Authors: Michael Robotham
‘So you’re saying her sacrifice wasn’t so great?’
‘No, I’m saying that expecting to die isn’t the same thing as expecting to live.’
We walk past a family picking raspberries to fill a big white enamel bowl. ‘Can I ask you a question?’ asks Julianne.
‘Sure.’
‘You’ve had to deal with Parkinson’s for ten years. How did you stop thinking about it?’
‘You try to think of other things.’
‘Such as?’
‘Do I have enough milk to get me through until Monday? What time does the dry cleaner close? Which of the Marx brothers pretended to be mute?’
‘Important stuff?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So I just ignore this?’
‘No.’
‘What then?’
‘Don’t make it everything. Don’t let it define who you are.’
Julianne glances along the path to the stream where Emma is searching for tadpoles. ‘It does rather concentrate the mind – having cancer. Up until now I’ve never really thought about dying.’
‘You’re not going to die.’
‘Don’t patronise me, Joe.’
‘I’m not patronising you. Lots of people have cancer. It’s almost like a stage of life these days.’
‘Just let me talk?’
‘Sorry.’
‘And stop apologising.’
‘OK.’
She takes a deep uncertain breath, lip bitten, mouth intent. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, except not make things worse. She steps to me, taking hold of my left hand, toying with my fingers as a teenager might – one who had briefly, many years ago, been in love with me.
‘I’m not mad at you. I don’t know what I am. I don’t think there’s a word for it.’
She begins to pull away.
‘I wish I could help you find the word,’ I say.
‘You can’t do everything.’
Charlie has gone to a party at a country house which has twelve bedrooms and an orangery that automatically turns to follow the sun across the sky. She seems to have a lot of glamorous young friends with rich or artistic parents. I don’t know why I think of them as glamorous; perhaps because they’re so much more self-assured than I was at the same age. Would-be doctors, lawyers, scientists, playwrights and artists – all going off to university or art college or taking gap years to travel to Cambodia and Vietnam.
Julianne is reading and Emma is watching
Frozen
for the umpteenth time. I open my laptop and go back to the statements, trying to piece together Elizabeth Crowe’s last day. The images of her defiled body keep polluting my thoughts. I have to force them away and concentrate on the other details.
Academics refer to something called the ‘half-life of facts’. Over time half of what we know now will become untrue. New research, better technology and greater understanding will make a mockery of the current truth, or a better version will be accepted as correct, which in turn will begin to grow obsolete. Smoking was once doctor-recommended. Pluto was once a planet. The Earth was once flat.
Based on this hypothesis, half of what I know about this crime will be proven to be wrong. The longer the time frame, the greater the change. But which half will it be? I can only base my assumptions on the available evidence.
Sherlock Holmes had a maxim: ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ That’s bollocks, by the way. The impossible cannot be defined or quantified or labelled or listed, so how can it be eliminated?
As I read the statements, I take notes, underlining certain details and putting question marks next to others. Elizabeth wasn’t some bland, almost anonymous divorcee, living quietly with her teenage daughter. She was university-educated, gregarious and sexually confident. She spoke French and a little Spanish. She began working as a medical researcher for a pharmaceutical company in Bristol, but quit her job when Harper was born. Later she worked three days a week as a sales rep selling medical supplies to GPs and surgeries.
Friends and colleagues have described her as feisty, opinionated, intelligent, warm and generous, but these are empty descriptions, platitudes and generalities. Nobody likes to speak ill of the dead. Not publicly. Yet behind the veneer of middle-aged respectability, Elizabeth led another life. She took risks. She joined an online dating agency. She went on Internet chat rooms. She engaged in intimate acts in public places. She was a strong, vibrant, sexual being, who fought against the mundane and the ordinary.
On that Saturday morning she had her hair done, a regular appointment at a salon in Clevedon. Afterwards she met up with a friend for coffee and went looking at linen and furnishings for the bed and breakfast. The police tracked her movements by triangulating the signals that bounced between her mobile and local phone towers. Her ex-husband called her at midday. According to Dominic Crowe they argued about his plan to take Harper for lunch for her birthday.
