Lasting Damage

Chapter 14

20/7/2010



‘It was only two days,’ Jackie Napier answered Sam’s question with her eyes on Ian Grint. ‘Two days isn’t a long time. I saw it on Saturday, and I phoned the police first thing Monday morning. I explained to you why.’

‘Could you explain it to me?’ Sam asked. Jackie tore her eyes away from Grint to scowl at him. She had taken out one of her gold sleeper earrings and was using the end of it to scrape underneath her pink-painted fingernails. Odd behaviour for someone so well turned out, Sam thought; the immaculate presentation and the rather unsavoury public grooming seemed to contradict one another. Jackie’s make-up looked as if it had been applied by a professional, and her bobbed dark hair had been styled with architectural precision. Sam didn’t see how it was possible to achieve that rigid triangular look – not without scaffolding and an RSJ, at any rate.

He couldn’t pin down Jackie’s age in the way that he could most people’s – she might have been anything from twenty to forty-five. She had a round childlike face, but her bare legs were covered with a tracery of prominent blue veins, like a much older woman’s. Or maybe it had nothing to do with age. If Sam’s wife Kate were here, she would say, ‘The legs might not be her fault, but the skirt is. Trousers were invented for a reason.’ Or words to that effect. Strange things offended Kate, things Sam didn’t give a toss about: people wearing clothes that didn’t suit them, clocks in public places that showed the wrong time, houses with brown window-frames, hot-air hand dryers.

Sam had the impression that Jackie Napier had been expecting Grint to take the lead, and resented this hijacking of proceedings by a newcomer who wasn’t even local, but Grint had decided Sam should direct the interview and had so far contributed nothing. He was sitting in the far corner of the room, using a radiator as a footstool. Sam thought his disaffected schoolboy posture was inappropriate, and would have preferred him to put his feet on the floor, but he had no illusions about who was in charge. Wherever I go, someone else turns out to be in charge, he thought. It worried him only indirectly: he spent a lot of time wondering if he ought to try to assert himself more, and always ended up concluding that he’d rather not have power over others, not if he could help it. What he would have liked was for those with power to behave as he would if he were them.

‘I’m not criticising you,’ he told Jackie. ‘You’ve given us some very useful information, and, as you say, two days isn’t a long time.’

‘No, it isn’t. What am I supposed to do, ring the police and say, “Excuse me, but I saw a dead body on a property website, except now it’s disappeared?” Who’s to say it was ever there at all? No one would have believed me. I’d have looked like an idiot.’

‘And yet you did come forward,’ Sam pointed out.

‘Well, I couldn’t just leave it, could I? I mean, maybe I imagined it, maybe it was never there at all, but I’ve still got to tell someone, haven’t I? What if I didn’t imagine it? I worried about it till it did my head in, asked all my mates – waste of time, they all gave me different advice. Some said, “Don’t be daft, you couldn’t have seen it”, some said, “You’ve got to tell someone”. Most just laughed at me, to be honest. It wasn’t funny, you know,’ she said indignantly, as if Sam had said it was. ‘Monday morning, I woke up and thought, this is going to bug me if I don’t get it off my chest. It shouldn’t be my responsibility, should it? No one pays me to worry about people getting murdered. So I rang the police.’ Her accent sounded like Essex to Sam, but perhaps it was Cambridge. Was there such a thing? he wondered. If so, it wasn’t one of the better known regional accents, like Brummie or Scouse.

‘You did the right thing,’ he said.

Jackie nodded. ‘I’ll swear to you right now: I didn’t imagine it. That’s just not me, I’m not an imagination sort of person. Do you know what I mean?’

Sam did. Jackie Napier was about as different from Connie Bowskill as it was possible to be. They were at opposite ends of the scale. With a dead woman lying in her own blood smack bang in the middle of the space between them.

‘Two things about me . . .’ Jackie counted them off on her fingers. ‘One: I’m as loyal as they come. If I’m on your side, I’m on your side for keeps. Two: I live in the real world, not fantasy land. I don’t get ideas, I don’t kid myself about my life, pretend it’s better than it is: I prefer to see things how they really are.’

Did she mean she didn’t get ideas above her station? Sam wondered. Fancy, far-fetched ideas? Or ideas, period? She’d given him one: maybe he could garnish his deficiencies with a bit of inverted boasting. He imagined himself saying to Proust, ‘Two things about me, sir: I avoid confrontation wherever I can, and I let my DCs run rings around me.’ That would go down well – about as well as Sam’s having devoted today to helping Ian Grint with his maybe-real-and-maybe-not murder, as if he had no cases of his own to attend to.

‘What time was it when you saw the woman’s body on Roundthehouses?’ he asked Jackie.

‘I told DC Grint: about quarter past, twenty past one.’

And Grint could have told Sam. But Sam was glad he hadn’t, now that he’d got this far, now that Jackie was looking at him, finally, and no longer grimaced at everything he said. When, earlier, he’d asked to be debriefed, Grint had chuckled and said, ‘Too much effort, not enough time.’ Sam had walked into the interview room knowing only Jackie’s name, and that she claimed to have seen what Connie Bowskill had seen. As a result, he was experiencing her first-hand, undistorted by whatever conclusions Grint had drawn based on his prior meetings with her.

Grint was right: it was a better way to do it. Sam wasn’t fooled by the outward flippancy; Grint cared about 11 Bentley Grove’s disappearing dead woman. When you were in the presence of someone who really cared about something – above and beyond professional conscientiousness – you could feel it in everything they said and did. In Grint’s company, Sam had that feeling – as if there was adrenaline in the air, in the walls, in the furniture – and he knew he wasn’t the one generating it. Grint’s like Simon Waterhouse, he thought. He’d have put money on the two detectives hating one another.

‘Do you normally go on the internet late at night?’ he asked Jackie.

‘Lord, no. I’m a nine-o’-clock-to-bed person, me. I was jet-lagged. I got back from holiday last Thursday, and I’m never right for a few days afterwards, if it’s long-distance.’

‘Where did you go on holiday?’

‘Matakana in New Zealand. You’ve never heard of it, have you?’

