by Gytha Lodge
* * *
—
HANSON FOUND HERSELF thinking about the conversation with Luke Searle on repeat, interrupted only by occasional thoughts of Victor’s statement. The fact that Victor and the faith leader had described Maeve in the same terms worried her. The fact that Maeve had so clearly wanted Aidan Poole to stick around worried her further, and the revelation that Maeve had probably lied about her movements was worse.
Maeve had never seemed to have a strong motive for killing Zoe. But what if she’d had a motive after all? What if she’d met up with Aidan, thinking he’d fall for her now that he and Zoe were no longer together? And what if he’d rejected her?
They needed to talk to Aidan Poole. Straightaway.
She’d already gotten to her feet when she saw Felix Solomon entering CID with a strangely determined glint in his eye. The uniformed constable he was with knocked on the DCI’s door, and she sat back at her desk with a frustrated sigh.
It took her a few minutes to stop thinking about Maeve and wonder why Felix had turned up at the station.
* * *
—
JONAH’S MOBILE RANG as he was at the point of getting up from his desk, and he smiled slightly as he read Angeline Judd’s name on the screen. His mind was already racing a long way ahead of what she was going to say, but he took the call anyway.
“DCI Sheens,” he said.
“One of your officers was having coffee with Luke Searle,” she said, her voice clear and absolutely lacking the dopey quality it had had before. “I want to know why.”
“I’m afraid I can’t give you information on a case,” Jonah said.
There was a tap on his door, and he turned to see a uniform out there with Felix Solomon. He held up a finger to gesture that he wouldn’t be long.
“Don’t be stupid!” Angeline was saying. “I’m not asking for information about the case. I want to know what bullshit Luke has been spreading about Maeve.”
“Again…”
“He’s a snake,” she said. “What did he have to say? That Maeve was a stalker, or some shit like that?”
Jonah made a noncommittal noise. In part because he was happy to let her speak, and in part because he was thinking of the questions he was about to ask Felix Solomon.
“She never stalked Isaac. He seduced her,” she said. “She held out for a bloody year, and he kept on at her and on at her. I saw them together, and I saw his messages. And when it all came out, he lied, and Luke Searle sided with him, the sexist prick.”
Even with half his mind elsewhere, Jonah couldn’t help feeling surprised that Angeline was speaking up for her friend. Everything he’d seen of her had pointed to someone needy and manipulative. To find her a loyal friend in a pinch was both surprising and a little heartwarming.
“So you can prove this?”
Angeline gave a laugh. “Yes, I can prove it. And if you want a quick note of proof, if Isaac was so bloody innocent, why did he invite Maeve to stay at a hotel with him on Thursday night?”
“We weren’t aware of that,” Jonah said, and he pulled a piece of paper across the table. Not to make notes, but to write a list of names. “Maeve told us she’d headed home after a dinner.”
“Probably because she didn’t think the timings were relevant, and she really didn’t want to talk about it,” Angeline said. “He told her on Tuesday that he’d left his wife for her. And on Thursday, she finally, finally gave in and slept with him, thinking it was true love. And then guess what? Having got his way, he naffed off back to Cardiff and hasn’t contacted her since. She’s heartbroken about it, and now Luke is busy undermining her when he should be having that guy thrown out of the church.”
“That’s all very useful.”
“You don’t believe me, do you?” Angeline asked bitterly. “You think she killed Zoe.”
“No,” Jonah said quietly, “I don’t. I know she didn’t kill her.”
There was a sudden, long silence. And then Angeline said hastily, “I’ve got to go. I’ll…bye.”
And then she was gone.
Jonah slid the phone back into place on his desk and stood up with an increasing sense of urgency. He beckoned for the uniform to show Felix in.
“You couldn’t have timed your arrival better,” Jonah said as Felix settled himself into one of the chairs. He waved Hanson over to him and gave her the piece of paper he’d scribbled on.
“Can you print off photos of all these people for me, and then cut them up?”
* * *
—
HANSON’S FRUSTRATION WAS gradually giving in to a sense of curiosity as she stood at the printer. Was he asking Felix to identify someone? It was an odd thing to do. Felix knew so many of the people associated with the case by name.
However, she thought, frowning down at the photographs emerging from the machine, not all of them.
* * *
—
FELIX WAS FEELING in control again, Jonah saw. There was nothing to show the shell of a man he’d been the day before. He’d accepted coffee and was now sitting back comfortably in the chair opposite Jonah’s. He was fairly sure Felix would have preferred to sit on the other side of the desk, where Jonah was.
As they waited for Hanson to use a rotary cutter to slice the photos up, Jonah said, “Can you quickly take us over what happened on Thursday afternoon?”
“In the afternoon?” Felix asked, raising his eyebrows.
“Yes,” Jonah said. “When you met your friend Esther for tea.”
Felix frowned. This clearly wasn’t the question he’d wanted or expected. “Well, I told you. She came over at four.”
