Rush of Blood (24 page)

The house was in a long, leafy street in Tilgate, a quiet neighbourhood a mile or so south of Crawley town centre. Jenny grabbed
a parking space a few doors down. She turned off the radio and took a last look at the notes she had prepared.

Wilson/Gold Interviews 2
.

She had written most of it up at home the day before, her flatmate thankfully away with friends for the weekend, but an extra
page had been added to the file first thing that morning, after a short session on the Police National Computer. Running the
six interviewees through the PNC would normally have been standard procedure, but she had not been able to do it first time
round. Any access to the database was strictly monitored – the log-ins timed and registered, the electronic fingerprint unmistakable
– and that had not been something Jenny had wanted to risk while she was working rather more off her own bat than might have
been tolerated. Now though, she had been given the all-clear. Trainee or not, she had been … endorsed.

No more coffee-runs or photocopying, for the time being at any rate.

Jenny looked at the printout and got excited all over again. Half an
hour on the PNC – a request to pull a file sent straight through to the General Registry – and she guessed that one of her
interviews was going to be rather more lively than it might otherwise have been. Four of the six were, as expected, clean
as a whistle. One had been cautioned four years before for possession of a Class C drug. Another – though all charges had
eventually been dropped – had been arrested six years earlier for something altogether more interesting.

She had fired off an email to Jeff Gardner straight away …

The front door was open, so Jenny walked in. She showed her warrant card to the first workman who looked her way and asked
where the boss was. The house was cold, the air thick with plaster dust and in the room where the kitchen used to be – where
she guessed a new one would appear at some point – three more labourers were hard at work, while a fourth stood leaning against
a wall taken back to the brick, fag in hand. Jenny raised her voice above the hammering and the sound of talkSPORT from a
paint-spattered radio and was pointed towards the garden. She walked out through the shell of an extension and found Barry
Finnegan talking to a short man wearing an anorak over a shirt and tie. The architect, she guessed. Planning officer, maybe.

‘I just need a couple of minutes,’ she said.

Finnegan nodded slowly and Jenny waited patiently while he finished up with the man in the suit, shook hands and told the
man to ‘bell me as soon as’. The conversation was semi-shouted, punctuated by the loud
snap
of the plastic sheeting in the window-frames, the bursts of noise from a jackhammer back in the house.

‘Right,’ Finnegan said, when the man had gone. He led her towards the end of the smallish garden, lighting a cigarette as
he went. ‘How did you know I was here?’

‘I called your office,’ Jenny said. She stepped carefully. There was as much mud as grass. ‘Very helpful bloke gave me the
address.’

Finnegan nodded. ‘Adrian.’ He took a deep drag. ‘My brother.’

They reached a dilapidated shed, its windows thick with cobwebs and a child’s plastic slide up against the door. They turned
to look back at the house.

‘Big job,’ she said.

‘Not for us. Pretty standard kitchen extension.’

‘Looks like a bit more than that. I mean not as grand as what you’ve had done at your place, but …’

Finnegan nodded towards the scaffolding at the side of the house. ‘Yeah, well, you start a job and other stuff comes up, doesn’t
it? Brickwork turns out to be buggered or like this place, you point out to the woman that her roof could do with sorting
out while we’re here. Tiles are blown. There’s always something.’

‘Something that means you can whack the price up.’

‘We’re not that sort of firm.’

‘An honest builder,’ Jenny said. ‘You should be on
The X-Files
or something.’

Finnegan snorted a laugh, but there wasn’t much to it.

‘So, while you’re being honest, I wanted to ask you about that trip to buy cigarettes. When you left your wife on the beach
and drove back into Siesta Village.’

Finnegan’s shoulders sagged and he let out a long breath. ‘I told you.’

‘It took you how long? That wasn’t very clear first time round.’

‘I don’t know, half an hour, something like that.’

‘Your wife said it was more like an hour.’

He said nothing for a few seconds. Lifted the cigarette to his mouth but didn’t draw on it. ‘I suppose.’

‘Right, so you bought your fags and then decided to stay and have a beer. You went to what, the nearest bar?’

‘Yeah. It was hot and I fancied a beer.’

‘You can’t remember the name of this bar?’

Finnegan shook his head.

‘And you didn’t see Dave Cullen and Marina Green at any time?’

Another head-shake, the cigarette in his mouth.

