Buried Secrets

by Lisa Cutts

  ‘Your mum and Travis have both confirmed that,’ said Pierre, putting the photograph back inside his folder.

  Now Aiden was off guard: he’d told them something, it checked out and they believed him. Perhaps he really could prove his innocence. He even felt his solicitor beside him as she sat back in her hard wooden seat, as though the difficult part was over with.

  Then came a terrifying moment as Pierre unleashed something he really thought that he had got away with and hadn’t been expecting.

  ‘You’ve made it quite clear, Aiden, that you and Linda didn’t have a sexual relationship. We’ve been over it a number of times during the last couple of days. Remember?’

  All he could do was nod, parched mouth forcing him to keep silent.

  Pierre resisted the urge to lean forward to maximize the impact. Apart from it being bad form, he didn’t fancy his chances if Aiden decided to lean across the table and punch him. It was unlikely in an interview, but here was a young man who was facing life with a minimum of twenty years inside if charged and found guilty. Assault on police wouldn’t even register on the scale.

  ‘Tell me how your semen ended up in Linda Bowman’s bedroom.’

  Pierre remained neutral and heard from the absence of her pen scratching its way across the page that Sophia had stopped taking notes and was probably watching their prisoner too.

  ‘My semen?’ breathed Aiden.

  He looked from Pierre to Sophia and back again, took a sip from the plastic cup in front of him and was prevented from speaking by his solicitor who said, ‘Again, this is something I wasn’t aware of—’

  ‘Please,’ said Aiden, ‘I know you’re trying to do what you think is best for me, but I want to tell them about this.’

  The heat of the room had steadily increased, despite the air conditioning attempting to cool everyone. A trickle of sweat ran down Aiden’s brow.

  He wiped his face with the back of his hand and said, ‘I’ll come clean. I lied about that. I know it’s a stupid reason only after everything Travis has been through, I didn’t want him knowing that I’d been to bed with his mum. This was over a fortnight or so before she was murdered, I swear. I hadn’t been up to her bedroom before and I certainly didn’t go there again afterwards. It was one occasion only – that was it.’

  Eyes darting from Pierre to Sophia, Aiden continued with his sorry tale. ‘We liked each other and to be honest with you, I thought, Why not? I wasn’t the one was who married with a son. I went over there one night to meet Travis except he was off somewhere with a girl, Linda said. She told me that he wouldn’t be long and invited me in.

  ‘I’d been round there hundreds of times and sometimes I’d be alone with Linda. Travis’s old man was never about whenever I was at theirs so I didn’t think anything of it. This time it was different though.’

  As soon as he said this, he paused and rubbed his palms up and down the legs of his tracksuit bottoms.

  ‘Linda seemed, oh, I don’t know. Upset? Sad? Lonely? I started talking to her, and one thing led to another. She told me that some bloke called George something had been to see her. Travis had been there at the time and this fella, who was also a copper, was shouting the odds about Milton and how he’d been shagging his girlfriend. This police officer really got to Linda and she told me it was the first time that anyone had told her anything about the way he carried on. Up until then, it had always been her suspecting him of being up to no good.

  ‘The worst thing of all for her was still to come: she stood in the kitchen and listened to her own son say that he knew all about it too. He’d even seen his old man in a pub with his arm around another woman. I wouldn’t let my mum put up with my dad treating her like that. It’s disgusting.’

  Aiden did a very bad job of stifling a yawn, an involuntary action that Pierre wanted to mirror.

  ‘The thing I told you earlier,’ said Aiden, ‘about the condoms. That was true. Me and Linda ended up in bed together but I didn’t have any condoms and Milton Bowman had a vasectomy years ago, so she told me. Christ, this is humiliating.’

  He ran his hands over his face until they found his hairline to grab hold of.

  ‘This is why I didn’t want to tell you the truth. I came over the bed.’

