Snarl (16 page)

Angie crossed her arms across herself.
“I was being
threatened
,” she said, as if Anderton was unbelievably dense. “Guy told me he’d kill me if I didn’t do what he said. He
forced
me. He forced me to film it.”

“Well,” said Anderton. “As he’s dead, we can’t really ask him, can we? How did he die, Angie?”

She stared back at him. “He shot himself in the head.”

“Did he? You didn’t shoot him yourself?”

“There’s no evidence of that,” interjected the solicitor, sharply.

“Exactly,” said Angie. She flashed Anderton a tight smile. “I was being held
hostage
, in case you’d forgotten.”

“When the officers who were first on the scene found you, you were sitting calmly at your editing suite, working on the footage of Jack Dorsey’s murder. Does that sound like someone who was in terror
for their life?”

“I told you, I wasn’t in my right mind, I was terrified. I can’t account for every single thing I was doing. “

Anderton sat back in his chair. “Forensics can tell us a lot, Angie. I wonder what we’ll find on the gun that killed Guy Wade? Your fingerprints overlaying his, perhaps?”

There was a beat of silence. Then Angie raised her head a little, turning her face so it could be clearly seen by the recording camera. Her mouth quivered.

“I moved the gun after he was dead,” she said, almost choking the words out. “I was so frightened he wasn’t dead and he was going to get up and kill me.”

With half his head missing? Kate held down a cough of disbelief
. The trouble was, Angie’s performance was all too convincing. She was aware of a slowly creeping unease, a discordant note, something that they’d missed.

It didn’t take long to surface. The grey-haired solicitor stirred himself, pulling himself upright.

“Am I to understand, Chief Inspector, that my client is being held on suspicion of murder? I see nothing you’ve put forward in this interview to show that my client can be held responsible for any of the terrible crimes you seem to be accusing her of. There is simply no justification for holding her on this charge.”

“I can hold her on plenty more,” snapped Anderton. He pushed his chair back from the table. Both Angie and the solicitor regarded him; the solicitor
with a cynical smile and Angie with the same hurt, vulnerable look she’d worn before. Kate’s palm itched to slap her.

“A short break,” said Anderton. “I’ll leave you to confer with Miss Sangello. Or should that be Miss King?”

He, Kate and Olbeck huddled in the corridor, far enough away so their whispered conversation couldn’t be overheard.

“Fuck,” said Anderton. “I was hoping he wouldn’t pick up on that.”

“You’re joking, right?” said Kate. “We can’t hold her on a murder charge?”

“Look, I’m doing my best, here. But we’ve got no evidence that she had anything to do with the car bomb – yes, there might be footage, but all she needs to say was what she’s been saying about the Dorsey case. She did it under duress. We actually have the murder of Jack Dorsey
on tape
– it’s irrefutably Wade.”

Kate’s chest felt tight. “What about Wade? Surely we can prove that she handled the gun. The angle, the fingerprints…”

Anderton half smiled. “Well, you see how quickly she threw out an excuse for having her prints on the gun. We can pin our hopes on forensics, but…” He shrugged.

Olbeck put both hands up to his temples as if he had a sudden headache.
“You’re not telling me this – this sociopath – is going to just walk away?”

Both Anderton and Kate gave him an old-fashioned look.

“How many years have you been a detective, Mark?” said Anderton. “For Christ’s sake, she’s not getting off scot free. She’s an accessory to murder, for one thing. Concealing a crime. There’s plenty there to be going on with—”

“But not what she’s truly guilty of,” Kate
said, quietly.

The three of them stared at each other for a moment.

“Look, let’s not go giving up yet,” said Anderton. “We’ve got hundreds of pieces of evidence to go through. There’ll be something there that can help. And even if there isn’t…” he trailed off for a second. “Something will come up. You’ll see.”

They walked back into the interview room together. Anderton conferred with the solicitor, letting him know with a kind of quiet intensity that they would be detaining Angie for further questioning, murder charge or not. The solicitor nodded a crisp assent and briefly murmured in Angie’s ear. Kate watched her face closely but the stony mask had slipped back down again.

Kate waited until Anderton had left the room. Olbeck was preparing to leave. She flashed him a quick glance and then walked over to the table. Angie looked at her sullenly.

