by Alison James
Rachel checked her watch. ‘We’ll have to be quick. I’m meeting my ex for lunch.’
‘Don’t you mean your husband?’ Brickall managed a weak grin.
‘Not for long, I hope.’
Rachel grabbed her bag and favourite winter coat – long and black with military-style frogging, which she liked to think gave her a Dr Zhivago air – and they headed for the lift.
‘Hope you’re going to tell him to stop phone-stalking you,’ said Brickall, as they walked across the street to the Pin and Needle.
‘Oh, don’t worry, I intend to,’ Rachel said firmly. She bought a beer and a bowl of chips for Brickall, a mineral water for herself and plonked them down on the table.
‘Now, tell me what the hell’s going on.’
Brickall sighed heavily, toying with a chip but not actually eating it. ‘You remember the Data Protection Act business?’
‘When the attractive lawyer warned you to stop misusing your access to her data: yes, I do.’
‘And you told me to just stay away from her…’ He mashed the chip into pieces on the edge of the bowl. ‘Thing is, I saw her. Last night.’
Rachel set down her glass. ‘Don’t tell me you approached her again.’
‘No, that’s the thing – it was a total accident. You remember Chris Daish?’ He named one of their former colleagues at Scotland Yard.
‘Yep. I do.’
‘Well, he invited me to a Christmas do being thrown by a firm of criminal solicitors. It was at a club near Chancery Lane. There were a load of people there: some CID, some CPS and lawyers…’
Rachel exhaled slowly. ‘Don’t tell me.’
‘Amber Crowley was there with some people from her chambers. I swear I didn’t know she was going to be there. I couldn’t have been more fucking horrified when I spotted her. I told Chris I was leaving, but there was a real crush round the bar, and as I tried to work my way over to the door, I bumped into her. Literally. I banged her shoulder as I tried to get out.’
‘Oh Christ.’ Feeling the need for something stronger than water, Rachel took a sip of Brickall’s beer. She didn’t even like beer very much. ‘Did she notice?’
‘Oh, she noticed,’ said Brickall grimly. ‘She spoke to me. Said, “Thought you’d have got the message by now.” I tried to apologise but she just went, “You haven’t heard the end of this.”’
Rachel sighed, checking her watch. ‘Listen, I’ve got to go… but here’s what I think you should do. Pre-empt the situation. Go to Patten and tell him what’s happened, before she has the chance to do anything. Tell him it was all a misunderstanding, admit you made a mistake. It will be much better if you do.’
‘You reckon?’
‘I know.’
‘Okay then, maybe I will.’ He took a gulp of beer and started smothering the chips in ketchup. ‘Thanks, Prince.’
* * *
Stuart had asked to meet in a small Italian restaurant in Blackfriars Road. It was a brisk twenty-minute walk from the Pin and Needle, but to save her still-weakened knee, and because she was running late, Rachel took a cab.
When she arrived, Stuart was already at the table and had ordered. For both of them.
‘I didn’t think you’d mind,’ he said, standing to kiss her on both cheeks. ‘It will save time.’
He produced the D8 divorce petition form, and they looked at it together while they ate antipasti of olives, artichokes and Parma ham.
‘My solicitor says we should have the decree nisi within a couple of weeks if there are no areas of dispute. The decree absolute follows about six weeks later.’ He looked up at Rachel with an expression she couldn’t read. ‘Then we’ll no longer be man and wife, Rae.’
‘We haven’t been man and wife for a decade and a half,’ she pointed out.
‘I know. It still feels a little like a loss, though. And I still wish I knew what happened when you disappeared. Where you went, why you cut yourself off from me.’
Rachel pretended to be reading the wine list. ‘Can we please just leave all that in the past? There’s nothing to be gained by rehashing it now.’
He gave her that steady, authoritative look; the one that could dismantle her when she was a naïve twenty-something. ‘I disagree.’
‘I’m sorry, Stuart, but that’s all you’re going to get out of me. But I have to ask you something…’
Her mobile vibrated on the table. They both looked at the screen.
