Robb looks from one detective to the other. McAvoy has crossed his arms. Framed by the window, the light defines his muscles and casts a shadow across his eyes, leaving only the set of his jaw
illuminated. Robb has no friends in this room. He looks down at his feet, stuffed into dirty white trainers, then addresses himself to Pharaoh.
‘We were together, yeah? Elaine and me. Three years, all in all, off and on.’
‘How exactly did you meet?’ asks McAvoy, unable to hide his surprise that the two were ever a couple.
‘Her brother. We were mates. Still would be if things turned out differently. He introduced us.’
‘So you were a friend of the family?’
He shakes his head. ‘No, just Don. He’s a delivery driver. Dropped some stuff off at the office where I used to work. He’s a rugby man. Bradford Bulls. We hit it off.’
‘And?’
‘His sister came to a match with us. Her and a friend. We hit it off too.’
Pharaoh looks Robb up and down. He sees her looking and can’t help but let his annoyance show on his face. ‘I’ve put weight on since we split.’
‘Comfort eating?’
‘Yeah, if you like. I was slimmer. Better-looking. Less bald.’
‘Sorry I missed out on you. You sound a catch.’
Robb looks down at the wooden floor. Sees himself, blurred and colossal, in the polished surface of the wood. ‘You see any mirrors in this room? There are none in the flat. I know what I am. You don’t have to remind me.’
Pharaoh looks at the side of his head until he looks up and meets her gaze. She nods, and while it is short of an apology, it is at least an acknowledgement.
‘You fell for her hard?’ asks McAvoy.
‘She was everything I wanted. I’ve had a few girlfriends over the years but I never thought it would feel the way it did with Elaine. She just made the world better, you know?’
‘You lived together?’
‘Yeah. Lovely place. Bought it cheap and did it up. I like all that stuff. Made it nice for her and the kids.’
‘And you met her family.’
Robb doesn’t seem to be able to cough up the ball of gristle in his throat. He swallows painfully. ‘Philippa, you mean?’
‘I mean her family.’
‘Yeah. Nice family. Close. Proper family, you know? Don was well happy with the way things worked out.’
‘And your relationship with Philippa?’
Robb looks away, past McAvoy, to the slate sea and stone sky. ‘We were close. All those jokes about mothers-in-law? It wasn’t like that. We were mates. She was a laugh. I helped her with her work on the council. Computer stuff. Research. I typed up her speeches. Set up a spreadsheet for her expenses. She used to make ginger biscuits for me as a thanks. Proper ones, with stem ginger.’ He gives a tiny smile at the memory. ‘It was all nice.’
‘So what happened with you and Elaine?’
Robb blows air through his nostrils. Scratches at his throat. He seems to be about to stand up, to offer to make tea, to straighten a picture or move the rug, but he appears to see the actions for the distractions they are, and stays where he is. When he speaks, his voice is soft as tears falling on wood.
‘Philippa was at our place. I was showing her how to use a website. Might even have been that walking challenge website. I can’t remember. Anyway, I left her in my office for a bit. Went for a pee or a cup of tea or whatever. Next thing she’s pulling on her coat
and slamming the door behind her. I didn’t know what was going on until I went back into my office.’ He looks at the wall, shame creeping up into his cheeks. ‘She’d clicked the wrong thing. Gone into my private files. Seen some of the things in there.’
Pharaoh gives a whistle. ‘Worst nightmare, eh?’
‘It was nowt weird,’ he says, despairingly.
‘Just good wholesome stuff, was it?’ asks Pharaoh.
Robb doesn’t reply.
‘Mr Robb, I don’t want to be crass, but everybody in the world has the occasional glimpse at stuff like that. She’d be embarrassed, sure, but she’d hardly cut you off for that, would she? These days? Really?’
Robb looks at her, quizzically, then his mouth opens wide as realisation dawns.
‘It was drawings!’ he splutters. ‘Drawings I’d done. I like to draw.’
Pharaoh is getting frustrated. ‘What?’
‘I’d done some drawings. Portraits, if you like. Sketches. Some still-life. Some from memory. Other times, they’d sit for me …’
‘Who?’
‘The kids. Elaine’s kids.’
Pharaoh’s mouth drops open and she turns to McAvoy. ‘Are you hearing this? Can you get a straight answer out of this bloke for me please, Hector, because I’m starting to get angry.’
