by Gytha Lodge
‘We need to know.’
Louise turned to Patrick. Her solicitor looked torn, as well he might. It was unclear whether anything Louise said was likely to incriminate or exonerate her. But it was important to show that his client was cooperating where she could. He glanced at Jonah, weighing things up, and then nodded.
Louise gave a long sigh. ‘I think I remember someone chasing me. Not him. Not Alex. But it’s a dream, so maybe it was meant to be him. I knew they were a threat, and they kept coming, and I kept falling.’ She gave a sudden, loud sniff, and then continued with an unsteady voice. ‘I fell, and they were suddenly on top of me, hurting me. There was – there was a pain in my back, and when I woke up and looked in the mirror, there was a bruise where – where I remembered it.’
‘OK,’ Jonah said, with some satisfaction. He felt instinctively that she was telling them the truth. ‘It’s important that a female officer photographs any bruising. Any injuries at all.’
‘I know.’ Louise’s cheeks were wet with tears again.
He watched her, briefly, as she rubbed at one of her cheeks. ‘You said you fell onto the grass. Was there anything else to your surroundings?’
‘Trees,’ she said, indistinctly. ‘I thought there were trees. But I don’t – I don’t think I was in the woods, after a night out. I don’t think that’s right.’
Jonah glanced at Lightman, who was writing notes with unusual energy. He suspected that Lightman’s thoughts mirrored his own. That with a large blank in her memory it was possible she’d ended up almost anywhere.
‘Was there anyone else, in the dream?’
Louise’s expression grew distant. She tried to speak, swallowed, and then said, ‘I don’t know. There could have been someone else. At some point in the evening someone was angry. Maybe with me, or maybe – maybe I just saw a fight. But I don’t – I don’t know. None of it’s clear.’
Jonah nodded. ‘That’s all right. And what else was there? You said you remembered a few fragments?’
Louise paused for quite some time, her eyes on her hands, before she said, ‘I think I talked to the victim. In the club. I don’t know how long for. I just have this memory of his face as he’s saying something and I have no idea what it was.’ She gave Jonah an anguished look. ‘I only remembered that this morning. I’m sorry.’
Lightman glanced at Jonah, and then asked, ‘You think this was after your friend April had left?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘And what else?’
‘Nothing else.’ She sounded dejected rather than combative. ‘I’m sorry.’
Jonah waited a moment before he asked, ‘You mentioned that Alex Plaskitt might have tried to rob you.’
‘I wouldn’t have hurt him,’ Louise said, immediately.
‘And yet you tried to hide his death,’ Jonah argued. ‘That was not the action of an innocent person.’
‘I told you –’
‘Who were you covering up for, Louise?’ he asked, cutting across her, his voice steely.
Louise looked upwards, as if trying to find strength somewhere. ‘I didn’t know what I was covering up. I panicked.’
‘Why were you so afraid of telling your husband what had happened?’
‘I wasn’t –’ Louise gave a short, strange laugh. ‘I already told you.’ Patrick leaned over to murmur something, but she shook her head, impatiently. ‘He hates it when I drink, and I thought he’d think it was my fault somehow. That’s all.’
‘That’s a strange idea,’ Lightman said, interjecting. ‘That the death of a young man was somehow your fault.’
‘I didn’t – what I meant was, he’d say I shouldn’t have been that drunk, or maybe I would have seen something. Stopped it.’ Louise looked close to the fine edge between coping and not coping at all.
‘I would caution you against overanalysing comments made by my client in a state of shock,’ her solicitor said.
‘Did he have some reason for thinking that you were having an affair?’ Lightman pressed, not acknowledging the solicitor.
‘No!’ Louise’s protest was a gasp of outrage. ‘Why would he? I’m bloody devoted to him.’
‘What did he say when you told him what had happened?’ Lightman went on, with an untouched coldness that was impressive.
Patrick Moorcroft shifted in his chair, his gaze moving from Lightman to Jonah. ‘How are these questions related to your inquiry into Alex Plaskitt’s death?’