No Caller ID.
Rachel cut the call and looked up at her husband. ‘That’s funny.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ve been getting anonymous calls. Nuisance calls. I was going to ask if it was you.’ She chewed her lower lip. ‘Clearly it’s not.’
Her phone rang again, and this time Stuart reached over and picked it up. ‘Hello?’
After a few seconds he handed it back to her. ‘They hung up without saying anything. But maybe having a male voice answer will put them off. Whoever they are.’
‘Sorry. I mean, that I thought it was you. It seems silly now.’
Stuart gave her hand a friendly squeeze. ‘Well, I did phone you a few times when I first tried to make contact… and I showed up very suddenly after a long absence. That must have been unnerving, so it’s not such a strange conclusion to draw, in the circumstances. But the truth is, I’m trying to get away from you, not closer to you. Yes, I would have liked a chance to talk properly about what happened, but I’m going to have to accept your decision. That you’re not going to. And the best part is that I can walk away knowing you’re okay – better than okay: thriving – and I can concentrate fully on my life with Claire.’
The waiter interrupted his soliloquy with two piping-hot plates of aubergine parmigiana, allowing Rachel to turn the conversation to Stuart’s work.
‘This symposium has been very interesting: a guy from Harvard – a medical examiner they call them there – talking about protocols in unexplained deaths.’
This brought Rachel straight back from his work to her own. ‘Stuart, there’s a case I’m working on… If I send you something, would you give me your professional opinion? Off the record.’
‘Of course. Although I’m always happy to go on the record. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve given evidence in a criminal case.’
‘Thanks, appreciated.’ She lifted the glass of wine that Stuart had ordered for her – red this time, she noted. ‘Here’s to the most overdue divorce in history.’
‘I’ll drink to that.’ He held up his own glass. ‘To divorce.’
* * *
As Rachel was heading back to Tinworth Street, her mobile rang again.
‘Jesus!’ she said out loud, addressing her invisible stalker. ‘Will you please just stop!’
She grabbed the phone from her bag, intending to switch it off, only to recognise the office phone number.
‘What is it, dickhead?’ she asked, assuming it would be Brickall.
‘Um, Rachel? This is Lee Knightley.’
‘Sorry, Lee, thought you were someone else. Obviously.’
He laughed. ‘It’s okay, I’m happy to answer to dickhead… I just went down to your desk, but you weren’t there. I’ve got some news.’
‘I’m on my way back into the office. Hang tight and I’ll come to you.’
When she reached Lee’s desk in the fifth-floor Tech Support department, his face wore an almost apologetic expression.
‘I’ve traced the IP address that the TruthTella comments were posted from. That’s the good news.’
‘And the bad?’
‘The computer is an open-access terminal in Eastwell public library.’
Rachel allowed this to sink in for a few seconds. ‘Okay, well that’s going to require a bit more digging, but the library should have a record of the people who are logged onto their computers at any given time. We just have to cross-match times and names.’
‘Unless they’re hiding behind a proxy server,’ Lee pointed out.
‘I don’t think this is a sophisticated cybercriminal, so that seems unlikely.’
‘And also assuming they’re using their real name. If they want to avoid discovery, they’re likely to use a fake one, surely?’
‘Only one way to find out,’ said Rachel, taking the printout he had produced. ‘Thanks for this, Lee: you’re a star.’
‘Not a dickhead?’
‘Whichever you prefer.’
She went down to the third floor with the intention of roping Brickall into a repeat road trip to Surrey, but he was nowhere to be seen.
‘Have you seen Mark Brickall anywhere?’ she asked Margaret, who was pottering about organising case files.
‘He went out about half an hour ago, love. Face like thunder.’
‘Did he say where he was going, or when he’d be back?’
Margaret shook her head.
