The school secretary was similarly unable to tell Geraldine much about Mark. The head of the music department on the other hand was visibly upset, and eager to help.
‘Mark was a gifted teacher,’ he said, sounding almost tearful. ‘He’d only been with us for a couple of years, but he was well liked by his pupils. He’s a great loss to the department. He was so young. It’s terrible, what’s happened. Just terrible. I still can’t believe it.’
But for all his dismay, the teacher was unable to help Geraldine. According to him, Mark had been reliable and pleasant to work with.
‘There was no problem with him. He was always in on time and he got on well with the kids.’
‘What about the rest of the staff?’
‘What about them?’
‘Did he get on with his colleagues?’
The head of music more or less reiterated what the headmaster had said, about the peripatetic teachers not spending much time with the rest of the staff.
‘They just come in and see their pupils, eat in the staff dining room if they’re here at lunchtime, and leave. They’re not really part of the permanent set-up here. They work on the periphery.’
‘But you saw him regularly, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. Although he was off sick for the week before we were told what had happened to him.’
‘Off sick?’
‘Yes, he was in on the Monday, the week before he was killed, and he seemed fine. But he called on the Wednesday morning to say he had flu. He sounded terrible.’
‘Did you speak to him?’
‘Yes, he called the department.’
‘And are you sure it was Mark who called you?’
The head of music frowned. ‘It was his mobile. I have all the peripatetic staff in my list of contacts so I can see who’s calling. But I couldn’t swear it was Mark speaking. He said he had lost his voice and honestly he could barely talk. He sounded awful.’
‘So it could have been him, but it could equally have been someone else calling from his phone?’
The music teacher shrugged. ‘I guess so,’ he agreed miserably. ‘But how was I to know? I mean, there was no reason to suspect it wasn’t him.’
‘And I suppose he had your number stored, as “head” or “school” or something similar so someone else could have identified which number to call, if they wanted to make sure no one noticed he was missing for a while,’ Geraldine said, speaking more to herself than to Mark’s colleague.
‘Yes, I suppose so. If he was on the regular staff, questions might have been raised sooner, because other teachers would have needed to cover his lessons and the head would have wanted to know how long he was likely to be off. But the peripatetic teachers work one to one, and if they miss lessons they’re expected to make them up, if possible, but no one else is involved.’
There was nothing else the music teacher could tell her that moved the investigation forward, so Geraldine thanked him and left.
Back at the police station, Geraldine wrote up her notes before going to the canteen for a quick lunch. Ian was already there but she ignored him. She was fond of him, but he distracted her and she wanted to be alone to think about the case. Although she did not think there was a sound reason for it, Ian’s attitude towards her had definitely changed since she had joined him in York, and he seemed almost hostile towards her. Thinking about Ian more than their relationship warranted, she concluded that he had become distant towards her since he had started divorce proceedings against his wife. But his marital difficulties were no concern of hers. Losing his friendship was more painful for her than he could possibly realise, given his ignorance of her growing affection for him. More than ever, she realised that she had overestimated the strength of their friendship, and she wished she had never agreed to join him in York. It was an uncomfortable regret.
Geraldine was shaken out of her reverie by a voice calling her. Looking up she saw Ian standing beside her table.
‘Sorry,’ she replied, without inviting him to join her. ‘I was miles away. What was that you said?’
For the first time in a while she watched his smile spread from his lips to his blue eyes, which had lately been looking sad.
‘I was just wondering if I could join you.’
She could hardly refuse. She was less than thrilled when Naomi turned up and sat down next to Ian without asking.
‘So, it’s looking like you were right about Jasper all along,’ Ian remarked, slightly ungraciously. ‘Geraldine Steel’s instincts hit the mark again.’
Geraldine shrugged. ‘It was just the spitting that didn’t seem logical.’
Naomi raised her eyebrows. ‘You can’t assume the behaviour of someone who goes around killing people is going to make sense.’
‘We have to assume that or we’re just casting around in the dark.’
‘We have forensic evidence,’ Naomi pointed out. ‘That’s the only reliable information we have. Anything else is just speculation. Anyway, we’ve got him now, haven’t we? And if you ask me, it’s obvious Don’s the killer. It was his van, wasn’t it? So now it’s just a matter of finding the proof. I think we’ve done a great job.’ She smiled at Ian.
Geraldine refrained from pointing out that, just a moment before, Naomi had said that forensic evidence was the only information they could rely on.
‘Why do you think he did it?’ Geraldine asked.
Naomi shrugged. ‘Who cares? He’s obviously insane.’
‘Not everything that seems obvious is necessarily true,’ Geraldine said gently. ‘We need to have more than that. We can’t produce convenient theories and then look for the proof to support them. We have to start with evidence.’
She was irritated when Ian agreed with Naomi. ‘It had to be the owner of the van,’ he said. ‘Otherwise how do you explain his conveniently losing the key?’
