Watching from the Dark

by Gytha Lodge

  He felt a rush of guilt as he saw Jojo’s name on his phone, and wondered how it was possible to want both her and Michelle to message, to tie himself up into knots about both of them. Perhaps this was how Aidan Poole had ended up, he thought.

  It was a cheerful message, and a longer one than usual.

  Hey, Copper Sheens! How’s the policing? I’ve been off the grid for the last while, but it’s been worth it. Some of the most incredible places out here. I found a nine-meter waterfall that had so little force behind it that it barely disturbed the pool below, and you could see all the way to the stones at the bottom. Today, I got woken up by a gemsbok. You should google it. I can’t remember feeling so much in touch with all things wild. Except maybe when I was five and I got lost at the pond-dipping center. I should have signal for a while now. Xx

  He read it three times, and had no idea how he should reply. What could he say that wouldn’t be duplicitous? But what would be the point in sending her a message about Michelle when she was out there trying to live her life?

  He was still looking at it when Hanson tapped on his door.

  “Sir,” she said. “I’ve had an interesting call through from a civilian.”

  Jonah gave a guilty start and put the phone down on his desk. “Fire away!”

  “It’s a guy who’s pretty sure he saw Zoe looking after a considerably older, well-dressed drunk male at a pub on Thursday night between ten and ten forty-five. He thinks the male was gray-haired and had a short beard and mustache.”

  “That’s pretty high on the list of interesting things,” he said. “What happened to them then?”

  “They took a cab, which she called.”

  “Did you get the name of the pub?” he asked, already reaching for his keys.

  * * *

  —

  JONAH EXPERIENCED THE usual lift in his spirits when he left the station. It didn’t matter that Aidan Poole’s solicitor was due at any moment, or that a filthy-looking rain was falling. It also didn’t matter that he had loaned his raincoat to Hanson. The feeling of leaving his desk was still energizing.

  He only managed to find a parking space a quarter of a mile from the pub, but he timed his dash from the car reasonably well. He was rain-spattered when he walked in, but not drenched. The pub was warm enough, too. It was more a gastropub than a watering hole, with big old-fashioned brass radiators installed as a feature.

  There was a girl on behind the bar, round-faced and slightly flushed and wearing a gray vest. He gave her a smile as he approached.

  “Are you Amy?” he asked her. “I’m from the police. Tanya said I might have a quick word with you.”

  “Yeah, she said.” Amy glanced around at the three occupied tables, and then nodded. “Can we do it here? Tanya’s in the cellar.”

  “Sure,” he said, and pulled up one of the barstools. They were blue velvet and deeply upholstered, which was always a mistake as far as he was concerned. Making barstools comfortable just encouraged the solitary drinker to stay longer and sink lower. Which was good for business and generally bad for policing. “Tanya said you were behind the bar on Thursday?”

  “Yeah.” Amy picked up a cloth and started wiping the bar down. “Six until closing.”

  “I wondered if you remembered seeing a young woman in here,” Jonah said, opening a file of printouts and sliding a photo of Zoe out of one of the clear plastic wallets inside it. He placed it on the counter facing Amy, and she stopped mopping in order to look down at it.

  Her mouth pinched at one side as she considered, and then she said, “I don’t recognize her, I don’t think. I mean, she might have been here. But I don’t remember her ordering or anything.”

  “She would have come to the bar to help a friend of hers, who was fairly drunk,” he said without force. “Perhaps you remember a man here? A chunk older than her? He was drunk enough to slide off his stool.”

  Amy looked uncertain. “Well, it was pretty busy, so I might not have noticed…There were a few guys in here ordering. But…did he come on his own?”

  “We think so.”

  Amy shook her head slowly. “I can’t remember anyone being that bad. There are some guys who come in just to get lonely drunk, but not that many. It’s more groups and people coming for food.”

  Jonah flicked on to the next plastic wallet, and pulled out Lightman’s printed photographs of a range of men, their suspects included. He removed Zoe’s picture, and laid them all out like playing cards instead. “Any of these men?”

  Amy shoved the cloth away and gave the photos her full attention. He watched her eyes move from photo to photo, and tried not to feel disappointed. It was clear that none of them were jumping out at her. She glanced at Felix’s photo and moved on at the same speed.

  On the very last photo, that of a dark-haired young man with no beard who was simply an actor they had on file, she hesitated. “Maybe him,” she said. “But I’m not really sure.”

  “That’s fine,” Jonah said, piling all the photographs up again and sliding them back into the wallet. “It’s actually really helpful, so thank you. I’ve left a message with Tanya asking the other staff member to give me a call when he has the chance. And if you remember anything, just give me a ring.”

  He left his card, and then stepped outside a little regretfully. The rain was still going, and there was a strong scent of salt in it as if the clouds had picked up part of the sea and were now raining it down on them. He jogged most of the way back to the car.

  He was thoughtful as he climbed into the Mondeo and set off again. Although memory was a flawed thing, he would have expected Amy to have remembered Zoe and Felix from only three nights before, and particularly if Felix had been drunk and making a fool out of himself. The bar wasn’t large enough for her never to have come near him, and if it had been busy, surely she would have clocked someone occupying a stool for hours.

