Lie Beside Me

by Gytha Lodge

  ‘Well, she’ll have to find someone else,’ Mr Reakes said, his voice high-pitched and unsteady.

  ‘She’s asked me to represent her, Niall,’ Patrick said, slightly more firmly. ‘I’m her solicitor.’

  ‘You’re joking,’ Niall said, half laughing in disbelief. ‘They’ve arrested her. They think – they must have a reason. Why are they holding her if she hasn’t done something?’

  Patrick looked, momentarily, almost awkward. And then he said, ‘The question over what she may have done rests on where the young man died. He was found to have died in your home, rather than outside it.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Niall said, putting his hands up to his face. ‘I knew it. I knew she was …’ He suddenly turned to Patrick. ‘She was sleeping with him, wasn’t she?’

  ‘That remains unclear,’ Patrick said. ‘He died in – in the bed alongside her.’

  ‘For God’s sake!’ He shook his head, violently. ‘You can’t represent her. There’s no way.’

  ‘Niall …’

  ‘There was another man in our bed!’ He leaned forwards to point somewhere towards the door, as if the bed lay in that direction. ‘Some stranger who’s now dead!’

  ‘It’s clearly a horrible thing to find out,’ Patrick said. ‘I’m so sorry, Niall. But from the moment she hired me, I became her legal counsel as well as your friend.’

  ‘She doesn’t effing deserve legal counsel,’ Niall Reakes said through gritted teeth.

  Lightman found himself smiling slightly at Niall’s non-swearing. His wife seemed to be much happier with colourful language.

  ‘Everyone deserves it, Niall,’ Patrick said, quietly. ‘Everyone.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to hire you instead,’ Niall said in sudden triumph. ‘You won’t be able to represent her, because it’ll be a conflict of interest.’

  Patrick sighed. ‘I’m afraid the way it works is that I wouldn’t be able to represent you. But then you aren’t in current need of counsel, are you?’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ Niall said. ‘I need counsel to explain to me what the hell happened.’

  ‘I can help you with that, up to a point.’

  Niall turned away, waving a hand in clear frustration, before he asked, ‘Did she take some – some – some bastard home and then find out too late he was violent?’

  ‘Your wife can’t remember a lot of the evening,’ the solicitor said. ‘She went out with her friend, April. The two of them ended up drunk. April left with a man she’d picked up, and Louise was left alone, and has a large memory blackout covering the later part of the evening.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ Niall almost laughed again.

  ‘It may be worth knowing,’ Patrick Moorcroft said, evenly, ‘that the young man who died was married. To another young man.’

  There was absolute silence. Niall moved his head, opened his mouth, and then seemed to falter. ‘What?’

  ‘The details of the case are clearly complex. However easy it is to jump to conclusions, I think you need to be patient and let the truth come out. Louise has assured me that she doesn’t recognise the man in question, and is certain she couldn’t have been violent towards him or anyone else.’

  ‘And do you believe her?’ Niall asked. He came to stand close to Patrick, his hands in his pockets and his body leaning slightly forwards once again. ‘Do you think that’s true? Do you?’ There was a brief pause, and then Niall said, much more quietly, ‘Please, Patrick. Please tell me. I’m losing my mind.’

  ‘I know, Niall,’ the solicitor said, quietly. ‘And I do believe her. She’s clearly been through an awful day as well.’

  Niall shook his head, for some reason unwilling to accept this. ‘Of course she has. She tried to hide some – some kind of murder.’

  ‘Niall,’ Patrick said, his voice suddenly sharp. ‘I’ve told you everything I know. Perhaps it’s worth you considering what you know of your wife’s character, and whether she is capable of this action, before you damage her defence.’

  Niall’s expression went momentarily slack. He looked, just then, like a chastened child. ‘I’m not … I’m … I’m sorry.’ He looked down, towards the floor. ‘I didn’t mean to – I’m not accusing her of anything.’

