by Kate Medina
Workman nodded. ‘This may sound like an unnecessary question, but I do need to ask what you were doing last night between the hours of ten p.m. and one a.m. this morning.’
Valerie smirked. ‘You’re not really sizing me up as Hugo’s murderer, are you?’
Workman met her smirk with an apologetic lift of her shoulders. ‘I’m sorry, but I do need an answer.’
‘I was having dinner and playing bridge with some friends in Bosham. I arrived at seven-thirty p.m., give or take a few minutes, and left at around midnight. I’ll give you their number.’ She ducked inside for a minute and returned proffering a sheet of cream notepaper with the names Dan and Margaret White written on it and a local phone number scribbled beneath. ‘And I didn’t nip over to my stepson’s house to butcher him and his wife on the way home.’
Workman returned her cynical half-smile with a hollow one of her own.
‘No, I’m pretty sure that you didn’t.’ She held up the piece of paper. ‘Thank you for this and, once again, please do accept my condolences for the death of your stepson and his wife.’
15
Darkness had fallen by the time Jessie dragged her exhausted body and brain from the Fullers’ crime scene and drove home, the twin cones of her Mini’s headlights picking out silent country lane after silent country lane, no one seeming to be out and about on this chilly autumn Sunday evening. She was slightly ashamed to admit that she had glanced quickly through her rear passenger window to check that the back seat and footwells were empty, before opening her driver’s door, climbing in and locking it immediately behind her. Ridiculous, she knew. As if anyone who could do her damage would be small enough to squeeze into a space that struggled to house a supermarket bag full of shopping. But still, she’d felt tense and jittery walking down the Fullers’ gravel drive on her own, back to her car, those horrific murders and the disturbing nature of the crime scene having already wormed their way deep into her psyche.
She parked outside her cottage as the clock nudged nine p.m. The lights were off downstairs, but a pale rectangular light shone through the lounge window – Callan must be sitting on the sofa, working on his computer. But when she opened the front door, she saw his computer lock screen, the badge of the military police floating on a snowscape, and an immobile Callan-sized shape, flat out on the sofa. Grabbing her knitted argyle throw from the chair, she draped it gently over him. His face, in the semi-darkness, was pale as the gritty wheat throw, and though he didn’t stir, his eyes were flickering from side to side underneath his lids. Dead asleep, but his mind agitated nonetheless.
What are you thinking about, Callan? The contents of that letter?
She had forgotten to return his phone calls and now, sensing it was better not to wake him, she couldn’t ask. Her gaze found his coat, hanging on the rack. Would the envelope still be in its pocket? Though she felt a strong pull to tiptoe over and check, she knew that she wouldn’t. She was obsessive about privacy. When she had lived with her father and his new wife Diane, in their narrow terrace in Fulham, she had understood that every day when she went to school Diane would be in her room, looking through her stuff, invading her privacy, just because she could. Diane always left something out of kilter, so that Jessie would know. And then at Hartmoor Mental Hospital, eyes had watched her through the sliver of reinforced glass in the door that trapped her, against her will, in that tiny prison room. Nothing private; nothing sacred, not body or mind.
She trailed her fingertips across Callan’s forehead, her heart swelling with love. His skin felt cold, but clammy with fevered sweat. Pulling the throw further up, she tucked it in around his shoulders. Still, he didn’t stir. Ducking down, she pressed her lips to his forehead, then headed upstairs to bed.
16
She was jerked into consciousness, suddenly and sharply, by a noise that she’d used to cringe and block her ears against when she was at school. Fingernails scraping down a chalkboard. Frowning, she rolled over, hooking an arm and leg over Callan, tucking her face into the warm, concave space between his neck and shoulder. He stirred, but didn’t wake. When had he come upstairs and got into bed? She didn’t know; hadn’t woken.
The noise came again, louder this time, and even though she moulded herself to Callan’s solid, safe bulk and yanked the duvet over her head, she could still hear it.
Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
Razor-sharp nails clawing down board, or wood, making her teeth grit and goosebumps rise on her skin. Rolling away from Callan, she slid out from under the duvet. Her bedroom was cold – not the normal night-time cold of radiators gone to sleep, but ice-box cold, depths-of-midwinter cold, the type of cold that burrowed through to the very core of your bones. She pulled her dressing gown from the back of the bedroom door and shrugged it on, wrapping the tie tight around her waist, hauling the collar up around her neck. It was jet black outside, she saw from the bedroom window, the moon a bold splash of white gold high in the sky, casting no light on the fields below.
Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
The noise was coming from downstairs. A ridiculous image of Miss Coffs, her GCSE maths teacher, rose in her mind, skinny and impossibly posh in her tweed suit, with her coiffed Margaret Thatcher hair, standing in her tiny sitting room, dragging one carnation-pink-polished nail down a line of quadratic equations. The thought made Jessie cringe and smile in equal measure.
It was cold on the landing as well, as if every window in the cottage had been left open, letting the outside flood in. And now that she was walking down the stairs, she could hear another sound too, that of lapping water. Had she left the kitchen tap on?
As she stepped from the bottom stair into the sitting room, she sank ankle-deep into ice-cold water. She yelped, hopping from foot to foot until the cold had numbed her skin and she felt it no more.
Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
No Miss Coffs in her lounge, but still the sound of her carnation-pink nails. She sloshed across the lounge. At the kitchen window loomed a huge, pale shape, its hand raised as if to snatch her attention. Not a hand though, she realized with sudden horror, but a paw, a massive, pale wolf’s paw, razor-sharp claws bared.
Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
She swallowed.
My mind is playing tricks. A dream – it has to be.
She could barely breathe. She wanted to scream, to run back upstairs to Callan, to hide under the duvet and press herself against his safe, warm bulk, but she couldn’t move, not a muscle.
Wake up. Control your body.
Instead, she watched helplessly as her hand stretched out and grasped the key in the lock, her fingers working to their own tune, turning, swinging open the door, letting in … letting it in.
The chill night air sliced through her skin. A freezing breeze ruffled her hair and flapped the hem of her dressing gown around her knees. The silence was absolute and she could smell something primeval, musty. She wondered if there was a place one reached where it was impossible to feel more afraid, and if there was, she was there, breathless with terror, trapped and helpless inside her own body.
One step at a time, her foreign legs bore her outside, eyes casting around for that huge, pale creature she had seen through the window.
Where had it gone?
Behind me? She spun. No, nothing, just the kitchen door gaping open, an empty expanse of pale ceramic tiles shiny with damp, water leaking over the threshold and pooling around her bare feet.
A noise. A whimper.
She twisted back to the dark garden. And saw him. Not the pale monster, but Lupo, sitting in the centre of the lawn. Deep gashes ran down his face and his eyes were gone, but there was something in those depthless black sockets that pleaded with her, begged her to let him in, save him.
‘Jessie, what the hell are you doing?’
She leapt and spun again.
Callan was standing on the doorstep. He looked hard, and solid and safe, and all she wanted to do was to hurl herself against him, but her body still wouldn�
�t cooperate, so she remained where she was in the middle of the freezing lawn, shaking and shivering.
‘Jessie!’
‘Lupo,’ she called.
‘What?’
‘I thought I saw Lupo in the garden. The Fullers’ dog. Lupo.’
‘You were sleepwalking.’
She shook her head. Had she been? ‘No, I was awake. I felt awake.’
‘Come in now. It’s freezing.’
She met his gaze dully and nodded. She felt as if she was floating underwater, everything muffled by dense liquid, her movements slow and ponderous. Should she tell him about the … the what? The animal? The wolf? That huge pale figure at the kitchen door? No – she knew that she wouldn’t. He’d think that she was crazy. Perhaps she was crazy.
‘What time is it?’ she murmured, instead.
‘Just past midnight.’
‘Not late. I thought it was three or four, that I’d been asleep for hours.’
He shook his head, held out his hand. ‘Come inside, gorgeous. Come back to bed.’
