Separated at Death (The Lakeland Murders) (8 page)

Hall started to write a short reply, but discarded it and went back to his work emails. To his surprise his mind felt surprisingly clear. As he lay awake in the small hours over the last few months he’d often wondered how he’d react when the blow finally fell, but he had never expected to feel remotely like this. He tried to place the feeling. It felt almost like relief.

In the few minutes since he’d opened Carol’s email a new one had appeared, simply called ‘Toxicology’. The full report was attached, but in one sentence the  Doc had summed it up nicely: blood was clear of alcohol and drugs, but hair samples showed that in the last few months she had smoked marijuana on quite a few occasions. But, since Amy had long hair, it was certain that this was a fairly recent occurrence.

Hall opened the attachment, and read through it. He was none the wiser. John Hamilton had said no boyfriend, and assuming that Amy hadn’t been raped they already knew that was wrong, so Hall doubted that he’d know anything about Amy’s recreational drug use. So he shouted Ian Mann’s name.

Mann stuck his head round the door, so that only his head and one broad shoulder were visible.

‘Have you seen the toxicology?’

‘I was just reading it then. Not a huge surprise, and we know she hadn’t been drugged when she died.’

‘Yes, so we can be even more certain that the sex was consensual. Is there anything in the statements from her friends about who the lad was? We really do need to track him down.’

Mann shook his head. ‘Not any of the boys from school, so far as anyone knew.  A couple of Amy’s friends mentioned that they’d seen her talking to some lad at the nightclub in town a couple of times.’

‘Name? description?’

‘Vague. A bit older perhaps, but not much. None of her friends came up with a name. We might have to wait for DNA to move forward on that line I suppose. I wonder if Jane has come up with anything more on the phone stuff? I know the techies have given her everything off Amy’s hard drive, plus her browsing and social media history, in so far as they have it.’

Hall looked at his watch, an old Omega that had been his father’s. He’d looked it up online, and discovered that it was called a ‘pie-pan’ because of the distinctive shape of the dial. He’d spent hundreds getting the movement cleaned and working again after his dad had died, but he’d asked for the dial and hands to be left as they were. ‘Team meeting is in ten’ he said, ‘so let’s hope Jane has something for us to develop. I don’t want to be relying on the DNA, because otherwise we’ve got virtually nothing as things stand.’

The head in the doorway nodded, and withdrew. Hall resisted the temptation to have another look at the email from his wife, and instead phoned the Doc on his home number for an update on the DNA report. Tomorrow morning was the earliest they could expect.

When Hall walked out into the open office the team was starting to assemble, and no-one had much to add to what they already knew. All of the available CCTV was in, and they now had Amy heading up Beast Banks, as they’d assumed she had. All the cars seen behind Amy’s had been checked, and there’d been no matches - just a couple of company vehicles, and a couple of private cars.

‘All right’ said Hall, ‘let’s get someone round to chat to each of the drivers who were behind Amy’s car going up Beast Banks tomorrow. That’s only a minute or two from where she parked, so maybe one of them saw something. Can we work out from the pub CCTV which ones turned left up the hill from the traffic lights? Ray, can you take care of that?’

DC Dixon nodded, and gave an update on the sex offenders. It wasn’t encouraging. Hall said to wait for the DNA results before taking that line any further. The incoming call rate from the public had slowed right down too, so they still couldn’t be certain of exactly when Amy entered the woods, which way she went in, and whether or not she was alone. It was frustrating.

‘Jane, what about the phone and Amy’s laptop? Tell me we’ve moved on somewhere.’ As soon as the words were out of his mouth Hall regretted them, and he regretted them more when he saw the look on her face. It wasn’t Jane’s fault that they didn’t have any eye-witnesses.

‘Not really boss’ she said. ‘But I can tell you that of the two unknown numbers, the one that had quite a few calls and texts, was always in Kendal, for every single one. Judging from the content of the texts I’d say it’s the missing boyfriend. But the number that just had one call in and out was taken on a mast out by the M6 for the first call, that’s the incoming one to Amy, but it was at Sizergh by the time the outgoing call from Amy came in.’

‘So that person was in a car, coming into Kendal. And what time was that?’

’8.29 for the incoming, 8.33 for the outgoing. Both very short, under a minute each. So they could have been arranging to meet I suppose. And one other thing did strike me as odd.’

Hall waited. Francis would have to learn that this wasn’t a parlour game.

‘Why would someone in a car use a pay-as-you-go phone? Five or ten years ago maybe, but it seems a bit low rent now, don’t you think? Unless of course they didn’t want anyone to trace them.’

‘Which means’ said Hall, ‘that whoever used that phone must be of interest to us. Can we use number plate recognition data to identify all the cars? Does anyone know?’

No-one did, so Mann picked up the phone and called through to the traffic Inspector covering the south of the county that shift. He put the phone down after thirty seconds and shook his head. ‘No go I’m afraid. That’s an unlit section, and the cameras only function during daylight hours. So we’ll have nothing.’

The meeting wrapped up, and Hall made a few notes for the morning. Perhaps that solitary phone call meant something, so Hall made a note, but wrote ‘wrong number?’ after it. Even Jane’s point about it being unusual for a pay-as-you-go SIM to be used in a car didn’t really stand up to close scrutiny. What if a passenger made the call? What if that passenger was a child who’d simply dialed a wrong number in the dark?

But if that was the case why had Amy called back? So perhaps it was a friend calling from her parents’ car, or using a sibling’s phone maybe, or perhaps Jane was right and the exchange of calls was significant. Hall decided to keep an open mind.

