A Shred of Evidence (36 page)

“Did you see anyone else?”

“Mrs. Cochrane,” Hannah said. “Well—I saw the dog first, and then her.”

The silence that fell after she had said that was clearly unnerving her.

“Go on,” Tom said, encouragingly, and this time the look that he got suggested that if he uttered another word Judy would garotte him.

“The dog was running about, but he still had his lead on, and …” She tailed off, looked at Tom.

He didn’t let his expression change.

“Mrs. Cochrane was running up from the depot,” she said.

Judy sat silently, writing in her notebook, not even looking at the girl.

“I thought she was chasing the dog, but she wasn’t, she was—” Hannah broke off.

There was a long moment before she spoke again.

“She was chasing Natalie,” she said, her voice small.

Judy still didn’t speak; Tom felt sorry for the girl, having to tell her halting story without the comforting reassurance of questions. It seemed very hard on her.

“She caught up with her at the big pipe,” Hannah went on, eventually.

Stony silence, until Hannah’s hoarse, damaged voice began again.

“She pushed her head against the pipe. Natalie sort of slid down, and …” She looked down. “I ran away,” she whispered. “She must have seen Colin’s car.”

Still nothing from Judy, not even now that the girl had told her what she had witnessed. No feedback, no encouragement, no reaction at all. She just sat there, calm and poised, the very opposite of the little girl across the table from her.

“I never thought she would kill her,” Hannah said defensively.

A reaction then, at last; a fleeting reaction, as a mixture of anger and sorrow of almost personal intensity crossed Judy’s composed face just for an instant, then was gone. She still didn’t speak.

It hadn’t occurred to Tom until that moment that Judy might be finding this difficult too—she had seen the girl so soon before she was murdered, after all. Now she was talking to someone who could have stopped it, could have got help, and who had been too afraid of the consequences, too embarrassed by what would come out about her fantasy life, to do anything at all.

Judy wrote in her notebook for a moment or two, then finally spoke again. “Did you see anyone else at that point?” she asked.

Hannah nodded. “Mr. Murray,” she said. “As I was running towards the footpath to Ash Road. He had a pair of shoes in his hand, and I realized that he was the one who’d been with Natalie.”

“Hannah,” said Tom gently, now that the silence had been
broken, and he felt free to join in. “Why didn’t you tell Mr. Murray what was happening? You knew that Mrs. Cochrane had got hold of the wrong end of the stick—you knew he could sort things out.”

“I didn’t want to get involved,” said Hannah. “I just wanted to get away.”

Murray had said that Hannah had looked frightened. He had thought that she was frightened of him, had thought that that was why she had stayed away from school. But it had been the furious Erica Cochrane that Hannah had been afraid of on the Green, it had been Erica Cochrane that she had wanted to avoid.

“He went over to the depot and I think he must have left the shoes there.”

As ever, Judy wrote that down too, then looked up, her face stern. “I can understand your being frightened and confused at the time,” she said. “But once you found out that Natalie was dead, why didn’t you tell anyone what you had seen?”

“I was too scared to tell anyone. I … I’d lied to my mum about the drama group last term.”

“Oh?” said Judy and Mrs. Lewis in unison.

Hannah looked shame-facedly at her mother. “I told you it went on until nine, because that’s when Colin usually finished his run.” She looked down at her hands.

“But, Hannah,” said her mother. “You had seen that woman attack Natalie! What did that matter?”

“I was scared to say what I’d seen,” Hannah said, and looked up at Judy. “Because you were interviewing Colin, and that was all my fault.”

It was all perfectly possible, thought Tom. Panic, shock, did strange things to people. No reason to suppose that it was anything but the truth, and yet he too looked at his inspector and he knew that she didn’t believe a word of it.

“How was it your fault?” demanded her mother.

Hannah’s eyes hadn’t left Judy’s. “I knew you must have found the letter saying I would meet him, and think it was from Natalie. That’s why I wrote that one on Wednesday night, because I knew Colin had never been there.”

“What do you mean, you wrote one on Wednesday night?” asked her mother.

“Mrs. Lewis,” said Judy, dangerously near the end of her tether. “You must allow us to ask the questions.”

