The Couple on Cedar Close

by Anna-Lou Weatherley

  I feel exhausted just listening to this. But Leanna is helping me to understand. To get a clearer picture of who Robert Mills really was. Someone wanted that man dead. And if she’s telling the truth, which I think she is, then it’s pretty easy to understand why.

  Cut and dry my arse, Woods.

  Thirty-Five

  ‘What do you make of that, Gov?’ Davis asks as we leave Leanna George’s apartment. ‘He was certainly spinning a lot of plates in the air at one time. I mean, how does someone do that? Convince all those women… have a wife and at least two other relationships on the go, plus a child and a job and…’

  I wonder if now is a good time to ask Davis if she’s okay – how things are at home and the other business. But I decide against it. I’m guessing she’ll reach out to me again when she’s ready.

  ‘I don’t think we’re dealing with your common or garden philanderer here, Davis. This man was an abuser. Possibly sociopathic, or narcissistic, or both.’

  I think about Laurie Mills. If four years on and off with Robert Mills almost destroyed an effervescent, vivacious and intelligent woman like Leanna George, then I can only imagine what almost eighteen years has done to her.

  ‘So, which one of them did him in then, boss?’

  ‘If I knew that, Davis, I wouldn’t currently be in Woods’ bad books.’

  ‘You’re always in Woods’ bad books,’ she says with a laugh as her phone rings.

  I zone out as Davis talks. I need to think. I’m missing something and I don’t yet know what it is. No one saw anything on the day of the murder and no one heard anything. There’s no CCTV, no witnesses, nothing. The circumstantial evidence all points to Laurie Mills – she has the biggest motive, yet her alibi is sound enough. The blanket, keeping the body warm, the writing on the mirror… This was a calculated murder and Laurie Mills, well, she just doesn’t match the profile of a premeditated cold-blooded killer.

  I need to pay her therapist a visit, get some background on her state of mind. Murray has given me a name, Dr Wells, a psychotherapist at a clinic in Islington, who specialises in trauma. But first I think I need to talk to Laurie again in person. Much as it galls me to agree with the old git, I think Woods is right about one thing: somehow Laurie Mills is the key to all of this.

  ‘We’re heading over to Cedar Close,’ I say, dropping down a gear. ‘We need to talk to Laurie Mills.’

  ‘Gov…’ The gravitas in Davis’s voice causes me to take my eyes off the road for a second and glance sideways at her.

  ‘What is it, Davis?’ I ask. The look on her face is making me nervous…

  ‘It’s Claire Wright, boss.’ Her voice sounds tight.

  ‘What about Claire Wright?’ I can feel my sphincter muscle contract. This does not sound like it’s going to be good. ‘Davis… what about her?’

  Davis looks at me in horror and puts her hand over her mouth. Then she bursts into tears.

  Thirty-Six

  Laurie wakes with a start, gasping for breath. She can tell by the low light that’s seeping through the curtains that it’s early and she lies back down onto the pillow, her breathing shallow and laboured. She’d been dreaming of Robert again. Dreaming of seeing him in the en suite, his head practically severed from his neck, the open wound oozing and glistening with blood and bone and tissue matter, like she’s taken an axe to him. She sees the look on his face, even when she’s asleep. His eyes, those eyes she had looked into a million times before, those beautiful, treacherous, deceitful eyes. They look back at her in shock and terror and surprise. And maybe something else, something else she can’t quite put her finger on. What was it? Familiarity… yes, familiarity. As if he knew.

