by S J Bolton
‘I guess not.’ Amber felt the last trace of hope slip away. Talitha had been right, of course; she always was. Xav had been murdered.
‘So, can you? Think of anyone who’d want to harm him?’
Amber shook her head. ‘Not a soul,’ she lied. ‘I’ve never met anyone who didn’t like Xav.’
The detective glanced down at his notebook. ‘You say you saw him on Monday at Waterstock. How did he seem to you?’
Tortured. At breaking point. On the verge of throwing his entire life away. ‘He seemed fine,’ Amber said. ‘Normal. Busy at work, making tons of money, normal Xav.’
A fresh pain around her jawline, tears threatening again.
‘Interesting,’ the detective said, ‘because his wife says the opposite. She claims he hasn’t been himself for weeks.’
Amber told herself to take it slow, give the appearance of thinking.
‘Well, she’d know him best, I guess. Maybe he let her see things he didn’t show the rest of us.’
‘And he’d resigned from his job, only four days ago.’
She hadn’t known that. ‘I didn’t know that.’
He’d meant it then; Xav had been putting his affairs in order. No, he’d been closing his life down, getting ready to leave it.
‘His wife says he spent the weekend clearing out his things. She thought he was planning to leave her.’
Well, he had been, in a way. Amber shook her head. ‘News to me.’
‘You’re an old girlfriend of Mr Attwood’s, aren’t you?’
‘Xav and I went out at school. That was twenty years ago.’
‘So, the two of you haven’t been seeing each other recently?’
Amber felt a stab of relief at being able to answer a question honestly. ‘If you mean having an affair, no we definitely weren’t.’
‘And yet you resigned only the other week, for personal reasons. Within days of Mr Attwood doing the same thing. Were you worried something might embarrass the government?’
‘Xav and I were not having an affair. As far as I know, he wasn’t having an affair with anyone.’
Funny, but until it was taken away, one never appreciated the simple satisfaction of being able to tell the truth.
‘So why did you resign?’
‘I was missing too much of my daughters’ childhood – I can return to the front benches when they’re older.’
‘Can you think why Mr Attwood might be in the garden of the house on Boars Hill at midnight?’
Another question she could answer honestly. ‘I can’t, I’m afraid. We knew one of the boys who grew up there, Will, the oldest, but I haven’t seen him for twenty years. I don’t know if Xav was still in touch with him.’
‘Will Markham is in the United States.’ The detective consulted his notebook again. ‘Mr Attwood is the second friend of yours to cause you some concern in the last two weeks, isn’t that right? A Dr Daniel Redman, head teacher of All Souls’ School, has been reported missing by the staff there.’
‘We’ve been worried about Dan,’ Amber said, ‘but his residence told us he’d gone on a retreat.’
‘We?’
‘A group of old friends.’ She named Tal and Felix, the only two left now.
‘I wonder why you didn’t report his disappearance to the police.’
‘We thought about it. I wanted to. But Tal argued that if Dan simply needed some time to himself, we could be causing him huge embarrassment by making a fuss. We decided to give it some time.’
‘You see, I ran Mr Attwood’s name through the police computer, and it came up in connection with yours and Daniel Redman’s. You were all friends with Megan Macdonald, weren’t you?’
‘A long time ago.’
The detective put down his notebook and fixed Amber with a long stare. ‘Did you know that she’s missing too?’
55
Talitha realised, as she pulled into the driveway and saw the huge black windows of her home, that she hated coming back to an empty house, and she had no idea why it had taken her so long to acknowledge it.
When she’d met Mark, she’d told herself his three sons from a former marriage were a point in his favour. Loud, smelly, frequently obnoxious, occasionally hilarious, the boys had been all the children she’d ever need and would present her with grandkids one day that, again, she wouldn’t have to get too close to because they wouldn’t be her – you know – real grandchildren.
Fortnightly visits and mid-week sleepovers had been all the family life she’d needed, but now, when Mark was away, as happened so often, she wandered the endless stone floors of the house with a heaviness inside.
