by Paula Daly
Kicking the ground with the toe of his paratrooper boot, he admitted to ‘having a little poke around’.
‘Did you remove anything from the scene?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘You’re certain about that?’
‘Certain.’
A pause.
‘Well, nothing except for a couple of Booths carrier bags from the boot,’ he said.
Joanne rolled her eyes. ‘Carrier bags containing?’
‘Some minced beef, carrots, onions…nothing major. I thought I could knock up a shepherd’s pie.’
Joanne wondered if anything was sacred any more.
‘We think a woman may have died in that car,’ she said, annoyed, and he shrugged, giving her a look as if to say, Well, I wasn’t to know that.
She took his details, handed him a card and told him that he could leave. They’d be in touch, she said, and she could see him regretting ever getting involved. He’d given her his mobile number, stalling on one of the digits, and Joanne suspected he’d switched the 3 from a 4 or else a 2. She did it herself sometimes, with acquaintances she had no interest in forging a friendship with, or when she was caught by someone on Kendal High Street conducting a survey. ‘My mobile number?’ she’d say innocently, before reeling off a jumble of figures that was totally unworkable. Anyway, she thought, watching the witness skulk off through the trees, she could catch up with him whatever his number was. She knew where he was staying.
You’ve changed your hair.
Surprisingly, after Noel Bloom had made this comment, she found herself giving him and his two daughters a lift to Bowness to collect his car. He told her he’d left it outside the Italian restaurant last night after drinking a little more than he’d planned, which was evident from the stench of alcohol on his breath. His girls chatted away pleasantly in the back seat. They did not seem remotely distressed by Karen’s absence, Brontë, particularly, peppering Joanne with questions about her work as a detective.
‘Have you ever seen a dead body?’ she asked.
‘A couple,’ replied Joanne.
‘Do the police have to call you ma’am, like they do on TV?’
‘No. They call me Joanne.’
‘What about your boss?’ she asked. ‘Do you have to call her ma’am?’
‘No. We call each other by our first names.’
‘Do you have your own gun?’
And so on.
When she’d taken a look around the house she’d found only one thing of interest. She’d been on the hunt for bloodied clothing, so the first place she headed to was the utility room, where she checked the laundry basket, the washer and the dryer. In the dryer, she found one lone white polo shirt. It had a Reid’s emblem on the breast and, by the size of it, Joanne assumed it belonged to Verity. Strange to dry only one item of clothing, Joanne thought, so she questioned Verity about it.
‘It was dirty after cross-country,’ she explained. ‘I needed it again for today.’
‘You have only one?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you didn’t think to wash any other clothes while you were at it? Strange to wash one thing, don’t you think?’
‘Not really.’
‘Where did you run?’
‘Near school. We have a fixed route.’
Near school was where Karen’s car had been found.
Joanne made a note of it.
Noel didn’t want to tell the girls about Karen’s car having been found, telling Joanne he would ‘deal with it later’. And when she had questioned him about Karen’s parents, asking if they’d heard anything from their daughter and could they shed any light on her whereabouts, Noel’s eyes had flicked sideways, evasively, before he mumbled, ‘They weren’t in.’
‘How about you try them again?’ she’d pressed.
And he’d said, ‘Leave it with me.’
In the rear-view mirror, Joanne watched the girls climb into Noel’s Volvo.
For a strange second, when they’d got out of her car, she had thought Noel was going to lean over and kiss her goodbye.
Not that she wanted him to or anything.
—
‘How much blood?’ Joanne asked Oliver Black.
‘A lot, apparently.’
‘Like a lot lot?’
‘Yes. And there’s spatter on the dashboard,’ he said. ‘Of course, we can’t know yet if it’s Karen Bloom’s blood, but it doesn’t look good. They’re saying it’d been cleaned up. Not well – it’s smeared all over the front seats – but there’s been an attempt at a clean-up, that’s for certain.’
