Watching from the Dark

by Gytha Lodge

  The CCTV footage was inconclusive. Victor could have been at Zoe’s at nine and argued with her. He could also have returned later with the intention of killing her. They just couldn’t prove either.

  Jonah had asked O’Malley to stop by Victor’s flat on his way home, to see if he got an answer. For now, that was all he could do.

  He took a route that led him past the top of Furzley Lane, where Jojo’s cottage was probably repaired by now. He tried to catch sight of the chimneys, thinking as he did so of the night when he’d glanced this way and seen the evening sky scalded an angry red.

  There was nothing to see tonight, though. The chimneys were out of sight, even through the almost-bare trees, and he felt an ache at the distance between them, an ache that lasted even as his thoughts moved seamlessly to Michelle.

  Lightman called him a little farther into the journey with another update on Greta Poole’s intruder.

  “It looks legitimate,” he said. “One of her neighbors saw a man running from her driveway down the road at about the right time. Greta Poole herself seems quite with it, if slightly intoxicated.”

  “Interesting,” Jonah said. “Did either of them provide a description?”

  “Nothing except ‘a probably male figure’ from the neighbor,” Lightman said. “Greta’s not entirely clear. She realized it wasn’t Aidan from the shape of the hair and the stature. She didn’t see the face that clearly, and it was all very quick. She had the impression of a beard or a scarf over his lower face, but that was about it.”

  “No coloring?”

  “No.”

  “That’s a shame,” Jonah said thoughtfully. “I’d be interested to know if it was our missing young Brazilian suspect.”

  “I’ve asked her to call if she remembers any more details.”

  Jonah rang off, and had made it home by the time O’Malley called. “No Victor here, but I’ve asked his flat mate to let us know when he’s back.”

  “Great. Thanks, Domnall.”

  It was dinnertime, and he had nothing particularly easy to eat. On inspection, he found he had the ingredients for some kind of coconut curry, so he started to cut onions. He made himself a cup of tea once they were braising, his thoughts returning to Jojo’s house and the fire, and at that point he realized that he’d never replied to her message.

  For some reason, having missed the window to reply to her made him feel worse than the fact that he’d slept with his ex on Saturday night. He wrote a long, apologetic reply in stints between chopping and stirring. He included a brief explanation of how the shit had hit the fan at work, and asked how much longer she was going to insist on staying out in the arse end of nowhere. He said nothing about Michelle, or how confused he felt, and he didn’t feel much better by the time he’d sent it.

  He had a plate of food in front of him when O’Malley called again.

  “Your man Victor is back home,” the sergeant said. “The housemate sent me a message.”

  “Is that just now?”

  “It was, so.”

  Jonah glanced at the clock on the microwave. Nine-forty. Two and a half hours since someone had gone to Greta Poole’s house to spy on her.

  “Thanks, O’Malley. Would you do me a favor and look up train times from Alton to Southampton?”

  “Sure, Chief,” he said. “Just as long as I don’t have to head back out there.”

  “No,” Jonah said decisively. “We’ll leave him for tonight. But first thing tomorrow, he’s having a visit in person if he hasn’t called back.”

  He managed to get midway through his curry before the next phone call. With a sigh, he decided that he’d just have to accept that his night wasn’t his own.

  “Sorry, Chief,” Hanson said. “I’ve had a call from Angeline on my mobile asking to talk to you. I did explain that I was at home, but she was quite insistent. She sounds drunk, if anything.”

  “She has something to say?” he asked.

  “Apparently so.”

  “All right. I’ll call her. She might end up saying more when drunk than she otherwise would. Can you message me her number?”

  He ate a few more mouthfuls while waiting for the number, and then called as soon as he had it.

  “This is DCI Sheens, Miss Judd,” he said. “Can I help you?”

  “Yes,” Angeline said. “You can. I know who killed her.”

  Angeline’s words were labored but she sounded triumphant anyway. Jonah felt instinctively skeptical, but he’d learned a long time ago that the most unlikely people could prove to know their stuff.

  “Who killed Zoe?”

  “Obviously,” she said with teenagerish rudeness, “it was Victor. He lied, and he said he hadn’t seen her, but he did see her.”

  Jonah tried not to sigh. He bit his tongue to keep from asking Angeline why she hadn’t mentioned this earlier.

  “When did he see her?” he asked instead, pushing his plate aside and scrabbling around for a pen and paper. He failed to find any paper with his searching hand and ended up grabbing the envelope from a gas bill, which would have to do.

  “On Thursday,” Angeline said with apparent satisfaction. “He lied about it, and I caught him. He knew about what we argued about in the morning, but he was supposed to have not seen her since Wednesday. And when I saw him on Thursday night, he was arguing with someone.”

  “I’m sorry?” Jonah said. “You saw him when?”

  “On Thursday night,” she said. “When I was going to buy some wine.”

  Jonah paused with his pen. “You haven’t mentioned this before.”

  “Didn’t I? I suppose I must have forgotten. It’s been…” Her voice caught, and in spite of the apparent drunkenness, Jonah suddenly had an unnerving feeling that Angeline knew exactly what she was doing. That this apparently fragile woman had a sharp, cunning side to her that none of them had yet seen.

