by Celina Grace
“Mark’s right,” said Anderton, interrupting Kate as she was taking a deep breath, about to launch into a tirade. “But you’re right as well. I want you to have a look at her bank statements. Go through them with a fine-tooth comb if necessary. Go through her house with a fine-tooth comb. Get the evidence.”
Kate shook herself, trying to calm down. “Yes, sir.”
“Get on with it then. I’ll swear the warrant for you.”
Kate remained standing. “What about the Fullmans?”
Anderton glanced at her.
“I’ll deal with them. Get on with looking in Gemma’s affairs. Olbeck, you too.”
“Has Nick Fullman got an alibi for the night of Gemma’s murder?” asked Kate, stubbornly.
“Are you trying to tell me how to do my job, DC Redman?”
“No, sir.” Stop it Kate, you’re antagonising him. Just leave it. “I’m just anxious to cover all bases, like you said.” Just shut up.
“Come on,” said Olbeck, propelling her towards the door. “Bank first. You can drive.”
Out in the corridor, he shook his head. “God, girl, don’t you know when to shut up?”
Kate twitched her shoulders crossly. “Oh, leave it out, will you? It’s just – you know we need to look at the Fullmans. At Nick Fullman particularly.”
Olbeck raised his eyebrows.
“But not Casey?”
Kate shook her head.
“Well,” said Olbeck. “You’re probably right. But you can’t go steaming in and accusing people without evidence, as well you know.”
“Are you telling me I don’t know that?” said Kate. “For fuck’s sake, Mark. That’s why we need to be checking alibis and so forth.”
Olbeck chuckled. “That’s the first time I’ve heard you swear.”
“I can assure you that it won’t be the last.”
“Look, Anderton’s no fool. He’ll dig up anything that necessary.”
They had reached the car. Kate flung herself into the driver’s seat.
“You suspect him, then?” said Olbeck quietly as he got in next to her.
Kate glanced over. “Don’t you?”
“It’s possible,” said Olbeck cautiously.
Kate made a noise indicative of impatience but said nothing else, putting her foot down on the accelerator.
The manager at Gemma’s bank was forthcoming and led them to a private room at the back of the bank with the paperwork all ready for them. Kate spread the statements out on the table and waited for the manager to leave.
“Plain as day,” she said as the door shut. She pointed. “Look, here and here. Large cash sums deposited.”
“Blackmail payments,” said Olbeck.
Kate nodded. “It’s possible. As you might say.”
He gave her a half-grin.
“The dates tally. Look, the first thousand goes in here, two days after Dita’s death. Then another a week later. Big one, that one. She must have used some of the cash to buy that Mulberry bag.”
“Someone didn’t want to pay out any more and killed her instead?”
“It looks like it. She must have known who took Charlie, or killed Dita, or both.” Kate stared across the room at the bank wall, unseeingly. “I knew she knew something. Secretaries always know something. I should have pushed her harder to talk.”
“You didn’t know she was going to be killed. Everyone’s always hiding something in a murder case, you know that. It’s finding out what’s important and what’s not that’s difficult.”
“I know. It’s just…” she let the sentence tail off in a sigh.
Olbeck gathered up the papers.
“I know. It’s shit. But let’s get this stuff back to the station and get to her house.”
“It has to be someone in that house,” said Kate as they left the building.
Olbeck looked across at her.
“You’re probably right,” he said. “But we need to–”
“Get the evidence, I know,” said Kate. They got into the car. “What happened with the Costa brothers?”
Olbeck exhaled loudly. “The usual. Superficial charm, then outrage and bombast at the accusation that they had anything to do with this case at all. ‘I’ve got two sons of my own, Detective Sergeant Olbeck’, as if that precluded any parent from doing anything criminal at all at any time. Both with rock-solid alibis for the night of the 14th.”
“What about the night Gemma was killed?”
“How would I know? It hadn’t happened when I interviewed them.”
Kate slapped her forehead. “Duh. Sorry.”
