The Missing Hours (26 page)

‘Situational awareness,’ barked Seth. He strutted across the classroom, each step a bounce. ‘When you are out there, you are always watching. A stroll isn’t a stroll any more. It is a chance to detect threats.’

Ed looked at me, grinned.

Seth had been with us for a few months at that point, four, five at the most. Was still a child playing Cowboys and Indians. Maybe it was us, the burgeoning Cole Group, that thrilled him. Or maybe it was simply being back in the world again, no longer held prisoner by his still livid scars. Here they gave him an extra dimension, a kudos that he would not have had without them.

‘He’s had a tough life,’ Ed had said, a package of persuasion designed to induce me to bring Seth into a company that was not yet big enough to feed another mouth. ‘Bad childhood, bounced around foster homes; there was abuse, I think. Left school without any qualifications. Then what happened in Basra. He needs us, Mogs.’

I stood, my gaze hooked on the participants, their gaze hooked on Seth. The room fizzing with energy now, the sudden realisation that this was not a game after all, that the next time they saw us would be when we were trying to save their lives. You do what you can. You give them what they are able to receive. You hope it’s enough.

Blood

DC Leah Mackay: Friday, 10.50 a.m.

WE SIT STILL,
the spindly branches of the apple tree tapping against the window like a minor character from a Poe story. We are now in the realm of polite conversation. Selena is desperate for me to go. You can see it in the way she leans forward in her chair, her eye contact becoming more desultory, there, then gone again. She is on the run, uncomfortable in her own home, her fingers tapping against the rough denim of her jeans, gaze leaping from me to the photograph of her dead husband and back again.

I know that I have her on the ropes. I should feel good about this, I suppose. I should feel that I am doing my job again, that I have washed the glamour from my eyes. But I don’t. I feel like crap.

I shift on the sofa, and Selena’s gaze flies back towards me, her expression lifting. I know that she is hoping that this is it, that I am finally about to leave.

I smile. ‘Could I possibly use your bathroom?’

Her face falls, is gathered up just as quickly, and she nods. ‘Of course. It’s out through this door, take a left towards the kitchen and it’s the last but one door on your right.’

I stand slowly, stretching it out. My heart is beating faster now, and I pray that she cannot hear it. I very carefully pull the living-room door closed behind me on my way out.

The hallway is cold after the heat of the living room, the Victorian tiles seem to be made of ice, and I suppress a shiver.

She lied to me.

I saw it, before she remembered herself, looking at me steadily as she told me she did not know Dominic Newell. I saw the alarm that flashed across her eyes, the slight tremble to her fingers, the contraction of her forehead. She lied.

I walk quickly along the tiled floor, straight past the bathroom to the closed door beyond it. Place my hand upon the wood and feel a thrum, thrum, thrum from beyond. The laundry room. Once I saw that, once I saw the lie, it was like someone had lifted a shade. I could see it all then in glorious Technicolor. The flimsiness of her story, her coat abandoned on the riverbank.

The sweater, the stain that I took to be mud.

I push open the laundry-room door. It is small, neatly organised. The machine gurgles, spinning the clothes in a dizzying rhythm. I sat there watching Selena Cole in her high-backed wing chair, looking every inch the professional, looking unsuspectable, and yet seeing her somewhere else. On a hospital bed, her hands folded into her lap, her skin pale, fingernails muddy. The white jumper with its dark stain.

Blood.

I slip inside, close the door tight behind me.

I am too late. My heart dances. The machine is on, spinning, gurgling. I am too late. She has washed it already, washing away the evidence of … what? Her involvement in a murder?

My breath catches at the thought, spiking where it settles. Can it really be that?

I stop for a moment, gather myself. There is a basket in the corner, laundry waiting for the wash. I send up a prayer to a God I’m not sure I believe in, pull a pair of protective gloves on, and plunge my hands into the folds of fabric. Please let it be here.

My gloved fingers run through cotton, some kind of viscose, then, finally, at the bottom they hit wool. Soft. Cashmere. I pull it free, the clothes that top it avalanching towards me with the movement. And there it is. A white cashmere sweater. Across its front a dark stain, almost black in the light from the small square window.

I stand, breathe out.

