Dead Secret (24 page)

“We need to talk about Bradley Turner now that we can prove he was following Amy. Even though we have only Simon’s say-so on that.”

“His flatmate provided him with an alibi,” Ava said.

“Simon’s mother provided him with an alibi,” Neal replied, guessing that his sergeant was silently bemoaning that a total of fifteen students, and not an individual, had provided Christopher Taylor with his alibi.

“PC Jenkins interviewed the flatmate — Josh something or other. Confirmed what Bradley said — they’d been out drinking all afternoon, got home and crashed out. They were both sick as dogs the following morning.”

“Go through her interview with a nit comb, interview the flatmate and Bradley again, if necessary. Make sure Jenkins follows up on the pubs they’d been to, possible witnesses to their presence there,” Neal said, “see if you can find a loophole in the story that PC Jenkins missed.”

“Yes sir,” Ava replied, a little wearily.

“Thoroughness, remember?” Neal said, picking up on her lack of enthusiasm, “Attention to detail, that’s what solves cases. That, and catching a break,” he said, sounding a bit weary himself.

“Ava,” he said, as an afterthought, acknowledging his own tiredness. Her first name had slipped out and felt comfortable on his lips, “Tomorrow will do. Go home, rest that foot and get some sleep. It’s been a long day.”

* * *

Simon was so quiet and still on the short drive home that Anna feared a regression to the closed-in state he had been in when he first came to her, broken and traumatised by witnessing his mother’s death. Now that he was returned to her, she felt ashamed of her earlier feelings of wanting to reduce him to a state of dependence, so that she could keep him safe from harm forever. Now, all she wanted was for her son to be whole again, even if that meant she would have to release him into the world to take his chances with everyone else.

Back in the flat above the shop, Simon did not go immediately to his room and close the door as Anna half thought he might. Instead, he sat down in his favourite chair, the one that, as a small boy he had curled up in with her to listen to her read a seemingly endless number of books. His thirst for stories had been insatiable. The first day she saw him in the library she had known he was a child who loved books. He had chosen a book about giants immediately, and settled down on a beanie cushion in the children’s library not stirring until the teacher called time on the rest of her unruly class.

He was still sitting in the chair when Anna returned from the kitchen with two mugs of coffee and a packet of chocolate digestives.

“Thank you,” Simon said, quietly as she placed his mug on the coffee table before him. It was his favourite mug, the one with Spiderman on it, that he had received one Easter years ago with a chocolate egg in it wrapped in red foil, Anna recalled. Funny the things to do with your children that stick in your memory.

“You’re welcome,” Anna said, smiling at him.

“I don’t mean just for the chocolate — and the biscuits — and the mug,” Simon said, solemnly. “Thank you for adopting me, for looking after me, for loving me all these years.”

Tears shone in Anna’s eyes, then rolled down her cheeks. She wiped them away with the back of her hand, reached into her sleeve for a tissue, and dabbed her face.

“I’m sorry I caused you worry. I thought you’d let me down. Now I know that when you gave the police that false alibi before I even had a chance to speak or explain where I’d had been, it wasn’t because you thought I’d killed Amy — it was because you wanted to buy me time, hear my story first so that, if necessary, you could make sure I didn’t incriminate myself. I know you never wavered in your support for me.”

Anna wanted to ask him why he had disappeared, but she waited, hoping he would open up further.

“All I could think after the evening when we bumped into that police officer was how everybody was going to think I killed Amy because I’d been . . . following her.” He looked at Anna and she nodded to show that she knew about it. “I would never have hurt her; I wish I’d waited outside the cinema, seen her safely home, but it was then I had the . . . flashback.”

Anna felt suddenly faint with the thrill that pulsed through her, a mixture of trepidation, excitement and hope. Was it possible Simon was at last dealing with the traumatic event in his past that had been so long suppressed?

Over the years there had been intermittent fallout: the nightmares he had suffered in his early years with her; the aloofness followed by clinginess; the mood swings in his early adolescence, the worrying signs that he was succumbing to depression as he entered young adulthood; could they now be consigned to the past so that he could embrace his future unencumbered by the baggage from his childhood? That dreadful, over-used cliché of a word was what he needed now. Closure. “Go on,” she encouraged.

