‘Why were you at his house last night?’
‘We’d arranged to meet tonight . . . for New Year’s Eve, but then he phoned me about Susan Sullivan’s death. He sounded so upset.’
‘So you decided to drive through a snowstorm?’
‘Yes, Inspector, I did.’
Lottie watched him. He appeared sincere.
‘Had his mood changed in recent times?’ she asked.
Harte thought for a moment.
‘James told me a few months ago that Susan was diagnosed with cancer. He seemed to have known her a long time but I never met her. Once I asked if he’d introduce us. He didn’t.’
‘Did he tell you anything else about Susan?’
‘Only that she’d been through a lot in her life. He spoke as if he shared her troubles. James was like that. A sympathetic soul. Now that I think of it, he seemed obsessed with her at times.’
‘Any idea why?’
‘I imagine it was something to do with their work.’
‘What could that be?’
‘He was incensed by a vote on a council development plan. Kept saying he couldn’t believe they’d rezoned something or other. I don’t understand all that but I’m sure it’d be easy for you to find out. It’s just a matter of knowing what to look for.’
‘And therein lies the crux of the matter,’ Lottie said, thinking of Kirby’s bulging face, having to trawl through a morass of planning files. ‘Do you have any idea when this was?’
‘Not sure. Possibly June or July. I honestly don’t know. It could be nothing, Inspector.’
‘Leave that for me to determine,’ she said. They had nothing already. What harm would another bit of nothing do?
‘I have so many regrets.’
‘I know the feeling,’ Lottie said. She thought of all she’d buried along with Adam, feelings she couldn’t cope with.
‘Thank you, Mr Harte. You can go,’ she said folding over her notebook, ‘but I’ll need to speak to you again.’
‘Any time,’ Harte said. He got up and walked out the door, wearing his jacket like a dead weight on his shoulders.
When he was gone, his scent remained, wrestling the air around Lottie. A bitter smell of deep loss. She recognised it and hoped Harte could mourn, putting his grief behind him. She doubted it.
And for some reason, despite all that, Lottie had a nagging doubt at his sincerity.
Twenty
‘Will you sit down, Tom? You’re driving me insane.’
Tom Rickard, property developer, continued pacing up and down the marble-floored kitchen, occasionally glancing at his wife Melanie. He was annoyed at his own stupidity over the call with James Brown. Even more annoyed with that detective inspector and her snooping. Melanie Rickard drained the dregs of her cabernet, went to the sink and rinsed the glass. She preferred white wine, so why had she opened his red? She was acting like a bitch because he cancelled their New Year’s Eve plans without consulting her.
There was plenty of room for his pacing. Their kitchen was as large as the ground floor of a normal house. But their house was not normal. Nothing was normal where Melanie Rickard, his wife of twenty-one years, was concerned.
‘What’s bothering you anyway?’ She dried the glass, keeping her back to him.
He didn’t answer. He knew she didn’t really want one. Melanie asked questions because she felt it was expected, not because she cared. She’d ceased caring about anything to do with him years ago. Of that he was sure.
The wall clock ticked the evening away, adding to the turmoil raging in his head. Melanie wanted a party. She wanted another holiday. Her wardrobe was creaking with clothes bearing designer labels and expensive price tags. She wanted everything. She got everything. He had serviced her every whim. Not any more. Everything he had was sunk in the new project. A project fast drowning in quicksand. He was sinking with it. Suffocating himself with the noose of irrecoverable debt, and now two people were dead.
He didn’t know what to do. So he kept pacing. Up and down their imported Italian green marble.
When he looked up, Melanie was gone.
He needed to talk to someone. He wanted his soulmate, to feel the comfort of her arms and legs around him.
And his soulmate wasn’t Melanie.
Rickard put on his coat, slipped his phone into the pocket and, wrapping a cashmere scarf about his neck, he swapped the warmth of his silent kitchen for the cold night air.
Twenty-One
Lottie stood outside Susan Sullivan’s house. Crime scene tapes floated in the arctic breeze. She nodded at the uniformed guards sitting in the squad car. It was going to be a long cold night. She hoped they had a flask of something hot with them. She’d ordered that the house be watched for a couple of days. Just in case anyone turned up.
Darkness shrouded the house like a hooded cloak. All the surrounding homes were bathed in bright lights, some twinkling with week-old Christmas décor. She presumed the residents were chilling their champagne to ring in the new year. But the Sullivan house stood in mourning, dark windows reflecting light from the frozen snow lining the windowsills.
Before leaving the station she’d updated the incident team on the pathologist’s reports and the Derek Harte interview. She left Boyd to mastermind the Jobs Book and Kirby was busy cross-referencing reports from the door-to-door enquiries. So far, nothing. No one had seen anything. Was Ragmullin the town of the deaf, blind and mute? What had happened to the valley of the squinting windows? No sign of any husband, boyfriend or even a girlfriend for Sullivan and they still hadn’t located her phone or laptop.
With the team mired in paperwork, grumbling about it being New Year’s Eve and the parties they were missing, she had escaped. She needed fresh air and with the cold assaulting her she had meandered along the frozen footpaths through the town, drawn to Susan’s house. Experience told her there was a clue in this house. She just had to find it.
She dipped under the tape and opened the door. Flicking on the hall light, she felt the house creak and a radiator rattled somewhere upstairs, then settled. The house was warm. Heat on a timer, she concluded. As she entered the kitchen a hum from the refrigerator sounded in an otherwise silent room.
Looking around, Lottie wondered how it could be in such a state compared with the bedroom upstairs. It was as if two different people inhabited the house. Was Susan bipolar or schizophrenic or what? Could it be something to do with Susan’s childhood?
When she opened the fridge, the internal light brightened up the kitchen. She pulled open the tiny freezer drawer at the top. Tubs of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream stared back at her. Neatly lined up, never to be eaten.