Why the hell hasn’t she washed it? I take a moment to be offended by this. That this woman who so blinded me with her capabilities, her success, should fail at something so basic, so obvious. At the very least she should have shown some evidence of criminal mastermindedness. Some greater guile. Did she too believe herself to be unsuspectable? Beyond reproach?

I breathe in the smell of fresh laundry, that ineffable cleanness, and study the jumper in my hands, the dark patch now, at a near distance, unmistakably blood.

The washing machine is spinning, faster, faster, and then it begins to slow, dwindling into silence. I feel dizzy from the loss of the sound, reach out a hand to the counter to steady myself.

I can hear the oversized clock that hangs on the laundry-room wall ticking now. And something else. Voices.

I pull an evidence bag from my trouser pocket, put there for this very purpose, slide the sweater inside. Move towards the door, pull it open. I assume that the voices have been there the entire time, masked only by the roar of the washing machine. I slip into the hallway, walking with soft steps past the bathroom door until I reach the one beyond it. It is closed tight, but the voices cannot be contained by mere wood. They slither underneath, low, urgent.

‘Where were you?’

‘What do you mean, where was I?’

A weighty silence, the calm before the storm. I listen for Finn’s voice, for his breathing, but there is nothing, just Orla and Seth locked in a marital war. I know how that feels.

‘You’re not seriously asking me this?’

‘You knew? About me and Dom?’

‘Of course I bloody well knew. I always know. You’re not as cunning as you think you are. I always know when you’ve got a new conquest. What? Did you think I was that stupid? Really?’

Another silence, the sound of someone crying. In my gut, I know that it’s Seth.

‘You loved this one?’

I strain, craving the answer, but there is nothing, just the creak of a chair, a heavy sigh. Did he nod, I wonder, or shake his head? Which is worse? That you have been betrayed for love? Or that you weren’t even given that courtesy?

Where is Finn? I lean into the hallway, can just about see an indistinct shape through the glass diamond cut into the front door. Think that I recognise my brother’s silhouette. Maybe it would have been better if my husband had loved her, the secretary. Then again, maybe not.

‘The bank called.’

You can hear that Orla is working to keep her voice flat, that it is taking all her resources. Is she always so capable? I wonder. Or did those resources crumble when faced with her husband’s lover? Then what role Selena?

‘They said we’re overdrawn on the business account, that we’ve reached our overdraft limit.’

Another scrape of a chair. ‘How the hell could that be?’

‘I don’t know, Seth.’ A pause. ‘I had them check back through the transactions. There was a fifty-thousand-pound withdrawal.’

A sound that my imagination twists into an intake of breath. ‘What? Who the …’

‘I don’t know, Seth,’ Orla repeats. ‘All I know is that there are very few people authorised to make that kind of withdrawal. And I know I didn’t do it.’

‘So you think I did?’

‘You think I’m a murderer.’

‘It must have been …’

‘Yes.’

‘But why?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You know this means we can’t cover wages? Insurance. Expenses. You know this means we’re done?’ Seth’s voice has climbed, a tinge of the hysterical. There is the ruffling of papers. Then, ‘Fifty thousand pounds. What the hell are we going to do?’

‘Are you … I mean, the police …’

‘No.’

Silence.

‘But …’

‘No, Orla. We are not getting them involved.’

I hear footsteps, someone twisting the handle of the living-room door. I spring back just in time, so that I could have been coming out of the bathroom, so that it isn’t blindingly obvious that I was eavesdropping.

I smile brightly at Selena. ‘Well, I’d better be on my way.’

She looks dazed, as if she has been startled awake by something, looks up and down the hallway. ‘I … I thought I heard voices.’ Her gaze moves to the closed office door, locks on it.

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘I didn’t notice.’

I move towards her, and it is then that she looks down, realises what is in my hands. I lift the evidence bag up. ‘I’m going to need to take this.’

The suspect

DS Finn Hale: Friday, 10.53 a.m.

I STAND IN
the weak sunlight, look to the sky.

‘Seth says they’ve been together for six months, on and off. That they dated, years ago. They were one another’s first relationship. Gay relationship, I mean. Apparently, once Beck Chambers came to work for the Cole Group, Seth got wind of the fact that Dominic represented him. I don’t know, must have brought back fond memories or something. Anyway, he reached out and they reconnected.’

