lot older than she was. I don’t know. I was thinking it was a shame. She clearly deserved better than some old drunk.”
Her pulse began to pick up a little. “So when you say he was old, was he gray-haired?”
He let out a breath. “I think it was gray? I’m not sure.”
“Any facial hair?”
“Some, I think,” he said. “Beard and mustache, though maybe long stubble.”
Hanson scribbled on her pad, and asked, “And how was he dressed?”
“Pretty well,” the guy said. “Expensive-looking shirt and trousers.”
Which unquestionably sounded like Felix Solomon.
“Did you see them after she took him outside?”
“Oh. Yeah, I did. I wanted a smoke, so I took my beer outside and sat at one of the tables out the front. The guy was upset, and she was hugging him and, you know, comforting him. And then he was sick into a plant pot, and after that she called a cab and they left.”
“What time was that?”
There was another huff of air. “I’m not sure. Probably ten forty-five?”
Hanson shivered. Ten minutes before Aidan’s assumed Skype conversation, Zoe had left a pub in a taxi with someone who looked like Felix Solomon.
“Do you know what he was upset about?”
Her informant paused. “I don’t know. He definitely said something about being useless and a waste of space, and she said he wasn’t. But other than that I’m not sure.”
“OK, thanks. Can I take your name and contact number?”
She thought again about Aidan’s fingerprints on the lock. Maybe there hadn’t needed to be two people involved in Zoe’s murder. Maybe there had only needed to be one. A man who had run his own cases, and knew exactly how to manipulate a crime scene. A man who used to be a DCI.
May—six months before
It was just a regular Tuesday. A Tuesday on which he and Greta had done a verbal download of the day’s events to each other, and sympathized and laughed, and then had gone on to talk about the other people in their lives while forking seafood tagliatelle in a white wine sauce into their mouths, and drinking a little more than either of them had meant to. Such an ordinary evening.
But it was also the sort of evening that made him feel that his other life must be a fantasy. He was so used to this life, lived in this house, with this woman. The idea of it all ending—of the two of them going their separate ways and perhaps just meeting up every few months for lunch—seemed unreal.
/> He and Greta ended up on the topic of their friend Antony and his loss of libido. The conversation continued as they loaded their plates into the dishwasher and rinsed their hands. He kept listening while he checked his phone.
A couple of messages had arrived, and they were almost definitely from Zoe. There was a little red two at the top left of the app, but nothing on the home screen. There were only two contacts he’d muted so their messages didn’t flash up. Zoe, he’d muted to keep her messages from Greta. Maeve was the other, and he’d muted her for everyone’s benefit, including his own. However strange it felt to think about Zoe right now, it was nothing to the shameful regret he felt when he thought about her housemate.
He had never, ever meant for anything to happen with Maeve. He’d enjoyed winning her over, and he’d liked the way her gaze locked onto him the moment he entered a room. He’d always known that her investment in his relationship with Zoe was as much about her own interest as it was about Zoe’s. But there had been strict, strict boundaries.
Unfortunately, when Zoe had broken the relationship off things had ended up off-kilter. He’d become dependent on his conversations with Maeve because they had brought him closer to Zoe somehow. They had given him a potential way in. And last October, it had been Maeve who had let him into the house and allowed him to talk Zoe round.
The trouble had come only when he’d met Maeve at a bar. He’d been drunk and overwhelmed with sadness when the meet-up had started, and he’d ended up confused. Two weeks had passed since Zoe had spoken to him, and he’d been desperate. And maybe his pride had been wounded, too.
He could still remember, with horrible clarity, how he’d begun to focus on Maeve instead. How he’d told her what a wonderful person she was, and worked harder to make her laugh. To make her blush with pleasure.
She’d been so gloriously intoxicated with it all. He’d pushed through her initial resolve, but she hadn’t quite given in to him completely. She’d kept the table between them and resisted attempts to hold her hand.