Talking to Strangers, page 26
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” I whisper, and Elise looks up, grim-faced, and nods. I fight it, but I have to stifle my sobs with my hands.
“He told me he was in Knapton Wood,” I gulp.
“Yes, I know.” Elise cuts me short, and I look at her crouching over the body. Does she? Ash said he hadn’t talked to the police.
I start to ask how she knows, but I’ve become invisible. Elise is all business now, phoning for an ambulance and shouting to Gordon to get up to the entrance to direct the paramedics. I watch her pick up a bottle of pills from the tabletop.
“Oh, God, did he kill himself?” I blurt. “Did he do it because he had let out his secret?”
Elise quietens me with a warning look.
“We won’t know until we get the toxicology report,” she says firmly. “No point speculating.”
When I get up off the floor, I stagger and have to catch hold of the counter where Ash kept his feathered patients. I look in the boxes, but all the birds are lying motionless. “Are you okay?” Elise says, voice full of concern. “It’s probably the shock.” But I notice she is wobbly on her legs, too.
“Let’s get some air,” she mutters, guiding me outside. “I need to make some more calls.”
I hear the ambulance siren echoing against the open sky miles before it screeches up to the static. I’m waiting for my moment to tell her the full story about Ash’s confession when a strong gust of wind blows me against the caravan and something hits me in the chest, making me yelp.
Elise whirls round, mid-dial. “What?” she snaps. I pull a soggy green rag off me between one finger and thumb.
“Sorry, but, God, look at this! This campsite is a tip,” I say. And that’s when I notice another rag sticking out of an external air vent near my knees. “Why’s he done that?” I murmur.
“Done what?” Elise murmurs back as she returns to dialing.
“Bunged up the vents,” I say, and we look at each other, eyes wide.
SIXTY-SEVEN
ELISE
Wednesday, February 26, 2020
Kiki Nunn was shivering in a tatty purple camping chair on the cinder path when Elise got to her.
“Have they checked you over yet?” Elise asked crisply. “I’ve been given the all clear, but the paramedics say it was a good job we got out of the caravan so quickly. The levels of carbon monoxide inside were still high enough to poison us.”
Kiki didn’t speak. The reporter was horribly pale.
“How are you doing?” Elise said, softening her voice. “I need you to come and look at the CCTV from the shopping center. Do you think you’re up to it?”
“I’ve been better,” Kiki murmured. “And I’ll review the tapes, but we need to talk. Urgently.”
Elise tried not to groan. Everyone needed her urgently. Was Kiki a priority? Probably not. Lucy Chevening could take her witness statement.
“Ash told me earlier he was in the wood,” Kiki started.
“Yes, as I said, we know. He told Annie Curtis and sent me an email detailing what he saw.”
“Did he? Really? That he saw Karen’s body?”
Elise steadied herself on the back of Kiki’s seat as she fumbled to snag on to what the reporter was telling her.
“Karen’s body?” she repeated slowly, weighing each word as she sank onto another folding chair.
“Yes. He went looking for her when she drove off from home that night,” Kiki gabbled, not meeting her eye. “He said he was trying to keep her safe. But when he saw her car up at the wood, there was someone in it with her. And when Ash went back later, Karen was dead.”
“When did he tell you this?” Elise exploded.
“At lunchtime today,” Kiki whispered. “I was going to tell you. Of course I was. I wanted to transcribe my recording of the conversation before I did, but there were bits I couldn’t quite make out, so I came to talk to him again. To clarify. But…”
Kiki closed her eyes as if in submission for what was to come.
“What are you talking about? You should have reported this immediately!” Elise ranted in disbelief. “What were you thinking of? Your stupid exclusive story? We are trying to find a man who brutally murdered Karen Simmons, who may kill again. And we’ve just lost a crucial witness.”
The reporter’s eyes opened again.
“Or the killer?” she murmured, voicing Elise’s exact thoughts.
Caro Brennan appeared at Elise’s side.
“All right, boss?” she murmured. “Everything okay?”
“Make sure we get Ash Woodward’s prints and DNA swabs on the system, pronto,” Elise hissed. “Wait until you hear this.” Caro’s eyes bulged as Elise recounted Kiki’s admission.
“Where’s this recording?” Caro snapped at the silent reporter. “And the transcript. Send them to me immediately.” Kiki fumbled with her phone for a moment, and the DS stalked off to review the evidence.
“And you…” Elise blinked rapidly, fighting to get her fury under control. “You do not leave until we have taken a full statement.”
“But I’ve got to fetch my daughter from swimming,” Kiki stammered. “Can’t I come back later?”
“No,” Elise snapped, standing over her. “You’ll have to make other arrangements for her. You are needed here.”
But as soon as Kiki had walked to a quiet spot to make her calls, Elise slumped back down. The showdown had sapped all her energy, and the effort of standing was suddenly too much. She sat on in her chair, reading the transcript on her phone and struggling to make sense of the new scenario.
