‘You can do better than that,’ said Simon. ‘Or maybe you can’t. It’s possible to know a name but not the face that goes with it.’
‘We’ve no reason to think Gemma knew Aidan Seed’s name, and therefore no reason to suppose he would change it,’ said Dunning. ‘That’s my point one.’ He tapped his thumb in a parody of counting. ‘Point two: even if Aidan Seed and Len Smith are one and the same, and that’s a big if, how do you know Gemma Crowther and Stephen Elton, her boyfriend, weren’t in on the secret?’ The look he threw at Milward suggested he’d happily take an answer from her if Simon couldn’t provide one. ‘Point three: you saw Aidan Seed at Friends House on Monday night—that doesn’t mean he’s Len Smith. They could be two separate people—they might
both
have been there.’
‘You’ve found a link between Seed and your victim,’ Simon directed his reply to Milward. ‘Seed’s car was parked outside her house. Not Len Smith’s. Seed was pretending to be a Quaker to get close to Crowther in order to kill her.’
‘Unless you were the one he lied to,’ said Dunning. ‘You said when he told you he only believed in the material world, Ruth Bussey was listening.’
‘Yeah. So?’
‘Did you know Ruth Bussey’s parents are devout evangelical Christians?’
‘No.’
‘Yes,’ said Charlie.
‘And that she doesn’t speak to them or see them, hasn’t for several years?’
‘Yes.’
‘No,’ Simon said again. Making Dunning’s day, no doubt.
Why the fuck hadn’t Charlie told him? Probably she’d figured Ruth Bussey’s family background had nothing to do with anything. There had been too much to talk about last night and this morning, not least whether the two of them had fucked up their careers beyond all repair. It wasn’t much comfort that they hadn’t been officially suspended. Neither of them was wanted back at work for as long as they were ‘helping’ DC Dunning with his inquiries; anything more official would wait until the results of those inquiries were in.
‘If you had a girlfriend who’d turned her back on her religious background, mightn’t you lie to her if you wanted to hang out with Quakers?’ Dunning asked. ‘Even more so if you were one of them, or thinking of signing up?’
‘Signing up?’ said Milward. ‘It’s not the army, Neil.’
‘So you’re taking an interest in Ruth Bussey,’ said Simon. ‘I didn’t think you’d even registered the name. Do you know where she is? Far away from Seed: that’s where you want her to be. He’s dangerous, and he’s no Quaker. He was playing a part. Phoney name, phoney faith. And why Len Smith? Is there a Len Smith in Seed’s past? Have you looked?’
‘No, we haven’t,’ said Dunning tonelessly. When he spoke, Milward looked ill at ease, and vice versa. Was it a competitive thing?
‘Did anyone apart from Seed have a reason to want Crowther dead?’ Simon asked.
‘I can’t answer that,’ said Milward, tipping Simon an easily deniable nod. Had he imagined it?
‘The boyfriend, Stephen Elton—why didn’t he go home with Crowther after the Quaker Quest meeting? They lived together. If he stayed behind to clear up, wouldn’t Crowther and Len Smith have waited for him, so that they could all go back together? Were Seed and Crowther having an affair? Did Elton find out?’
Milward folded her arms, waiting for the questions to stop.
‘What was Stephen Elton doing between the end of Quaker Quest and midnight? It wouldn’t take him two hours to clear away some chairs and get back to Muswell Hill at that time of night.’
‘Wouldn’t it?’
‘You don’t know where he was all that time,’ said Simon. ‘You like him as a suspect—it’s usually domestic if it’s not drug- or gang-related. So he also had a motive to kill Crowther, did he?’
‘Excuse him,’ Charlie said to Dunning. ‘He gets carried away.’
‘I’m interested in hearing all you can tell me about Seed.’ Milward had started to behave as if she and Simon were alone in the room. ‘You’ve met him. We haven’t. Forget about his car being outside Gemma’s house, forget about his being at Quaker Quest and using a false name—what can you tell me about him as a person?
Is
he a killer?’
‘We don’t know,’ said Charlie. ‘Simon doesn’t know.’ Was there a note of satisfaction in her voice? ‘He told us both he’d killed a woman who’s still alive. His girlfriend seems intermittently scared of him, though she’s insisted several times that he wouldn’t hurt her or anyone else. We’ve told you all this . . .’