Sam had, but he pretended he hadn’t, guessing that Jackie would enjoy enlightening him.

‘My sister lives there. It’s a pretty little place. She runs a café. Well, it’s an art gallery, really – but they do cake and coffee and stuff. It doesn’t know what it is – it’d make more money if it did. I always say, it’s great for a holiday, Matakana, but you wouldn’t want to live there.’

Same wondered how often Jackie had said this in the presence of her sister, while enjoying her hospitality.

‘Do you mind my asking what you do for a living?’

Jackie jerked her head in Grint’s direction. ‘Hasn’t he told you anything?’

‘It’s helpful for me to hear it from you,’ Sam told her.

‘I’m an estate agent. I work for Lancing Damisz. We’re the ones selling the house where the body was, 11 Bentley Grove. Why do you think I was looking on Roundthehouses?’ She frowned. ‘Are you one of those people who hates estate agents?’

‘No, I . . .’ Sam heard a scraping sound, and turned; Grint had chosen this moment to adjust the position of his chair. An estate agent. That was the last thing Sam had expected, as Grint well knew; it explained the hint of a smile on his face.

‘When I couldn’t sleep Friday night, I thought I’d have a look at what had come on the market while I was away,’ said Jackie. ‘I knew 11 Bentley Grove’d be there – I knew she was selling it, the doctor that owns it, Dr Gane. I’d have dealt with the sale myself, only I was due to go to New Zealand, so I handed it over to Lorraine – my colleague, Lorraine Turner?’

‘So . . .’ Sam felt as if he was lagging behind. ‘Sorry, you might have to clarify something for me: you said you were looking at Roundthehouses to see what had come up for sale while you were out of the country . . .’

‘That’s right. To see what had sold, too, and what was under offer. Keep an eye on our competition, check they weren’t selling more than us. The property market’s strong in Cambridge. The downturn didn’t hit us as badly as it did some places, and things are really picking up now. Any house or flat in the city centre that comes on for less than about six hundred grand gets snapped up within days, unless it’s a huge refurb job or on a busy road. It’s a supply and—’

‘Sorry, if I can just stop you there.’ Sam smiled to compensate for the intrusion. ‘So essentially you were trying to get up to speed before you went back to work.’

‘Yeah. See, the thing about me is, I love my work – it’s a vocation more than a career for me. I even miss it when I go away. There’s no job I’d rather do, and that’s the God’s honest truth.’

‘I think that might answer the question I was about to ask.’ The question I’d have asked some time ago, if you weren’t quite so keen on the sound of your own voice. ‘Why did you play the virtual tour of 11 Bentley Grove? I suppose you need to see a house’s interior to know whether it’s fairly priced,’ Sam answered his own question, imagining how he might feel if selling homes were his passion in life.

‘You do.’ Jackie nodded enthusiastically. ‘Too right you do. Still, I’d already seen inside Dr Gane’s house, twice. I looked at the virtual tour because I was curious to see if she’d moved out like she said she was going to. Just being nosy, really. She told me she wouldn’t be able to stay there after what had happened, said she’d have to go to a hotel. I said to her, “That’ll cost you a bomb – staying in a hotel till you’ve sold, and bought somewhere else.” She’d gone and done it, though – I could tell from the tour. She’d left most of her stuff in the house, but there was no toothbrush, toothpaste or loo roll in the bathroom, no pile of books or water glass on her bedside table.’ Jackie tapped the side of her nose. ‘I’ve got an instinct, when it comes to houses – and the people that live in them.’

And the people that die in them?

‘I remember thinking, “She’s only done it – moved into a hotel, at God knows what cost. Silly woman!” And then the picture of the lounge came up, and I saw that body lying there, all that blood . . .’ Jackie shuddered. ‘I don’t want to see anything like that again, thank you very much.’

‘You said, “After what had happened”. I need you to start from the beginning, I’m afraid.’ Sam could feel Grint watching him.

Jackie laughed scornfully. ‘That’s a bit of a tall order. Like I said to DC Grint, I don’t know what the hell’s going on, so how do I know when it began?’ Bored with picking her nails, she slotted her earring back through the hole in her ear.

‘Start with the phone call on 30 June,’ Grint told her. If Sam had been a different sort of person – if he’d been Giles Proust, for example – he might have turned round and said, DC Grint! So glad you could join us.

Jackie sighed heavily. ‘I was at work. I answered the phone,’ she recited in a bored, ‘been there, done that’ voice. ‘It was a woman. She told me her name was Selina Gane – Dr Selina Gane. She made a point of saying that. Normally people don’t – normally we ask. So, like, if you rang me and said your name was Sam . . .’ Jackie wrinkled her nose. ‘What’s your surname again?’

‘Kombothekra.’

‘So you’d say your name was Sam Kombothekra and we’d say, “Is that Mr, Doctor or Professor?” Or, if you were a woman, we’d say, “Is that Miss, Mrs, Doctor or Professor?” We don’t ask about “Ms” – not allowed, orders from on high. The whole traditional image thing.’ Jackie mimed quote marks. ‘I’ve got a real bee in my bonnet about it, actually. I’m a Ms – so are most of my colleagues. But Cambridge is Cambridge – a lot of people here don’t realise that change is going to happen to them whether they like it or not.’

‘Phone call,’ Grint intoned from the back of the room. ‘30 June.’

‘Yeah, so I got this call, Dr Selina Gane she said her name was. Wanted to put her house on the market, 11 Bentley Grove, so I arranged a meeting with her for later that same day at the house. She seemed nice – there was nothing about her that made me suspicious. I looked round, measured up, talked to her about commission, marketing, we agreed an asking price. I took some photos for the brochure . . .’

‘You took the photos?’ Sam asked. ‘When I spoke to Lorraine Turner, she told me she took them.’

‘Yeah, that’s because I deleted mine,’ said Jackie, as if this ought to have been obvious.

‘Lorraine took the pictures that ended up in the brochure and on the website,’ Grint contributed from his ringside seat. ‘But let’s not leap ahead. Go on, Jackie.’

