The Collared Collection (16 page)

Callie sat with Mike while David did all the work – his choice. She told him about the bombshell of Ginny’s will and showed him her letter. His eyes misted over as he read her words.

‘That’s a great thing to have, Callie – are you going to frame it?’

‘I may well do that. It’s actually far more precious than all the stuff she’s left me.’

He smiled, but looked dreadfully sad. ‘I can appreciate that.’

‘I don’t want us to be too morbid tonight, but Elizabeth – oh, do you remember her at Bernard’s party?’

Nodding, he said, ‘Yeah – scary Mary, tripped the light fantastic with that bloke Roman.’

‘Ronan – yes, that’s the one, well, Elizabeth is Ginny’s executor – sorry, executrix, must get the vocab right now I’m a partner in a law firm! – and we’ve been discussing funeral arrangements. I don’t suppose you have any thoughts on the subject?’

‘We did talk about that once, funnily enough – not Ginny’s, of course – we were comparing the funerals of our dads. Her dad’s was very formal, she said, arranged with military precision.’

‘It was – I was there.’

‘Oh, yeah – anyway, it was in complete contrast to my dad’s, which was actually quite a jolly affair; a real knees-up after the service, with lots of music and dancing and great food. I think she liked that idea.’

‘She specified in her will that she doesn’t want anyone to wear black and the service is to be a celebration of her life – like your dad’s, by the sound of it. Plus she wants to be cremated, which quite surprised me.’

‘That’s because she wanted to have her ashes scattered somewhere where she’d been happy with her brother.’

‘She told you that?’ Callie was impressed. ‘Did she say where?’

‘It was a toss-up between Richmond Park, where they used to go horse riding every weekend right up until he died – and the Isle of Wight, where the whole family used to spend their summer holidays. Her mum didn’t like flying.’

She shook her head. ‘She never told me that – she must have felt very close to you, Mike. Ginny didn’t confide in people easily.’ She squeezed his forearm.

‘I hope I made her happy for the short while we were together – I was very near to falling for her … or maybe I already had.’ She put her arm around him for a comfort cuddle, which made her feel a little better too, and then they went to annoy the chef.

The lamb was exquisite and she ate too much. All through dinner, David and Mike unashamedly talked shop, but as they were reviewing the deeds of Balaclava Man, she was an interested party and felt OK about sticking her oar in every now and again.

‘Forensics are going over your car, Callie, but it’s unlikely we’ll get anything useful – we’ve already found the vehicle responsible, after all,’ said Mike. ‘That’s going to tell us about Balaclava Man, we hope. And nothing so far from the CCTV tapes near the car hire company, but there are still more of those to go through. Deadly boring job for someone – you don’t realise quite how many cameras are watching you at any given time.’ He topped up her wine glass.

‘And I have a couple of PCs reviewing and confirming the whereabouts on Tuesday, late afternoon, of everyone connected – even remotely – to the case,’ added David. ‘We can eliminate anyone who remained in the office for more than ten or fifteen minutes after Ginny left for her exercise class – which was almost everyone who was in that day, I gather.’

‘Good,’ Callie said, ‘and Susan is off the hook because – apart from being a woman – we got a postcard from her this morning from Paris, lucky thing. It should be easy enough to confirm that George and Tinker/Harry were where they should have been. It’s a bit harder with Ronan – I think he lives on his own.’

‘Luckily for him,’ said Mike, ‘his mother went to visit him to administer some TLC and stayed until around 9 p.m. So, he’s out of the frame. Anyway, my gut instinct tells me it’s not someone who works at Montague’s. I know David disagrees.’

David chuckled, ‘Actually, now we know you benefit from the will, Callie, it’s fortunate you have a watertight alibi I can vouch for, or you’d be our number one suspect. Follow the money …’

‘Oh crap,’ she said, ‘I didn’t think about that … but going back to the beginning, have you managed to dig up anything sinister on Dee that might explain why she was killed? It’s my theory that Giles was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

‘We’re still looking at a brick wall for both of them. We’ve come up with zippo so far,’ said Mike, shaking his head.

‘And definitely no DNA on the balaclava that Giles managed to grab off our man in the garden? I hoped that might be our big breakthrough.’

‘Not so much as a skin cell or a flake of dandruff. The men in white coats can do wonderful things now with the smallest of traces, but it’s defeated even their skills,’ Mike said.

