The Couple on Cedar Close

by Anna-Lou Weatherley

  Robert lifts her up by the waist onto the kitchen work surface and pulls her skirt up in one seamless move, causing her to gasp with excitement. She loved his spontaneity, particularly his sexual spontaneity. It turned her on.

  ‘Mmm.’ He kisses her hard on the mouth, pulling her underwear to the side and slipping his fingers inside of her. ‘I’m sorry I’ve been neglecting you, baby… You know I want us to be together more than ever. But my job,’ he says between kissing her mouth. ‘You know what the industry is like. You’ve got to take the gigs as and when and where they come.’ He covers her neck in scattergun kisses. ‘You know how much I love you, Law – you’re the best thing that ever happened to me. I want you to be the mother of my child, of my children…’

  ‘Uh-huh…’ she says, letting her head fall back. Her husband turned her on so much more than any man she’d ever known. There was something in his touch, something elusive that she found irresistible, like a half-remembered song. Much as she hated them spending so much time apart, she did understand. Bobby was a sensational photographer and had worked hard to accrue an impressive portfolio of clients. Her man could work a room like no one else she’d ever known. People, women in particular, were drawn to him; she understood this more than anyone. Robert had a way of making a woman feel like she was the only girl alive in that very moment.

  When Monica had introduced him to Laurie seven years previously she had been captivated within minutes; the way his eyes seemed to see right through to her very soul, like he could read her thoughts and knew all her secrets. She enjoyed watching the way he engaged with people and effortlessly brought them out of themselves; it was nothing short of a gift that had gained him many admirers.

  ‘You’re like the Pied Piper, do you know that?’ she had said to him on more than one occasion. When Robert played a tune it seemed to cast a spell on people, enchanting them and enticing them to follow him, like the Lord of the Dance. She was proud of her husband and trusted him implicitly. So what if he sometimes worked with beautiful models! She was beautiful too, and he’d chosen her; they’d chosen each other.

  Besides, Laurie was also making something of a name for herself in the design world. She had sparked the interest of various high-end clients, including celebrities and politicians, and was currently working with her bosses on the theme of a brand new luxury five-star hotel in Lake Como, Italy. Her career was taking off alongside her charismatic husband’s, and she knew they had the dual potential to become something of a celebrity couple. But what she really wanted was a baby, to give her husband what she knew deep down he craved the most: a family.

  ‘Let’s get as much practice in as we possibly can,’ he said, entering her roughly and burying himself deep inside her on the kitchen work surface, causing her to gasp aloud in pleasure as she arched her back to receive him. His phone began buzzing on the surface next to Laurie, and despite her ecstasy she automatically glanced down at it.

  ‘Where are you? I miss you. X’

  Robert’s eyes followed suit. ‘Some stupid menopausal client,’ he said, dismissing the text. He slowed down a pace but did not stop, pushing himself deeper into Laurie as he looked her directly in the eye. ‘She’s got a thing for me apparently.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Laurie smiled, raising an eyebrow. ‘Haven’t they all?’

  ‘You’ve no competition, Law. There is no competition. Anyway, she’s in her late fifties, early sixties, and is the size of a small planet.’

  ‘And if she wasn’t?’

  ‘Well then, I’d be fucking her.’

  She slapped his bare backside playfully, though niggling doubts lingered in her mind. No. She trusted him implicitly…

  ‘Bastard!’

  He pushed himself deep inside her again, taking long, hard strokes, causing her moans to crescendo.

  ‘Your bastard,’ he said as she came hard in his arms. ‘Only yours, Laurie. Always only yours.’

  Ten

  ‘Ah, Riley.’ Chief Superintendent Woods looks pleased with himself as I enter his office. ‘Looks like we’ve got an open-and-shut number with the Mills case. Laurie Mills has asked for a solicitor, so we’re waiting for Michaels or one of the other duties to show up. Shouldn’t be long now. Then we can get in there and have this all wrapped up within a few hours.’

