Never Coming Home

by Evonne Wareham

  ‘Or assumed it. Guilt has a habit of jumping to conclusions.’ Devlin avoided her glance. ‘Yes?’ He flipped the buzzing mobile phone open, frowning. Kaz tensed. ‘Rossi and Munroe are in position.’ Devlin dropped the phone back in his pocket. ‘I guess we can go down and pay your ex-husband a visit.’

  There was nothing threatening about the house. It was just a building shuttered against the sun. No sign of Jeff. No sign of anyone. Kaz’s chest was tight. What did she expect? That he’d come flying out, yelling at her to leave? Heart thumping, she surveyed the courtyard and the building.

  The silence suddenly seemed odd, oppressive. She tried to imagine Jamie running around, splashing in the pool. Had her daughter been here? Was she still? Were she and Jeff hiding, somewhere in the house? Had he told her they were playing a game?

  Behind her Devlin was turning the car, so that it was facing the road, but she hadn’t been able to wait. Unexpectedly unwilling to approach the silent building alone, she craned to peer into the red Lotus. Would there be something – a child’s book or toy? There was nothing but an empty mineral water bottle and a man’s linen jacket, tossed over the seat. She prowled around the car to look on the opposite side, checking the barn through the open doors.

  And saw. And screamed.

  Devlin came up behind her at a run. He had her around the waist in a second, pulling her back. She hit out blindly, caught him on the chin and heard him curse. ‘Let me go!’ She squirmed to face him. ‘For God’s sake, we have to get him down. Get help –’

  ‘Kaz.’ Devlin shoved her head hard against his chest, holding her eyes away from the thing that was hanging inside the barn. ‘It’s too late for that. He’s dead.’

  ‘How can you know?’ She was shaking, teeth rattling against each other. ‘He might –’ She looked up, saw the bleakness in Devlin’s face and abruptly stopped struggling. ‘How can you know?’

  ‘Think about it. We’ve been here watching for at least half-an-hour. No one’s been in or out of there.’ He jerked his head. ‘He was dead before we got here, baby. We go in there and all we’re doing is contaminating a crime scene.’

  ‘Oh, God.’ Kaz put her hands to her mouth. ‘After he saw me he came straight out here and did that. He killed himself.’ Abruptly she twisted out of Devlin’s grip, to retch into a patch of weeds.

  Devlin waited until she was done, studying the scene in the barn from the safety of the doorway. Jeff’s body hung from a beam, swaying slightly in a cross breeze. Even from a distance the distortion and discoloration of the face was visible, and the unnatural angle of the neck. A set of steps lay overturned under the dangling feet. The guy could have been dead before they hit the floor. Devlin turned away to hand Kaz a handkerchief as she straightened up.

  ‘Thank you. I’m sorry …’

  ‘Natural reaction.’ Devlin shrugged, looking back at the house.

  ‘We need to call the police.’ Kaz put her hand to her head.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Once we call the cops, we get hustled straight out of here.’ The phone was in his hand. ‘Munroe? Get down here. We have a situation.’ He folded the phone. ‘Another ten, twenty minutes isn’t going to matter. If there’s any trace of Jamie here, we’ll find it.’

  ‘Anything?’ Devlin came out of the dining room, into the hall, intercepting Munroe as he came down the stairs. Munroe was shaking his head.

  ‘Most of the top floor is empty. Nothing that looks like a child’s room.’ He slid off the thin latex gloves, storing them in his pocket. ‘We’ve been here long enough. You need to call this in.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Devlin stared back through the open door of the dining room and the French windows beyond. There was a battered-looking football resting against a pot on the terrace. Would a five-year-old girl play with something like that? ‘You and Rossi head out. I’ll take it from here.’ Slipping off his own gloves, he handed them to Munroe and went to find the house phone.

  Kaz was sitting on a bench outside one of the partly renovated cottages. He paused to give them a critical once over. Typical rural idyll stuff. Pretty. Elmore would have done well with them. He sat beside Kaz on the bench. If she’d been crying, she wasn’t now.

  ‘I called the cops.’