‘The woman – the one who said she was Selina Gane – she told me she’d pop into the office the next day, to proofread the draft brochure, which she did. She made a few changes, and I said, great, thanks, I’ll send a copy of the brochure when it’s ready. She said not to bother – she didn’t need one. She gave me a spare key, told me to arrange viewings whenever I wanted, let myself in and out. She was going away, she said. I told her I’d ring her to let her know when I was coming, as a courtesy, but she said, no, there was no need.’

Sam was having trouble concentrating. He knew something was on its way that he wouldn’t be able to predict if he tried for a million years. Would Simon know where Jackie’s story was heading, if he were here? Would he already have a theory? Sam was straining to pay attention to every word, and his awareness of the effort he was making was interfering with his ability to listen. Grint’s looming background presence wasn’t helping.

‘By the time the brochures were done, I’d already rung round a few of the buyers on our priority list,’ Jackie went on. ‘Anyone I thought might be interested. Not university people – they all want historical buildings and period features, and there’s not much of that on Bentley Grove. Luckily the science park and Addenbrooke’s lot don’t care – they want square footage, shiny and new, big gardens. I had a family who were gagging to be shown round, the Frenches – they were the first ones I rang, to be honest. I knew they’d be perfect for 11 Bentley Grove.’

Odd way to look at it, thought Sam. A house needed to be right for its inhabitants, surely, not the other way round.

‘When I turned up at the house with the Frenches, I let myself in and walked into this woman I’d never seen before. Except I had – I’d seen a photo of her, a passport photo. She looked terrified, as if she thought I was going to attack her, or something. She asked who I was, what was I doing in her house, how come I had a key? She went white in the face – honest to God, I thought she was going to pass out. I asked her who she was. She said she was Selina Gane – well, she was Selina Gane, I know that now – but she wasn’t the woman I knew as Selina Gane.’ Jackie patted the nape of her neck, as if to emphasise her own identity. ‘She had no idea what I was on about. Some bloody woman had only gone and put her house on the market without telling her.’





Charlie was taking photographs. As many as she could, of as much as she could: of the pool from every angle, her favourite trees and plants in the gardens, her and Simon’s bedroom. Otherwise known as the site of only one shag. He’d put his arm round her in bed last night – in that way of his, stiff with significance and awkward invitation – but she’d been too upset about Liv and Gibbs, then more upset still because Simon hadn’t seemed to mind her not wanting to.

She took one picture each of all the empty bedrooms they hadn’t used, a few of the lounge, kitchen, dining room, the various sun terraces. God, she loved this place. How was it possible to love a place when you’d been nothing but miserable there? In the same way that it was possible to love a person with whom you were miserable, she guessed.

Grudgingly, she included in her photo-shoot the annoying mountain that doggedly refused to show its face to anyone but Simon. She had asked Domingo about it this morning; he hadn’t been able to see it either. From his evident bewilderment, she’d concluded that no other guest had ever mentioned it. Yet again, Simon was the special one. Charlie still hadn’t ruled out the possibility that he was pretending to see something that wasn’t there: another of his twisted thought-experiments.

Was she going to take a photograph of Domingo’s wooden lodge? Yes, why not? For the sake of completeness, she ought to have one. If she ever spoke to her sister again, she could show her the picture and say, ‘That’s where I was when I found out you were screwing Chris Gibbs.’

As she approached, she heard Simon’s voice. He’d been talking to Sam for nearly an hour. They were going to have to offer Domingo a contribution towards his phone bill. Charlie listened outside the open door: something to do with Roundthehouses, the property website. And a murder, or a death. Connie Bowskill was involved; Simon had mentioned her name a couple of times at the beginning of the conversation, before Charlie had given up trying to understand what was going on and gone to find her camera.

She photographed the hut from every angle. Leaning into the dark, stuffy room that smelled of Domingo’s woody aftershave, she pushed Simon to one side so that she could get a shot of the wicker chair through the open door, the blue and red blanket draped over it.

That’s where I was sitting when you ruined my honeymoon, you selfish bitch.

‘I’ll try to get Sam later,’ Simon was saying. ‘I’ll have to go to Puerto Banus, find another phone to ring him from. I feel under pressure here, with the caretaker waiting to get his gaff back. Can’t really concentrate. What? There are no other rooms, only this one and the bog. For as long as I’m on his phone, he has to stand outside.’

Get Sam later? Charlie frowned. Sam was the person Simon had said he was phoning. Had he rung somebody else afterwards? The Snowman? No; the rigid hatred was missing from his voice, so it couldn’t be Proust. Colin Sellers, then. It had to be.

Simon grunted goodbye. He didn’t put the phone down straight away. Charlie took a photo of him tapping it against his chin, mouthing words to himself – that was always a sign that his obsession levels were soaring, well on their way to being off the graph. ‘Smile, you nutter,’ she said.

‘I thought you weren’t taking any photos till the last day.’

She laughed. ‘You think this isn’t our last day? Don’t kid yourself.’

Simon took the camera from her hand. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘You want to go home.’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘It’ll be a few hours before you admit it to yourself, a few more while you pluck up the courage to tell me we’re going.’

‘That’s crap. We’re going nowhere.’

‘Sellers just told you something about a dead woman. You want to be there, where the action is. Where the rigor mortis is, rather.’

‘I want to be here. With you.’

Charlie couldn’t allow his reassurances to penetrate her wall of resentment. It would hurt too much if she believed him and then he went back on it. ‘Why wouldn’t you want to go home?’ she said angrily. ‘Your friend Connie witnessed a murder and wants to tell you all about it. What a coincidence that she just happened to stumble across the body. Is the dead woman her husband’s girlfriend, by any chance?’

‘Nobody knows anything.’ Simon sighed. ‘Least of all you. Connie Bowskill saw a dead body lying face down on a bloodstained carpet on the Roundthehouses website. In one of the interior shots of 11 Bentley Grove – the house her husband had in his SatNav as “home”.’

Charlie stared at him. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you? You’re actually serious.’

‘Friday night, this happened – early hours of Saturday morning.’

