by Robert Innes
“Good luck,” Kath said. “You’re going to have a great time.”
“Thanks,” Nicola said. “Fingers crossed.”
She climbed out of the car and closed the door, the cold night air grasping her immediately. As she drove away, Kath wound down her window and her words echoed around the empty street. “Don’t get too drunk!”
Nicola watched the car disappear around a corner and turned to Gary’s house. It was small, but for the one person it homed, perfectly nice looking. Lights were on in the downstairs room and as she began walking towards the house, Nicola imagined Gary cooking in his kitchen. As she knocked on the door, she hoped that the wine she had brought went with whatever he had cooked.
She stood on the doorstep for about a minute, hearing no noise from inside the house. She frowned and peered through the living room window. A couple of candles were lit on the table in the centre of the room, but there was no sign of Gary. She returned to the door and pushed open the letterbox, peering inside. She could see nobody, but she quickly realised that the hallway had a thin layer of black smoke floating around.
Nicola let the letterbox closed and walked round the house to the next window and peered in. It was the kitchen, and the smoke was even heavier in here, making it difficult to see what was going on. But then Nicola looked harder and what she did see made her blood run cold.
A pair of legs were floating in the middle of the room and as she looked through the black smog, she realised they were attached to Gary, who was hanging in the centre of the room from a rope that was round his neck.
“Gary!” Nicola screamed. She dropped the bottle of wine, which landed on the ground with a loud smash. Barely registering the glass crunching beneath her feet, she ran around the house and to the back door. It was partly ajar, the wooden frame splintering around the lock as if someone had already kicked their way in. She ran into the house and followed the smoke into the kitchen.
The smoke was coming from the food in the oven which had obviously been left to burn. She switched off the oven dials before a fire had the chance to break out and grabbed a knife out of a wooden holder on the side. With her heart hammering in her chest, she stood on a chair that was lying discarded in the middle of the room and jumped up on it, cutting frantically through the rope. Before she had finished hacking at it all the way, Gary fell to the ground in a crumpled heap. As Nicola quickly pulled her phone out of her pocket, she desperately tried to undo the rope that was wrapped tightly around his neck.
“Ambulance!” she cried into her phone as she lifted Gary’s head and pulled the rope free. The acrid smoke in the kitchen was making her cough as she frantically told the operator her location and the situation. All she could do now was pray that she was not too late.
10
Nicola watched Gary through the window of his room at the hospital, listening to the heart monitor beeping as he lay there. She had been told by a senior doctor that he was alive, but in a critical condition, his brain having been starved of oxygen. The past hour had gone by in a complete blur. Once the paramedics had arrived, they had quickly bundled Gary into the back of the ambulance and disappeared down the street, their sirens wailing furiously into the night. At the same time, Nicola had been interviewed by police. The two officers had demanded to know why she was there alone with him, what their relationship had been, and what her movements had been for the past hour before arriving there, as well as asking her whether she thought that Gary had shown any indications that he had been intending on hanging himself. She was unsure if the officers interrogating her had been colleagues of Gary, as neither had given any signs either way.
She felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to see Kath smiling sympathetically at her. “Hey,” she said. “How are you doing?”
Nicola shook her head as Kath pulled her in for a tight hug. “Numb. It doesn’t feel real.” They both watched Gary’s lifeless body through the window. “Look at him. I’ve only known him a couple of weeks, but he seemed so full of life. What if I hadn’t found him?”
“Well, you did,” Kath said firmly. “And you saved his life. He is going to be fine, I just know he is.”
Nicola sighed. She did not even have the energy to cry, much as she wanted to. She felt far too emotionally drained. “What are you doing here, anyway? What about the restaurant?”
“I’m not that money obsessed, you know,” Kath said, chuckling. “I closed up. The Bay can do without us for one night.”
“We’re even prepared to take a night’s pay for you,” said a familiar voice behind them. “How’s that for staff loyalty?”
