by Gytha Lodge
The phone was still buzzing. Angeline wasn’t giving up.
“Is it always you she calls?” he asked, giving her a very steady gaze.
“I—I think so,” she said.
“Do you think that’s quite fair on you?”
Aidan put the question so mildly that it didn’t make her feel under attack. It did something else. It made her wonder fleetingly whether it actually was fair. But then the memory of Angeline’s limp body, looking like a heap of debris on her bedroom floor, struck her. That had been the result last time Zoe hadn’t been there. There had been nobody else to help.
The phone stopped finally, and Zoe looked at it wretchedly. When she didn’t reply, Aidan reached out and squeezed her hand. “Sorry. I’m not saying you shouldn’t help her. Of course you should. I just want to make sure you don’t drain yourself dry. Maybe you need looking after, too, sometimes.”
He rubbed his thumb along hers, and then, turning her wrist, he slid it along the underneath, where her skin was at its palest and most sensitive. She felt a response deep within herself, and checking up on Angeline seemed less urgent.
“Let’s ask for the bill,” Aidan said intently, and when Zoe nodded, he gave a wry smile. “And I’d better go for a pee, because there’s only so much wine I can take.”
“Such an old man,” Zoe muttered.
He laughed and stood.
Zoe took her card over to the waiter, full of thoughts of the hotel room and that kiss.
“Can I pay?”
The waiter looked flustered as he went to find a card machine. He’d clearly expected them to stay longer. But then she was handing him her card without checking the amount, and keying in her PIN.
Aidan returned as she was putting her card back in her purse.
“Wait, you’re not allowed to pay for all of that,” he said.
“Why not?” Zoe asked with a lift of her chin.
“Because it was extravagant. And I had more wine than you did,” he said. “And you paid for your share last time. Look, let me transfer you half.” He pulled out his phone. “If you decide you like me enough to want to see me again, you can treat me to your heart’s content, but I’d feel bad about you doing it now.”
Zoe gave an exaggerated sigh. “All right. Just half. Which is…about forty-two.” She took her card out again and let him read her account details off it.
“Check I’ve done it right,” he said as she put it away. Zoe rolled her eyes, but logged in to her banking anyway.
“Yup, done,” she said. And then her eyes moved across the line and stopped on the name of the account holder. Mr. & Mrs. A. Poole.
It took her a second to get her head around it, and when she did, a horrible, cold feeling spread across her chest.
“You’re married,” she said in a flat, hard voice. And then she looked up at him and saw his expression. It was like an animal in headlights, and she knew it was true. “Mr. and Mrs. A. Poole.”
He looked down at his phone, and said, “Oh…the joint account thing…” And for a moment, he seemed lost. Glib, charming, fascinating Aidan, struck dumb.
After a moment, he sighed, and looked up at her. “I am,” he said firmly, holding her gaze. “But not like you think. I’m married on a technicality, because I’m not going to screw her over by divorcing her a few months before my mum’s inheritance comes.” He stood up straighter, his posture open. Honest. “It’s not a marriage; it’s a bloody farce. We live in the same house, and we don’t have a clue who the other person is anymore. I think she would have left me by now if she hadn’t felt a little sorry for me, underneath it all.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Zoe said. She looked away from him because she wanted to push him over. And also for it not to be true.
“Zoe,” he said, reaching for her hand, but she snatched it back and shook her head again, so he said it again more urgently. “Zoe. I’m not trying to trick you. I’ve been trying to get up the guts to tell you since I met you. I felt like you’d run away, all because of a marriage that hasn’t meant anything for a very long time.”
“Yeah, I’d have run away,” she said, and moved past him. “I’m running away now.”
“Please don’t,” he said, and then, in a low, earnest voice, “We’d both regret it.”
Zoe shook her head, that awful coldness spreading further and further through her. She kept walking.
“You wouldn’t go if you knew how unhappy Greta and I both were,” he said behind her. “I know I should have ended it before looking elsewhere, but sometimes that’s not how people are. And she’s not…She doesn’t deserve to be swindled out of half of that money,” he said. “She cared for my mum for the whole of her illness, like I did.”
Zoe hesitated at the door to the restaurant. She could feel her heart thumping in her chest. God, she wanted that to be true. But what if he was no better than Isaac, who’d lied to Maeve for months? She said, without turning, “Don’t try to call me.”
She managed to keep from crying until after she’d left the hotel, and then it was the kind of crying that feels like your insides are being wrenched out through your mouth. She needed to leave, but the world suddenly seemed empty of places that meant anything.
In spite of her unfinished work with the blackmail case, Hanson was half hoping that she’d be brought in to talk to Zoe’s parents. Having sent off the CCTV requests, she found herself thinking about the flat; the girl; the blood. The money trail she’d been following suddenly seemed trivial.
Talking to two grieving parents was unlikely to be fun, but at the same time Hanson felt that she wanted to be part of it. She’d seen Zoe’s body, and felt some small echo of the loss her parents must be feeling. She wanted to be there, showing them that they would all do everything they could to find out what had happened.
