Watching from the Dark

by Gytha Lodge

  Maeve shook her head with a roll of her eyes. “Look, you can’t take stuff literally.”

  “That’s understood,” Lightman said gently. “But it would be useful to know.”

  “He said he’d kill him if he came back,” she said. “But you know he didn’t mean kill him.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “It wasn’t Aidan who ended up dead, was it?” Maeve asked, her eyebrows raised but with a glimmer in her eyes. “It was Zoe.”

  “It’s possible,” Lightman said, as evenly as he could, “that Victor could have seen him as the one standing in his way until she was single, and then realized that actually it was her.”

  Maeve shook her head, and then looked up toward the ceiling.

  “Someone killed her,” Lightman said. “I know you don’t want to believe it of your friends, but someone did.”

  “So you tell me,” Maeve said with sudden energy, “but I keep wondering if you’re wrong. Siku told me they weren’t back together at all and maybe she’d never really got over it. Maybe she was in real despair and none of us realized.” She looked at Lightman with eyes that were filling rapidly with tears. “She was so hurt when he broke things off with her that last time. In May.”

  “What happened to Zoe later on Thursday?” Lightman asked, shifting the topic. “We’ve got her leaving the flat at five and not returning till eight-thirty, and I’d like to know what happened during that time.”

  Maeve shook her head. “I don’t know what she would have done. Maybe she crumbled and begged Aidan to take her back.” She gave him a fierce, bright-eyed look. “And then she decided she’d had enough.”

  “I understand you think she might have been in despair,” Lightman said quietly. “But Aidan Poole witnessed an attack.”

  “Maybe he wanted to believe that,” she said with that same fierceness. “Maybe what he saw and heard was her deciding she’d had enough. But maybe he couldn’t deal with that. Maybe he knew it was his fault. But what if he never really saw the door move?”

  Lightman nodded as though he was taking this in, while he watched her earnest expression very carefully. The two questions that immediately occurred to him were how she’d known about the door moving, and why she seemed so keen to paint Zoe’s death as a suicide.

  * * *

  —

  THE SCHOOL OF Art hadn’t looked that promising from the outside, but once he was in its curving hallways, surrounded by color and texture, Jonah began to feel like he never wanted to leave. His eyes were on every piece and every detail as he and Hanson followed Zoe’s tutor, Annette Lock, a willowy blond woman in a wrap-around cardigan.

  “So we have no CCTV of the inside of this place, it turns out,” Annette had told them. “But we do have some out at the front. The office says they can send that to you. It wasn’t maintenance, in case you wondered. I checked with them first in case there had been a mix-up.”

  She stopped midway along one of the ground-floor corridors and gestured at the wall. There wasn’t much to see. Just a picture hook, a big expanse of wall, and one small handwritten card pinned in space. It had Zoe Swardadine’s name, and then Her Painted Eyes as the title, and beneath that it said “Willart Long prize–winning piece.”

  “Is that quite a gong, the prize it won?” Jonah asked.

  “Yes,” Annette said with a funny, taut smile. “It’s a beautiful piece of work. Really wonderful.”

  “She was talented?”

  “Yes,” Annette said, nodding. “Though she started out only good. The single-figure paintings she did for some months were perfectly fine, but not…not stunning. Not like the later stuff, when she added a second figure in and began to experiment with the interplay between them.”

  Hanson gave her a curious glance. “Was it a man? The figure she added?”

  Annette tilted her head. “It was a shadow, but it was essentially masculine.”

  Jonah wondered whether that particular man represented Aidan Poole. He would be interested, he thought, to see some of Zoe’s art.

  He scanned up and down the corridor, thinking that the curve of it made it easier to take something without observation. The thief would only be visible for a short distance in either direction.

  “When did the painting go up here?” Hanson asked.

  “At the end of last year,” Annette told him.

  “Do you think it would be valuable?” the constable asked.

  “I don’t…That’s hard to say.” Annette put her hands together in front of her abdomen, the motion pushing her elbows out awkwardly. “It’s not usual for a graduate to sell much art, however good it is. Nobody knows who they are. But maybe there would be interest in her because of her murder. But then…what’s the point in thinking about stealing it if you couldn’t publicly say that it was hers?”

  Hanson gave a slow, thoughtful nod.

  “Well,” Jonah said, “I’ve generally found, in the world, that there will be someone, somewhere who’s into any single weird thing you can think of. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that there was someone who liked to collect art by murder victims.”

  “God,” Annette said. “That’s hideous.”

  “It is,” Jonah agreed. “How many people would have known this was here?”

  “Anyone who came here, I suppose,” she said uncertainly. “I mean, it’s not exactly private and you don’t need a key card or anything to access it unless it’s after hours…” She stopped short suddenly, and then said, “You know, I should have thought about it before. It’s not the first time someone’s interfered with her work.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No.” Annette pulled her arms up and folded them across herself. “One of her paintings was vandalized last year.” She gave an awkward non-smile. “It wasn’t very nice. Someone wrote ‘whore’ across it in red paint. They’d used her oils and she ended up abandoning the piece because it was upsetting as well as difficult.”