Mrs. Lewis sighed loudly.

“Tell me about yesterday evening,” Judy said crisply.

“My mum told me that Kim was coming back to the main school to see Mr. Murray. I went over to meet her.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “I’m not really sure,” she said. “I wanted to see her. I think I might have been going to tell her what I’d seen.”

Tom frowned. “You think?” he queried.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I was getting desperate to tell someone—I knew I should have told the police, and I was scared of what might happen because I hadn’t. I think I wanted to talk to her, that’s all.”

Yes, Tom could see that she might want to confide in a friend.

“But you didn’t,” said Judy. “You didn’t talk to her—you left before she came out of her meeting with Mr. Murray.”

“Because Mr. Murray saw me and recognized me,” explained Hannah. “I wasn’t sure what he wanted. He’d been with Natalie, and I thought he’d want to talk about what had happened. I didn’t want to talk to him—I just got on my bike and …” She looked at Tom again, having sensed a more sympathetic response than she was getting from Judy. “The next thing I knew there was a car heading straight for me,” she said

Tom said nothing, and Hannah continued.

“I was a bit dazed after I came off the bike. The first thing I really remember is being in her car, and then we were in the Cochranes’ garage.”

She was looking at Judy again now, as she spoke.

“We went into the kitchen, and she fed the dog. That’s when I took the knife.”

They had wondered where the knife had come from.

“Why?” asked Judy.

“Just … for protection.”

“It’s just as well she did!” said Mrs. Lewis. “Are you going to charge her with that, too?”

Judy ignored her. “Did you have any reason to think that she would attack you?”

“She had shouted at me,” Hannah said. “Earlier on. At the school.”

Judy’s eyebrows rose, and she wrote that down. “What about?” she asked.

“A crowd of us used to hang about their house,” Hannah said. “To see Colin. She didn’t like it, and Colin asked us not to go. When the others stopped, I still went. She recognized me from then. She said it was my fault Colin had been arrested.”

“So, after what you’d seen her do to Natalie, you thought you might need protection?” asked Tom.

“Yes,” said Hannah. “The cutlery drawer was open, and I could see this knife, so I just … took it. While her back was turned.”

“Go on,” said Judy, her voice hard.

“Then she took me to that flat,” Hannah said. “She said she knew somewhere I’d be safe. I had let her think that I thought Mr. Murray had killed Natalie, so she was pretending she was trying to protect me. She made tea—she said we had things to discuss.”

“What things?” murmured Judy, as she wrote.

“She asked if I had written the letters. I told her I had.”

“And what happened then?”

Judy was still being cool and efficient and detached. Possibly even not detached. Maybe hostile would be a better word, which was really very odd. She didn’t seem to give a toss about Hannah’s feelings.

“I was looking at her books—she was standing beside me, talking about the letters, and then she … she …” The girl tailed off.

Oh, God, here we go again, thought Tom, as Judy waited.

“She just suddenly pushed me, said that she had killed Natalie because she thought she’d been with Colin, but she had got the wrong one. I got the knife then, but she caught my wrist and made me drop it, and pushed my head hard against the
corner of a shelf. It made me sick, and she pushed me down on the floor and sat on me.”

The doctor’s examination had told them most of that. The cuts and bruises were ones that they saw quite often in casualty on a Saturday night after the pubs closed. Hannah had vomited, another aspect of hand-to-hand combat not unknown to the medical profession.

“She was pulling her tights off. I could feel the knife underneath me—I got it and stuck it into her, but it made no difference. I tried to push her away, but she put the tights round my neck and pulled them tight. I couldn’t breathe—but I could hear people at the door, calling out. I managed to stick the knife into her again. That’s all I remember until I was in the ambulance, really.”

Now, the DI closed her notebook. “Your recollection’s very clear,” she said. “Thank you, Hannah. I’ll get someone to type up your statement, and then you can sign it.” She stood up, neatly putting her chair under the table. “You might want to think about what you’ve said—you may want to add to it, or alter it,” she said.

Hannah shook her head.

“Well, think about it anyway,” advised Judy. “I hope not to keep you too long. In the meantime, perhaps you’d like to get something from the canteen?”