  I blink at him. Woods appears disinterested in discussing the case any further, as though he’s already moved on mentally.

  ‘I’d say she needs psychiatric assessment before we think about making an arrest.’

  ‘Delaney reckons she’s sound enough of mind,’ he replies, rooting around for something on his untidy desk. ‘Ah, there it is.’ He locates the stapler triumphantly underneath a pile of files and, I note, a copy of Fishing Times.

  ‘Doctor Delaney, you mean?’ I say facetiously.

  Woods glances up at me and continues, ‘She’s having her prints and photos done now, then all the forensics. After that she’ll be looked over by a doctor and assessed. The wounds inflicted on her wrists were superficial. We’ll do it by the book as always, Riley. Once the doctor gives the all-clear, you can read her her rights.’

  ‘On what grounds should we arrest her, exactly?’

  Woods looks back up at me then, indignant. I knew that would get his attention.

  ‘On the grounds, Riley, that it appears she brutally murdered her bloody husband! Then made a half-hearted attempt at killing herself.’

  ‘We don’t know that, sir,’ I say, standing straight, almost to attention. ‘We don’t know that for definite.’

  ‘Well it’s certainly looking that way, wouldn’t you agree?’

  I go to speak but he cuts me off. ‘She was covered in her husband’s blood; she was the only person at the scene; there was no sign of an intruder or a break-in; the murder weapon was a kitchen knife that she’d been using to chop onions a few hours before his death. Somewhat conveniently she says that she can’t remember a damn thing; she appears to have a motive – by all accounts she’d been mouthing off to the neighbours about wanting him dead for months; lastly, she seems to have attempted to take her own life. Will that suffice?’ He certainly doesn’t bother to hide his irritation. ‘Oh, and the fact it also appears she wrote her husband a final farewell on the mirror telling him exactly what she thought of him. In the poor bastard’s own blood.’

  ‘We don’t know that she wrote that message on the mirror. Forensics haven’t come back with anything conclusive yet – no fingerprints, no analysis. At the moment all we have is circumstantial.’

  Woods shakes his head, releasing a few flecks of dandruff into the air and I think, perhaps unfairly, what a TV cliché he has gradually turned into over the years.

  ‘Do you do this deliberately, Riley?’ he says, standing now. It appears he’s been seated a while because his trousers are crumpled while the top half of him remains impeccable.

  ‘Do what, sir?’

  He’s gripping the stapler. ‘Be deliberately obtuse.’

  ‘Obtuse? No, sir,’ I say calmly, which I know will aggravate him even more. ‘I’m just saying that we have no evidence – no concrete evidence – yet.’

  ‘You know as well as I do that we don’t bloody well need concrete evidence to arrest her, to detain her.’

  ‘I’m well aware of that, sir. But I don’t think this is as open-and-shut as Delaney might th—’

  ‘Ah, so that’s what’s bothering you, is it?’ Woods interjects. ‘Delaney. What is it with you two?’ he mutters like a jaded parent.

  I avoid answering his question but this remark makes me wonder if Delaney has been saying things about me too.

  ‘What bothers me, sir, is that…’ I pause. ‘What bothers me is that we may be jumping the gun in having this one all sewn up.’

  Woods sighs heavily. ‘And what makes you say that, Riley? This is about as open-and-shut as they come and yet here you are…’ He sighs again and scratches his receding hairline once more, releasing a few more flakes of skin into the ether.
>
  I have to agree with Woods about how this looks, but something is niggling at me. Something, but I’m not sure what it is yet. ‘Intuition, sir,’ I say after a moment’s pause.

  Woods blinks at me but his appearance seems to have slightly shifted. He looks less angry and more… nervous. He doesn’t speak for a moment.

