“Yes. I was confused because he kept saying one thing to me, but acting in a different way to her. I was very miserable. I decided to leave. I would have gone last night already if they’d come back earlier, but I couldn’t leave the children on their own.”
“Your passport.”
Now Bruton spoke and she swallowed nervously.
“Yes?”
“You don’t have a work visa for the UK. You’re here on a visitor’s visa.”
“Like I said, I was a friend.”
Bruton’s face was like thunder.
“We interviewed Ryan Ellis’s wife again this morning. She confirmed that she has never met you, and that her husband never mentioned you.”
One lie—one lie, and she was being caught out. For a moment Cassie was dazed by the irony. This could sink her. Meanwhile, Ryan had told thousands of lies, and had gone about his life with no consequences—until the end, anyway.
“All right. It’s not exactly the truth.”
Parker nodded in satisfaction as he noted her confession down.
Cassie sensed his antipathy toward her, although she didn’t know why. It was as if he wanted her to have committed this crime and to be convicted of it. He didn’t seem to have a shred of sympathy for her. Were they even considering any other suspects? Surely the spouse was always a suspect in a case like this, but it didn’t seem as if they doubted Trish’s version at all.
How could she convince them to consider Trish as a suspect? Was there a way to redirect their attention from her?
She stared at Parker, looked at his thickset, muscular arms crossed on the table, a frown creasing his broad forehead. He was a strong, focused guy. So maybe she needed to try to be stronger, too. Falling apart, weakness, fragility was all she’d shown and maybe, in his mind, it was painting her as the victim.
Bruton seemed more neutral, although he might just be better at hiding his feelings.
At any rate, they’d caught her out in a lie.
This was the worst thing that could have happened. Perhaps she should have admitted she’d come here to work for cash—but then she would have confessed to breaking the law and they would have gotten her on that.
Either response painted her as an unreliable witness and a criminal. There was simply no good outcome to that line of questioning. She could accuse anyone else, including Trish, of having committed this crime, but there would be no weight behind her words.
If she had lied about one thing, she could lie again. A smaller lie would lead to a bigger lie. That was why they would not believe her, and she knew they would use it against her.
That made her think about Ryan all over again, and her brain reeled as she thought about the immensity of the lies he’d told. The audacity of what he’d done, how he’d misled her, felt as shocking as it had the first moment that she’d realized.
She’d wanted to kill him.
Cassie felt a thrill of fear as she remembered the murderous thoughts she’d had about Ryan, the anger she’d had inside her. She couldn’t tell the police that or they might regard it as a confession.
Nor could she tell them about the way her memory fragmented under stress, and that strange sleepwalking incident she’d had before he had died.
She swallowed hard as she wondered how much she herself remembered about that night. What if their relentless questioning triggered memories she didn’t even know about?
In horror, Cassie visualized herself walking to that cupboard, opening the poison, adding it to the wine. She imagined stirring it to be sure it had dissolved and smelling it, nodding in satisfaction when all she picked up was its fruity, earthy scent. Pouring another, untainted glass for herself, and walking out to Ryan with a humble apology, telling him that she believed him after all, waiting and watching while he drank down the deadly liquid.
What if these repressed memories had caused her to sleepwalk?
Glancing at the police, Cassie saw to her relief that they were reading through their notes. Perhaps that meant questioning was over for the day. But then Parker put down his pen and picked up her passport again, paging through it carefully.
“I see here you have a French student visa, stamped in October. So you were working there. That was supposed to be a year’s contract, correct? What happened?”
Cassie felt short of breath. She’d thought the information inside her passport couldn’t get her into any more trouble, but now she was realizing it could, and would.
“The family I worked for didn’t need me anymore,” she said.
“Is that so?” Parker’s voice dripped with sarcasm and she couldn’t summon the nerve to look him in the eye. Instead she stared down at the table.
“Can you give us the name, all the contact details?” he pressed her. “We will need to check if there were any irregularities during the brief time you were in their employ.”
Irregularities. Now it seemed as if there was no air in the room at all. She couldn’t lie her way out of this, it was too serious, even though the truth would instantly incriminate her.
She thought of her ex-employer and wondered whether he was being held in prison while awaiting trial.
He had insisted, from the start, that he had been wrongfully accused of the crime.
Now Cassie was discovering exactly what that felt like.
What a twist of irony that she had ended up in the same situation—the only difference being that he had a top legal team working around the clock to exonerate him, and she had nobody.
“I was working for the Dubois family,” she said. “Pierre Dubois employed me.”
There was a short silence, and then, as Parker realized who she was speaking about, she saw the blaze of triumph in his eyes.
CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE
When Chandra entered the conference room after taking the redhead back to the cell, she found Parker and Bruton discussing the case. Their conversation