  It made him doubt their witness’s account. It wasn’t uncommon to find that someone had invented a story. It was odd, though, that Hanson had been interested in what the caller had to say. He’d generally found her to be a good judge of character.

  The cyber team should have finished with Zoe’s phone by now. Looking at her call list would be time well spent. And there might be more on the phone, too. Something that ruled Aidan Poole firmly in or out.

  * * *

  —

  O’MALLEY WAS IN the midst of writing up his findings from Ziggy, and putting them forward as a theory about the blackmail case. He’d done a very complete job of shutting out distractions from his team members and their case. So complete, in fact, that only when Hanson called something loudly to Lightman about webcams did a connection occur to him.

  He grabbed his phone again and added another message to his chat with Ziggy.

  Could you use Skype to do all the above? The spying?

  There was a short delay, and then Ziggy sent him a reply.

  Yes. One of the most common ways as it’s easy to hack and already has webcam privileges.

  O’Malley was halfway to the DCI’s office when he realized that the chief was still out. He told himself to be patient, and went to add a new file to the Zoe Swardadine case.

  * * *

  —

  JONAH CALLED THE cyber team on his way back to the station and was glad he did. The report on Zoe’s phone had indeed been completed. It should have been sent with the fingerprints, but was actually sitting in someone’s out-box.

  He took the stairs two at a time on the way back up to CID, and did little more than nod to his team as he headed for his office. The report was there, he saw.

  He loaded up Zoe’s list of calls first, and saw that there had been no call to a local number on Thursday evening. In fact, there had been no call to any number of any kind that night. The last phone call on the list had been at just after five, from a num
ber listed as Felix. The timing tied up with what Felix had told them, though Jonah wrote it down with curiosity. There had been three other calls from Felix, each lasting no more than a few seconds. What had been going on there? It surely couldn’t have been poor signal in a flat where she routinely received calls.

  Scrolling down, he saw a call just after ten on the Wednesday, which had come from Zoe’s father. It had lasted a more standard fourteen minutes.

  And then, below that, he saw a listing for B-Cab, at 10:45 P.M.

  He sighed as he typed the number into Google, and confirmed that it was a local taxi company. It looked a lot like their witness had seen Zoe, but on the wrong day. It was frustrating, but he would at least now be able to call the taxi company to get a further description, and also go and show the identity pictures to the Wednesday-night bar staff at the Bridge instead. There was hope of identifying Felix Solomon if it had been him.

  He scrolled on through Zoe’s phone. He found numerous sporadic calls to and from Felix. He also found Maeve, Angeline, and Victor, and several to and from her parents.

  He paused as he reached three weeks earlier, only now realizing what was missing. There were no calls to Aidan listed. Had she not had his number saved? There were no entries that looked like any name she might give him.

  He looked up Aidan’s number on the database, keyed it into the file, then hit the search button. There were results under Aidan’s name. But none were recent. The last calls and messages were from May.

  With a sense of unease, he opened up the files related to her Skype account. Searching, he found Aidan’s account pretty quickly. But again, there were no calls to or from him for the last six months. Nothing since the twentieth of May.

  He looked at that, and then, feeling a little shaky, stood and walked out to where his team were all buried in computer work.

  “Did anyone check whether the Skype ID Aidan had called on his phone was actually Zoe’s?” he asked.

  “Yup,” Hanson said. “I put it in the notes from his interview. It’s definitely hers.”

  “It doesn’t appear on the Skype calls on her phone,” Jonah said.

  Hanson gave him an uncertain expression, and O’Malley drew breath as if to speak just as she continued. “I don’t think you can modify that info on Skype, so I’m pretty sure he must have called her,” she said. “Did someone delete it? The killer? Realizing they’d been seen?”

  “I don’t know,” Jonah said. “It’s…strange. There are no calls at all to or from Aidan from Zoe’s phone in the last six months, either. If they were back together and Aidan was Skyping her, surely there should have been other communication.”

  “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about that,” O’Malley said. “I started looking into webcam hacking for the blackmail case, and I found out from Ziggy that you can hack someone’s Skype account so their webcam comes on when you want. I’ve been looking it up, and you can watch whatever they’re doing without them knowing or having to answer a call or anything. It doesn’t even turn the little webcam light on.”

  Jonah stared at him for a moment, and then said, “Well, that explains a lot.”

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS CLEAR to Jonah from the moment he walked into the interview room that Aidan’s solicitor had briefed him. The lecturer was so purse-lipped in his silence that it was almost comical.

  As Jonah went over the position of the fingerprints for the benefit of the solicitor, and gave Aidan an opportunity to explain their presence again, he was looking mutinously at the table. It was the solicitor, middle-aged and more academic-looking than Aidan, who spoke for him.

  “My client has already explained that he had no knowledge of how this could have happened,” he said. “He was not aware of the location of the flat, and has not been there.”

  “Thank you,” Jonah said. “We won’t continue with that line of questioning for now. Our main interest is elsewhere.”

