Woman with a Secret (19 page)

“Yes, but it’s more than that,” said Charlie, wanting to make sure Simon hadn’t missed what she thought was her best point. “It’s not only ‘I didn’t stab him, but he’s no less dead than if I had.’ It’s ‘I didn’t use the knife in the way knives are meant to be used, but the end result is the same.’ It’s about knife use specifically—a knife not being used in the way that it normally is. I’d say the killer wants you to focus on two questions: why was he so keen to use a knife to kill Blundy, and why was he determined to use it so . . . unconventionally?”

Simon’s phone had started to vibrate on the table, but he was busy mouthing something to himself silently and didn’t notice. Charlie picked it up with her free hand. “Hello?”

“Oh.” A surprised-sounding woman’s voice. “I was hoping to speak to DC Simon Waterhouse.”

“I’ll pass you over. Who’s calling?”

“Gemma Dobson. I’m Paula Riddiough’s PA.”

“Hold on a second.”

Charlie waved the phone in front of Simon’s face. He swatted it away as if it were an insect, then did a double take and grabbed it. “Hello? Hello? . . . Yes. Thanks for getting back to me.”

Gemma Dobson’s voice was loud enough to be audible across the table, but only as a noise—no identifiable words, which was frustrating. “Pen,” Simon mouthed. Charlie fished in her handbag, pulled one out and handed it to him, then went back in for a scrap of paper. She knew there were lots in there, but they’d all gone into hiding; everything Charlie’s fingers touched was hard and three-dimensional. She couldn’t imagine what all these objects were that she carried around with her every day, and when she peered in, she could make out very little. This was the worst bag she’d ever owned. It was far too big—like a network of pitch-black subterranean caves with a smart leather exterior and a shoulder strap. By the time she’d found a suitable receipt for Simon to scribble on, it was too late: he’d already started to make notes on his nondisposable cloth napkin.

He’d written, “October 26, 2011, 10:30
A.M
., Rose Lounge, Sofitel
St. James Hotel, London.” Then, underneath, “November 11, 2011.” Charlie watched, waiting for him to write down a time to go with the second date, but the pen hovered in midair.

“Really?” he asked Gemma Dobson. “You’re sure? Not eleven or eleven thirty? . . . Right . . . No, I’m not doubting you. Thank you. You’ve been helpful.” Simon tried to stuff his phone into his inside jacket pocket and missed. It fell to the floor. He bent to pick it up. “I knew it,” he said to Charlie. “Six ones. Not one hundred and eleven thousand one hundred and eleven, but November 11, 2011. Paula Riddiough and Damon Blundy met twice, according to her assistant. The second time was on eleven eleven eleven. So that’s Blundy’s computer password explained: Riddy111111.”

“I see,” said Charlie. “Must have been a significant meeting for him, are you thinking? If he used it as his password?”

“Yeah, and Blundy knew it was going to be significant.”

“You mean he picked that as his password before November 11, 2011—when the date was arranged but before it had happened?”

Simon smiled. “No. I don’t know how long it’s been his password.”

“Then—”

“How do I know Blundy knew his three-elevens appointment with Riddiough was going to matter to him before it had happened?”

Charlie waited. Tried not to mind being toyed with.

“Guess what time they arranged to meet?” said Simon.

Not eleven or eleven thirty?
he’d said to Gemma Dobson. There was only one way in which the time could possibly be significant . . . “If you’re asking me to pull something else out of thin air that’s probably going to be wrong . . . my guess is eleven minutes past eleven,” said Charlie.

“Spot on. What does that tell you?”

“Obvious, isn’t it? It must have occurred to Blundy, or Paula Priv, or both of them, that they were meeting on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 2011. What could be more fitting than to
meet at eleven minutes past eleven? They probably thought it was funny: five elevens instead of three. Except . . .”

It was Simon’s turn to wait. Impatiently. “Go on,” he said.

“Well, why are they arranging to meet in an in-joke kind of way when they’re supposed to be enemies?” said Charlie. “He’s a demolition-job columnist who’s invented a nasty nickname for her—”

“And called her the UK’s worst mother more than once.”

Charlie shook her head. “Doesn’t make sense,” she said. “If you were meeting an enemy on November 11, 2011, you’d meet them at half past ten, or eleven. You wouldn’t say, ‘Tee hee, let’s meet at eleven minutes past eleven.’ It’s too . . . cozy.”

