by Nicci French
Fearby had lived alone for years and he knew about life with surfaces that never got properly wiped, dishes that piled up, food that was left out, clothes on the floor, but this was something different. In the dark, hot living room, he had to step around dirty plates and glasses. He saw opened cans half filled with things he couldn’t recognize, white and green with mould. Almost everything, plates, glasses, tins, had stubs of cigarettes on or in it. Fearby wondered whether there was someone he could call. Did someone somewhere have a legal responsibility to deal with this?
The television was on and Conley sat down opposite it. He wasn’t exactly watching the screen. It looked more like he was just sitting in front of it.
‘How did you get this place?’ said Fearby.
‘The council,’ said Conley.
‘Does anyone come round to help you? I know it must be difficult. You’ve been inside so long. It’s hard to adjust.’ Conley just looked blank, so Fearby tried again. ‘Does anyone come to check up? Maybe do some cleaning?’
‘A woman comes sometimes. To check on me.’
‘Is she helpful?’
‘She’s all right.’
‘What about your compensation? How’s it going?’
‘I don’t know. I saw Diana.’
‘Your lawyer,’ said Fearby. He had to speak almost in a shout to be heard above the television. ‘What did she say?’
‘She said it’d take time. A long time.’
‘I’ve heard that. You’ll have to be patient.’ There was a pause. ‘Do you get out much?’
‘I walk a bit. There’s a park.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘There’s ducks. I take bread. And seeds.’
‘That’s nice, George. Is there anyone you’d like me to call for you? If you give me a number, I could call the people at the council. They could come and help you clear up.’
‘There’s just a woman. She comes sometimes.’
Fearby had been sitting right on the edge of a sofa that looked as if it had been brought in from outside. His back was starting to ache. He stood up. ‘I’ve got to head off,’ he said.
‘I was having tea.’
Fearby looked at an open carton of milk on the table. The milk inside was yellow. ‘I had some earlier. But I’ll pop back soon and we can go out for a drink or a walk. How’s that sound?’
‘All right.’
‘I’m trying to find out who killed Hazel Barton. I’ve been busy.’
Conley didn’t respond.
‘I know it’s a terrible memory for you,’ said Fearby. ‘But when you found her, I know you bent down and tried to help her. You touched her. That was the evidence that was used against you. But did you see anything else? Did you see a person? Or a car? George. Did you hear what I said?’
Conley looked round but he still didn’t say anything.
‘Right,’ said Fearby. ‘Well, it’s been good to see you. We’ll do this again.’
He picked his way carefully out of the room.
When Fearby got home, he went online to find the number of the social services department. He dialled it but the office was closed for the day. He looked at his watch. He had thought of calling Diana McKerrow about Conley’s situation, but her office would be closed as well by now. He knew about these compensation cases. They took years.
He went to the sink, found a glass, rinsed it and poured himself some whisky. He took a sip and felt the warmth spreading down through his chest. He’d needed that. He felt the staleness of the day in his mouth, on his tongue, and the whisky scoured all that away. He walked through the rooms with his drink. It wasn’t like Conley’s flat, but it was a distant relation. Men adrift, living alone. Two men still trapped in their different ways by the Hazel Barton case. The police had no other suspects. That was what they’d said. Only George Conley and he knew different.
Suddenly the dirty glasses and bits of clothing, the piles of papers and envelopes scared him. People hardly ever came to the house, but the thought of anyone coming into this room and feeling some part of what he had felt in George Conley’s flat made him flush with a sort of shame. For the next hour he picked clothes up, washed glasses and plates, wiped surfaces, vacuumed. At the end, he felt it was closer to some sort of normality. It needed more. He could see that. He would buy a picture. He could put flowers in a vase. Maybe he would even paint the walls.
He took a lasagne from the freezer and put it into the oven. The back of the packet said fifty minutes from frozen. That would give him time. He went to his study. This was the one part of the house that had always been tidy, clean and organized. He took the map from the desk, unfolded it and laid it out on the floor. He opened the top drawer of his desk and took out the card covered with red stickers. He peeled off one sticker and carefully placed it on the village of Denham, just south of Oxford. He stood back. There were seven of them now and a pattern was clearly forming.
Fearby took a sip of whisky and asked himself the question he’d asked himself many times before: was he fooling himself? He’d read about murderers and their habits. How they were like predatory animals that operated in territories where they felt comfortable. But he’d also read about the dangers of seeing patterns in random collections of data. You fire arbitrary shots at a wall, then draw a target around the marks that are closest together and it looks as if you were aiming at it. He examined the map. Five of them were close to the M40 and three to the M1, no more then twenty minutes’ drive from a motorway exit. It seemed completely obvious and compelling. But there was a problem. As he’d read through newspapers, checked online, for missing teenage girls, one of his main criteria in weeding them out was looking for families near motorways, so maybe he was creating the pattern himself. But he thought of the girls’ faces, the stories. It felt right to him. It smelled right. But what good was that?
