by Cari Hunter
“Oh, Jesus.” Meg raised her hands to Sanne’s breasts, teasing the nipples into peaks as Sanne entered her.
“That’s very distracting,” Sanne murmured, slowing the movement of her fingers until Meg whimpered in protest and dropped her hands back to the bed. Wasting no time, Sanne slid back into her. “Like this?” she asked, smiling at Meg’s vigorous nod. In the lamplight, Meg’s face was damp with sweat, her eyes heavy-lidded as she guided Sanne’s pace. When they kissed, Sanne tasted salt and mint toothpaste, before moving her mouth to join her hand, and tasting only Meg.
“Bloody hellfire!” Meg’s head hit the pillow with a thud, and her toes curled into the sheets.
Her yelp was enough to make Sanne pause and look up. “Such a pushover,” she said, feeling Meg’s legs shake as she laughed.
“Please stop talking.” Meg’s tone held more than a hint of desperation.
Sanne grinned and for once in her life obeyed her doctor’s orders.
*
With timing honed by years of shift work, Sanne woke five minutes before her alarm and cancelled it to stop it from disturbing Meg. Sensing the movement, Meg shuffled closer, but the furrow creasing her brow disappeared as her sleep deepened again. Sanne tucked the sheets around her and crept reluctantly from the bed.
She ran the shower hot, letting the water pound her muscles while she tried to work out which were stiff from sprinting after Ned and which were aching because of Meg. Right on cue, the bathroom door opened.
“Oh God, you broke me,” Meg said, limping to the toilet.
Sanne shut off the water before the toilet flush could turn it into a trickle. “If you’d like to make a complaint, I can give you an address.” She grabbed her towel and began to rub her hair. “It’s number five, You-Bloody-Started-It Road.”
Meg cackled and came over to plant a wet kiss on Sanne’s lips. Then, as if regretting her haste, she kissed her far more thoroughly.
“No. No. I’ll be late…”
Sanne’s resistance got lost somewhere in the midst of the tongue circling her breast and the fingers slipping between her legs. Unable to do much but stay on her feet, she allowed Meg to steer her back into the shower. The water was already warm when Meg turned it on again. Sanne shuddered with pleasure as it cascaded onto her and Meg trailed kisses down her torso.
“I’ll be in so much trouble,” she whispered, raising her head into the spray and trying not to hyperventilate. She felt hands spread her legs wider, felt a heat between them that wasn’t from the water, and gave up thinking about anything but what Meg was doing to her. Within minutes, she came hard and fast, her hands sliding down the glass as she searched for something to grip on to.
Meg caught her, keeping her steady until the tremors stopped and then cradling her to the floor. She reached for a discarded flannel to dry Sanne’s face.
“I think I might need to learn self-restraint,” she said.
“Where would the fun in that be?” Sanne curled against her. She didn’t want to move, didn’t want to open the shower door and let the day back in. Instead, she entwined Meg’s fingers with her own and wondered how long it would be before the water ran cold.
*
With most of the detectives following leads or interviewing, the EDSOP office was quiet for once. The rain pattering on the window and the rhythm of Nelson’s four-forward, two-back typing were the only sounds breaking the peace.
Chewing the last bite of her late lunch, Sanne straightened her spine to ease out a kink and sent another completed report to the printer. Although she would have preferred to observe Ned Moseley’s interview, she had spent most of the day in Halshaw, finishing the enquiries there, and had resigned herself to watching the recording in her own time. At the desk opposite, Nelson dry-swallowed two painkillers and squinted as if the light hurt his eyes.
“You should go home,” she said. “No one expected you to be in today.”
“Funny. That’s what Abeni told me.”
“Talks a lot of sense, your missus.” She clicked open a new e-mail headed Rope Analysis, her attention already diverted by the details. The rope used to bind Josie had been a 10mm multi-purpose utility type, widely available in DIY, auto, and boating stores. It could even be bought through Amazon. As there were several sailing clubs and a multitude of farms in the area, the officers attempting to trace local purchasers weren’t making much headway.