  “You said he was arguing,” he said.

  “Yes. On his phone.”

  “Can you describe exactly what happened?” Jonah said calmly, part of his mind on what Angeline was trying to do. Had she decided to throw Victor to them out of some kind of revenge? “From when you left your flat? Your flat’s on what road?”

  “It’s on Hill Lane,” she said.

  He scribbled that down, and then asked her to clarify which part. Hill Lane ran north to south through the city and past the common. It was briefly in parallel with the much shorter and smaller Latterworth Road, and was only a couple of streets away from it. Jonah had driven up it on the way to Zoe’s flat.

  He asked Angeline for more detail, which revealed that her own flat was half a mile south of Zoe’s.

  “And where were you going?”

  “I told you. The off-license. For wine.”

  There was a low buzz of noise in the background, and Angeline was silent for a moment.

  “Is there someone there with you?” he asked.

  There was a fractional pause before Angeline said “No” belligerently, and then asked, “Why would I need someone with me? I’m not a child.”

  “Of course not,” Jonah agreed. “So you went along the road to the off-license.”

  “And I saw Victor shouting at someone on the phone. Well, I heard him and then I saw him.”

  “And what time was this?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” Angeline said, “but it must have been before the off-license shut, and that’s midnight.”

  “But it might have been much earlier?” he asked. “At eight or nine?”

  “No, it was later,” Angeline said. “I saw the ten o’clock news. I’d fallen asleep and then I woke up and it was on, and it was horrible.”

  Jonah tried to put this into his mental picture of that evening. And then he asked, “And were you drunk when you saw him?”

  There was a
momentary pause. “It was before I went to buy wine,” she said coldly.

  Which wasn’t actually a no, Jonah thought.

  He asked Angeline to come into the station the next day to give a statement, wondering exactly how much this account could be relied on. There was the sudden apparent memory, and the fact she had probably been drunk, and was almost certainly drunk now. There was another sound in the background just before he hung up, and Jonah felt certain that someone else was there with her. He would very much like to have known who it was.

  It was hard not to think about Felix Solomon, who had had access to police data. Might he be able to see their own files somehow, and be aware that attention had just fallen on Victor Varos? And might he have been the one there with Angeline? How well did the two of them know each other?

  So far, his current thinking hadn’t gotten beyond a few basics. The mainstay was that Aidan Poole had been framed. Which meant access to his fingerprints.

  Zoe had argued with someone at nine, but he had never been entirely comfortable with the idea of a murder planned and executed within ninety minutes, as the direct result of a row. Too much stood against it. The care taken to make it look like a suicide. The desflurane. The fingerprints.

  Angeline was now claiming that Victor had seen Zoe, and Jonah was already beginning to think that the most likely time was at 9 P.M. Victor could easily have argued with her. He had proven himself to have a temper, and it was quite possible that they had fallen out if Zoe had suddenly become unsympathetic and angry, as seemed to have happened. But he couldn’t see Victor then returning to carry out a cold-blooded murder a mere hour and a half later.

  Perhaps the killer had argued with Zoe, but much earlier on. Both Angeline and Felix had fallen out with Zoe much earlier that day. He only had their account of how serious it had been, and exactly what they had argued about.

  Victor might be able to tell them a lot more about what had gone on with Angeline. If he could be persuaded to talk to them.

  For a moment Hanson’s theory that there had been two people involved came swimming to the top of his thoughts. He had instinctively doubted it, but now, with that strange phone call behind him, and the realization that Angeline and Felix had both been on bad terms with Zoe when she died, he wasn’t quite so sure.

  November 21, 4:45 P.M.—six hours before

  Zoe had been wandering for hours, at times overwhelmed by feelings of self-loathing and at times so angry with every single person in her life that it made the inside of her head feel like some kind of an inferno, full of an awful, searing heat that threatened to lash out at the people around her.

  She was just so tired of their bullshit, and of her own. She’d tried so hard to believe that other people’s joy could be enough, but last night some kind of a switch had tripped in her. She had realized profoundly that her whole way of thinking had been based on a fabrication.

  She had finally understood that other people’s happiness meant nothing. It meant nothing at all. Maybe that was because none of them seemed to get any happier. It didn’t matter how often she propped them up. It didn’t matter how often she patiently talked to them about the cause of their unhappiness. None of them ever changed. Not Maeve. Victor. Felix. Angeline. Not her father.

  The only one who changed was her. She sank with them, drowning in all their crap.

  And maybe it was also because other people’s happiness could lacerate you. It could cut through you and make you want to howl.

  It had been Greta Poole’s happiness that finally broke her. She’d spent so long telling herself that Aidan’s wife was welcome to him. That he was a cheating bastard who would hurt her again.

  And then, last night, she’d seen them. She’d left her friends in order to help her father, and seen Greta and Aidan in a restaurant a mere two doors down, illuminated at a window table. And they had looked radiant and beautiful together, and Zoe had had to lean over the gutter and empty her guts out into it like some stupid drunk.

