‘Why “was”?’
‘Is then. What is this, am I under the spotlight now?’
‘Do you know where Nicola is now?’ Don’t be led by the interviewee.
‘Not at this moment.’
‘What were you arguing about with Lulu – with Tallulah Frost – in the street after your brother’s inquest?’ Surprise them with your questions, give them no chance to anticipate or rehearse.
Stella clicked her ballpoint on and off to agitate him, then remembered the microphone and stopped.
‘I told her I thought that Rick had been murdered. She refused to believe me.’
Safety first: avoid being trapped with a person you suspect of murder. Don’t ask questions likely to inflame. The houses in Braybrook Street were dark; if she shouted for help, no one would hear.
‘Why didn’t you tell us you were having an affair with Tallulah?’ Avoid open questions and tackling a point head on.
‘Because I’m not. Any more,’ William said after too long a pause.
‘You didn’t think it pertinent to tell us this?’ Know when to be silent.
He loosened his shirt collar, although the top two buttons were undone. ‘It’s over.’
‘Why is it over?’
‘Tallulah – or Lulu as she’d restyled herself – promised she’d leave my brother, but kept putting it off. When Rick was killed, I ended it, the whole thing had got out of hand. I couldn’t live with the guilt. I had betrayed my brother. I was having a relationship with his wife and when he asked for help, I wasn’t right there. I missed his call. But listen, I didn’t want this to divert you. I didn’t kill my brother and nor did Lulu, or at least—’
‘You hinted we should talk to her. Was that out of revenge? Did you plan to frame her?’
‘No! It was me that ended it, so it would be stupid to take revenge on her.’
Stella momentarily lost the thread of her argument. Was this what it was like for Terry? Stain by stain.
‘You said you ended because she wouldn’t leave. Presumably if she had left her husband, then you’d still be with her.’
‘I don’t know. I thought I knew her, but I’m not so sure.’
‘Meaning?’
‘I have a feeling that someone’s following me.’
‘Like your feeling that your brother was murdered?’
‘If you like, yes.’
‘Why do you think it’s Lulu?’
‘She has the most to gain from Rick not being around. Simple.’ He gave a shrug.
‘Are you sure it was her?’ Stella remembered Lulu arriving back, excitedly telling her and Dale that she had seen her husband in the street with his mistress. Had the ‘husband’ been William, not Rick? William had left her.
‘With this app I can check where someone is. It was definitely her following me.’
‘You were with Nicola Barwick.’ Stella was gratified by his look of surprise. Like a boxer she must concentrate on one area and then suddenly go for another part of the body – mix it up.
‘That’s why I was coming to see you. I think that whoever was threatening my brother is after me.’
Rain pattered on the roof of the van. Black clouds made a false dusk that merged with the trees where Jack had stood. Stella hoped he wasn’t still out there.
‘Where were you the night your brother died?’ Stick to the basics.
‘I already told the police, I was at home alone, working, so yes, no alibi, it could have been me.’
He turned sideways in his seat to look at her as he had done the night she had taken him to Gunnersbury station. Then she had supposed he was one of Jackie’s Mr Rights. How simple that problem seemed now.
‘But it wasn’t me.’ He leant forward and touched her arm. ‘Stella, you have to believe me.’
Stella’s phone buzzed with a text. Excusing herself, she turned off the recorder.
Can’t see you tonight. Driving. Jack had found his phone.
If Jack was out there, he could see her with William. She dialled his number.
‘This is Jack, who are you? Tell me after the beep.’ Her patience evaporated.
‘Could I use your brother’s app?’
‘I should have told you sooner.’
‘Your app?’
‘Tallulah or Lulu’s at home, if that’s who you want, I checked.’
‘It isn’t.
Stella submitted to William’s instructions – she couldn’t say she had used the app before. When she put in Jack’s number, up came the Seek and destroy icon. The cross hairs zeroed and found the target. Her heart thumped. Jack was on Du Cane Road, passing Wormwood Scrubs prison; if she went now she might catch up with him.
‘I have to go.’