“You buffoon.”
Kate grinned, despite herself. “You’ve got a good vocabulary for a copper.”
“Oh, cheers,” he said sarcastically. “‘For a copper’. Do you mind? I get enough of that at home.”
Gemma’s little house had a forlorn appearance, made worse by the police tape cordon and the little straggle of curious onlookers. Kate wondered whether people would come and tie ribbons to the railings outside to join the few pathetic bunches of flowers that had been laid on the pavement. Pink ones, naturally. She gritted her teeth.
Ravinder Cheetam, Rav to his colleagues, and Jerry Hindley were already there, working methodically through cupboards and drawers. They nodded at Kate and Olbeck.
“There’s more designer stuff here than you shake a stick at,” said Rav. He held up a Prada bag. “Clothes in the bedroom. New iPad. Looks like she was spending for England.”
Kate stirred the tissue paper that had drifted onto the floor with her foot. “Shame she never got to enjoy any of it.”
“Right.”
“Jane and Theo are interviewing the neighbours,” said Jerry, to Olbeck. Kate couldn’t put her finger on it, but she had the impression that Jerry didn’t much like her. It annoyed her, but this wasn’t the time or place to worry about it.
“I’ll look upstairs,” she said.
Gemma’s bedroom was mostly white and pink, the bed unmade, a hot-pink quilted throw half-slipped to the floor. A grubby pair of slippers with the backs trodden down peeked out from under the bed. The sight of them made Kate feel sad again. She began to work through the bedside cupboard, finding the usual stash: condoms, tissues, old pens, broken necklaces, a vibrator shoved right to the back. In the base of the cupboard were several self-help books dealing with relationships. More glossy magazines. An older model mobile phone.
She moved to the wardrobe, which was stuffed with clothes, mostly the formal work suits that Gemma had so often been seen in, but some dresses, shirts, short skirts to show off those long legs. What seemed like hundreds of pairs of shoes. Kate thought of her own pathetic collection of footwear at home, a black pair of heels, work shoes, trainers, Birkenstocks. Sometimes she felt as if she was slightly weird, unfeminine, not in the least like women that the media and society kept trying to tell her were doing it right. Mind you, Gemma had seemed to be very much that type of woman, and where had it got her?
She got down on her knees to search under the bed, pulling out more shoe boxes, dust-covered hair clips, old tissues. The tips of her fingers touched something hard and square. She pulled it out – a photograph album. Leafing through it, she could see that the photographs were reasonably recent. Strange, to have a photo album at all – most people used digital albums. The photos were all of Gemma and Nick. All of them, Kate realised. Nothing revealing, just everyday shots of the two of them in the office, at various building sites and properties, a couple of party scenes where they shared the same frame. How strange. Poor Gemma must have had a massive crush on her boss. Had it been reciprocated? Was Casey as ignorant of her husband’s affairs as he was (as far as Casey knew) of hers? Kate made a mental note to talk to Nick herself and to hell with Anderton if he didn’t like it.
There was a photograph near the end of the album that snagged her eye. In it, Gemma and Nick stood side by side, smiling, and on Nick’s other side was a woman that after a moment Kate was able to place
as Rebecca D’Arcy-Warner. Nick and Gemma were smiling into the camera, full, beaming smiles but Rebecca was looking out of shot and the expression on her face pulled at Kate, nudged her somewhere. It was a look of – what? Misery? Hunger? Something of the two, perhaps. It was an expression she’d seen somewhere before without being able to place it. It made her uneasy - it had a connection with something unpleasant in her memory. With what? She couldn’t remember. No doubt it would come back to her. She couldn’t tell where the photograph had been taken. The background was blurred – it looked something like a stone wall. She regarded for a moment longer and then shut the album.
Back at the station, Jane and Theo related the findings of their interviews with the neighbours.
“Nothing of great interest,” said Jane. She was short and plump, with glorious red curls of the kind you don’t see much anymore. Pre-Raphaelite, said Kate to herself, watching her talk. What a satisfaction it was to be able to find the right word. What a satisfaction it was to know you were at least adequately educated, even if you’d had to educate yourself.