‘Simon, Roundthehouses is a property website,’ Charlie spelled it out as if for a child or a fool. ‘There aren’t any dead bodies on it, only houses for sale. And for rent – let’s not forget the lettings side of the operation. Apartments, maisonettes . . . no dead women. Did Sellers . . .’ Charlie stopped, shook her head. ‘It’s a wind-up, isn’t it? He’s probably been planning it for months.’

‘I haven’t spoken to Sellers. That was Gibbs on the phone.’

Gibbs. Charlie felt as if an invisible hand was closing around her throat, gripping tightly so as to let nothing out. Probably a good thing if it was; sensible of the human body to put a system in place to prevent a person from screaming all the way through their honeymoon.

It was Chris Gibbs who, four years ago, had uttered the words that had brought Charlie’s world to a standstill. He and only he had seen the look on her face as she realised what she’d done, as her life began to unravel – in public, in broad daylight, in the f*cking nick of all places. Perhaps Gibbs had thought nothing of it, unaware that he was witnessing the destruction of the thing Charlie held most dear: her sense of herself as someone who was worth something. It hadn’t been Gibbs’ fault; all he’d done was provide her with information she’d asked for and that he’d found for her. Logically, she knew he’d done nothing wrong, but she held it against him all the same. He’d been front row and centre, spectator at the scene of her humiliation.

‘You said you were going to ring Sam.’

‘His phone’s switched off.’ Simon leaned forward to see Charlie’s face. ‘What? Don’t look like that. I didn’t say anything about Olivia. You heard the conversation – it was about Connie Bowskill. Gibbs and I don’t have personal conversations.’

Everybody and you don’t have personal conversations.

‘You spend an hour on the phone to Gibbs chatting about made-up dead bodies on property websites, and you don’t think to mention that he and my traitor of a sister have done their best to wreck our wedding and honeymoon?’

Simon slotted Domingo’s phone back into its base. ‘They can’t wreck anything,’ he said. ‘Apart from their own relationships, and that’s their lookout.’

‘You’ve changed your tune! Last night you said you’d always think of our wedding day as the day that—’

‘No, you said that. And you told me I felt the same way – let down, implicated . . .’

‘Well, don’t you? It was our wedding day. They had no right to make it anything else.’

Simon pushed past Charlie, out into the sunlight. ‘Anything that’s ours, the only people who can f*ck it up are you and me. If you don’t want your honeymoon ruined, stop talking about going home early.’

‘That’s . . . you’re confusing two things that have nothing to do with each other!’

‘Am I?’ Simon pushed a hanging tree out of his way. Orange petals fell on Charlie; she brushed them off her face.

‘Last night you said you’d lost all respect for both of them.’ She was running to catch up with him. ‘Was that a lie? Have you forgiven them already?’

‘It’s not up to me to forgive or not forgive. Yeah, I think less of them. Gibbs is married, Liv’s supposed to be getting married. They shouldn’t have done it.’

‘You didn’t sound like you thought less of Gibbs, before, on the phone. You sounded the same as you always sound.’

‘Does he need to know what I think?’ Simon sat down on the steps of the swimming pool, put his bare feet in the water up to his ankles. ‘Doesn’t stop me from thinking it.’

Charlie pressed her eyes shut. Nothing she said would make a difference. Simon and Gibbs would go on as if nothing had happened – talking about work, slagging off Proust, drinking together in the Brown Cow. What had she expected, that Simon would take a stand? Refuse to speak to Gibbs until he apologised and promised to leave Liv alone?

Like everyone at Spilling nick, Gibbs knew what had happened at Sellers’ fortieth birthday party. He knew Simon and Charlie had been in a bedroom together, that Simon had changed his mind and made a run for it, leaving the door wide open and Charlie naked on the floor. Stacey, Sellers’ wife, had been outside on the landing with three of her friends; she’d seen everything. Charlie had laughed off all references to the incident at work, and had mentioned it to nobody outside work. Liv knew nothing about it. Yet.

‘I don’t believe in collective responsibility,’ Simon said. ‘Gibbs is the one cheating on Debbie. He’s met Liv plenty of times before. How many times have they been at the Brown Cow with us, without Debbie or that tosser Dom Lund? It could have happened any time – didn’t need us getting married to make it happen.’

‘And if Debbie finds out we knew, and didn’t tell her?’

Simon looked up, shielding his eyes from the sun with his hand. ‘Why would we tell her? It’s none of our business.’

It was like trying to explain the way planet Earth worked to an extra-terrestrial. Charlie took a deep breath. ‘Liv’s my sister. If this gets out, people are going to assume I’m on her side.’

‘Then you can tell them what you told me last night: that you never want to see her fat treacherous slut face again.’

‘I said that?’

‘I was convinced,’ said Simon. ‘I can’t see anyone doubting you.’

Charlie hated being reminded that she’d said that about her own sister. But whose fault was it? Who had made her say it? ‘Debbie’s popular,’ she worried aloud. ‘All her friends are police wives – Meakin’s wife, Zlosnik’s, Ed Butler’s – Debbie’s a central part of that . . . network. She and Lizzie Proust go to the same Aquafit class at Waterfront. If it was Stacey Sellers, I wouldn’t worry so much – everyone thinks she’s a bitch. And she’s not having IVF, she hasn’t had a million tragic miscarriages. Did you see that “Good Luck” card that was doing the rounds, before Debbie had her first . . . hormone thingy?’

Simon nodded. ‘Couldn’t squeeze my signature on, there were so many.’

Charlie wrapped her arms round herself, feeling shaky. ‘Everyone at work’s going to hate me, Simon. I’ve been through that once—’

‘The only person who hated you four years ago was you.’

‘I seem to remember the tabloids offering their support,’ Charlie said bitterly. ‘I can’t cope with it again, Simon – I can’t cope with being the bad guy everyone’s pointing at.’

‘Charlie, the Sun and the Mail don’t give a shit about Debbie’s IVF.’

‘What if Debbie finds out, and she and Gibbs split up, and Liv becomes the new Mrs Gibbs? Mrs Zailer-Gibbs, with her double-barrelled f*cking pretentious . . .’