A sudden intrusion of animated voices in the corridor made Sanne raise her head. She exchanged an intrigued look with Nelson, recognising one of the voices as Eleanor’s but unable to distinguish the words.
“I guess the interview’s over,” she said. She could hear Carlyle now. As a Tier Three interviewer, he had been selected to question Ned alongside Eleanor.
“Sounds like someone’s happy,” Nelson said.
The door slammed back against the wall as Carlyle bounded into the office. Evidently pleased with himself, he collected his briefcase from his desk and marched out again with it swinging by his side. From just inside the doorway, Eleanor watched him leave.
Sanne waited for his footsteps to fade. “How did it go, boss?”
Eleanor looked tired, but there was something of the usual spark in her eyes. Instead of answering directly, she set a memory stick on Sanne’s desk. “I’d like your opinion, without prejudice. We’re seeking an extension from the CPS.”
With that, she left them alone again. Her office door shut, and a phone that had started to ring fell silent. Sanne picked up her mug and held out her hand for Nelson’s.
“Think we’re going to need a brew with this,” she said.
*
Ned Moseley didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. Within the first five minutes of the recording—as Carlyle introduced himself and Eleanor, and explained the structure of the interview—he had sat on his hands, shoved them beneath his armpits, and then hidden them in the sleeves of his police-issued sweatshirt. Fifteen minutes later, he was crunching on his fingernails and pulling at the loose skin around his cuticles. His lawyer, a woman with a cheap dye job who was probably nudging retirement, looked as if she might clip him around his ear if he continued to fidget.
“I don’t know,” he kept mumbling. “I don’t know…”
Leaning closer to the screen, Sanne adjusted the volume. The notepad in front of her was still blank. Carlyle, apparently keen to make Ned squirm, had barely started the questioning.
“You don’t know?” he repeated. “You don’t know why you assaulted a detective and fled from your house?”
Failing to grasp Carlyle’s scepticism, Ned shook his head earnestly, his thumbnail tapping on his teeth.
“Did your actions have anything to do with this?”
Ned’s chewing became hesitant as he stared at the evidence bag Carlyle slid across to him.
Hunched beside Sanne, Nelson pointed at the screen. “Is that a joint?”
Sanne tipped her head at an angle. It didn’t help, so she hit pause and zoomed in on the bag. “Yep,” she said. “Personally, if I were watching Emmerdale I’d want to be stoned, too.”
“Good point.”
When she restarted the video, Ned was sitting on his hands again, his face pale and shiny with sweat.
“I was smoking it in my own home. That’s not a crime.”
“Tell me about your job at Rowan Cottage.” Carlyle’s change of subject was deliberate, ignoring the joint and Ned’s loose grasp of the law, and it worked. Wrong-footed, Ned stuttered, a muscle in his jaw twitching.
“I’m like a caretaker,” he said at length. “I have the keys, and I go and fix stuff when Mrs. Martindale tells me to.”
“When was the last time you went there?”
Sanne watched Ned’s eyes flick to the camera and back. He must have known that they would have spoken to Mrs. Martindale, and the gravity of his situation seemed to be dawning upon him. He took a gulp of water, almost knocking over the glass when he put it down.
“About
ten, maybe twelve days ago. One of them girls said the sink was leak—” Realising what he had just revealed, he snapped his mouth shut. His chest heaved as he tried to regulate his breathing.
“Did you meet them, Ned? Were Josie and Rachel there when you went to the cottage?” It was Eleanor who spoke, keeping her voice calm and controlled, in direct contrast to the young man across the table from her. As she said each name, she placed the women’s photographs side by side on the table.
Ned nodded miserably. “They made me a brew.”
“Did you speak to them?”
He frowned, toying with the edge of Josie’s photo. “Not much. They were going out. Asked me if I knew any good pubs, so I told them the Crown and Anchor did the best sausage and chips. They were nice. They said I could help myself to biscuits.”
