Authors: Rachel Abbott
As he drove back to the office, Tom’s mind was only partly on the road – enough to avoid him hitting the car in front – but mostly he was in another time, another place, rifling through every fact, every impression that he’d had. He was only vaguely aware of the woman standing alone on the side of the road opposite police headquarters.
Indicating right to turn across the busy road and into the car park, a flash of colour caught his eye. It was an emerald-green scarf that had attracted his attention, and it was worn around the neck of a woman with long, dark hair and bright red lipstick wearing a black raincoat.
‘
Leo!
’ Tom almost gasped out her name.
He glanced back to where the woman stood, staring at the offices from across the road as if unsure whether to cross or not. Unable to stop in the middle of the road, Tom drove as quickly as he could into the car park. Typically there were no spaces close to the entrance. He muttered an expletive and pulled into the first available slot, jumped out of the car and ran back towards the road.
As he reached the visitors’ area of the car park, a door opened and he heard his name. ‘Tom? Do you have a moment, please?’
He didn’t stop to see who it was. ‘Just a minute,’ he called over his shoulder.
He couldn’t see her. Where had she gone?
‘Come on, Leo. Where are you?’ he muttered, scanning up and down the road. But she wasn’t there. There was no black coat, no tall, slender woman with hair below her shoulders. The scarf was unusual, though. He had never seen Leo wear any colour at all.
He stood where he was for a few more minutes, knowing she had gone and he wasn’t going to find her.
‘Bugger,’ he muttered.
‘Tom?’ The same voice spoke from behind him and he turned round. He recognised the face of a young man with dark, curly hair and a slightly sallow complexion, but couldn’t place it.
‘I’m Luca Molino – Daniela’s boyfriend from next door to Leo.’
‘Luca, of course. I’m sorry – my mind was elsewhere. What can I do for you?’
‘I wanted to speak to you about Leo.’ He looked down at the ground and back up again. ‘I’m afraid Daniela didn’t tell you everything.’
Tom felt a moment of anger at Luca’s girlfriend. When somebody was missing, every scrap of information could help. He forced himself not to show his irritation. ‘Come into the office out of the cold,’ he said. ‘We’ll grab a meeting room and you can tell me.’
Tom ushered Luca inside, organised a cup of coffee and waited for him to find the words.
‘When you came to visit, Daniela thought you were worried about Leo because she’s your ex-girlfriend, and perhaps you wanted to get back together with her.’
Tom said nothing. He didn’t want to influence Luca’s story one way or another, but this did explain why he had wondered about about the brevity of Luca’s translation of Daniela’s long burst of Italian.
‘She told me just to tell you when she had last seen her – Saturday – and that was the truth. Then I saw the picture of the girl who’s been killed. She looks so much like Leo that I thought I should come to see you. Daniela didn’t want me to, because she thought you would be angry with her for not telling you everything. She doesn’t know I’m here now.’
‘I’m glad you are, Luca. I’m very concerned for Leo.’
‘The thing is, Leo has a new man in her life, and Daniela wasn’t sure how you would take that. She’s been seeing him for about two months. He’s quite a high flyer – corporate finance, I believe. I think she went to Cheltenham with him, to the racing earlier this month. She had to buy a hat. I remember that because she came round to ask Dani if it suited her.’
Tom felt for a moment that it should have been
him
she had modelled the hat for. Maybe
he
should have taken her to the races. He couldn’t help wondering why Ellie or Max hadn’t told him about this man. As if reading Tom’s mind, Luca answered the unasked question.
‘She didn’t tell anybody about him apart from Dani. She knew we would see him coming and going so it was better if she told Dani so she wouldn’t gossip.’ The look on Luca’s face suggested that would be a tall order. ‘She asked Dani not to say anything because she wanted to see how it went before she told her family.’
That sounded like Leo. She wouldn’t want to expose herself in case it didn’t work out.
‘Do you know his name, who he works for, where he lives – anything that might help me track him down.’
Luca nodded. ‘She said he was a partner in his firm, and we knew his name was Julian. But no surname. He drives a big Merc.’
Tom couldn’t think of anything else to ask. He was fairly sure that there wouldn’t be too many Julians who were partners in a corporate finance firm, so it was likely they could track him down.