Rachel’s right leg was now finally capable of driving without pain, and once she had cleared a snowstorm of sweet and crisp wrappers from the passenger seat of the pool car – making way for the Lola Jade Harper file – she was quite content to have an hour of her own company. The Friday-afternoon rush hour had not yet kicked in, and the drive was relatively smooth. She tuned the radio to a classical channel – something Brickall would have sneered at – and enjoyed a bubble of relative peace.
Eastwell Central Library was a handsome civic building, one of the many built to celebrate Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee. The head librarian, a grey-haired motherly woman called Nancy Poole, proudly pointed out its stained-glass windows, and the original book stacks just visible behind cheap plywood shelving units and peeling nylon carpet. Rachel spotted the row of desks in the corner where people were using the four public terminals. There was a ceiling-mounted CCTV camera trained in that direction.
‘Do you ask to see formal ID before someone can use one of the computers?’
Nancy shook her head. ‘Only if they want a reader’s card. For time online, we just ask them to sign a register with their name and address, and they’re given a time code. Maximum one hour, so people can’t hog them.’
‘That might make things a bit trickier.’ Rachel showed her the printout of the IP log.
‘We’ll do all we can to help,’ Nancy said, ‘But it might take a while to go through our records. We’re very short-staffed.’ She grimaced ruefully. ‘Public funding cutbacks: the usual story.’
‘It is quite urgent.’ Rachel was wondering whether she could offer Lee Knightley’s support to speed things up. His line manager probably wouldn’t be willing to spare him.
‘Leave it with me, and I promise we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.’
* * *
Rachel parked outside Eastwell police station and pulled out her phone. She tried calling Brickall, but he didn’t answer. There were three missed calls from No Caller ID. Switching the thing off in disgust, she tossed it into the glovebox and went inside in the hope of finding Leila Rajavi.
‘She’s on a major incident,’ the desk sergeant told her. ‘They all are.’
Rachel produced her warrant card. ‘I’ll wait.’ But she didn’t have to. DS Rajavi appeared with a couple of constables in tow, all of them in stab-proof vests. Her own was straining over her pregnant belly.
‘Sorry,’ she said to Rachel when she saw her. ‘I can’t talk now: we’ve got a suspicious death on our hands. Young woman found dead in her home. I’m heading over to the scene now.’
‘I could come with you,’ Rachel offered. ‘Not like I’ve not had plenty of DB experience.’
Rajavi shrugged. ‘All right. I’ve got a forensic team there already, but a pair of extra eyes won’t hurt.’
‘It’s a really sad situation,’ she told Rachel, when they were in the squad car. ‘The victim is Carly Wethers, twenty-nine. Single mother, raising her seven-year-old on her own. He found her dead in her bed this morning but was too terrified to do anything for a couple of hours. When he didn’t show up at school and there was no reply on Carly’s mobile, the headmaster phoned the grandmother, who went round and found the kid sitting on the floor next to his dead mum.’
Rachel shuddered. ‘Poor little bugger.’
They pulled up in Albert Park, a few streets from where Lisa Urquhart lived. The whole road had been cordoned off, and two police officers were trying to discourage the small crowd that had gathered, some of them snapping pictures or filming with their phones. A third uniformed officer was stationed at the door of the shabby terraced house, and SOCOs in paper suits and overshoes tramped in and out to their van.
‘Front bedroom,’ said one of them, pointing up the stairs.
Carly’s body was lying at the centre of a small brass double bed, tawny corkscrew curls forming a halo on the pillow, eyes closed. The duvet still covered her torso and legs, and at first glance she could have been asleep. But only at first glance. The skin around her eyes and mouth was pale, but the rest of her face was flushed a sickly shade of violet. A dark sliver of tongue was just visible between her lips and there was a shadow under her nostrils that turned out to be the faint ooze of blood.
One of the anonymous white suits was taking photos; another extended his hand and introduced himself.
‘Adrian Christie, forensic pathologist.’
‘I know you can’t confirm cause until you’ve completed your PM, but it’s looking like…’
‘Suffocation from obstruction of the air passages. And with some force, too.’