‘You’re working yourself up into a state for no reason.’

‘I’ll leave work and there she’ll be, waiting in the car park to pick him up after his shift. There’ll be no getting away from her. She might move to Spilling.’ Charlie shuddered. ‘You think none of this has occurred to her? This thing with Gibbs, she’s done it deliberately.’

‘I hope so,’ said Simon. ‘F*cking Gibbs by accident’d be traumatic for anyone.’

‘She’s always preferred my world to hers – hovering on the sidelines, waiting for me to invite her in. She saw her chance and she took it – now she’s in. All she needs to do is eliminate Debbie. She doesn’t need me any more for access.’

No response.

‘Say something!’ Charlie snapped.

Simon was staring into the water.

Charlie thought about the last thing he’d said. He’d never used the word ‘f*cking’ in a sexual context before. Never.

‘Simon?’

‘Sorry, what?’

‘You’re not listening to me.’

‘I know what I’d be hearing if I was: someone who’s addicted to suffering. Who’ll go to any lengths to create opportunities to feel bad, and make other people feel bad.’

Charlie tried to push him into the swimming pool. He grabbed her wrists to stop her. She gave up; he was far stronger. A few seconds later, it was as if it had never happened. She sat down on the steps beside him. ‘You’re not listening because you’re thinking about bonkers Connie Bowskill, with her stupid SatNav and dead body stories,’ she said. ‘You might as well be in Spilling.’

‘I’ve got a theory.’

Charlie groaned.

‘Not about Connie Bowskill – about you. You’re the one who wants to go back. You want Liv to find out via your mum and dad that we sacked it after four days. That way the symbolism’s clear: one day she rings up, next day the honeymoon’s dead – unambiguous. A romantic dream in tatters, a high-concept disaster . . .’

‘Oh, shut up!’

‘A lifetime of guilt for your sister.’

‘Can I ask you something?’ Charlie’s voice was brittle. ‘Why did you marry me if you think I’m such a bitch?’

Simon looked surprised. ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘You’re human, that’s all. We all have shitty thoughts, we all do shitty things.’

Charlie wanted him to say that there was a clear distinction between her shittiness and Liv’s, that Liv’s was a hundred times worse. From many years of experience, she knew that the thing you wanted Simon Waterhouse to say was never the thing he said.

His eyes narrowed. He squinted at Charlie, as if he was concentrating on memorising her face. ‘Categories of people – that’s where we start. You post the image of a dead body on a website, you’re either the killer . . .’

‘I don’t believe this,’ Charlie muttered. She walked down the steps of the pool into the water and started to swim. Her dress clung to her; her sandals were like bricks tied to her feet.

Simon stood up and walked along the side, keeping pace with her. ‘If you’re not the killer or an accomplice, who are you? The person whose house it is? Course, the owner might be the killer. The estate agent selling the house? I can’t see how that would work, can you? Or maybe someone interested in buying. Nothing better for lowering the price than blood and guts all over the living room floor.’

‘F*ck off, Simon, f*ck off, and thrice f*ck off.’

‘If you’re the killer and you post a picture of the body online, you’re advertising your work. If you’re not the killer—’

‘There’s no dead body apart from in Connie Bowskill’s mind,’ Charlie shouted over him.

‘Didn’t I tell you?’ said Simon. ‘Someone else saw it too, and contacted Cambridge police.’

‘What?’ Charlie stopped swimming. ‘Who? Connie Bowskill’s best friend? Her mum?’ It had to be a lie.

‘If you’re not the killer, were you there when it happened? Were you watching? Hiding? Did you know it was going to happen? Were you waiting with a camera? Or did you only come along afterwards and find the body?’

Charlie hauled herself out of the pool. Now she was weighed down by the water trapped in her clothes; moving quickly in the heat was even harder.

‘Where are you going?’ Simon asked her.

‘Where am I going?’ she echoed his question. ‘Where could Charlie be going?’ Let the speculator speculate, she thought, hurrying towards Domingo’s wooden house. She was going to ring the airline, find out how soon they could fly home.





Sam understood, finally, something Grint had said in passing earlier: that he’d asked Lorraine Turner for the names, addresses and phone numbers of everyone she’d shown round 11 Bentley Grove so far, as well as anyone who’d enquired about it, even if they hadn’t followed up with a viewing. Sam had put it down to thoroughness, a desire to cover all bases, but he saw now that it had been more than that. The woman who had assumed Selina Gane’s identity and put her house on the market without her permission might have decided to pose as a prospective buyer. The psychology was consistent. This was someone with form for gaining entry under false pretences, someone who was known to have lied about who she was. Sam could see that it might amuse her to deceive yet another member of Lancing Damisz staff.

And then? What would the woman who wasn’t Selina Gane do next? Make an offer? Buy the house? Was that the aim, all along? It was pointless speculating, Sam decided, with so few solid facts available.

‘Couldn’t make it up, could you?’ Jackie was chatting to him now as if they were old friends. ‘There was me standing there like a lemon, and the poor Frenches, who’d have bought that house, guaranteed, except I had to tell them it wasn’t for sale after all, it was a mistake. Embarrassed doesn’t even begin to cover it! The Frenches were gutted. It’s the worst part of my job, having to deal with the emotional fallout when things go wrong. It must be the same with your job.’

It was a pity Jackie Napier wasn’t more intelligent; a cleverer person would have known which parts of the story were important and which weren’t. Sam had an awful feeling he would shortly be hearing all about Jackie’s saving of the day – the even better house she found for the Frenches, with its sunnier garden and superior garaging facilities – if he didn’t take active steps to avoid it.

‘I need to clarify this,’ he said. ‘You’re saying the woman you met at 11 Bentley Grove the first time you went there wasn’t Selina Gane? The woman who told you she wanted to sell the house, the one who proofread the brochure and gave you a key?’

‘She was nothing like Dr Gane,’ Jackie said angrily.

‘So the real Selina Gane was the one you met when you turned up with the Frenches a few days later?’