‘Thing is, they told us they were having lunch at the same time you were having your beer and it’s just that the whole stretch
of the village is shorter than this street we’re on right now.’ She had spent a useful
hour or two on Google Earth, mapped the place out. Half a dozen bars, a few souvenir shops, an upmarket strip mall. No more
than five minutes’ walk end to end. ‘Just worth checking that you didn’t see them, maybe while you were driving past whichever
bar they were in.’

‘Well, unless they were sitting outside I
wouldn’t
have seen them, would I? Like I said, it was hot, so they were probably inside.’

‘And obviously you didn’t see Amber-Marie Wilson.’

‘Obviously.’

One of the labourers appeared on the patio, shouting something about the sparks and where the woman wanted her power points.
Finnegan shouted back, said he’d be in to sort it in a minute. The labourer gave a thumbs-up and went back inside.

Jenny said, ‘This bar.’ She scraped mud from her shoe on the edge of a stone. ‘It was probably the one nearest the place you
bought your fags. I’m assuming you didn’t get back in the car and drive to it, did you?’

‘No. Yeah, it was close to the 7-Eleven,’ Finnegan said. ‘I got the fags from a 7-Eleven.’

Jenny nodded. She remembered the map. There was a 7-Eleven a few doors down from a bar called Gilligans. That was one of the
places Dave Cullen had said he and his girlfriend might have eaten lunch in.

‘Are we about done?’ Finnegan asked. He tossed his fag end into the bushes. ‘If I’m going to whack my prices up, I need to
crack on.’

They walked back towards the house. The wind was up and a few leaves skittered about on the shitty lawn. A pace or two behind
him, Jenny thrust her hands into the pockets of her jacket and said, ‘Can you tell me where you were a week ago today? Last
Monday. Late afternoon …’

Finnegan turned to look at her but kept walking. He stopped at the doors to the extension and waited for her to catch up.
She saw the question on his face. ‘I’m sorry, but I just need you to tell me where you were.’

‘I’ll check,’ he said, finally. ‘God knows what it’s got to do with anything, but far as I can remember I was in the office.
Me and my brother had a business meeting. Yeah, I reckon …’

‘Thanks,’ Jenny said. ‘I’ll talk to Adrian.’

He nodded, looked away for a few seconds. ‘Listen, I should probably tell you me and my brother haven’t exactly been seeing
eye to eye lately. A few silly rows, that’s all, nothing major. Anyway, that’s why I was in such an arsey mood when you came
round before. A bit of a ding-dong, you know? Just wanted to let you know that … say sorry for being out of order.’ He reached
for his cigarettes again. ‘I got a right ear-bending from the missus when you’d gone.’

She told him it was fine, that she’d known worse. All the same, she wondered why he was telling her. Was it a genuine apology,
or was he making it clear that he and his brother were not close; providing a reason in advance if his brother failed to back
up his story? Then again, alibis from family were usually treated with a degree of scepticism anyway, so perhaps she was reading
too much into it.

‘You going to talk to Angie?’

‘Yes, I’ll be calling her,’ Jenny said. She clocked his expression, guessed that the minute she was out of there, he would
be calling her first.

They stepped inside. It was quieter and, looking through into the kitchen area, she could see that the workmen were taking
a tea break.

‘What have you got?’ Finnegan asked. ‘A flat or something?’

‘Yeah, a flat.’

‘Renting?’

‘For now,’ she said.

‘Well, as soon as you get your own place, if you need any work doing, you know where to come. I was being straight with you
before. We don’t rip anybody off …’

Walking back to the car, Jenny asked herself if Barry Finnegan was just supremely confident or a bit thick. Or so completely
innocent of anything that it hadn’t seemed remotely inappropriate. It was certainly an odd moment to be touting for business.
Then again, she had once had a sex offender try to advise her on where to buy clothes that would make her look a bit sexier.

She supposed she shouldn’t be too surprised by anything any more.

It wasn’t easy doing the normal things and I wasn’t sleeping too well either. You never know how good you’re going to be at
something like that, I mean, how can you? All that pretending and carrying on like none of it means anything, and even though
I turned out to be a damn sight better at it than I would have guessed, it was definitely a strain. It got a lot worse, of
course, after the police came sniffing around again, and I’d known that they would. I’d taken all that into account before
I’d made that first drive out to Sevenoaks, but there was no backing out, not once I’d sat and watched that playground for
a while.

Two decisions at once, one leading straight to the other. Once I’d decided I was going to take the girl, I’d started making
plans.

