by Gytha Lodge
But it wouldn’t help them if they ended up talking while he felt like this. He’d say stupid things, and he’d hurt both of them. He let himself out quietly, wincing at the sound of the door closing behind him.
* * *
—
HANSON WOKE AT seven when someone in a neighboring room turned some kind of early-morning chat program on at levels loud enough to be heard across the street. She spent a few minutes staring up at the plain white ceiling, depressed to find herself staying in a cheap hotel room all over again. Having left this behind once Damian was well and truly out of her life, it gave her a heavy, glum feeling to find herself back here.
It didn’t help that the whole episode seemed a lot less threatening now that it was morning and she was surrounded by Travelodge noises. It made her wonder whether she’d overreacted and wasted sixty-one pounds she could have usefully spent elsewhere.
She’d been planning on calling the chief this morning to tell him all about it, but it now seemed too embarrassing. What had she really seen, after all? Someone waiting at her house and trying the doorbell, and then leaving when there was no answer. Those were the facts of it, when you removed the feeling of threat.
Perhaps she could mention it when the chief updated them, she thought as she rose sluggishly, feeling stiff muscles tighten. But by the time she’d showered and dressed, the chief had messaged them all to let them know they had no CCTV as of yet, and no forensics until Monday. He suggested they get on with their weekends until they had more to do.
She tried to see it as a good thing. It meant she could go and see her mum and off-load all her work worries. It would be nice. Comforting, even. Even if she wouldn’t feel able to mention the figure outside her door.
Lightman messaged her a short while later, making sure she’d gotten the chief’s message and asking how she was doing. She felt sorely tempted to be honest with him and mention what had happened. She could get his thoughts on it, and he’d probably be able to reassure her that it had been nothing.
But Ben had shown that he didn’t want to share personal things with her, and it felt awkward to tell him her own, particularly when they amounted to a feeling of fear. And so she just told him she was fine and glad of a day off, and then started getting ready for a trip to her mother’s back in Birmingham.
* * *
—
MAEVE LET HERSELF out of the house a good ten minutes later than she should have. It didn’t seem to help that she’d cut everything that wasn’t essential over the last couple of days. Instead of being perpetually behind in a frantic, too-tightly-packed schedule, she instead seemed to lose time staring into space, so very deep in awful thoughts that she surfaced with a feeling of disorientation. And she still felt like a failure about her lateness, and was convinced that people were judging her. Even now, when she’d just lost her best friend.
Her bike was locked up out front, where she had fallen into the habit of leaving it. The house had a side passage to a courtyard where her bike would be a lot safer, but she never seemed to have time to take it down there.
She pulled out her keys and saw that there was some kind of flyer attached to the bike. It was sodden with rain and clinging to the frame, and she growled to herself as she tore it off. Even then, there was still a lot of wet paper attached to the bike.
She pulled it open and saw that it was a handwritten note rather than a flyer. The thick marker pen had stayed where it was, and she could read the words easily.
Keep your slutty little mouth shut.
She stared at it, her heart feeling diseased in her chest. Broken.
She looked compulsively up the road toward the town center, and was turned in that direction when she felt a powerful blow to her right shoulder.
She grabbed at the bike as she fell, but the gesture did nothing but bruise her hand. She still went down, hard, onto her knee and elbow. The terror of her sudden defenselessness was awful, and she flailed as she tried to get up, feeling like she was in some kind of a dream where she couldn’t move properly.
She scrabbled her way to her hands and knees, wincing as they touched the wet pavement, and looked up to see a tracksuit-clad figure jogging round the corner and out of sight.
* * *
—
HAVING CHECKED IN on the case and told his team to stand down for now, Jonah slept for most of the morning. He then woke up feeling guilty that he’d spent so much time out of it. He expected to see a message from Michelle waiting for him, but there was nothing.
He decided he’d better be the one to make contact, given that he had left her sleeping. He wrote a brief note saying how nice it had been to see her and apologizing for being in a state. He asked if she’d like to meet up later, or in London.
Her reply had arrived by the time he was out of the shower, and it was painfully brief.
Already home. Drop you a line in the week maybe?
And that was it. No expression of pleasure at what had happened, but no regrets, either. Nothing to tell him that she felt anything at all, or acknowledging that it had opened everything up all over again for him.
Jonah shoved his phone away, sank a coffee, and then pulled on the cycling kit that still had damp patches from the day before. The headache hadn’t entirely gone and it looked like it had been raining again, but anything was better than sitting around thinking about Michelle, and Jojo, and what might or might not be wrong with him.
* * *
—
THE BIKE RIDE did a lot to clear Jonah’s head, putting Michelle into the background and letting him think more clearly about Zoe Swardadine and the people who might have killed her. He sprinted along the Godshill road, turning everything around in his head: The missing three hours. The figure in the cap. Zoe’s tense, frightened movements as she’d spoken to someone at the door to her flat, who could have been any of their suspects except Aidan Poole, who hadn’t known where she lived.
