Kind of Cruel (53 page)

‘Let’s go back to how you got a key to Sharon’s house,’ he said. ‘Amber says you used to try to persuade her to bring Sharon round for lunch, dinner. You couldn’t stand the thought of Amber having a best friend you hadn’t met. Unaware of anyone’s needs and feelings but your own, you wouldn’t have understood Amber’s wish to keep you and Sharon apart.
You
knew there was no danger you’d tell Sharon that Amber had let her down by failing to talk to Luke about guardianship of Dinah and Nonie. It didn’t occur to you that Amber might worry about that.
You
knew it wasn’t going to happen.’

‘What’s this achieving, DC Waterhouse?’ Jo’s solicitor asked. Simon ignored her. He’d been told her name and chosen to forget it.

‘I think you went round to Sharon’s one day when you knew her girls wouldn’t be there. You knew Amber had them for the day, was that it? You introduced yourself to Sharon as someone else – was it Veronique Coudert? Or did you only think of using her name when you got Amber’s email about booking Little Orchard? Either way, you used a false name. You couldn’t risk Sharon knowing your real name. You knew if your plan worked, the police’d want to talk to anyone she’d had contact with. You’d decided how you’d do it: like a coward, without direct physical contact and in disguise. Using a false name, you got yourself invited into Sharon’s house on a pretext. Something to do with the residents’ association, I’m guessing, and the ongoing saga of Terry Bond’s pub. Maybe you said you were a new neighbour, you’d just moved in down the road and wanted to know what was going on. Or did you say you were from the council? Environmental health?’

A heavy sigh from the solicitor. ‘I hope you’re not taking my client’s silence as tacit agreement,’ she said. ‘Silence is silence. It means nothing, and gets us nowhere.’

‘You weren’t worried. You knew Sharon wouldn’t recognise you, since she’d never clapped eyes on you. You weren’t at Amber and Luke’s wedding and neither was she. They got married abroad, thousands of miles from everyone they know, because of you, your attempts to make decisions about the wedding that weren’t yours to make. And you didn’t worry that Sharon might have seen a photograph of you at Amber’s because there aren’t any, are there? Just as there are no photos of Kirsty in your second home, Little Orchard. For the same reason.’

No response from Jo.

‘You stole one of Sharon’s spare keys. Amber says you’d have seen them if you went into the kitchen. DS Ursula Shearer who led the original investigation says so too. Mixed in with the fruit in the fruit bowl, weren’t they? Six or seven loose keys, all exactly the same. Sharon had lots of spares. She tended to misplace them, leave them at work and in other people’s houses, throw them out with the old papers. Did Amber tell you that about her best friend, not knowing how you’d use the information? She can’t remember if she did or not. I think she did. Must have been easy for you to nick a key while Sharon was making you a cup of tea. You had your cosy chat with Sharon and then you left, with one of the many spare keys to her house and a feeling of infallibility. Don’t tell me it didn’t make you feel powerful, being with Amber’s best friend without her permission, knowing you were going to kill her.’

‘It’s surely counterproductive to start sentences with “Don’t tell me”,’ Jo’s brief muttered.

‘You waited. Whenever you saw Amber, you asked her about Sharon, the residents’ association, the Four Fountains pub – just showing a friendly interest, or so Amber thought. She was upset, more reliant on you than usual. She and Sharon had fallen out. Over the pub, ostensibly, but Amber’s guilt about lying to Sharon was the real cause, the guilt you stoked by telling her she’d betrayed her best friend. Amber couldn’t handle it. She and Sharon went through a phase of not speaking, but Amber quickly realised that without Sharon in her life, she felt worse. They made up. You got to hear all the details, and still Amber said nothing about Sharon having had a visit from someone who lied about who she was, nothing about a key going missing. You’d got away with it. You were satisfied that no one but you knew you and Sharon had ever met. The next step was the fire. Where did you park? Not too near Sharon’s. You wouldn’t have risked your car being seen. And you’d have taken the fireman’s uniform with you in a bag, changed into it only when you were inside Sharon’s house.’

If a woman called Jo arrives at a house and a nameless fireman leaves, which of them is responsible for the crime committed in between? What was it Ginny Saxon had said: the house represents the self? Jo Utting owned two houses. Simon wondered how hard it was for her to locate and communicate with her true self after so many years of playing a part. He had the uncomfortable sensation that he was talking less to a person than to a survival instinct with a human face.