She sat in the drive a while longer. Gus, the youngest at seven, had stuck Marvel stickers on his bedroom window, and she’d been annoyed; the garish pictures cheapened the minimalist frontage of their home, but Mark had taken his son’s side. Now, she found herself longing for Gus’s warm, stocky body next to her own on the sofa. Gus was a cuddle machine, prepared to snuggle up to anything warm that stayed still long enough, and she’d never been especially patient with him.
Was it too late, she wondered, to have a child of her own?
The rain, that had been pouring down since she left the office, was blurring the windscreen. Talitha left the car, ran the last few paces, and let herself in. Remembering her own advice to Amber and Felix, she checked the deadlock and was putting the chain on the door when she realised that something was wrong. She should be hurrying to the burglar alarm, punching in the code that would prevent it going off, and yet the low-pitched alert hadn’t sounded. The alarm was disabled.
Only she, Mark and their housekeeper knew the alarm code, but she’d spoken to Mark earlier from his hotel room in Berlin and the housekeeper never came outside her normal hours. On the other hand, it was entirely possible that she’d forgotten to activate the alarm that morning; she had a lot on her mind at the moment.
Raindrops fell from Talitha’s coat as she hung it in the small cloakroom. As usual, it was almost impossible to find a hook and numerous coats and jackets formed a great shapeless mass that the door could hardly push back. She would have to speak to the boys about leaving so much junk here.
Her heels echoed down the hallway and the buckle of her handbag strap clattered against the granite of the kitchen worktop. She’d never realised before how noisy a house it was. The windows, taking up the entire back wall, had become a huge mirror against the darkness outside and the mezzanine gallery behind her was perfectly reflected. She could see five bedroom doors, one ajar.
Something – a twig, litter – rapped against the kitchen window, making her jump.
‘Alexa,’ she said. ‘Close the blinds.’
A second of silence and then the vertically hung blinds hummed into place. Cutting off the night should have helped, but no sooner was she enclosed in the kitchen, unable to use the windows as a mirror any longer, than Talitha had an undeniable feeling that someone was watching her. She pivoted. Still no one on the gallery, of course, but the open door was a problem. The bedroom doors were kept closed when the boys weren’t here. Someone had been up there.
On the way out of the kitchen, she stopped by the knife block. All seven knives were exactly where they should be, which was good in itself, she supposed, and she certainly wasn’t going to carry one around the house because the idea was too ridiculous.
But this was not her life as she’d known it, this was a world in which Dan had vanished and Xav had been killed. She chose a medium-sized knife, one she’d seen Mark use for chopping vegetables, because the bigger meat knives really would be absurd, and this one could be almost concealed in her hand.
The ground floor was empty. Mostly open-plan, devoid of hiding places, it was easy to inspect. No crouching assassin behind any of the leather sofas in the sitting room; in the cloakroom by the front door, the mass o
f coats was exactly that, a mass of coats; Mark’s study was a mess, but it was Mark’s mess, as he always left it. The upper floor would be trickier.
The knife handle had become slick with sweat as she climbed the stairs.
Starting with the room she and Mark shared, Talitha checked the bedrooms in turn, not forgetting the en-suites, stepping back as she pulled open wardrobe doors, all the while conscious that on the upper floor, there was no easy way of escape from the house. On the upper floor, she was trapped.
The door that wasn’t quite closed belonged to Rupert, the eldest. She stopped on the threshold and slid the knife properly into her hand. The beating of her heart became almost painful.
OK, go!
The door slammed back against the wall; out of sight, a high-pitched voice yelled. Talitha screamed, even as she leapt forward to see a sixteen-year-old boy on the bed. A smartphone had dropped to the floor, and he wore headphones that had blocked out the sound of her arrival.
‘Rupert, what the fuck?’ The sudden release of tension made Talitha yell. ‘What are you doing here?’