  Kaz nodded, eyes distant. ‘If she’d ever been here, we’d have found something.’

  ‘I think so.’

  She turned stiffly, focusing on him, eyes bleak. ‘Where is she? What are we going to do now? Jeff was –’ She broke off, swinging round.

  Devlin was listening, but not to her. The distant sound of sirens was growing louder, more strident. She watched, open-mouthed, as three police cars bounced along the drive towards them. Devlin hoisted himself to his feet as the cars rolled to a stop, spitting a dozen yelling, gun-wielding police into the courtyard.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘Tell me, Signora Elmore, your ex-husband – he was a violent man? Jealous perhaps?’

  ‘No!’ Kaz put her hand to her temple, trying to ease the pounding in her head. Her Italian was too rusty for a police interrogation. Finding that she was having trouble keeping up, the policeman had switched to English. The events at the farmhouse were a dizzy blur. She and Devlin had been bundled into separate cars and driven away, as the police swarmed over the house. Now she was sitting in a windowless room, being asked the craziest questions.

  ‘Look, I don’t understand what you want.’ She pulled herself up straighter in the chair. ‘I told you already. Jeff didn’t have a violent temper, he didn’t drink to excess, he didn’t do drugs. Not when I was married to him.’ He was a serial adulterer. That’s all. ‘I don’t know what this has to do with him killing himself.’ Her voice cracked. ‘When I met him this morning he was frightened, not angry.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Your meeting in the church. Can you describe please the clothes your husband was wearing?’

  Kaz closed her eyes and opened them again. ‘Chinos, dark shirt and jacket – linen, loafers, I think.’ The policeman was making notes.

  ‘None of these clothes were marked or stained in any way?’

  ‘No. There wasn’t much light where we were standing, but I didn’t see anything.’ She gripped the edge of the table. ‘Will you please tell me what all this is about?’

  ‘Mrs Elmore, do not distress yourself. I will get you a cup of coffee and then I wish you to tell me again all that you have done here in Florence. This time it is for the record. What you would call making a statement? You will do that?’ He was already on his feet. Kaz found herself nodding blankly at a closing door.

  Outside in the corridor a young officer, smoking a cigarette cupped guiltily inside his palm, was leaning against the wall. He looked up as his colleague joined him, raising his eyebrows. ‘Well?’

  ‘Their stories match. Signora Elmore came here looking for her daughter.’

  ‘You think the child is still alive?’

  ‘With what we saw this morning? No. Jeff Elmore was a head case.’ The first man made a gesture of distaste and shoved himself away from the wall. ‘Let’s get this finished.’

  Kaz sipped coffee she didn’t want and stumbled again through her story, trying to read the police officer’s expression. He was plump and balding, probably in his mid-40s. He’d given her his name and rank, but she couldn’t remember it. When she’d stammered to a close, finally, he lifted a file and put a photograph in front of her. ‘You recognise the woman in this picture?’

  ‘Yes.’ Kaz had no doubt who the laughing, dark-haired girl was. ‘That’s the waitress who told me about Jeff – Giuliana.’

  ‘Giuliana Sforza.’ The policeman nodded. ‘And this?’

  It looked like a school photograph. The child’s hair was carefully combed, the shirt and sweater unnaturally neat.

  ‘I think … I think it may be
the little boy in the restaurant. The one who gave me the message.’

  The policeman nodded again. His eyes were grim, but his mouth suggested satisfaction. ‘Dominic Sforza – Giuliana’s son,’ he confirmed. ‘And can you tell me, Mrs Elmore. Is this your husband’s writing?’

  The paper was in a plastic bag. Kaz smoothed it down.

  ‘I never meant things to end this way. I’m sorry for Dom and Giuliana and for my daughter. I didn’t know what I was doing. I couldn’t stop it. This is the only way I can repay.’

  Kaz nodded sharply. Her throat was too tight to speak.

  ‘It was found near to your former husband’s body.’ The policeman pushed it back into the folder. ‘Thank you, Signora Elmore, you have been most helpful. If you would now like to wait in my office –’

  ‘No.’ Kaz put her hand up to hold him, her mouth working. ‘A moment, please.’ She swallowed. ‘I have to know what this is about. Giuliana and her little boy. Has something happened to them?’