Unbelievably, Ash had been in Knapton Wood on both occasions. Is that what he’d come to tell her six days ago? All that nonsense about Barry Sherman calling at Karen’s flat? Ash had been there to confess, hadn’t he? But she hadn’t let him. Elise reran the interview in her head and stopped on Ash’s startled face when she’d asked him what he’d seen. Why the hell hadn’t she coaxed him further? She cursed herself for rushing it and missing that chance. Her own sliding doors moment, maybe. Elise looked over at Kiki’s huddled figure and swore under her breath. The bloody reporter had known how to handle him.
She glanced at the SOCOs photographing the vents. It was the same green material in both. But could Ash’s death have been an accident? She knew people did reckless things like block up air vents to stop their heat escaping. Without realizing the lethal consequences. But had Ash?
Elise picked away at the evidence for suicide. He’d put himself in the vicinity of two murders. Was it a guilty conscience? But there was no confession in the caravan. Nor in the email she’d received. And engineering suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning wasn’t a simple matter. Elise watched as the officers carried the small cardboard boxes of his former patients down the step. Would someone who loved animals as much as Ash choose a method that would kill his precious birds as well as himself?
She staggered upright when Caro approached. “Have you listened to it?” she croaked.
Caro nodded. “We’ve got to pick Barry Sherman up immediately, boss,” she said. “Ash Woodward said he thought he was in Karen’s car.”
“Thought?” Elise murmured. “Or wished? He may have made the whole thing up—we can’t test his story now, can we? Let’s not forget that Ash had been stalking Karen all evening, by his own admission. He could have lured her to the wood and killed her. And blamed Barry. She’d rejected him as a lover. It’s a powerful motive for revenge.”
Elise knew the line between love and hate was as fragile as a spider’s web. And as complex.
She’d been there. Lying awake at night, planning how to punish her ex, Hugh, for leaving her for someone else. She’d burned with the humiliation and injustice of it. She’d wanted him to suffer as she had. Thought seriously about sending anonymous texts and intimate photos of Hugh to the new woman, accusing him of further infidelities. To drive a stake into the relationship. Her fantasies had gathered speed and detail until the final scene where Hugh was begging Elise to take him back. And she was laughing in his face. It had given her an incredible high at first. But the furred-tongue taste of self-loathing was always close behind.
In the end, the only retribution she’d taken was breaking Hugh’s beloved Crystal Palace FC mug. Ash Woodward might have gone down a very different route.
“Maybe,” Caro said. “Let’s find out.”
* * *
—
Elise plunged straight in when Sherman was brought into the interview room. “We have a witness who says you were in Karen Simmons’s car with her the night she was killed.”
Sherman rocked back in his seat. “I wasn’t. I absolutely wasn’t there. I had nothing to do with it.” He paused and rubbed his face ruefully. “Look, I was with a woman that Friday night. She came over after the bar closed. I wanted to tell you at the beginning, but she begged me not to say.”
“How convenient. Who is she? We’ll need to talk to her, to check your alibi,” Elise said.
Sherman ran the tip of his tongue along his veneers.
“Mina Ryan,” he muttered. “She made me promise not to say anything. Because she’d get in trouble.”
“Mina? Why? She’s single, isn’t she?”
Sherman sighed. Elise watched him take a smug sip of water. Like a quiz show contestant when they give the right answer. “She’d left her kid on his own at home,” he said. “She was terrified you’d find out.”
Elise wrote, “Ash was lying,” on her pad and underlined it so hard her pen went through the paper.
“I see,” she said crisply. “And what time did Mina Ryan leave?”
“I’m not sure. About one a.m.? We did the deed, had a drink, and she took herself home.”
Elise gritted her teeth at his brutishness. “You didn’t drive her, then?”
“No. Like I said, I’d had a couple of drinks. Couldn’t risk losing my license. Anyway, she said she didn’t mind walking.”
“On her own, at one in the morning? It’s a good thirty minutes from your pub.”
He shrugged. “Not if you go the back way. Look, I offered to call a cab, but Mina said she didn’t want to be recognized by one of the drivers. Anyway, the point is, she can tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing while Karen Simmons was getting herself killed.”
* * *
—
A phone call later, they were all round the interview table again.
“Mina Ryan said she didn’t know what we were talking about, Mr. Sherman,” Elise said sharply, drilling straight down to the heart of the matter. “That she was never there in your pub flat.”
Sherman gaped. “But it’s the truth,” he hissed. “I was trying to protect her and she does this to me?” His mouth hardened. “Okay. You need to talk to Noel. He’ll tell you.”
“Tell me what?” Elise said. But her stomach was telling her. Mr. Clayton and his photos. “Was he there? Why didn’t you mention him before?”
“Mina didn’t know,” Sherman muttered. “It was just a bit of fun. And the photos were unusable.”
The evidence was there when they looked again, in the hundreds of deleted pictures recovered by the techies. Two blurred, badly lit images that only made sense when they looked at them with knowing eyes.
* * *
—
Mina covered her cried-out eyes to blot out the evidence when Elise showed her. “How could they? What sort of filthy perverts are they?”