The thin, dark-haired boy stared back with wide-open eyes and a pitiful expression. ‘Sorry, sorry, I let myself in.’
Heart still thumping, Talitha slid the knife, unnoticed, into her pocket.
‘We’re not expecting you till the weekend. Does your mum know you’re here?’
Rupert’s face flicked from apologetic to sullen. The idiot thought he was in trouble; she’d never been more pleased to see him.
‘She thinks I’m staying with Stan,’ he said. ‘I had an argument with him.’
Stan was one of Rupert’s less pleasant friends. ‘So why not go home?’
‘Mum’s best mates with Stan’s mum. She’d make me go round and apologise so it wouldn’t be awkward.’
Stan’s mum was head of the school PTA and the sun around which the other mothers circled like lesser planets.
‘What if she phones to check on you and finds out you’re not there?’ Tal asked. ‘She’ll panic.’
‘She’s texted me three times with instructions on how to behave.’ Rupert held up his phone. ‘I replied. She knows I’m alive, just not where I am.’
Talitha sank onto the bed beside him. ‘So how did you get in?’ she asked.
‘I found a spare key last time I was here.’ Rupert’s eyes dropped. ‘You’ve got others, I knew you wouldn’t miss it.’
‘Charming. And the burglar alarm?’
He shrugged. ‘Known it for months. We all do.’
Talitha raised her voice. ‘Alexa, remind me to change the burglar alarm code.’
As Alexa scheduled a reminder, Talitha let herself smile. ‘Hungry?’ she said.
Rupert’s eyes lit up. ‘I had some crisps,’ he offered.
‘Your dad put some lasagnes in the freezer. Fancy one?’
Rupert jumped up and pulled her to her feet. He’d be taller than she was soon; he was already much stronger. Talitha touched his shoulder. ‘It’s good to see you,’ she said.
As Rupert left the room, Talitha stepped to the window to draw the blinds. On the upper floor they weren’t automated. They’d reached the halfway point when she spotted movement in the street outside. She switched off the bedroom light and gave her eyes a few seconds to adjust before going back to the window.
There was someone on the pavement outside, standing beneath a streetlight, mainly shielded by an umbrella, but her face was revealed a split second before she walked away. Megan.
‘We said we wouldn’t do this,’ Felix’s voice sounded muffled, as though he were talking through a scarf.
‘I think Megan’s outside my house,’ Talitha replied.
‘Hang on.’
The phone clattered onto a hard surface. Talitha waited.
‘If she is, she’s on foot,’ Felix said, when he’d picked up the phone again. ‘Her car’s back on the Blackbird Leys estate. Different street but same area.’
‘She was on foot.’
‘Doesn’t make a lot of sense, though. It’s a long way from Blackbird Leys to Summertown. Why walk in this weather?’
Why indeed? And now she came to think of it, the hair had been wrong. It has been short, blonde, like the Megan of old.
‘It may not have been her, I suppose?’ She’d only seen the woman for a moment.
‘Want me to come round?’ Felix offered.
Talitha could feel the tension slipping from her body, leaving it exhausted. ‘No, it’s OK. Rupert’s with me.’
‘Well, keep the doors locked.’
Late supper over, Talitha and Rupert were huddled together on the sofa – turned out Rupert was a great cuddler too – watching one of the old Marvel films, when the doorbell could be heard above the sound of the Hulk taking out an attack helicopter. Rupert groaned. ‘Mum,’ he said, opening an app on his phone.
Talitha paused the film.
‘Not Mum.’ Rupert sounded puzzled. ‘Find My Friends says she’s still at home.’
‘Wait here,’ Talitha told him.
The hallway was dark, apart from the dimmest of beams from the security lighting, meant to ensure no one need walk around at night in the dark. Talitha made no move to switch on lights, because then she’d be less able to see through the glass of the front door and make out who was standing on its threshold.
From the sitting room, came the sound of the film resuming, and that was a good thing, because it meant Rupert wouldn’t hear anything she called through the door.