  She saw the indecision in the man’s face, swiftly resolved. He shrugged. ‘You will be able to read it in all the papers tomorrow.’ His voice took on a formal inflection as his face hardened. ‘Giuliana Sforza and her son were found in her apartment at ten-thirty this morning. They had both been stabbed to death.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘Jeff killed his girlfriend and her little boy and then took his own life,’ Kaz said hoarsely.

  ‘That’s the scenario the police are working with,’ Devlin confirmed.

  ‘Was that why he was scared this morning, when he saw me, because of what he’d done?’ They were sitting outside a bar. An untouched glass of brandy stood on the table in front of her. Devlin nudged it forward. Kaz picked it up and drained it, almost choking, her eyes filling with tears. ‘Nothing makes sense. Why would Jeff do any of this?’

  ‘Giuliana knew too much,’ Devlin suggested. ‘That’s what the cops think.’

  ‘You understand Italian? – You listened in on their conversation.’ For a second Kaz felt her face lighten into the ghost of a grin. Devlin nodded, not looking the slightest bit guilty. Then her features, and her control, crumbled. ‘That suicide note … The police think my daughter is dead. They aren’t looking for Jamie, they’re looking for her body.’

  The shift in Devlin’s eyes was tiny, quickly masked. It covered her skin with ice.

  ‘Kaz –’

  ‘You think that, too.’

  ‘Kaz –’ This time he leaned to take her hand, but she evaded him, curling her fingers into fists.

  ‘I can’t make it add up. That Jeff is a killer, that he would hurt Jamie? It doesn’t make sense.’ She heard the rising note in her voice and swallowed. ‘He was never violent, even when we argued. Now I have to believe that he killed Jamie, then murdered his girlfriend and her son?’

  Devlin grimaced. ‘Whatever happened, Jeff regretted it to the point of taking his own life.’

  Kaz sat, staring at the empty glass on the table. ‘I don’t understand any of it.’ She lifted her head. ‘But with Jeff gone, everything comes to an end. He was our link. There’s nowhere else to look. I may never find out what happened to Jamie.’ Abruptly her throat choked on a sob. ‘I’ve lost her, all over again.’ With a helpless gesture she stood up, almost overbalancing her chair. Devlin righted it, tried to pull her into his arms. When she resisted he dropped his hands. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Back to the hotel, to pack. Mum needs me – because of Phil.’ A fresh wave of pain shuddered through her. She’d had half-a-dozen text messages from her mother, each sounding more urgent than the last. She needed to get back. Her crazy daydream, that when she left Florence Jamie would be coming with her, was over. Loss twisted deeper in her chest than tears. ‘There’s nothing to stay for now. My daughter is never coming home.’

  Devlin stood by the window, looking down into the square. He’d booked two seats on a late evening flight, paid off Munroe and Rossi and left contact details at police headquarters. His holdall was packed, waiting on the bed. The hire car would be left at the airport. He’d see Kaz to her house and be back at Heathrow for a plane to Chicago before morning. Extraction complete. Case closed.

  Except that this one would never quite be closed.

  He watched a pair of pigeons on a nearby roof, the male strutting his macho stuff, neck feathers puffed to impress, the female turning a cold shoulder.

  He wasn’t kidding himself. The police thought Jamie Elmore was dead, and he couldn’t argue with their logic. What he’d seen in Kaz’s eyes, down in the square, was the end. All he’d brought her was a whole heap of agony. He’d forced her to mourn her daughter, all over again. She was going to want to bury the memory of that, and of him, in the blackest hole she could find.

  He was the one who’d brought all this shit down on Kaz, so if something was biting inside him, something that he could barely identify, and didn’t have the first idea how to handle, it served him fucking well right.

  Kaz was only dimly aware of Devlin as she went mechanically through the check-in procedure, the wait, the flight itself. The small part of her that wasn’t in a fog of confusion and pain was very grateful for the way he was taking care of her, and the warmth and strength of his shoulder as the plane powered into the night. She wanted to tell him, but the words wouldn’t come. She put her hand on his chest, fingers curled into his shirt.