He wrote ‘Why no witnesses?’ on his pad. That was odd. Plenty of people had been near the entrance to the wood that evening, but none reported seeing Amy walking anywhere nearby. So had she gone into the wood elsewhere, or might she have arrived by car?

The background file was thickening by the shift, so Hall looked again at everything that had been added that day. He was in no rush to get home.

Amy seemed like an absolutely typical teenager; not an angel, but far from a bad girl either. She had been working hard at school, and apart from following up on that lad in the club there wasn’t anything in her personal background that felt remotely like a line of enquiry. But Hall added ‘night club - CCTV’ to his to-do list and moved on.

The immediate family didn’t seem any more likely to yield a lead. The mother and her new bloke seemed clean. She’d picked up a generous financial settlement after the divorce, and had re-married that summer. There were no really pressing financial issues, no CCJs or current HMRC interest, and the couple were on reasonably friendly terms with Amy’s father.

John Hamilton continued to run the family business, and though he’d had a couple of relationships since his marriage had ended nothing had been of any duration. The business was solvent, but its profitability had really taken a hit during the recession. And John owned his house outright, and had no debts.

Hall wasn’t too good with high finance, because beyond paying off his mortgage early and keeping a few grand in rainy day money his only investment of any value was his Police pension, so he wasn’t sure exactly what the figures added up to. But as far as he could tell John Hamilton’s cash resources were quite depleted. Because as well as paying off his wife he had recently bought his younger brother Simon out of the business. He’d owned 25%, and when the annual dividend stopped coming in because of the recession Simon Hamilton had asked to cash in his chips.

The notes were a bit vague, but it sounded as if there’d been a bit of a falling out between the two, because John’s final offer was much lower than Simon’s own valuation of his shares. But the deal had been done a few months previously, suggesting to Hall that Simon either really needed the cash, or sensed that the business was in long term decline and wanted to get out.

Either way, there was certainly nothing in any of Amy’s or the wider family history to point towards a motive for murder. It just looked like another broken family, albeit a wealthy one, and as he’d read the notes Hall had been aware that he had been subconsciously building a picture of what the process of divorce had been like, especially for John Hamilton. And then, for the first time since he’d read the email, he started to think about his wife’s email, and about what lay ahead for him and his family.

He closed the file, got up, closed his office door, turned off the light and sat down again at his desk. No-one in the open office outside noticed. And an hour later, at 9pm, when Ian Mann got up from his desk and looked over at Hall’s office he decided that he must have already called it a night and gone home. But Ian Mann was wrong.

Hall sat in the half light for another ten minutes. He had been thinking through how it might go with his wife when he got home. By now she and the kids would have eaten, so they’d be able to talk without interruption. Would she really want him out of the house that night? Over the years Hall had sat across the table in interview rooms from countless men who had recently left the family home, sometimes because they’d been forced to by the courts, sometimes because they’d agreed with their wives that it was for the best.

But usually it wasn’t for the best, and that was why the husbands ended up under arrest and in bother, often after a drink-fuelled domestic. And until that evening Hall had sympathised with them, but never really empathised. But now he did. Just as having children had changed the way that he saw the world, and himself, for ever, so he started to realise that what was about to happen to him would change it all again. And as he sat there in the artificial gloaming he realised, with absolute certainty, that he wouldn’t be one of those people who manage to bounce back quickly and ‘move on’, as everyone liked to say these days. It was just something that he’d have to live with.

Hall got up, feeling pins and needles in his legs from sitting for so long on his inspector-grade chair, and wondered if John Hamilton was very much the same kind of person.

Things went much as he’d expected that night, but after twenty one years of marriage he didn’t expect many surprises from Carol, nor she from him. Perhaps that was half the trouble. It had all been remarkably calm, and they’d agreed on how to proceed. They’d tell the kids in the morning, go for a separation and then a no-fault divorce, and split their assets 50/50. But then Carol had surprised him. ‘Why don’t you stay in the house, and the kids stay here with you? I know you work long hours, but they’re plenty big enough to look after themselves until you get home from work. What do you think?’

He said that he agreed wholeheartedly, and added that they should tell the kids straight away, that evening. He didn’t want Carol to have a chance to change her mind.

He’d resisted the urge to address the whole ‘there’s no-one else’ lie when he’d first got home, and now he was delighted that he had: he reckoned that keeping everything so amicable had just helped earn him half his family. Carol had obviously been planning this for some time, and Hall guessed that she and her new lover had no interest in living in Hall’s house, or with his children. They probably had a use in mind for the cash that would come Carol’s way when he bought her out of her share of the house. It would mean taking out a mortgage, and maybe doing a few extra years at work after he’d got his 30 in, but that seemed like the bargain of a lifetime to Hall.

As he lay in bed that night - Carol had gone out when the children had eventually calmed down - he cried, as he had known he would. He would come to realise that the vast fog-bank of grief that he would have to navigate had only just begun to roll over him, but even that night he knew that his situation could have been so much worse. He couldn’t stop his wife from loving someone else, and from not loving him, but he was going to be able to stay with his children. And, try as he might, he couldn’t begin to imagine how Carol could bear to go. But Hall was just grateful that she was going to.

Eventually he slept. In his dream he was back in the little cottage that he and Carol had bought when they first married, and he was trying to carry something up the stairs, though he couldn’t tell exactly what it was. It was heavy, and awkward, with edges that caught the bannister and the walls, and when he woke he was trying to negotiate the narrow return on the staircase. Hall had a strong feeling that he wasn’t going to make it.