‘Stella, I—’
‘Now!’
She leant over and pushed open the door for William to get out. ‘I’ll call you,’ she shouted back to him as she drove down Braybrook Street.
55
Monday, 28 October 2013
‘Where’s Jackie?’ Stella burst into the office.
‘Gone home. She got a text from Jack. She’s put me in charge!’ Beverly was Jackie’s assistant. She was in her mid twenties, dressed immaculately in a short black dress with precise make-up, a precision that didn’t extend to her work. Kneeling amidst piles of papers on the floor, Beverly tackled the filing as if searching for something. ‘Shall I make you a cup of tea or coffee?’ Beverly made perfect tea.
‘No thanks.’ Stella had the urge to say ‘yes’, to sit at her desk and plan next week’s rota, scrutinize application forms, fix visits with prospective clients and prepare quotes. She could not. She had a case to solve.
‘What did Jack want?’
‘He told Jackie he was passing her house and noticed a window open. She’s gone home to close it. When she got there, she found it was closed! She thinks Jack got the wrong house.’
‘When was this?
‘An hour ago. She asked me to lock up. I’ve done it before.’
Stella couldn’t absorb the detail. By the time she had got to Du Cane Road, there was no sign of Jack. The wind was blowing and it had been raining hard and in his dark coat he was as good as invisible. How had he got to Corney Road so quickly?
‘I was going to drop Stanley off with Jackie, but, um—’
‘She said to say I can look after him,’ Beverly said.
‘Are you any good with dogs?’ Stella only trusted Jackie with Stanley.
‘My mum breeds poodles, and I help out.’
‘OK then.’
‘We’re old friends. Actually, I was about to say, I think he needs a drink.’
When she looked back through the wired glass in the office door, Beverly was putting a document into a drawer in one of the filing cabinets. Stanley was snoozing in his bed by her desk. He was more at home in the office than she was.
‘You didn’t tell me about William Frost?’ Stella said as soon as Lulu Carr opened her front door.
‘Sorry, is that your business?’ Lulu eyed Stella coldly, no longer the scatty woman who Stella had assured Jack wasn’t capable of murder.
Establish who has the most to gain by a person’s death: usually the spouse, partner or close relative. ‘Gain’ doesn’t have to be financial.
‘I’m investigating your husband’s death, so yes, it is my business.’ Stella stepped into the hall and, closing the door, leant on it. This wasn’t how she talked to her cleaning clients. ‘I think it’s time you started telling me the truth.’
‘You weren’t truthful. You pretended to be a cleaner when all the time you were spying on me.’
‘I didn’t know who you were until I found your husband’s driving licence.’ To Stella’s surprise – she had expected her to brazen it out – Lulu appeared to accept this.
‘My husband killed himself. They said so at the inquest, but William said it was murder, that Rick would never kill himself. William was just looking for a way to dump me. He behaved as if I killed him. Well, I’
ve proved him wrong!’
‘How?’
‘Come with me.’
Lulu went up the stairs, so Stella had to follow her. On the way up, she tried Jack again.
‘This is Jack, who are—’
‘I’ve found out who killed my husband.’ Lulu went into Rick Frost’s study. She sat down in the black swivel chair and scooted the mouse about. The computer screen awoke.
Stella was looking at the picture of a room, taken from above. It showed a black chair, a desk and filing cabinets. It was the room they were standing in. There was a man sitting in the chair. With a shock, Stella realized she had seen the back of his head before. She looked behind her. Above the door, a camera was fitted to the wall. A red light blinked. It was on.
‘I cracked Rick’s password. My brother suggested I try his company registration number and he was right. This is who Rick told William was a threat.’ She jabbed at the screen. ‘He killed my husband.’
Lulu moved the cursor and the man on the screen came to life.
He opened a drawer in the desk, shut it and opened it again. He took something out. Stella moved closer. It was a belt with bullets in it. As she saw this, Lulu opened the same drawer in the desk and pulled out the same belt. She put it back and shut the drawer. The man put the belt back.