Sanne swung her chair back, balancing it on two legs as she considered Ned’s answer. He had relaxed incrementally as he spoke, warming to his theme and showing no indicators of stress or subterfuge. There was an innocence to his short sentences and simple diction that seemed genuine, as did the tears that filled his eyes when Carlyle threw down two further pictures of Josie.
“Those are nasty,” he whispered, trying to cover them with his hands, before turning them facedown. One was from the moors, the other from the ITU.
“Why didn’t you come forward when Josie was found?” Carlyle phrased the question like an accusation. Ned looked to Eleanor and his lawyer, as if beseeching them to intervene, but Carlyle wasn’t finished. “You’d met her, spoken to her, yet you didn’t tell a soul.”
“I didn’t know! I didn’t know it was her! How could I, when she was all messed up like that?” Trying to emphasise his point, he shoved the photos back toward Carlyle, who took them and studied them calmly.
“What made you decide to help with the search?” Carlyle asked. Ned drew in a breath to answer, but Carlyle didn’t wait for his response. “Is that how you get yourself off, Ned? Leading everyone on a run-around? Watching the police chase their tails, and knowing that you’d moved Rachel and left nothing for us to find?”
Ned shook his head repeatedly, his expression full of horror. For a moment, Sanne thought he might be sick, but he swiped tears from his face and managed to reply.
“I wanted to help find out who done that to that girl. I watch a lot of telly, so I thought I’d be good at finding clues, and I helped find that rope. You ask Detective Sanney.” He ended on an indignant note, as if annoyed that his contribution was being overlooked.
The self-satisfied smirk that spread across Carlyle’s face made Sanne’s skin crawl. “Telly isn’t all you like watching, is it?”
Ned stiffened, every inch of him on guard.
Sanne glanced at Nelson, who shrugged, apparently as confused as she was.
On the recording, Carlyle had opened a plastic folder and carefully laid out a series of magazines, to which he added a small pile of silver discs and the sleeves from four DVDs. Ned closed his eyes, and Sanne felt like doing the same. Though rendered in grainy quality on the computer screen, it was still possible to distinguish the violent nature of the pornography, and the titles of the DVDs left little to the imagination.
“We know these are yours, Ned,” Carlyle said quietly. “We found them in your house.”
Ned swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as his throat worked. He seemed on the verge of attempting a denial but said nothing.
Sanne felt as blindsided as he looked. She had been sucked in by his blank face and his childlike answers, almost to the point of feeling sorry for him. Now she found herself wondering exactly what he was capable of and how accomplished an actor he might be. She blinked, refocusing her eyes, when Carlyle began to speak again.
“Tell us what you’ve done with Rachel.” His tone was soft and persuasive. “Things will work out much better for you if you tell us where she is.”
Heedless of the snot streaming from his nose, Ned let out a single sob and turned his head away, refusing to acknowledge the display on the table. When his lawyer placed a hand on his arm, he yelped as if scalded.
“I’d like to request a break,” she said, and seconds later, the recording stopped.
Sanne minimised the video and stared at her desktop wallpaper for a few seconds, drawing comfort from the image of the Peak District covered in deep snow.
“Didn’t see that coming,” Nelson said with considerable understatement.
“Me neither.” Sanne tapped her mouse, making the cursor jump. There was something about Ned’s reaction to the pornography that felt off, though she couldn’t put her finger on it. “No wonder Carlyle looked so bloody smug.”
“I suppose he has to get something right every now and again, and he did a good job there.”
“Yeah, he did,” she said. As Nelson reached for his jacket, she checked the clock, surprised to find it so late in the evening. “You heading off?”
He nodded. “I’ll write up my impressions at home and e-mail them in. You?”
One click of her mouse reopened the video. She hovered the cursor over play. “I think I’ll stick around for a while,” she said.
