Jessica gaped and almost spilt her tea. She put her mug down carefully on the table before answering. Geraldine was aware she was considering what to say. Without answering the question, she turned to her mother.
‘What have you been saying?’ she demanded furiously. She turned back to Geraldine. ‘My parents never liked Jason. They thought he wasn’t good enough for me. But honestly, no one would have been good enough for them. Jason and I were happy enough, thank you. Don’t believe a word my mother has been saying about him.’
Jessica seemed to have forgotten about her own attack on Jason. Now she burst into tears. With both Jessica and Anne in tears, Geraldine left. There was no point in pressing either of them for answers, although she had an uneasy feeling that she had somehow been hoodwinked, as though Jessica and Anne were both deliberately hiding behind Daisy’s disappearance to avoid talking about their murdered husbands. But it was impossible to judge whether they were sidestepping the subject from grief or guilt.
37
Now they knew why Jason had disappeared without trace, but they were no closer to discovering where he had been hidden away, or to finding his baby, or to working out who had killed him or his father-in-law.
‘There are too many unanswered questions surrounding these tragedies,’ Eileen said.
With the baby still missing, the team were all hoping desperately that there would turn out to be no more than two deaths in this sorry family.
‘It all centres around Jessica,’ Eileen said. ‘Is she really an unfortunate victim in these crimes, or does she have something to do with all of it? Her baby, her father, her husband. She’s the common link.’
‘Along with her mother,’ Geraldine pointed out.
Eileen nodded. ‘True. They might even be in this together.’
It sounded unlikely, but nothing could be ruled out. Jessica and her mother had both been questioned, but as yet no evidence had been found that suggested either one or both of them could be guilty of any crime.
‘Can a mother kidnap her own baby?’ Ariadne asked.
Before Eileen could answer, her phone buzzed. Studying the screen, she frowned.
‘Here’s an unexpected development,’ she said. ‘I’ll upload the message and we’ll have him brought straight here for questioning.’
Johnathan Edwards had been stopped at Leeds Bradford Airport, attempting to board a plane. Clearly he had not realised how serious the police were when they had told him not to leave the area.
‘He thought he could just skip off,’ Eileen fumed, but there was a distinct note of triumph in her voice.
The airport was about an hour’s drive from York, and two hours later Geraldine and Ian faced Jonathan across an interview table, with a duty solicitor present. Geraldine entered the interview room behind Ian and took a seat without once glancing at her colleague, but consciousness of his presence at her side made it hard for her to focus on anything else. She wished that Eileen would stop partnering her with Ian. They had worked together on many cases over the years, and knowing one another as well as they did made them an extremely effective team. All the same, every time Geraldine saw Ian her breath seemed to catch in her throat, and she felt an urge to reach out and put her arms around him, drawing him close. She wondered whether she might speak to Eileen about it, but was reluctant to appear unprofessional. She had always prided herself on her refusal to allow personal problems to intrude on her work.
‘You were caught attempting to leave the country,’ Ian began the interview.
Jonathan scowled. ‘I was going on holiday. I booked it months ago. It’s not a crime to have a holiday, is it? Was I supposed to pay out all that money for nothing? Anyway, I’ve lost it now, because thanks to your intervention I’ve missed my plane. What happens now? Are you going to refund me the cost of my flight? And the cost of the night in Spain I’ll have missed if I fly out tomorrow?’ He was almost spitting with rage. ‘This is an outrageous infringement of my rights as a citizen, to be prevented from leaving the country for a perfectly innocent purpose.’
‘My client has not been charged with any offence,’ the lawyer said, fidgeting as she spoke. ‘You are interfering with the rights of an innocent member of the public and we will be seeking compensation.’