“Oh, and by the way,” said Kate, quietly. “You’re not an artist.”

Angie said nothing for a moment. Then, frowning, she opened her mouth to reply.

“Yes, I—
”

“You’re not, you know,” Kate went on, cutting her off. “Artists create. That’s what they do. You don’t create, you destroy. You’re not an artist.”

Angie’s face contracted. Now, as Angie’s pupils shrank down to tiny, glittering pinpoints of fury, Kate was reminded of another figure from Greek mythology.
Medusa
. If looks could kill… but Kate knew she’d got through. The barb had struck home. That’s for Stuart, you bitch – and Mary, and Madeline, and Harriet, and Jack, and the children. Take that. The solicitor was looking at her with a look she couldn’t decipher, his mouth slightly twisted. Inside her, she felt a delicious leap of self-righteous glee.

Kate stepped back.
“Yes,” she said, infusing her tone with just a hint of pity. “You’re
not
an artist. You might want to mull that thought over, in prison. You’ll have a nice long time to really think it through.”

Behind her, Olbeck stifled a laugh. Kate kept her face
in the same rueful, pitying smile and she didn’t clench her fist in triumph until they were both safely out of the room.

“Nice one,” said Olbeck, as they reached the corridor. “I’m only surprised you didn’t cough ‘whole life term’ under your breath as you left the room.”

“I would have done, if I’d thought about it.”

They both looked at each other and collapsed, bellowing slightly hysterical laughter. Kate knew Angie would be able to hear them from inside the room.
Good
.

They walked back to the office
, half-supporting one another, still wheezing. Theo looked up in surprise as they staggered through the door.

“What’s up with you two?”

“Oh, nothing,” Kate said, wiping her eyes. “Just a bit of a delayed reaction, I think.”

“Right,” Theo
said, in a mystified tone. “Anyway, I’ve got some good news. Madeline Dorsey’s regained consciousness.”

Kate and Olbeck looked at each other, sobering up completely.

“That’s brilliant,” said Olbeck. He sat down at a nearby desk, running his hands through his hair. “That’s great. Do they think she’ll recover?”

“As far as I could tell. They were being cautious
, but I gather that’s the gist.”

“Fantastic,” Kate
said. She pinched her nose and heaved a deep sigh. “What did Anderton say? Something will turn up.”

“Well—
” Olbeck began.

“Come on, this could be it!
Hopefully all the additional evidence we’ll need.”

Olbeck looked sombre.
“Come on, Kate. You know as well as I do that she might not be able to remember a thing. Traumatic amnesia and all that.”

“Yeah,” said Theo. “We might very well end up with nothing.”

“Oh, I know.” Kate reached out and shook them both gently, one hand on each. “But let’s hope for the best, eh?”

The two men smiled reluctantly.

Kate went back to her desk to collect her bag and coat. She was so tired that even moving felt like wading through slowly setting concrete. She dropped her head on her desk and sighed.

Olbeck paused on his way past.
“Are you all right, really?”

Kate nodded, head still down. Then, with an effort, she lifted it.

“I’m all right,” she said. “You know what? I was just thinking I might have a pop at the Inspector’s exams.”

“Why not? You’ll breeze through them, I’m sure.”

“I’m sure I will,” said Kate. “After all, if
you
can pass them…”

Olbeck snorted
and Kate grinned tiredly.

On the steps of the station, Kate felt her phone vibrate. Another message from Andrew, to add to the multiple calls that she’d let go to voicemail. Standing there in the sunshine, too exhausted for her usual denial to kick in, Kate faced the fact. She didn’t love him. Surely the first person you’d normally want to see after a traumatic experience would be your boyfriend? She didn’t want to see him; all she wanted to do was go home, on her own. Olbeck passed her with a pat on the shoulder – she could see Jeff in the car down on the road, waiting to collect him. That was what a relationship should be. You know it, Kate. You know what you have to do.

She sighed a little.

“You all right?” asked Theo, passing her.

“I’m fine.”
When were people going to stop asking her that?

“Need a lift home?”

She smiled at him. He was a good lad, really. “Yes. Please. Thanks, Theo.”

As she got into his car, she sent Andrew a text.
I’ll call you later and tell you everything. Don’t worry.
She didn’t put a kiss on the end of it.