  As she faded into exhausted sleep, the last thing she remembered was Devlin’s hand covering hers.

  They were waiting just outside baggage reclaim. A man and a woman. Plain clothes and blank faces. Warrant cards.

  ‘Mr Devlin? If you wouldn’t mind coming this way, sir?’

  ‘Sure as hell I mind!’ Devlin let out a long breath. ‘Not that it’s going to make a damn bit of difference.’ He looked from one to the other and then at Kaz standing, dazed, beside him. ‘Any chance of telling me what this is about?’

  He thought he could read the glance that went between them. This was pain in the ass, not panic button.

  It was the man who spoke. The woman was watching Kaz, with something like concern in her eyes. ‘We have a few questions. It concerns the murder of Inspector Philip Saint.’

  Devlin knew his jaw had slackened. Of all the things it could be, he hadn’t expected this.

  Kaz’s head came up ‘Uncle Phil?’ The bewildered look on her face spiked his gut. You and me both, baby.

  He forced a hand through his hair. ‘Does it have to be now?’ Silence. ‘I guess it does.’ With a sigh he retrieved his bag from the luggage trolley and pushed the trolley towards the woman. ‘I’ll go with him.’ He jerked his head. ‘You see Mrs Elmore gets out of here. There should be a car with a driver waiting, in my name. Get her in the car and I’ll answer anything you want.’

  That look between them again. An infinitesimal nod. The woman took the trolley. Devlin hesitated, then reached down to kiss Kaz on the cheek. Her skin felt cold. He gave her a gentle push, towards the exit. Her eyes were huge and dark in a pale face. ‘It’s OK. Go on. Go find the car.’

  For a moment she looked up at him, face unreadable. The female officer tapped her on the arm, pointing. Kaz turned to follow her.

  Devlin stood and watched her walk away.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Kaz held the phone in a grip tight enough to crush it. ‘Devlin’s gone!’

  ‘I thought you’d know that, darling.’ Suzanne sounded distracted. ‘He got a flight back to the States, right after the police finished questioning him. Never left the airport. I can’t remember who told me – oh yes – the police liaison officer – did I tell you we had one of those? He really –’

  ‘Do you know why the police wanted to question Devlin about Uncle Phil?’ Kaz cut in.

  ‘I think his name was on some papers on Phil’s desk. He had been looking into
him, hadn’t he? And the police have to investigate every possible line of enquiry.’ Suzanne caught herself up. ‘I’m babbling, aren’t I? I just don’t seem to be able to concentrate. They want to put it on that programme on television – where they get the public to ring up with information,’ she said abruptly. ‘They have CCTV footage. They want to put pictures of a man murdering my brother, on national television.’ Her voice rose and broke. ‘I still can’t believe Phil is dead. And that poor girl and her little boy, in Italy, and Jeff and Jamie. When did the world turn into a nightmare, Kaz? Oh!’ Her voice changed, sharpened. ‘Oh, no!’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Kaz demanded, alarmed.

  ‘Something’s burning. That bloody toaster is jammed again.’ The ear-splitting whine of a smoke alarm came clearly over the line. ‘Oh sod! I have to go, darling.’ The phone went down with a crash.

  Kaz sat on the stairs, arms wrapped around her waist, rocking. Devlin had left, without saying goodbye. Those last moments at the airport. Should she have known? She’d been in emotional meltdown, wiped out by shock and grief. And guilt. Recollection dug into her brain, like glass shards. She’d threatened, so casually, to ring Jeff’s neck …

  Gasping, she fought her way back from the memory of that ghastly, sickening fog that had enveloped her at the airport. To Devlin.

  He’d kissed her cheek. His lips had been so warm on her skin. And then she’d walked away and left him alone. Had he walked out of her life, or had she walked out of his?

  Sometime soon she was going to have to deal with this. And with Jamie.

  The police thought Jamie was dead.

  But Jeff had said she was safe?

  A scared man and a killer?

  Nothing safer than death. Nothing to hurt her now.

  How do you tell a woman you killed her child?