McAvoy takes three steps to the middle of the room and looms over Darren Robb. Were he here alone, he would never consider using his size, would never threaten or intimidate, but in Pharaoh’s presence, he knows his role. He is both her enforcer and gentle poet. His job is to keep the suspect off-balance. To become his friend, and then step into his personal space with
the softest of snarls. ‘Were they naked pictures, sir? The drawings you did of your girlfriend’s children?’
Robb stares up at the big man. ‘It’s art. Like Rubens. Cherubs and stuff. I like all that. I scanned them into the computer so I could use some art software. I wasn’t sending them to anyone. I wasn’t doing anything wrong! It’s just pictures.’
‘Nothing that could be considered inappropriate?’
‘Not unless there’s something wrong with you.’
‘But Philippa didn’t like what she saw?’
‘She wouldn’t answer her phone. Wouldn’t come to the door when I called for her. She just cut me off.’
‘And Elaine?’
‘She didn’t understand. Her mum sent her this message, telling her that her boyfriend was sick. Twisted. Disgusting.’
‘Did you explain?’
‘I deleted the pictures as soon as Philippa left.’
‘Why?’
‘I panicked.’
McAvoy runs his tongue around the inside of his mouth. ‘So when Philippa told her daughter that you had naked pictures of her children on your computer, you had no evidence to the contrary.’
Robb looks back at his feet.
‘Elaine left you?’
He nods. ‘She wouldn’t listen.’
‘Did you try and make her?’
Robb bites at his lip. ‘Over and over. I tried to get Don to talk to her but he wouldn’t take my calls either. I went to Elaine’s work, to the kids’ schools, I just wanted her to listen.’
McAvoy pushes a fist into his palm. ‘You must have been frustrated. Angry.’
‘Everything was ruined, over a mistake. A misunderstanding. I’d never hurt those kids. I loved those kids.’
‘But Elaine didn’t know you were drawing them naked, did she? If it was innocent, why not tell her?’
Robb is silent. He tries to find somewhere to direct his gaze, but finds nothing to his satisfaction. He gets up, and adjusts one of the pictures on the wall. ‘It was just art,’ he mutters to himself.
‘And if we took away your computer, Mr Robb, would we find more art?’
A look of horror passes over Darren Robb’s face, and McAvoy takes a step towards him, using his size to put the fat man almost into shadow.
‘You’ve been stalking your ex, Mr Robb. You’ve been following her on Facebook with a fake alias. You’ve been making a nuisance of yourself. You’ve made threats about a woman who is now dead.’
Robb’s lower lip trembles. He seems to be about to cry.
‘Where were you last night?’ asks Pharaoh from the sofa.
‘I was here,’ he says.
‘Doing what?’
‘I was on the computer. I’m often on the computer.’
‘Doing what?’
Slowly, like a bouncy castle deflating, Darren Robb sinks to his knees. ‘Same as fucking always,’ he says, between sobs. ‘Reading her emails. Reading her messages.’
‘You hack her emails?’
‘Elaine’s. Don’s. Philippa’s. I just want to stay close to them. They were my family too. It was just a misunderstanding.’
‘You can show us your search history, then. You can show us that you were here all night, I presume.’
‘I stopped about 2 a.m. Then I went to bed.’
‘Alone?’
‘Of course alone.’
Pharaoh turns to her sergeant. ‘We don’t know what time she was killed yet. Not for certain.’
‘If he’s good enough with computers he could do his Internet browsing remotely and make it look like he was on his home terminal. But if he did that on his mobile, we can pinpoint the location from the signal. Will be easier once the forensics people have had their fun.’
‘Aye, if he was there we’ll probably have found a crisp packet in the vicinity.’
Robb looks at each of them in turn, as if they are passing his fate between them like a tennis ball.
‘I can’t drive,’ he blurts out, as if the admission is the most important thought he has ever had. ‘I haven’t got a car. I don’t have a licence. I work from home. How the hell would I even get there?’
Pharaoh lets the annoyance show in her face. ‘You can’t drive? How did you bother Elaine then? See her at work? At the kids’ school?’
‘I took cabs. Buses. I’ve only moved back to Hornsea the past few weeks. I kept this place on when Elaine and me moved in together. I don’t go anywhere. I couldn’t.’
Pharaoh looks at the fat man on the floor. ‘Pathetic,’ she says, and her sneer is an ugly, powerful thing.
McAvoy has been running his tongue around his mouth for the past few moments, his thoughts sliding into one another like coins inside a slot machine. ‘The emails,’ he says, at length. ‘You’ve been reading them for a while?’
