Authors: Michael Robotham
My mobile is sitting in a cradle on the dashboard. I have tried to call Julianne twice and left messages. She’s not answering. Avoiding me. Pulling over to the side of the road, I try again, typing the words:
Emma told me you needed an operation. Please explain. Call me.
I wait. A message pings back:
Can’t talk now.
I type:
When?
Later.
I try to call her. She doesn’t answer. Why is she so bloody infuriating!
All this time I’ve been worrying that there was someone else – another man, a new lover, my replacement – and now I discover that she’s sick. That’s why she invited me to live at the cottage.
She needs a hysterectomy. I studied medicine for three years and I know enough to be worried. It could be bleeding, or fibroids, or a prolapse. She could have cancer. My stomach lurches. I’m the one who’s supposed to be sick and crumbling, jiggling my way through each day. Julianne never gets sick. Hardly ever. She’s the healthy one.
I feel as though someone has played a tasteless practical joke on me, tricked me into believing that happiness is a possibility before snatching it away. Now I’m sulking, touching at the truth with the barest tips of my thoughts, frightened of what I might find. When was she going to tell me? Did I have to wait until she went into hospital?
I’m angry at her secrecy, but at the same time I feel guilty. I have wished for something like this to happen – some event that I imagined would send her hurtling back into my arms. Now that it’s transpired I blame myself for contemplating such a terrible thing. Nobody can know.
Please, please let her be OK.
Just after ten o’clock I pull through the farm gates, splashing through puddles before parking in the cobblestone yard. Monk is waiting. He almost seems to unfold as he gets out of the car and pulls on a rain jacket.
‘Could be wetter,’ he says sarcastically, carrying a box to the front door and keying open the padlock. He brushes raindrops from his hair and hands me a USB stick. ‘The statements are on this.’
‘What about the post-mortem report?’
‘That too.’ He hangs up his jacket. ‘You’ll also find the 3D scan of the farmhouse, maps, timelines, phone records, financial statements and receipts. The statements are colour-coded – red for high priority, then orange, then yellow. The boss thought you might want hard copies of the photographs.’ He points to the box.
‘I might also need a printer.’
‘Colour?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
We walk past the open sitting room door. I don’t look inside.
‘You going to be OK out here?’ asks Monk, as we reach the kitchen. He opens the curtains.
‘I’ll be fine.’
He tests the lights and turns on a tap, checking that I have water.
‘What do you think happened?’ I ask.
Monk flexes his nostrils and rubs the grained skin of his jaw with one finger. ‘I think Mrs Crowe met some random stranger for sex, or someone watched her having sex, and followed her home.’
‘She chose the wrong one.’
‘It happens.’ Monk’s face is elongated, almost jug-shaped. ‘I don’t like speaking ill of the dead, but by most accounts Mrs Crowe was the sort of woman who liked all flavours of ice cream except the one she had in the freezer.’
‘Care to explain that?’
‘You see it often enough – a middle-aged woman goes searching for a little excitement or to recapture her youth – a Mrs Robinson type, who reaches her sexual peak and then sees her beauty starting to fade. I’m not being sexist – men do it as well: buy a Porsche or run off with their secretary. I got a feeling that Mrs Crowe was never going to settle for slippers and a cat.’
‘You sound as though you’re speaking from experience.’
Monk grins sheepishly. ‘I used to have women hitting on me all the time when I was young and single. Some of them wanted to sleep with a black man. Try it once. See if the stories were true.’
‘And now?’
‘I’m a happily married man,’ he says, ‘and my Trisha would snip Little Monk with garden shears if she caught me bumping nasty with another woman.’
‘Tell me about Elizabeth’s ex-husband.’
‘Dominic Crowe. Nice guy. Bitter.’
‘Why?’
‘She took him to the cleaners. Hired a head-kicking lawyer from London – the same brief who looked after Nigella Lawson when she split with Charles Saatchi.’
‘He lost the house.’
‘And his share of the company. You want to know the worst part? Dominic’s best friend and business partner had been shagging Elizabeth Crowe for years.’
‘Jeremy Egan?’