“Let’s say you were meeting Liv,” said Simon.

“No. No, let’s not, please.”

“All right, Stacey Sellers or Debbie Gibbs.”

“Thanks for giving me such a sparkling fantasy social life,” Charlie said sarcastically.

“If it was November 11, 2011, that you were planning to meet, would you suggest meeting at eleven minutes past eleven?” Simon asked.

“No.”

“And if they suggested it?”

“I’d think it was weird. Unless it was . . .” Charlie stopped. “It’s flirty, isn’t it? In a purely platonic relationship, you wouldn’t suggest it. Would you?”

“I don’t think so. I agree.” Simon looked pleased. “Also, you wouldn’t choose the date you met a purely platonic friend as the password for your laptop.”

“So he was cheating on his wife, having an affair with a hot MP,” said Charlie. “I guess that explains why he moved to Spilling. He used to live in London, didn’t he? I remember reading his column about moving—he said he’d had a dream about moving to the Culver Valley and being set upon by sexy women, and he had to try and make it come true. Sounds like his wife’s got an ample motive for murder,” Charlie summed up.

“He wasn’t married to her when he wrote that,” said Simon. “He and Hannah met on November 29, 2011, and got hitched in March 2012.”

“So . . . eighteen days after his second meeting with Paula Priv, the one that was so important to him that he made it his password, he met the woman he went on to marry?” Charlie frowned. “That’s all very . . . quick. Perhaps his fling with Paula only lasted two weeks. Things can move fast in relationships, I suppose. Not ours, obviously, but I’ve heard of speedy romantic developments happening to other people.”

“I need to talk to Paula Riddiough.” Simon stood up. “She lied to me. When I spoke to her on the phone earlier, she said she’d met Blundy twice but couldn’t remember the exact dates, but you wouldn’t forget agreeing to meet on November 11, 2011, at eleven minutes past eleven, would you?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“When she pointed me in the direction of her assistant, she knew what I was going to find out. I reckon she was throwing me a hint deliberately. Toying with me. She wants me to come after her for the real story. She must do.”

“Of course she does.” Charlie laughed. “If there’s one thing about Paula Privilege that’s beyond doubt, it’s that she loves being pursued by men. You need to be prepared to suspect her in a different way from what you’re used to.”

“How do you mean?”

“She might act like someone with a guilty secret just to reel you in and keep you focused on her. Course, I don’t know her personally, but . . .”

“You really think she’d act like a possible murderer in order to get a bit more attention? Most people—”

“Paula Privilege and most people are light-years apart,” said Charlie. “And if that’s not apparent the second you meet her, then it’s not the real her that you’ve met.”

“The person you’re describing sounds like a potential killer,” said Simon.

Charlie thought about it. “Yes,” she said eventually. “I wouldn’t rule that out either.”

“SHE ASKED ME IF
I wanted to go back to her place,” said Sellers. “That was all she said: her place. We were in a bar—I assumed her place was a house, a flat . . . somewhere normal.” He sighed and shook his head.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” said Gibbs, keen to hear what was coming next. Being with Liv had made him more curious about other people than he used to be.

He and Sellers were in the Brown Cow, which was busier than usual. Gibbs had noticed that it tended to be packed and noisy whenever he needed to concentrate on an important conversation, and silent and empty whenever he was keen to avoid one. Place should change its name to the Sod’s Law, he thought.

“I’ll tell you, and you can tell Liv—and then can you get her off my back?” said Sellers. “She’s emailed me twice on my work email, asking me how I am and if I’ve got any news. I barely know her!”

Gibbs smiled. He found it hard to be angry with Liv, even when he knew he probably ought to be. “She thinks you should talk to someone about it, whatever it is,” he said. “And thanks to her, you are.”

“Just ask her to leave me alone, all right?”

Gibbs nodded. “So . . . this woman invited you back to her place, and . . . ?”

Sellers took a long sip of his pint, then mumbled something inaudible.

“What?”

“It was a shelter, all right? Her ‘place’ turned out to be a fucking . . . shelter for battered women.”

“‘All right, love, wipe yourself . . .’”

“Will you shut the fuck up? It’s not funny. It wasn’t then and it isn’t now.”

“So . . . what happened?” Gibbs asked.

Sellers looked away.

“Don’t tell me you went in there and did her anyway?” Of course he had. Sellers, on the promise of a fuck, would stop at nothing. “I hope she had her own room at least.”