Elizabeth arrived home just after four. She took a call from Jeremy Egan an hour later. Her sister, Becca, called shortly after six and Elizabeth told her that she was spending a quiet night at home. Harper showed up, showered, changed and went out again. At 8.37 p.m. Elizabeth left the farmhouse. For the next hour her mobile signal placed her at a popular lover’s lane known Clevedon Court Woods. More than thirty mobile phones had been identified in the immediate vicinity, but most had been linked to local residents. Five numbers were still being traced.
One of the curious truths about small towns is that rivalries and intrigue are just as common as in cities, although harder to hide. People fall in love and out of love. Men cheat on their wives and wives cheat on their husbands. There are exhibitionists, paedophiles, voyeurs, sadists, masochists and transvestites – the full box of chocolates – none of them confined to a particular demographic or social class.
Since her divorce Elizabeth had been on two dates – both organised through a matchmaking website. The first was with Mark Sherwin, an antique dealer from Taunton. Widowed. Alibied. They had a drink and went to his flat. He didn’t contact her again.
The second date was with Dion Ferguson, a sales rep for a fitness equipment company. Married. Four children. He lied on his web profile, giving a false name and saying he was divorced. He has no alibi for the night of the murders.
Elizabeth arrived home by 10.20 p.m. She showered and got ready for bed. She had a drawer full of sexy lingerie, but chose to sleep naked. She checked her emails and looked at a website for bathroom fittings.
At 10.42 Harper sent her a text message:
Got my phone back. Had a fight with Blake. Coming home
.
By 11.08 p.m. she was back at the farmhouse. Mother and daughter were together. Tommy Garrett mentioned seeing a silhouette behind the curtains, but that was closer to 9.30. Perhaps the killer had been in the house all along.
Monday morning. Traffic crawls along the coast road, banked up behind convoys of caravans and campers. I have never understood why some people take their holidays in the same place every year, parking their caravan next to the same families, eating at the same cafés and restaurants, listening to the same stories, as though their lives are trapped on a continuous loop. There are all kinds of ghettos in the world and some are built afresh every holiday season.
Ruiz is driving. He picked me up from the cottage first thing, flirting with Julianne and promising he’d come for dinner one night. We reach the western edge of Portishead where the streets are lined with pebble-dashed houses with net curtains and flat façades. These are the sorts of places Margaret Thatcher sold off in the eighties because she had a vision of a home-owning democracy where everybody could owe money to a bank.
Three redheaded boys are playing in the front garden of a tired-looking house. The oldest boy is riding a bike with training wheels that buckle under his weight. The other two are whacking everything in sight – a tree, a rose bush, a garden gnome and a compost bin. Small boys are a mystery to me. They gain such joy from destroying things.
‘Is your daddy home?’ I ask.
The eldest looks at me sullenly and wipes his nose, smearing a silver trail along his sleeve.
‘Can you tell him he has visitors?’
The boy jumps off his bike, letting it fall, and runs up the front steps, wailing as though he’s about to be kidnapped. A second boy follows him, mimicking his performance. The last one stares at me and picks at a scab on his elbow, telling me how it happened.
A man steps outside. Dion Ferguson has a broad, jovial face and the same colour hair as his children.
I introduce Ruiz and myself. Ferguson doesn’t shake our hands. A new face appears at the window, a girl this time. The redheaded children seem to be multiplying.
‘We were hoping to talk to you about Elizabeth Crowe,’ I say.
Ferguson’s mouth drops open and he looks panic-stricken. ‘You can’t come here! They promised me. They said my wife wouldn’t have to know.’
‘She doesn’t,’ says Ruiz.
‘She’s inside now,’ he whispers. ‘You have to leave.’
‘Say we’re Seventh Day Adventists,’ says Ruiz. ‘It won’t be the first time you’ve lied to her.’
All four children are now outside in the yard – three boys and a girl, all of them under six. The oldest boy has a spoon covered in peanut butter. The girl tries to take it off him, but he holds it above his head, out of reach.
‘Mine. Mine. Mine,’ she says, over and over.
Ferguson ignores them. ‘You shouldn’t have come here. It’s not fair.’
‘You went on a date with Elizabeth Crowe,’ I say.
‘Yeah, OK. I’m not proud of it, but I can’t unmake that particular omelette.’