‘Bloody Facebook.’ The DI’s voice is tinny down the phone line.

‘Indeed.’

‘He have an alibi?’

I kick at some moss growing through the cracks in the pavement. ‘He was on a plane. Overnight flight from Newark to Gatwick, landed at 7.20 the morning after the murder. Pretty good as alibis go.’ I watch as a neighbour, an elderly woman with a frizzy knot of battleship curls, struggles with her shopping, her bag for life dragging against the ground. It occurs to me that I should offer to help, but I’m on the phone with my DI, so of course I don’t. Then, as if she senses me watching, her gaze swings up towards me and the Cole house. ‘It’ll have to be checked, of course, but if it’s real, then …’

‘Then he’s out.’

‘Sir.’

She stares at me, shifts her shopping from one hand to the other, then turns to begin her slow progress into a sad-looking semi.

‘I’ll get Christa to take a look. What about the wife? Opal?’

‘Orla, sir. The wife isn’t doing as well. She admits that she knew about the affair, says that it was by no means her husband’s first and that she, and I quote, had “learned to live with it”. She does admit that she tried to contact Dominic repeatedly that day and that he never returned her calls. Says that she didn’t speak to him, didn’t see him, and that she spent her evening polishing off a nice bottle of Merlot in the comfort of her own home.’

‘Witnesses?’

‘A cat, apparently.’

The DI sniffs. ‘Fabulous.’

I shift from foot to foot. Watch a kestrel riding high above me, plunging down towards the mountain slopes that surround us, then climbing again.

‘So,’ says the DI. ‘The wife, eh?’

‘Sir.’

Did she do it? Did she get frustrated with Dominic’s refusal to acknowledge her, make the drive into Cardiff and wait for him coming out of the office? Did she talk, get close to him; did he, feeling guilty, feeling sorry for her, the wronged spouse, let his guard down? And then, when he had decided that he was safe, did she plunge a knife into his neck?

I watch the kestrel. Think that I just don’t know.

‘Well, best bring her along.’

‘I’m sorry?’ The kestrel is plummeting downwards now, a flash of darkness against the hillside.

‘You’d better arrest the wife. Get everything on record. We’ll assemble a team, have them do a house search. You never know. Maybe they’ll find Newell’s car in the downstairs toilet.’

‘Yes, sir. Sir, best do the Cole house too.’ I look up at its fascia, catch a glimpse of a figure moving across the living-room window. ‘Both Mr and Mrs Britten work from the office here.’

I am looking at the door when it swings open. Feel myself tense. But it is merely Leah, a plastic evidence bag gripped in her hands, jaw set in that way that means trouble for someone.

I mutter a swift prayer to the gods that it’s not me.

‘All right. I’ll get the ball rolling here. Keep me updated.’

I open my mouth to reply, but he has already gone, leaving me clutching my phone uselessly to my ear. I look at Leah, shake my head.

‘Okay?’ she asks.

‘DI,’ I say, gesturing with the phone. ‘Orla is coming with us.’

She nods, her face getting grimmer by the second. ‘I had a feeling she might be.’ She crosses her arms across her blouse, barely controlling a shiver, and looks back to the house. ‘Something is going on in there.’

‘Like what?’

‘No idea. But I’m pretty sure we’re being lied to.’

I study her. ‘By whom?’

Leah shrugs, glances at me. ‘By everybody.’

‘Awesome.’

‘Look,’ she says, ‘there’s somewhere I need to go.’ She is assessing me, waiting for me to interrupt, object, so I keep my mouth sealed shut. ‘I have a hunch. There’s money missing from the Cole Group account.’

‘Okay?’

‘So I want to chase it down. Now. I’ve called the SIO and arranged a production order for the bank.’ She is preparing for a fight, lining up her defensive moves before I can begin. ‘I know this isn’t strictly speaking related to the murder, but I just can’t shake this feeling that if I can fill in those hours of Selena’s, it will also lead us to what happened to Dominic.’

I open my mouth, see her brace herself. ‘Drop me back at the station with Orla,’ I say, ‘then take the car.’

Leah nods. ‘Cheers, Finn.’ Gestures back to the house. ‘What do you think?’