Joanne asked if they’d located blood anywhere else, and Oliver told her they’d found a couple of spots towards the lake. Trouble was, there had been high winds in the night, which had blown the leaves around to heaven knows where, so it was unlikely they’d find more. They were hoping to discover something in the soil samples taken from the shoreline.
DI Pat Gilmore was near the boot of the Volvo, wagging her finger at one of the CSIs. This was a habit of Pat’s which Joanne didn’t much care for. Joanne felt as if she was being lectured and, from the pissed-off look on the face of the CSI, so did he.
Pat called her over. ‘Joanne, what do you know?’
‘Husband hasn’t heard from her since yesterday morning. He called me last night to report her missing and—’
‘He called you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why you?’
‘I suppose he didn’t know what else to do. Too early to report her gone.’
The CSI cleared his throat. He’d pushed his mask up and was wearing it across his forehead rather than covering his nose and mouth. ‘Or,’ he said, ‘the husband was making it look like he was doing the right thing. Who better to call than the person who’d be investigating?’
Pat Gilmore rolled her eyes dismissively at the officer, saying, ‘Yes, yes, thank you, Miss Marple. We’ll all stick to our own jobs, if that’s okay with you.’
She turned back to Joanne. ‘Where was he last night?’
‘Took his youngest out for dinner and then stayed at home with his kids.’
‘And this morning, how did he seem to you? Nervous? Edgy? Frightened?’
‘Hungover.’
‘What did he say when you told him we’d found the car?’
‘Not a lot. He looked surprised. It seemed genuine.’
‘Upset?’
‘Not really.’
‘Don’t suppose he knows of anyone who’d want to hurt her?’
‘She’s had a few threats.’
‘Okay, well, let’s leave this in the hands of Jason here and head back. I’ll call North West Marine. We’re going to need divers, and we’re going to need dogs. Whoever left this car here scarpered on foot, so let’s see if we can trace them. And we’ll get the husband interviewed this afternoon, see if we have a wife killer on our hands.’
Was Noel Bloom capable of killing his wife?
Absolutely. Didn’t mean he did it, though.
As much as Joanne liked to concentrate on the hard facts in front of her, she tended to get a feeling for who was telling the truth and who wasn’t. Sometimes she got it wrong. Not often. And at the moment she couldn’t see Noel Bloom taking a knife to his wife and dumping her body. Granted, he was not as fretful as perhaps you might expect, but shock was a funny thing. Joanne had delivered enough bad news to enough people to know they didn’t do what they did on TV. Most didn’t cry. Most did everything they could not to cry in front of a police officer. As if bravery was the one thing the situation warranted above all else. Some laughed. That was the trickiest to deal with, since Joanne would have to wait it out, wait it out until it dawned on them that this was not a joke and they would now spend the rest of their lives reliving the moment, the moment when they got it so absurdly wrong. She’d never had anyone collapse or faint. But it didn’t mean she wasn’t ready just in case they did. What she hated most was silence. Silence was the worst.
&n
bsp; They drove back to the station in convoy, DI Pat Gilmore in front of Joanne, Oliver Black behind. Pat Gilmore was on her mobile phone the whole way, and she wasn’t a great driver. She was doing less than twenty around some of the bends of the Crook Road and Joanne looked in her rear-view mirror to see Oliver Black miming putting a gun to his head, losing the will.
A lot of blood.
A lot of blood was indicative of repeated stabbing. And though Joanne had never dealt with a stabbing before, she knew about slippage.
Slippage occurred when the perpetrator’s hand, slick with the victim’s blood, slipped down the knife, causing wounds to their own palm. It was almost impossible to stab a victim more than a couple of times without incurring some slippage. So, with any luck, they’d find traces of the killer’s blood in the front of Karen’s car as well.
As Joanne drove, she cursed out loud.
Why the hell hadn’t she thought to check Noel Bloom’s palms?