‘Perhaps he left the key in the ignition, and that’s how the killer was able to drive it away. And then he might well have lied about leaving his key in the van so he could claim on the insurance. They wouldn’t pay up if he admitted he’d left the key in the ignition, would they? That seems to make sense.’
She stood up, and left them sitting together. She thought Ian looked forlorn as he watched her leave, but that had nothing to do with her. She had given up hoping he might regard her as anything more than a useful member of his team. When she glanced over her shoulder he was no longer watching her. He had turned to Naomi and they were laughing together. It seemed a long time since he had laughed with her.
That evening, with an unaccustomed feeling of loneliness, she called Celia.
‘Geraldine, lovely to hear from you,’ Celia said. ‘I can’t chat now, we’re going out this evening. A work do for Sebastian. If you lived nearer, you could have come round to babysit,’ she added, with only a touch of bitterness.
She had come to terms with Geraldine moving so far away from Kent, where she had lived near her sister before moving away to London, but Celia could not resist making the occasional barbed comment when the occasion presented itself. Celia thought Geraldine had chosen to move even further away, but that was not the whole truth. Geraldine had been given a stark choice when she had been demoted from her post in London: relocate to York or leave the force altogether. Somehow Celia had gathered that something had gone wrong in her sister’s professional life, but she had generously refrained from challenging Geraldine about her demotion from detective inspector to detective sergeant, merely raising her eyebrows in an interrogative expression which Geraldine had ignored.
One day Geraldine would tell her adopted sister what had happened, but it was complicated because Celia did not know that Geraldine had discovered the existence of a birth twin. At first Geraldine had kept quiet about Helena because she had not wanted to upset Celia while she was pregnant. Now so much time had elapsed since the momentous di
scovery, Geraldine did not feel she could easily share what she had been keeping from Celia. If she confessed her secret now, Celia might never feel able to trust her again. So Geraldine remained silent about Helena, and with every passing week the truth became more difficult to share.
After tidying her already tidy living room and emptying her dishwasher, she put some dinner in the oven and switched on the television. There was nothing worth watching. She hesitated to open a bottle of wine. She was trying to cut down on her drinking so she put the kettle on and settled down to read a book, but her thoughts kept wandering. Somehow she was convinced they had not yet found the killer and, as long as he remained at liberty, there was a danger he would strike again.
36
Hatred grew inside Ann like a monstrous embryo, but she had to control her impatience until she had worked out how she was going to kill her husband without being caught. Other than her own impatience there was no immediate reason to hurry; her revenge could wait for as long as it took to devise a foolproof plan. Still, given that she had unlimited access to him, it should not be too difficult for her to come up with a way of getting rid of him. Her main worry was that David might die of natural causes before she had a chance to exact her vengeance on him. She desperately wanted her husband to know that in killing her lover, he had sealed his own fate at the hands of the woman he loved. It was the only way she could live with the knowledge of what had happened to Mark. Every time she saw David, she wanted to tear at him with her bare hands, and feel her nails dig into his flesh, scratching until she drew blood. Never before had she experienced a feeling as strong as this. Even her love for Mark paled into a dim memory beside the power of her hatred for David. She gloried in the assurance that she was going to kill him. And all the time he remained oblivious to her feelings, as he had always been.
‘Are you feeling all right?’ he asked her one night, when she rejected his advances in bed.
She did not tell him that the thought of his body touching hers made her feel physically sick, or that such a betrayal of Mark was unthinkable. Instead, she told him she was fine. It was true, because there was nothing physically wrong with her.
‘I’ve got a headache, that’s all.’
The next time she made that excuse, David suggested she go to the doctor.
‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ she replied. ‘I just need to get my eyes tested, or something.’
‘Go and see the doctor,’ he insisted. ‘I know it’s probably nothing, but you can’t be too careful with your health.’
She promised she would book an appointment. ‘But stop hassling me about it.’
‘I’m not hassling you,’ he answered. ‘I can’t help worrying about you if you’re not feeling well.’
She turned her back on him, mumbling that she was tired and wanted to get to sleep. After that she lay perfectly still with her eyes closed, trying to work out how to kill him. In any murder case, those nearest to the victim were always top of the list of suspects, especially when money was involved. As it happened, David’s death would not leave her particularly well off although she would inherit the house. She knew where he kept his documents and made a point of checking the details of his personal circumstances. It was as well she did, because he had a small pension fund that specifically excluded suicide. That was annoying. It would have been relatively simple to fake her husband’s suicide, but she would be stupid to forfeit a tidy little pension from the insurance company by acting rashly. Having decided that the best option would be to fake his suicide, she needed to rethink her plans.