“By arrangement?” Jonah asked. “Or was it a spontaneous thing?”
“Spontaneous,” Felix said. “Not some prearranged alibi…”
“Did you bump into her?”
Felix glanced over at O’Malley and then back. “Yes,” he said. “I did. She’d been up checking on her flat and I bumped into her on the stairs, so I invited her in for a cuppa.”
“Exactly which flat is that?” Jonah asked.
“I don’t know,” Felix said with a shrug. “I’ve never asked.”
“And she never volunteered that information?”
“No.”
“Was she coming down from the second floor?”
There was a pause, and Felix said, “Yes, but I’d really like to know what all these questions are pointing to. I came to help.”
“And you are helping,” Jonah said, standing and opening the door to Hanson. She handed him the sheaf of photos and he gave her a grin of thanks before returning to the desk. “Is Esther one of these women?”
Jonah laid the photos out on the table, and Felix’s hand went straight to one of them.
“That’s her,” he said. “Different hairstyle, and she wears glasses these days, but her.”
Jonah gave him a small smile that did little to show the satisfaction he felt.
“So can you tell me why you’re asking this?” Felix asked.
“Because Esther isn’t who you think she is,” Jonah said. “The woman you identified is Greta Poole.”
The door lock. That was what Aidan needed to think about. There couldn’t be many people who could have planted his prints. Whoever had killed Zoe must have had access to prints of his.
He was now sitting at the desk of the hotel room, his laptop open in front of him. He didn’t know the first thing about how to plant prints, but that was what Google was for.
He started typing “How to…” but the first search term that was suggested made him stall.
How to tell if your partner’s having an affair.
God. Was that really humanity’s most frequent query? Or was it a search result that had been triggered because Greta had searched for it at some point on one of the machines h
e used?
He felt a wave of profound sadness at the thought of her typing that in. Had she suspected something? Had she pushed the truth aside because it was too painful to think about?
He suddenly found himself desperate to know. To know whether she had been aware on some level, and what she was thinking now. Whether she was done with him, or whether there was some hope of reconciliation.
The familiar urge was too strong to ignore, though in the past it had almost always been Zoe he had been snooping on. It had started with checking her messages while she’d been in the shower, and realizing exactly how much Victor messaged her. That had made him wonder what Victor sent her on email, and it hadn’t taken him long to find out her password.
The snooping had become a habit, and it had been impossible to break it even after he’d ended things. Particularly after he’d ended things. It had been his way of feeling part of her life still. And then, finally, he’d graduated to spying through her webcam, which had let him at least watch her when he couldn’t have her.
He’d hardly ever thought of checking up on Greta. He remembered having an idle browse of her emails once or twice over the years, looking for some nice mention of himself, or for clues to what to get her for Christmas. There had never been a great deal to see. She told him everything about herself.
But now he wanted to know. He wanted to know, with a terrible intensity, what she was saying to people about him. About them. He was desperate to know what she was going to do.
He pulled out his phone, and opened up Safari. He still remembered the Gmail password she’d had a few years ago, and he doubted she’d ever changed it. She’d never been big on security.
To his grim satisfaction, her account opened for him easily. And there were her emails, all arranged neatly into folders.
The first page didn’t seem to show him anything particularly interesting, but she was a demon for filing things away. He wouldn’t really know unless he searched.
He searched for his own first name first. But that brought up, as he should have predicted, every email he’d ever sent her or she’d ever sent him, thousands upon thousands of results that would take forever to wade through. He didn’t have time for that.
He thought about searching for Zoe’s name, but realized that he’d never told her what it was. He’d kept that little piece of information back. He couldn’t bear to search for himself under “cheat,” so he searched instead for “Southampton.”
That brought up just forty results, which was much better. A bunch of Trainline confirmations, and further down, what looked like a promising email to her mother, until he realized it was from a few months ago.
He was slow to look properly at those Trainline confirmations. Slow to wonder why there were so many of them. Slower still to start wondering why they’d all come up more recently than that email to her mum from July.
He opened the first one, which congratulated her on her ticket purchase to Southampton. It was from yesterday afternoon, he saw. And it gave him a strange feeling to imagine that Greta had been there, too. Where he had been.
And then he opened the second one and saw that it was from Thursday night. It was for the nine fifty-one from London Bridge to Southampton, and the truth of what that meant hit him like a wave.
* * *
—
“JUST OVER HERE,” Lightman told the cabdriver. The large, beautifully built house was lit by a cold sun from a temporarily cloudless sky, and it seemed a little sad somehow. It was too large to be occupied by one woman. Or even by a couple, really. It needed kids. Life. Noise.
He’d booked the cab through an app, using his card, which meant no messing around with cash. He stepped straight out onto the pavement. The door opened. She’d clearly been waiting for him.
“It’s so kind of you to come,” Greta said once he was at the door.