‘What would you have done to Dinah and Nonie Lendrim on Friday 3 December, if you hadn’t been interrupted?’ he asked. Sometimes, if you changed the subject quickly, you could surprise an answer out of a supect. Not this time.

Back to Sharon Lendrim’s murder. ‘What you can’t have known until you read about her death in the papers was that Sharon went out that night, until late – to the Four Fountains, of all places. If you’d arrived a bit earlier, you might have bumped into her, winding down after her night out or getting ready for bed. You were lucky. Less so when you tried the same again. We’ve got CCTV footage of your car on its way to Amber’s house in the early hours of Thursday morning, on your way to start your second fire. Good footage, from several different cameras. You pulled over at least once, to reply to Amber’s email about Little Orchard using your iPhone.’

‘We’ve been over the evidence,’ Jo’s solicitor said in a bored voice.

‘But not the motive,’ said Simon. ‘It’s the motive – all the motives – that I’m most interested in. Amber thinks you torched her house as a warning,’ he told Jo. ‘She’d seen you on Wednesday 1 December, told you about being questioned in connection with Kat Allen’s death. She’d asked your husband about Little Orchard, told him she and Luke wanted to book it again. How could your setting fire to her house several hours after those two conversations took place be anything other than a warning? That’s the way Amber saw it, understandably. She was wrong, though. It wasn’t a warning, it was revenge. Rage, jealousy, whatever you want to call it.’

Jo’s eyelids fluttered closed.

‘You had a bad shock that Wednesday. Amber told you something you didn’t know, something you’d never have guessed. It made you hate her, made you think about her, Luke, Dinah and Nonie living happily ever after together: the perfect family, a family
you
created by murdering Sharon. Unnecessarily, as it turned out.’

‘What do you mean, unnecessarily?’ the solicitor asked.

Simon decided it was time to talk to the only person who was demonstrably listening. ‘Amber thought Jo was jealous of her ending up with Sharon’s girls, and she was right. Jo was the one who’d taken the risk and killed Sharon because she thought she had no choice, and Amber, who’d done nothing to deserve anything, was the one who’d ended up with Dinah and Nonie. Jo might not have wanted them herself – she had children of her own – but that didn’t stop her resenting Amber for getting a perk she hadn’t earned. Let me tell you something about the monster you’re here to represent today: nothing makes her evil heart bubble over with envy like a perfect family.’

‘Please.’ The solicitor recoiled as if Simon had said something distasteful. ‘There’s no need for hyperbole.’

‘I’ll call her your client, then,’ said Simon. ‘The way she sees it, Amber’s winning and she’s losing. Not because Amber has anything she doesn’t have. The opposite: Amber doesn’t have, and will never have, what your client has and wishes she didn’t.’

He could see the lawyer still didn’t understand, and struggled to keep his impatience in check. It wasn’t her fault. She hadn’t met Jo Utting until yesterday, hadn’t heard the whole story yet and couldn’t be expected to fill in the blanks. ‘Jo and Amber share a father-in-law,’ he said. ‘Quentin. Physically, there’s nothing wrong with him; practically and psychologically, he’s as dependent as a small child. He couldn’t manage on his own after his wife Pam died. Jo and Neil took him in and have suffered ever since. I’ve met this man. Trust me, you wouldn’t want him living with you.’

‘I wouldn’t want any man living with me,’ said the solicitor, looking Simon up and down. He got the message:
especially not you
.

‘On Wednesday 1 December, Amber told Jo she was a saint for putting up with Quentin,’ he said. ‘Jo said she’d had no choice but to welcome him into her home, that Amber would have done the same if she’d had to. Amber made it clear that wasn’t true: under no circumstances would she have had Quentin under her roof, even if he couldn’t cope on his own, even if she hadn’t already had Dinah and Nonie to look after. She wouldn’t be prepared to sacrifice her own quality of life in the name of family duty. That’s what she told Jo, and she meant it. Jo could see she meant it. That’s why she tried to burn Amber’s house down, with Amber, Luke and the girls in it.’

‘So?’ the solicitor asked. Trying to sound bored, unwilling to admit she was curious.
She sounded like Charlie
.