He stood up. ‘Thanks for coming in, Luca. You’ve been a great help. Leo’s obviously keeping this relationship close to her chest and is waiting to see how it goes.’
‘I’m not so sure if it’s still going or not. Dani thought they’d had a row, because the last time he was with her – Friday, I think – he left before midnight. We were coming back from a bar in town and he came out of the front door quickly. He didn’t look happy. We stood back out of his way. He didn’t know us, and we only knew who he was because Dani’s nosy. That was the night before we saw Leo for the last time.’
‘Did he usually stay the night, then?’ Tom asked, realising that this might sound intrusive, although he was actually trying to decide if this man had somebody to go home to – which could make a difference. At least, that’s what he told himself as he ignored the stab of jealousy at the thought.
‘Yes, I think so. Dani’s not so nosy that she kept a watch on him, but we did see him leave at about six in the morning more than once. We heard Leo’s door close, and of course Dani leapt out of bed to see who came out.’ Luca’s eyes didn’t quite meet Tom’s, and Tom realised that they had probably done exactly the same each time he had gone to Leo’s. Six had been his normal time to leave too.
Luca headed towards the door.
‘Well, I expect they made it up and she’s gone away with him somewhere for a week or so,’ Tom said, holding out his hand to Luca.
‘Oh, I don’t think so. He turned up a couple of days after we realised she wasn’t home. That would have been Monday. He knocked on our door to ask if we’d seen her.’
Tom felt a stab of concern. He would have felt much happier if Leo had been away with her new man.
‘Clearly the flowers didn’t work,’ Luca said, a small frown furrowing the skin between his eyes.
‘Flowers?’ Tom said.
‘The day after the row. Late Saturday morning. A delivery guy arrived carrying a huge bunch of flowers. It was the biggest arrangement I had ever seen, so we guessed it was an apology.’
Tom remembered the drying petal he had found. But no flowers – neither in a vase, nor in the bin.
26
Tom was still struggling with the idea that Leo had been standing outside police HQ, maybe looking for him, and he hadn’t been able to get to her in time. If it really
was
Leo of course. Everything about the woman looked so similar from the far side of the road, but the green scarf was an unlikely choice. Since then he had called Leo, left messages, tried to contact her on every form of social media that he knew she used, but he had heard nothing. He had also asked one of his team to check out all corporate finance firms in Manchester with a partner called Julian, but Tom’s main focus had to be on the murder of Hayley Walker.
He was in the incident room when Becky returned from several long hours at the hospital. She flopped into a chair, rested her elbows on her desk and cupped her hands under her chin. It was a pose he had seen many times. He always thought of it as her thinking-but-not-getting-anywhere-fast look.
‘What’s up, Becky?’ he asked.
‘Oh, nothing.’ She blew out a puff of air through pursed lips. ‘Except that all I seem to have for my day’s labour is a lot of paper, several lists and not a clue who would have wanted to hurt Hayley Walker.’ She picked up a pile of files and let them drop again on the desk.
Tom leant against the wall, one leg crossed over the other. ‘Well, the doctor who came in this morning – Louisa Knight – has gone away to come up with a list of people Hayley might have had an interest in, or vice versa. She’s called and offered to come and talk it through with us. You bring your list, and we’ll see what we’ve got.’
‘I can do that, boss,’ Becky said. ‘There’s no need for both of us, just because I’m in a grump.’
‘No, it’s okay, Becky. I want to hear what she has to say. Anyway, something might ring a bell with the crimes from twelve years ago.’
He was relieved that Becky seemed to have recovered a little from her fluster the day before, even if it had been replaced with a cantankerous attitude. He always thought Becky was at the top of her game when she was at her most stroppy, and he smiled to himself.
Louisa was waiting for them in a meeting room, and she stood up when Tom and Becky entered. She had removed her coat and was wearing an apricot silk shirt that complemented the colour of her hair. She smiled at Tom and held her hand out to Becky as Tom introduced them.
‘I’ve made the list you asked for.’ She briefly waved a sheet of A4 paper in the air. ‘I’ve named anybody who might have shown an interest in Hayley and I’m happy to run through it and give you my impressions of each of them, but I do hope none of these guys will ever know what I’ve said.’