THE END

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Want more Kate Redman? The new Kate Redman Mystery,
Chimera
will be released in Autumn 2014…

Abbeyford is celebrating its annual pagan festival, when the festivities are interrupted by the discovery of a very decomposed body. Soon, several other bodies are discovered but is it a question of foul play or are these deaths from natural causes? It’s a puzzle that DS Kate Redman and the team could do without, caught up as they are in investigating an unusual series of robberies. Newly single again, Kate also has to cope with her upcoming Inspector exams and a startling announcement from her friend and colleague DI Mark Olbeck…

When a robbery goes horribly wrong, Kate begins to realise that the two cases might be linked. She must use all her experience and intelligence to solve a serious of truly baffling crimes which bring her up against an old adversary from her past…

Chimera (A Kate Redman Mystery: Book 5
) is released in Autumn 2014. Sign up to Celina’s newsletter for updates on release dates and promotional prices at
http://www.celinagrace.com

Hushabye (A Kate Redman Mystery: Book 1)
is the novel that introduces Detective Sergeant Kate Redman on her first case in Abbeyford. It’s available for free! Read the first two chapters below…

HUSHABYE

(A KATE REDMAN MYSTERY)

CELINA GRACE

© Celina Grace 2013

Prologue

Casey Fullman opened her eyes and knew something was wrong.

It was too bright. She was used to waking to grey dimness, the before-sunrise hours of a winter morning. Dita would stand by the bed with Charlie in one arm, a warmed bottle in the other. Casey would struggle up to a sitting position, trying to avoid the jab of pain from her healing Caesarean scar, and take the baby and the bottle.

You’re mad to get up so early when you don’t have to
, her mother had told her, more than once.
It’s not like you’re breastfeeding. Let Dita do it
. But Casey, smiling and shrugging, would never give up those first waking moments. She enjoyed the delicious warmth of the baby snuggled against her body, his dark eyes fixed upon hers as he sucked furiously at the bottle. 

She didn’t envy Dita, though, stumbling back to bed through the early morning dark to her bedroom next to the nursery. Casey would have gotten up herself to take Charlie from his cot when he cried for his food, but Nick needed his sleep, and it seemed to work out better all round for Dita, so close to the cot anyway, to bring him and the bottle into the bedroom instead. That’s what I pay her for, Nick had said, when she’d suggested getting up herself.

But this morning there was no Dita, sleepy-eyed in rumpled pyjamas, standing by the bed. There was no Charlie. Casey sat up sharply, wincing as her stomach muscles pulled at the scar. She looked over at Nick, fast asleep next to her. Sleeping like a baby. But where was her baby, her Charlie?

She got up and padded across the soft, expensive, sound-muffling carpet, not bothering with her dressing gown, too anxious now to delay. It was almost full daylight; she could see clearly. The bedroom door was shut, and she opened it to a silent corridor outside.

The door to Dita’s room was standing open, but the door to Charlie’s nursery was closed. Casey looked in Dita’s room. Her nanny’s bed was empty, the room in its usual mess, clothes and toys all over the floor. She must have gone into Charlie’s room. They must both be in there. Why hadn’t Dita brought him through? He must be ill, thought Casey, and fear broke over her like a wave. Her palm slipped on the door handle to the nursery.

She pushed the door. It stuck, halfway open. Casey shoved harder and it moved, opening wide enough for her to see an out-flung arm on the carpet, a hand half-curled. Her throat closed up. Frantically, she pushed at the door, and it opened far enough to enable her to squeeze inside.

It was Dita she saw first, spread-eagled on the floor, face upwards. For a split second, Casey thought, crazily, that it was a model of her nanny, a waxwork, something that someone had left in the room for a joke. Dita’s face was pale as colourless candle wax, but that wasn’t the worst thing. There was something wrong with the structure of her face, her forehead dented, her nose pushed to one side. Her thick blonde hair was fanned out around her head like the stringy petals of a giant flower.

Casey felt her heartbeat falter as she looked down at the body. She was dimly aware that her lungs felt as if they’d seized up, frozen solid. She mouthed like a fish, gasping for air, but it wasn’t until she moved her gaze from Dita to look at Charlie’s cot that she began to scream.

