‘Fair?’
‘What have the last couple of months been all about, Alex? I’ve just been convenient, haven’t I? A distraction to take your mind off other things.’
He seemed to know as soon as he’d said it that his words were a mistake.
‘Meaning?’
Rob raised his hands in surrender. ‘Meaning nothing. I shouldn’t have said it. I’m sorry.’
‘Sorry’ just made Alex angry. She could feel her face growing hot. He’d done enough damage at the supermarket, and now this.
‘I’m right though, aren’t I?’ he continued, not ready to take the warning that he’d already said too much. ‘It’s you calling all the shots, as usual. You just craving control to make up for all the things that have slipped from your grip, and once again I’m just collateral damage.’
‘I thought you were sorry? You can stop now.’
Rob shoved his hands into his pockets and lowered his head. He looked pathetic, she thought.
‘How long have you been with her?’
He shrugged. ‘A few months.’
Alex’s lip curled. It was insulting, being lied to in her own home by the man she had once shared it with. Rob would never have met the kids of someone he’d only been seeing for a matter of months – it just wasn’t like him. But then, she thought, there were so many other things she had believed ‘weren’t like him’ which now apparently were.
‘That night I called you,’ she said, ‘months ago, when you came to fix the window. You were with her then?’
That night had been the first of many. She wished now she could go back in time and deal with that broken window herself. Letting him back into her life had been an invitation for trouble and now here it was, welcomed into her home by her own stupidity, her own desire to feel a way she had thought was long behind her. She was too tired to be dealing with this.
He couldn’t even bring himself to nod in response. He didn’t need to say anything: the answer was in his face, in the way he lowered his head and looked at the hallway carpet like some unruly child receiving a reprimand.
What now? She could kick him out, stand on the doorstep yelling and screaming like some woman scorned, but where would that get her? There was a reason they had separated. She was not meant to be with him.
‘Just go, Rob.’
‘But…’
‘Please.’
He put a hand on the handle of the front door. ‘I assume I’m expected to apologise. I can’t. You’ve picked me up and put me down when it’s suited you. We’re really not that different.’
He waited for a reply and pushed down the handle of the door when he didn’t get one. There were a hundred things Alex wanted to say to him – spiteful, vicious things that would relieve her momentarily of the bitter taste they were creating in her mouth – but she managed to hold them back. Voicing her anger wasn’t going to make it go away.
Rob closed the door behind him, leaving Alex standing in the hallway. She wasn’t sure which hurt the most: the humiliation of having been the other woman, or the fact that too many of the things he’d said had been disconcertingly accurate. She had never before considered seeking control a negative thing, but perhaps that’s what it was.
She looked around the empty house, breathing in its silence.
Perhaps in her case it was destructive.
She heard her phone ping with a message and went to the living room to retrieve it from her bag. The message was from Chloe.
Check your emails. I’m so sorry for everything. Please catch this bastard.
Chapter Fifty
The following day, Alex took DC Mason to visit Cardiff Council’s office buildings to gain details of both ex and current employees within their grounds maintenance departments. Alex realised it was a long shot. The maintenance of the stretch of river running through the grounds at Bute Park involved external services, meaning plenty of people beyond the council’s staff would have been able to gain access to the area of land where the pathologist seemed sure Lola Evans’s body would have been placed in the river.
‘Would someone working in the grounds of either park be brazen enough to abandon the body of a woman he had killed there?’ Alex wondered as they walked back to the car.
‘Seems crazy to us,’ Dan agreed, ‘but it takes all sorts. Whoever’s done this wasn’t right in the head to start with.’
Alex unlocked the car and they got in.
Dan’s summary was a simple one, but there was perhaps more to it than he’d intended. To what extent could a criminal mind ever be understood? In cases like this the mind was damaged, perverse, and it seemed to Alex that although no rational human being ever wanted to fully comprehend the workings of a mind that had planned, executed and then lived with the memories of killings such as Lola Evans’s and Sarah Taylor’s, it was her job to think like a criminal.
‘Nice little job for someone,’ Alex said, gesturing the pile of paperwork that rested on Dan’s lap. It was details of staff members obtained from the council. A lack of physical evidence was making things complicated. Short of arresting every member of staff in turn, DNA testing each and hoping for a match with the second blood sample found at The Black Lion, all Alex could see were dead ends.
‘Can you have a quick check through those names, check for a Christian Cooper or a Joseph Black?’
Dan flipped through the paperwork and scanned the list of staff names.
‘Connor Price’s wife was in again this morning,’ he told her. ‘She’s claiming police harassment. Apparently, his post-traumatic stress disorder is making him an easy target for victimisation.’
Alex rolled her eyes and started the engine. ‘I’ll give her a detailed description of Lola Evans’s corpse, if she likes. Then she can talk victimisation.’
Connor’s wife now knew – had seemingly known for a while – of her husband’s infidelities, but if she was happy to turn a blind eye to it then Alex figured that was her problem. She had bigger things to worry about than other people’s marriages.
‘Anything?’ she asked.
Dan looked up from the paperwork. ‘No.’
It was hard for Alex to ignore the pessimism consuming her. She realised that events of the previous evening hadn’t helped her mood, and thoughts of Chloe ate into her. She wished it was Chloe rather than Dan who sat beside her now. Dan was nice enough and proving good at his work, but things just weren’t the same. Alex needed some of Chloe’s enthusiasm, even if it was now apparent that her enthusiasm was likely to have all been a brilliantly performed charade. But her focus and energy hadn’t been.
How had she been able to maintain such pretence amidst everything she had carried with her all that time?