Geraldine glanced at the same solicitor who had accompanied Jonathan at his previous interview. She looked about sixteen, although she was old enough to have qualified in her profession. Her mousy brown hair looked dull and she seemed lethargic, as though she was present only in body. She was young to be taking so little interest in her work and Geraldine wondered if she suffered from depression, or perhaps she had recently split up with her boyfriend. With a faint sigh, she returned her gaze to Jonathan.
‘We asked you not to leave York,’ she reminded him. ‘Why were you attempting to leave the country? Surely you must have realised we would receive an alert?’
‘I just told you,’ he replied, his voice growing strident with irritation. ‘I was taking a holiday. That’s not a crime, is it? Well? Is it?’ He leaned forward in his chair and glared at her.
‘There’s no need to raise your voice,’ Ian said quietly.
‘I’m not bloody raising my voice, but you don’t seem to want to hear what I’m saying. I went to the airport because I was flying to Spain. I booked this holiday months ago and so I went. What’s wrong with that? It’s not as if I was trying to avoid being questioned. If you check my booking, you’ll see it was made months before any of this happened. And you had me stopped and brought here like – like a common criminal.’
‘We asked you not to leave York,’ Geraldine repeated patiently.
‘So you keep saying, but it’s a free country and you haven’t charged me with anything, which means I’m entitled to go away if I want to. Don’t forget, it’s taxes from people like me that pay your wages.’
Geraldine was sure that Ian was thinking the same as her, but neither of them pointed out that Jonathan was no longer paying income tax because he had lost his job.
‘And before you say anything else, I’m going back to the airport tomorrow and going on my holiday. I’ll send the bill for my rescheduled flight to your chief inspector.’ Red-faced, Jonathan sat back in his chair and folded his arms. ‘And we’ll see what my friends on social media have to say about that!’
‘About a possible suspect in a murder case trying to slip out of the country?’ Ian asked softly.
‘What? You can’t say that – I’m not a suspect in anything. You haven’t charged me with anything. I’m a free man. Innocent until proved guilty. Suggesting otherwise is slander. I don’t even know what I’m doing back here. What the hell do you want with me?’
‘You have to see that in trying to board a plane to Spain when we specifically asked you to remain in York means you’ve brought suspicion on yourself,’ Geraldine replied. ‘We are bound to question what you were doing, where you were going, and why you wanted to leave in such a hurry.’
‘I told you, I was going to Spain for a week, and I’ve already told you, I booked it months ago. I was going on holiday.’
‘So you say.’
‘You can see my ticket. I fly back after a week. Only now it’s going to be six days, isn’t it?’
Ian shook his head. ‘I’m afraid we can’t let you leave the country until this case is cleared up.’
‘You can’t stop me,’ Jonathan replied, but he didn’t sound very confident. He turned to his lawyer. ‘They can’t stop me, can they?’
‘I think you’ll find that in a murder investigation, within reason we can do whatever we deem necessary or appropriate,’ Geraldine said.
Jonathan shook his head angrily. ‘No, that’s not right. You had me here, you questioned me, you let me go, and that has to be the end of it. If you had anything on me, you wouldn’t have let me go in the first place.’
‘Things have cha
nged slightly,’ Ian said.
‘How have they changed? What’s happened to make you suspect me that you didn’t know about before?’
‘Your attempt to leave the country,’ Ian replied drily. ‘You must see that looks suspicious.’
‘Oh for goodness sake,’ Jonathan snapped. ‘You’re saying if I hadn’t decided to go away you wouldn’t have brought me back here? So what difference would it have made if I was at home or in Spain, seeing as I wasn’t being questioned?’
Ian shrugged.
‘All right,’ Jonathan went on. ‘Let’s pretend I never went to the airport. Pretend I never bought a ticket to Spain. I’ll go home and pretend none of this ever happened. How’s that? It’s not as if I can afford another flight anyway. So I won’t go away. Some stranger gets himself killed, and I’m not allowed to have a holiday. Listen, I solemnly promise to stay in York until you find the real culprit, even of it means throwing money away, all the money I spent on my trip. And now I’m going home.’ He stood up.