Chapter One

Kate Redman stood in the tiny hallway of her flat and regarded herself in the full-length mirror that hung beside the front door. She never left the flat without giving herself a quick once-over—not for reasons of vanity, but to check that all was in place.
She smoothed down her hair and tugged at her jacket, pulling the shoulders more firmly into shape. Her bag stood by the front door mat. She picked it up and checked her purse and mobile and warrant card were all there, zipped away in the inner pocket.

She was early, but then she was always early. Time for a quick coffee before the doorbell was expected to ring? She walked into the small, neat kitchen, her hand hovering over the kettle. She decided against it. She felt jittery enough already.
Calm down, Kate
.

It was awful being the new girl; it was like being back at school again. Although now at least, she was well-dressed, with clean hair and clean shoes. It was fairly unlikely that any of her new co-workers would tell her that she smelt and had nits.

Kate shook herself mentally. She was talking to herself again, the usual internal monologue, always a sign of stress. It’s just a new job. You can do it. They picked you, remember?

She checked her watch. He was late, although not by much. The traffic at this time of day was always awful. She walked from the kitchen to the lounge – living room, Kate, living room – a matter of ten steps. She closed her bedroom door, and then opened it again to let the air flow in. She walked back to the hallway just as the doorbell finally rang. She took a deep breath and fixed her smile in place before she opened it.

“DS Redman?” asked the man on the doorstep. “I’m DS Olbeck. Otherwise known as Mark. Bloody awful parking around here. Sorry I’m late.”

Kate noted a few things immediately: the fact that he’d said ‘bloody,’ whereas every other copper she’d ever known would have said ‘fucking’; his slightly too long dark hair; that he had a nice, crinkle-eyed smile. She felt a bit better.

“No drama,” she said breezily. “I’m ready. Call me Kate.”

When they got to the car, she hesitated slightly for a moment, unsure of whether she should clear the passenger seat of all the assorted crap that was piled upon it or whether she should leave it to Mark. He muttered an apology and threw everything into the back.

“I’m actually quite neat,” he said, swinging the door open for her, “but it doesn’t seem to extend to the car, if you see what I mean.”

Kate smiled politely. As he swung the car out into the road, she fixed her mind on the job ahead of them.

“Can you tell me–” she began, just as he began to ask her a question.

“You’re from–”

“Oh, sorry–”

“I was going to say, you’re up from Bournemouth, aren’t you?” Olbeck asked.

“That’s right. I grew up there.”

“I thought that’s where people went to retire.”

Kate grinned. “Pretty much. There’s wasn’t a lot of, shall we say, life when I was growing up.” She paused. “Still, we had the beach. Where are you from?”

“London,” said DS Olbeck, briefly. There was a pause while he waited to join the dual carriageway. “Nowhere glamorous. Just the outskirts, really. Ruislip, Middlesex. How are you finding the move to the West Country?”

“Fine so far.”

“Have you got family around here?

Kate was growing impatient with the small talk. “No, no one around here,” she said. “Can I ask you about the case?”

“Of course.”

“I know it’s a murder and kidnap case–”

“Yes. The child – baby – belongs to the Fullmans. Nick Fullman is a very wealthy entrepreneur, made most of his cash in property development. He got married about a year ago – to one of those sort of famous people.”

“How do you mean?” Kate asked.

“Oh you know, the sort of Z-list celebrity that keeps showing up in Heat magazine. Her name’s Casey Bright. Well, Casey Fullman now. Appeared in Okay when they got married, showing you round their lovely home, you know the sort of thing.”

Kate smiled. “I get the picture.”

She wouldn’t have pegged DS Olbeck for a gossip mag reader, but then people often weren’t what they seemed.

“And the murder?”

“The nanny, Dita Olgweisch. Looks incidental to the kidnapping at this point, but you never know. What is known is that the baby is missing and as it – he’s – only three months old, you can imagine the kind of thing we’re dealing with here.”

“Yes.” Kate was silent for a moment. A three-month-old baby…memories threatened to surface and she pushed them away. “So on the face of it, we’re looking at the baby was snatched, the nanny interrupted whoever it was, and she was killed?”

“Like you say, on the surface, that seems to be what’s happened. We’ll know more soon. We’ll be there in,” he glanced at the sat nav on the windscreen, “fifteen minutes or so.”