“I was standing on the pavement outside the cinema wondering what to do. I decided to go back to my flat at the uni, maybe see if Gary or Ric or one of the others fancied going out. I started walking home, thinking of Amy and Nancy. I’d just turned into Tanner’s Close — you know where I mean, just off the bottom of the High Street, near the river.” Anna nodded. She knew exactly where he meant. A narrow close of steep steps that led down to the river, where it ran between the backs of buildings fronting the high street. It was a gloomy, dank spot known locally as ‘Tanner’s Hole,’ which people tended to avoid after dark, even though it provided a convenient short cut to the university. It made her shudder to think of her son facing the horrors of his past in such a lonely, unwholesome spot.

“Thinking of the two of them, Nancy and Amy, set something off — something like a panic attack, I think. I couldn’t breathe properly and I was sweating and shaking all over. I managed to get to the bottom of the steps without falling over, then I sat down and suddenly all these images started exploding in my head. Things from before I came to live with you: places and people’s faces and the sound of my baby sister Emmie crying in the background, a man shouting, my mother’s face — so like Amy’s.” Anna placed a hand on her son’s arm. It had begun to tremble as he spoke, and under her touch it steadied. She took his hand and held it as he went on talking.

“All the images, flashes really, finally came together in a single moment, a single place, and I remembered when and where it was. I was in my mother’s bedroom. The man shouting was my father and he had been hitting my mother. Now she was lying on the bed, sobbing, Emmie was crying and I was hiding in the wardrobe, afraid he’d come back. Afraid to go to her and see if she was all right.” At this, Simon withdrew his hand from Anna’s and buried his face in both his hands.

“Shh,” Anna whispered, “You were three years old. You had a right to be afraid and there was nothing you could have done.”

“I just stayed in there, with my mother sobbing on the bed and Emmie screaming her head off until . . . until my mother suddenly went quiet. I looked over at the bed and she was lying there very still. I thought she was dead. Emmie was still crying but not loudly anymore, just a kind of tired grizzle.”

“How long were you in the wardrobe, Simon?” Anna asked, quietly, remembering that the police had found Simon there several hours later.

“I don’t know. It still feels more like a dream than a memory. I was so young. Could have been minutes or hours, I don’t know. After a while I heard a noise but I was too scared to come out, even though I recognised the woman who came into the room.”

“Nancy Hill?”

“Yes. She looked after us a lot. She took me to the library sometimes,” he said, looking at Anna, who nodded at her son, noting the feverish excitement in his face.

“It’s the clearest image of all. My mother was still alive. Nancy shook her and she made a noise and moved. Then Nancy . . . Nancy made her swallow some pills . . . a lot of pills, then she took a pillow from the bed and held it over my mother’s face until she stopped moving.”

The words gushed out, too vivid to be untrue. For a moment, Anna wondered if she could have misheard. In complete shock, she stared at her son, lost for words.

“Nancy Hill killed my mother.”

“She took an overdose,” Anna said, forgetting for a moment that she had left that part out when she had told Simon that his father murdered his mother. “There was an empty bottle of pills. And it was claimed at her trial that she could have died of her wounds anyway if they had gone untreated for as long as they did.”

With mounting horror, Anna began to appreciate the enormity of what Nancy had done. “She could have saved her,” she said. “Nancy could have saved your mother if she had called for help, but she didn’t.” And it hadn’t just been a sin of omission. That would have been hard enough to bear; Nancy had not just let Debbie Clarke die, she had sent her on her way. Anna realised that she was covering her mouth with her palm. “Do you remember anything else?” She asked Simon, afraid of what more he might reveal.

“I remember what she said when she took Emmie. She said, ‘She wasn’t fit to look after you, Emily. She can rot in hell for putting you in danger. I’m your guardian angel and where I’m going to take you will be heaven compared to this place.’”

It was what the three-year-old Simon had repeated over and over when he was questioned after his mother was found.
An angel took my sister to heaven
.