‘I’m afraid that may no longer be possible,’ Ian said.
‘What? Nothing’s changed since the last time I was here, and you couldn’t find any evidence I was guilty then. You didn’t even charge me. Don’t you see? Nothing’s changed since then.’
‘But you tried to leave the country,’ Geraldine told him, ‘and that changes everything.’
The solicitor spoke up for the first time. ‘My client has given his word that he won’t try to skip the country again –’
‘Skip the country?’ Jonathan repeated. ‘Skip the country? What kind of language is that? I was going on holiday. I thought you were supposed to be on my side.’
‘I’m afraid we’re not sure we can trust him,’ Ian told the solicitor. ‘We’ll continue this tomorrow. Interview terminated by DI Peterson at four forty-five pm.’
He nodded at a constable standing by the door who approached the suspect.
‘If you’d like to come with me, sir.’
‘What? Where are you taking me?’
‘You’re going to spend a night with us here and then we can continue this discussion in the morning,’ Ian said. ‘I’m afraid we have to stop now. We have other matters to attend to.’
Realising what was going to happen, Jonathan began to protest loudly.
‘No, no, you have no right to do this. No! I refuse to go to a cell. Bloody hell, do something, woman!’ He yelled at his solicitor.
‘There’s nothing I can do but I’ll be back tomorrow,’ she replied. ‘And then you will have to charge him or let him go,’ she added, turning to Ian.
‘But what about tonight?’ Jonathan insisted. ‘I can’t sleep in a cell. Oh, bloody hell, some holiday this is turning out to be.’
38
‘Well, we now know he has a temper,’ Ian said to Geraldine as they walked away from the interview room.
‘That’s hardly a crime,’ Geraldine replied. She laughed. ‘If we’re going to treat everyone who has a temper as a suspect, there won’t be many people we won’t have to interview.’
‘It suggests he might have killed David in a fit of rage.’
‘It no more points to him being a suspect than anyone else. He had good reason to be annoyed.’
‘Well, of course it doesn’t mean he’s guilty, but it does make it seem plausible that he killed David Armstrong. We know that he had reason to hate him, and now we’ve established he has a temper.’
‘And what about Jason?’
Ian looked sombre. ‘You heard what the pathologist said. He doesn’t think one killer was responsible for both murders.’
Neither of them suggested they go to the canteen, but they walked there almost without thinking. Before Ian’s wife had returned to him, he and Geraldine had frequently gone to the canteen together to chat over a mug of coffee. Usually their discussions had centred on work, and this occasion was no exception. They sat down at their favourite corner table where they were able to converse without being overheard, and could watch their colleagues hurrying in and out.
‘The pathologist was only voicing his opinion, based on limited information,’ Geraldine said as she took her seat.
‘Exactly. He was drawing conclusions from information which is incomplete,’ Ian grumbled.
It wasn’t the first time he had criticised the pathologist for being too free with his speculation.
‘Yes, you’re right, of course, but –’ Geraldine hesitated.
‘But what?’
For the first time since Ian had moved out of her flat, she looked up and stared directly at him. Their eyes met, and for a moment neither of them spoke. Knowing each other so well, it was difficult to hide their feelings from one another. Seeing the misery in his face, Geraldine wondered if her own feelings were as obvious to him as his were to her.
‘Playing strictly by the book isn’t always the most useful approach,’ she murmured.
Ian frowned at her words. ‘Geraldine, what are you talking about?’
She tried to explain that Jonah sometimes gave her useful insights that he would be unable to voice if he were to restrict himself to what he was allowed to tell her.
‘The point is,’ she concluded lamely, ‘he gives me helpful details, off the record. He wouldn’t be able to do that if he could only tell me what he’s actually allowed to say.’
Ian scowled. ‘He has no business saying anything he’s not allowed to say.’