‘Jo and Amber had never discussed Amber’s willingness to provide a home for Quentin before,’ Simon said. ‘There’d been no need. Amber and Luke were busy dealing with their new family arrangements and Dinah and Nonie’s grief. It didn’t occur to anybody that they might take Quentin on as well. Jo and Neil offered. Their family life was more stable, it was the obvious solution. Their house is small, but the boys were happy to share a room when Jo explained to them that sacrifices had to be made for Grandpa’s sake. They could have sold their large second home in Surrey – Neil suggested it, he told me yesterday – but Jo didn’t want a bigger house. It was important to her to be seen to have no space, and to be seen to be carrying the full burden of looking after Quentin.’

Simon turned to Jo, whose demeanour hadn’t changed. Her eyes were still closed. ‘Funny thing is, I don’t know if I’d have worked it out without your son’s help,’ he said to her. ‘William’s been helpful in unexpected ways as well all the obvious ones. He remembers his last half term, going to the Corn Exchange building in Spilling, to the flat of a lady you needed to speak to. He remembers being parked in the lounge with Barney. You turned the telly on for them, closed the door so that the noise wouldn’t disturb you and the lady while you were talking.’

Simon paused to compose himself. He wanted to yell at her,
What kind of mother takes her two kids with her to kill someone?
It would achieve nothing; Jo wouldn’t react, and her solicitor would lose all respect for him. Simon knew the answer: the kind of killer who took her sons with her and put them in the room next door while she killed was the cleverest kind. Sabina was the only person who knew Jo wasn’t on Amber’s course the day Kat Allen was murdered; even Neil didn’t know. He would have disapproved. If Jo wanted to break the law to help Amber, that was her look-out, but Neil would have thought it wrong of her to offer and then palm the risk off on Sabina. Jo knew Sabina was likely to hear that there had been a murder in Spilling that day. She knew Sabina wouldn’t for a minute suspect her. Not only because the people we know personally and like and trust are never the bad guys, but because Jo had been with William and Barney – a bit of much-needed quality time away from a too-busy house, away from Quentin, alone with her children. Simon could almost hear Jo explaining it to Sabina:
You’ll be so much better at pretending to be Amber than I would. You’re braver than I am. I’d panic and give the game away
. The opposite of the truth.

‘We showed William a photo of Kat Allen,’ he told Jo. ‘He identified her as the lady you went to see, said she was pleased and surprised when you turned up unannounced. He’s also told us that you, he and Barney met Kat a month earlier – by chance, in town. What did Kat say to you? ‘‘We must stop meeting like this’’? Did she mention that the last time the two of you had met, you’d been in Pulham Market hiring a fireman costume? William remembers her telling you that she’d applied for a new job – at Barney’s school. That was the spur, wasn’t it? That was the day you decided Kat had to be punished: for knowing too much, getting too close.’

Jo made a barely audible noise. She might have been clearing her throat. Or else Simon imagined it.

‘Back to Kat’s murder, your visit to her flat,’ he said. ‘William and Barney watched TV in the lounge until they got bored of whatever was on. That’s when they noticed the notepad and pen on the table, and had the idea of playing a game Dinah and Nonie had told them about, one that involved dividing their classmates into three categories: Kind, Cruel and Kind of Cruel. Didn’t get very far, did they? Suddenly, you were calling out to them that it was time to leave. William tore the sheet of paper off the notepad, folded it up and stuffed it in his pocket, to be continued at home later. Except he never got round to it. When you came into the room, you were shaking. You had blood and what your eldest son described as “stuff” on your clothes, and the game didn’t seem important any more. The boys forgot all about it.’

Jo’s wardrobes had been emptied, their contents taken away for analysis. With luck, some forensic material would have survived the washing machine, but it wouldn’t matter if not. DNA found in Kat’s flat after her murder matched the sample taken from Jo three days ago. That together with William’s statement would be enough to send her to prison for a long time. Simon was unwilling to feel merciful towards her for a number of reasons; chief among these was his conviction that Kat Allen had suspected nothing. She’d said nothing to her boyfriend or any of her friends about a possible connection between a woman who used to have a second home near her parents’ house and a murder in Rawndesley in 2008; as far as Simon could tell, Kat hadn’t registered Sharon Lendrim’s death.