‘I believe Seed’s a killer,’ said Simon. ‘All right, I don’t
know
. But he described a murder to me in vivid detail—too vivid to be invention, I thought when I heard it. Mary Trelease is alive, though, which means Seed’s also a liar, unless he’s crazy. If he is a liar, he’s the best kind.’
‘What kind is that?’ asked Milward.
‘One who blends lies seamlessly with the truth and counts on you spotting the truth but not the join. He killed another woman, maybe more than one, before he killed Gemma Crowther. He might still kill Ruth Bussey and Mary Trelease, which is why you need to find them.’
‘Aidan Seed the picture-framer. The two of you visited his picture-framing workshop on Monday afternoon.’
‘Why do you keep saying that?’ Simon asked. ‘Are you suggesting he isn’t a picture-framer?’
‘What about this photo you wanted to show us?’
‘We’ll come to it,’ said Milward. She turned her attention to Charlie, who’d asked the question. ‘I don’t understand your role in all this. You were worried about Ruth Bussey when she first came to see you, yet you didn’t take a statement from her. Then you found out Aidan Seed had been in and spoken to a CID officer, DC . . .’
‘Chris Gibbs,’ said Simon wearily.
‘That’s right. Gibbs and DC Waterhouse both checked out Seed’s claim, and DC Waterhouse relayed the result of those checks to Seed. End of story, and even if it wasn’t, your CID were dealing with it. Why did you go to Mary Trelease’s house on Monday morning when you should have gone to work?’
‘I went on my way to work,’ Charlie corrected her. ‘I knew Ruth Bussey was frightened . . .’
‘But you didn’t take a statement from her,’ said Milward.
‘She ran away before I had a chance. I had a bad feeling about what she’d told me, and, after talking to Simon, I had a bad feeling about the whole business. I wanted to see Mary Trelease for myself and hear what she had to say.’
Milward looked down at her notes again. ‘A conversation that left you with the impression that Aidan Seed had killed somebody, though obviously not Ms Trelease.’
‘That’s right. She said, “Not me”. She clearly implied that he’d killed somebody. Look, can you at least tell us what’s being done to find Ruth and Mary? Sam Kombothekra went to both their houses and Ruth Bussey’s place of work this morning and there’s no sign of either of them.’
‘Does DI Proust know DS Kombothekra’s been doing favours for you instead of the job he’s supposed to be doing?’ asked Milward. ‘Maybe I ought to ask him.’
That shut Charlie up.
‘Perhaps it’s different in the provinces, but in London police officers work on the cases they’ve been allocated, not on whatever takes their fancy. My understanding, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that your CID is neither investigating Bussey, Seed and Trelease nor keeping them under surveillance. Mary Trelease in particular . . . Even you, DC Waterhouse, will have a hard job persuading me she’s pertinent to my case.’
‘You can’t be that stupid, surely,’ said Simon. ‘Ruth Bussey and Aidan Seed share an obsession with Mary Trelease. If they’re involved, she is. You can’t shunt her to one side. Look for a connection between Trelease and Gemma Crowther, if you haven’t already.’
‘So now Mary Trelease killed Gemma Crowther?’ said Dunning. ‘Make your mind up.’
‘You know I’m not saying that.’ Simon looked at Milward. ‘Does he know, or is he too dense to keep up? If a man pretends he’s killed one woman, then goes and kills another, the first question I’d ask is: what’s the connection between the two women?’
Nobody had ever asked Olivia Zailer to list her least favourite words, but if they had, ‘logic’ and ‘research’ might well have been among them, suggestive as they were of excessive amounts of time and effort. Yet here she was, immersed in both and even quite enjoying it. The dearth of decent telly programmes helped, as did the raspberry liqueur cocktails she’d been drinking. Olivia didn’t think they were scrambling her brain too much.
There was no Wikipedia entry on Martha Wyers; the online world seemed largely unaware she’d ever lived and died. Olivia could find nothing about Wyers’ suicide or murder, whichever it was. She’d phoned a few of her literary journalist friends but none of them knew anything. A couple said the name ‘rang a vague bell’, so noncommittally that Olivia wasn’t sure she believed them; more likely they didn’t want to admit to never having heard of an author who, for all they knew, had just won a prestigious award or secured the highest advance since the dawn of time for her latest book.