Nicola turned to see Alex strolling towards them. It was the first time Nicola had ever seen him out of his chef’s whites. He was wearing a pair of skinny black jeans, a checked black and red shirt over a black t-shirt and his hair was straighter than she had ever seen it, barely covering his eyes. He hugged her tightly and planted a kiss on the top of her head. He was certainly not the man she thought would kiss her that night, but it still comforted her. “Thank you,” she said gratefully. “What would I do without you? I take it Dominic took advantage of the night off to go hunting?”
“Oh, he’s here,” Kath said, a strain of exasperation in her voice. “Why go out hunting when there’s men in uniform to be accosted here?”
Sure enough, Dominic’s voice began to echo from down the corridor. A young-looking doctor in a green uniform rounded the corner with him in hot pursuit.
“I’m sorry,” said the doctor. “I really must get on.”
“Sure, I understand,” Dominic said, with a slight glance up and down of his target. “Do you finish late or…?”
“I really couldn’t say,” the doctor replied. He walked off quickly, gripping the clip board he was carrying tightly like a shield.
Dominic sighed as he strolled over to them. “He was gorgeous. I mean his bum in that uniform. You’d think they’d limit his shifts around people with dodgy heart problems.” He glanced at Alex and raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you think he was good looking, Alex?”
“I wasn’t looking,” Alex replied. “Anyway, do you really think now is the time for you to be flaunting yourself?”
“Nicki,” Dominic exclaimed, his arms outstretched, an expression on his face that he clearly assumed was emphatic. “Are you okay? What the hell happened?”
Nicola accepted his hug. “I found him hanging from the ceiling of his kitchen.”
Dominic’s eyes widened. “Hanging? What, you mean with a rope or something?”
“Yeah.”
There was a pause as Dominic glanced at Gary through the window. “Bit extreme. It was only your second date.”
“Shut up,” Kath said, belting him round the head. “Come on, you can come with me. Nicola needs coffee and so do I. You need supervision. Move.”
She grabbed Dominic by the collar and frogmarched him down the corridor, leaving Alex and Nicola alone, the sound of Gary’s heart monitor beeping around them.
“I did some asking around,” Alex said as they watched Gary. “Turns out that Geraldine McGuire was on jury duty just a couple of weeks ago. Take a wild guess which case.”
Nicola sighed and rested her head on the window to Gary’s room. “This was them, wasn’t it? Whoever killed Dennis Tate and Dorothy Fountain and Geraldine?”
“Certainly looks that way,” Alex said. “Gary was on the jury. Someone is going after everyone who was involved in sending Rebecca down.” He turned to her, looking nervous but serious. “I’m not trying to scare you, but you could be in real danger here.”
“I know,” Nicola replied quietly.
“So, you’ll just let the police deal with this, yeah?”
Nicola stared at Gary through the window in silence for a few moments. Finally, she looked at Alex with resilience. “When I walked into that funeral parlour and embarrassed myself, I was with you, one hundred percent. I’m just a barmaid from some seaside down in Devon. How can I go about trying to solve a murder?” She
glanced back at Gary again. “But now, I dunno. There’s something going on here, Alex. Something twisted. And I might be next. If this is all to do with Rebecca Winters, then I’m going to find out the truth.”
Alex sighed. “There’s not a lot I’m going to be able to say to change your mind is there?”
“Not really,” she replied. “So, I just have one question for you. Is it just going to be Gold, or Gold and Silver?”
***
A few days later, Alex and Nicola were driving towards the prison where Rebecca Winters was being held. The visiting order had arrived the day before and Nicola had spent several hours writing down several questions that she wanted to ask, most of which had been altered by Alex, who Nicola decided was slightly better at this sort of thing than her.
Unlike the last time they had shared a vehicle together, and despite Alex’s protestations, they were driving in Nicola’s car, with her behind the wheel. If she was not feeling so determined, Nicola would have been irate at the number of times Alex gripped the side of his seat in fear and took in breath sharply every time she rounded a bend.