‘That will become evident,’ Jonah said, firmly, his gaze fixed on Louise. ‘Please carry on, sergeant.’
‘Would you tell us what he said, please?’ Lightman said, evenly.
Louise shook her head, in small, quick, jerks. ‘I don’t know. He just asked – what had happened.’
‘I’m sure you can be more specific,’ Jonah said, his voice a great deal less measured than Lightman’s. Where his sergeant did a wonderful line in being relentlessly unemotional, Jonah’s real skill had always lain in attack. In suddenly bringing out such harsh, scathing tones that it broke suspects down. The deep marks left by his father’s abuse would always have their uses. ‘You claim not to be able to remember Friday night, but yesterday morning, when you called your husband, you were stone-cold sober. So what, exactly, did he say?’
‘He asked – if it was someone I knew …’ Louise said, and then she stopped, and he saw one of those rare, intensely telling expressions. She wasn’t looking at Jonah, though. She was looking towards the wall, with her face a mask of shock.
22
Louise
I realise that telling you about the Italian man at the wedding was something of a sidetrack. If we’re going to continue chronologically, then the next thing to address is the revelation that hit me like a bus earlier today.
I’m not sure quite how it took me so long to realise. I’ve thought back to the phone conversation we had so many times. I’ve thought how heart-breaking it was that you were so ready to believe this was my fault, before there was anything to point in my direction.
It occurs to me, having written this all out, that I understand you better tonight than I have ever understood you. I understand why you’ve been so angry with me for so long, and that it hasn’t really been about my drinking, or my desperation for a child. It’s had nothing to do with the times I couldn’t help tidying when you just wanted to relax.
It explains not only your anger, but also your swift belief that I’d cheated. That I’d killed. Because if you could be angry with me, it exonerated you, didn’t it, Niall? Nothing that you’d done could ever be as bad as that, and that left you free from guilt.
But anyway, back to that phone call. The bit I kept forgetting about was the start of it, when I waited for five rings for you to pick up. Waited with a dial tone in my ear that was not the long, irritating beep of an international call, but which was instead the standard double-chirrup of a bloody UK one. Long before you should have even boarded a plane home, you were back in this country, and had probably been back before any of this shit even happened.
You lied, and it took a police interrogation to make me realise the truth. I wonder how I can have been so slow.
23
Louise hadn’t even tried to hold out on them. When Jonah asked her, sharply, what it was that she’d realised, she had looked at him, her eyes large and unfocused, and said flatly, ‘Niall wasn’t in Geneva.’
They’d got a few more words out of her before Patrick Moorcroft had intervened and demanded a private conversation with his client. But they had heard enough.
‘We need to get confirmation from the airline,’ Jonah said to Lightman, as they walked rapidly back to CID. ‘Find out when he did actually arrive back, and see if we can trace him to Southampton on Friday night. Get O’Malley on to it.’
‘Of course,’ Lightman answered, a little awkwardly. ‘Sorry. I’ve dropped the ball. I should have pushed the airline earlier …’
‘Hindsight is a wonderful thing,’ Jonah said. ‘We’d already t
aken steps to prove he was at the conference and it seemed to tie in. He went to great efforts to cover his tracks. The big question is why.’
‘Given his immediate assumption of an affair,’ Lightman commented, ‘could he have been trying to catch Louise out?’
‘It is possible,’ Jonah agreed. ‘An attempted trap that went wrong. I think she was telling the truth about someone attacking her, and I want to find out where it happened. Louise remembers falling face first onto grass, and trees around her. If the ANPR cameras haven’t picked up any of our suspects’ cars in the area, then our search radius is fairly small. As far as a drunk woman could stumble.’ He paused outside his office door. ‘Do we know when Juliette’s going to be back?’
‘I’ll find out,’ Lightman replied.
‘I want the two of you to work out any likely places for an attack. And when you have any, get Linda McCullough to meet you there.’
As Lightman wrote himself a note, Jonah briefly updated O’Malley and asked if he’d had any joy with the traffic cameras.