“Although several people did report seeing a tall man in a Barbour jacket walking towards the house that night,” said Theo. “Not actually in Gemma’s street, but in the street leading to it. It’s probably nothing, but we’ll chase it up. Unfortunately it was a bad night, lots of rain and cold so everyone was indoors with the curtains closed.”
“We need more background on Gemma Phillips,” said Anderton. He turned to Kate. “Would you talk to the people who knew her best? The Fullmans to start with. I’ll come with you.”
“Yes sir,” said Kate, inwardly cheering. Perhaps Anderton had forgiven her for her outburst the previous day.
Nick Fullman opened the front door to them himself. For the first time since Kate had met him, he was dressed casually, in jeans, socked feet and a grey sweatshirt, his dark hair unbrushed, his jaw dark with stubble. He looked stunned, bludgeoned by the knowledge of his assistant’s death. Kate wavered a little in her suspicions of him. He looked truly shocked, and that was something that was very difficult to fake.
In the kitchen, Nick sat down at the kitchen table. Casey was nowhere to be seen. After a moment, he collected himself and asked whether they wanted coffee.
“I’m not sure where it all is,” he said, gesturing to the cupboards. “But if you want one–”
“No, thank you, Mr Fullman.” Was the man so babied, so pampered, that he’d never made his own coffee? “We wanted to talk to you about Gemma Phillips, if you feel up to answering some questions? I can see that you’ve had a shock.”
“I have. I can’t take it in. Not after everything else. Gemma – I mean, why? Why would someone kill her?” He looked up at them. “She was killed, wasn’t she? I mean, I was told she was but – “
“But what, Mr Fullman?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I thought, it’s stupid but perhaps she’d taken Charlie and she – she was so remorseful she’d – you know, killed herself.” He looked at their faces. “No, okay, it’s a stupid theory.”
“I’m afraid there’s no doubt that she was murdered, Mr Fullman. Did you really suspect her of having something to do with Charlie’s abduction and Dita’s death?”
“Well, no – it’s just that your mind comes up with all these strange ideas...” He trailed off, running a hand through his messy hair. “I trusted her. I really did trust her, I had to. She had access to everything, all my accounts, business dealings. Like a PA does. That’s what I couldn’t understand, that I trusted her and yet I still thought – thought she might have done it.”
Olbeck and Kate exchanged a glance.
“When did these…suspicions first arise, Mr Fullman?”
“No, you’ve got it wrong. They weren’t really suspicions. I was just thinking – you know – forget I said it. It’s really not important now, is it? Not now that this awful thing has happened.”
“You weren’t angry at her? When you had these ideas?”
“No, and I just said, it wasn’t important. It was a throwaway comment, that’s all. Just a theory and a pretty stupid one, I know that.”
“That’s fine, sir,” said Olbeck smoothly, as Kate opened her mouth to ask another question. “We’re just trying to establish what happened on the night Gemma died. You said she’d asked you for a few days holiday, is that right?”
Nick nodded.
“Yeah. She rings me up and asks for a few days off, doesn’t give me any kind of excuse except to say that she just needs a bit of time off after all that’s happened.”
“Was she in the habit of asking you for time off at short notice?”
“No, she wasn’t. She took the odd sick day here and there but she’d never really asked for time off out of the blue for no good reason.”
“She’d worked for you for quite a long time, hadn’t she?”
Nick shrugged.
“I guess so. A few years.”
“So would you say you were close friends? Close colleagues?”
Nick stared as if they’d asked him the name of Gemma’s first pet or favourite shade of blue. “I suppose so,” he said, after a moment.
“Can you tell us about her? One of the things we try and do is construct a picture of the victim, their likes and dislikes, their history, family and friends and so forth. Can you help us with that sort of thing?”
“Well…”
“It would be a great help to us if you could.”