  As she’d straightened up, she felt strangely weightless. She imagined that some kind of terrible burden had suddenly broken away from her and left her without anchor or direction.

  Not knowing where else to go, she went to rescue her father. It was a habit, nothing more. The same habit that had guided her through the process of helping him, even while she’d known it was hollow and false. Even while she’d hated him.

  That habit had carried her as far as the train and then it had abandoned her, leaving behind unrestrained rage. As her father had made to step onto the train she had shoved him, hard enough that he’d banged the side of his head on one of the vertical rails of the train before he fell. She hoped, viciously, that it would still show in the morning, so everyone he worked with would realize what he was.

  As he sprawled on the ground and groaned, she’d felt no shame. None of the horror she should have felt. She felt only a strange freedom, and she was smiling as she helped him up and pretended to fuss over him, telling him that he’d tripped and she’d tried to save him.

  He’d messaged her in the morning to apologize, and she’d felt nothing but disgust. And so she hadn’t replied. Not today. Today, she no longer cared. She no longer cared about her father’s feelings, or about Angeline’s. It was almost satisfying to tell her friend that she was worthless. Broken. And to really mean it.

  And then she’d left the flat at the right time for her classes, her face gloriously bare of makeup, and she’d walked in the opposite direction, hating herself and everyone else in equal measure, and only after a very long time feeling a numb nothingness that was almost bearable.

  Half a mile from the flat, her phone rang. It had sunk to the bottom of her bag and she couldn’t lay her hands on it immediately. God, she hated that cheerful ringtone. Why in the hell had she chosen it? It was pure torture.

  “Shut up!” she shouted at it, scrabbling to pull it out of her bag so she could end the call. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

  It stopped for a blessed moment, and then it began again. Whatever selfish bastard was ringing wasn’t going to give up that easily.

  She finally managed to find it with her hand and pull it out. She saw Felix’s name, and thought about ending the call. But she was too angry to simply silence him.

  She answered it, and heard his rapid, distressed breathing. It had always, always made her feel for him. She had always soothed him. Always. But today it meant nothing to her. Nothing except a hideous weight of responsibility that she didn’t want.

  “I can’t talk now,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m not well.”

  She hung up. And three seconds later, he rang again. She picked up, feeling like he was attaching a physical weight to her stomach. Her chest. Her head. It was impossible to bear.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “But I don’t have anyone else. I tried to…talk to Esther, but—”

  “You need to find someone else,” Zoe said. “I’m sorry, Felix. I can’t do it right now. Find someone to call.”

  She hung up, but the phone rang again and she felt the helpless fury overwhelm her. She answered it with a vicious, “What?”

  “Can you please just come and see me? Just for a minute?” Felix said.

  “Do you not care about anyone other than yourself?” she asked.

  “Of course I do.” There was surprise in his voice. Shock. And it was so good to hear.

  “Then why aren’t you listening?”

  “Because I’m not…good. I need…I need help.”

  “When do you ever need anything else?” Zoe asked loudly. “But you won’t help yourself, will you? You claim it’s all the NHS’s fault, or the force’s fault, but you won’t bloody listen! You won’t go to therapy, you won’t take the bloody drugs, and somehow it’s everyone else who’s to blame. And then it’s me who has to deal with this shit, isn’t it? It’s me.”

 
“How can you say that?” he was half crying, half-angry, and almost hyperventilating. “I don’t mean to be like this!”

  “Yes, you do,” she said. “You do, or you’d actually try to change. I’m not going to carry on pouring my happiness down the drain of your unwillingness to lift a bloody finger. I’m not going to do it, Felix.”

  She hung up, and this time she turned her phone off. She was shaking, a tremble caused by anger and exhilaration. It felt just as good as when she had attacked Angeline that morning, telling her she was broken and disposable.

  Part of her wanted to find someone else to call up so she could lash out at them, too. Or tell them what a fucking useless twat Felix was. She wanted to use words so awful that they burned the air.

  She let herself into her flat, her face drawn so tightly into a scowl that it began to hurt within minutes. She couldn’t keep still. She had to move.

  She realized that Monkfish’s food bowl was empty and his water bowl low. She filled it with no less anger, resenting this other form of care. But Monkfish didn’t even come when she put it down or when she called. Perhaps he could sense her mood, and knew to keep away. It was so like a bloody cat. They were never there when you needed comfort. It was all about them.

  I hate them, she said to herself. I hate all of them. Why can’t everyone just leave me alone?

  For minute after minute, she did nothing but hate, until a trickle of something else hit her. Remorse. Horror. Something.

  Oh God. What was she doing? What was she doing?

  There was a more rational, kinder part of her still there somewhere. It told her that her friends were good to her, too, when they could be. It told her that they cared about her as much as she cared about them. Why couldn’t she believe that anymore? Why couldn’t she feel anything beyond this red-hot rage?

  She went to the window by the desk and threw it open. She’d taken the catches off the windows the day she’d moved in, and it opened all the way out onto the street, leaving the cold November air to flood in unhindered. She leaned out farther than she should have to try to catch it. She needed it all around her and in her lungs to stop the heat of her anger. Otherwise she might just burn up.