  They say that your eyes are the windows to your soul and in that moment, the moment she’d awoken and found him there, she’d seen into them as though for the very first time in all the years they had known each other. Robert had sold his soul to the devil long ago, and yet in that moment of his death she felt sure she had seen a glimmer, a last glimpse of the man she had met in the very beginning all those years ago…

  Laurie rolls over onto her side. She’s unsure if she’s dreamt it, but a vision has appeared in her mind. One where she’s slumped over the kitchen table, drunk, wasted on vodka and Prosecco and grief. She feels the sensation of being lifted up, carried in someone’s arms and taken up the stairs; at one point her shins bash against the bannisters and she thinks she can remember the sharp pain as her thin bones make contact with the wood. It’s been bothering her; how she ended up in the guest bedroom. She has no recollection of walking upstairs. What if someone had carried her up there, in her booze- and pill-induced catatonic state? That would explain the bruises too. Is she just imagining it because her brain needs to rationalise it or did it really happen? And who carried her? She knows it wouldn’t have been difficult. She weighs next to nothing, the equivalent of a child. Perhaps the intention was to make it appear that she had murdered Robert by placing her at the scene, next to the weapon, and covering her in her husband’s blood.

  The more she thinks about it, the clearer it becomes and the more convinced she is that this is what actually happened.

  Laurie closes her eyes and attempts to focus. She can smell something – what is it? Food? The smell of dinner cooking? No. Something different. Perfume… she can smell perfume. The person who was carrying her was wearing perfume.

  Laurie thinks about getting up. She knows she must try. She’s been bedridden for almost three days now, relying solely on Monica for her most basic needs. She can barely eat a thing and as a result feels weak and incapable, like she’s shutting down inside. Perhaps it would be best if she did. After all, she’s a murderer, isn’t she? Monica had seen her with a knife in her hand through the window, fighting with Robert. She had been mad as hell. It had all culminated in murder in that moment, the betrayal and the lies and cruelty. So why does she feel sure someone else had been in the house? She could sense that there had been someone else there that evening, and she was sure that someone else had carried her to the crime scene…

  The more she thinks about it, the more she feels her memory returning, fragments of it, slow and clunky. But even if she’s right, the police will never believe her. They’ll think she’s making it up to throw them off the scent. Perhaps her mind is playing tricks on her. She had believed that nothing could ever be worse than losing her two perfectly formed children in the tragic and unnecessary way that she had. But she had been wrong again. Always wrong, Laurie.

  Despite her adrenal fatigue, Laurie suddenly feels a sense of purpose, a surge of energy course through her frail body. She will confess. She will explain everything to the police. She will tell the truth from the very beginning, that’s what she will do. She will tell them about Robert, about the years of abuse and what it has done to her. She will explain about the accident, the aftermath, her depression and the blackouts. She will come clean about the alcohol and drugs too; she will hope that the jury will show her some mercy and compassion; perhaps they will see that in many ways, she has already paid so much; she has paid for the sin of loving a disordered person by becoming disordered herself. She will atone, purge herself and somehow regain herself in the process, the woman she once was – the brilliant, successful, confident, healthy and mentally stable woman she had been before he came along. She will ask to see that detective, the nice one with the kind eyes, and tell him what she remembers.

  The truth is non-negotiable, Laurie, she hears her mother’s raucous voice inside her cluttered head. She will call her today. She will tell her mother everything. She’d always felt something of a disappointment to her ambitious and outgoing mother. Perhaps that was why her mother had all but abandoned her when she was sixteen years old to go and live in California with her rich lover. Cynthia Harris had always made her daughter feel something of a burden. Once her father had walked out on them soon after her birth, the idea of motherhood had become increasingly less appealing to the free-spirited, twenty-year-
old Cynthia. Though she had never neglected her child physically – Laurie was always clean and well presented – she had neglected her emotionally in favour of a revolving line of lovers and her career as a charity-event organiser. They say it begins at home, charity, but that was not the case in the Harris household. As a result, Laurie had become independent at a very young age, while her mother spent increasingly long hours, sometimes days, away from the home they shared. Yet she had instilled some good values in her daughter, despite a lack of her own: integrity, truth, honesty, a hard-work ethic and ambition, though Cynthia had always accused Laurie of being too kind. People see kindness as weakness, Laurie, her mother would warn, as if it was a curse to care too much about people. Maybe it was…

  Laurie thinks about her father for the first time in years. She had never met him and her mother refused to ever speak of him. He’d been studying medicine at university when he’d met her mother and had, according to Cynthia, begged her to get rid of her unborn child. Laurie wonders if her mother refused as an act of feminist defiance, rather than the desire to keep her, just to be belligerent. Despite the scant and unfavourable information from her mother about the man who was responsible for half of her DNA, she can’t help but think that he was a kind person. Somehow she feels this instinctively. Perhaps everything would’ve been different if she’d known him. Perhaps.