On top of that, she wanted to see how the DCI handled it. There was always something to learn. Despite an inward certainty that she was good at interviews, she could see the difference. Sheens was in a league of his own.
She’d been asked more than once by other Hampshire officers why Sheens did so much grunt work, and made excuses to miss so many meetings and events where there were opportunities for promotion. Most coppers were understandably looking to rise through the ranks. There were very few who clung to a DS or DI title, because the pay went up so steeply with promotion. And a superintendent’s role, the next big step up, came with a serious salary.
It had been hard to explain exactly why Sheens was so hands-on, particularly with interviews. She’d always said that he was good at it, which he was. But that didn’t go nearly far enough. It was as if a hugely important part of him only existed when he had a subject to dissect and manipulate.
Sheens left Zoe’s parents in the relatives’ room and came to ask Hanson to come along, nodding at O’Malley but not extending the invitation to him.
“Great,” Hanson said with a smile. “I’m ready when you are. I’ve sent off the CCTV requests already, and the only other thing I was thinking was that I should head to Zoe’s flat tomorrow morning and see if I can find her cat.”
Sheens looked at her properly, a small smile on his lips. “What are you going to do with it?”
“Feed it?” she suggested. “You never know. Might be a witness.”
* * *
—
JONAH WAS MORE relieved that Hanson was in the relatives’ room with him than he would ever have admitted. It wasn’t just that she was good at giving sympathy without going overboard. It was also that having a colleague sitting next to him somehow kept Jonah from being dragged too far into the family’s grief. She could have been Lightman or O’Malley or a PCSO, it didn’t really matter. Just by being there, she acted as an anchor. Someone to keep his cool in front of.
“What happened to her?” Zoe’s mother asked. Suki. No. Siku.
Siku, he thought. Get it right.
It was slightly problematic that his mother’s cat was called Suki. Names were easy enough to get wrong when he was under pressure without that added source of confusion.
“It looks as though she was attacked while in the bath,” Jonah replied. “She seems to have been incapacitated, perhaps by something like chloroform, which allowed the perpetrator to injure her wrists. It was the blood loss that caused death.”
Siku nodded and asked, “Arteries?” and he suddenly remembered that she was a GP. That made things a little harder. He wasn’t going to be able to gloss over as many of the details.
“Yes, the pathologist thinks so,” he said. “The radial artery on each side. The postmortem should confirm that.”
He could see her thinking it through. She probably didn’t have to ask how long it would have taken. She would have known that there had been only a ten- or fifteen-minute window in which Zoe could have regained consciousness before the lack of blood to the brain would have taken its toll. And that the bathwater would have kept the blood flowing continuously.
Siku’s piercing gaze came to rest on him again, and she asked, “What did they use?”
“Siku,” Martin said in a choked voice. Jonah realized that he was a sick-looking white. He didn’t want to hear any of this.
“I’m sorry,” his wife said quietly. She slid her hand over his and then squeezed it. “I need to know.”
She looked back at Jonah, and while Martin turned away, he said as lightly as he could, “A Stanley knife from her art kit.”
There was a brief pause in which he was aware of Martin’s unsteady breathing, and then Siku said, “So they knew her.” There was a resonant certainty in her voice. “They knew there would be a weapon there.”
“They also had access to the flat,” Jonah said. “We’ll check further, but we know that her landlord had a key and that Angeline had one. Are there any others you know of?”
Siku glanced at Martin, and then shook her head. “We never had one. I don’t think she would have given them out at random.”
“She was quite careful,” Martin said. “Particularly with all the goings-on with her and Aidan.”
“How so?” Jonah asked neutrally.
Martin gave his wife a long, questioning look. She lifted her chin, and Martin said, “You had him in here. Are you investigating him?”
“We’re certainly keen to find out what was going on,” Jonah said carefully.
“He shouldn’t have been anywhere near her,” Siku said in a low, angry voice. “She broke up with him.”
Jonah raised his eyebrows. “You weren’t under the impression that they’d got back together?”
“No,” Siku said firmly. “She’d made up her mind, and finally stopped being talked round. She blocked him and she moved to get away from him. It was terrible, her having to move. Terrible. She had a gorgeous place in St. Denys with Maeve, with a view of the estuary and all that character instead of some featureless box. Moving away broke her heart, and it was clearly all for nothing.” She shook her head. “He must have found her.”
“Actually, it seems that Aidan Poole might not have known where she lived,” Jonah said, deciding that this was a point he should reveal. “However, it seems that the two of them may have picked up their relationship.”
“Who told you that?” Siku asked, her voice steely. “Did he?”
“It’s partly circumstantial,” Jonah said gently. “It was Aidan Poole who reported the crime. By his account, she was attacked while they were Skyping, and he tried to get help. Now, we are checking that, but it seems unlikely at this point that he would or could have lied about it, particularly if he was in any way implicated in her murder.”
