I move to stand next to him. Our neat pile of leaves and prunings is the only evidence that anyone has been in the garden. A finch flies across the patio to the fence, where Mum has replenished the bird feeder. It hangs upside down, pecking at the ball of peanut butter and seeds. Aside from the birds, the garden is empty.
Murray walks away from the window. He leans against the breakfast bar and I keep my gaze steadily on him, not daring to glance again at the garden. This man is too perceptive. Too shrewd.
‘What was it you wanted to speak to me about?’
‘I wondered how many mobile phones you had.’
The question takes me off guard. ‘Um … just the one.’ I slip my iPhone out of my back pocket and hold it up in evidence.
‘No others?’
‘No. I had a second phone for work, but I handed that back when I went on maternity leave.’
‘Do you remember what the brand was?’
‘Nokia, I think. What’s all this about?’
His smile is polite but guarded. ‘Just tying up some loose ends from the investigation into your parents’ deaths.’
I go to the sink and start washing my hands, scrubbing at the dirt under my fingernails. ‘I told you I’d changed my mind. I don’t think they were murdered. I told you to drop it.’
‘Yet you were so adamant …’
The tap runs hotter, burning my fingers until I can hardly bear to hold them under the water. ‘I wasn’t thinking straight.’ I scrub harder. ‘I’ve just had a baby.’ I add using my daughter as an excuse to my mental list of things to feel guilty about.
There’s a noise from outside. Something falling over. A rake; a spade; the wheelbarrow. I turn around, leaving the tap running. Murray isn’t looking outside. He’s looking at me.
‘Is your partner at home?’
‘He’s at work. It’s just me.’
‘I wonder …’ Murray breaks off. His face softens, losing the sharpness that makes me so uneasy. ‘I wonder if there’s anything you want to talk about.’
The pause stretches interminably.
My voice is a whisper. ‘No. Nothing.’
He gives a brief nod, and if I didn’t know he was a police officer, I might have thought that he looked rather sorry for me. Just disappointed, perhaps, not to have found what he was looking for.
‘I’ll be in touch.’
I walk him to the door, standing with one hand on Rita’s collar while he crosses the road and gets into an immaculately polished Volvo. I watch him drive away.
Rita pulls away, complaining, and I realise I’m shaking, holding her collar too tight for comfort. I drop to my knees and give her a fuss.
Mum’s waiting in the kitchen, her face ashen. ‘Who was that?’
‘The police.’ Articulating it makes it even more frightening, even more real.
‘What did he want?’ Her voice is as high-pitched as mine, her face as drawn.
‘He knows.’
FORTY-SEVEN
MURRAY
Nish was still talking to Sarah when Murray returned home.
‘That didn’t take long.’
‘She wasn’t exactly hospitable.’ Murray was trying to pinpoint exactly what had been wrong with the scene at Oak View. Anna had been jumpy, certainly, but there had been something else.
‘Did you ask her outright?’
Murray shook his head. ‘At this stage, we don’t know whether she’s only recently found out her parents are alive, or if she’s known from the start. If she’s guilty of conspiracy, she needs to be interviewed under caution by a warranted officer, not questioned in her kitchen by a has-been.’
Nish stood up. ‘Much as I’d like to stay, Gill will be sending out a search party if I don’t get back soon – we’re supposed to be going out later. Let me know if you turn anything up, won’t you?’
Murray walked her to the door, joining her outside as she found her car keys in the depths of her bag.
‘Sarah seems to be doing well.’
‘You know what it’s like: two steps forward, one step back. Sometimes the other way around. But yes, today’s a good day.’
He watched Nish drive away, raising a hand as she turned the corner.
Back inside, Sarah had spread out Caroline Johnson’s bank statements. They had been examined at the time of Caroline’s apparent suicide, a summary note on file concluding they held nothing of interest. There had been no large payments or transfers immediately prior to Caroline’s apparent suicide, no activity abroad that might hint at a pre-planned hideaway. Sarah moved her finger down the rows of figures, and Murray settled on the sofa with Caroline’s diary.
He marked with Post-it notes the period in the diary between Tom’s disappearance and Caroline’s. Did the pair meet up? Make arrangements? Murray scoured the pages for coded reminders, but found only appointments, lists of things to do, and scribbled reminders to buy milk or call solicitor.
‘A hundred quid’s a lot to take out of a cashpoint, don’t you think?’
Murray looked up. Sarah was running a neon pink highlighter across a statement. She lifted the pen, moved it a couple of inches lower, and carefully highlighted a second line.
‘Not for some people.’
‘Every week, though.’
Interesting. ‘Housekeeping money?’ It was a bit old-fashioned, but some people still budgeted that way, Murray supposed.
‘Her spending’s more erratic than that. Look, she uses her card all the time – Sainsbury’s, Co-op, the petrol station – and takes out cash with no obvious pattern. Twenty quid here, thirty quid there. But on top of that, every seven days in August, she took out a hundred quid.’
Murray’s pulse quickened. It could be nothing. Then again, it could be something …
‘What about the next month?’
Sarah found September’s statement. There, too, among ad hoc cash withdrawals and card payments, were weekly withdrawals – this time for a hundred and fifty pounds.
‘How about October?’
‘A hundred and fifty again … No, wait – it goes up halfway through the month. Two hundred quid.’ Sarah rifled through the papers in front of her. ‘And now three hundred. From mid-November, right up to the day before she disappeared.’ She dragged the nib of the highlighter across the last few lines, and handed the sheaf of statements to Murray. ‘She was paying someone.’
‘Or paying them off.’
‘Anna?’
Murray shook his head. He was thinking about the 999 calls that had been made from Oak View; the pocket notebook entry describing Caroline Johnson as ‘emotional’, following the report of a domestic from the next-door neighbour, Robert Drake.
The Johnson’s marriage had been a tempestuous one. Possibly even a violent one.
Ever since Murray had realised the Johnsons had faked their deaths, he had been looking at Caroline as a suspect. But was she also a victim?
‘I think Caroline was being blackmailed.’
‘By Tom? Because she’d cashed in his life assurance?’
Murray didn’t answer. He was still trying to work through the possibilities. If Tom had been blackmailing Caroline, and she had been paying up, that meant she’d been scared.
Scared enough to fake her own death to get away?
Murray picked up her diary. He had already been through it several times, but back then he had been looking for leads on why Caroline had been at Beachy Head, not where she’d gone afterwards. He scoured the leaflets and scraps of paper tucked into the back, hoping he’d find a receipt, a train timetable, a scribbled note with an address. There was nothing.
‘Where would you go, if you wanted to disappear?’
Sarah thought. ‘Somewhere I knew, but where no one knew me. Somewhere I felt safe. Maybe a place I knew from way back.’
Murray’s mobile rang.
‘Hi, Sean. What can I do for you?’
‘It’s more what I can do for you. I’ve had the results back on a reverse IMEI search on that handset of yours.’
‘Which tells us what, exactly?’
Sean laughed. ‘When you brought me the job, I checked the networks to see what handset that SIM card had been used in, right?’
‘Right. And you traced it back to Fones4All, in Brighton.’
‘Okay, so the same thing can happen in reverse, it just takes a bit longer. I asked the networks to tell me if that handset has appeared on their systems at any point since the witness call from Beachy Head.’ He paused. ‘And it has.’
Murray felt a surge of excitement.
‘What is it?’ Sarah mouthed, but he couldn’t answer – he was listening to Sean.