Jessie nodded. She let herself be led meekly inside, stood while Callan locked the kitchen door behind her, felt his strong arm slip around her shoulders and guide her upstairs. But still that image of a broken, bloodied Lupo filled her mind.
17
‘Hugo Fuller had decidedly questionable morals, by the sound of it, but that doesn’t mean that he and his good lady wife deserved to die.’ Marilyn cleared his throat, a grating sandpaper rasp in the silent room. ‘Far from it. Very far from it. Now, any questions for me before we hear from our resident clinical psychologist, Dr Jessie Flynn?’ His gaze tracked along the rows of assembled faces, before alighting, settling, on Jessie’s. He raised his arm, gesturing to the gaping space beside him at the front of the room. ‘The floor is all yours, Dr Flynn.’
Resident clinical psychologist, Dr Jessie Flynn.
She couldn’t remember the last time Marilyn had referred to her formally, except in jest. Pushing herself reluctantly to her feet, grabbing her notebook, just something to hold to calm the shake in her hands, though it contained no notes related to the case, she rose and skirted around the chairs to join Marilyn at the front of the incident room. Twenty cynically expectant faces stared back at her, a sea of crossed arms and legs echoing the facial expressions, none of it confidence-boosting. Jessie’s gaze flicked quickly to the huge whiteboards paving the walls, where the fledgling investigation played out in crime-scene photographs; schematics of the Fullers’ house and the woods hemming it; maps of the local area already marked with likely approach routes to the house and escape routes from it – multiple approach and escape routes, needles-in-haystacks multiple, courtesy of the house’s grandiose isolation; as well as flipchart sheets, each filled top to bottom with ‘to-do lists’. Just the beginning. The first few broad-brush strokes that would be painstakingly fleshed out, coloured in with many hundreds of hours of mainly terminally tedious grunt work.
Unless.
Unless they caught a break.
Her job, to catch them that break. She wasn’t sure that she was up to it.
‘OK, uh, thanks for coming in,’ she said. Her voice wavered and she was angry at herself for it.
‘They didn’t have choice,’ Marilyn cut in. ‘It’s called work and they get paid to be here.’
Jessie joined the ripple of laughter with a muted smile. Marilyn had sensed her unease, she realized, and the joke had been his way of lightening the atmosphere after the deadening video walkthrough of the Fullers’ house. The sight of the couple’s ravaged bodies – Hugo Fuller’s in particular – had been almost as horror movie on the screen as it had been in real life, and Marilyn was perhaps trying to demonstrate that they were all on her side, or the same side at least. But his casual aside served only to knock her off her stride. She had been all set to begin, keyed up, focused.
She flicked open her notebook and glanced unseeing down at the randomly opened page, buying herself time. Why on earth did she feel so nervous? Because she’d done nothing but one-on-ones with individual patients for years? Her job, getting into the mind of one person, not selling her ideas to twenty. Or because, although she had helped Marilyn on two previous investigations, this was the first time that she had been wheeled out as an expert from the get-go? Surveying the faces in front of her, most of whom had been on the force for years, she felt like a one-eyed man called in to guide the fully sighted through Daedalus’ labyrinth.
‘OK, so, uh, it’s personal,’ she began. ‘I believe that it’s personal, that the killer has some personal connection to the Fullers, most likely to Hugo Fuller.’
A man’s voice, calling out from the back of the room. She didn’t see whose. ‘Why most likely to Hugo Fuller?’
‘Because I think that he was the intended target. The autopsy will confirm or refute, but I think that his wife was killed first, tied up and drowned in the swimming pool, while he was made to watch. So, while she clearly suffered, he suffered more.’
Another man’s voice. ‘What if he didn’t like his wife?’
A burst of harsh laughter, too loud, graveyard humour to paper over the canyon-sized cracks of tension and unease in the room.
‘It’s irrelevant,’ she said when it had died down, her smile fading too, readopting the mask of professionalism to paper over her equally canyon-sized confidence cracks. ‘Even if Fuller didn’t like his wife, by killing her first, the murderer was deliberately drawing out the torture for him. For any human being, however cold or lacking in morals, seeing another human being killed, someone you have lived with and potentially loved at some point, would be incredibly traumatic. And also, he would have known what was coming, known that he was next.’