I knew I needed to think ahead, because it was pretty obvious they’d be putting things together once I’d done it again. I
know they talk to each other, police force to police force or whatever, and these days, with the internet and everything,
the connection was likely to get made very bloody quickly.

I’m not denying I was lucky because I was
stupidly
lucky. The people I needed to behave in particular ways behaved in exactly the ways I thought they would, said the right
thing. Said the wrong thing.
Of course, luckiest of all, there’d been so many of us out there enjoying the Florida sunshine to begin with. Let’s hear it
for the crappy British weather. Plus, once the connection was made between the two girls, they widened the investigation out
and started looking into all the British holidaymakers who had been in the area at the time. That silly cow, WPC Smartarse
… Quinlan … thought she was being entrusted with chasing up on the, what do you call them, prime suspects or something. She
probably never clicked that they were running about like chickens with their heads cut off on the other side of the pond,
desperately trying to track down
all
the Brits who’d been anywhere near Sarasota when Amber-Marie was taken. A waste of time obviously, and you’d think they’d
have worked that out for themselves, wouldn’t you? I mean, it’s not rocket science to figure out she would only have got into
a car with someone she recognised.

So, as it turned out, that jumped-up trainee detective
cunt
stable was closer than she knew all the time. She’d been almost spot on from the word go. Big things predicted for that one,
future commissioner I shouldn’t wonder, blah blah.

Luck and lies then, that’s about the size of it. The other thing, the ‘why’, well that’s not really for me to say, is it?
Anyway, I’m not sure I could put it into words that made sense and how could anybody? Whatever it is that makes your blood
race and puts your hands where you know they really shouldn’t be.

The thing that opens the cage.

‘There’s something different,’ Jenny said. The three of them were seated at the same table as before in the Dunnings’ living
room; mid-afternoon sun cutting in through the windows on to the polished pine. The weather was better than it had been first
time round and the small garden had more colour in it, or seemed to.

Sue Dunning looked around, shrugged. ‘I think it’s just because I had the chance to tidy up a bit,’ she said, laughing. ‘School
hadn’t broken up when you were here before.’

Jenny nodded. ‘Well, thanks for sparing me the time, anyway.’

‘Tell you the truth it’s nice to talk to anybody who’s not making up some story about why they haven’t done their homework.’

‘Dog ate it, that always did the trick for me.’

‘We’re not quite as gullible these days.’

Jenny looked at Ed Dunning. ‘And thanks for taking the time off work.’

Ed gave a small nod. Said, ‘Why
do
people tidy up when the police are coming round?’ He quickly answered his own question, which was clearly just the set-up
for a punchline of some description. ‘I mean
obviously it’s a good idea to get the body out of the way. The bottle of poison and the bag marked
swag
.’

Sue laughed a little and rolled her eyes, but Jenny just looked down at her notes. She did not feel inclined to humour either
of them at this stage.

‘So, how can we help you?’

Moving things along was fine with Jenny. ‘You could start by telling me why you lied about going shopping that day.’

‘Sorry?’ Ed looked at his wife.

‘We checked the CCTV at the shopping mall,’ Jenny said, enjoying the
we
rather than the
they
. She looked at Ed. ‘We know you weren’t there.’ They didn’t know any such thing of course; the absence of Ed Dunning on four
sets of CCTV pictures being far from conclusive and Gardner having said as much.

Jenny could see straight away, though, that they’d been right.

‘So, I don’t particularly like being dragged around shopping centres looking at candles and cushions,’ Ed said. ‘I don’t
think
that’s grounds for arrest, but maybe they’ve brought in some new law.’

‘I’m not a big fan of shopping either,’ Jenny said. ‘It’s not just a bloke thing. I’m just a bit confused as to why you felt
the need to tell the police in Sarasota that’s what you were doing.’

‘We had a flight the next day.’

‘I’m still not—’

‘We didn’t want to get held up, that’s all. I know what they’re like over there and I didn’t fancy giving them any reason
why they might want to keep us hanging around.’

‘Ed dropped me off,’ Sue said. Her hand moved reflexively across the table towards her husband’s, stopped just short of it.

‘Yeah, I dropped her off. I went off on my own for a bit then came back to pick her up.’

‘A couple of hours later,’ she said. ‘Something like that.’ She watched Jenny taking notes. ‘For the record, I didn’t buy
any candles or cushions.’

‘Where did you go?’ Jenny caught movement out of the corner of
her eye and turned to see a skinny ginger cat in the doorway, watching her. ‘I didn’t see him last time either,’ she said.