‘How did the perp get in?’ Rachel asked. Thinking out loud, she went on: ‘She’s not going to answer the door in the middle of the night and then climb back into bed, is she? So it was either someone with a key, or a break-and-enter.’
‘The front door had a single flimsy cylinder lock, and it’s been “bumped” by inserting a specially adapted key and giving it a whack with a something like a spanner… well, with any hard object really. It’s such a simple technique, we’ve known ten-year-olds do it,’ Rajavi told her. ‘We haven’t found whatever was used. Yet. We’re still searching nearby drains and bins.’
‘A burglary gone wrong, perhaps?’
DS Rajavi was shaking her head. ‘It’s a technique burglars use, certainly, but there was nothing of value to nick, and the house contents are completely undisturbed. According to her mother, Carly didn’t own a laptop, and her mobile phone was by the bed when Ben found her.’
Rachel was looking around the room. The floorboards were stripped bare, the door stripped and varnished, and the clothes hanging on the wardrobe door had an earthy, hippy-ish look. There were half-burned joss sticks on the simple pine dresser, along with a bottle of patchouli oil. A few ethnic necklaces, but no valuable jewellery, and no make-up. Downstairs, the furnishings had a colourful but homespun air. There was a simple woodburner in the living room, jars of muesli and leaflets for spiritual self-improvement workshops in the kitchen and a bicycle in the hall, fighting for space with two pairs of Scandinavian-style clogs. One adult-sized, one small.
‘According to the neighbours, Carly was the tree-hugging type. Opposed to a digital lifestyle, into activism; that kind of thing,’ Rajavi told Rachel as they came out onto the street and examined the damage to the front door.
‘Is the little boy at Overdale Infants?’
‘Ben Wethers? Yes. Same school as Michelle’s sister’s kids. Most of the kids in Albert Park go there.’
‘And he’s where now?’
‘He’s with his grandmother and an FLO. I’m headed over there next to see if we can get anything useful out of him.’
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Rachel told her. ‘I was going to touch base with you about the Harper case, but it can wait. Finding the nutter who’d kill a twenty-nine-year-old mother is priority number one.’
Twenty-Two
Rachel drove herself straight home in the pool car. She would return it to Tinworth Street and switch it for her own car on Monday morning. For now, she needed a hot scented bath to wash the odour of death fr
om her clothes and her hair. But still, lying in the fragrant steam, the sight of Carly Wethers’ dead face kept coming back to her. She poured herself a glass of wine, put on some Ibiza chill-out music and sat down with the Harper file.
Were they looking in the wrong direction by scrutinising Michelle, and in doing so, were they mistakenly ruling out Gavin Harper? He might now be in prison, but could he have harmed Lola Jade accidentally in a bungled attempt at removing her from the wife he despised so much? She re-read the papers she had copied in the offices of Hepburn, Willis & Bell. Coming at them afresh, the commissioning of the psychiatrist’s damning report seemed calculated, spiteful even. Who wouldn’t come up short if our personalities were put under that sort of scrutiny? So much bitterness and resentment leapt off the pages. Each parent so determined that the other did not deserve to keep their daughter, with little Lola Jade herself getting completely lost in the process. Her photo gazed out from every news website in the world, and yet she was a victim without an identity or a voice. A pawn.
She looked at the copy of Oliver’s non-committal death certificate again, and something occurred to her. She had already recruited the best help available, but hadn’t yet got round to using it.
She phoned her soon-to-be-ex-husband.
Stuart didn’t pick up straight away, but called her back after a few minutes.
‘That thing I was going to send you, can I do it now?’
‘Sure, if you’re quick. We’re going away to Aviemore for the weekend, but not for another hour or so.’
He gave Rachel his email address and she sent him the post-mortem findings and the police report on Oliver Harper.
‘I take it you suspect infanticide?’ he said when he phoned her fifteen minutes later. ‘I can’t think of any other reason you’d be asking me about this.’
‘Correct.’
Stuart sighed. ‘Okay, to start with, there are a couple of things that make me think it was asphyxia rather than an intercurrent infection that killed this child.’