Everything else had been wiped from his memory and his words had been interpreted as the ramblings of a confused and frightened little boy who had witnessed his father beat his mother to death. Allowing Nancy to disappear with Emily. No one had suspected her; no one even mentioned her, and Simon’s father, Wade Bolan, had gone down for a murder that, technically, he did not commit.

Chapter 21

Ava could find no loopholes in Bradley Turner’s story. She had been going over PC Jenkins’s report hoping to find some scant evidence to prove he might have been in Stromford on the night of Amy’s murder. PJ had visited Sheffield and interviewed Bradley again, along with his flat-mate and drinking partner, spoken with other students and with bar staff at the pubs Bradley had been drinking in that evening. Everywhere she had drawn a blank. Yes, the other students she spoke to had seen Bradley at the pub watching the match that afternoon. Yes, most of the pubs they claimed to have visited had at least one member of staff who remembered them being there. Yes, the waiter at the Indian takeaway recognised their photos and remembered they had been in his restaurant the evening after the match — he was a fan of the winning team and remembered talking to them about the result.

It was evening now and she was going over her notes and the findings again, staring at the writing, bleary-eyed, until the words seemed to dance across the page in a sleepy unfocused blur. Camden was lying across her lap, a heaving ball of tortoiseshell fur, his soporific purring causing her eyelids to droop.

She had read the report so many times she almost knew its contents by heart. PJ had been thorough. Bradley and his mate, Josh Hogg, had been memorable during their drunken spree; bar staff remembered seeing the lads because they stood out, both dressed in identical T-shirts bearing the slogan, ‘don’t mess with me . . . I’m a furniture restorer.’

The lads claimed to have arrived back at their flat around eight in the evening. Their drinking spree had begun with ‘pre-drinks’ in their flat before they set off at midday to watch a football match in the student union bar in the early afternoon.

Spurred on by their team’s magnificent four-nil win, they had embarked on a mammoth drinking binge that took them to seven pubs in less than four hours. According to Josh, they had been, ‘totally rat-arsed’ by the time they returned to their flat with their takeaway chicken vindaloos, which they stayed awake long enough to eat before crashing out for the night. Bradley, Josh claimed, had still been asleep when he knocked on his door at eleven o’clock the following morning.

Ava speculated that, had Bradley not been as drunk as he seemed, he could have driven to Stromford, located Amy Hill, strangled her, and been back in his room before his flatmate awoke the following day. It would have meant a four and a half hour round trip — easily doable in the time. The theory would need to be checked out — if Bradley’s car had been on the road between Sheffield and Stromford that night, it might have been caught on a camera somewhere along the route. An echo of Neal’s words about thoroughness rang in Ava’s ears like an unwelcome attack of tinnitus.

She sighed. She felt like crashing out herself, though it was still early evening. “Sorry, Cam,” she said, pushing the warm, fluffy mass off her lap, ignoring her pampered cat’s disapproving meow. The bag of peas she had draped over her ankle earlier was beginning to thaw; there was a bag of sweet corn somewhere in the freezer. It was time to swap them over.

“Bloody foot,” she muttered as she limped into the kitchen, remembering her shame at having to give up the chase earlier in the day. What if Neal hadn’t been there, or if he’d been similarly indisposed? He’d had a right to be ticked off at her; fitness was a prerequisite of the job; she’d had problems with her damn foot for weeks now, and she had to concede the various treatments and therapies she was trying weren’t working.

Despite the lingering ache in her foot, Ava couldn’t settle. Camden looked at her expectantly as she approached the sofa again, but instead of sitting down and inviting him back onto her lap, Ava paced restlessly around the room. There was a lot on her mind, uppermost of which was her conversation with Roxy earlier in the day.

Christopher Taylor had a predilection for young girls, of that she was convinced. Frustratingly, of the two women who could prove it, one was dead and the other refused to come forward. Instead, Roxy was behaving like a kind of benevolent vigilante, keeping a watchful eye on Taylor and warning off his potential victims. It was a system that worked for Roxy, but it did not satisfy Ava’s sense of justice. She wanted to see the professor brought to account for his actions. Supposing his boast about his forthcoming novel was true? He was set to become a very wealthy man and, along with greater wealth would come more opportunity and less chance of being caught.