“You do realise if you keep driving like this, then whoever is doing this will have been saved a job?” he said to her as she enthusiastically overtook a tractor with barely a second’s glance to the road ahead.
“Oh, relax,” Nicola told him. “I’ve been driving for years and I’ve never had so much as a parking ticket.”
Alex relaxed his tensed up body slightly as they came to a straight bit of road and Nicola reduced speed slightly. “How’s Gary doing?”
“Still no change,” she replied. She had been at the hospital the previous night. The doctor had told her that while he was certainly not showing any signs of worsening, he was still in a critical condition, and that they would hopefully know more in the next few days.
“Fingers crossed,” Alex said. “They can work wonders these days. Don’t forget that.”
Nicola gave him a small smile but said nothing.
When they arrived at the prison, Alex stared at it through the windscreen. “Bloody hell,” he exclaimed. “It’s huge. Just think how many freaks and psychos are in there. Are you sure we want to go in there?”
“Yes,” Nicola said firmly, pulling the visiting passes out of her bag. “We’ve got to talk to Rebecca.”
“You do realise that she’s going to tell us she didn’t do it whether she did or not?” Alex sat back in his seat, staring at the foreboding building. “People who kill, they’re not like us. They don’t have the same brains as us. They’d lie and cheat to get themselves out of anything, just so they can go out and do it again.”
“They’re not all like that,” Nicola told him, shaking her head at his dramatics. She was starting to suspect more by the day that she was going to lose her bet to Dominic. “You heard the judge. Even if she did do it, it was crime of passion. Heat of the moment, where she just lost herself. Surely she can’t be that good a liar.”
“She could be good enough to convince a chef and a barmaid,” Alex reasoned as Nicola handed him his visiting pass. “We’re not Mulder and Scully.”
“We’ve just got to have faith,” Nicola reiterated, for what felt like the hundredth time that morning, as she climbed out the car. “We could leave here with a set of brand new information.”
“Which we’d immediately take to the police, yes?”
“Yes,” Nicola moaned, rolling her eyes. “Though, to be honest, I don’t know how much they’d believe. The open and shut case they thought Rebecca Winters was, and with all the media pressure, how do we know they’d even take what we said on board?”
“Oh, I see,” Alex replied sardonically as they made their way across the carpark, towards the prison. “So, you’d rather go and find the killer place him or her under citizen’s arrest, would you? Yes, I’m sure that’ll work. ‘Hello, Mr Killer, I’m arresting you for being naughty and killing lots of people. Now please remove that rope from round my neck and behave yourself till the police get here, but make sure you tell them the truth, because they might not believe me.”
Standing in front of the prison, the magnitude of where they were starting to take hold, Nicola was too nervous to argue.
11
The room where they were taken was large, intimidating and very draughty. It seemed to be made entirely from grey concrete blocks, although some attempt had been made to make the place look somewhat inviting years ago with an old and tattered red carpet on the floor, worn away under the feet of heavy footed visitors and police officers.
They were sat down at one table waiting for Rebecca to arrive. The way the hard, wooden tables had been arranged reminded Nicola of the school hall she used to take her exams in.
“Are you sure we didn’t come in with the prisoners?” Alex said out of the corner of his mouth, glancing worriedly at a rough looking man with a skull tattoo emblazoned on his bald stubbly head, who was sitting a few tables down.
Nicola kicked him under the table as the doors opened on the other end of the room and the guards escorted the prisoners into the room.
For a few minutes, Nicola could not see Rebecca anywhere and wondered if she had changed her mind, but eventually she saw her, walking slowly in behind two huge women, glancing fearfully at them as she passed.
“Oh my God,” Nicola murmured. “This place has not been kind to her.”
The woman Nicola had seen standing defiantly at her trial, with shiny brown hair trailing down her back had long gone, instead replaced by someone who vaguely looked like Rebecca, but she seemed a shell of her former self. She looked like she had lost weight, her hair was frizzy and sticking up and she had large bags underneath her eyes.