  ‘Good,’ Patrick said, nodding. ‘I’m glad.’

  Another silence grew between them, and then Niall asked, ‘So what’s next? What do I do?’

  ‘Perhaps you should go home,’ the solicitor said.

  Niall shook his head. ‘I want – I need to see the police. I want to talk to them. Myself.’ He looked up at the solicitor. ‘I found out that – that she’d been arrested from the bloody news.’

  ‘I called you as soon as I could, and I think the police have been trying to reach you –’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ Niall snapped. And then he added, in a quieter voice, ‘I’m sorry, Patrick. I should be … grateful to you. It just feels suddenly like there are sides. My side and hers.’

  ‘There are no sides as far as I’m concerned,’ Patrick told him, reaching out to put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. He gave a small smile. ‘In my official position as your best friend, I’m here for both of you. All right?’

  Hanson spent the remainder of the journey back mulling over what Issa had told them. It seemed possible that Alex and Louise had gone home together for sex, but they had no proof that a liaison had occurred at the club. Nothing on any of the cameras. Nothing from the bar staff or Louise’s friend. And the two of them had technically left separately.

  She was still thinking it all over as they drew back into the car park at the rear of Southampton Central. As she climbed out of the chief’s Mondeo, she found herself looking at a black BMW 3 Series that was hovering up near the entrance to the station. She felt her heart squeeze in immediate response.

  It’s not him, she told herself, as she removed the laptop from the car and closed the door. But she couldn’t look away from the car. She thought she could make out the driver’s shape in the light from the street lamps, and in her mind he became Damian, sitting at the steering wheel and watching her.

  He’d still been driving the BMW the last time she’d seen him. The car that she’d paid the deposit on, stupidly believing that he would pay her back. A car that was far, far too expensive for Damian’s modest salary and immodest debts. But of course Damian had to have it. He had to have the best of everything, always, as if the world owed him luxury.

  She lowered her head and started to follow the DCI, refusing to look towards the car. It probably wasn’t even him.

  Lots of people have black BMWs, she told herself.

  But she was still shaking as she stepped into the rear lobby.

  She wished they hadn’t built the place with so much glass. She could feel her skin crawling until she’d closed the door of CID behind her.

  Jonah’s call from the superintendent came as he was halfway to his office. He deposited the desktop computer he was carrying on O’Malley’s untidy desk in order to answer it.

  It was a mercifully quick call. The superintendent agreed that a custody extension was warranted, and approved a further application to the magistrates’ court for longer if needed. Technically, this meant that only Hanson, as the team’s constable, would be required to take Louise Reakes to the court the next day. But Jonah would go too. It was useful to have a senior officer there to answer any difficult questions, and kinder to support his junior officer.

  ‘Right,’ Jonah said, with the call done. ‘We have our thirty-six hours, and we’ll plan for a court application. Can I get a download on what Niall Reakes said to his solicitor, Ben?’

  Lightman told him in his measured, precise way about the conversation. He outlined Niall Reakes’s doubts over his wife and his demand for Patrick Moorcroft to represent him instead.

  ‘They are clearly friends rather than solicitor and client, and Mr Reakes seems to feel betrayed by his friend’s decision to represent his wife. He implied that it pits her against him somehow, though exactly how
that works isn’t clear. It was a fairly heated conversation,’ he added, in such a cool voice that it was slightly comic.

  ‘So he found it easy to imagine his wife cheating, and even killing,’ Jonah said.

  ‘Yes,’ Lightman agreed. ‘That’s a good summary. He’s now demanding to see you. His wife, meanwhile, is demanding to see him.’

  Jonah gave a wry grin. ‘Well, I’m demanding coffee. Let’s see which one of us gets what we want first.’

  O’Malley took a thermos and went to do a Costa run. ‘You don’t need a crappy disposable cup, so,’ he said, waving the thermos at Jonah. ‘Those things last for centuries before rotting down.’