The Amazon website, at least, knew who Martha Wyers was. She’d published only one novel,
Ice on the Sun
, in 1998. It was unavailable, even from Amazon marketplace; out of print, and not a single used copy advertised. Must have failed quite spectacularly to make any impact at all, thought Liv. There was a short synopsis of the novel which was interesting, but not as interesting as the only customer review, dated 2 January 2000, contributed by one Senga McAllister: a four-paragraph five-star rave about the book’s bleak, searing beauty.
Liv knew Senga. They’d worked together briefly before Liv went freelance. Senga was still at
The Times
, and remembered both Liv and Martha Wyers. She’d known nothing about Wyers’ death but declared herself unsurprised. Her first question was, ‘Did she kill herself?’
Suicide, then, thought Liv, re-reading
Ice on the Sun
’s blurb. Definitely. Bleak, searing suicide. Not murder.
Now she was waiting for Senga to email her the text of a
Times
feature she’d written years ago that included an interview with Martha Wyers. Before reading her novel, Senga had met Wyers and interviewed her.
Decided she was the sort of person who might one day take her own life.
Olivia smiled to herself, feeling quite the detective.
The new message icon flashed on her screen and she clicked on it. She started to read what Senga had sent her and saw that it was incomplete: a headline, an introductory paragraph, then space, then a chunk of text about Martha Wyers.
What if . . .? She tried to cast the idea from her mind but it wouldn’t shift. Punching the air in triumph, she imagined herself proved right already. God, she was clever! Time for a celebratory cocktail while she waited for Dom to arrive. No, not yet. First the important stuff. Let no one accuse Olivia Zailer of putting an urgent need for a pink drink before a selfless crusade for the truth. She emailed Senga asking to see the whole of the feature. It was worth a try. If she turned out to be wrong, Charlie didn’t need to know anything about it.
‘You’ve had your turn in the limelight,’ Milward told Simon coolly, from which he inferred that she hadn’t thought to look for anything that tied Gemma Crowther to Mary Trelease.
Stupid.
She hadn’t liked it when he’d called her that. Tough. ‘Sergeant Zailer, did you ask DS Kombothekra to check up on Ruth Bussey and Mary Trelease?’
‘Yes, I did,’ said Charlie. ‘If you tell DI Proust, make sure you blame me and not Sam. I didn’t give him much choice. I led him to believe he’d find each of them with Aidan Seed holding a knife to her throat.’
‘Your maverick methods are legendary,’ Milward told her. ‘I’ve heard they include having sex with murder suspects.’
‘Then you heard wrong,’ said Charlie. ‘I believe you’re referring to a serial rapist I dated for a while. No one ever thought he was a murderer. Anyway, we weren’t serious. Just a bit of fun, you know.’
Simon tensed. Why couldn’t she ever stop?
‘I see,’ said Milward, smiling. ‘My mistake.’
‘You mentioned a photograph,’ said Charlie. ‘Where is it? I want to see it.’
‘You will.’
‘What are you waiting for? Has it occurred to you that if you were straight with us instead of playing games, we might actually get somewhere?’
‘What time did you leave Ruth Bussey’s house on Monday evening?’
‘Here we go again. Half past ten.’
‘After which you drove home.’ Milward was reading from notes. ‘DC Waterhouse joined you at your house shortly after eleven, and the two of you spent the night there.’
‘Yes.’
Milward and Dunning were bound to be wondering how Simon felt about sharing a bed—sharing a life—with the ex-lover of one of the sickest psychos in the UK prison system. He wondered himself.
‘And then, on Tuesday morning, you phoned work and pretended to be ill. Why?’
‘I didn’t pretend. I felt ill, then I felt better.’
‘Better enough to fancy a day-trip to London,’ said Milward caustically.
‘Yes. I thought I’d go shopping. We don’t have real shops in Spilling, only mud huts selling painted masks.’
‘How did you travel?’
‘By train, as I said last night. My answers aren’t going to change.’
‘You caught the slow train—the 9.05 from Rawndesley to King’s Cross?’
‘And got in at 10.55. Yes.’
‘What did you do in London?’
‘For the third time, I looked round art galleries in the morning and went to see my sister in the afternoon. Then Simon rang me and told me about all this shit, and I came here.’
‘All this shit being Gemma Crowther’s murder?’ Milward leaned forward. ‘Are you always this flippant about the deaths of young women?’
‘No. Only on Wednesdays.’
‘The trouble I’m having, Sergeant Zailer, is that I haven’t spoken to Ruth Bussey. You might be lying about what time you left her house. How do I know you didn’t drive to London on Monday evening?’