‘Louise Reakes’s car wasn’t on the road,’ the older sergeant answered. ‘April Dumont I’ve only picked up much earlier in the day. She must have got a cab to Saints Close, which means any movements later would have been in a cab, too. I’m checking Step Conti now.’
‘When you’re done with the airline, I want to look for Niall Reakes on those cameras,’ Jonah said, tersely. ‘Someone attacked her, and Niall wasn’t where he said he was. We need to know where he went, and what happened to his wife.’ And then, realising that this was a little sharper and more melodramatic than his usual style, he added, ‘Please.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Louise said, quietly, as soon as the officers had left the interview room. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Patrick. ‘I didn’t … I’m too tired to think. I’m not trying to get Niall in trouble.’
There was a moment of silence, and then Patrick said, ‘Of course not, and I’m sure he isn’t in trouble. It’s sensible for you to explain everything that casts doubt on this idea of you as perpetrator.’
There was another pause, and then Louise said, ‘I think it’ll be OK for Niall. I’m pretty sure I know what he was doing. And who he was doing it with. It isn’t what they’re thinking.’
After another moment, Patrick said, ‘Perhaps you should tell the police what you think. But I’ll be sorry if it’s that, too.’
Jonah picked up the phone to Hanson twenty minutes after leaving the interview room.
‘So we definitely have no sign of a meet-up between Alex Plaskitt and Louise Reakes on London Road,’ she summarised. ‘And he was too far behind to be following her. So either they met at the house by prearrangement, or something else went on.’
‘That’s very interesting,’ Jonah said, not sure how to fit this into everything else. He briefly imagined Louise letting Alex into her home, and Niall arriving back to find them there together. Had Louise been lying about the attack? Or had something else happened on her way home?
‘I’ve also travelled along her most likely route home,’ Hanson went on. ‘If she was attacked, I think it must have been on Asylum Green. It’s bang on the way, it’s the only real green space, and once she was under the trees, she’d be pretty much invisible from the road. Can we get someone out there?’
‘I’ll send Linda’s team,’ Jonah told her. ‘Are you on your way back?’
‘Yes, almost there,’ Hanson confirmed.
‘Good. Pick Ben up and meet Linda at the scene.’
O’Malley leaned in through the door of Jonah’s office. ‘Niall Reakes is on his way in. And I’ve tracked down his movements. He ditched the doctors and came back late on Friday night, from Zurich instead of Geneva. He landed at Gatwick at ten twenty, and could easily have been back here by twelve thirty. Time enough to work out the house was empty and go out and find his wife.’
Jonah gave him a grin. ‘That’s excellent news.’
As O’Malley let himself out, though, Jonah became thoughtful. If Niall had found Alex and Louise in bed together, he might well have killed them. But how did Louise being attacked on the grass fit? Had Alex stumbled on an attack and thwarted it? Or was Louise Reakes, who had proven adept at hiding the truth, still sending them on a merry dance in order to protect her husband?
Even that made little sense, though, Jonah thought. Why would she protect the man who had killed her lover and left her to deal with it? Unless Niall had threatened her. Or unless Louise had been involved from the start.
Hanson decided to park at the magistrates’ court, which was right by Asylum Green. It limited the amount of walking they’d have to do in the freezing wind, even if they did end up standing around in it.
Driving into the car park gave her a strange feeling of déjà vu. It had only been a few hours ago that she’d come here to ask for a custody extension.
She’d been in a very different frame of mind then, her anxiety limited to the tiny flicker of nerves at having to speak in front of the magistrates. There had been no constant panic that was like a siren somewhere in the background. No feeling of everything having gone wrong.
She knew it could be nothing, even now. Jason could have read her message and forgotten to reply. She did that, sometimes, only to be told off for it later. But this was Jason. The man who always messaged back, and dropped her a line at bedtime. Which meant something was really wrong.