  She hears voices, a commotion going on downstairs, and groans. The press has been relentless in trying to secure an interview with her. She supposes that eventually she will have to speak to them. But first she will talk to the police, to that detective with kind eyes whose name she cannot remember. She will shower and dress herself, try to look like a human being again, even though she no longer knows how that is supposed to feel. Maybe she was destined for this life: a life of punishment and pain. Like some people are destined for greatness, happiness and success, perhaps others are simply destined for the opposite and there’s nothing you can do to change that. Maybe it’s all preordained and written by the gods.

  Laurie momentarily lapses into inertia, as if asleep again, her thoughts paralysing her physical body. She knows Monica will not want her to confess to killing Robert, but she must. There’s no other option, is there? If she’s capable of slaughtering her own husband, then she’s capable of anything. She’d be better off locked away. And yet somewhere, somewhere deep inside of her, past her shattered, non-existent self-esteem and the quagmire of self-loathing that courses through her every blood cell, she knows – something primal in her feels – that somehow she could not possibly be capable of such savagery. No matter how far she had fallen into the vortex of emotional torment, no matter how much alcohol and prescription drugs had altered her state of mind, she cannot accept that she is capable of killing anyone. Not even herself.

  Laurie pulls the duvet back from her body. It’s an effort in itself and already she feels defeated. But she must try. Try, Laurie, try. She swings her frail, tiny body to the edge of the bed and that’s when the bedroom door crashes open.

  Thirty-Seven

  It’s part of the nature of being on homicide to have to witness some horror. And over the years I’ve seen my fair share of it, you know, the stuff of nightmares, the kind of thing that Stephen King would balk at and that would put the willies up Wes Craven. But nothing, nothing, could prepare me for what I witness as I walk into Claire Wright’s apartment.

  I tell Davis to keep back but she’s right alongside me, hyperventilating loudly.

  There’s a deathly, eerie silence in the room as forensics set about their grim tasks punctuated by the amplified sound of cameras popping like fireworks.

  ‘The mother found them,’ Harding says. She sounds, and looks, choked up. Frankly I’d be worried if she didn’t.

  ‘When?’

  ‘About an hour ago. She was on her way to work. She does shifts at the hospital. Says she’d rung her daughter the previous evening twice and got no answer. Said it was unlike her not to pick up, that they spoke most nights. So she came to check on her, on them, and…’

  The smell in the apartment is immediately identifiable to my regrettably seasoned nostrils. It’s the scent of the onset of decay, of decomposition, of death. But there’s something else too. Another scent I pick up on. I’ve got a good nose, metaphorically speaking, and I think I can smell perfume – a faint, underlying sweet scent lingering behind the smell of death.

  I walk round to the front of the sofa where her body is resting. She’s still wearing the same nightclothes that she had on when Davis and I paid her a visit, a fluffy pink bathrobe and a shorts and T-shirt set with rainbows on them. She’s got slippers on, fluffy boot-type ones, and she’s lying on her left side in a foetal position. Her chubby legs are pulled almost up to her chest and are blue and mottled in colour, like someone’s delicately painted them with watercolours. You might assume at first glance, given the natural positioning of the body, that she was simply asleep on her couch. Until you look at her from the neck upwards that is. Claire Wright’s head is encased in a plastic bag. A clear plastic bag that gives her features a ghoulish and distorted appearance, like she’s underwater. Her eyes are wide open, her mouth forming an ‘O’ shape. It’s an unnatural sight, surreal, like something from a horror film, something created by someone else’s twisted imagination.

