‘How do you mean?’ asked Charlie.
‘I asked him to describe the woman he killed, which he did in great detail. Point for point, his description matched the woman I saw and spoke to this morning.’
‘You’ve met Mary Trelease?’ The idea made Charlie feel funny; she wasn’t sure why.
‘I have and Gibbs has. We’ve both seen her passport, her driving licence. Today she showed me the deeds of her house with her name on, all the paperwork from her solicitor from when she moved, her bank statements . . .’
‘Why so much?’ said Charlie. ‘Passport and driving licence should have been enough.’
‘I think she was worried one of us was going to turn up every day and ask her to prove all over again that she’s who she says she is. She gathered together a stack of stuff to show me how absurd the whole thing is. She acted like . . . like she was afraid I was trying to steal her identity or something.’
‘Afraid, literally?’
Simon considered it. ‘Yeah, underneath her chippiness, I reckon there was some fear there.’
Two frightened women. Charlie didn’t like the feel of this at all. ‘So how did you get dragged in? You said Seed saw Gibbs first?’ She waited to be told that Seed had at some point requested Simon’s involvement, asked for him by name. She wasn’t quite ready to believe this wasn’t all a cruel hoax aimed at her. If Ruth Bussey and Aidan Seed knew she and Simon were engaged . . .
‘Kombothekra said Gibbs was needed elsewhere,’ Simon told her, ‘Reading between the lines, he didn’t trust him with it.’
‘He doesn’t think Gibbs is capable of checking if someone’s alive or dead?’
‘Mary Trelease wouldn’t let him in,’ said Simon. ‘He didn’t see the house. Most importantly, he didn’t see the master bedroom, the one facing the street. According to what Seed told Gibbs yesterday, that’s where he left Mary Trelease’s dead body, in the bed in that room . . .’
‘Hold on. When did he say he’d killed her?’
‘He wouldn’t say. Nor why, though he did say how: he strangled her.’
‘Ruth Bussey said Seed had told her he’d killed Mary Trelease years ago.’
Simon blinked a few times. ‘Sure?’
‘Me or her? I’m sure she said it, and she seemed convinced that was what he’d told her. I think she quoted his exact words as, “Years ago, I killed a woman called Mary Trelease.” ’
‘Makes no sense,’ Simon muttered, turning to face the window. Which was why Sam Kombothekra hadn’t wanted Gibbs on it, thought Charlie. Most of what CID were called upon to investigate had some logic behind it. People hurt or killed each other over money, or drugs, usually some combination of the two. They stole from shops, disturbed the peace or terrorised the neighbourhood because they saw it as the only way out of a hopeless life—it was grim, but you could see the reasoning.
Charlie was about to ask Simon what he’d meant about Seed trying to use logic to convince him Mary Trelease was dead, but Simon was already saying, ‘He killed her years ago, left her body in the front bedroom at 15 Megson Crescent, and expects it to be there, undisturbed, for us to find several years later when he decides to confess? No.’ Charlie watched him junk the hypothesis. ‘Trelease didn’t live in that house years ago. She bought it in 2006, from a family called Mills.’
‘That’s two years ago,’ she pointed out, knowing what the response would be. Would she ever be able to hear ‘2006’ without experiencing a small earthquake in the pit of her stomach?
‘The phrase “years ago” implies longer,’ said Simon, on cue. ‘You know it does.’
She couldn’t argue. Ruth Bussey had said Seed had confessed to her last December, at which point 2006 would only have been ‘last year’. ‘What else did he tell you, apart from that Trelease’s body would be on the bed in the master bedroom and that he strangled her?’
‘In the bed, not on. He said she was naked, she’d been naked when he killed her. And her body was in the middle of the bed, not on one side or the other—he made a big point of that. Apart from saying several times that he didn’t rape her, that was all he told me.’
‘Ruth Bussey mentioned none of this.’ Charlie pulled a cigarette out of a packet on the window-sill. She had nothing to light it with. ‘Was he in the bedroom with her when she took her clothes off? Had they gone to bed together?’
‘He wouldn’t say.’
‘Did he have his clothes on when he strangled her?’
‘Wouldn’t say.’
Charlie doubted she’d be able to come up with a question Simon wouldn’t have put to Seed. Everything Gibbs would have neglected to ask, Simon would have asked several times over.
‘He answered some questions willingly and in great detail—others, he wouldn’t open his mouth.’