Ben seemed to be oblivious to her mood, thankfully. He climbed equably out of the car, stretched his shoulders slightly, and began to amble back up the road towards the green. As Hanson caught him up, pulling her scarf up as high as it would go to protect herself from the wind, he said, ‘I wonder if she walked this way often during daylight hours. Louise Reakes, I mean. You’d probably avoid going across a deserted area at one a.m. in the normal run of things. But if it was a frequently used route and she was drunk, she might default to it.’
‘Yes,’ Hanson said. Then she added, ‘She looks like someone who runs. Could be a route she uses for that.’
Lightman gave her a sidelong look. ‘Do I look like someone who runs?’
‘Probably.’ She glanced at him. ‘Do you not run?’
‘Only under duress,’ he said. ‘If there are no pools open anywhere, or tennis courts or anything.’
Hanson shook her head, trying to bring some kind of banter to mind now that it seemed to be back on the menu. But she felt as though it had been drained out of her, and she wondered, suddenly, whether this feeling really had anything to do with Jason, or whether it was just the long-term effect of Damian’s persistent presence in her life. Whether she’d actually just reached some kind of breaking point.
They crossed the Avenue, the two-lane road that described a long, thin loop like a racing circuit. Asylum Green sat in its centre, a narrow strip of park land that bulged at its southern tip. Linda McCullough’s scientific support vehicle was parked up at the bottom, near the green’s widest point. She emerged from the driver’s door, white-clad and ready for business. A male assistant climbed out of the other side and gave them a nod.
‘What are we looking at?’ McCullough asked.
Lightman glanced at Hanson, and she realised he was letting her do the talking.
‘Thanks for coming so quickly,’ she said, grateful that her voice seemed to sound normal in spite of everything. ‘We’re looking for evidence of some kind of attack on our suspect. I’ve been looking at routes. If she crossed the green, it’s likely to have been at this end. She would have emerged from London Road, and it’s likely she’d cut across the diagonal path to get onto the far side of the Avenue.’
‘OK,’ McCullough said, pulling a set of latex gloves out of her pocket and handing them to Hanson. ‘You two may as well look too. Any scuff marks, dropped items, signs of discolouration of the soil or obvious blood on the grass or paving, call me over.’
So Hanson and Lightman began treading the frozen grass, stepping slowly and carefully. They moved in and out of the sun
light between the trees. It was strange how quickly they got into a soothing rhythm, despite the freezing air. There was nothing to do except look at their feet and make occasional remarks.
When she glanced over at Ben a few times, she realised that he looked less neutral than usual. There was an aura of brooding about him.
‘You aren’t beating yourself up about Niall Reakes’s flights, are you?’ she asked him, quietly. ‘If you are, you’re being an idiot.’
There was a note of surprise in his expression as he looked at her, and then he gave a very small smile. ‘I’ve never denied being an idiot.’
‘You spoke to the conference organisers,’ Hanson said. ‘You spoke to the airline. It’s not your fault they hadn’t bothered checking properly.’
‘But I always work on the assumption that people don’t bother,’ he said, with a shrug. ‘It’s how I make sure of things. And I should have chased them up.’
‘It didn’t make any difference,’ Hanson told him. ‘Niall Reakes is still going to have to explain himself. So cut yourself a bit of slack. Otherwise it makes the rest of us feel worse.’
Ben’s smile turned into a laugh, and she was pleased to note that he seemed a little less morose as they trod onwards. It made her feel incrementally more useful and in control of things, and that was important right now.
After ten minutes, Lightman found an empty cigarette packet in a patch of remaining snow. Linda came over and bagged it up, despite the low chance of it meaning anything. Five minutes later, Linda’s team found a single glove that looked like it might belong to a woman. It was navy fleece, the cheap kind you got in petrol stations, and it was sodden with melted snow. It got bagged up too.
A few minutes later, at a midpoint in the green, Hanson caught a glint of reflected light. Crouching down, she saw an earring nestled into the grass. Its triple rows of hanging diamantés were set into silver squares. It looked, to Hanson, like the sort of thing Louise Reakes might well have worn on her night out, and she tried to remember whether earrings had shown up on the CCTV.