Ava picked up her smartphone. There were no fewer than five texts from the good professor, all unanswered. She had to admire his brazenness, courting a police detective when he had so much to hide. Was he really attracted to her, or was he playing a game, deflecting suspicion by dating a grown woman and a police officer to boot? Perhaps he was a risk taker, the kind who derived satisfaction from the proximity of danger, for surely, he understood the threat she posed him? Such was the man’s arrogance that Ava doubted it was even that. He simply refused to believe that he could be bested.

Her fingers hovered over her phone pad. Camden yawned, urging her to make a decision. Taylor answered on three rings.

“Detective Sergeant Merry. It’s a pleasure to hear your voice. I thought you were avoiding me — all those unanswered texts.”

“Yeah. Sorry about that, I’ve been busy,” Ava said, hoping that her voice betrayed nothing of the loathing she felt for the man, “I was wondering if you’d like to come over . . .”

* * *

Only one hour later, Taylor’s sleek red Porsche was crunching over the gravel in her driveway. Ava had been busy in the hour since her phone call, changing from comfy, baggy sweats into a tight-fitting red dress and sheer black tights. She had showered, washed her hair and applied just enough make-up to hide her tiredness. Standing in front of the mirror in her bedroom she approved of what she saw. As a concession to her still painful foot, she considered eschewing her flattering high heels for a pair of glossy black ballet pumps, then changed her mind.

The entrance to Ava’s cottage was via a wooden porch and her front door opened straight into a flagstone-floored living room divided into two halves, separated by a staircase leading to the bedrooms and bathroom. One side of the room was the living area, with mismatched comfy chairs and sofa, TV and end tables, the other served as a dining-room-come-study-come everything else. A single, wide, stone step led into the kitchen from the dining area.

Ava’s pride and joy was a long oak table that doubled up as a dining table and work space. More often than not, it was, as it was now, piled up with papers and books, some relating to cases she was working on, some articles that she was intending to look at or was already some way through. It didn’t bother her that it looked untidy; to her it represented her work and leisure and the two were intertwined.

She had, in fact, never used the table for entertaining; the kitchen was big enough to accommodate a drop leaf table that could sit up to six at a pinch, and Ava could count on one hand the number of occasions when she had had that many guests in her home at once. Perhaps when her brother moved in, she would make more effort.

Ava opened the door before Taylor had a chance to knock; she noticed how he took everything in as he stepped over the threshold and kissed her on the cheek, handing her a posy of red roses, tied with a velvety red ribbon. They didn’t look like they’d been bought in a supermarket or a garage. How had he managed to conjure them up after the shops had shut up for the night, she wondered; perhaps he kept a supply at home for emergencies.

“If you haven’t already eaten, I’ve sort of cooked,” she said, after making just the right amount of fuss over the flowers.

“Sort of?”

“Marks and Spencer’s — dine in for two. Main course and dessert. All ready to pop in the microwave.”

“Wine included?”

“Of course.”

He followed her into the kitchen and she showed him where to find a vase for the roses, while she took two meals from her freezer and set the microwave timer, and laid the table for two. All the while she was aware of Taylor in her peripheral vision moving, quiet as a cat from cupboard to sink, to table, where he placed the posy in a cut glass vase.

“Pretty,” Ava said, hoping that the loathing she felt tingle through her whenever he was near wasn’t detectable. Despite her utmost resolve to act normally, she stiffened as he slipped an arm around her waist and pulled her to him. Then she found herself responding to his kiss, a little shocked and dismayed that she was actually feeling aroused by his touch.

Even though she had prepared for his arrival, psyching herself up, telling herself that she was working undercover, doing her job, practising detachment, compartmentalising the man and her feelings for him, her assurances now seemed hollow. What she was really doing was justifying the means to an end and it made her wonder what kind of a person she was, that she’d been willing to go so far in the line of duty.