30
NOEL DROPPED A pod into the espresso maker. He pulled down the lever, pressed the button on the top for a large cup, and bent down to inhale the aroma. He alternated now between decaf and the real deal, but found he was enjoying the decaf more and more. He might switch altogether. Particularly with his blood pressure the way it was. He’d been borderline high and noticed an immediate drop when he’d cut his caffeine intake, so perhaps he should go for it. Hard to give up his first one of the day, though. Particularly on a day like this.
He needed to call Bruce and tell him about Karen. He should do it right now. Now would be the time to do it, before he started work.
He drained his cup. Then he rifled about in the bottom drawer of his desk until he found his stash of TicTacs, and poured a few from the box directly into his mouth. He knew his breath still stank of booze, but he’d just have to keep some space between his patients and himself.
His first of the day was a post-partum check-up. He always enjoyed these. He liked babies and, at six weeks after the birth, the mothers tended to be upbeat and optimistic. The real exhaustion didn’t tend to kick in until around weeks eight to nine. That’s when the babies who’d been peaceful and easy up to that point – ‘good babies’ – suddenly seemed to find their lungs, causing merry hell in the household.
He stood at his open door, waiting to greet the patient, knowing she’d have her hands full with baby, nappy bag, and so on, and watched as she waddled towards him, still with the distinctive duck-like gait of the heavily pregnant.
As she approached he said, ‘Your hips sore, Hazel?’ and she replied, ‘Killing me.’
He took the baby from her arms and she handed him over gratefully. This was Hazel’s third son. Each had been over ten pounds. Noel cradled the child in the crook of his right arm and asked Hazel how the baby was doing.
‘Him? Oh, he’s right as rain.’
Hazel was correct; he was. You only needed to look at the child to see he was thriving. That was the thing with babies – generally, if they looked all right, they were all right, regardless of what their parents had to say.
‘And you?’ Noel asked. ‘How are you?’
‘Tired. Sick of being fat. Sick of not having a second to myself.’
‘I can refer you to the physiotherapist for your hips if you like?’ but Hazel waved away his suggestion, as if that would be more hassle than it was worth.
‘I’ll cope.’
When Noel had first become a GP, he would examine a woman physically at her post-partum check-up. Make sure her abdominals had knitted together, ask if she’d resumed intercourse. Now he did very little, just had a general chit-chat. Mostly, he was there to reassure them that whatever they were feeling and going through was entirely normal. It was okay not to be completely besotted with this new life they’d created. It was okay to hate their husbands a little.
Karen had struggled in post-partum with Brontë. She’d had a tricky birth, a seventy-two-hour slog that had ended with forceps and then Brontë being pulled from Karen with a ventouse.
Her strange, conical head had remained that shape for far longer than Karen could really cope with.
Noel hadn’t had a lot of experience of bad births. During his training he’d been attached to a midwife-led centre in North Wales, and the staff there did such a fine job of preparing women (lots of walking, lots of squatting, lots of talking through their fears about the birth process) that his boss was rarely called upon to assist. And then of course Verity’s birth had been such a breeze. Two big pushes from Jennifer and Verity had shot out like a salmon. And Jennifer had such an array of relatives on hand to help out afterwards – everything from cooking, to her siblings taking turns to push the pram around Windermere so Jennifer could get some sleep – that his home took on an almost party-like atmosphere for a while.
Very different to his experience with Karen.
‘It’s normal to feel like this,’ Noel would tell her when he found her crying on the bathroom floor at two in the morning. And she’d scream back at him, ‘Normal? How do you know what’s fucking normal?’ and he’d look at his ravaged wife and have no clue how to help her. Of course, it might have helped if he’d known her a little better before she became pregnant. If they’d been more of a couple. She later told Noel that she’d struggled in the weeks following Ewan’s birth, too, and perhaps if Noel had known this he could have supported her more.
Once, at his wits’ end, he’d almost found himself saying, It wasn’t like this with Jennifer, but managed to stop the words from escaping just in time. One of life’s great taboos: comparing one’s current wife to one’s last. But Karen must have seen it in his face nonetheless and she went for him with the baby monitor, hitting him over the head with it repeatedly until he promised he would never measure Karen against his ‘inbred bog-trotter of an ex-wife’ again.