“No problem,” he said. “I hope you’re doing OK since last night.”
“Yes,” she said, nodding and leaning her cheek against the edge of the door. “It’s been a hard twenty-four hours, but in a weird way I think realizing how much I’d missed and quite how bad it was has been good for me. I don’t think I’ll ever be that blind again.” He gave her a small smile, and she suddenly laughed. “Sorry,” she said. “Come on in.”
She moved aside, and he stepped into the house.
* * *
—
“I WAS THINKING that Aidan must have met up with someone recently, and they’d tricked him into picking up a lock before it had been installed on the door. Maybe they’d even taken the lock off their own bathroom after he’d visited. But obviously the person who was spectacularly easily placed to plant it was the woman who shared his home.”
“But we weren’t thinking about her,” Hanson said, her gaze following the signs to the motorway as they made their way north out of Southampton toward the Poole house. She couldn’t help feeling a sense of chagrin that she hadn’t been the one to figure it out. She’d made all the right connections when it came to Maeve, and had still been wrong. “She had an alibi all evening, and we thought she didn’t know about the affair.”
“And her alibi placed her in London,” Jonah added.
“But she knew all about it, didn’t she?” Hanson said quietly. “And Aidan and Zoe never realized.”
“Yes,” Jonah replied. “She’s far from stupid, and Aidan doesn’t have as much of a poker face as he’d like to think. I’m guessing she became suspicious and checked up on him. She might even have looked at his phone or computer for an innocent reason and seen messages he hadn’t deleted quickly enough.”
“But then she didn’t confront him,” Hanson said. “Which I suppose must have been either pride or a hope that he was going to leave Zoe.”
“Yes,” Jonah said. “I was assuming the latter, but maybe she plain hated the idea of it going public.”
Hanson suddenly thought of Lightman, who was probably back at the station by now. “I’d better let Ben know.”
We’re on our way to make an arrest. Are you back at base? You could probably catch us if you hurry.
* * *
—
“IT’S ON HIS desktop computer,” Greta said as she showed Lightman into Aidan’s study. “I’d never thought of looking before. Which makes me sound seriously stupid.”
“Or like you have very few trust issues,” Lightman demurred.
“Well, maybe I should have had some,” she said, her eyes gleaming in the increasingly orange sun that was illuminating the room. “I think…I think he killed her.”
Lightman nodded slowly and then looked at the screen. There was a folder open on the computer’s navigation. It was named “Lecture Notes.” And it was full of images, which Lightman did his best not to look too hard at. They were all images of violence, and almost all of them featured women.
“He’s a psycho, isn’t he?” she asked in a surprisingly steady voice. “He’s got hundreds of them. All in this folder, which was hidden from the navigation. I thought there was nothing to find until I asked it to search for files that weren’t indexed. And then…”
Lightman gave a long breath. His first thought was that someone had tried to get into the house the night before. Maybe they’d come to plant this evidence. Or maybe it really had been Aidan, trying to get in and delete it before it was found.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” he said.
“I don’t know why I didn’t think to check before.”
He felt a buzz, and he reached into his pocket for his phone. There was a message from Hanson about an arrest. Were they going to pick up Aidan? Or had something pointed them elsewhere? He itched to ask, but Greta was leaning over him to maximize Chrome.
“I looked at his browser history, too,” she was saying. “Look.”
Scattered amid ordinary searches, there were phrases like “
How long does it take to bleed to death from a wrist injury?” and “Where are the arteries in the arm?”
He frowned as he scrolled down. These weren’t all recent. Aidan clearly only used the desktop sporadically. Some of the searches were from months ago.
Was it really possible that someone else had had access to this over that long a time frame? Or had it really been Aidan?
He heard Greta’s breathing change into a sob, and he minimized the screen quickly. She had her face hidden behind her arm and was crying into the sleeve of her cardigan.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “Is there anything I can get you?”
“No, it’s OK,” she said, wiping at her eyes. “It’s fine. I’ll make a cup of tea. Would you like one?”
“Sure,” he said, even though he didn’t really want tea. He wanted to message Hanson back, but he needed privacy if she was going to tell him who they were arresting. It wouldn’t be in the least bit appropriate to let Greta see that. As she moved toward the kitchen, he called, “Is there a bathroom I can use, too?”
“Out in the hall,” Greta said.
He picked up his phone and, while walking, sent Hanson a brief message back to tell her he was at Greta Poole’s and that she had a hard drive full of evidence. He was hopeful that he’d get a reply while he was still in the privacy of the bathroom. The kettle clicked on in the kitchen, and he heard Greta pulling cups out of the cupboard.
* * *
—
“SHIT,” HANSON SAID.
“What’s up?”
“Lightman’s at Greta Poole’s house.” Jonah could feel the way her gaze came to settle on his face, appealing to him. All while his own insides jolted and seemed to get left behind somewhere down the motorway. “What should I do? Should I call him?”
