‘D’you know anything about hairdressing?’ she asked.
‘About as much as I know about bartending,’ I said. ‘I’ve always fancied it. You’d have to drop the Goth get-up.’ She smiled at me and it was the first open acknowledgement that this might be a disguise. ‘And you’d have to tell me your real name,’ I said.
She looked at me, thinking for a moment, as if deliberating on whether she could trust me.
Then she said, ‘Saskia.’
Day 3
17 December
Davy
He is standing in front of an illuminated map of Hinchingbrooke Park, projected via PowerPoint onto the wall, and holding a pointer stick as if he is an army general preparing them for battle. And they – his squadron – are all looking up at him, awaiting his orders. Davy has important information to share and just at the right moment, Gary Stanton idles in and perches on a desk at the back of the briefing.
‘Our victim gets off the 4.13 p.m. train from London, walks through the car park as you’d expect, but instead of turning right into town and his hotel room at the George, he turns left, here,’ pointer again, ‘onto Brampton Road, following it until he can hang a right onto Hinchingbrooke Park Road. The question is, why? Was he heading for the hospital to visit his ex Ellie Bradshaw, who is a nurse on a medical ward?’ He points to a line of dashes traversing the open fields of the park. ‘As you all know, this is a footpath into Huntingdon and his body is found opposite the secondary school, at the start of this footpath.’
Davy nods at Stanton, kindly father figure, and Stanton smiles back as if to say, ‘That’s the way, Davy my lad.’
‘So the big development, the game changer,’ Davy tells the room, ‘is the forensic postmortem on Ross’s body, which has just landed. Ross died from a single stab wound to the heart. Derry Mackeith has stated that the nature of this wound means that Ross could not have walked any distance at all after he was stabbed. In other words, he was stabbed either where he fell, or extremely close to where he fell. So this is our crime scene.’ Davy circles the wooded area on the map with his stick. ‘Now, at the scene there are a series of blood spots.’ Davy uses his pointer to mark them. ‘Here, here and here along this footpath leading to the car park. The blood spots go on for a distance in excess of what Derry reckons the victim could have walked. We must therefore assume that the spots came, not from the victim, but from the assailant – or assailants – leaving the scene. They could have dripped from the knife – as it was carried away, for example.’
Stanton slips from the room.
‘Surely if he’s stabbed and then falls, then Judith Cole would have seen whoever did it,’ Kim says.
‘Possible. But it’s also possible that the assailant stabbed Ross, fled, either across the park or along the road, then Judith Cole comes ambling into the wood a minute or two later and Ross falls in front of her.’
‘Is there any CCTV pointing at the scene?’ Harriet asks. ‘I thought we’d gathered all footage.’
‘We’ve found a temporary camera, which was set up by the Friends of Hinchingbrooke Country Park to monitor antisocial behaviour. We’re getting the footage off it,’ Davy says.
‘And when’s that CCTV going to land?’
‘Person who normally manages it is in the Algarve,’ says Davy. ‘We’ve made it clear there’s a rush on this, but they’re not the most … well, they’re a bunch of volunteer pensioners trying to find someone who can burn it onto a disc for us. Additionally, there is a partial footprint in one of the blood spots, so we’ll be looking to match that.’
‘So this changes things,’ Harriet says. ‘It puts our King’s Cross chap out of the frame. He got off the train at St Neots and then travelled directly back to London, don’t ask me why, but he wasn’t in Huntingdon at the time Ross was stabbed. It also takes the pressure off Giles Carruthers.’
They’ve lost the King’s Cross chap anyway. His ticket paid for in cash, no trace on other CCTV cameras around the station. Davy still wanted to interrogate Ellie on her alibi, or lack of it, but Harriet was reluctant to authorise re-interview when Stanton seemed set against it. She hasn’t told Davy why this is. Perhaps she doesn’t know.
Davy says, ‘Still haven’t confirmed Carruthers’ takeaway.’
‘There’s no evidence he left London on the fourteenth of December,’ says Harriet. ‘What we are looking for is the person who was as close to that location where Ross fell as possible, at the time in question.’
One week in
21 December
Manon
She stands at the entrance and lifts a basket from the stack – one of those with an extendable handle you can wheel along. The green signs and oak flooring and abundant flower displays cater for the well-to-do.
She hovers, unable to begin. Her vision swims. She wonders if she might need a sit-down, but instead she approaches the ‘entertaining’ cabinet – shelf upon shelf of canapés for the festive season. The supermarket urges a life of largesse; Prosecco parties, nibbles arranged in those bowls with partitions, warm finger food involving prawns or filo pastry or both.
Nearby are stacked enough boxes of chocolates to bury a tired woman.
Manon is all sunk in on herself and ungenerous, trussed up in her anxiety like a Christmas turkey. She turns, ready to put back her basket, thinking, I don’t have to do this now. And also thinking, is this happening because I didn’t talk to Fly about the baby, avoided that conversation until the baby was self-evident?
‘Hellloooo!’ says Ann-Marie, one of the school mums she barely knows.
Manon tries to erase her slack-jawed existential crisis face.
‘Hi,’ she says.
‘Got fifteen coming for dinner,’ says Ann-Marie, nodding at her trolley, which is groaning with booze and raw ingredients, venison probably.
Manon nods.
The headmaster had said, ‘Take a seat,’ when she was summoned to his office this morning. The last day of term, the atmosphere raucous and loose. From this, too, she was excluded. She heard shrieking out in the hall.
‘I’m rather concerned about Fly,’ said Mr Jenkins. She was grateful he’d removed his Santa hat. A mince pie sat on a napkin beside his keyboard. ‘He got into a fight yesterday with the Cole twins.’
‘A fight?’
She wanted to say, ‘Well he won’t have started it, that’s not like Fly. It must’ve been the twins.’ But these days she’s not so sure. Not in his current state. She’s not sure of anything, in fact.
‘A member of staff – Mr Mitchell, geography – had to pull him off,’ said Mr Jenkins.
They both looked at the mince pie.
‘What was it about?’ she asked.
She couldn’t figure out whether she wanted to wrap her arms about Fly and tell him how sorry she was that life had taken a turn for the worse. Or box his ears and shout that he needed to man up and pull himself together. Some confusing mash-up of the two was the likely outcome.