‘Exactly a week later,’ said Grint. ‘Wednesday 7 July.’

‘I should have known as soon as I saw that bloody passport photo,’ said Jackie, tight-lipped. ‘Selina Gane’s blonde and pretty. The other woman was dark and . . . sort of severe-looking, but you don’t think, do you? Someone shows you a passport photo and says, ‘‘I used to dye my hair blonde,’’ you believe them, don’t you? You don’t think, ‘‘I wonder if they’re pretending to be someone else.’’ I had no reason to be suspicious of her. She had a key to the house, for God’s sake – she was in the house when I went to meet her there. Of course I assumed it was her passport and her house – who wouldn’t? Who puts someone else’s house up for sale? I mean, why would anyone do that?’

Why would anyone put a photograph of a murder victim on a property website?

‘How did you come to see the passport?’ Sam opted to ask an easier question.

‘We have to see ID for anyone whose house we’re selling. So we know they’re who they say they are.’ If Jackie was aware of the irony, she was hiding it well.

‘You say she was dark, the woman who wasn’t Selina Gane. What was her body shape – small, tall, fat, thin?’

‘Small and thin. Petite.’

Sam felt something click into place in his mind before he realised why. Then it came to him: petite. Connie Bowskill had used the same word. A dark-haired petite woman . . .

Some bloody woman had only gone and put her house on the market without telling her. That’s what Jackie had said.

Some bloody woman . . .

‘Jackie, the woman you saw on the virtual tour, lying face down – could she have been the woman who met you at 11 Bentley Grove and pretended to be Selina Gane?’

Jackie frowned. ‘No. I don’t think so, no. The dead woman – you could see the backs of her legs. She had darker skin. The woman I met was pale. And she had a wedding ring on, but a really thin one – not much thicker than a ring-pull from a can. The dead woman was wearing a thick wedding ring.’

‘You’re sure?’ Sam asked.

Jackie tapped her finger against one of her earrings – the same one she’d used to pick her nails. ‘I always notice jewellery,’ she said proudly.

Even when there’s a butchered woman in the same photograph, competing for your attention? Sam noticed that Jackie wasn’t wearing a wedding ring herself, and felt sorry for the unfortunate man who might one day put one on her finger.

‘The real Selina Gane doesn’t wear a wedding ring,’ Jackie added. ‘She’s not married. I think she might be the other way – it was just a feeling I got.’

Pale skin. Thin wedding ring. Sam turned to look at Grint, saw that he was hunched and frowning. Connie Bowskill was petite, with pale skin and a very thin wedding ring. Sam shivered involuntarily. Why would Connie Bowskill pretend to be Selina Gane and put 11 Bentley Grove up for sale? Because she thought Selina was living there with Kit? Sam didn’t like that as an explanation – the logic of it was too hazy. It was hardly the first thing you’d think to do in that situation. If Connie was the dark woman Jackie met at 11 Bentley Grove, how did she get hold of a key?

Grint had stood up, and was making his way across the room, hobbling. ‘Foot’s gone to sleep,’ he said. ‘Jackie, do you reckon you’d know her face if you saw her again, the woman who impersonated Selina Gane?’

‘Definitely. I’m good with faces.’

Sam thought that was debatable, given that she’d fallen for the passport photo. When he looked up, he found her staring at him, her face frozen in a mask of dislike. It gave him a shock; what had he done wrong?

‘You think I should have known it wasn’t her, from the passport. Don’t you? How stupid must I be, that I didn’t clock it was a picture of someone else? She’d thought of that. “I used to dye my hair blonde,” she said. “It suited me too. Admit it, I look better there than in real life. Most people’s passport photos make them look like serial killers – mine makes me look like a film star. Sadly, the reality falls way short.” ’

‘That was what she said?’

‘Not exactly that,’ said Jackie. ‘I don’t remember her exact words. It was over a month ago. But she gave me some flannel about not looking like her photo. She definitely said the serial-killer-film-star bit. Oh, she was clever. She knew all she had to do was talk about people not looking like they do in their passports. If she made me think about all those other people, she wouldn’t have to convince me – I’d do all the work myself. It’s one of those things everyone says, isn’t it? ‘‘He looks nothing like his passport photo, I’m surprised he’s ever allowed back into the country.” ’

Sam had to concede she had a point.

‘What if we were to introduce you – here, today – to the woman who passed herself off as Selina Gane?’ Grint asked Jackie.

‘I’d ask her what the hell she was playing at.’

Grint nodded. ‘I’ll ask her the very same. Between us, we might get an explanation out of her.’

Sam didn’t like what he was hearing. Jackie hadn’t yet identified Connie as the woman she’d met; why was Grint acting as if she had, offering her his support? Was it a tactic? If he seriously planned to put Jackie and Connie in a room together, Sam didn’t want to be there too. Plus, there was something else worrying him, something that wasn’t any of the things he knew he was worried about. He’d suddenly become aware of a dragging anxiety beneath the surface of his thoughts. What was it? It hadn’t been there a moment ago.

‘I’d like to hear the end of Jackie’s story,’ he said. ‘There you were at 11 Bentley Grove, with the Frenches and a frightened, confused Dr Gane – what happened?’

‘The Frenches scurried off home to ring my boss and complain.’ Jackie rolled her eyes. ‘Ungrateful sods – nothing like giving someone the benefit of the doubt, is there? They assumed I’d cocked up. I haven’t spoken to them since. I wouldn’t.’

So, no superior garaging and sunnier gardens for the Frenches, Sam thought, not if Jackie could help it. Hadn’t she described herself as loyal, at the beginning of the interview? In Sam’s experience, people who extolled their own loyalty often sought to impose reciprocity, by coercion if necessary. Almost always, there was an unspoken caveat: but if you cross me, or let me down . . .

‘I was left standing there like a spare part, with Selina Gane threatening to ring the police. I managed to calm her down, at least enough to explain what had happened. She was in a state – who wouldn’t be? So was I, to be honest. I mean, it wasn’t like anything bad had happened to me, but it freaks you out a bit, thinking you’ve been tricked by some weirdo and you don’t even know why. What I don’t get is, what was the point of it all, from the dark-haired woman’s point of view? She must have known what’d happen: I’d turn up to show people round the house, and I’d meet the real Dr Gane. Eventually that was bound to happen, wasn’t it?’