  It made Jonah grin. This was clearly a new concern for O’Malley, who was well on the way to being a takeaway coffee addict. He noted that O’Malley’s hectic desk had three disposable cups sitting on it, their contents in various stages of moulding over.

  He took a few minutes to retreat to his office and mull things over before he spoke to Niall Reakes. Though, in fact, when he sat down and woke his desktop, he found a note in O’Malley’s sloping scrawl asking him to call Janet McCullough. The call had clearly slipped his sergeant’s mind.

  Their forensic scientist answered swiftly, and with clear enthusiasm.

  ‘I’ve talked to my guy about this knife of yours,’ she said. ‘And it’s actually pretty good news. Unless it’s a copy, which he doesn’t think it is, it’s a Ukrainian import. At the moment there’s only one firm in the UK that sells them.’

  ‘Wow, great work,’ Jonah said, not really surprised that McCullough had contacted him herself instead of just putting them in touch. It was very much her style to go beyond her brief. ‘Can you give me the name?’

  ‘It’s Steel and Silver, and they’re an online retailer with shops in Newcastle and London,’ McCullough told him. ‘Let’s hope they don’t sell so very many of them.’

  ‘Let’s hope they don’t,’ Jonah agreed.

  18

  Louise

  You won’t want to read about this next part. I know you won’t. But it’s vital that you know. If I don’t explain the sheer, heart-twisting panic I felt when I woke up on Saturday morning, then you’ll never understand why I did what I did. Even now, I hate that the picture you have of me in your head is all wrong. All distorted.

  I’ve told you how it was, when I found him there next to me. But I need you to understand, now, the awful, awful things I began to think. I imagined that Drunk Louise had seduced and then killed him, and that she’d done everything she could to make sure I suffered for it.

  You’re probably thoroughly sick of all this talk of Her, aren’t you? By this point you must be railing against it, wanting to shout that it’s all me, and this artificial distancing of myself from Her is both childish and pathological.

  But to say that is to misunderstand the nature of me and Her. It is to trivialise the dissociation that happens each and every time. I can see, now, that there is something more profound at work in my psychology than simple alcoholism. And, in part, I can see it more clearly because of another version of me that I met that morning.

  It was the anxiety that triggered it. Fear like I have never known before. It reached an unbearable crescendo, and then something snapped. I vanished, and another me came into being. She was – well, she was unstoppable.

  That new Louise knew more than I did. She knew she had to get the body of this man out of the house. She could see herself being jailed for something she had no way of defending herself against. She had to stop it happening.

  And, as a side point, isn’t this refreshing? An alter ego that is actually looking out for Sober Louise. One who clears up the mess instead of making it. I can’t help liking her.

  It felt very much like watching someone else as she set to work. She knew she had to do it while it was still dark, and that it would be better to do it naked, so she stripped off, and put my going-out clothes into the wash. She noted, as she did it, that I was missing a diamanté earring but dismissed it. It didn’t matter if it turned up somewhere on the streets if the crime scene was going to be in my front garden.

  She put on a pair of disposable cleaning gloves, and heaved him out of bed. He was unbelievably fucking heavy but she did it anyway.

  Did you wince again just there? Did you feel more revolted by the swearing than you did by this vision of your wife dragging a well-muscled dead man out of our marital bed? I almost want to know.

  Anyway, she was a determined person, this newly born Louise. After a good twenty minutes, she’d made it outside with the body. And having Dettol-ed the knife in case she’d touched it at some point, she put it down next to him and stood back to take a look.

  There wasn’t enough blood, she realised. Nobody would believe he’d been attacked there. She needed to make it look like he’d come from somewhere else.

  So she took his shoes off him, soaked them in blood off the mattress, slipped them on to her own feet (over some socks) and left a fake trail from the pavement to where he lay, making sure to step only on the marks she’d already left on her way back.

