Authors: Kim Fleet
A sideboard held a number of toppled photo frames. She righted one, seeing a photo of Donna with a teenaged boy. Other photos of the two of them, and lots of just the boy, growing steadily older and moodier in successive snaps. Where was he? A nasty feeling crawled in her stomach. Donna dead, her son missing, their house turned over: she didn’t like it at all.
An expanding file lay open, the compartments plundered, the contents slewing across the carpet. Gathering up a handful of papers, Eden flicked through them. Bank statements. Donna’s salary going in every month, plus a monthly deposit of a couple of hundred pounds from a B. Small. Her ex-husband, presumably. Gas bills, water bills, credit card statements. Donna spent up to her credit limit on every card, and paid all of them off in full each month. Eden looked down the list of purchases: beauty parlours, hair salons, manicures, clothes, shoes, skin preparations, botox injections.
Lawyers’ letters and a decree nisi dissolving the marriage between Donna and Barry Small. Birth certificates for Donna and Wayne Small – presumably the arsey-looking teenager in the photos – indicating he was now fifteen. Wayne’s school reports from the Cheltenham Park School, where he was a day pupil. Eden skim read them. Wayne Small was not a model pupil: problems with his attitude, poor attendance, a few detentions for answering back to staff and fighting with other boys. His grades were low and he was expected to get three Cs for his GCSEs and fail the rest. The starchy headmistress wouldn’t like that: she seemed the sort to expect all her pupils to achieve A grades in about two hundred subjects.
A photo album had been tossed across the room. There were a few photos of a younger Donna with a man, the toddler Wayne cuddled between them, all of them gurning into the camera. The family in happier times. The man disappeared from the photos and there were several of Donna with female friends on what was evidently a singles holiday, lounging by a pool swigging drinks laden with fruit.
Eden turned the page. Donna, topless on a sun lounger, holding a cocktail. There was a man next to her, tanned and grinning. There were more photos of them together somewhere tropical, judging by the white sand and achingly blue sky. Eden blinked. She knew the man in the pictures: he was Donna’s boss in the planning department, Greg Barker.
Eden whistled and dropped the photo album back on the floor, and carried on her search upstairs. A messy bathroom with a cabinet crammed with toiletries. A narrow bedroom reeking with the musty cheese odour of teenage boy. It was furnished with a single bed with a Spiderman duvet cover that he’d surely grown out of by now, a desk, laptop computer, and walls covered with photos of glamour models cut out of lads’ mags. Under the bed was a stash of pornography, well thumbed. Eden blessed her rubber gloves as she shoved the hoard back under the bed.
Donna’s room was decorated in pink and smelled strongly of heavy scent. The whole of one wall was given over to built-in wardrobes. Eden cracked open the doors and clothes bloomed out. Stacked at the bottom of the wardrobes were at least fifty transparent plastic boxes containing shoes. Her bed had a red satin cover and all the pillows heaped up on one side of the bed, a frilly heart-shaped cushion perched on the top. The bed looked as though it hadn’t been slept in.
Eden slid open the drawer in the bedside cabinet. Headache pills, antidepressants, tissues, a small appointments diary. Eden fanned the pages and a photo tumbled out. She tucked the diary into her pocket while she retrieved it and smoothed it out on her knee – Donna and Paul Nelson, heads together, beaming into the camera.
But what was most interesting was the fracture lines across their faces. At some point, the photo had been ripped into little pieces, and then sellotaped back together again. Pieced back together with some care, Eden noted, the edges carefully aligned and the picture taped on the back to save the image. She’d love to know when it was ripped up and then so tenderly repaired.
As she was squinting at the picture, trying to make out where it was taken, the front door banged. There was no time to hide; footsteps already thumped up the stairs. Better brazen it out.
She stepped out of Donna’s bedroom just as a boy rounded the top of the stairs. He jumped and let out a cry.
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Eden Grey, I’m a detective. Are you Wayne?’
‘What’s happened? That mess downstairs …’ He had black hair about four days overdue for a wash that hung past his collar. His clothes were rumpled, his trousers drooping low off his backside, and the high rank stink of alcohol came off him in waves. ‘Are you from the school?’
‘Where have you been, Wayne?’ Eden asked, stepping towards him.