He glances over his shoulder again. A woman appears at the door. She’s wearing a pink housecoat and resting a laundry basket on her hip. Matronly. Pear-shaped. Harried. ‘Did you get Marcie breakfast?’
‘I’m just talking to these two gentlemen from the council,’ says Ferguson.
She studies Ruiz and me. ‘Is this about them dogs barking? It’s about bloody time. I must have called a dozen times.’
‘Yeah, it’s about the dogs,’ says her husband.
‘Tell ’em they bark all bloody night,’ she says.
‘I’m telling ’em now.’
‘Maybe I should talk to ’em.’
‘I got this.’
Marcie is still trying to get the peanut-buttered spoon, but her voice is growing more strident. ‘Mine. Mine. Mine.’
‘Just give her the bloody spoon,’ says Ferguson, cuffing the boy behind the ear.
‘But tha’ was mine.’
‘We share in this house.’
‘When does
she
share?’
‘You’ll get nothing if you don’t shut up and leave me be. I’m talking here.’
His wife has gone from the doorway. I can see along the hallway where clothes are drying on the radiators and the rug is littered with toys.
Ferguson looks at us, exasperated. ‘One date, one lousy date.’
‘Why did you sign up?’
‘I wish I’d never heard of that website.’
‘You gave a fake name. You lied about your age, about being married…’
‘Yeah, yeah, OK, I’ve been over this.’
‘You wanted to have an affair,’ says Ruiz.
‘No. Yes. No.’ He scratches under his armpit. ‘I just wanted to go out on a date, have a conversation about something other than my kids and barking dogs and unpaid bills.’ He glances at the house. ‘I’m suffocating here.’
‘You slept with Elizabeth Crowe?’ I say.
‘I didn’t expect that.’ He looks from face to face. ‘Honestly. I mean, I didn’t think I’d even get to buy her a drink when I saw her. I was shocked. Everybody lies on those websites, don’t they? They tell porkies about their weight or their age or they find their most flattering photograph. But she didn’t tell any lies. She was drop-dead gorgeous … I mean, way out of my league.’
‘Where did you meet her?’
‘At a pub in Bridgewater.’
‘Somewhere away from home.’
He nods.
‘What did you talk about?’
‘I honestly can’t remember. I was too busy staring at her. I thought any moment she was going to make some excuse and leave. I mean, look at me.’ He opens his arms showing the pot belly and sloping shoulders. ‘I’m a sales rep. I sell gym equipment.’
‘A walking advertisement,’ says Ruiz.
Ferguson sucks in his stomach. His two older boys are shooting at each other with pretend guns. One of them is using the trigger attachment from the hose. The other has found an old pump-action water pistol.
‘We had a few drinks and she was very sweet. She’d been a sales rep, she said, so she knew all about dealing with retailers and suppliers. It got to about nine o’clock and she didn’t want another drink. I thought she was going to say goodbye, but then she said she wanted to crawl under the table and blow me. Right there! In the bar! Said she’d done it before – and I believed her.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I suggested we take a drive. We took her car. I didn’t want her seeing mine – it’s full of booster seats, toys and other crap.’
‘You knew what she was suggesting?’
‘I’m ugly, not stupid.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘Trinity Waters – near one of the fish farms.’
‘Had you been there before?’
‘Never. She pulled up and walked around to my side, opened my door and unbuckled my belt and went down on me. It was the most exciting and terrifying thing that had ever happened to me. When my eyes uncrossed, I looked up and noticed two people watching us while they, you know – did their thing. This other woman had her skirt rucked up and was lying on the front of a car while this bloke was between her legs, banging away. They were doing it right in front of us. I tried to tell Elizabeth, but she didn’t stop.’ He wipes his top lip, wide-eyed like a schoolboy telling his mates what he’d discovered about girls. ‘I’d never had sex in public. I’d never heard of dogging.’
‘What happened then?’
‘Nothing. I mean, I freaked out. I mean, I enjoy it as much as the next guy, but indoors, you know, and not as a spectator sport.’
‘Your semen was found in her car.’
His face reddens. ‘Yeah, well, that was an accident. I mean, I sort of came to the party a little early. And I couldn’t get up again – not with people watching. She called me a few names, which I probably deserved. Then she drove me back to the pub and said goodbye. I didn’t see her again.’