‘I hope the year brings health, wealth and happiness to us all.’ He raises his glass. ‘A very happy New Year to you, Angela; to my beautiful Ella; and to Anna, who I am hopeful might this year say yes.’
I smile fiercely. He will ask me tonight. At midnight, perhaps, when my mother is on a train to heaven knows where, and I’m grieving on my own. He will ask me, and I will say yes.
And then I smell something. An acrid burning, like melting plastic, teasing my nostrils and catching the back of my throat.
‘Is there something in the oven?’
Mark is a second behind, but quick to catch up. He moves swiftly to the door and into the hall.
‘Jesus!’
Mum and I follow. The smell in the hall is even worse, and below the ceiling hangs a mushroom of black smoke. Mark is stamping on the doormat – black fragments of burned paper fly out from beneath his feet.
‘Oh my God! Mark!’ I scream, even though it’s obvious that whatever flames there were have been extinguished, the cloud of smoke already dissipating.
‘It’s okay. It’s okay.’ Mark’s trying to stay in control, but his voice is a notch higher than normal, and he’s still stamping on the doormat. It’s the rubber surround I could smell, I realise. Whatever was put through the letterbox has disappeared; would probably have burned itself out even without Mark’s input. Paper kindling designed to frighten us.
I point to the front door. Sweat trickles down the small of my back.
Someone has written on the outside of the stained-glass panels on the upper section of the door. I see the block capitals, distorted by the different thicknesses of glass.
Mark opens the door. The letters are written in thick black marker pen.
FOUND YOU.
FIFTY-ONE
MURRAY
It was dark before they hit the motorway. Murray had made one phone call after another once they’d left the bedsit, and when it was obvious he wasn’t going to be free to drive any time soon, he had handed the keys to Sarah.
‘I’m not insured.’
‘You’ll be covered under mine.’ Murray mentally crossed his fingers and hoped he was right.
‘I can’t remember the last time I drove.’
‘It’s like riding a bike.’
He shut his eyes as they joined the M42, Sarah pulling out in front of a ten-tonne truck amid a cacophony of horns. She settled into the middle lane at a steady seventy miles per hour, ignoring the cars that flashed her from behind to move over, her knuckles white on the steering wheel.
Murray hadn’t been able to get hold of anyone at Eastbourne borough planning office, and he didn’t have the authority to call someone out. Before he found someone who did, he needed to get his facts right. He smoothed out the papers he’d found in the bin of the bedsit. It was a printout of Robert Drake’s planning application, crumpled and stained, but still readable.
There had been many occasions over Murray’s thirty-year career when a gut feeling had provided the key to an otherwise frustrating investigation. He might be a few years out of date with the latest legislation and procedure, but instinct never retired. Drake had something to do with his neighbours’ disappearances, Murray was sure of it.
Murray skimmed over the objections, interested not in the content, but in the details of the complainants. Next, he worked his way through the supporting documents. He scanned the elevation drawings, and compared the proposed footprint with the existing one. It was a huge extension; Murray wasn’t surprised by the number of objections.
He looked at the next page, reading through the long list of building materials, techniques and suggested methodology for the extension. He couldn’t have explained what he was looking for, only that he felt certain the key to this case lay with Robert Drake.
He found it buried in a paragraph halfway down the final page.
Murray looked up, almost surprised to find himself still in the car. In his head he’d been in the CID office, amid the hustle and bustle of a dozen live cases, the good-natured ribbing between colleagues, and the fallout from office politics.
There was no time to ponder on how life had changed. No time to do anything other than finally call in the job he’d been sitting on since Anna Johnson first walked into Lower Meads police station.
‘Hello?’ Detective Sergeant James Kennedy did not sound like a man on duty. He sounded, in fact, like a man who had the good fortune to be off for a couple of days after a Christmas on call, and was settling down with a beer, his wife and his kids, for a quiet New Year’s Eve in. Murray was about to change all that.
‘James, it’s Murray Mackenzie.’
A brief pause, before James feigned enthusiasm. Murray imagined him glancing at his wife, shaking his head to indicate that no, it’s nothing important.
‘Remember I mentioned the Johnson suicides when I swung by last week?’ Whether James did or didn’t, Murray didn’t wait to find out. ‘Turns out they weren’t suicides.’ Murray felt the familiar buzz of a job gaining momentum; heard his voice assume the energy of younger years.
‘What?’
Murray had his attention now. ‘Tom and Caroline Johnson didn’t kill themselves. The suicides were faked.’
‘How do you—?’
It didn’t matter that Murray was going to get another bollocking from Leo Griffiths. What did he care? He was going to resign anyway. He took another glance at Sarah, her knuckles still white on the steering wheel, and decided it might be better if he did the driving in the new motorhome.
‘On the twenty-first of December – the anniversary of Caroline Johnson’s death – the Johnsons’ daughter, Anna, received an anonymous note suggesting the suicides weren’t straightforward. I’ve been looking into them since then.’ Intercepting James, he kept on talking. ‘I should have handed it over, but I wanted to give you something more concrete to go on.’ And I didn’t think you’d take it seriously, he wanted to add, but didn’t. Neither did he add that the case had given him a focus; that it had given him and Sarah a distraction from their own lives.
‘And now you have?’ Murray heard a door being closed, the background sounds of James’s children fading away.
‘The witness call on the nines, saying Tom Johnson had gone over the cliff, was a fake. It was made on a mobile phone bought by the Johnsons the day Tom allegedly died.’
‘Hang on, I’m making notes.’ There was no hesitation now, no question lingering in James’s voice about the validity of Murray’s claims. There was no pulling rank, no insistence that Murray go through proper channels.
‘No one saw Caroline jump. The chaplain was a credible witness because he really did see Caroline on the edge of the cliff, appearing as though she was going to jump.’
Murray remembered the young chaplain’s statement, his angst that he hadn’t been able to save Caroline Johnson. When all this was over Murray would find the poor chap and tell him what had really happened. Give him some peace of mind.
‘There’s a planning application in with Eastbourne Borough Council,’ Murray went on. If James was surprised by this apparent change of tack, he didn’t show it. ‘I can’t get hold of anyone in the office. We need access to the back end of the planning portal and the IP addresses of everyone who lodged an objection to an extension proposed for the house next door to the Johnsons’.’
‘What are we looking for?’
‘Confirmation. One of those objections will be from an IP address in or near Swadlincote, Derbyshire, from a woman using the name Angela Grange.’ Murray was certain of it. Caroline had been just as determined to stop that extension as Robert Drake had been to push it through. If she didn’t regret that already, she soon would.
‘I’ll put in a call.’
‘The anonymous note Anna received was intended to flush Caroline out, and it did just that. She left Derbyshire on the twenty-first of December. It doesn’t take a genius to guess where she went.’
‘The family home?’
‘Bingo. And if we don’t get there soon, someone’s going to get hurt.’