The boy looked round wildly. ‘What’s going on? Where’s Mum?’
‘I’m trying to find out what happened,’ Eden began. ‘Here.’ She fished a business card out of her backpack and handed it to Wayne.
‘A detective?’ Fear chased across his face. Suddenly he turned and bolted past her, down the stairs to the front door.
Eden hurtled after him, calling, ‘Wayne! Wait! What is it?’
Wayne didn’t answer. He had the front door open and was sprinting up the street before she reached the bottom step.
‘Wait!’ she called after his receding heels. He didn’t stop.
Eden was back at her flat before she remembered she’d slipped Donna’s diary into her pocket. Damn! She couldn’t get it back to Donna’s house now: the police would be there any minute and she’d have to fess up to breaking in. That would inevitably lead to awkward questions about how she knew who the victim was, and that would get Aidan into trouble, too.
She squared it with her conscience by deciding she’d see what was in the diary, and if there was anything that could help the police, she’d get it to them somehow, even if it backfired on her.
The hair was in place across her door as she ferreted her key out of her backpack. Inside, the flat was undisturbed, but a light blinked on the answering machine. Eden pressed the play button and wandered into the kitchen, hunting for paracetamol. The morning’s stress had brought on a thumping headache. As she riffled through the cupboard, the answering machine beeped and a disembodied voice echoed across the room.
‘Hello there. Long time no see. Still, what with me being stuck here inside, and you being on the outside, that’s no surprise.’
Eden froze, her hand in mid-air. She knew that voice, knew it all too well. Even now, the sound of it sent a sickening fear rippling through her.
Hammond. His voice in her flat, her home.
‘Anyway,’ he continued, in that sing-song tone that was more menacing than any overt threat, ‘I just wanted to catch up with you. See how you’re doing.’
She swallowed. Her throat was dry and her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth.
‘And I will catch up with you, Jackie, or whatever you’re calling yourself now. I will catch up with you.’ A noise in the background, a scrote swearing at the screws, something about his fucking human rights. Hammond paused. Maybe he was eyeballing the shit who’d interrupted his phone call. His voice was breathy when he spoke again, as if his mouth was very close to the receiver. ‘I will catch up with you, and when I do, then we’ll see how you’re doing. Bye bye.’
A clunk as he hung up. Hammond ringing her here. His voice poisoning her home. How the hell had he found her? She gripped the sink and ran cold water, splashing it on to her face and into her mouth. It tasted metallic. She rinsed her mouth and spat into the sink. Just hearing Hammond’s voice again had sent her pulse into overdrive.
Breathing fast, she went to the answering machine and replayed the message another three times, straining to pick up any clue from his voice or the noises in the background. He was definitely calling from inside prison; the sound quality suggested he was using the public phone. Yet surely Hammond would have got a mobile smuggled in somehow? The thought he was saving a mobile for something special didn’t comfort her. Neither did the thought that he felt so untouchable he was confident to make a threatening phone call with a prison officer in earshot.
Her hand hovered over the phone. She should call Miranda, then the police. Hammond had found her somehow, like he’d found Little Jimmy. Bragging, that’s what Miranda had said. Hammond was in prison yet he’d got someone to kill Little Jimmy for him. He was snubbing his nose at them. Probably pissing himself laughing.
She didn’t call Miranda and she didn’t call the police. It was pointless. She was on her own. No one stood in Hammond’s way.
Her flat was polluted by his call. His voice lurked in the corners and made her jumpy. She had to get out. She checked the windows and fixed the hair in place across the front door as she left, taking her notebook and Donna’s diary with her. The hallway was empty as she checked and double-checked the door. No one in the stairwell. No one watching her as she got into her car and drove away.
No one that she could see, anyway.
As far as she could tell, no one followed her to her office. She parked up and walked to the sandwich shop, craving normal human company and a large mocha. Tony was in there, slicing tomatoes, his hands wrinkly in protective food-handling gloves. He grinned when she came in.
‘You’re early,’ he said. ‘Hungry?’
The initial rush of adrenaline had subsided leaving her suddenly starving. ‘A bacon bap, please. Lots of sauce.’
‘Red or brown?’
‘Surprise me.’
She leaned against the counter as Tony fried two rashers of bacon and sliced a bun.