FORTY-FIVE
Karlsson sat down opposite Russell Lennox. Yvette started the recorder and sat to one side.
‘You know you’re still under caution,’ Karlsson said, ‘and that you’re entitled to legal representation.’ Lennox gave a faint nod. He seemed dazed, barely responsive. ‘You need to say it aloud. For the tape, or chip, or whatever it is.’
‘Yes,’ said Lennox. ‘I understand. I’m fine.’
‘You’re quite a family,’ said Karlsson. Lennox looked blank. ‘You seem to do damage to everyone you come into contact with.’
‘We’re a family in which the wife and mother was killed,’ said Lennox, hoarsely. ‘Is that what you mean?’
‘And now your daughter’s boyfriend.’
‘I didn’t know about that, until I heard about the death.’
‘The murder. Zach Greene was hit with a blunt instrument. Like your wife.’ There was a pause. ‘How did you feel about him?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘About your fifteen-year-old daughter’s relationship with a twenty-eight-year-old man.’
‘As I said, I didn’t know about it. Now that I do, I feel concern for my daughter. For her welfare.’
‘Mr Greene died some time during the day yesterday. Can you tell us where you were?’
‘I was at home. I’ve been at home a lot lately.’
‘Was anyone with you?’
‘The children were at school. I was there when Dora came home at about ten past four.’
‘What did you do at home?’
Lennox seemed terribly tired, as if even talking was a great effort. ‘Why don’t you just ask me if I killed that man? That must be why you brought me in here.’
‘Did you kill him?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘All
right, so what did you do at home?’
‘I pottered around. Sorted through some things.’
‘Maybe you can help us by coming up with something we can check. Did someone call round? Did you make any calls? Did you go online?’
‘Nobody came round. I probably made some calls and went online.’
‘We can check that.’
‘I watched a bit of TV.’
‘What did you watch?’
‘The usual rubbish. Probably something to do with antiques.’
‘Probably something to do with antiques,’ said Karlsson, slowly, as if he was thinking about it as he repeated it. ‘I’m going to stop this now.’ He leaned forward and pressed a button on the recorder. ‘You’re going to go away and have a think, maybe talk to a lawyer and come up with something better than what you’ve said. And meanwhile we’ll make our own checks on who you were phoning and where you were.’ He stood up. ‘You need to think of your children, your family. How much more of this are they meant to take?’
Lennox rubbed his face, like a man checking whether he’d shaved. ‘I think about them every minute of every day,’ he said.
Chris Munster was waiting for Karlsson in his office. He had just returned from Cardiff where he had been interviewing Josh Kerrigan’s girlfriend, Shari Hollander.
‘Well?’
‘She just repeated what Josh Kerrigan said: that he’d probably been with her, they’d spent practically every minute of the day together since they’d started going out, she couldn’t quite remember. But she was pretty sure that there wasn’t a time when he was away for a large chunk of the day or night.’
‘It’s a bit vague.’
‘He didn’t use his credit card to buy any kind of transport to London on that day. But he did take a hundred pounds out in cash a couple of days before, so he could have used that.’
‘But he’s not looking very likely, is he? Not that he ever was.’
‘I wouldn’t say that.’
Karlsson looked at Munster more attentively. ‘What do you mean?’
‘There was something his girlfriend mentioned that I thought might interest you.’
‘Go on.’
‘She said Josh was furious with his father. Spitting mad, she said. She said he’d had a letter, telling him his dad was not the happy family man he set himself up as.’
‘So he knew.’
‘That’s what she said.’
‘Good work, Chris. We need another talk with him. Right now. And his little brother while we’re at it.’
Josh Kerrigan had got himself a haircut – or maybe, thought Karlsson, looking at the uneven tufts, he’d done it himself with clippers. It made his face seem rounder and younger. He sat in the interview room and couldn’t keep still, but drummed his fingers on the table, twisted in his chair, tapped his feet.
‘What now?’ he asked. ‘More questions about my whereabouts?’
‘We spoke to Shari Hollander.’
‘Did she say I was with her, like I said?’
‘She said you probably were.’
‘There you go, then.’
‘She also said that you knew about your father’s affair.’
‘What?’
He suddenly looked scared.
‘Is that true? Did you receive a letter telling you about the affair?’
Josh stared at Karlsson, then away. A heaviness settled on his young face, making him resemble his father. ‘Yes. I got a letter sent to me, care of my physics department.’
‘Anonymous?’
‘That’s right. So whoever sent it didn’t even have the courage to admit who they were.’
‘Who do you think it was?’