‘Yeah. Dominic had no idea. Poor schmuck.’
Monk circles the kitchen counter, running his finger over the bench top.
‘What do other people say about Mrs Crowe?’ I ask.
‘Depends who you talk to. I interviewed some of the tradesmen who were fitting out the bathrooms. None of them liked her. She screwed them on costs and kept changing her mind.’
‘Did any of them have keys to the farmhouse?’
‘The architect.’
‘Egan?’
‘Yep.’
‘What’s going to happen to this place?’
Monk shrugs his shoulders. ‘Elliot Crowe will most likely inherit … unless we find that he’s responsible.’
‘You think he could have killed them?’
‘He’s a junkie, not a genius, but yeah, he’s in the mix.’ Monk looks at his watch. ‘I got to get back to headquarters. I’ll try to get you that printer.’
After he’s gone, I boot up my laptop and plug in the USB. The files are indexed and dated. Within two hours I realise the size of my task. There are hundreds of statements and thousands of other pieces of information that have to be collated and cross-matched to reveal any inconsistencies or anomalies.
Opening a new file, I hit ‘play’ and the 3D scan starts to run. Time-coded at the bottom of the screen, it begins on the morning after the murders. An overview of the farmhouse shows the floor-plan and the relationships of the different buildings. There are two cars parked in front of the barn. One of them is a Volvo estate and the other a small hatchback, which belonged to Harper. A sticker in the rear window reads:
Horn Broken, Watch For Finger
.
By moving my cursor I can circle the farmhouse, entering doors, moving along corridors and turning 360 degrees. The detail is extraordinary. It’s as though I’m standing in each room exactly as it was that morning. I can see coffee cups on the shelves, a spoon beside the sink, condiments on the table. There is a coat-rack on the wall. Matching Barbour jackets. An umbrella stand. Walking sticks.
The front door has a splintered wooden panel above the deadlock. Shards of wood were found scattered on the doormat. Elsewhere there are no obvious signs of a struggle.
Moving the cursor, I enter the sitting room. Elizabeth is lying on her back, her legs splayed, her head turned to one side, arms outspread, one hand seeming to point towards the door. Opening an album of crime scene photographs, I see an attractive woman, not beautiful but well preserved, her stomach sagging slightly in a paunch and a caesarean scar the only blemish on her white skin.
I change the point of view until I see the candle holders coated in wax. He left them burning. Why light them at all? Amid the speckles of blood on the sofa there are larger smears on the front of the cushions. He sat down after he finished. He needed to rest. I can also see where he knelt to clean the knife on a cushion. A partial shoeprint was found inside the front door and further bloodstains in the hallway. Did he remove his shoes?
Traces of blood show his progress through the house, into the kitchen, then the laundry. He cleaned up using a cake of soap and a hand towel. Perhaps he took off his clothes.
Did he bring a spare set, or borrow something?
Closing the computer, I walk to the sitting room and take a seat on the solitary armchair. Opening an album of the crime scene photographs, I leaf through the pages. Elizabeth is lying on her back, her dressing gown open. She’s naked underneath. One breast is visible. The blood and urine stains suggest that she had been standing when the fatal blow was delivered. He held the knife in his right hand. He raised the blade above his shoulder and drove it into her neck below her left ear, angling down to her spine. He let her fall. She lay on her back.
The second phase of her injuries then began. He stabbed her thirty-five more times, most of the blows delivered after death, some so violent and deep they damaged the rug beneath her body. He focused on her genitals. The knife rose and fell in an uncontrolled frenzy. There was anger in this act. Hatred. Perhaps revenge. Likewise exploration. He wanted to punish Elizabeth, but also to test his own boundaries.
I open my eyes. The dark stain on the floor is like a shadow without a light source. Crossing the room, I crouch down, propping on my haunches, and study the speckled pattern of blood on the floor. Something must have been covering the floor when Elizabeth was first stabbed. The object had one straight edge and one obvious corner, slightly curved.
A plant? A table? A lamp?
Nothing in the photographs or the 3D scan reveals the source. Perhaps the forensic team took it away for analysis. I cross-check with the evidence log and find no record of the item. Either a mistake has been made or the killer took something away with him.