In the end, it passed, as these things tend to. But the first thing Karen did was to get herself sterilized, even though Noel pleaded with her against it. ‘You’re too young,’ he said. ‘You might want more children,’ he said. ‘Let me have the snip. It’s so much safer…statistically.’
‘I won’t go through that again,’ she told him.
‘So don’t. Let me. I really don’t mind and—’
‘Noel. I won’t go through that again.’
And the matter was closed.
He wondered, over the years, if having more children would have been better for Karen. Perhaps, if she were saddled with another one, she would have had to lower her standards and Brontë would have been given an easier ride.
Now they’d never know.
In his arms, baby Jonathon gurgled and smiled. Noel pulled a surprised face, touching the side of Jonathon’s mouth to get him to do it again.
‘You’re using birth control?’ he asked Hazel, not moving his gaze away from her bonny baby.
Hazel made a snorting sound. ‘What do you think? Course I am.’
‘Great. Any worries? Any concerns?’
‘When can I start exercising?’
‘With the pain in your hips the way it is, I wouldn’t do anything right now.’ Strictly speaking, it wasn’t her hips that were troubling her, it was her sacroiliac joint. ‘Anyway, what’s the rush?’
Hazel lifted her shirt and took two great handfuls of belly. ‘This,’ she said.
‘Give yourself a chance, Hazel. You’ve only just given birth.’
‘It’s disgusting.’
‘It’s what happens.’
‘Not to the celebs, it doesn’t.’
‘Yes, well, they have an army of people helping out. And besides, I heard that some celebrities are paying for surrogates now so they can keep their bodies exactly the way they are.’
Hazel sat back in her chair and gaped at him.
‘Really?’ she said. ‘They’re pretending to be pregnant?’
‘So I’ve heard.’
Noel had no idea if there was any truth to this rumour, but he’d brought it up a couple of times recently, and his p
ost-partum ladies certainly left a lot happier than when they’d walked in.
The office phone was ringing.
‘Excuse me a moment,’ he said to Hazel, and picked up.
‘There’s a DS Aspinall on the line for you, Dr Bloom,’ said the receptionist. ‘Sorry to disturb, but she says it’s important.’
‘Put her through, Mandy.’
Noel handed the baby back to Hazel, just in case he needed to make a note of something, and said, ‘Joanne. Hello again.’
‘We’re going to need to talk to you, Noel. At the station. Any chance you could come in around lunch?’
‘Sure.’
‘Do you want me to send a car or can you make your own way?’
‘I can drive myself.’
‘Great. See you later, then.’
‘Joanne?’
‘Yes?’
‘Do I need a lawyer?’
31
DI PAT GILMORE was standing by the whiteboard. On it she’d written Karen Bloom’s name, and drawn a big circle around it, and yesterday’s date. The day she went missing.
That was it.
‘So we’re working on the assumption that the blood in the car is from our missing woman,’ she began. Pointing her marker pen at DC Gidley, the young officer sitting next to Joanne, she said, ‘Hannah, you find out where Karen Bloom was yesterday, where she went, who she spoke to. She had around six hours to fill, between dropping her child at school and when she was expected back there. Find out who her friends are, where she shops, if she goes to zumba, anything.’
Jackie went to zumba at the Ladyholme Centre twice a week. Joanne had joined her once for moral support. Never again. Too noisy. Too sweaty. She couldn’t imagine the likes of Karen Bloom jumping up and down next to Jackie in her leotard, bits jiggling, but you never knew. People could be surprising.
‘Joanne,’ Pat Gilmore said, ‘I want you and Oliver to compile a list of potential suspects. Who doesn’t like this woman? Who’s had run-ins with her in the past? Her handbag and wallet were still in the car, so that rules out a robbery gone wrong. From the amount of blood, I’d say we’re looking at multiple stab wounds. In my view, this has personal vendetta written all over it. Start with those close to her and work outwards. You’ve got the husband coming in?’