  ‘Has it ever been wrong, sir?’ I ask, admittedly quite arrogantly, but I can’t help myself. It’s how I truly feel in my guts. ‘Have you seen the suspect? Have you seen Laurie Mills?’ I ask the question knowing full well that he hasn’t, because there’s no need for him to. Most people only ever get to see the top half of Woods from behind his desk. His role is largely sedentary these days. Some of the lads joke that he could be wearing stockings and suspenders underneath that desk and no one would know. Seeing his full stature today is a rare honour. ‘She’s like a child, probably weighs around 90lbs,’ I hazard a guess. ‘She looks emaciated, anorexic, like she doesn’t have the strength to lift her own eyelids, let alone ambush a man almost twice, possibly three times her size, stab him repeatedly and almost decapitate him.’

  Woods’ narrowed eyes meet mine.

  ‘There’s no one else in the picture, Riley. It appears she executed him in a fit of jealous rage over his serial cheating, a woman on the edge by all accounts. And you know how the saying about hell hath no fury goes. I’ve had a look at the reports from the neighbours. Laurie Mills is an unhinged alcoholic, suffering from depression. The letter you found on the body was informing her of Robert Mills’ intentions to divorce her and it pushed the woman over the cliff by the looks of it. And you and I both know that size, when it comes down to it, is irrelevant.’

  I raise an eyebrow. I imagine this is a conversation he has with Mrs Woods. I feel a touch saddened by Woods’ blatant assumptions. Whatever happened to being innocent until proven guilty? Has Woods forgotten about the nuances in this job even after all his years in it, how things aren’t always simply how they appear? And what about the small matter of evidence and witnesses? As yet we’ve got nothing concrete at all. It appears Woods has decided what’s what on conjecture and assumptions alone and that he wants this one to be simple and sewn up so he can get on with reading about his tackle.

  ‘If,’ I say, ‘Laurie Mills flipped out and almost severed her husband’s neck in a fit of rage and stabbed him multiple times, then why didn’t she abscond? Why go to the bother of writing the message on the mirror? Why didn’t she stage a robbery, flee the scene of the crime, or make a better job of slicing her own wrists open? We both know that’s the usual state of play in crimes like this.’

  Woods looks irritated again. ‘Maybe she wanted to be caught – maybe this wasn’t just a crime of passion but cold-blooded, premeditated murder. Maybe she lured him to the house with a plan to butcher him and plead temporary insanity, then staged a half-arsed suicide attempt, claiming amnesia. Oh Jesus, Dan, I don’t know… It’s your bloody job to find out.’

  Uh-oh, Woods has used my Christian name. This does not bode well.

  ‘Look, just don’t be difficult for the sake of it, okay?’ He says this with a resignation that somehow gives me a sense of victory. ‘We could have this one wrapped up quickly with the CPS if you don’t go all Columbo on it.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I say, non-committal. I’m mildly offended by the Columbo reference; I’m decades younger, and I dress better. ‘But I’d like to see what forensics come back with first.’

  ‘So would I!’ he bellows. ‘If only to shut you up.’

  Woods rubs his temples with his forefingers. I tend to have that effect on him and I can’t say I don’t get a small kick out of it.

  ‘I mean, come on, Dan!’ He cocks his head to one side. ‘If she sprung him from behind with a knife it wouldn’t make the blindest bit of difference what the woman weighs, would it?’

  I stifle a smile. He’s questioning himself now. I’ve got to him, planted the seed of doubt.

  ‘Probably not, sir, but I’m telling you there’s more to this than meets the eye.’

  Woods buries his head in his hands. There’s a long pause.

  I finally break it. ‘Let me interview her. Let me and Davis talk to her.’

  Woods gets up from his desk again, I assume as some kind of statement.

  ‘Delaney’s prepped for it,’ he says. ‘He wants this one, Dan.’

  I’m sure he does, I think, imagining the power trip it would give him. That’s what men like Martin Delaney, I suspect, got into the job for: power.

  I say nothing. I let my silence speak instead.

  ‘Okay… Okay,’ he says eventually. ‘You and Delaney do it, but get this one in the bag as soon as possible, Riley. Don’t make any more work for yourself or the team simply because of one of your bloody hunches, do you understand?’

  I nod. ‘Have they ever been wrong, sir? Any of my “bloody hunches”?’