Josh gazed darkly at Karlsson. ‘Her, of course. Who else?’
‘You mean Ruth Lennox?’
‘That’s right. Though I didn’t know that at the time.’
‘Do you still have the letter?’
‘I tore it into little bits and threw it in the bin.’
‘What else did you do?’
‘I tried to put it out of my mind.’
‘Nothing at all?’
‘I didn’t get on a train to London, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Did you speak to your father about it?’
‘No.’
‘Or your mother?’
‘No.’
‘Are you close to your mother?’
‘I’m her son.’ He looked down, as if he was embarrassed about meeting Karlsson’s eye.’ She’s always put me and Ben before anything else – even when she had cancer, we were all she thought about. And Dad,’ he added viciously. ‘She put him first, too.’
‘But you didn’t tell her about this letter?’
‘No.’
‘Did you tell your brother?’
‘Ben’s a kid doing his A levels in a few weeks’ time. Why would I tell him?’
‘Did you?’
Josh pulled at a tuft of newly cut hair. ‘No.’ But he sounded stiff and uneasy.
‘Listen to me, Josh. We’re going to talk to your brother, and if his account doesn’t agree with yours, you’re going to be in even more trouble than you are right now. It’s better to tell us the truth at once. Better for Ben, as well.’
‘All right, I told him. I had to tell someone.’
‘Did you tell him over the phone?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did he react?’
‘Like me. Like anyone would. He was shocked, angry.’
‘Is that all?’
‘He thought we should tell Mum. I didn’t.’
‘How did it end?’
‘We agreed we’d wait until I came back for Easter, that we’d talk about it then.’
‘And did you?’
He gave a wide, sarcastic smile. ‘We sort of got overtaken by events.’
‘And you didn’t tell your mother?’
‘Like I said.’
‘And Ben didn’t either?’
‘He wouldn’t without telling me.’
‘And you’re telling me that neither of you confronted your father, however angry you were with him.’
‘I said, no.’
‘Why were you both so quick to believe what the letter said?’
Josh seemed taken aback. ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘We just did. Why would anyone make up something like that?’
‘And there’s nothing else you want to tell me?’
‘No.’
‘You’re sticking to your story that you didn’t know who the mystery writer was?’
‘Yes.’
Karlsson waited. Josh Kerrigan’s eyes flickered towards him, then away again. There was a knock at the door and Yvette put her head around it. ‘I need a word,’ she said.
‘We’re done here anyway. For now.’ Karlsson stood up. ‘We’ll speak to your brother.’
Josh shrugged. But his eyes were anxious.
‘No,’ said Ben Kerrigan. ‘No, no and no. I did not tell my mother. I wish I had. But we decided to wait till we were together. I had to look at her over the breakfast table and not say anything. And him.’ His face twisted.
‘Yes?’
‘I didn’t say anything to him either. I wanted to. I wanted to punch him in his stupid fat face. I’m glad he’s got beaten up. He’s just a wanker. It’s such a fucking cliché, isn’t it? Except the other woman wasn’t some bimbo. What did he think he was doing? Ten years. He was cheating on Mum for ten years.’
‘But you never confronted him or told your mother about the letter.’
‘Like I said.’
‘And you never go
t the impression that your father knew about the letter.’
‘He didn’t know anything.’ Ben’s voice rang with scorn. ‘He thought he could get away with it, and no price to pay.’
‘Or your mother?’
‘No. She trusted him. I know Mum. She thinks that once you trust someone, it’s unconditional.’
‘Why did you hide this information from us?’
‘Why do you think? We’re not stupid, you know – we do realize that you’re all thinking this murder is some kind of revenge.’ His voice rose in distress.
‘All right.’ Karlsson tried to hold his eyes. ‘Let’s take it slowly, from the beginning. You were here, living with your parents, when Josh told you.’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you do when you found out?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing at all?’
‘I keep telling you.’
‘You didn’t talk to anyone apart from Josh?’
‘No.’
‘But you believed it was true?’
‘I knew it was true!’
‘How?’
‘I just did.’
‘How did you know, Ben? What made you so sure?’ He waited, then asked: ‘Did you find out anything else?’ He saw Ben flinch involuntarily before he shook his head. ‘Ben, I’m asking you one more time: did you try to find anything out?’ He stopped and let silence fill the space between them. ‘Did you go through your father’s things, looking for evidence? It would only be natural. Ben?’
‘No.’
‘Alone in the house, with this new and horrible suspicion, and you didn’t do anything?’
‘Stop it.’
‘We will find out.’
‘OK. I may have.’
‘You may have?’
‘I poked around a bit.’
‘Where?’
‘You know. Pockets.’
‘Yes.’
‘And his phone. His papers.’
‘His computer?’
‘That too.’
‘And what did you find?’