‘His girlfriend was exactly the same,’ said Charlie.
‘I’ve never come across anything like it before.’ Simon shook his head. ‘You know what it’s like normally: people talk or they don’t. Sometimes there’s nothing doing at first, then you twirl them and they spill the lot. Other times they spout crap until you point out to them how they’ve landed themselves in it, at which point they clam up. Aidan Seed: none of the above. It was like he had this . . . this checklist in his head. Two lists: the questions he was allowed to answer and the ones he wasn’t. When I asked him the questions on the first list, he went out of his way to be informative. Like I said, I got every detail of Mary’s appearance, from the tiny caramel-coloured birthmark beneath her lower lip—he actually said “caramel-coloured”—to her small earlobes, her wiry, curly hair, black with the odd strand of silver.’
‘Is she attractive?’ Charlie asked. ‘Don’t look at me like that. I’m not asking if you fancied her. I just wondered.’
‘She’s not pretty,’ said Simon after some thought.
‘But striking? Sexy?’
He shrugged. ‘Dunno.’
Aidan Seed’s not the only one with a list in his mind of questions it’s not safe to answer, thought Charlie. ‘Did he say if he killed her in the bed or moved her body there later?’ she asked, a question she knew would be on Simon’s acceptable list.
Is there anything I wouldn’t do to please him? Would I take early retirement and roam the country with a set of golf clubs, wearing dreadful sweaters?
‘She was in the bed when he killed her, he said. But . . . listen to us.’ Simon took a swig of his beer. ‘ “Did he move the body?” If Seed and his girlfriend are mad, we’ve nearly caught them up. What body? Mary Trelease is alive.’
‘You said “the questions he’s
allowed
to answer”,’ said Charlie. ‘Who’s doing the allowing? Ruth Bussey? She also seemed eager to talk, but only in response to certain prompts. And then I’d ask her something else—in most cases, the obvious next question—and she’d button it. Not a word, not even, “Sorry, I can’t answer that.” ’
‘Could there be a third person involved, someone who’s telling them what they can and can’t say?’
‘Mary Trelease?’ Charlie suggested.
Simon waved the idea away. ‘Why would she tell them both to go to the police and pretend Seed believes he killed her? Why would they go along with it?’ He didn’t wait for an answer, knowing she didn’t have one. ‘Gibbs asked Trelease if she knew an Aidan Seed. She said no, but he thought she was lying. I asked her again today, told her he was a picture-framer, how old he was. She said no. Seemed genuine enough, but then she’d had a day to polish up her act. Seed, though—he wasn’t acting. He feels guilty about something, that’s for sure. Whatever’s in his head, I wouldn’t want it in mine. He kept saying, “I’m a murderer.” Said he’d felt like he was dying himself when his hands were round her neck, the nail of his left thumb pressing into his right thumb . . .’
‘He said that?’
Simon nodded.
‘But he hasn’t strangled her. Nobody has.’ Charlie shuddered. ‘This is starting to do my head in. I’ve heard plenty of people confess to crimes they haven’t committed, but they’re always crimes
someone’s
committed. Why would anyone confess to the murder of a woman who isn’t dead? According to Ruth Bussey, Seed didn’t tell her any of that stuff about the bedroom, or strangling Mary—why not?’
‘You wouldn’t want to put that sort of image in your girlfriend’s head,’ Simon suggested.
‘What did Seed say his relationship with Mary Trelease was? How did he know her?’ Seeing Simon’s expression, Charlie guessed the answer. ‘He wouldn’t say.’ She cast around for something else to ask, as if the right formulation of words might shed sudden light. Nothing came to mind. ‘We should be doing the pair of them for wasting police time,’ she said.
‘Not my decision. For once, I’m glad. Seed’s not like any bullshit artist I’ve ever seen. Something was bothering him, something real.’
Charlie had felt the same about Ruth Bussey until she’d found the article.
‘Kombothekra’s got to decide where to go next with it,’ said Simon. ‘If it was my call, I don’t think I’d want to risk not taking statements from everyone involved. From Seed at the very least. Though I’ve no idea what I’d do with his statement once I had it.’ He frowned as a new thought occurred to him. ‘What did you decide to do? After you spoke to Ruth Bussey?’