He found himself thinking about Zoe herself after that, and how much she seemed to have changed over the last months of her life. He thought back to what Maeve had said about her weight loss and her eye makeup. There had been no trace of makeup when she’d been found in the bath, though that wasn’t necessarily surprising. Then he recalled her face on the CCTV camera, and was pretty certain she’d had no elaborate eye makeup. It would have shown up even in black-and-white footage.
Did that mean she hadn’t been going out to meet anyone when she left the flat? She hadn’t received any messages triggering the sudden departure. They knew that from her phone records. Perhaps she really had been trying to follow someone. Maybe they should distribute some images of the woman with glasses, in case she had been trying to hurry after her.
The other thing her lack of makeup might signal, he thought, was a total breakdown in Zoe’s mental state. A point reached at which even her excessive grooming had stopped.
The strangest thing in looking at that last day was that Zoe’s actions seemed markedly out of character. Everyone had described a long-suffering, supportive friend. Even Maeve’s description of depression hadn’t included a disregard for either other people’s feelings or her own appearance. Yet she had told her friend she was broken, and argued with someone that evening.
He wondered if the clue to all this was Wednesday night. Perhaps one of her friendships had reached a breaking point, tipping Zoe into anger at everyone around her. Perhaps that point had hit the friend in question just as hard, and made them decide to kill her. Or perhaps Zoe’s sudden, harsh mood the next day had made her do something that had triggered her murder.
There was a message waiting for him from Michelle when he pulled his phone out at the farthest point of his ride.
Sorry for being a bit short earlier. Just hungover as hell and feeling like an idiot. Happy to talk later this week. Xx
Jonah sighed as he read it. It still didn�
��t exactly exude positivity, but it did make him feel less like he’d just lost her all over again.
He couldn’t blame Michelle for being uncertain. Even in his fitful sleep this morning, he’d found himself wheeling between a desperate longing to make things work, sudden irritation at himself, and a pining for Jojo to be in touch. It was anything but simple, and if he were honest, he wasn’t sure what he would have said if they had met up again.
* * *
—
JONAH WAS ON his way into the station on Monday morning when he received a call from an unknown number.
“Hi.” The voice was female. Hesitant. “It’s…it’s Maeve Silver. I just wanted to let you know about something that happened yesterday.”
He listened while Maeve described the note on her bike and the violent shove that had sent her sprawling onto the pavement.
“You didn’t get any idea of who it was?” Jonah asked. “No impression of age? Gender?”
“No,” Maeve said miserably. “It was…They had a tracksuit on. They were jogging. I think they were pretending to be a jogger.”
“What color clothing?”
“Just…dark. Maybe black.”
Jonah thought back to their figure in a cap from the CCTV footage. It was just possible that the same person had pushed her. Though it was also possible that the note had nothing to do with the runner, and she’d been shoved out of the way by someone in a bad mood.
This was assuming, too, that the incident had actually happened.
“Do you still have the note?”
“Yes,” Maeve said. “It’s kind of beaten up, but…”
“Can you bring it into the station?” Jonah asked. “We’ll get you to do an official statement, if you don’t mind. I’m hopeful that whoever killed Zoe will be picked up soon, anyway. We should have a lot of forensic information back soon.”
“Good,” Maeve said. “That’s a relief.”
He wondered whether she really meant it as he hung up.
Jonah’s optimism took a slight dip on opening up his emails. There was nothing from forensics yet, but there was something from Wilkinson. The DCS had put through CCTV requests, but he also wanted an update on the blackmail case the next day. He gently reminded Jonah that he had agreed to commit half of his resources to it. As a high-profile case, Wilkinson’s email continued, it was important they didn’t let it slide, however important a murder investigation was.
Jonah called O’Malley and asked him to head in as soon as he could.
“I want you to be full-time on the blackmail case today,” he told him.
O’Malley agreed without argument. He arrived within fifteen minutes, looking only slightly thrown together, and buried himself in the blackmail files.
Ten minutes after that, Linda McCullough called Jonah.
“We’ve got your fingerprint comparisons in,” she said. “Do you want a rundown?”
“Sure,” he said, refreshing his email and seeing a forward from her.
“Male one, who was on the glasses, door, and light switch, is Victor Varos.”
So Victor could well have been there that night, Jonah thought with satisfaction. Either arguing with Zoe or killing her, and possibly both.
“Recent prints, you thought?” he asked.
“Yes, not overlaid much,” she agreed. “Male two, who features over more of the flat but is quite overlaid, is Felix Solomon, her landlord.”
“OK. Not unexpected.”
“Male three, who only appears on the bathroom-door lock, is Aidan Poole. The boyfriend, I think?”
Jonah took a breath. “Aidan Poole?”
“Yes.”
“There’s no doubt about that?”
“None,” McCullough said. “The prints are clear and recent.”
Jonah thanked her, and said he’d read the rest later. He hung up and felt totally outraged. Outraged that Aidan had sat in the interview room and lied so consummately about not knowing where she lived. That from the very first, he’d done everything to suggest he had no idea of the address.