  “Does that kind of thing happen often?” he asked.

  “No,” Annette said with a trace of offense. “Of course not. Look, they’re all art students in here. They know how much personal connection there is with a piece. Zoe was shattered by it, and we didn’t manage to identify the perpetrator. We started locking all the workshops at night after that until the end of term, even though there were students trying to get final pieces ready and wanting to stay on and pull all-nighters.”

  “But you didn’t continue that practice this term?”

  “No. Because nothing else happened. And we thought…to be honest, we just thought she must have dumped someone and paid a high price. She didn’t offer any information, but I got the impression she knew who it was.”

  Jonah nodded again, thinking about that word. Whore. It was quite particular. Quite old-fashioned. And it implied someone who had known that she was having an affair.

  He left feeling that this was a weird addition to an already weird investigation. It was profoundly unlikely that anyone but the killer would have taken it. But they’d run a huge risk, if so. It seemed to point to some kind of obsession with Zoe, which went against the current trend of his thinking. He’d been inclined to believe that the killer had felt coldly resentful toward her by the time of her death. So why do so much to have something of hers?

  * * *

  —

  “WHAT ARE YOU thinking?” Hanson asked a few minutes into the drive. Jonah was still lost in thought, and was startled by the question.

  Hanson, he had discovered, wasn’t as willing as O’Malley and Lightman to leave him to his musings, but he didn’t find it quite as annoying as he might have expected. At times, like today, he felt that he needed to talk it all through.

  “Quite a few things,” he said. “Mainly that this doesn’t fit with what I’d begun to put together. The planning, the apparent suicide, the con
stant awareness of observation…that seemed like someone who felt cold toward Zoe. Someone she’d argued with. So why steal a painting? Why decide to keep something of hers, at a huge risk?”

  There was a pause from Hanson, and then she asked, “That might depend what was in the painting. I mean, it may well have had Angeline posing in it. Which might have meant it was about her. Or maybe Zoe had put something in it that pointed to the killer somehow, and they wanted to hide it from everyone.”

  Jonah nodded slowly, and saw a text message notification pop up on the display. The beginning of it read Hi, this is Piers Lough….

  “Could you tell me what he says?” Jonah asked, nodding at the phone.

  Hanson picked it up, opened the message, and said, “Oh, he’s got in touch with Felix Solomon’s former tenant, someone called Shannon? She didn’t pass on forwarding details because there was an argument over rent and apparently Felix got a bit unpleasant and she doesn’t really want to get involved in anything.”

  He could feel Hanson watching him, as he debated with himself how to reply.

  “OK. Can you tell him thank you, and to see if Shannon wouldn’t mind just talking to us briefly to reassure us all is well with her. Hopefully we can gently encourage her to say a little more.”

  Hanson was still typing her message when Lightman called to give them the lowdown on Maeve Silver. Her attempted suggestion that it might, in fact, have been suicide was one that Jonah found immediately interesting. As Lightman had noted, she seemed to know the specifics of what Aidan had seen. That wasn’t information that had been released by the police.

  “So she’s either been talking to Aidan, or she knows what he saw because she was there,” Jonah said.

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  “Did you get the impression she was keen for us to believe it was suicide?” Jonah asked.

  “Hard to say,” Lightman said. “It’s possible she wanted to believe it.”

  “If she saw Aidan,” Hanson said, “she could have tricked him into touching something so she had his prints.”

  Jonah nodded. “Agreed. That might be the most interesting side to it. There aren’t all that many people who would have had a chance to get hold of Aidan’s fingerprints, and it sounds just possible that Maeve was one of them.”

  * * *

  —

  VICTOR VAROS WAS not, it turned out, at the station by the time they got back. He had fobbed them off for an hour and a half as he apparently “had to work his shift and had no choice.”

  “Did he sound to you like a man who had something to hide?” Jonah asked with a raised brow.

  “He did,” O’Malley said, “but everyone sounds like that to me. I’d lay good odds on him being the one who threatened Maeve Silver.”

  “I’d say he’s the favorite,” Jonah agreed.

  “CCTV-wise, there’s one thing in his favor, and one that’s against him,” O’Malley added. “I’ve picked up the cab he took at eight on the night of Zoe’s murder turning off down West Bargate. Which is toward his house and not Zoe’s. But I also took the liberty of checking the camera feed that’s near the station for last night, when Greta Poole saw someone outside her house. Victor cycled past like a man possessed at five-eighteen. That would have put him in good time to catch the five forty-two to Alton.”

  “That’s great work, Domnall,” Jonah said.

  “Ah, sir,” Hanson, who was still hovering with her bag slung over her shoulder, said at that point. “I was meaning to mention before. I think he may also have been loitering outside my house on Saturday evening.”

  Jonah watched her for a moment, feeling caught off balance. “Outside your house?”

  “There was someone hanging around as I was running home,” she said, a slight flush to her cheeks betraying the apparent calm of her voice. “I saw him and waited until he’d gone before I went in. I thought at the time it might be him, but it was hard to see. He went off the other way down the street and my priority was getting inside and warm.” She gave a small shrug. “But I guess it would be logical. I gave him a hard time when we saw him.”