WPC Alexander bore Hannah and Mrs. Lewis off to the canteen, but Judy wasn’t exactly breaking her neck to get this statement typed by anyone.

“Let’s talk to the DCO,” she said, her face grim.

Lloyd sat at his desk, finch and Judy facing him, and sighed.

Tom Finch was of the very strong opinion that this case was closed. But. But, there was always a but. But Judy was immovably convinced that Erica Cochrane had done nothing at all to either Natalia or Hannah.

Listening to Hannah had been like listening to a short story on the radio, she had said. You could hear the fiction being woven. Her drama lessons hadn’t been wasted on her; all the improvisation techniques had been put to good use. But not, Judy had said, good enough use. Hannah had been too busy mooning over Colin Cochrane in the drama group to learn how to act all that convincingly.

Natalia’s friend Kim, it appeared, had cast some doubt on Hannah’s story. Not much her eye-witness account could have been of an abduction. But she certainly hadn’t seen it like that at the time, and even the events of last night hadn’t swayed her, which did merit serious consideration.

Lloyd would like nothing better than to tell Cochrane that at least his wife had not been a murderer, but that was beginning to look very unlikely, because whatever Judy and Natalia’s best friend Kim thought, Hannah’s story was hard to fault in any detail.

“Come on, guv,” Finch said. “We’ve got a result—you know we have.”

That was just what they didn’t have. They had, as far as he could see, a draw. If Lloyd had felt like a substituted player before, he now felt like nothing more than a referee. Finch had
all the evidence on his side, and Judy only had her instinct. But Judy’s instinct was something that Lloyd would, if he had to, bet his life on.

She was saying that Hannah Lewis was their psychopath, and if her instinct was right, then the appalling truth was that unless she could prove it they would, in the end, have to let her go. They could bring charges with regard to Erica Cochrane, but no court would let them hold her in custody on that, and her self-defence plea would be accepted by the CPS as unshakeable.

Judy believed with all her heart and soul that Hannah could and would murder anyone else who crossed her—like her mother, for instance. Or Kim. Or Patrick Murray. They had all irritated her in the very recent past. And it was Mrs. Cochrane who was dead, like Natalia’s best friend Kim had pointed out. It was Hannah who had taken the knife.

So the referee was playing extra time, much to his sergeant’s bafflement, but Finch kicked off with as much vigour and enthusiasm as he had shown at the beginning of the match.

“Erica Cochrane thought she saw her husband at it with Natalie,” he said. “She lied to us about what had happened that night. Hannah’s not making that up, is she?”

“No.” Judy looked up from her notebook, which she had been studying without success.

Her note-taking had let her down this time, thought Lloyd. Or her instinct, with any luck. But he had a dreadful suspicion that it was her note-taking.

“But even if Mrs. Cochrane didn’t tell us about the car,” Judy went on, “she told us that Natalie was alive when she saw her first. Why would she do that if she had killed her? Wouldn’t it have been safer just to say she’d found the body?”

“That
was
what she said,” Finch reminded her. “To start with.” He warmed to his argument. “Think about it, guv,” he said. “She only told us that she had seen Natalie alive once I had asked her about the car. But I didn’t tell her why I was asking about a car, did I?”

Judy frowned a little, and checked back through her notebook. “No,” she said. “You didn’t.”

“She assumed someone had seen it—she thought she’d landed her husband right in it.
That
’s when she said Natalie was alive when she saw her first—not before. Because she thought he would have been home by ten, and out of the frame.”

One nil, back to the middle of the park. Judy’s turn to kick off now.

Right on cue, she did. “But you thought then that she was simply trying to protect her husband—not that she had actually done it. I still think that is what she was doing. She thought Cochrane was the last person to have been with Natalie before the murderer, and she was just keeping him out of it.”

“She had just topped the kid,” said Finch.

“If she had just murdered Natalie, why didn’t she go home the way she had come, along the pathway?” asked Judy. “That way she could have kept her head down, and not got involved. Why was she climbing the banking at all, if it wasn’t in order to get to the phone?”

“She was running away from the scene of a crime—she thought her husband was at home, and she could hardly go home in that state, could she? And she
was
in a state—remember?”