murder to me in vivid detail-too vivid to be invention, I thought when I heard it. Mary Trelease is alive, though, which means Seed’s also a liar, unless he’s crazy. If he is a liar, he’s the best kind.’
‘What kind is that?’ asked Milward.
‘One who blends lies seamlessly with the truth and counts on you spotting the truth but not the join. He killed another woman, maybe more than one, before he killed Gemma Crowther. He might still kill Ruth Bussey and Mary Trelease, which is why you need to find them.’
‘Aidan Seed the picture-framer. The two of you visited his picture-framing workshop on Monday afternoon.’
‘Why do you keep saying that?’ Simon asked. ‘Are you suggesting he isn’t a picture-framer?’
‘What about this photo you wanted to show us?’
‘We’ll come to it,’ said Milward. She turned her attention to Charlie, who’d asked the question. ‘I don’t understand your role in all this. You were worried about Ruth Bussey when she first came to see you, yet you didn’t take a statement from her. Then you found out Aidan Seed had been in and spoken to a CID officer, DC…’
‘Chris Gibbs,’ said Simon wearily.
‘That’s right. Gibbs and DC Waterhouse both checked out Seed’s claim, and DC Waterhouse relayed the result of those checks to Seed. End of story, and even if it wasn’t, your CID were dealing with it. Why did you go to Mary Trelease’s house on Monday morning when you should have gone to work?’
‘I went on my way to work,’ Charlie corrected her. ‘I knew Ruth Bussey was frightened…’
‘But you didn’t take a statement from her,’ said Milward.
‘She ran away before I had a chance. I had a bad feeling about what she’d told me, and, after talking to Simon, I had a bad feeling about the whole business. I wanted to see Mary Trelease for myself and hear what she had to say.’
Milward looked down at her notes again. ‘A conversation that left you with the impression that Aidan Seed had killed somebody, though obviously not Ms Trelease.’
‘That’s right. She said, “Not me”. She clearly implied that he’d killed somebody. Look, can you at least tell us what’s being done to find Ruth and Mary? Sam Kombothekra went to both their houses and Ruth Bussey’s place of work this morning and there’s no sign of either of them.’
‘Does DI Proust know DS Kombothekra’s been doing favours for you instead of the job he’s supposed to be doing?’ asked Milward. ‘Maybe I ought to ask him.’
That shut Charlie up.
‘Perhaps it’s different in the provinces, but in London police officers work on the cases they’ve been allocated, not on whatever takes their fancy. My understanding, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that your CID is neither investigating Bussey, Seed and Trelease nor keeping them under surveillance. Mary Trelease in particular… Even you, DC Waterhouse, will have a hard job persuading me she’s pertinent to my case.’
‘You can’t be that stupid, surely,’ said Simon. ‘Ruth Bussey and Aidan Seed share an obsession with Mary Trelease. If they’re involved, she is. You can’t shunt her to one side. Look for a connection between Trelease and Gemma Crowther, if you haven’t already.’
‘So now Mary Trelease killed Gemma Crowther?’ said Dunning. ‘Make your mind up.’
‘You know I’m not saying that.’ Simon looked at Milward. ‘Does he know, or is he too dense to keep up? If a man pretends he’s killed one woman, then goes and kills another, the first question I’d ask is: what’s the connection between the two women?’
Nobody had ever asked Olivia Zailer to list her least favourite words, but if they had, ‘logic’ and ‘research’ might well have been among them, suggestive as they were of excessive amounts of time and effort. Yet here she was, immersed in both and even quite enjoying it. The dearth of decent telly programmes helped, as did the raspberry liqueur cocktails she’d been drinking. Olivia didn’t think they were scrambling her brain too much.
There was no Wikipedia entry on Martha Wyers; the online world seemed largely unaware she’d ever lived and died. Olivia could find nothing about Wyers’ suicide or murder, whichever it was. She’d phoned a few of her literary journalist friends but none of them knew anything. A couple said the name ‘rang a vague bell’, so noncommittally that Olivia wasn’t sure she believed them; more likely they didn’t want to admit to never having heard of an author who, for all they knew, had just won a prestigious award or secured the highest advance since the dawn of time for her latest book.
The Amazon website, at least, knew who Martha Wyers was. She’d published only one novel,
Liv knew Senga. They’d worked together briefly before Liv went freelance. Senga was still at
Suicide, then, thought Liv, re-reading
Now she was waiting for Senga to email her the text of a
The new message icon flashed on her screen and she clicked on it. She started to read what Senga had sent her and saw that it was incomplete: a headline, an introductory paragraph, then space, then a chunk of text about Martha Wyers.
What if…? She tried to cast the idea from her mind but it wouldn’t shift. Punching the air in triumph, she imagined herself proved right already. God, she was clever! Time for a celebratory cocktail while she waited for Dom to arrive. No, not yet. First the important stuff. Let no one accuse Olivia Zailer of putting an urgent need for a pink drink before a selfless crusade for the truth. She emailed Senga asking to see the whole of the feature. It was worth a try. If she turned out to be wrong, Charlie didn’t need to know anything about it.
‘You’ve had your turn in the limelight,’ Milward told Simon coolly, from which he inferred that she hadn’t thought to look for anything that tied Gemma Crowther to Mary Trelease.
‘Yes, I did,’ said Charlie. ‘If you tell DI Proust, make sure you blame me and not Sam. I didn’t give him much choice. I led him to believe he’d find each of them with Aidan Seed holding a knife to her throat.’
‘Your maverick methods are legendary,’ Milward told her. ‘I’ve heard they include having sex with murder suspects.’
‘Then you heard wrong,’ said Charlie. ‘I believe you’re referring to a serial rapist I dated for a while. No one ever thought he was a murderer. Anyway, we weren’t serious. Just a bit of fun, you know.’
Simon tensed. Why couldn’t she ever stop?
‘I see,’ said Milward, smiling. ‘My mistake.’
‘You mentioned a photograph,’ said Charlie. ‘Where is it? I want to see it.’
‘You will.’
‘What are you waiting for? Has it occurred to you that if you were straight with us instead of playing games, we might actually get somewhere?’
‘What time did you leave Ruth Bussey’s house on Monday evening?’
‘Here we go again. Half past ten.’
‘After which you drove home.’ Milward was reading from notes. ‘DC Waterhouse joined you at your house shortly after eleven, and the two of you spent the night there.’
‘Yes.’
Milward and Dunning were bound to be wondering how Simon felt about sharing a bed-sharing a life-with the ex-lover of one of the sickest psychos in the UK prison system. He wondered himself.