  Chapter 67

  ‘Ready then,’ said Pete Clements, the older and more senior DC, to Tom Delayhoyde when they were in the corridor, about to re-enter the custody area.

  ‘Definitely. What’s this latest information you mentioned?’

  ‘There are a couple of interesting things back from the lab. I’ll fill you in as we go.’

  The two detectives made their way back towards the interview rooms, pausing well out of anyone’s earshot whilst Pete got Tom up to speed on the developments coming in from the rest of the team.

  They both knew that what they were about to put to Jenny Bloomfield had the potential to send her to prison for a very long time. Neither of them was prepared to have their conversation overheard either, so even when a chief inspector walked past them, they stopped talking, both said, ‘Hello, ma’am,’ and waited until she went into an office at the furthest end of the corridor before carrying on.

  Each new piece of information Pete passed to Tom made Tom’s jaw drop a little further, until he was sure that he must have looked quite demented standing in the corridor completely open-mouthed at what he was hearing.

  Finally, Pete said, ‘Come on. The only reason we haven’t sat in the office and gone through all of this is because we’re running out of time on both prisoners’ PACE clocks. We’re trying to avoid running out of the extra time we’ve already been granted by the Magistrates. We don’t have long so let’s just go and ask her about it.’

  Some days Tom adored his job. He felt a rush like no other. He knew that he would remember the next hour for the rest of his life.

  He was about to catch a murderer out.

  Back in the interview room, Tom and Pete remained the calm professionals and carried on as they had before. They checked that both their prisoner and her brief were prepared to continue with the interview and that Jenny was suitably composed. Once the DVDs were recording, Tom went over everything he was legally obliged to remind Jenny of, and he even covered how she was feeling and what the custody nurse had given her for her headache during the break.

  It was unlikely that Jenny had any idea of what was coming.

  ‘One of the many enquiries we’ve done, Jenny,’ said Tom, ‘is to take a look at your computer. The computer you confirmed only you use.’

  Jenny said nothing.

  ‘Our Digital Forensic Team had a look at your search history. You looked up the difference between murder and manslaughter on several occasions.’

  Tom had the sheet of paper in front of him with the dates on. He broke eye contact with the ashen-faced Jenny to read out the dates.

  ‘Have you got anything you’d like to say about that?’

  ‘No comment,’ she said.

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Were you planning on going to Linda’s house to murder her?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Did you try to find out the difference between planning a murder and what could be considered manslaughter so that if you got caught and arrested, it would look like a spur of the moment thing?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘The prison sentence for manslaughter is likely to be a lot less than for murder. Was that why you looked it up on your computer eleven times?’

  ‘No comment,’ she croaked, looking down at her lap.

  ‘Let’s move on to CCTV,’ Tom said.

  A look of bewilderment took over Jenny’s face and she snapped her head towards her solicitor, mouth open and the start of a word on her lips. His answer to her was to shake his head and put a finger to his own lips.

  None of this went unnoticed, of course, by the interview team.

  ‘This is a CCTV image, exhibit PR/4,’ began Tom,
enjoying himself. ‘I’ll put it down here so that you can see it clearly. It’s been downloaded from the CCTV system at North Downs Tools in North Downs.’

  If it was possible, Jenny’s face took on an even whiter shade.

  ‘Who is this in the picture?’ said Tom to Jenny.

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘I would say that’s you. It’s a colour still too. That’s unusual for a shop to have a system as sophisticated as this, but North Downs Tools sells some very exclusive and expensive stuff so they have a very good security system, Jenny.

  ‘I’ll go on a little further in a moment to explain more about that but for now, let’s concentrate on the CCTV. I would say that woman in the still is you. She’s slim, in her mid-forties—’

  ‘I’m thirty—’ began Jenny before her solicitor held up his hand to silence her.

  Tom continued, inwardly amused by what would break her refusal to answer. ‘The person on the CCTV I’m saying is you has bobbed, straight blonde hair, wearing a blue denim-style dress, buttons down the front.’

