It would take some luck, I thought. We’d hang on to them for as long as we could, and make the most of getting to search the house. There was a twenty-four-hour window before we had to charge them with anything, and I was inclined to use it.
‘Get dressed first. You’ll be going to the local police station and you’ll get one phone call once you’re booked into custody,’ Una Burt said, completely calm. ‘It’s up to you who you decide to call. Mrs Norris, is it? Could you gather everyone apart from your husband and brother-in-law in the living room? That would make it easiest for us to search the premises without causing too much disruption.’
‘Disruption?’ She laughed hysterically. ‘That’s one word for it. You’re tearing my life apart.’
‘It’s part of the investigation.’
‘You don’t care, do you? You don’t care that you upset people. You’re like the Stasi. Give you a little power and you take it as far as you can.’
‘That’s enough, Eleanor,’ Oliver said wearily. ‘I must apologise.’
‘Don’t you dare apologise for me. Don’t you dare.’
‘Mrs Norris,’ I said. ‘Eleanor. Come into the living room and have a seat. You too, girls.’
They started to make their way down the stairs, self-conscious and bewildered. Chloe’s head was hanging down so I couldn’t see her face. Eleanor Norris muttered something and darted towards the kitchen. Chris Pettifer blocked her, massive and bull-necked.
‘Whoa. Where are you going?’
‘I don’t—’ She put a hand to her head. ‘I need coffee.’
‘I can make you coffee,’ he said. ‘You just sit yourself down in here.’
Yes, why don’t you sit down in the room full of cushions rather than the room full of knives. I winked at Pettifer over the top of Eleanor’s head and steered her into the living room. The girls followed and sat down at the very end of the sofa, huddled together like birds on a wire. Eleanor collapsed into an armchair as if her legs had given way. I could hear footsteps upstairs, people moving around, the low rumble of conversations.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes. Shocked,’ Eleanor mumbled.
‘We’ll get you that coffee. Chloe? Bethany? Do you want anything?’
A double headshake. I had the impression that they were still holding hands but I couldn’t quite see. And was that strange, anyway? I tried to remember how I’d been with my friends when I was a teenager and came up blank.
That feeling – coming up blank – was going to become very familiar to me over the next couple of hours as I went through Oliver Norris’s house. Searching was one of my specialities, but even I couldn’t find anything if there was nothing to find in the first place. I let the girls and Eleanor get dressed once we had finished with their bedrooms, mainly so I could search Oliver’s desk in peace. It was in a corner of the living room, set into an alcove beside the chimney breast, with shelves above it and a small filing cabinet wedged underneath it. There was barely room for my legs under the desk when I sat in the chair and I wondered how he managed. With some difficulty I levered out the drawers of the filing cabinet (unlocked, I noted) and flicked through each one. Insurance documents, bills, the family’s passports, a tax return that made me whistle and showed there was decent money in pushing God … Nothing that made me sit up. I turned my attention to the shelves, lifting down books so I could flick through the pages. They had titles like Bound Together: A United Church and The Spirit-Filled Vessel: A Voyage into Faith. Page-turners, I was sure.
As I lifted down the last two, I saw there was a box on the shelf, slightly dog-eared and crushed from being hidden behind the books. A dozen condoms, the same brand as the ones I’d found in Kate Emery’s and Harold Lowe’s houses. I was peering into the box to discover there were only two left when footsteps made me twist around. Eleanor, who had pulled herself together enough to brush her hair as well as getting dressed.
My first instinct was to hide the box, but I thought better of it.
‘Do you recognise this, Mrs Norris?’
She looked at it, uninterested. ‘No.’
‘Do you know what it is?’
‘I can read.’
OK then. ‘Do you know how it came to be on this shelf?’
‘No.’ She looked at me levelly, her face impassive.
‘Who uses this desk?’
‘My husband.’
‘Anyone else? Your daughter, maybe?’
‘No. Just Ollie.’
‘Do you ever look on these shelves, or in the drawers?’
‘Ollie looks after all our affairs. I don’t need to. I cook and clean and take care of Bethany. Those are my responsibilities.’ She gestured. ‘These are his.’
‘And – sorry if this is an intrusive question – do you use condoms with your husband?’
She flushed. ‘It is intrusive and I’m not going to answer you.’
‘But you’ve never seen these before. And you didn’t buy them.’
‘No.’
‘Aren’t you wondering where they came from?’
‘I don’t wonder about my husband. I trust him.’ She said it as if she expected me to argue the point.
‘May I ask Bethany about them?’
‘About what?’ Bethany slid around the door with such speed I thought she had been there for a while. ‘Condoms? Where did you find them?’
‘How did you know what they are?’
Bethany gave her mother a withering look. ‘I shop in Boots. I’ve seen plenty of them. Ribbed. Multi-coloured. Extra-large— Ow!’
Eleanor had grabbed her daughter’s arm. ‘Are they yours?’
‘No. Of course not.’
‘Mrs Norris, please.’ Or I’m going to have to arrest you for ABH on your daughter …
She got the message and let go. Bethany rubbed her arm, wounded. ‘How could you even think they’d be mine?’
‘I’m going to need to take the box away for forensic examination,’ I said. ‘So if you do know anything about them, Bethany, now would be the ideal time to say.’
‘I told you. I don’t.’ She turned away. I wondered if I was imagining that she looked uneasy.
‘We’re going to need to take the car away too.’
‘But you already checked it,’ Eleanor protested.
‘They gave it the once-over, but now they want to have another look at it.’ Look at, in this context, meaning take apart.
‘You know, I don’t understand any of this,’ Eleanor said. ‘Why you would want to question Morgan about Kate, why you’re asking questions about some old condoms, for God’s sake – why you’re even here. It’s ridiculous to think that Ollie had anything to do with her disappearance, and Morgan never even spoke to her.’
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘I think so.’ Eleanor wrapped her cardigan around herself and shivered. ‘I mean, I thought I was. Now I’m not sure about anything.’
Join the club. It took a lot of self-control to think it and not say it.
15
It was quiet in the office. I tracked Una Burt to the meeting room where she was monitoring the live feed of Derwent’s interview with Oliver Norris. I’d already called her with the bad news: with the exception of the condoms, we’d found nothing much of interest in Norris’s house.