  ‘The baby was next to her,’ Harding informs me. ‘The crying alerted a neighbour who called the mother—’

  ‘And where is she now, the baby – Matilda?’

  ‘At the hospital, Gov. She’s critical.’

  ‘Where was she found?’

  ‘Next to the mother, nestled inside her dressing gown, poor thing.’

  ‘Injuries?’ I brace myself.

  Harding shakes her head. ‘Nothing visible. Dehydration. Poor little thing nearly starved to death.’

  I shudder inwardly.

  Davis looks visibly shaken. I think she may be crying. I think I may be crying. She moves in closer to look at Claire Wright but I put my arm out to prevent her. The three of us are silent for a moment, myself, Davis and Harding, frozen in a triangle, locked into a diabolical moment of disbelief. It’s pretty clear how Claire Wright met her end. I can’t see any visible markings on her body, no blood, no obvious wounds. It appears that she was suffocated; a horrible, terrifying death, but nowhere near as hideous as starving to death – that would be slow, and ugly.

  ‘Maybe the killer hoped that the baby would be found,’ Davis says, but I’m unconvinced. This cold-blooded bastard left a tiny, defenceless baby to starve to death next to her dead mother, and I feel such a rush of contempt that I almost have to sit down.

  It’s clear to me now that we’re dealing with a full-blown psychopath, a mentally disordered killer void of any conscience or empathy whatsoever – someone very dangerous indeed.

  I come out of my trance and snap back to the brutal reality in front of me.

  ‘They’ve found some hair, Gov.’ Mitchell appears behind me. ‘Forensics.’ I didn’t even know she was here. ‘It’s dark, brunette. Doesn’t match the deceased’s.’

  I watch as forensics bag things up and take away the contents of Claire Wright’s apartment.

  ‘There were two coffee cups, mugs, on the coffee table,’ she tells me. ‘It could be that she used them both, but one has faint lipstick marks on it. I think someone was here with her before she died. That she had a guest, or guests.’

  ‘The intercom,’ Davis says suddenly. ‘There will be CCTV.’

  I nod. ‘Get hold of it right away and put a rush on the hair, yeah. This is urgent. Seriously urgent.’

  ‘Vic Leyton’s on her way, boss,’ Davis says with her phone to her ear.

  I nod again, my brain fizzing and whirring. It hadn’t occurred to me that Claire Wright’s life may have been in danger, and certainly not her child’s. Why? What have I missed? Have I been naïve? Have I been wrong about Laurie Mills all along? Could she have killed her husband before going to the hairdressers and manipulated hi
s watch so it looked as though he’d been murdered later? It would definitely have been cutting things very fine and would’ve needed a lot of pre-meditation and certainly not much room, if any, for error. Perhaps she’s not only capable of savagely slaughtering her husband, but of murdering his mistress and their child too? I feel like I’ve messed up, like I somehow should, could, have prevented this godawful scene in front of me. It’s not a nice feeling at all.

  As Davis and I are leaving, we see Claire Wright’s mother outside in the communal area. She’s being comforted by PC Choudhry and a female officer whose name I don’t know but probably should. She’s standing but is bent almost double, wailing and crying like a wounded animal as they attempt to keep her upright.

  I go over to her, stoop down to talk to her. ‘Mrs Wright? You’re Claire’s mother, yes?’

  The poor woman manages to look up at me, though it’s clear she’s in a state of complete shock and unimaginable grief. Whatever memories this woman has of the child she had carried and given birth to, brought up, nurtured and loved, will be contaminated by the truly sickening scene she’s been forced to witness today. Every parent’s worst, most horrific nightmare realised – her daughter’s head encased in a plastic bag, her baby granddaughter dying next to her. I know that the images she’s seen will haunt this poor lady until her last breath. People don’t get over that kind of stuff. They simply have to find a way to live with it. She’s nodding as she cries and wails. Her body cannot keep still; she’s twitching and lurching as though the pain is forcing its way into her limbs like a diabolical entity possessing her.