Charlie felt her face heat up. ‘Err on the side of negligence, that’s my motto,’ she said bitterly. ‘I wasn’t planning to follow it up, even though she told me she was afraid something really bad was going to happen, and even though a fool could have seen she was seriously fucked up. I hadn’t even checked, like you and Gibbs did, that Mary Trelease was alive.’ Charlie put the cigarette she was holding in her mouth: comfort food.
‘I don’t get it,’ said Simon.
She left the room, started to go downstairs.
‘What?’ He followed her. ‘What did I say?’
‘Nothing. I’m getting a lighter.’
There were a few to choose from on the mantelpiece in the lounge, all plastic and disposable. ‘What aren’t you telling me?’ Simon asked.
‘That’s a question from the wrong list. Sorry.’ Charlie tried to laugh, lighting her cigarette. The wonderful tranquillising power of nicotine started to do its work.
‘You said before that Ruth Bussey was waiting for you when you went into work yesterday.’
‘Did I?’
Too clever for his own good. And everyone else’s.
‘Why you?’
Charlie walked over to her handbag, which she’d left dangling from the door handle, and pulled out the newspaper article. ‘She left her coat behind. This was in the pocket.’ Did he have any idea how hard it was for her to show it to him? Chances were he hadn’t seen it at the time; Simon didn’t read local papers.
She left him alone in the lounge, took her cigarette through the kitchen and out to the backyard, even though it was cold and she had no coat or shoes on. She stared at what Olivia called her ‘installation’: a pile of broken furniture, things Charlie had dismantled and thrown out two years ago. ‘How hard is it to hire a skip?’ Liv said plaintively whenever she visited. Charlie didn’t know, and didn’t have the time or the inclination to find out. My neighbours must pray every night that I’ll move, she thought. Especially the ones who’d replaced their neat, paved yard with a little lawn and flower-beds as soon as they moved in. Now they had colour-coordinated borders: red, white and blue flowers in a pattern that was overbearingly regular.
What a waste of time, when your garden’s the size of a fingernail.
Charlie felt something touch her and cried out in alarm before realising it was Simon. He put his arms round her waist.
‘Well? Did you read it?’
‘Slander,’ he said. ‘Like the way you described yourself tonight. ’
‘It wasn’t negligent, to take no action over Ruth Bussey?’ She knew he was talking about the party, but chose to misunderstand.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Simon. ‘As we both keep saying, no crime’s been committed. Bussey told you Trelease was alive and well—turns out she is.’
‘So Sam Kombothekra will tell you to leave it. It’s not a police matter. Just three oddballs behaving oddly, none of our business.’
Simon sighed. ‘Are you happy with that explanation? Seed and Bussey come in on the same day, separately, and tell two versions of almost the same story? You want to let it lie?’
‘Ruth Bussey said she was frightened something was going to happen.’ That was the part Charlie kept coming back to in her mind, now that she knew the whole thing hadn’t been about her.
‘One thing’s going to have to happen if we want to take it any further,’ said Simon.
‘What?’
He’s still touching me. He didn’t have to, but he did, he is.
He started to hum a tune, Aled Jones’ ‘Walking in the Air’.
‘You, not we,’ said Charlie. One of the advantages of leaving CID—the only one—was that she no longer had to negotiate with the Snowman. She tried not to sound as if she was crowing when she said, ‘I don’t work for him any more.’
3
Sunday 2 March 2008
A noise startles me: my house, breaking its long silence with a sharp ringing. The woolly feeling in my head clears. Adrenalin gets me moving. I crawl into the lounge on my hands and knees to avoid putting weight on my injured foot, and manage to grab the phone on the third ring, still holding the blanket I’ve been using as a shawl around my shoulders. I can’t say hello. I can’t allow myself to hope.
‘It’s me.’
Aidan.
Relief pours through me. I clutch the phone, needing something solid to hold on to. ‘Are you coming back?’ I say. I have so many questions, but this is the one that matters.
‘Yeah,’ he says. I wait for the part that comes next:
I’ll always come back, Ruth. You know that, don’t you?
For once, he doesn’t say it. The thudding of my heart fills the silence.
‘Where have you been?’ I ask. He has been gone longer than usual. Two nights.
‘Working.’
‘You weren’t at the workshop.’ There’s a pause. Does he regret giving me a key? I wait for him to ask for it back. He gave it to me when I first started to work for him, the same key for Seed Art Services as for his home. It was a sign that he trusted me.