Sam wondered if the point had been to scare Selina Gane out of her senses. To make her think, ‘If my lover’s wife is capable of this, what else might she be capable of?’

‘I don’t suppose Selina Gane said anything about who the dark woman might be?’

‘She wasn’t making much sense. At first when I asked her who’d do a thing like that, she said, “I know who did it.” I waited for her to say more, but she started yapping on about changing the locks. She grabbed the Yellow Pages and started looking up locksmiths, and then she threw the book on the floor, burst into tears and said how could she stay in the house after this? “If she can get a copy of my front door key once, she can do it again,” she said. I told her she ought to contact the police.’

‘She took your advice,’ said Grint. He aimed his next comment at Sam. ‘She made a statement on Thursday 8 July. In it, she said that she was aware of a dark-haired woman who’d been following her – she had no idea who she was, but this woman had been hanging around, behaving oddly. From her statement, there was no way of us working out who this person was, but then . . .’ Grint turned back to Jackie. ‘There have been some developments, recently.’

Grint couldn’t have known about this statement yesterday morning, Sam thought, or else he would have sounded far more interested than he had the first time Sam had spoken to him about 11 Bentley Grove and Connie Bowskill’s disappearing dead woman.

‘I had to ask her,’ said Jackie. ‘I wanted to know who she thought had done it. She said, ‘‘I don’t know who she is.’’ But a few minutes before, she’d said she did know who it was. She mustn’t have wanted to talk about it.’

Grint and Sam exchanged a look. Grint said, ‘I think what she meant was that she suspected the woman who’d been following her was responsible – she knew she had a stalker, but didn’t know the stalker’s identity.’

‘Right,’ said Jackie. ‘Yeah, I suppose so. I didn’t think of that.’

‘So you threw the brochures in the bin, took 11 Bentley Grove off the website . . .’ said Sam.

‘Deleted the photos I’d taken, explained to my boss what had happened.’ Jackie sounded bitter. ‘I got a right bollocking for not checking the passport properly.’ She gave Sam a look that said, I know whose side you’re on. ‘Then, just before I went to New Zealand, I got a call from Dr Gane – the real Dr Gane. I checked.’

Sam wondered how rigorous the checking process had been, over the telephone. Are you really Selina Gane this time? Yes. Oh, okay, great.

‘I recognised her voice,’ Jackie snapped at him.

‘Fair enough,’ Sam said evenly.

‘She rang me because she said I’d been kind and understanding, that day with the Frenches.’ There was an unmistakeable ‘So there’ on Jackie’s face, as if Sam had called her essential goodness into question. ‘She wanted to sell her house, wanted me to take care of it. Said the house didn’t feel like hers any more. I could see where she was coming from – I’d have felt the same way in her shoes, to be honest. She said, ‘‘If that woman got in once, she might have got in a hundred times. I can’t live here knowing she’s violated my space. She might have slept in my bed, spent nights here while I’ve been away.” I told her I couldn’t deal with it, I was off on holiday, and I’d ask Lorraine to ring her. She was okay with that – she knew Lorraine, from when she bought the house – it was Lorraine that sold it to her. Lorraine went round, took new photos . . .’

‘Hold on,’ Sam stopped her. ‘When I spoke to Lorraine Turner, she said nothing about anyone impersonating Selina Gane and putting her house up for sale without her knowledge.’

‘I didn’t tell her,’ said Jackie. ‘Dr Gane asked me not to.’

‘She didn’t want anyone to know what had happened who didn’t need to,’ Grint told Sam. ‘She found it distressing and embarrassing, didn’t want people asking her about it.’

Sam was still thinking about Lorraine Turner, whose relationship with 11 Bentley Grove went further back than Selina’s, Jackie’s, Connie’s. Lorraine had sold 11 Bentley Grove to Selina on behalf of the Christmas tree couple, Mr and Mrs Beater. Did she also sell the house to the Beaters, when it was first built, or had the developers done that themselves?

‘I told Lorraine she’d have to meet Dr Gane at Addenbrooke’s or at her hotel to collect the key,’ Jackie went on. ‘I was thinking, “Don’t bother asking her to meet you at Bentley Grove – she won’t go near the place.” She said to me she wasn’t going back to that house ever again.’

Grint was moving towards the door of the interview room. ‘Let’s go and meet Selina Gane’s stalker, shall we?’ he said. Jackie rose to her feet. A more sensitive person might have been nervous, Sam thought; he certainly was. He tried to imagine Connie Bowskill admitting it, and couldn’t. Couldn’t imagine her denying it either – how could she, if Jackie pointed the finger in no uncertain terms? As Connie had said herself, it was difficult to maintain a state of denial when what you were trying to deny was laid out before you and you were forced to confront it head-on.

If it was denial. It occurred to Sam that Connie might be cannier than she seemed. How good an actress was she? Her painful-to-watch attack on her husband had been inconsistent, lurching from one accusation to another; Sam had put this down to confusion and panic at the time, but now he wasn’t so sure. At first Connie had seemed convinced that Kit thought she was a killer, and terrified that he might be right. She’d wanted Grint to say that for her to have killed a woman and then repressed the memory was impossible – she’d virtually put the words in his mouth. Then she’d changed tack: Kit didn’t really think she’d killed anybody, but he wanted her to think that was what he believed – wanted to plant in her mind the fear that she might have committed a murder of which she now had no memory.

Listening, Sam had wondered how she could harbour these two suspicions simultaneously. He’d concluded that she was most afraid of not being in control of her own behaviour; she preferred to think that her husband was a monster.