  Jonah saw Aidan’s eyes flicker up to his face and then down again. He couldn’t help smiling to himself as he lifted a sheet of paper and scanned it, letting a pause develop. He could sense Aidan Poole’s anxiety building.

  “So,” he said at last. “You have claimed several times that you were in a relationship with Zoe Swardadine at the time of her death. We have recently discovered that claim to be false.”

  Aidan moved his head away and let out a breath. His solicitor gave him a sideways look that was almost funny. Clearly Aidan hadn’t been entirely honest with his legal counsel.

  “You broke up with Zoe in May,” he said. “The reason you were ignorant of her address was that she moved to get away from you. You hadn’t spoken in months.”

  Aidan fidgeted, and his solicitor leaned to whisper to him, though God knew what he was saying when he had clearly been caught on the hop.

  “We spoke that night,” Aidan said.

  “Oh, so was this a new development?” Jonah asked. “She suddenly decided to talk to you?”

  There was a pause, and Aidan said, “Yes.”

  “And yet,” Jonah said, looking down at his papers again, “your alleged call to Zoe didn’t show up on her Skype account. No communication between the two of you shows up on her phone. Not since May, when you broke up.”

  There was a very long silence, and then Aidan gave something like a sob.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  * * *

  —

  FORTY MINUTES LATER, Aidan was being released pending further investigation. They had informed him that they were intending to bring charges about the webcam hacking, but needed to look into the likelihood of conviction and whether or not Aidan had distributed any of the material he had recorded. The cyber team had been booked to pick up Aidan’s laptop and desktop in the interim.

  It was unlikely that they’d bring him in for the spying until the question of whether he had murdered Zoe Swardadine had been fully answered. Though if Jonah were being honest with himself, it had already been answered for him. The breakdown in Aidan’s defenses had been complete. He’d spoken unstoppably about how he’d been convinced it was for the best that Zoe and he were apart, and how much he’d wanted to make his marriage work. How he’d thought he and Zoe could be friends, and how her sudden absolute shutdown had driven him mad.

  “I didn’t mean to…you know. To perv on her. That wasn’t how it started,” he said. “I was genuinely afraid that she was going to hurt herself, and nobody would tell me anything. There was just this wall of silence. Even Maeve shut me out in the end.”

  Jonah listened in tight-lipped silence, aware that Hanson was doing the same and reacting with just as much incredulous disgust.

  “So I found a way of seeing what she was doing. And I knew it was wrong. I did know. I’d just got to this point where nothing else mattered. I thought just checking in on her would make it all go away. I dug until I’d found a site where people would do this for me, and I paid them three hundred quid for access to her camera.”

  “But it wasn’t enough?” Hanson asked. “Checking up on her?”

  “It turned into an addiction,” he said. “The weirdest addiction. I got a kick out of seeing her at random times, and it would cheer me up. Seeing her face after what became weeks and weeks.”

  “And on Thursday night?”

  Aidan shrugged. “It was just another night. I’d hoped she’d be online earlier. With Greta out, it would have been nice. I was thinking of putting the TV on and kind of…watching it with Zoe.”

  Jonah decided not to think too hard about that as he went over the presence of fingerprints once again, and pushed for an answer to how they had gotten there. And in spite of Aidan’s torrent of confession, he shook his head at Jonah and said, “I wasn’t there. I’ve never been there. And the only thing I can think of is that someone’s trying to take me d
own.”

  As he finished signing for his belongings, and slid phone, keys, and wallet back into his pockets, Jonah couldn’t help but agree with him.

  * * *

  —

  JONAH WAS DEEP in thought as he made his way back to his team. Hanson was already at her desk by the time he drifted over and pulled up an empty chair.

  “You think he’s telling the truth,” Hanson said, and Jonah nodded.

  “On balance, yes.”

  “The truth about…?” Lightman asked.

  “About never having been in the flat,” Jonah replied. “He thinks someone wanted to set him up, and I’m inclined to think the same. It’s too specific, those prints in that one significant place and nowhere else.”

  “So the question,” Lightman said, “is who would want to do that.”

  “Yes,” Jonah agreed. “I mean, killers don’t generally frame people. It’s difficult, and it adds a whole layer of stuff to get away with.”

  “Could revenge be a motive?” Hanson asked, leaning on one elbow and crossing her legs. “Someone really wanting to take Aidan down as well as killing Zoe?”

  “I’d say it’s more likely than any other motive,” Jonah agreed.

  “Victor would probably like to see him locked away,” Hanson went on. “And what about the girls? Did Aidan spurn either of them, maybe?”

  “Not that we know of,” Lightman said. “Something to look into?”

  “Definitely,” Jonah replied. “I also wonder whether the most likely person to frame anyone is the one person who understands crime scenes fairly well.”

  “Felix Solomon,” Hanson murmured.

  “The thing we need to bear in mind,” Jonah said, slowly, “is that the fingerprints might actually let off whoever argued with Zoe at nine. An argument could just about have led to a vengeful murder less than two hours later, but it can’t possibly have led to those fingerprints being placed. There’s simply no way somebody could get out to Alton and engineer taking Aidan Poole’s prints in time to get back and kill Zoe by eleven.”