Jonah gave a sigh of disgust, opened the door to CID, and called to Lightman and Hanson.
“You two get yourselves ready. We’re about to go and arrest Aidan Poole.”
October—thirteen months before
Zoe was screwing everything up at work. She’d had to remake two drinks already thanks to putting milk into one instead of soy, and making normal coffee instead of decaf for the other. Mieke had been so supportive when Zoe had told her about the breakup, but that had been two shifts ago and she could tell that her colleague was starting to get impatient underneath it all.
It wasn’t actually the breakup that was affecting her today. The background pain was still there and it still made her feel like crying every time she thought of it, but she was managing better now. She’d started being able to think about other things. About dating other men.
The problem today was that Angeline had come in, and she wasn’t alone. She had given Zoe a defiant, possibly even triumphant smile as she’d arrived with Richie. Zoe couldn’t look at him without remembering the way Angeline had been draped over him at that dockside bar.
What was she doing with him? Zoe couldn’t understand it. He was just so, so awful. From the way he almost bellowed everything he said and glanced around the coffee shop, she could tell he was convinced he was some kind of a tough guy. And she hated the way he looked at Angeline like she was a possession.
She realized that her next customer was waiting for a drink, and she turned to smile apologetically before seeing that it was Felix.
“Oh, hi,” she said, feeling herself brighten in spite of everything. “How’s it going? I haven’t seen you in too long.”
“It’s fine,” he said, smiling back at her. “Better for seeing you, obviously. I just had a bug and decided I wouldn’t spread it around.”
“Very thoughtful of you. I just hope you missed me.”
“Every second.”
She grinned as she cleaned the milk-foaming wand and set about making his flat white.
“How are things with you?” Felix asked. “Is Aidan well?”
Zoe flinched and tried to keep smiling. “Oh, we’re not together anymore.”
Felix looked genuinely taken aback. “Oh, I’m so sorry. Foot right in mouth. Are you OK?”
“Fine,” she said. And then, over the noise of the milk steamer, she added, “It turned out he wasn’t so very separated from his wife.”
“Ah,” Felix said. “That’s…crap.”
Zoe nodded, then shrugged. She stopped the steamer and started to pour the foamed milk into Felix’s coffee. “Yeah, well. People can be crap.”
“I never liked him, anyway,” Felix said with a wink. “You deserve someone much less sulky.”
Zoe laughed, even though she didn’t really feel like it. “Well, he’s definitely sulking now. He keeps trying to pass on messages through my friends, and he turns up everywhere I go. I had to change my shift to avoid him.”
“At your house, too?” Felix asked.
“Sometimes,” Zoe said.
There was a pause, and then Felix said, “That’s not right, you know. If that behavior goes on, you need to go to the police. It’s harassment.”
“It’s not really…”
“Zoe, I used to be a bloody copper. Trust me on this.”
Zoe gave a shrug, then nodded.
“Secondly, if you want to move somewhere else, then I can help. I’ve got to end my tenant’s stay because she’s no longer paying her rent. If you want to move in, you’d be doing me a favor.”
Zoe looked up at his kind expression, and smiled. “Thank you. That’s really lovely of you. I think…I think moving right now would be too much. But, you know, if it’s empty in a few weeks and I can’t deal wi
th it…”
“You just tell me,” Felix said firmly. “I’m not in a rush to fill it.” He gave her a significant look. “Nobody should have to feel like they aren’t safe in their own home.”
* * *
—
ZOE FINISHED HER shift at six, helped Mieke close up, and then cycled back down Hill Lane toward home. She scanned the street outside, looking out for Aidan. He didn’t seem to be waiting for her. She wasn’t entirely sure whether she felt relieved or not. It was so hard not to miss him while trying her best to shut him out.
Zoe thought again about Angeline and Richie and wondered whether he’d harassed her friend into giving in. But then, why hadn’t Angeline said anything? Presumably because she was ashamed of him.
Well, Zoe thought, shoving her bike behind the side gate, it was up to Angeline who she wanted to hang out with. Zoe wasn’t her keeper.
Stop worrying about everyone. They’re all adults and they can manage without you.
It was something Aidan had said to her on numerous occasions, and she hated that it was his voice she heard now.
She let herself in, hoping that Maeve would be in her room. She was in the mood for some peace and quiet.
The hall looked normal, with no extra coat hanging up. Even Monkfish gave her no heads-up. He just twined himself around her legs as usual and then scampered toward the kitchen. So there was nothing until Zoe walked in on Aidan sitting in her own armchair, with Maeve curled up on the sofa opposite him.
He saw her and he jumped up, a look of awful happiness on his face, which then turned into uncertainty.
She shook her head at him. “What are you doing here?” she asked as coldly as she could.
“Sorry, Zo,” Maeve said, uncoiling herself slowly. Her face was hot pink, and Zoe wondered what exactly she’d walked in on.
Maeve hurried out, and Zoe knew she should turn and leave, too.