After talking to Jackie Napier, Sam had a different theory. It was no accident that he’d been left wondering which of the two it was: Kit the liar, Kit the killer, messing with his wife’s head in the hope that he could make her collude in his framing of her for a crime she didn’t commit – or Connie the unfortunate victim of a mental breakdown whose psychological disintegration was so severe that she couldn’t be held responsible for her actions. It was no accident that a choice had been set up between these two possibilities and no other. Sam’s attention, and Grint’s, had been skilfully diverted away from a third possibility: that Connie had knowingly and deliberately killed a woman. That the anguished on-the-edge persona she presented to the world was a carefully constructed lie.

Sam was torn. Part of him would have liked to take Grint to one side and ask him what was happening on the forensic front, what Selina Gane had said when Grint had interviewed her, as Sam assumed he must have. He’d have liked to know if the former owners of the house, Mr and Mrs Beater, had identified the stain on the carpet as being the same one made by their Christmas tree, or if Grint was content to take Lorraine Turner’s word for it. Sam wouldn’t have been; a couple of times he’d opened his mouth to tell Grint as much, then changed his mind. Not his patch, not his problem.

It was time to extricate himself and return to his own far duller caseload. The more he discussed 11 Bentley Grove’s disappearing dead woman with Grint, the deeper he’d be drawn in. Interviewing Jackie Napier had been a step too far; he should have refused. Why didn’t you, then? his wife Kate would say – the most pointless question ever to be formulated, and one Kate asked regularly.

I didn’t because I didn’t.

As he followed Grint and Jackie up a narrow flight of grey stairs, Sam admitted to himself that he had no choice but to put Grint in touch with Simon, who, if nothing else, would be able to confirm that Connie had told the truth about the conversations she’d had with him. Simon would have formed an impression of her character, positive or negative. He wouldn’t be afraid to take a position, or several: reliable or dishonest, crazy or sane, victim or victim-maker. Good or evil. Simon dealt in larger concepts than Sam felt comfortable with, and trusted his own judgement; he was the help Grint needed. Someone who didn’t constantly equivocate. It often seemed to Sam that, while most people’s minds were like manifestos, foregrounding their beliefs and commitments, his own was more of a suggestion box, with every side of every argument stuffed into it, all clamouring for attention, each demanding equal consideration; Sam’s only role was to sort through the competing claims as impartially as possible. Maybe that was why he felt tired nearly all the time.

He’d have to contact Simon in Spain and warn him that Grint would be in touch; it was only fair. Great. Offhand, Sam couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do less than interrupt a honeymoon, especially not one that belonged to Charlie Zailer. Charlie wasn’t known for her forgiving nature.

Sam got a shock when Grint opened the interview room door and he saw the Bowskills. Both seemed out of breath. Connie looked as if she’d been crying non-stop for the whole time she’d been alone with her husband. There were grey streaks on her trousers that hadn’t been there before. What the hell had happened? An unpleasant, sour smell hung in the air, one Sam could neither describe to himself, nor match to anything he’d smelled before.

‘Sam?’ Connie’s voice was thick. Her eyes were on Jackie Napier, but there was nothing to suggest she recognised her. ‘What’s going on? Is this the woman who saw what I saw?’

If she’s lying, Sam thought, then by now the lie is as necessary for her survival as her heart and lungs are; she’ll cling to it no matter what, because she can’t envisage a life without it. Most of the liars Sam’s work brought him into contact with favoured the disposable variety – they’d put a story together and trot it out in the hope that it might net them a lighter sentence, but they knew they were talking rubbish; that was how they defined it to themselves. They weren’t emotionally attached to their invented scenarios; when you pointed out to them that you could prove they weren’t where they said they were at a particular time, they normally shrugged and said, ‘Worth a try, wasn’t it?’

Sam steeled himself for confrontation. He sensed a powerful latent aggression in Jackie Napier, always on the lookout for a legitimate outlet. That she would lay into Connie Bowskill, verbally if not physically, seemed beyond doubt. So why the delay? Why was she staring at the Bowskills, saying nothing?

Jackie turned to Grint, her mouth a knot of impatience. ‘Who’s this?’ She gestured towards Connie.

Grint took a second or two to answer. ‘This isn’t the woman who showed you Selina Gane’s passport?’

‘I did what?’ said Connie.

‘What the f*ck are you talking about?’ Kit turned to Sam. ‘What does he mean?’

‘No,’ Jackie Napier said irritably. ‘I don’t know where you got her from, but you can put her back. I’ve never seen her before in my life.’



*

POLICE EXHIBIT REF: CB13345/432/24IG



CAVENDISH LODGE PRIMARY SCHOOL



Date: 13.07.06

Name: Riordan Gilpatrick



Form: Lower Kindergarten

Average Age: 3 years 4 months

Age: 3 years 8 months



COMMUNICATIONS, LANGUAGE, LITERACY



Riordan has made good progress this year with language. Always clear and fluent in his speech, he has good recall and enjoys story time. He recognises all the Letterland characters and their sounds and is now building words from their individual sounds.



MATHEMATICAL DEVELOPMENT



Riordan recognises numbers up to 9 and counts to 18. He can complete a 6-piece jigsaw, recognise colours and geometric shapes and sort for colour and size. Riordan enjoys playing number games and joining in songs.



KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING OF THE WORLD



Riordan shows interest in the world about him and likes to join in the discussions we have. He enjoys planting seeds and bulbs, baking, looking at the day’s weather for our weather chart and learning about topics such as Farms, Life Cycles and ‘People Who Help Us’.



PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT



Riordan’s fine motor skills are excellent. He draws some lovely pictures and handles pencil or paintbrush with skill. He can thread beads and use scissors and he traces his letters carefully. Gross motor skills are also very good: he runs and jumps, enjoys pushing the prams, and likes to join in playground games.



CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT



Riordan just loves to dress up and role play in the Home Corner with his friends! He also likes to use his imagination with the small world toys. He is always eager to sit at our creative table and paint, draw lovely detailed pictures or make collages.



PERSONAL, SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT



Riordan has settled well into his first year at school and made lots of friends. He socialises well and is caring towards his friends. He is a pleasure to have in the class: we shall miss him when he moves up to Kindergarten next year! I am sure he will enjoy being in Kindergarten. Well done, Riordan!



Form Teacher: Teresa Allsopp