Robb nods, seemingly unsure whether to stay on his knees or get up.
‘Did Philippa ever receive any threats of any kind? And I advise you to think carefully about this, because at the moment, we’re staring very hard at you for the murder of Philippa Longman.’
Robb screws up his eyes, like a child pretending to concentrate. ‘Philippa’s emails were just council stuff. Vouchers. Special offers. Sometimes she’d get pictures from friends. I used to search under my name in her correspondence and there wasn’t a thing. They’d just moved on. Cut me out like I was something disgusting.’
‘And Elaine?’
‘She mentioned me sometimes. After I’d been to see her, or sent her a letter or texted her or whatever, she’d message a friend about me. She never sounded cross with me, just sorry for me.’
‘But you were cross with her. With Philippa too.’
‘I said things I shouldn’t have. I was just trying to shock her into listening.’
‘You said you would cut out her mum’s heart.’
Robb shifts his position, moving the fat around. ‘I’ve never hurt anybody in my life.’
Pharaoh clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth. She seems to be weighing things up.
‘Hector?’
McAvoy looks at the morbidly obese specimen before him. He sees something pitiful, but he does not yet see a killer.
‘Don’t go anywhere,’ he says, to Robb.
Pharaoh scoffs. ‘He can’t drive, remember?’
‘Let’s check that, eh?’
‘And we’d better tell the boys in the tech unit to remotely access his hard drive. Make sure nothing gets deleted in the next few days.’
McAvoy manages to keep the look of confusion off his face. Pharaoh knows nothing about computers, but has a quality poker face and knows how to scare a suspect.
They turn away from the snivelling man on the floor and head for the door. Halfway across the living room, McAvoy turns back.
‘Are you sorry she’s dead?’
Robb raises his head. There is nothing but sorrow in his face, though most of that seems to be for himself.
‘Did she suffer?’ he asks, at length.
McAvoy nods. ‘More than anybody should.’
Robb drops his head. The only sound in the room is the soft snuffling of a fat man crying into his T-shirt, and the distant peal of children laughing beneath the crashing of the waves.
3.28 p.m. Courtland Road Police Station. Hull.
A three-storey building, all bare brick and dirty windows, painted the colour of storm clouds, shielded from the estate it watches over by bent silver railings and untended grass.
First floor. Home of the Serious and Organised Crime Unit.
Flickering monitors, overstuffed folders and cardboard boxes cluttering the pathways between desks. Home Office posters on the walls and every window pushed open as far as it will go. Phones, answered with coughs and grunts; fingers bashing inexpertly on keyboards that are missing letters and patterned with crumbs. Bluebottles buzzing helplessly on dirty windowsills varnished in coffee stains and smudges of printer ink.
Helen Tremberg, wrist-deep in a packet of crisps, salt sticking to her damp fingers and chipped nails, sweat on her upper lip, fringe twisting itself in knots every time the fan turns in her direction and the edges of her paperwork lift their skirts.
She types, one-handed, on a keyboard that sits in front of a monitor garlanded with Post-it notes. They contain reminders. Phone numbers. Her passwords.
She’s hunched. Furtive. Trying to stay below the plastic barrier that divides her desk from DC Ben Nielsen’s. There is a tiny smile on her face.
Helen has been officially single for three years. She had two serious relationships before that, with men she was pretty sure she loved. Each ended within a year of them moving in together. In both cases, it was the men who made the decision to go, and Helen who had done nothing to change their minds. She enjoyed cohabiting, liked the intimacy of it all: the foot-rubs during the movie; the unexpected cups of tea; the feeling of slipping on a man’s big cosy jumper to pad downstairs in the middle of the night and having somebody warm to spoon up beside when she worked a late shift. It was the other side of it that caused the rifts. Bills. Sensible stuff. Which electricity supplier to use. Getting the broadband to work properly. Whether to do a big shop once a month for freezable stuff, or pop out every night for perishables. Them, forgetting to keep the shower curtain inside the bathtub and soaking the floor. Her with her stubbornness. Her refusal to compromise. Even to be guided. Steered. Told. Sitting there with her fingers digging into the leather of the sofa as some great interloper held the remote control for her TV and decided what they should watch. Both of her failed relationships were so similar in their pattern and make-up that sometimes she forgets which was which, and has to consider the length of her hair in each snapshot of memory to know which lover she went where with, and when.