‘No women in white coats?’ She didn’t expect that question to be dignified with an answer and concentrated on her wine for a while. Eventually, she shared a thought, ‘It’s weird, you know – in some ways Dee’s death affected me more than Ginny’s.’ After that pronouncement, they both looked at her expectantly – and she wished she hadn’t opened her big mouth. ‘I don’t know how to explain it … Ginny was my best mate for so many years, but once I got over the initial shock, I’m able to deal with her death. I’m terribly sad and if I had Balaclava Man in front of me, I wouldn’t hesitate to disembowel him, but I can deal with it. The worst thing of all is I know if she hadn’t been driving my car, she’d still be alive. That sense of guilt is awful.’

David said, ‘You can’t think like that, Callie; in no way was it your fault. There’s only one person responsible and we are going to get the bastard, no matter what it takes.’

‘I know, it’s just … how can I put this? I was detached from Ginny’s death – I wasn’t there when it happened like I was with Dee. I suppose in my mind I’m not sure I’ve actually accepted it yet, because I haven’t seen proof. Does that make any sense? Or am I about to be certified and the key to my padded cell thrown away?’

‘Of course it makes sense. That’s why funerals are so important – a final goodbye and closure, as the trick-cyclists put it. With Dee, your formal relationship suddenly advanced to intimacy when you found her body and tried to get her out of the bath. You were very much involved and that’s the big difference. You were literally in at the kill.’

‘He’s not as stupid as he looks, is he?’ said Mike. ‘And anyway, we’re all so busy trying to work out what this case is about, it’s keeping profound grief away from our doors, if only temporarily.’

Callie got up from the table to play a CD of Handel’s ‘Entrance of the Queen of Sheba’, her very favourite piece of music. Ginny had loved it too – it occurred to her it would be a good piece to be played at her funeral. As she was about to offer coffees and brandy, a car alarm was set off and screeched like a banshee in the street below. Callie was nearest to the window and so peered down to see what was going on.

‘Your car, David – it’s flashing like Blackpool illuminations!’

He grabbed his keys ‘It’s too bloody sensitive for its own good. You stay with Mike – I’ll sort it, before it disturbs the whole neighbourhood.’

Less than two minutes later, the car was silent. But when David didn’t return, Callie was worried and cajoled Mike into going down to the street with her.

David was talking on his phone and pacing when they joined him. ‘Why are you here?’ he asked, when he’d finished the call. He looked and sounded really angry. ‘You should have stayed in the flat with Mike, as I told you.’

He was scaring her, ‘What’s happened, David?’

‘Nothing.’ He looked her straight in the eye, but she knew he was lying. ‘I’ll see you upstairs.’

She heard herself whine, ‘Tell me!’ and she punched him on the arm to show him she was determined to find out anyway.

Without another word, he inclined his head to the windscreen. When she walked round to the front of the car to get a better view, she could see a large white piece of paper stuck on the driver’s side of the glass. The typed note read, Lucky Ashten Your Next.

Pretending she wasn’t scared stiff, she spat, ‘Huh! Rotten speller, isn’t he?’

Chapter Twenty-seven

By Saturday, Callie had managed to calm down a bit and resist the temptation to glance over her shoulder every two seconds. It helped enormously that David had hardly left her side, enabling her to feel as secure as possible in the circumstances. Because she found it terribly draining to be always on edge and in a constant state of fear, she’d quietly made a pact with herself – she was damned if she was going to allow this anonymous bastard to rule her life, any more than he did of necessity. Consequently, her stance was fast shifting to fatalism; if she didn’t check herself into one of David’s bijou cells (he had suggested as much – and not in jest, either) for the duration, she could only do so much to protect herself (relying on a lot of help from David and Mike, of course) and if that were not enough, then Balaclava Man would finish her off. So be it. Naturally, she had absolute faith in her bodyguards and didn’t for one nanosecond think it would ever come to that …

For a couple of hours, she and David had trawled around her house in the wake of Jack Hardy, from the insurance company. Callie felt peculiarly anaesthetized to the destruction of the home she had once loved, but found his upbeat manner immensely irritating, so that she gave little input as he swept from room to room, assessing what needed to be done to make the place habitable once more, at the same time as taking copious notes and measurements for his report. Perhaps her lack of enthusiasm got on his nerves too, she reflected, because he didn’t linger long past telling her that the place would soon look good as new. She remembered those were Ginny’s words too …

She told David, ‘When the renovation work is complete, I’m going to sell this place, I think.’ They were sitting in the garden, after Jack’s departure.