  Tom took a sip of water before he said, ‘When the search team were at your house, they seized a dress identical to this one. Anything you want to say about that?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Here’s another still,’ he said. ‘This one is PR/5 and it shows you handing over cash for a hammer. The hammer here in the still is also identical to the one we found with Linda’s hair and bone on one end, and your and your son’s DNA on the other end.’

  He leaned lower in his seat to attempt to look Jenny straight in the eye except she had shut down now and knew that the game was up.

  ‘The date on this CCTV and from the shop’s records of having sold the hammer was on the Friday before Linda’s murder. You bought this hammer three days prior to going to Linda’s house on the Monday morning, didn’t you?’ ‘No comment.’ This time it was barely a whisper.

  ‘We’ve been through many times how you told me that the hammer was lying on the counter in Linda’s kitchen and you picked it up, and before you knew what you were doing, you swung it at Linda’s head, hitting her a number of times. Is there anything else you’d like to tell me now?’

  ‘No. No comment.’

  ‘Did you take the hammer from your house to Linda’s?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Perhaps there’s a perfectly innocent explanation as to why you would go to see Linda at six or seven o’clock in the morning with a hammer?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘There’s one last still from the tool shop, exhibit PR/6, I want to show you.’

  Once again, all eyes in the room were on the tabletop where Tom put down a picture of Jenny Bloomfield, showing her as she turned to walk out of the shop.

  She held the hammer in one hand as she made towards the door.

  ‘I’ve shown you this, Jenny, because I want you to look at the shoes you’re wearing.’

  Her hand gave an involuntary flutter in the direction of her throat before she remembered where she was and put it back down again.

  Any hope she had had up until now that she might find a way out of this was well and truly dashed.

  ‘I’ve been given a crash course in expensive women’s designer shoes today,’ said Tom. He pointed at the footwear in the still and said, ‘These are Louis Vuitton shoes, and I’m told the cost of them is over £1,300. You’re wearing them in this picture here and the search team also found a pair in your wardrobe. That’s a lot of money for a pair of shoes so I can see why you wouldn’t want to throw them away.’

  Once more, Tom pulled a colour photograph out of his pile of paperwork.

  ‘The final photograph I need to show you is of the shoes we took from your wardrobe. Both shoes are covered with thousands of tiny strass crystals. In between those crystals and covering the surface of them, the forensic scientists at the lab have found traces of Linda’s blood.’

  He paused to let his words sink in.

  ‘It’s no surprise that some of Linda’s blood was on them – you’ve told us yourself that you were there and hit her on the head at least twice with the hammer.’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘What the scientist has told us is that this is airborne blood and this happens when wet blood becomes airborne. It’s usually due to the application of force, such as hitting someone with something. For wet blood to travel from Linda’s head injury onto your shoes, her head would need to have been fairly close to your feet when you were hitting her with the hammer. Did you hit her on the head with the hammer whilst she was lying on the ground?’

  This time, the ‘No comment’ was accompanied by rigorous shaking of her head.

  ‘As well as your shoes,’ said Tom, ‘blood-pattern analysis has been carried out in the kitchen where Linda was murdered. From the blood and the post-mortem, Linda Bowman was hit four times on the skull, breaking her head open. The way the blood splattered shows us two of those blows were more than likely delivered to her head as she was on the floor. Did you hit her on the head as she lay dying on the floor?’

  ‘No comment.’ But this time, the tears came and they wouldn’t stop.

  Anticipating that the interview was coming to an end, his prisoner about to be covered in her own mucus, Tom gave her his final line of questioning.

  ‘You told me several times in earlier interviews that after you hit her, you left the house straight away in a total panic at what you’d done. Please explain how Linda’s blood came to be on the floor in the garage and on the wall where Milton Bowman kept his work tools?’

  This time, she only shook her head and hid her face in her hands.

  ‘Did you kill her and then go into the garage to take a hammer to make it look like someone attacked her with something already in the house?’