They were off the motorway now and into the countryside. Looking out of the window, Kate noted the ploughed fields, shorn of the autumn stubble, the skeletal shapes of the trees. It was a grey January day, the sky like a flat blanket the colour of nothing. The worst time of year, she thought, everything dead, shut down for the winter, months until spring.

The car slowed, turned into a driveway, and continued through formidable iron gates which were opened for them by a uniformed officer. After they drove through, Kate looked back to see the gates swung shut behind them. She noted the high wooden fence that ran alongside the road, the CCTV camera on the gatepost. The driveway wound though dripping trees and opened out into a courtyard at the front of the house.

“Looks like security is a priority,” she said to her companion as he pulled the car up by the front door.

He raised his eyebrows. “Clearly not enough of a priority.”

“Well, we’ll see,” said Kate.

They both got out of the car. There was another uniformed officer by the front door, a pale redhead whose nose had reddened in the raw air. He was stamping his feet and swinging his arms but stopped abruptly when Kate and Olbeck reached him.

“DCI Anderton here yet?” said Olbeck.

“Yes sir. He’s inside, in the kitchen. Just go straight through the hallway.”

They stepped inside. The hallway was cavernous, tiled in chilly white stone, scuffed and marked now with the imprint of shoes and boots. Kate looked around. A staircase split in two and flowed around the upper reaches of the hallway to the first floor of the house. There was an enormous light shade suspended from the ceiling, a tangled mass of glass tubing and metal filaments. It had probably cost more than her flat, but she thought it hideous all the same. The house was warm, too warm; the underfloor heating was obviously at full blast, but there was an atmosphere of frigidity nonetheless. Perhaps it was the glossy white floor, the high ceilings, the general air of too much space. A Philip Starke chair stood against the wall, looking as though it had been carved out of ice.

“Mark? That you? Through here.”

They followed the shout through into the kitchen, big on an industrial scale. It opened out into a glass-walled conservatory, which overlooked a terrace leading down to a clipped and manicured lawn. Detective Chief Inspector Anderton stood by a cluster of leather sofas where a woman was sitting, crouching forward, her long blonde hair dipping towards the floor. Kate looked around her surreptitiously. The place stank of money, new money: wealth just about dripped from the ceilings. It must be a kidnapping. Now, Kate, she chided herself. No jumping to conclusions.

She had only met the Chief Inspector once before, at her interview. He was a grey man: steel grey hair, dark grey eyes, grey suit. Easy to dismiss, at first.

“Ah, DS Redman,” he said as they both approached. “Welcome. Hoping to catch up with you later in my office, but we’ll have to see how things go. You can see how things are here.”

He gave her a firm handshake, holding her gaze for a moment. She was surprised at the sudden tug of her lower belly, a pulse that vanished almost as soon as she’d registered it. A little shaken, it took her a moment to collect herself. The other two officers had begun talking to the blonde woman on the sofa. Kate joined them.

Casey Fullman was a tiny woman, very childlike in spite of the bleached hair, the breast implants and the false nails. Kate noted the delicate bones of her wrist and ankles. Casey had bunchy cheeks, smooth and round like the curve of a peach, a tip-tilted nose and large blue eyes. These last were bloodshot, tears glistening along the edge of her reddened eyelids.

“I don’t know,” she was saying as Kate joined them. Her voice was high, and she spoke with a gasp that could have been tears but might be habitual. “I don’t know. I didn’t hear anything and when I woke up, Dita,” she drew in her breath, “Dita wasn’t there. She would normally be there with a bottle and Ch- and Ch–”

She broke down entirely, dropping her head down to her bare knees. There was a moment of silence while Kate watched the ends of Casey’s long hair touch the floor.

Anderton began to utter some soothing words. Kate looked around, her eye attracted by a movement outside on the terrace. A man was walking up and down, talking into a mobile phone, his free hand gesticulating wildly. As Kate watched, he flipped the phone closed and turned towards the house. He was young, good-looking and, somewhat incongruously given the early hour, dressed in a suit.

“Sorry about that, I had to take it,” said Nick Fullman as he entered the room. Kate mentally raised her eyebrows, wondering at a man who prioritised a phone call, presumably a business matter, over comforting his wife after their baby son had been kidnapped. Not necessarily a kidnapping, Kate, stop jumping to conclusions. She thought she saw an answering disapproval in Olbeck’s face.