“Bloody hell,” Alex whispered as Rebecca waved her over. “She’s only been in here a couple of weeks.”
Rebecca sat down opposite them, her hands clutched together.
“Hi, Rebecca,” Nicola said gently. “I’m Nicola Golding, this is my associate, Alex Silverstone. We were hoping to talk to you about Simon? We’re investigating the possibility that you were sent down for a crime you didn’t commit.”
Rebecca did not seem to have taken in her words properly, but she nodded vaguely, her eyes wide. Nicola briefly wondered if she was on medication, but pressed on.
“We don’t feel that you were given a fair trial. Are they things that were missed out? Any details you could give us that might help us build a case?”
Rebecca suddenly leant forwards and grabbed Nicola’s hands, holding them tightly, a slightly deranged look about her. “You’ve got to get me out of here. I remember you from the trial. I saw it in your eyes. You don’t think I did this, do you? I saw it in you. The sympathy you had for me. You were the only one on that jury giving me any consideration.”
“No, Rebecca,” Nicola said firmly. “I don’t think you did this. Your defence made absolutely no sense. It never has. Why wouldn’t you give yourself a better alibi?”
“They wouldn’t listen,” Rebecca whispered, glancing around at the prison guards. “None of them. The police, the courts, Simon’s family, none of them. Only my Mum and my children seemed to believe me.”
“We met them,” Nicola replied. “They told us that they thought Bernice Stockport might have been involved.”
Rebecca let out a humourless laugh. “That woman. She wasn’t fit to breath the same air as Simon. I loved him. I’ve never loved anybody the way I did Simon. He made me feel safe at a time when I thought the whole world was against me.” She let go of Nicola’s hands and sank back in her seat, looking utterly defeated. “Now he’s not here and I feel exactly the same. Except this time, the whole world really is against me. They think I murdered my husband. I could never do that. I don’t have it in me to kill anyone, but especially not Simon. If I was going to kill anyone, it would have been that bitch for getting her claws into him.”
“But do you think that Bernice could have killed him?” Alex asked.
Rebecca sighed and shook her he
ad. “Much as I’d like to make her go through what I’m going through now, no. Simon mentioned Bernice’s father when we were rowing. In fact, she sent a text message from the hospital saying that there was very little the doctors could do for him. The hospital he was at wasn’t the local one. It was in Exeter, over forty miles away. Simon had seen her onto the train that morning.”
“So, there’s no way she could have been anywhere near Simon?” Nicola sighed. She was not surprised, she had already discounted Bernice as a suspect, but it still annoyed her to have it confirmed.
“Simon had lots of business associates,” Rebecca continued. “He wasn’t exactly popular at work.”
“What did he do?”
“He was a senior contractor for a big building firm. It was basically his job to get the work for independent builders.”
“Sort of like an agent for construction?”
“Basically. But he was in charge of his own percentage of the cuts. It was easy for him to arrange with the companies that were hiring these people how much they were willing to pay, but he wasn’t always completely honest with those lower down the pecking order.”
“You’re kidding,” Nicola said, raising her eyebrows. “He’d fiddle with the books?”
“Nothing illegal,” Rebecca assured her. “Not as far as I knew anyway. But, maybe there was some builder bloke he’d annoyed?”
Nicola glanced at Alex, who looked sceptical.
“You said you’d seen my family,” Rebecca said, sitting up straight. “How are they?”
“They miss you,” Nicola told her. “Your mum is looking after the kids though.”
“Did you speak to them? Estelle and Ross?”
“Yeah, we did. They send their love.”
“I could tell Estelle was struggling so much at the trial,” Rebecca said sadly. “That horrible barrister. I mean, how on Earth could her dress sense have any baring as to whether I killed her father or not? The whole thing’s ridiculous. She’s so sensitive. I just hope she’s okay. She doesn’t really react well to change. All the media attention, you know, one of the papers had a picture of her on her way into town once! She was getting on a bus! She doesn’t deserve any of this.”