  Doing it, she thought about dead men’s shoes, and it made her laugh. She actually laughed, out there in the bitter cold, with the threat of discovery hanging over her. And that isn’t the black mark against her character you might think. There is a great, terrible absurdity in having to handle a dead body, and I defy most people not to be hit by it at some point.

  After she’d put his shoes back on to his feet, she started to clean everything up. And I bet at this point you’re laughing a little bitterly and thinking, Of course she cleaned. But it was absolutely needed. It turns out both versions of me were born for this.

  Cleaning everything took us until twenty to six, a good hour and a half after I’d first woken up and found him. Getting up early is clearly the first habit of successful justice perverters.

  The final and biggest problem we both had was the mattress, which was still steeped in blood. She was equal to this, though. She used my hair dryer on a cool setting to blow-dry it. By the time she’d finished, it left only a smudge on her hand if she pressed it hard. None of it showed once she’d got the spare duvet and pillows out and made it up again.

  That other version of me stayed right up until the police arrived. She was there with me, telling me what to say. Guiding me. Stopping me from messing everything up.

  And I know you’re going to be certain, now, that there’s something wrong with me. That this constant dissociation with myself shows that I’m deeply damaged. But I’m starting to understand that these parts of me come into being out of necessity. That life, and the people in it, sometimes just push me too hard.

  So whatever you think of my other personas, I’ll tell you this: I miss them intensely now that they’ve left me. Each of them did, in their way, what I so badly wanted you to do, Niall. They made me feel like everything would be OK.

  19

  With Lightman volunteering to check up on Niall Reakes’s trip to Geneva, and O’Malley on coffee duty, Hanson was free to investigate what she chose. She needed to take her mind off that black car in the car park and, more particularly, off her own adrenaline-filled reaction to it. Off the way it was all getting to her.

  Alex Plaskitt’s tower computer was still on O’Malley’s desk, sitting at an angle on top of some paperwork. She had his laptop case perched on her own. Between the two machines, they had all of Alex’s videos to work through, and she might as well get on with them.

  She hesitated over which to start with and chose the laptop. This was, presumably, where any more recent, unedited footage would be found. She knew finding something significant was a long shot, but at the very least she hoped to understand more about the man and his frame of mind. Something to tell her whether he might have wanted to sleep with Louise Reakes, and whether he could ever have been violent.

  She loaded up the laptop, half listening to Ben in the background. He was now talking to a second person at Niall Reak
es’s pharmaceutical firm to ask them about the conference. She had the strong suspicion that they were being difficult from the way he was repeating his requests extremely politely. She’d never known him get angry with anyone. Not a witness, or a suspect, or a colleague. Though she often wondered whether he felt more underneath it all.

  She pulled her headphones out of her desktop and plugged them into the laptop, hoping that she wasn’t about to get a telling-off from the cyber team for accessing the files before they’d had a look.

  It took her a few tries to locate Alex’s personal videos. There was nothing in his documents, but eventually she thought to look for online storage folders and found a batch of them sitting in Dropbox. Ben had finished his call and started another by the time she’d loaded the most recent one up.

  This video had been recorded the day he died, and Hanson took a long, steadying breath before pressing the play button.

  Alex appeared in excessive close-up, having clearly just pressed the record button on the camera. His expression, even in that unplanned moment, was warm. Excited. Open.

  Alex backed away until he was standing in the middle of his studio, and then, after a brief pause, he launched himself into a greeting.

  ‘This is Alex Plaskitt, your health and fitness coach, and today I’m looking at how to do a really great core-workout session. Now, a lot of people will use plank holds as their core training, without movement. What I want to show you today is taking that position and turning it dynamic, because your core will always be trained better when you move.’

  He hunkered down onto the ground and put himself into an easy plank position, his feet on the floor and his body supported with enviably straight forearms.

  ‘Now, trying to hold a static plank for longer and longer to try and get better core is like weight training by holding a car over your head. It’s likely to cause injury, and it doesn’t really help. Like with weights, we need movement.’