  Woods inhales, makes to speak, but seems to think better of it and waves me out the door instead.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ I say, and smile to myself as I shut the door behind me.

  Eleven

  Laurie Mills has been sitting inside the cell for what feels like days yet she knows, realistically, that it can only be a few hours at best. She’s wearing a pair of grey joggers and a matching sweatshirt that they have given her, both of which are at least three sizes too big for her minuscule frame. ‘Smallest we’ve got,’ the woman had said, expressionless, as she’d handed them over. The Chloé summer dress that Robert liked and she had been wearing has been taken from her, for, she assumes, analysis. She was shocked by the amount of blood on her clothes, her hands shaking as she’d handed them over in some kind of twilight reality. They have taken DNA samples from her, the blood on her hands, her fingerprints and nail clippings, strands of hair and her photograph. She’d sat in stunned silence as the uniformed female officer instructed her to ‘turn to the left’, ‘turn to the right’, and ‘look straight ahead’.

  The woman had been professional but almost jovial, attempting, at one point, to engage her in conversation as she moaned about the camera being ‘temperamental’. But Laurie had been unable to speak. Her larynx felt compounded by shock, like it had seized up and locked itself shut. She felt paralysed by fear, by the thousands of questions sprinting through her mind at breakneck speed, her brain unable to process one before the next presented itself. She feels trapped, exposed, humiliated. Her mind is exhausted yet still, somewhere, something tells her she should keep her wits about her. She must hold it together to prove that she did not, could not, have killed her husband. Because she didn’t, did she? She has nothing to be frightened of. The truth is non-negotiable, right? It will come out. It always does, in the end, just like his sordid love affair. She has trust in the truth, in justice, in the system.

  But she doesn’t really understand the system, does she? She sees those programmes on telly, those cases where the wrong person is convicted for something they didn’t do. Is this what’s going to happen to her?

  Panic and doubt are creeping in around Laurie like fog. Her memory of last night feels the same, foggy. Could it be that she blacked out, or is it because there isn’t anything to remember? She isn’t sure and it’s scaring her. Her whole life has seemed like a blur for so long, a dark cloud of depression. Time: she had lost all concept of it after she discovered the affair; the days had become seamless, all rolling into one somehow. Sometimes, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the accident, she had slept right through whole days, waking in a disorientated sweat, not knowing if it was day or night, or which day of the week it was. Robert had taken her life gradually. Slowly, insidiously, he had stripped her of everything, of her very joy for existence, of her essence. Over the years, Laurie realises, little by little he had been taking a piece of her day by day, killing her softly.

  She looks around the cell. It reminds her of a public toilet, like the ones you see in train stations, cold and clinical. The tiles are white, shiny, uniform ones and
she notices the walls are smooth – there are no sharp lines on which to self-harm. Angled to the left there is a metal toilet that can be viewed from the door. If you were sitting on it, someone could actually see you, not full frontal, but definitely a side glimpse. She needs to pee but can’t for this reason. She is crying but it doesn’t register with her: it hasn’t for a long time now.

  The bed she’s lying on has a thin blue mattress made of slim foam and is covered with a blue, waxy, plastic-type material. It smells of the sweat and anguish of a thousand men and no doubt a few women too. She can barely lie on it but has to every now and again, when exhaustion forces her to. She pulls the grey blanket they have given her over it to stop the smell reaching her nostrils but it’s of little comfort.

  Laurie folds her tiny frame in half as she lies down but she can’t rest. She is inside a police cell. And Robert is dead.

  Someone looks in on her, pulls the small shutter down, but she can’t see if they’re male or female and she pulls the blanket tighter up around her chest to hide her face. She feels like an animal in a cage. How can they just do this, lock her up like this, treating her like a murderer. Is she a murderer? She wonders when or if they will let her out and resists rushing to the door and pounding it with her small fists. She doesn’t have the strength anyway and this makes her angry. It’s all been taken from her. She has been robbed of everything.