There was a pause, and then Siku said, “God, why would she give him the time of day?”
“Because she was too warmhearted,” Martin said, his eyes glimmering under the overhead lights. He put a hand out to Siku’s shoulder. “And maybe she did want to be with him. You used to like him.”
“Before I realized what he was like,” Siku said harshly.
“So you didn’t approve of the relationship,” Hanson said quietly, as Jonah watched the mother’s expression.
“How could we?” Siku asked. “Who would want their daughter seeing a bloody married man who wouldn’t leave his wife for her?”
Jonah looked over at Hanson, whose expression mirrored his own shock. “I’m sorry?”
Siku recoiled. “He hid that little gem, did he?”
“We weren’t aware, certainly,” Jonah said.
“He’s a liar,” she said harshly. “It’s what he does. He hid his wife from her, and when she found out, he claimed they were getting divorced. Then when that didn’t happen, he said there were delays. He lied and he lied and he kept her hanging, and it made her miserable. And now he’s killed her.”
* * *
—
THEY’LL TELL THEM I’m married, Aidan thought. He had made it to the train station, but then had come to a total stop by the ticket barriers. Even habit only carried him so far. In his mind, he was hundreds of miles away from the ticket machines and the barriers. At times, he was a year away, remembering how he had met Zoe. And then, with the next breath, he would be in an interview room again, knowing that she was dead.
It would have happened by now, he realized. Siku and Martin would have told the police all about it. They knew.
But of course they bloody knew. Aidan had been kidding himself. He could never have kept Greta’s existence quiet. Maeve, Angeline, Victor…they’d all known he was married.
It was a royal mess, and it was entirely self-caused. He’d let all this happen, though when he looked back on it, he felt that someone else must have made all those stupid decisions. It couldn’t have been him.
Even that very first night, he’d felt like there was someone else inhabiting him. Someone wittier and more charming. Someone who was free to flirt and make promises. He’d regretted the exchange of phone numbers almost the moment he’d left the building, and then he’d felt compelled to call Greta straightaway.
He often wondered whether things would have gone differently if Greta hadn’t been away that weekend. For starters, he probably wouldn’t have gone from a film with colleagues to a bar. He’d have gone home to Greta and actually had dinner, and not sunk eight drinks in a row on an empty stomach.
And even if, for some reason, he’d done all those things anyway, he would have gone home to her later and had to face her. He would have remembered at that key moment all the wonderful things they had. And, as a consequence, he would have deleted Zoe’s number and blocked her from his phone. He knew he would.
Instead of which, he’d called his wife from the taxi and heard her irritation at being interrupted when she was busy networking.
“Is everything OK?” Greta had asked, and he understood the subtext: that if everything was OK, he shouldn’t be calling.
“Oh, fine. I was just…checking in.”
“Right. Well, I’m just at the bar with some of the editors. Can we talk later?”
“Sure,” he’d said breezily. And then he’d felt compelled to add, a little petulantly, “Though I might be asleep by the time you’re done.”
“OK, well, we’ll catch up in the morning if I miss you.”
And that had cemented everything he’d been feeling. That final sentence that told him she really wasn’t bothered whether they talked or not. That she had far more important things to think about.
He’d rung off and gone straight to his messages. It had taken three comments from his wife to erase all the regret. He typed quickly, though he had to go back and correct a few typos. He was rolling drunk and the movements of the cab weren’t helping.
It was so good to meet you. I’m glad I was a freeloading bastard tonight. Hope to see
you soon. A xx
And he’d been glad in that bubbling, can’t-stop-smiling way that characterized the start of a relationship when, a mere two minutes later, he’d had a reply.
Totally agree. Sometimes it’s obviously good to be a bastard. Let me know when you’re free for a drink. Xx
The battle had basically been lost right then.
That said, Greta’s arrival home from her Berlin trip had triggered the worst recriminations. When she’d dropped her bags in the hall and come to give him a long, lingering kiss and a smile, he’d wondered if he’d been misremembering what she was really like. She was so much warmer than he’d been thinking, and so much more tender. He’d kissed her furiously in return, and they’d ended up moving upstairs and having one of the most satisfying lovemaking sessions he could remember.
He’d lain next to her afterward, telling himself he was an idiot but that he was lucky to have realized his mistake. That he had been about to risk a wonderful marriage for no reason at all.
And then Greta had gone for a shower, and his phone had buzzed with a message from Zoe. He’d already set his phone so that messages didn’t show up on the home screen, but he’d still felt a jolt of fear.
It had been a simple message, but for some reason it had cut straight through all the guilt and hit the reward centers of his brain. It had brought surging back all the excitement he’d felt since meeting her.
Hey Aidan. How’s your day going? I just served Judi Dench in the coffee shop. I kid you not. Judi fricking Dench. AMAZING xx
He’d grinned to himself as he’d written back saying he didn’t believe her, and demanded photographic proof.
And that, for some reason, had been his last chance of escape gone. Even during the breaks that were to come, their relationship had never really released either of them.
