‘About the Johnsons? In what way? People topping themselves at Beachy Head is hardly unusual. I seem to remember the coroner’s reports being fairly cut and dried.’
‘They were. I just thought … You know how you have a feeling about a job, sometimes? Something not right – as though the truth is hiding in plain sight, but you can’t quite get hold of it.’
‘Sure.’ James was nodding politely, but there was no spark of recognition. His generation of detectives didn’t work on feelings. They worked on facts. Forensics. It wasn’t their fault – the courts didn’t go a bundle on intuition, either. Murray did. In his experience, if something smelled like a fish and tasted like a fish, it was almost certainly a fish. Even if it didn’t look like one.
‘But you didn’t feel like that about these jobs?’
‘Pretty standard stuff, mate. They were in and out of the office within a couple of weeks each time.’ He leaned forward and lowered his voice, even though there was no one else in the office. ‘Not exactly taxing stuff for CID, am I right?’
Murray smiled politely. He supposed an open-and-shut suicide didn’t present much of a challenge to a team of hungry detectives with an array of rapes and robberies on their desks. It had been different for Murray. His motivation had been people, not crimes. Victims, witnesses, even offenders – they’d all fascinated him. He had felt – still felt – compelled to investigate the mysteries in their lives. How he wished he had been sitting at James’s desk when the Johnson suicides had come in.
Murray stirred himself. ‘I’d better get off.’
‘Things to do, people to see, right?’ James clapped him on the shoulder again. ‘Why the interest in the Johnsons?’
That was the point at which Murray should show him Anna Johnson’s anonymous card. The point at which he should officially hand over the job to CID and go back to his front desk job.
Murray looked at the list of jobs on the whiteboard, at the piles of ongoing files on each detective’s desk. Would James prioritise this one? A job with no clear answers, handed to him by a retired cop?
‘No reason,’ Murray said, before he’d properly thought it through. ‘Idle curiosity. I saw the name on an old briefing sheet. I bought a car from them a few years ago.’
‘Right. Cool.’ James’s eyes flicked to his screen.
‘I’ll let you get on. Have a good Christmas.’
Anna Johnson was vulnerable. In a little over a year she’d lost both her parents and had a baby. She felt threatened and confused, and if this job was going to be investigated then it needed to be done properly, not given a cursory glance before being filed again.
‘Great to see you, mate. Keep up the good work!’ James half stood as Murray left the office. He was back in his seat before the older man had reached the door, the Johnson case already forgotten.
Murray would quietly investigate Caroline Johnson’s death, and the moment he had concrete evidence of foul play, he’d come back to DS Kennedy.
Until then, he was on his own.
SIXTEEN
ANNA
‘It just seems a bit over the top, that’s all I’m saying.’
‘Not to me.’ We stand in the open doorway, Ella in her car seat between us. Mark looks at his watch, even though he only just checked the time. ‘You don’t have to come. You can drop me at the police station and go on to work, if you’d rather.’
‘Don’t be silly, of course I’ll come.’
‘Silly? I’d hardly call a dead rabbit—’
‘I didn’t mean the rabbit! Christ, Anna! I meant: “Don’t be silly, I’m not going to leave you to go to the police on your own”.’ Mark exhales noisily and stands squarely facing me. ‘I’m on your side, you know.’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’
There’s a shout from next door. ‘Morning!’
Robert Drake is standing outside his house, his hands on the railings between our driveways.
‘Bit early, isn’t it?’ Mark slips easily into Jovial Neighbour mode, going down the steps to greet Robert through the railings.
‘First one off for six years – I’m going to milk it.’
‘I don’t blame you. Six years!’
I watch them shake hands through the railings.
‘Still on for Christmas drinks at mine?’
‘Absolutely,’ Mark says, with far more enthusiasm than I’d be able to muster. Robert holds a party every year. He cancelled it last year, out of respect for my parents, but the invitation for this year’s dropped through the door a couple of weeks ago. Presumably my mourning period is over. ‘What can we bring?’
‘Just yourselves. Unless you want soft drinks. Not many of those around. Ha!’
Dad and Billy used to play golf with Robert from time to time, but Mum never joined them. She said Robert was smug. I look at him now – at his expensive shirt and his confident stance – and think she was right. Robert Drake has the innate arrogance of someone so on top of their professional game that they adopt the same position in their private life.
Fuck off, Robert.
The voice in my head is so clear I think for a moment I’ve said it out loud. I imagine Mark’s face, and Robert’s, and stifle a snort of laughter that erupts from nowhere. I think perhaps I’m going mad, the way I think my mum did after Dad died. Laughing at things that weren’t funny, crying at things that weren’t sad. My world feels tipped upside down and this man next door, with his cheery Christmas greetings and his jokes about soft drinks, feels not just insignificant but inappropriate after the events of the last twenty-four hours.
My mother was murdered, I want to tell him. Now someone’s threatening me.
I don’t, of course. But it occurs to me that Robert, with his penchant for wandering outside to chat to the neighbours, might have seen something useful. I join Mark by the railings.
‘Did you see anyone outside our house this morning?’
Robert stops short, his festive cheer dimmed by the intensity of my stare. ‘Not that I recall.’ He’s a tall man, but not broad, like Mark. He stoops slightly, and I imagine him leaning over the operating table, scalpel in hand. I shiver. Imagine that same hand slicing open a rabbit …
‘Were you outside the house late last night?’
The abruptness of my question is followed by an awkward pause.
Robert looks at Mark, even though it’s me who asked the question. ‘Should I have been?’
‘Someone put a rabbit on our doormat,’ Mark explains. ‘There was blood all over the steps. We wondered if you might have seen anything.’
‘Good God. A rabbit? What a peculiar … But why?’
I examine his face, looking for any sign that he’s faking. ‘You didn’t see anyone?’ Even as I ask, I’m not sure what answer I’m expecting. Yes, I watched someone put a mutilated rabbit outside your house, but didn’t think to ask what the hell they were doing. Or: Yes, I put it there as a joke. Ha ha. An early Christmas present.
‘I wasn’t back till late last night … Both your cars were in the driveway, but there were no lights on. And I’m afraid I had a lie-in this morning. Off till New Year. I know: lucky bugger, eh?’
This is stupid. Robert Drake is the sort of person who starts Neighbourhood Watch schemes and reports cold callers. If he had seen someone putting a rabbit on our step, he’d have told us. As for putting it there himself … the man’s a doctor, not a psychopath.
I turn to Mark. ‘We should get going.’
‘Sure.’ He picks up Ella’s car seat and takes it to his car, strapping it in with no sense of urgency. I sit in the back next to her.
I don’t think Mark is taking this seriously. My parents were murdered. How much more proof does he want? The anonymous card. A dead rabbit. These aren’t normal events.
He stands for a while outside the closed car door, then moves away. I hear the crunch of gravel underfoot. I stroke Ella’s cheek with one outstretched finger and wait for Mark to lock the front door. I have a sudden memory of waiting in the car for my parents, sitting in the back like this, while Dad tapped the steering wheel and Mum rushed back to the house for something she’d forgotten.