She would have expected that killing her own husband would be easy but the more she thought about it, the more she realised that was not the case. When she stopped to consider what she was planning, her whole mindset felt unreal and she could not believe she was really contemplating committing murder. But then she remembered that David had killed Mark, and she knew that prison was too good for her husband. He had to die, and it had to be at her hand. Only the thought of her revenge kept her from falling apart. She needed to witness the shocked expression on David’s face when he realised she was killing him. Mark was dead, and someone had to pay for taking him from her.
Whatever happened, she had to avoid the police coming along and asking too many questions, so the next best plan, after suicide, was to make David’s death look like an accident. The trouble was, an accident was not necessarily going to prove fatal. If she pushed him down the stairs, for example, and he survived, the game would be up. He would make sure she never had a second chance. She could try to damage his brakes, but the police were bound to discover someone had tampered with them. She had no illusions that she would be clever enough to escape detection if there was a full-scale murder enquiry, with forensic examination of the body and all the evidence.
There was no point in lying to the police and telling them David had been ill, because a medical examination would easily disprove that, and then everyone would know she had lied. But it was imperative the police believed either that his death was an accident, or that he had died from natural causes.
She could try and read up about different poisons but she would have to be discreet. Researching poisons on the internet at any time before her husband was poisoned would be a bit of a giveaway. The only other possibility she could think of was to hire a hitman, but she had no money of her own. Even if she could persuade David to give her however many thousands of pounds it would cost to have him killed, there would be evidence that she had spent a lot of money, and questions would be asked.
She seemed to have reached an impasse, when she had a brainwave.
‘You’re looking a bit more cheerful,’ David said to her that evening as she served dinner.
She nodded, hesitating. If she admitted she was feeling better, she might be expected to resume her conjugal duties. But she supposed she could put up with his attentions, knowing it would not be for much longer.
‘Yes, I’m feeling a bit better,’ she replied and he smiled.
‘That’s a relief,’ he said. ‘I was beginning to worry about you.’
She returned his smile without answering; he was right to be worried about her.
37
A search team were going through Mark’s flat. Interested in seeing where he had lived, Geraldine went along to see how they were getting on. The rooms he had rented were located above a shop in Gillygate. The staircase leading up to it was poorly lit and dingy, but the interior of the flat was clean and neat. She took a quick look around. It did not take long as the flat was small and compact, comprising one square living room, a single bedroom, a kitchenette and a bathroom. The rooms were a curious combination of slovenliness and cleanliness, with a pile of soiled laundry on the floor of the bathroom, and a kitchen sink full of dirty dishes, while the carpets looked as though they had been recently hoovered, and there were no cobwebs, and no sign of dust anywhere.
‘Either he was obsessed with cleaning, or else someone has tried to remove their prints from all the surfaces,’ a scene of crime officer replied when she commented on the state of the flat.
‘Or he had a cleaner who came in once a week,’ she muttered.
It looked to her as though he might have been leaving the laundry and the washing-up for someone else to do.
‘We found this under the sofa,’ another scene of crime officer told her when she went into the living room.
He held up an evidence bag containing a bright pink bra.
‘And there was women’s hair in the plug hole in the bathroom, from more than one source,’ he added, with a grin. ‘By the looks of it he was seeing several women here, at least three, from what we’ve found so far. And who knows if there were more? He was a busy boy.’
Geraldine nodded curtly. ‘Send off whatever you find for analysis and keep searching.’
‘Yes, Sergeant.’
There was nothing to suggest the women Mar
k had been seeing had anything to do with his death, but there might be a lead somewhere in the evidence they had found in his flat. Leaving the search team to continue their work, Geraldine went to see Mark’s doctor.
‘He rarely came here,’ the GP admitted. ‘I can’t say I knew him personally, but he saw a couple of my colleagues when he had the flu, and other ailments relatively minor in a healthy young man. I’m afraid I have no explanation for why he had been starving himself before he was killed. Certainly there’s nothing in his history to point to any mental instability or depression. That’s not to say there wasn’t anything,’ he added, covering himself. ‘When it comes to illnesses like depression, we only know what patients choose to tell us.’
Thoughtfully, Geraldine returned to the school where Mark had worked. A stream of pupils were leaving and she threaded her way through the noisy throng as quickly as she could, hoping the head of music had not yet left for the day. He was in his office and greeted her with a worried smile.
‘Any news on who did it?’ he asked.
Geraldine was struck by how awkward members of the public felt when talking about the dead. She and her colleagues were accustomed to the language of death and spoke about it as openly as they would talk about the weather, but other people talked about murder in the vaguest of terms.
‘Did Mark ever mention any personal problems?’ she asked.
The teacher shook his head. ‘Quite the contrary. I’d say he seemed very happy with his personal life. He didn’t talk about it in any detail, but I know he had a girlfriend. Possibly more than one. And as far as I know he was on good terms with his family. He visited his parents at Christmas and over the summer, and he seemed to quite like them, so I don’t think there were any problems there. I certainly wasn’t aware that anything out of school was bothering him.’
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