He sat so still that Stella thought the film had stopped. Then he leant forward and seemed to be peering at the desk. He took something from his jacket and scribbled on it as if crossing something out. Then, as if startled, he got up and went to the door. Stella saw his face. It was Jack.
She grabbed the mouse off Lulu and paused the film. She read date and time at the bottom of the screen. It was the day she’d found the driving licence. The time was eleven minutes past eleven. The time when Stanley had barked outside the landing cupboard. Now she knew why. Jack had been in there.
‘This man didn’t kill your husband,’ Stella said firmly.
She bent forward and looked along the desk, as Jack had done in the film. She ran her finger over faint indentations in the veneer.
‘Is this the password?’
‘No, his password isn’t that long!’
‘I wonder if it’s the serial number for his phone.’ She rummaged in her anorak pocket and pulled out the plastic bag with Rick Frost’s phone that Jack had given her on Stamford Brook station, the night they visited it together. She pulled off the silver cover and squinted at the tiny lettering on the back. There wasn’t a serial number.
‘Whose phone is that?’ Lulu Carr asked impatiently.
‘Your husband’s.’ Too late Stella realized that the police would have given the phone to Rick Frost’s next of kin, his wife, not his brother. William must have taken it from Lulu without her knowing.
She shook her head. ‘No, it’s not.’
‘What do you mean?’ Lulu never said what Stella expected her to. In that respect she was rather like Jack.
‘He scratched his initials on the back of his phone. So worried about people stealing it. That doesn’t have any scratches on it.’
‘Are you sure?’ Stella looked at the smooth shiny black surface. Not a scratch in sight. The phone in fact looked brand new.
‘Of course I’m sure. The man was obsessed with holding on to his stuff. That’s not his phone.’
‘So who has his phone then?’ Stella asked. And, she thought to herself, who left a brand new phone with no data on it where the police would find it?
‘Good question. I suggest we start with the man in this film. What’s he looking at?’
Stella crouched down and examined the numbers on the surface of the desk. Jack had left the paper with the numbers on in his flat and it had disappeared. She drew open the desk and found the bullet belt that was on the film. She also found a block of sticky notes and a bundle of Bic ballpoints bound with an elastic band. Typical of Jack to take a pencil rubbing when he could have written them down. Then Stella remembered Jack’s dictum about leaving no trace and inwardly apologized. Except Jack had left a trace: he had left a film of himself.
She began scribbling down the numbers on a sticky note and then stopped. Jack did nothing for effect or as part of some fantasy. He honed his skills. He had taken a rubbing because he wanted not only to reproduce the numbers, but to see how they were written. She looked again at the laminated surface of the desk. Jack had noticed that the distance between the numbers varied. He had guessed Frost – it was safe to assume the numbers were carved there by Rick Frost – had been in a hurry.
‘19 9 13 15 14 19 8 21 20 20 15 23 5 18 4 15 15 18’.
When she had looked at the numbers on the paper with Jack, before he said he lost the rubbing, he had suggested it was a serial number of a computer. She had thought it was the IP address of a computer, although the latter didn’t fit. Now she saw that the gaps between the numbers were irregular. Some greater than others. They were regularly irregular.
‘Lulu, I wonder if Rick left this as a message for you,’ she said slowly.
‘He was always leaving me messages. Stuck them all over the house. Cryptic notes letting me know he knew I’d seen my brother, or where I’d been. The man was mad.’ Lulu began to cry.
Stella ripped open a handy pack of tissues from her rucksack and passed Lulu one.
‘I think it might be a warning.’ Stella was feeling her way; the thought had come from nowhere. ‘If these gaps are to distinguish the numbers, then the first five are nineteen, nine, thirteen, fifteen and fourteen. Do they mean anything to you?’
‘No, they do not!’ Lulu flapped at the air with her tissue.