  Jenny’s solicitor passed her a tissue. She blew her nose and muttered, ‘No comment.’

  ‘It looks as though you took the hammer there, murdered Linda and then took a similarly sized and shaped hammer to cover what you’ve done. Is that correct?’

  For the first time in several minutes, Jenny looked up to meet Tom’s gaze. He could see how broken she was.

  Chapter 68

  Evening of Friday 9 June

  As Hazel pulled up outside Harry’s house, she tried her best to push all thoughts of Linda, Milton and Travis Bowman from her mind. It was easier said than done, and she knew that within five minutes of walking through Harry’s front door, he would be asking her about the investigation.

  The front door opened before she was halfway along the driveway.

  ‘Hi, beautiful,’ he called as she got within a couple of feet from him.

  ‘Hello, Harry.’

  Then came an awkward moment when they came face to face, both unsure if a kiss was right for their first official date in private, and if so, what kind of kiss. So far, not counting Hazel’s first and only visit to his home where she took a long statement involving his discovery of a dead body, they had shared one less than average pub meal. That had felt so much easier and more casual because of the other customers in the bar. It had been totally natural to leave their greeting of one another as verbal, and the kiss goodnight on the cheek had been instigated by Harry.

  Now, she felt as though she was walking into a lair, unsure of what was expected of her. Bringing up the subject of Linda’s Witness Protection wasn’t going to be easy either.

  Harry leaned forward and placed his hand on one side of her face, brushing the other side with his lips. He stood back up and said, ‘You’d better get inside. I think it’s about to piss down.’

  Seated at the kitchen table, Hazel watched Harry as he stirred saucepans on the stove, chopped ingredients and busied himself getting their meal ready.

  ‘What do you fancy to drink?’ he asked.

  ‘Just a soft drink of some sort,’ she said. ‘I’ve probably got a long weekend at work ahead.’

  ‘Do you mind helping yourself?’ he said, opening the oven. ‘I don’
t want to leave this lamb and let it overcook. It’ll go as dry as old bollocks if I don’t keep watch. Grab me a beer, please.’

  Walking over to the fridge, and with Harry’s back turned, she couldn’t resist running an eye over the kitchen. Last time she had been here, there’d been a definite lack of attention. She couldn’t fail to notice that the cobwebs on the clock had gone and Harry had made an effort to clear up. The place hadn’t been dirty, more neglected with a sad air about it.

  Now, it seemed to be brighter and more lived-in without looking abused.

  She handed him his beer and took a can of lemonade for herself. He pointed towards a cupboard, which, she assumed, held the glasses.

  ‘Have you always done the cooking?’ she asked.

  ‘Me and the wife shared it. I like cooking but by the time I got home, it would have been beans on toast or takeaway most days. I’m not really surprised she fucked off.’

  ‘Do you miss her?’

  Harry broke off mid-stir from the pot of home-made soup simmering away.

  ‘I won’t be offended if you say yes,’ said Hazel.

  ‘I miss having company, but that’s not really the same. The kids were our focus and I suppose they kept us together. They’re that bit older now, so I suppose it wouldn’t have been too many years before they buggered off and did their own thing anyway. I guess it was a matter of time before it would have been me and her. Then I suppose the situation would have got worse.’

  Hazel sat back down at the table and sipped her cloudy lemonade as Harry dashed from oven to stove to chopping board.

  ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

  A look of puzzlement crossed Harry’s face as he paused with the oven gloves in his hand.

  ‘I mean with dinner, not your marriage,’ she said.

  ‘Thank fuck for that,’ said Harry picking up a spoon. ‘I don’t want you to persuade my wife to come back but I do want you to try this soup and let me know if it needs any more salt.’

  She got up and went over to where he was standing, spoon of pea-and-mint soup in one hand, the other underneath to catch any drops.

  ‘Careful,’ he said, standing inches away from her, ‘it’s hot.’