‘
Her
,’ Sue said. ‘She’s not very sociable.’ She pursed her lips, made kissing noises. ‘She’s old …’

The cat turned round and padded out. Jenny turned back to Ed. Perhaps the distraction had given him time to gather his thoughts,
she could not be sure.

‘I drove to the harbour,’ he said. ‘Wandered about looking at the boats for a while. Watched a couple of the charters come
back, tourists thinking they’re what’s-his-name … Ernest Hemingway or something.’

‘Did you talk to anybody?’

He shook his head. ‘Just wandered around, keeping the tan topped up. It’s one of our favourite places over there, isn’t it?’
His wife nodded. ‘We’ve taken a little boat out ourselves occasionally, rented kayaks, all that.’

Jenny wrote down what Ed had said and thanked him. ‘I also need to know where you were rather more … recently.’ She turned
back a page or two to check the date she had written. Like it was just a small thing. ‘A week ago yesterday. Monday … the
eleventh?’

‘Why do you want to know?’

It was a reasonable enough question. While a detailed description of Samantha Gold had been circulated, together with photographs,
no mention had been made of the girl’s learning difficulties, which were not considered relevant to the hunt for her. There
was no reason for anyone – if they were innocent – to have made any connection to the murder of Amber-Marie Wilson. Still,
reasonable or not, innocent or not, Jenny wanted none of these people anywhere but on the back foot.

‘Can you just answer the question, please?’

‘How should I know?’

He looked to his wife and when Jenny did the same she saw Sue Dunning smile and nod; saw that she had got it. A look to her
husband. Isn’t it obvious? ‘That girl who went missing last week. In Kent, wasn’t it?’

‘You’re kidding,’ Ed said.

‘Can you tell me where you were that afternoon?’

He raised his hands, opened his mouth and closed it again. ‘At work.
Obviously
. I was at work …’

‘So …?’

‘God, I had calls all over the place, same as always.’ He shook his head, thinking. ‘Size of the territories these days, you
know? Maidenhead, Reading, High Wycombe, out that way. Might even have gone as far as Swindon. I’ll have to check the diary.’

‘I think I spoke to you on the phone at lunchtime,’ Sue said. ‘Yeah, I think you told me you’d just finished in Reading.’
When she saw Jenny looking at her, Sue said, ‘
I
was almost certainly lying around on my fat arse watching
Loose Women
.’ She blushed slightly. ‘Making the most of the school holidays.’

‘I can send you the names of the bookshops,’ Ed said.

Jenny said, ‘That would be helpful.’ She checked that he still had her number then closed her notebook. This was going to
be the good bit. ‘What you said before, about knowing what the police were like …’

Ed blinked.

‘That’s presumably got something to do with the way they’ve treated you before. The police over here, I mean.’

Ed began shaking his head. ‘Here we go.’

‘Something to do with a woman called Annette Bailey.’

He turned to his wife with a look that was almost triumphant. ‘You see?’

‘Relax,’ Sue said.

‘Fucking
Annette Bailey?
’

‘Anything you’d like to say about that?’ Jenny asked.

‘Not a damn thing.’

‘You might be doing yourself a favour in the long run.’

‘A
favour?
Is this some kind of a wind-up?’

‘Look.’ Jenny was pitching for ‘trustworthy’ but worried as she spoke that her tone was closer to downright patronising. ‘I
can understand why you might have thought it would be held against you in
some way, if the police in Florida had done some digging and found out about it, but I’m giving you a chance to tell me—’

‘I’m telling you bugger all.’

‘Your prerogative,’ Jenny said.

‘What the hell d’you need me to tell you anyway? You obviously know all about it.’

Jenny knew no more than the basic details. The PNC gave the names, dates and little else. She would not know any more until
the file she had requested arrived from the General Registry. She gathered her things together, dipped for her handbag.

‘Maybe I should be calling a solicitor,’ Ed said.

‘Maybe you should,’ Jenny said.

She stood up and stepped away from the table. Sue moved quickly to join her and at the doorway they both cast a look back
to Ed, who had not moved and was not bothering to watch them leave. He rubbed the back of his neck, stared out towards the
garden. There had been agitation certainly but he had not raised his voice and now he looked calm enough. Jenny felt sure
there would be shouting after she had left.

At the front door, she turned to Sue Dunning. Over the woman’s shoulder she could see the ginger cat perched halfway up the
stairs, licking itself. Jenny said, ‘You really shouldn’t have bothered to tidy up.’