“Well, I’ll try,” said Nick Fullman. His mouth twisted. “I need Gemma for this. She’d know what to do.” His voice thickened and he stopped talking for a second, pinching the bridge of his nose hard. “Sorry, I just–”
“Take a moment if you need one, sir,” said Anderton. Kate drummed her fingers on her knees impatiently.
Nick took a deep breath and sat back. “Gemma’s thirty-five, I think. Was thirty-five. She didn’t like celebrating her birthday much, I can’t even remember when it was, around June, I think.”
“Was she a good secretary?”
“Pretty good. I mean, she could be a little bit lazy sometimes, and she clearly didn’t have anything like I do invested in the business – by that I mean it wasn’t important to her, not really. I could see that it was just a job to her, but she was okay.”
“You two spent long hours working together, didn’t you?” asked Kate.
Nick looked at her narrowly.
“Yes.”
Kate hesitated, not sure whether to get this personal just yet. Would Anderton head her off? She made up her mind to go ahead. “Long hours and close working conditions can mean that people get, well, more involved with one another than they might do normally.”
Nick was still staring at her.
“And?” he said.
“Was there ever anything more between you and Miss Phillips than an employer/employee relationship?”
“Why the hell would you ask that?”
“Could you please answer me, sir?”
Nick dropped his eyes to the table.
“Of course not,” he said. “I’m a married man, for a start.”
So what? Since when had marriage vows ever stopped anybody? She thought for a second of a name she’d left in the past long ago, the silly sixteen-year-old it had belonged to. Had marriage vows stopped that teenager from doing what she did? She cleared her throat.
“There was never anything between you at all?”
“I said no, didn’t I?” said Nick, irritably. He looked at her and she realised he disliked her as much as she disliked him. Anderton raised a placatory hand.
“Thank you, sir. My colleague is just trying to ascertain the facts. One thing we do need to know is what you were doing on the night of Gemma’s death.”
If the question about an alleged affair hadn’t shaken Nick Fullman, this one did. He sat back in his chair, blinking.
“You can’t seriously suspect me of – of this. What are you saying?” He was gripping the tabl
e with both hands. “You’re not serious?”
Anderton attempted to soothe him. “It’s routine, Mr Fullman, you must know that. We have to ask everyone connected with the case to establish their whereabouts at the time of the crime.”
Slowly, Nick relaxed his grip on the table. He sat back, flexing his fingers a little. His hands shook.
“Fine, fine, I see that,” he muttered. “It just gave me a shock.”
“So can you confirm your whereabouts between the hours of seven pm and one am on the night of January twenty-fourth?”
“I was…” he began, and then apparently had to stop and think. “I was at the office. I had to work late. It was flat out, particularly as Gemma hadn’t been there that day. I couldn’t believe she’d just left me to get on with it. I couldn’t believe it. Oh God–” He clearly recollected what had happened to his absent assistant. “I didn’t mean…anyway, I was at work. In the office.”
“Can anyone corroborate that? Did you speak to anyone? Did anyone call in to see you?”
Fullman thought for a moment. “I’m not sure. I – wait, I did make a few phone calls. I–” He stopped talking suddenly.
“Who did you speak to?” There was silence. “Mr Fullman?”
“No one in particular,” said Nick, reluctantly.
“Come now, Mr Fullman. Who did you speak to?”
“Um, a friend of mine on the Council. We’re friends...”
“Would this be Councillor Gary Jones?”
Fullman looked shocked. “Yes, how did you know?”
“Never mind that now. You spoke to Gary Jones at what time?”
“I don’t know, I can’t remember. It was late, after nine.”
“A strange time to be making a business call,” said Kate, earning herself a glare from Nick Fullman.
“It might be to you, Sergeant, but not to me. Besides, it was a personal call, not a business call.”
“That’s fine, said Anderton, seeing that Kate was about to speak. “The telephone company can provide us with details of your calls.” Fullman shifted in his seat again. “We can also confirm your conversation with Councillor Jones himself.”