*
With each hour that passed, Sanne’s handwriting deteriorated. Neat, precisely formed letters became a scrawl, and her hand was cramping every few minutes. She had rewatched Ned’s interview in its entirety and then flicked through it several times more, trying to debunk or add weight to her initial reactions. From a circumstantial viewpoint, things didn’t look good for him. By his own admission, he had been in contact with both women. He had volunteered to aid in the search and bragged about his forensic know-how. According to the Cleggs, he had skipped two days of work during the period the women were missing, and his whereabouts at that time could not be accounted for. The cannabis proved he had access to illegal substances, and the pornography found at his address implied a fascination with violent and non-consensual sex. Sanne had tagged “resisting a reasonable request for an interview” and “putting a detective in the hospital” onto the end of her list, but those seemed almost incidental in comparison.
Her eyes felt gritty, and the ache in her back had spread to her bottom and thighs. Sighing, she shifted the marker to thirty-two minutes and fifty-seven seconds, and restarted the recording. By now, she knew exactly how the sequence of events played out: Ned averted his eyes and flinched away from the table, stress making a florid rash creep up his throat. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse and tremulous. “Those are nasty.”
Jumping ahead to thirty-eight minutes and twelve seconds, she watched him react to the pornography in exactly the same manner. His facial expression, the rash, and the way his body edged backward mirrored his response to the graphic images of Josie. In both instances, his revulsion seemed instinctive, and the unease Sanne had felt upon her first viewing was developing into full-blown doubt.
She slapped a hand on the mouse, minimising the video, as she saw Eleanor approaching her desk.
“You stay any later, and you may as well sleep here,” Eleanor said.
Sanne flipped her pad to a clean page before Eleanor was close enough to read it. “I was just shutting stuff down. I’ll finish it tomorrow.” She dropped the pad into her bag, hoping that that might discourage Eleanor from asking questions. She didn’t want to say what she thought. She didn’t want to be the one who undermined what looked to be a significant development in the case, particularly when she wasn’t sure she was right.
“The CPS are happy. They’ve granted us a twenty-four-hour extension.” Eleanor gestured at the computer screen. “How many times have you watched it?”
Sanne slowly drew the zip on her bag shut. “A few,” she said, her heart sinking.
Eleanor sat down heavily in Nelson’s chair, eliminating the height difference between them. “Doesn’t strike you as a criminal mastermind, does he?”
“Not really.” The zip reaching its end seemed like a sign. It left Sanne with nothing to do but bite the bullet. “Cir
cumstantially, everything looks great, but when you study him properly, his body language, his expressions and reactions, they just seem wrong. And that rope on the moor, he didn’t find that. He found a dead sheep that happened to be nearby, and he was so excited by it.”
“He’s all we’ve got at the moment, Sanne.” Eleanor made it sound like a warning. “And I don’t think we know enough yet to dismiss the evidence out of hand. We’ve only scratched the surface in terms of interviewing him. The brass are pleased, the press are coming onside, and I need my team to back me.”
Sanne nodded and hated herself for it, but Eleanor looked equally uncomfortable pulling rank. Deciding that she couldn’t make matters worse, Sanne broached an issue that had been troubling her since Ned’s arrest.
“If he really has done this, and we keep him in custody for forty-eight hours straight, what will happen to Rachel, assuming she’s still alive?”
The question gave Eleanor pause. She opened her mouth to reply and then shut it again to consider. “He’ll tell us where she is,” she said finally, but it must have sounded inadequate even to her own ears, because she rubbed at the bridge of her nose. “You should go home. We’ve got a warrant to search the land around where he goes fishing, so I’ll need you in early tomorrow.”
As soon as the office door closed, Sanne covered her face with her hands. “Bollocking fuck,” she whispered.
*
There was no light in the study window and no other cars parked outside the cottage. Frowning at the uneven feel of the steering as she pulled into the driveway, Sanne made a mental note to check her tyres in daylight. The wind had strengthened, lashing loose leaves and twigs across the gravel, and she had to kick her car door to open it fully. When she stepped inside the cottage, the kitchen was cold, the creak of the roof beneath the force of the storm giving it an eerie air. She fumbled for the light, dispelling the creepiness with the flick of a switch. As her vision adjusted, she saw the bottle of calamine lotion still sitting on the table and two sets of breakfast plates on the draining board. Meg must have washed up before leaving.