Whatever happened, whatever excuse she offered, Megan was not coming in.
The dark outline of the figure on the doorstep took shape slowly as Talitha moved down the hall. Two steps away, she saw hair, shoulders, the curve of a face that she knew.
The credits were rolling before it occurred to Rupert that his stepmother hadn’t returned to the sitting room. Nor had he learned who’d been at the door. He got up, expecting to find Talitha at the kitchen counter, hunched over the laptop, as she usually was, but the great open-plan room was empty. He was about to try upstairs when a door slammed somewhere in the house; he felt a cold draught, and realised the front door was open.
‘Tal?’ He stepped cautiously along the hallway.
It was still raining outside. Rupert had his phone in his hand – of course he did, he was sixteen years old – and keeping his eyes on the doorway, he found his dad’s number. His finger hovered over the call button, but he made himself wait.
On the threshold, he could see Talitha’s car parked in the driveway; she hadn’t gone anywhere.
‘Tal? What’s going on?’ The gravel of the drive bit into his feet. He hadn’t thought to put shoes on, and the rain would soak him if he stayed out here for much longer. Already it was running into his eyes, dripping down his neck.
He didn’t need to stay out long.
The body of his stepmother lay on the gravel by the side of her car.
56
‘Do you believe in coincidence, Mr O’Neill?’
‘Of course,’ Felix said.
‘So, you’d put the deaths of two of your oldest friends, and the disappearance of a third, all within a few days, down to coincidence?’
‘No, that would be absurd,’ he said. ‘Megan Macdonald killed Tal and Xav, probably Dan too.’
The more senior of the two detectives interviewing Felix slid a photograph of Megan across the desk towards him. ‘This Megan Macdonald?’ he said.
The picture had been taken in prison, against a stark white background. Megan’s hair clung to her scalp, damp, possibly unwashed; in a face devoid of make-up, her skin seemed a mass of tiny blemishes and eczema patches.
‘That’s her.’ He pushed the photograph back. ‘Have you found her?’
‘We’re following some leads. Tell me why Miss Macdonald would want to kill
two of her oldest friends.’
‘Three. The fact you haven’t found Dan’s body doesn’t mean he’s alive. Dan wouldn’t disappear like that.’
Dan would totally cut and run, but these bozos didn’t need to know that.
‘Why would Megan want to kill anyone?’
‘There’s something not right about her. She was never right. Look what she did twenty years ago. It was brutal. And she’s spent twenty years in prison – that’s enough to send anyone nuts.’
Hardly convincing, it was all he had.
A heavy sigh answered him. Then, ‘And yet most people come out of prison as sane as they went in. Megan Macdonald has never been considered as having anything other than normal mental capacity.’
‘She’s clever, I’ll give her that.’
‘OK, let’s go with your theory for a moment. Why would she choose her oldest friends? Why not some random stranger in the street?’
‘She was angry at us. She thought we betrayed her.’
‘How so?’
Felix had spent much of the previous night awake, planning his response to exactly that question. ‘When Megan was arrested, it was a massive shock,’ he began. ‘We couldn’t believe what she’d done. I guess we turned our backs on her. We were under a lot of pressure from our parents to cut her out of our lives, and I suppose we did. The last time we saw her, not so long ago, she had a real go at us for abandoning her.’
‘And had you?’
Deliberately, Felix dropped his eyes to the desk. ‘I guess so. We didn’t visit or write. I think Talitha made some childish promise that as soon as she was a qualified lawyer, she’d represent Megan, try to get her sentence reduced, but she didn’t. Daniel was at university in Durham, where Megan was in prison, and even he hadn’t been to see her.’
‘What about Xav Attwood? Why would she want to kill him?’
Felix risked a glance up; the detective’s eyes were bloodshot. ‘That’s the easiest to explain,’ he said. ‘She had a major crush on him back in school. I think he may even have promised he’d wait for her. So, when she came out and found he was married, with no intention of leaving his wife, she flipped.’