Elise pushed the tissues toward her.
“I shouldn’t have gone, but I was so fed up after the evening I’d had with Karen,” Mina finally continued, voice flat and exhausted.
“Did she know you were seeing Barry?”
“No. But I didn’t know she was seeing him, either. He played us both, didn’t he? Getting us to keep it secret. I bet he enjoyed that power trip.”
“Did he ring you?”
“No, I rang Barry and he said to come over. But the babysitter had gone.”
“Why didn’t Barry come to you?”
“The neighbors,” Mina muttered. “One of them is still friendly with my ex. Word gets back very quickly. Look, it was only for an hour and my son sleeps like the dead.”
“Your ten-year-old son.”
Mina pulled her hair over her face. “Zac hadn’t even moved when I got home,” she whispered.
“What time was that?”
“One twenty-five. I walked as fast as I could—I hate those alleyways—and looked at the clock when I came in. I’m so sorry I didn’t say before,” she added quietly. “I was so frightened I’d get in serious trouble, and I didn’t want my ex finding out. We’ve got a custody thing going on.”
“Bloody woman. She’s let us run around after Barry Sherman, wasting police time,” Caro muttered when she and Elise stood in the corridor. “We should charge her with withholding evidence.”
“Not now, Caro. Let’s focus on the fact that her testimony has knocked our main murder suspect out of the inquiry. And Clayton. They were otherwise engaged during the period Karen was meeting and being killed by her date. Neither of them was in the car. So the only person we’ve got in the wood now is Ash. And he’s dead,” Elise snapped and strode off.
THURSDAY:
DAY 13
SIXTY-EIGHT
ELISE
Thursday, February 27, 2020
Elise’s phone pinged as she was putting on her coat to leave. An alert. And her flesh crept. Her hospital appointment was today. She must have sent herself a reminder. Elise looked to check what time she had to be there and saw the other entry on her calendar. Mal?
It was second date night. How had she forgotten? How had it come round so quickly? She should cancel. How could she go out on a date when there was so much happening on the case? She scribbled on a blue Post-it to ring him later and make her excuses. But she couldn’t stop thinking about him all the way to work.
“Are you okay?” Caro asked when Elise walked into the room. “Bit pale this morning.”
“I’m fine,” she muttered, and busied herself with email. There was a message from the lab on Kiki Nunn’s rape. No matches for the assailant’s DNA on the database. She went to dial the reporter but stopped. She’d remembered she had to do something first.
“We need to go to see the Curtises,” she told Caro.
“We haven’t got time for that, boss.”
Elise took a breath and let it all out.
“Henry was having an affair with Karen when Archie Curtis was killed,” she said, watching Caro’s mouth fall open. “He was planning a new life with her but stayed when his son was murdered. He has been living half an hour from her ever since.”
“Bloody hell, where did you get that from?” Caro rasped, eyes wide.
“Kiki Nunn. Xander Curtis told her about it the day before yesterday.”
Caro scowled. “She’s got her nose in everywhere. And I suppose she’s going to broadcast it all over the net?”
“She says not. But we need to go straight after the briefing in case she changes her mind.”
* * *
—
“Ash Woodward may be dead, but he is still a suspect,” Elise said, noting the weary cast of some of the faces in the incident room. “He was in the wood that night, and he told us he followed Karen after she left the Neptune. He was obsessed with her—called himself her ‘guardian angel.’ And he knew she was in a sexual relationship with Barry Sherman. He had motive and opportunity.”
“Easy, boss,” Caro muttered. “I think we need to tread carefully here. At the moment, we have only his unconfirmed testimony that he was in the wood. There is zero forensic evidence to link him to Karen’s death,” she warned. “Nothing to show that he had any physical contact with her.”
“But the lab is still working on samples from the scene,” Elise said irritably. Why was Caro pissing on their main line of inquiry?
“And I’ve checked the CCTV at Sunny Sands—it shows him coming and going on his bike at the times he gave Kiki Nunn,” Chevening piped up from the back of the room.
“He would still have had time to kill her,” Elise countered, trying to close her down.
“And it’s very unlikely that he drove Karen’s car to Brighton,” the young DC persisted.
Elise whipped round to face her. “Why?”
“He can’t drive,” Lucy said. “He’s never had a license—or a passport, actually. I checked after he produced his library card as an identity document downstairs.”
“Bloody hell,” Andy Thomson said. “But he might still know how to. Some of the kids who nick cars round here haven’t passed their test.”
Seriously! Elise wanted to shout. “Look, let’s check and double-check our information on Ash,” she said instead, struggling to hide her disappointment in front of the team and looking down at her latest list. Cancel date jumped out at her. Christ, she’d forgotten to ring him. Was it too late to call it off?
“Hi,” she told Mal’s voicemail. “I’m really sorry but I’ve got to work tonight. Can we—”
Her phone beeped in her ear. Incoming call. It was him. She went to stand in the corridor to take it.
“Elise? Hello. Just missed picking up. What time am I calling for you tonight? We can walk to the curry house if you fancy stretching your legs.”