  “I’m a little concerned at the idea he would know where you live,” Jonah said in a low voice. “Do you have a landline listed in the phone book?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “OK. I’m going to the coffee shop now. And Victor can brace himself for a bloody grilling.”

  “There’s a lot stacking up against him,” O’Malley commented. “You don’t want to take a uniform and bring him in?”

  Jonah felt a stab of surprise, and then realized that there was nothing to be surprised about. A lot of his recent theorizing had gone on entirely within his own head.

  “Yes. Well…Victor’s facing two potential charges of harassment,” he said, making himself stand still for a moment and share his thinking, “but I have a strong suspicion he had nothing to do with Zoe’s death.”

  “Because the cab went the wrong way?” O’Malley asked.

  “Not quite,” Jonah said. “I’d say the cab going the wrong way just tells us that he wasn’t the one waiting outside for her when she arrived.” He picked up O’Malley’s iPad where it lay half-covered by a wad of paper, and loaded up a map of Southampton. “He picked the cab up at eight, in the city center. It would be no more than fifteen minutes to get to Zoe’s, but he didn’t go that way. He went toward his house, which is a twenty-minute walk from the flat.”

  “So…” Hanson said, following the finger he was tracing over the route, “you think he changed his mind, and went to see her after he got home?”

  “Exactly,” Jonah said. “I think he went home and then, because he was drunk and dwelling on it all, set off on foot across the park. He would have arrived in plenty of time to head in, have a drink, and then argue with her at nine.”

  “Why do you think that was him?” O’Malley asked.

  “He knew that Angeline had argued with Zoe, which he shouldn’t have known,” Hanson answered, before Jonah had a chance to. “And he’s been avoiding us, and nobody else has let on that they saw Zoe at that point. It’s also exactly the kind of thing that someone with a clearly high level of angst would do.”

  “The interesting question,” Jonah said, “is whether Victor saw who was waiting for Zoe when she got home.”

  * * *

  —

  HANSON WENT TO dump her bag at her own desk once the DCI had left, and found a Post-it note stuck to her computer screen, asking her to call back someone called Luke on a mobile number. She pulled it off with a tut and rubbed the mark off her screen, and then waved it at O’Malley.

  “What’s this?”

  “Oh, some guy with information for you,” O’Malley said. “He seemed to have been told to speak to you and you only, so I said to leave a number.”

  Hanson nodded, fairly used to being the first one to take calls for the team. That was what came with being the only detective constable.

  “Oh, thanks for calling back,” Luke said in a voice so enthusiastic it was jarring. “I’m so keen to speak to you. I’ve got to dash to make the post, but could you come and meet me afterward?”

  “What’s this about?” she asked him.

  “Maeve Silver,” Luke said. “I’m a faith leader at her church. I saw one of your colleagues talking to her, and I think there are a few things you need to know.”

  “Sure,” Hanson said. “I can be in town in twenty minutes…?”

  “How about that vegan coffee shop on Queensway? Half an hour?”

  “Sure,” Hanson agreed. “See you there.”

  Her phone rang again before she could leave the building, and she picked it up with a slight sigh.

  “DC Hanson. How can I help?”

  There was a pause, and then a woman’s voice said, “Is DS Lightman there? I just had something I
wanted to talk to him about.”

  Hanson went through several thoughts, the first being that this was Greta Poole once again. But the voice was wrong. A different accent, and a lighter tone.

  “I’m afraid he’s not in the office at the moment,” she said, “but if you want to discuss anything, maybe I can help?”

  “Ah, no, you’re all right,” she said, and Hanson realized that this was Maeve Silver. The suspect Ben had just been to see. “I’ll give him a call back in a few.”

  Hanson shook her head as she put the phone down. The whole team could do without the estrogen brigade.

  “I’ll be back in an hour or so,” she told O’Malley. “I’m handing over the baton of being Ben’s PA. Use it wisely.”

  * * *

  —

  JONAH SAW VICTOR’S expression as he walked into the coffee shop, and he recognized it as a man who had been caught. He finished serving a customer at the till, and then turned to talk to the young man who was working next to him. And then he lifted his apron off and came to stand in front of Jonah.

  “I said I was working,” he said.

  “And I said it was urgent,” Jonah replied quietly. “Or do you not want to find your friend’s killer?”

  Victor gave him a look that was somewhere between angry and defeated, and led him to a table in the corner.

  “All right,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

  “Let’s start with last night,” he said. “You went to Aidan and Greta Poole’s house. Why?”

  “I didn’t—” Victor started to say.

  “You aren’t as good at covering your tracks as you think you are,” Jonah said firmly. “You were caught on camera.”

  There was a moment of silence, in which he could see the muscles in Victor’s jaw working, and then the young Brazilian said, “All right. I was…I just wanted to talk to him. Well, no. I wanted to punch him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he killed her,” Victor said, lifting his chin. “You may be too trapped in procedure to see it, but he did.”