Clearly Ian disagreed with Jonah speaking so candidly to her. Geraldine wasn’t sure whether Ian was being pedantic about the rules, or if he was feeling jealous of the friendship that had sprung up between her and the tubby little pathologist who, in any case, was happily married. The thought that Ian might be feeling possessive about her gave her an unexpected thrill, although it was just as likely he was asserting his authority as her senior officer, but she made no comment. The police station canteen was hardly the place for an emotional scene.
Leaving him in the canteen, gazing morosely at his mug of lukewarm coffee, Geraldine drove to the primary school where Jonathan Edwards had worked. The school was situated at the end of a cul-de-sac of square brick houses. Leaving her car beside a tall hedge at the end of the road, she rang the bell beside a gate in the high metal railings that surrounded the site. A woman’s voice answered over a crackly intercom and Geraldine identified herself. Crossing a tarmac car park, she entered a two-storey flat-roofed building with large square windows. A sign by the door showed a name which was also displayed by the gate: Clifton Primary School. She pushed open a door marked School Office and a middle-aged woman looked up at her with a worried smile.
‘How can we help you, Sergeant?’ the secretary asked when Geraldine introduced herself.
Geraldine hesitated. She had come there to talk to the head teacher, but the school secretary might have useful information.
‘Do you know a man called Jonathan Edwards who used to work here?’ she asked as she stepped into the room and closed the door gently behind her.
The secretary’s neatly permed brown curls bobbed around her ears as she nodded her head.
‘He left us last year,’ she said, adding tersely, ‘cutbacks.’
‘What can you tell me about him?’
‘Has something happened to him?’
‘No.’
‘Is he in trouble?
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Only that you’ve come here asking about him.’
Geraldine smiled. ‘He’s not in any trouble as far as I’m aware, and I don’t know that anything’s happened to him. We’re speaking to him as we think he might be able to help us with an enquiry.’
The secretary’s worried expression cleared. ‘Is there anything we can do to help?’
‘No, thank you, I just wanted to make a few enquiries. We need to establish how reliable he might be a
s a witness,’ Geraldine said, hoping her explanation sounded sensible. ‘Did you find him honest?’
The secretary frowned at the question. ‘I should certainly think so,’ she replied, sounding slightly affronted. ‘I don’t think Mr Brice would have kept him here otherwise. Working with children we have to be scrupulous about our staff.’
The head teacher smiled sadly when Geraldine explained the purpose for her visit.
‘He was a loss,’ Gordon Brice said, nodding his head solemnly. ‘Jonathan was a dedicated member of our staff here, and he did good work with the children. It’s not easy encouraging them to read, and it gets harder every year. There are so many other sources of entertainment for them these days, mostly online. We do our best, of course, but the parents aren’t always on board, and without their support we’re fighting a difficult battle. We need all the help we can get. I have to tell you, Sergeant, these latest cutbacks have been disastrous. I don’t think we’ll ever fully recover.’
From what Geraldine heard, Jonathan had been quiet and hard working, liked by the children and the rest of the staff, although none of them had known him well. The headmaster seemed bemused and even faintly entertained at hearing how his former librarian had been a vocal opponent of the leader of the council, but his smile faded abruptly when he learned that David had been murdered.
‘Murdered?’ he repeated, frowning. ‘And you’re telling me you suspect Jonathan may have been involved? Surely not. No, I can’t for one moment believe Jonathan would have had anything to do with – with the councillor’s murder. No, Sergeant. That’s not… it’s not possible. Not Jonathan. He was a gentle, kind man. He worked with children!’ he added, a note of outrage creeping into his voice.
‘Even people who work with children have been known to commit terrible crimes,’ Geraldine replied softly.
‘Listen, Sergeant, Jonathan was a harmless man. A little odd perhaps, but harmless.’
‘In what way was he odd?’
The headmaster sighed. ‘Please, don’t go getting the wrong impression,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean odd in a bad way.’
Deadly Revenge Page 19