‘You hear about that woman?’ Tony said.
‘Woman?’
‘Found dead in Cheltenham this morning. It was on the news.’
The press were on to it quickly. ‘They say who she was?’
‘No, don’t think so. Bet you wish you’d found her, eh?’
‘Oh yeah, I love starting off the day stumbling over a corpse or two,’ she said, drily. ‘It beats chasing round after cheating husbands.’
Tony selected a bottle and squirted sauce on to the bap. ‘I think you’re in a brown sauce mood.’
Eden smiled and handed over a five-pound note. ‘Thanks, Tony.’
‘Laters.’
Still no one lurking in the car park. She allowed herself to feel safe for a moment before reminding herself that Hammond wasn’t subtle. If he wanted her dead he wouldn’t waste time conducting a pattern of life analysis, he’d just pay two thugs to snatch her off the street and drive her somewhere no one would ever find her. Not until it was way too late, anyway.
She fumbled getting her office door open. She kicked it hard, imagining Hammond’s face, and the door bounced back against her toe. The red graffiti, BITCH, confronted her, suddenly sinister. She’d assumed it was glued-up kids, but was it Hammond, letting her know he’d found her?
Once inside, she slammed the door shut and locked it, and flopped down in her chair. A waft of bacon fumes made her stomach rumble and she bit into the bap, licking brown sauce where it squidged on to her hand. While she chewed, she cracked open Donna’s diary at that day’s date.
Donna had an appointment at the school scheduled for later that day. Was that why Wayne was jumpy, because his mum had been hauled in to discuss his appalling school reports? Then again, how did Donna afford the fees at a place like the Park School? Eden had seen her salary going in every month on the bank statements, and almost all of it going straight out on the mortgage, food and bills. All Donna’s luxuries were on plastic. Goodness knew how she paid the credit cards, either.
Eden did a quick internet search for the Park School’s number and rang the admissions team.
‘Good morning, I’m enquiring about your fees.’
‘Day pupil or boarding?’
‘Day pupil.’
The woman in admissions quoted a price that made Eden rock back in astonishment. For a moment, she couldn’t speak; there was no way Donna could afford that. The fees were more than her annual salary.
The woman evidently guessed her dilemma, because she added, ‘We do offer a number of scholarship places.’
‘How many a year?’
‘Two or three. There’s stiff competition for them.’
I bet there is, she thought, thanking the woman and hanging up. Wayne didn’t appear to be overly blessed with brains, so how
did
he get a place at the Park School?
Eden flicked back through the diary and froze when she saw the entry on Monday evening: ‘P.N. 9pm’. Did that stand for Paul Nelson? Did Paul and Donna arrange to see each other after the planning meeting? And did Donna kill him?
The coroner’s office had told her that the poison that killed Paul could take between a few hours and three days to take effect. That meant he took it any time between Saturday and early on Tuesday. Donna certainly fitted the time frame. But then who killed her, and why?
Eden chewed the side of her thumb. From what the barman said at the singles club the night before, Donna hated Paul and had made her feelings clear. So why would Paul agree to meet her? He didn’t seem the sort of man to enjoy raking over old grievances.
Eden unlocked her drawer and took out Paul’s diary, turning the pages and cross referencing it with Donna’s. On New Year’s Day, Paul had written ‘Donna’ in his diary; Donna had written ‘Paul’. She flicked through the pages, noting where they corresponded. For a few weeks, they met twice a week, then the entries stopped.
Donna wasn’t Paul’s type. Paul, with his interest in art and preserving heritage buildings, wouldn’t find much to hold him to Donna, who came across as shallow and vain with her warpaint and tight skirts and botox injections. But to Donna, Paul was a wallet, a refined gentleman who’d treat her right and with plenty of cash to spoil her. No wonder she was pissed when they split up.
Eden stood and stretched her back, the vertebrae clicking. She needed a run to get her blood pumping again and work her muscles; let the rhythm of running smooth her mind and create a capsule of peace. Maybe after work tonight.
Her mobile rang.
‘Eden, bad news.’ Miranda’s voice came through as soon as she answered. ‘Switch on the TV news.’
‘How did you get this number?’
A throaty laugh. ‘Friends in low places.’