His brow furrowed. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, the boys and I will live at Ginny’s when this is all over. This house holds too many bad memories – it’s not only the fire, Dominic leaving … next door will always be Dee’s and the vision of her dead in the bath like that will constantly be just a breath away for me, no matter who lives there.’ She gaily tossed her head, determined to sound positive. ‘Anyway, you are going to catch Balaclava Man very soon, so I can live a normal life again with Alex and Sam – it’ll be a new start, so why not a new home? I have only good memories of Ginny at her mews cottage.’

‘Do I figure anywhere in this blueprint for the future?’

She smiled, ‘I do hope so, but we haven’t really known each other that long and we should wait and see what develops.’ She thought she sounded unusually level-headed.

David closed his eyes and his lips homed in on hers – but something gave her the shivers and he missed, planting a smacker on her ear.

A dismembered voice called, ‘Callie? Is that you?’ and she immediately understood why she felt as though an army had just trekked across her grave.

‘Oh shit,’ she whispered, ‘it’s that Robert Wyatt character – does he lay in wait for me, do you think?’

David laughed, ‘The Sirens have nothing on you – a veritable man magnet.’

‘Piss off.’

She got up and went to open the gate, ‘Hello, Robert, are you OK?’ Not that she really cared, but he did look ghastly – like he’d seen her credit card balance.

‘I’m fine … err, you’re alright, are you?’ His clammy fingers touched her bare arm, making her flesh crawl.

‘Of course I am; why do you ask?’

‘Well … this is all very strange … I’m not sure how to put it …’

She didn’t like the way this conversation was going and said rudely, ‘Spit it out, Robert.’

He thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps it would be better if I show you – would you come to my house for a minute?’

Before she followed him, she made sure David was along for the ride.

Robert, however, tried to dismiss him, ‘There’s no need for you to come; this won’t take long.’

‘It’s cool, I have nothing better to do,’ David quipped, and bared his teeth – whether in a snarl or grin, Callie wasn’t sure.

She wanted to get it over with. ‘Let’s just go, shall we?’

She’d never been inside the Wyatt house, even before they moved in. The traditional furniture that she’d ogled as it was unloaded from the removal van was nicely arranged, but the atmosphere in the house was unnerving – she couldn’t put her finger on why, but it completely lacked the aura of a friendly, welcoming home … In fact, it felt like somewhere not often inhabited. This was not a place she felt at ease to linger in. It didn’t help that the walls were all clad in very thick, dark wallpaper, and every wooden door and architrave was stained almost black. Creepy – perhaps this was where Lord Lucan had been hiding all those years.

‘Is your wife here?’ she asked.

‘Ah, no, she’s away again.’

Body in the cellar, she wondered? It was the type of house where that would come as no big surprise. ‘Oh, I see.’

He took yesterday’s local free paper from a magazine rack and flicked through a few pages, found what he wanted, and laid it open on the coffee table. ‘Here, this is what I’m talking about.’ His finger stabbed toward the bottom of the page.

On closer inspection, she saw he was pointing to a tiny article and without even scanning the words, she knew she would find a premature report of her death. Curiosity got the better of her – she wanted to know how she’d died and whether people spoke glowingly of her. She read the headline,
Local mum dies in horrific crash
.

‘Yes, that should have been me.’ She read on, ‘Caroline Ashten, aged 40, died as the result of a bizarre road accident – it gave Tuesday’s date. She is survived by her husband and two young sons. A friend said she will be sorely missed. Funeral arrangements tba – no flowers, by request.’

Though her vision had reduced to a pinprick through a black tunnel, she tried to pretend she was unaffected. ‘Huh! That’s rather short and not so sweet – nothing about what a lovable person I was – nor that I was a fine, upstanding member of the community. And I’d like absolutely masses of flowers, no expense spared. Worse than all that, I am nowhere near forty!’ She assumed the ‘friend’ referred to would be none other than Balaclava Man. The walls were starting to close in on her.