‘Isn’t it possible that the killer tied Fuller up to keep him subdued while he did the wife and that it was nothing to do with watching or drawing out torture?’ the same man challenged – a middle-aged, dark-haired, jowly man who Jessie didn’t recognize. ‘There was most likely only one killer, wasn’t there, DI Simmons, and Fuller was a big man.’
Jessie looked across at Marilyn, waiting for him to answer.
‘The forensic evidence we have, limited to footprints so far, suggests that there was only one killer,’ Marilyn said. ‘A man. Other forensic evidence collected at the scene has been sent to the labs and is being expedited, so that may yet prove us wrong, but, yes, we are ninety-nine per cent sure that this crime was perpetrated by one man.’
‘Right,’ the man at the back continued. ‘There was one killer and two victims and so he probably couldn’t have handled both at once. And, as I already said, Fuller was a big man.’
‘If he had just wanted to kill both of them by the most expedient method, he would have killed Claudine Fuller in the downstairs hallway, when she opened the door to him,’ Jessie said, adding for clarification: ‘To the dog … to what she thought was the dog. Then he would have come into the swimming pool and killed Fuller. Fuller was lying on a lounger facing away from the patio where the intruder entered. The only light onto the patio was the dim reflected light from the swimming pool’s conservatory. There is a solid door and a changing room between the hallway and the swimming pool area and the swimming pool has noise – the sound of the air-conditioning system, the pool filter, the bubble of the Jacuzzi. It’s unlikely that Hugo would have heard his wife being killed, so he still would have been surprised. I believe that the set-up was deliberate and that the murderer wanted Hugo Fuller to watch.’
‘So you’re saying that Hugo Fuller knew the killer?’ DC Cara asked.
‘Not necessarily. Fuller may have known his killer personally or he may never have actually met him. But yes, I would say, without doubt, that something Fuller did, either to this man, or to someone he loved, was a driver for the murders.’
‘Why?’ asked Sergeant Arthur Lawford, the exhibits officer, frowning. He was a veteran of forty years, had started in Major Crimes when Marilyn was in short trousers (though Jessie had trouble imagining
Marilyn in anything apart from his battered black leather biker jacket and faded black jeans, or one of his identikit, drainpipe-legged, black suits), and Lawford was happy to languish at sergeant level, had no desire to be a star player. She met Lawford’s insipid blue gaze.
‘The murders, particularly that of Fuller, were exceptionally violent, but not in a way that demonstrates impulsive aggression or lack of control. To my mind, the crime scene demonstrated a very planned and calculated level of aggression, of nastiness for want of a better word, that to me says personal. The killer wanted Hugo Fuller to suffer, not just physically but also, and more importantly perhaps, psychologically. For the whole time the perpetrator was tying up and killing Claudine Fuller, Hugo would have known … known what was coming and he almost certainly would have known why, worked out why. Or been told why, if he couldn’t work it out himself.’
Jessie’s mind filled with an image, the swimming pool, the heat, a big man tied to a wooden lounger, struggling hard, knowing that it was futile, that he couldn’t free himself, then offering the killer inducements, anything he wanted, anything, just to stop. And when he realized that the killer couldn’t be bought, crying, howling, begging.
‘Tears,’ she murmured.
‘What?’ Marilyn asked.
‘Tears,’ she repeated, lifting a hand to indicate the photographs tacked to the board behind her, but not turning to look herself. She’d had her fill of Hugo Fuller’s injuries this morning, in addition to another painful shot in the arm when she’d let her eyes graze around the walls while she’d been finding her confidence at the beginning of this meeting. She didn’t need a third dose. ‘I’ll bet that there are tears mixed with the blood on Fuller’s face. He would have struggled and fought, to start with, maybe been angry, abusive. Then he would have tried to bribe the killer, boasted about his wealth, offered the killer anything, anything, to stop. But then, as the horror show playing out in front of him progressed, he would have realized that he was fucked, and he would have cried. Cried and begged …’