‘They won’t hear anything from us, Louisa, and please call me Tom.’ Tom couldn’t miss Becky’s slight raising of the eyebrows but he chose to pay no attention. ‘What have we got?’
‘The fact is, we’re a large team. Most of our patients have a dedicated nurse assigned to them – one per shift. There are a lot of consultants, but it’s the anaesthetists who tend to be around and maybe a surgical registrar or two. Given that Hayley thought somebody was interested in her, I thought I’d concentrate on the men. She’s never given me any indication that she prefers women, and I’m sure it was a man she thought was watching her.’
‘Okay. Any suggestions you can give us would be useful.’
Louise opened a soft brown leather document case and pulled out a photograph. ‘I thought this might be helpful. It’s the departmental photo taken at Christmas. There are a couple of new people since then, but Hayley spoke as if this person – if he’s in any way implicated in her death – was somebody she’d known for a while.’
Tom couldn’t be sure that the person who killed Hayley and the person who had suddenly seemed attracted to her were one and the same, but they had to start somewhere.
‘I’ll start from the top and work down,’ Louisa said in her slightly husky voice.
She pushed one side of her hair behind her ear, as if getting down to business. As she spoke about each person, Louisa pointed to him on the photo.
‘There were two male surgical registrars that Hayley knew well, Charlie Dixon and Ben Coleman.’ She lifted the photo and pointed first to a man who looked to be in his early thirties with prominent cheekbones and a mop of dark curly hair. ‘This is Ben.’ She moved her finger to the far end of the picture. ‘And this is Charlie.’ The second man was much shorter with a lopsided happy grin that suggested he was rather too full of the party spirit.
‘Ben is charming and popular, extremely bright and young for his level of seniority. Personally I find him a bit overconfident and slightly cynical, but that probably goes with his ability. He was friendly with Hayley, but as far as I’m aware never showed her any special attention. Charlie is friends with everybody. He’s a bit of a joker. They’re both attractive men, and if either of them had started to be more attentive Hayley would definitely have noticed. It would also explain why she didn’t want to tell me who it was. To some of the nurses, these guys are demi-gods, and Hayley would have needed concrete evidence of any interest before she spoke out. She wasn’t desperately confident about herself, for reasons nobody could understand.’
There was one man in the picture that Tom couldn’t take his eyes off. Although he was with the others, he seemed somehow apart, as if he – rather than his colleagues – was making himself something of an outcast. His attempt at a smile was failing, and there was slightly more space around him than there was around anybody else.
‘Who’s this?’ Tom said, pointing to the man and momentarily interrupting Louisa’s flow.
‘Ah,’ she said. Louisa was silent for a moment. ‘That’s Malcolm Doyle. He’s a fellow anaesthetist and regularly on the ward.’ She tapped the photo with her short, unpolished nail. ‘Malcolm finds it difficult to associate with people. But he’s exceptionally good at his job when he’s in theatre. It’s just his interpersonal skills that aren’t that great. Hayley felt sorry for him and we try to include him in things, but he’s like a rabbit caught in headlights if anybody ever speaks to him at a party. I’m not sure how she would have responded to interest from him.’
She continued, identifying two male charge nurses as possibles, and they ended up with a list of seven men who were the most likely to have paid Hayley attention and had it reciprocated.
‘Please don’t take my word alone for any of this,’ Louisa said, looking from Tom to Becky and then back to Tom. ‘I could be miles from the right person and I’m terrified I’m wasting your time.’
‘You’re not. We have to start somewhere and this is as good a place as any.’ Tom turned to Becky. ‘I think we should get the team on checking these people out. We need to know their backgrounds: where they were brought up, went to university, worked before coming here and how old they are.’
And most specifically, Tom thought, he needed to know where they were in May 2003.
27
Maggie’s ten-minute vigil outside police headquarters had left her feeling like a traitor. She still didn’t know what she’d been thinking. Duncan had specifically asked her not to go to the police, and yet once she had discovered who was leading the team in the investigation, she wanted to see him – to talk to him.
Her colleagues in the office had been talking about little else but the murder since she had arrived that morning.