‘If it’s not a serial number, it might be a code.’ Stella heard herself sounding like Jack. ‘Did you have a code, you know, a secret thing between you both?’ A question she had never asked a client. Thinking of Jack, she must tell him about Rick’s phone. She dialled him again and got his answer machine. When they were looking at the pencilled rubbing, Jack had commented that Rick Frost only had one computer in his study. She had supposed he had special detective powers so she hadn’t asked how he knew. He knew because he had been here. Jack had lied to her. Stella made herself concentrate on Lulu.
‘We had nothing between us. Unless you count a wall when he slept in here.’ Lulu gave a hooting snort into the tissue.
‘If it was a code, it’d have to be something you’d easily get.’ Stella found a tactful way to say that Rick Frost would allow for Lulu not being used to codes and computer languages.
‘Rick lived in a fantasy world. I should have listened to Simon, he warned me that “the Captain will betray you”,’ Lulu wailed.
‘The Captain? Do you mean William?’ Stella folded the sticky note into her anorak pocket. No point in pushing Lulu once she was upset.
‘Rick. Simon called him the Captain because of their idiotic army games. It was bad enough when they were kids, but Rick never grew up.’ Lulu’s eyes swam with tears. ‘My brother says Rick only married me to spite him; he used to bully my brother when they were boys. I wonder sometimes if Simon has ever forgiven me for marrying Rick.’
‘Why would Rick have wanted to hurt your brother?’ Stella didn’t like the sound of the brother. At least Dale wasn’t like that.
‘Rick hated my brother and I think Simon was right, he hated me too. Rick watched me from this computer. There are cameras all over the house, haven’t you noticed?’
Stella had noticed. She had thought they were burglar alarms.
‘Rick wrote “Activity Reports” detailing where I had been, what I had been doing and who with. I found them all on the computer. Whom, I mean,’ Lulu added.
‘Whom.’
‘Sorry?’ Stella roused herself.
‘Grammar. My brother’s always correcting me, a horrid habit that I’ve caught off him.’
Stella wasn’t listening. She ran her finger over the marks on the desk. Perhaps they hadn’t been scratched directly on to the laminate, but were indentations from pressing too hard on paper with a ballpoint. Fro
st hadn’t written them for Lulu; if he had, he would have taken a less subtle approach and left her notes all over the house. He had written the numbers down and sent them somewhere, but whom had he sent them to?
‘If he watched you constantly, then Rick must have known about William.’ Stella didn’t know whom to believe, Lulu or William. Neither. She got a feeling in her solar plexus. It was one of Terry’s hunches. ‘Lulu, don’t take this the wrong way, but do you think your brother could have had anything to do with Rick’s death?’
‘You’ve been talking to William! No I do not. My brother looks out for me. When I told him about the Captain and Nicky, he reminded me that he’d promised to protect me. William’s only jealous; he says I don’t need protecting. All those boys think Nicky is Miss Perfect.’ She dabbed at her nose with the tissue. ‘This code-thingy was probably for her, she was Enigma Woman!’
‘She was what?’ Stella fought to keep bafflement at bay.
‘In their unit, Nicky-Perfect was the Official Codebreaker. I can’t imagine there were many codes to break for a bunch of kids sneaking about a graveyard wearing flower pots and shooting insects!’ She balled up her tissue and tossed it at the scratches on the desk.
‘Who was Nicola Barwick with when you saw her in Chiswick Mall that time? It can’t have been Rick, as you told me then – he was dead.’ Stella tried to keep on track.
‘My brother,’ Lulu muttered. ‘He said he’d stopped seeing her, that I was right not to trust her. He had her by her arm, holding her tight, all over her like a rash. He lied to me!’
Stella examined the numbers she had copied on to the sticky note. The most obvious code was to swap out numbers for letters, but that was too easy. Then again, while Rick Frost had been hot on surveillance, it seemed he was a kid at heart. He mightn’t have been a genius with codes. The one and the nine were together – so nineteen – then a gap followed by a nine and another gap, then thirteen, fifteen and fourteen and a bigger gap. She calculated out loud, ‘The nineteenth letter in the alphabet is “S” and the ninth is “I”. The thirteen is “M” and—’
The Detective's Secret Page 31