Leaving the sitting room, I climb the narrow stairs, pausing involuntarily as my left leg freezes mid-step. Focus. Move. Obey.
Entering Harper’s room, I see a publicity poster for
Game of Thrones
fixed to one wall. Opposite are two large photographs of a wind farm and a coal-fired power station.
Which is the greater blight on the countryside?
reads the caption.
The ceiling slopes above the bed, following the roofline. Harper has used the space to display dozens of Polaroid images, mostly artistic shots of abandoned buildings, railway goods yard.,warehouses and stretches of stark coastline. Elsewhere in the room there are charcoal and pencil portraits, given depth by the delicate cross-hatching and shading. Some of the drawings still have notes in the margins from her art teacher:
Tone does not follow form … flattens it … Don’t use cross-hatching for foliage … You lose perspective in the foreground …
Opening the relevant album of crime scene photographs, I follow as each shot moves closer to the single bed where the duvet has been pulled up, shielding the occupant from immediate view. I can only see the top of a head with sleep-tousled hair. The duvet is pulled back for the next series of images. Harper looks as though she’s sleeping. I half expect her to groan in protest and roll over, telling me to go away.
She is lying on her back with her hands folded on her chest, her right thumb hooked into the silken bow tied at the front of her pale yellow nightdress. Her hair is spread in a halo across her pillow, perfectly framing her face, except for a few strands that have come to rest on her cheek.
A fuzzy-looking brown teddy bear is tucked between her arm and her side. Her nightdress extends to her thighs, pulled down. Her legs are slightly apart. Her feet splayed at forty-five degrees. Her toenails painted.
She has been left like this. Arranged. Someone came to this room and suffocated her. Afterwards he rearranged her body, pulling down her nightdress, placing her hands on her chest as though she’s Sleeping Beauty waiting for her prince.
Questions are forming. This wasn’t sexual. Harper wasn’t raped or violated or defiled with stab wounds. It was almost the opposite. He tried to safeguard her modesty or protect her innocence. He created an idealised fairy-tale resting place. Why? What did Harper represent that Elizabeth didn’t?
The teddy bear strikes a strangely paternal note. This small gesture is the act of someone who loves children. Perhaps the toy had special significance to Harper – every child seems to favour one above the others. A father would know. A father would care.
According to the post-mortem report, Harper had two broken fingernails. She fought back as the pillow was pressed upon her face and may have scratched her attacker. Afterwards, he dipped her fingers in bleach to remove any possible evidence.
Going back over the details, I try to understand the sequence of events.
If the killer had broken through the front door, Elizabeth and Harper would have heard him. One of them would have phoned the police. Instead Elizabeth put on her dressing gown and went downstairs. More likely she knew this man. She opened the door, perhaps expecting him. She poured a glass of wine – a nightcap, just the one – her prints were found on the glass.
The police assume that Elizabeth was murdered first and didn’t have time to cry out or to warn Harper. The killer must have been covered in her blood – his clothes, his hands – yet no traces of blood were found on the stairs or in Harper’s room. He must have cleaned up, changing out of his clothes, washing his face and hands.
Unless … unless …
What if there was more than one killer? Two perpetrators. One went upstairs, the other stayed with Elizabeth. No, a mother would have warned her daughter of the danger. She would have fought. Harper would have barricaded herself in her room, phoned the police or gone to help her mother.
I look at the window and the small corner pane of broken glass. A desperate teenage girl might have tried to climb out and shimmy down the rainwater pipe, but the window was broken from outside rather than within.
Whatever the sequence of events, the break-in was staged afterwards to make it look like … like … like what? It was never going to be confused with a robbery. Instead the killer was laying a false trail, trying to complicate or obfuscate or muddy the water.
I have no way of knowing what happened unless I learn more about Elizabeth and Harper. I have to explore their lives, discovering their likes and dislikes, fears and dreams. Were they risk-takers? Did they draw attention? Make enemies? Attract admirers? By understanding them I will learn more about their killer. I will see the world through his eyes and then hold up a mirror to his face.