“Yeah. Own room.” Sellers sighed. “I thought it was OK, you know? She seemed to like me; she’d invited me there—I hadn’t pushed it at all. And at first it
was
all right. The sex was decent. It was a bit odd being in a shelter, but a place is just a place, right?”

“Something went wrong?” Gibbs guessed.

“You could say that. Afterward, when I tried to leave . . . she had a major freak-out. Suddenly, I was a shit who’d used her, just like all the others. I don’t know what she expected, how long she wanted me to stay, but I had to get home. I’d told her I was married, hadn’t promised her anything. I thought it was just a bit of fun. She started hitting me, punching me in the face and in the stomach. I had to hold her wrists to stop her. It was a nightmare.”

“You were in a battered women’s shelter, mate. What did you expect?”

“Yeah, a
battered
women’s shelter!” Sellers said indignantly. “I didn’t expect to get battered in there,
by
a woman!”

“You didn’t tell her your name, did you? Or your job?”

“I’m not that stupid. I was just Colin, no surname, electrician.”

“So you
did
tell her your name.” Sellers was a giver by nature; that was his problem: too generous-spirited, too talkative. “What happened? Did you manage to calm her down?”

“Yeah. She wasn’t happy about me leaving, but she agreed to let me go without trying to kill me. I couldn’t talk her out of thinking I was a shit, though.” Sellers turned to Gibbs. “I’m not a shit, am I?”

“No.”

They drank their pints in silence.

“That wasn’t the end of it,” Sellers said once he’d finished his drink.

Gibbs groaned. “Don’t tell me you went back for more?”

“No. Wouldn’t go back there if you paid me. But . . . it was horrible. Leaves a bad taste, having something like that happen. It’s never happened to me before. I didn’t want to go home feeling like crap, so I . . . well, I tried again. Not with the same woman.”

Gibbs shook his head in despair. “Let me guess: you went back to the bar, picked up another woman who turned out to be even more psycho?”

“I didn’t go back to the bar,” Sellers corrected him. “I wish I had. As I was leaving the shelter, I bumped into someone. A young woman, really pretty. One of the other residents. She was in the kitchen. I walked past. We got chatting.”

“You don’t learn, do you?” said Gibbs. Then he thought about his own situation. “Don’t s’pose any of us do,” he said.

“I thought she liked me, and I just . . . I wanted to end the night on a high note. So I started flirting with her. Nothing too direct—I didn’t proposition her or anything, I was just seeing how far she’d let the flirty banter go, but . . . suddenly she turned really cold. Said if I didn’t fuck off, she’d ‘press the alarm.’ I tried to explain that I didn’t mean any harm and she started yelling in my face. Told me to go fuck a hornets’ nest and die.”

“That’s . . . extreme.” Gibbs stored the insult away for future use. It was a good one.

“All in all, one of the worst nights of my life.”

“When was this?”

“Weekend before last. I know I should forget it, get on with my life, but it’s shaken me up. I don’t feel the way I used to. Couple of nights ago, I was at the supermarket and I saw this gorgeous woman, on her own. I was on my own . . . I didn’t go anywhere near her. Couldn’t do it. Anyway . . . enough about me and my sad life. Have you taken the plunge yet?”

Gibbs raised his eyebrows as his heart started to beat faster. “You mean . . . ?”

“Not the
plunge
plunge, not the big one. I meant have you told Simon and Charlie?”

“Not yet. Liv was going to meet Charlie for a drink later and tell her, but then I had a message from her saying she’d changed her mind. So now we’ve moved to Plan B.”

“Which is?” Sellers asked.

“A relief,” said Gibbs. “Let’s face it, Charlie and Simon were always going to hate Plan A, weren’t they? I always thought telling them was a crazy idea.”

“So what’s Plan B?”

Gibbs was prevented from answering by the sudden appearance of PC Robbie Meakin, looking irritatingly cheerful as always.

“All right, Robbie,” said Sellers. “How goes it? Get us a round in, will you?”

“Yeah, all right, then. What you having?”

“Pint of Landlord.”

“Same,” said Gibbs.

Instead of heading for the bar, Meakin answered the first question Sellers had asked him. “I’m wiped out, but I think that’s a permanent state once you’ve got kids, isn’t it? How are you doing on the Blundy case? The man that every citizen of the UK expressed a desire to kill at one time or another.”