she quickly lowered her eyes.
‘Do you have anything you want to say about this, Tina?’
‘No.’
Anna nodded to Paul and he produced the receipt for four large containers of bleach purchased by Tina the day after Alan Rawlins had returned home with a migraine.
‘It was determined that an extensive clean-up had been done in your flat. Bleach had been used to wipe around the walls and the bathroom. You have admitted purchasing containers of bleach and we have the receipt and CCTV footage dated the sixteenth of March confirming this. You have maintained that you bought it for use in your beauty salon, however we were unable to find three of the containers.’
Tina sighed, but still remained with her head down. ‘I used them in the salon.’
‘Did you also use this?’
Paul passed over a still from the CCTV. Tina frowned and picked up the photograph of her at the checkout till.
‘You can obviously see what it is, Tina; it’s you buying an axe.’
Paul passed across the second series of photographs – this time Tina at the returns desk with the axe.
‘March the nineteenth, two days after purchasing the axe you are on camera returning it to the store to claim a refund.’
There was a pause. Tina crossed her legs and glanced at her brief, but remained silent.
‘Would you please explain what this item was purchased for?’
‘No comment.’
Anna leaned back in her chair.
‘No comment? Then let me tell you what I think you used this axe for, Tina. To hack up Alan Rawlins. Having dragged his body into the bathroom you used this axe to slash him and dismember him to enable you to remove his body with ease.’
Hyde tapped the table with his pen.
‘My client does not wish to answer this allegation, and without proof that indeed this axe was used in the manner you have suggested, she wishes to remain silent in the event she might implicate herself.’
‘As your client has admitted that no one else was living at her flat on these dates, the implication is not just obvious, but shows she must have murdered Alan Rawlins,’ Anna insisted.
‘Then we reach an impasse because my client does not wish, as is her right, to answer questions relating to the purchase or return of the axe.’
‘If there is an innocent reason then I’d like to hear it.’
‘I have advised my client not to answer.’
‘Why don’t you advise your client to start telling me the truth? She has lied from day one. Alan Rawlins was murdered in the flat she shared with him.’
‘If you have evidence to show that this axe was used to kill or dismember Alan Rawlins, then kindly present it, but it seems clear to me it was returned unused to the store and my client was given a refund. Is that correct?’
Anna leaned close to Paul and whispered. He opened another file and passed her the photographs and reports.
‘I must inform you that we have identified and recovered the axe and it is presently with the Forensic Department who have discovered some blood on it. We are awaiting verification that it’s Alan Rawlins’s.’
Hyde reacted and gave a covert glance to Tina. She leaned close to him whispering, but he clearly didn’t like it.
‘The mattress removed from your bedroom, Tina, was bloodstained, and bleach had been used in an attempt to clean it off. Also discovered on the sheet on the bed when examined by Forensics was a semen stain and male head hair that does not match Alan Rawlins’s DNA profile.’
The photographs of the bedsheet before removal were shown and Hyde replaced them in front of Paul.
‘After you’d murdered him, Tina, who did you sleep with? Who was in the bed with you – lying on the mattress still stained with your boyfriend’s blood? Did it make you feel sexy, knowing what you’d done? No one even knew he was missing, did they? Did you enjoy it? What kind of sick perverted woman are you?’
‘My client has denied . . .’ began Hyde.
‘Your client is lying; you have the evidence in front of you. How can you explain this, Tina? What made you do it? Anger? Hatred? Did you find out that the man you intended to marry was a homosexual and was planning to leave you, not for another woman, but for a twenty-one-year-old guy? Was that what drove you to do this?’
There was a flicker of a reaction. Tina pursed her lips tightly and Anna stepped up the pressure. Paul passed her the photograph of the house in Cornwall.
‘Look at the property he’d bought for his lover. He was intending to walk out on you and live with this boy. He was working on that snazzy little Mercedes as his birthday gift for that young guy’s twenty-first. It must have made you feel old and worn and betrayed, considering all the money you’d managed to save was a paltry seventy thousand when Alan had thousands being hoarded in a bank in the Cayman Islands and had paid almost half a million for the lovely beachside house.’
At last Anna was getting through to Tina. She was wriggling in her seat, crossing and uncrossing her legs.
Anna kept up the pressure.
‘Find it all out, did you? Find his mobile phone and start to put two and two together? It must have made the bile rise up, made you bitter and angry enough to want to kill him. You trusted him, you loved him and you’d driven him home because the poor lamb had a migraine.’
‘I didn’t know any of this until you fucking told me,’ Tina snapped.
‘You didn’t know? You didn’t have any idea that when he went to Cornwall for his supposed surfing holidays, he was screwing young pretty boys? He made sure you didn’t know, didn’t he? Used his former schoolfriends’ names just in case the old bitch at home tried to catch him out.’
‘I trusted him.’ She was wringing her hands.
‘You told me he never liked confrontation, never argued with you – but you found out about his other life, didn’t you? You confronted him, you wanted to get to the truth and you wanted to know if he was about to leave you.’
‘You couldn’t have an argument with him – you don’t understand. He would just walk away. He would not argue with me and you don’t know what you are talking about.’
Langton leaned towards the monitor screen, muttering to himself.
‘Do it, girl, push her – she’s cracking.’
Anna did not feel as confident as Langton that Tina was opening up. She continued to goad the woman in an attempt to get her angry enough to either admit what she’d done or make a slip-up that showed her guilt; at the same time she was trying to fathom out what was constantly niggling at her. What was the missing jigsaw piece? She intuitively knew there was something else, but just couldn’t place it. So she pressed on in the same manner, never taking her eyes from Tina’s face.
‘I know enough about Alan, Tina. He was never going to marry you, and when you found out just how much he had betrayed you, you were not going to let anyone else have him. He was weak, he was ill in bed, it was the ideal moment to kill him.’
Tina shook her head and laughed.
‘You think you knew him? Well, let me tell you he was never what you are trying to make out. Yes, he hated confrontations, yes, he didn’t like to argue – but you also never wanted to goad him into a face-off because . . . because . . .’
‘Because what, Tina?’
She clicked her fingers.
‘He could snap just like that. You never knew which way he would go, if he didn’t like something. Everything had to be just perfect – and if it wasn’t, he could get very nasty. And let me tell you, once was enough for me – just once – and I never ever got into an argument with him over anything again.’
‘Was that when you killed him?’
‘NO! You are not listening. I just said I did not argue with him. We did not argue because I knew it would be
