‘He might’ve figured out the connection with Jayne too,’ Doyle mused. ‘Maybe like Loraine he’d picked up on something . . . Didn’t he and Jenni take Jayne home after that screaming match at the funeral, sir?’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ said the DI. ‘They volunteered to look after her and see she was alright. Tariq came back later by himself . . . said he’d left Jenni with Jayne because she was good in those kind of situations.’
‘The perfect opportunity for them to ’ave a little catch-up,’ Noakes observed grimly. ‘Proper little serial killers’ tea party.’
‘Perhaps something about the way they were with each other stuck in his mind,’ Doyle resumed. ‘And then when he saw that synopsis, he had a . . . well, a lightbulb moment.’
‘Shoulda kept it to himself or come to us ’stead of tackling Harte on his own,’ Noakes said grimly. ‘Frigging kamikaze that was.’
‘He might’ve hoped she could explain everything,’ Doyle countered. ‘It must have been a godawful shock . . . He likely wasn’t thinking straight.’
‘That seems a reasonable explanation, Doyle.’
The DI was suddenly filled with pity for Tariq Azhar, recalling his gentle courtliness towards Shirley Bolton at the wake.
‘Tariq was a decent young man,’ he said pensively. ‘We’ll never know what was in his mind . . . Maybe he only made the connection between Jenni and Rebecca when he saw Jenni’s words staring back at him in the synopsis for that novel.’ The well-shaped lips compressed tightly in an expression his colleagues knew all too well. Then he continued, ‘Or maybe he was already uneasy about her.’
Maybe faint, unformed suspicions had been rising in his subconscious like bubbles in frogspawn. And then came the moment of illumination when all these subterranean, unthinkable misgivings suddenly gelled in one lightning instant of comprehension.
‘Shirley Bolton said she thought Tariq liked Rebecca,’ the DI said heavily. ‘He may have noticed Rebecca hanging about the surgery and thought nothing of it . . . failed to realize there was a hidden attraction . . . until he was confronted with Jenni’s words in black and white, smack bang in Rebecca’s outline for The Amber Tells.’
‘Yeah, guv.’ Noakes thumped the table in assent. ‘They were meant to be close friends an’ all. So he gotta have wondered why she never said anything about being close to Shawcross . . . why she was so sneaky about it . . .’
‘It’s unethical to have a sexual relationship with someone you’re counselling, isn’t it?’ said Doyle, the bushy-tailed law student. ‘I mean, you can be struck off.’
‘That’s right.’ Markham went on piecing it together. ‘Tariq must have guessed something like that lay behind Jenni’s silence.’
‘And don’t forget that burglary,’ Burton put in. ‘There was the theft of all the appointment books . . . She must’ve put down something compromising . . . something personal in writing that Peter Elford knew about . . . so then she or Jayne stole all the diaries so she wouldn’t stand out and we couldn’t trace anything back to her.’ She took a deep breath. ‘But when Tariq had his lightbulb moment, he worked out what she’d done—’
‘And figured that Peter Elford died because he knew the secret and was blackmailing her,’ finished Doyle.
‘D’you think Tariq worked out that it was Jayne did the killings after Jenni talked her into it?’ Noakes ran a sweaty paw through his hair whose porcupine quills would have done any punk rocker proud. ‘I mean, like, sussed whatever creepy stuff was going on between the two of ’em?’
‘Well, he knew Jenni’s alibi was solid for Rebecca and Peter Elford because she was with him,’ Markham replied. ‘Which would have led him to the conclusion that someone else was involved.’ He gestured to the DC. ‘And as Doyle said before, it’s very possible that, like Loraine, he sensed something wasn’t right with Jayne.
‘And the anxieties that had lain dormant within Tariq suddenly reared up before him in one devastating revelation after that fateful meeting with Leo Cartwright.
‘Maybe right up to the last moment he hoped it wasn’t true,’ the DI said slowly. ‘He and Loraine were good people . . . reluctant to believe the worst . . . he must desperately have hoped the nightmare could be explained away.’
‘Only it couldn’t,’ Noakes said baldly.
‘Jenni was his old friend.’ This was Burton. ‘Maybe he wanted to give her a chance to turn herself in . . . do the right thing . . . persuade Jayne it was all over.’
The DI recalled the look on Loraine Thornley’s face. Her eyes dilated into pools of horror as though the dead midwife had looked into an abyss.
‘Jayne Pickering is a very dangerous young woman,’ he enunciated, the words like hammer strokes.
‘Jenni Harte was her Svengali,’ Burton added. ‘That’s—’
But before she could translate for Noakes’s benefit, the other drew himself up. ‘I know what that is,’ he said complacently. ‘A sort of hypnotist — like Paul McKenna.’ Gratified at the discombobulation of his colleagues, he elaborated, ‘The missus swears by his tapes . . . allus listening to ’em in the car. She went to one of his shows . . . he got a bloke on stage thinking he was a dog.’ Clearly something about this story tickled Noakes’s fancy, but he became solemn once more. ‘D’you think that’s what happened with Jenni Harte an’ Pickering then, guv . . . was it some kind of trance thingy?’
‘Not as such, Noakes.’ The DS looked disappointed. ‘But autosuggestion and regression can undoubtedly be deployed for evil purposes,’ Markham said hastily before Kate Burton could unleash the benefits of her BA (Hons) degree in psychology upon them. Though from the intrigued expressions of