Shimmying out of Taylor’s amorous embrace, Ava said, “Let’s eat first.” It was at that moment that she realised she had absolutely no intention of having sex with Taylor again.

“I’ll pour,” Taylor said, picking up the bottle of red wine that had been part of the meal deal. “It’s a little chilly in here, isn’t it?” he said.

“Sorry,” Ava apologised, “heating’s on the blink. I’ve let the landlord know but he can’t get anyone round ‘til Friday. We can eat in the other room if you like. I’ll put the fire on.”

Taylor touched the cold radiator, then moved to where the wall-mounted boiler was fixed to the kitchen wall. He said, “In here’s fine. You know, I could take a look at that boiler for you. I know this model; in fact I could probably tell you exactly what the fault is without even taking it apart. It’s one my father recommended not to buy when I fitted mine recently.”

“I thought you said your dad was a plumber.”

“Plumbing and heating engineer. Boilers, radiators, gas fires. He’s pretty versatile, and never out of work. Real work, as he calls it. He doesn’t regard a career as an academic and a writer as a proper man’s job. Always hoped I’d go into business with him; I was his weekend apprentice when I was a kid. Boring as hell but it taught me the value of money, saving for university. And the skills I picked up come in useful from time to time, of course.”

Ava thought she detected a hint of bitterness in his tone. Clearly, Christopher Taylor was contemptuous of what he obviously regarded as his lowly background.

It was such a mundane conversation that, for a moment Ava nearly forgot that she was almost certainly in the room with a sexual predator of underage girls. That was good. One of the reasons she had invited him to her home was to regain his trust. He had been suspicious of her questions the last time they had been together. She needed him at ease with her again, playful, teasing, but she also needed to be careful . . .

“I’ll wait for my landlord’s bloke if you don’t mind. He probably wouldn’t approve of anyone else fiddling with his appliances, and besides, we can’t have the great professor and soon-to-be celebrated author getting his hands dirty.” The microwave pinged a second time and Ava took out their meals and gave them a stir.

Whilst they waited the requisite five minutes for their food to finish cooking and cool, they clinked their wine glasses together and sipped, and Ava encouraged Taylor to talk about his novel. He didn’t need much, and was still droning on about it when she brought out their dessert, her favourite chocolate mousse pudding.

It sounded unutterably dull, she thought; one of those tedious, plotless, overlong or too-short tomes that seemed to win all the literary prizes. The sort of thing Anna Foster and her friends discussed at her book group, no doubt. No wonder Neal fancied her; his bookshelves were full of that kind of thing too.

Ava’s mind began drifting to the case, as Taylor droned on and on about his ‘work.’ Careful to smile and nod approval at Taylor as appropriate, she sifted through the layers of facts and information relating to Amy’s murder. For some reason an image of Amy’s pale, stick-thin friend, Becci, kept popping up in her thoughts, feeling puzzlingly like a warning.

The deaths of Becci and Gary had been a tragic accident, but not suspicious. An examination of the gas fire in their bedroom had revealed a slow, insidious leak, undetectable and deadly.

Taylor’s voice droned on, “ . . . Booker longlist . . . Not bad for a lad whose prospects, if his parents had had anything to do with it, would have been for him to unblock sinks and toilets and fit gas fires and central heating boilers for the rest of his life.”

Ava was on the verge of pointing out that making an honest living in that way would be attractive to a lot of people when the words suddenly stuck in her throat, and she experienced one of those revelatory moments that pretentious people sometimes referred to as an epiphany.

Once, reading a book about psychology, she had come across another word, synchronicity, and she wondered if that, along with the epiphany was what she was experiencing right there and then. A sort of double whammy of intuition and serendipity. At around the very moment that she had been picturing the tragic sight of Becci and Gary curled up together in front of their poisonous fire, Taylor had mentioned fitting gas fires with his father.

Ava’s senses prickled with a top-heavy rush of excitement and fear. Taylor had her full attention now. As she caught his gaze across the polished surface of her Ikea table, Ava was certain she was looking into the eyes of a killer. Taylor had tampered with the gas fire at Amy’s flat and, instead of killing Amy, it had killed the hapless Becci and Gary.