‘Had Josh mentioned being worried about anyone to you?’
‘No.’
‘Did you know about his work situation?’
Her eyes narrowed as if she suspected him of trying to catch her out. ‘He’d quit his job at Long Fleet, is that what you mean? Of course I knew about it. I was encouraging him to start a GP practice of his own, but he was talking about going away for a few months to do some charity work.’
‘And you didn’t like that idea?’ Ferreira asked.
Another cold look. ‘Yes, I murdered him because he was going to go abroad for a couple of months and deprive me of my extramarital sex. What world do you live in?’
‘One where murderers tell whatever lies they need to so we don’t charge them.’
Zigic drew Collingwood’s attention back to him. ‘What about the protests at Long Fleet?’
‘What about them?’
‘Did you discuss them with Josh?’
‘I knew he’d had some leaflets through his door but he wasn’t concerned about them. Why would he be worried about them?’ She shook her head, looking perplexed. ‘I’m sorry but I suppose I assumed this was a burglary gone wrong. Are you saying you think Josh was killed because of his job at Long Fleet?’
‘It’s too early to say yet,’ Zigic told her, the words slipping thoughtlessly off his tongue, sounding like the stock answer they were. ‘Now, we need you to come in and provide us with fingerprints and a DNA sample, Mrs Collingwood.’
She picked up her phone and thumbed at the screen. ‘My last appointment this evening is at seven, would that be doable your end?’
Like she was fixing a house viewing or a check-up with the hygienist.
‘That will be fine,’ he said.
A few minutes later, as they were crossing the seemingly endless car park, Ferreira finally snapped.
‘What the hell was that?’ she demanded. ‘Why aren’t we hauling her in?’
‘Does she seem like a flight risk to you?’ Zigic asked, pausing to look along the lines of cars.
Ferreira turned around and stalked back over to him.
‘If she cleaned toilets for a living you’d have taken her in.’
‘That’s what you think this is about?’ he asked, incredulous. ‘You think I’m class-struck?’
‘You’re acting like you are.’
‘She thinks she’s in control,’ he explained. ‘The more leeway we give her, the more confident she feels, the more likely she’ll end up contradicting herself.’
‘So you accept that she’s our prime suspect right now?’
‘She always was.’ He finally spotted his car, half hidden by a van. ‘We just didn’t have a name for her before.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
DC Keri Bloom sprang out of her chair as Ferreira walked in.
‘I’ve just got off the phone with the couple from the holiday let,’ she said excitedly. ‘They did see someone at Dr Ainsworth’s house on Saturday evening. A woman.’ She consulted her pad. ‘She arrived around half six, that’s when they saw her. Petite, slim, redhead, fortyish, the wife said; her husband thought she was in her late twenties.’
‘This woman,’ Ferreira told her, plucking the photo of Portia Collingwood from the board and moving it to the top of the suspects list.
‘Oh.’ Bloom’s face dropped. ‘I thought I’d made some progress.’
‘You did,’ Ferreira said. ‘We’ve got corroboration for the time she arrived. What we need now is to find out if she left at nine o’clock like she claims she did.’
‘They didn’t see her leave.’ She gestured back towards her desk. ‘Should I try them again?’
‘Keri.’
‘Yes, Sergeant?’
‘What did they say about the fight?’
Bloom cringed and Ferreira remembered that feeling, embarrassment that in your desperation to reveal one piece of information to a senior officer, you’d completely blanked out the rest.
‘It was just before midnight,’ she said. ‘Apparently they’d gone to bed early because they wanted to be up for a dawn walk. But they were woken by the sound of raised voices and something smashing next door.’
‘Male or female voices?’
‘Neither of them would commit.’
‘Did they see anything?’
‘Nothing.’ Bloom shrugged apologetically. ‘I did wonder why they didn’t go and have a look to see if everything was okay.’
‘People don’t,’ Ferreira said. ‘That’s what they keep us for.’
‘I suppose I wouldn’t, if I was older.’
‘But you’d call the police, wouldn’t you?’ Ferreira asked, getting a nod. ‘So why do you think they didn’t bother?’
Bloom considered it for a second. ‘Because they had plans for the next day and they probably didn’t want to disrupt their schedule talking to us?’
‘Never underestimate the potential for selfishness when you’re struggling to find witnesses.’ Ferreira went over to the coffee machine and poured herself a cup. ‘Next we need to pull the CCTV for the streets around the Collingwoods’ house. See what time she got home and we’ll take it from there.’
‘Yes, Sergeant.’
They’d stopped at the house – a Tudorbethan mini-mansion with tiny windows and a black-and-white wooden façade – on the way back from City Hospital, wanting to speak to Portia Collingwood’s au pair about her movements on Saturday night, hoping she hadn’t straightened out her story with the young woman already.
After the interview in her office, Ferreira wouldn’t put anything past Portia Collingwood. She was too held together, too upright and stone-faced. Nobody who exerted that level of self-control could maintain it for ever and in her experience, they were the people who exploded the most extravagantly at the first sign of a crack. She couldn’t help but wonder just why the doctor felt the need to be so contained. What was lurking in there she didn’t trust herself to let out?
The au pair backed her up.
‘Mrs Collingwood was called into work at six o’clock on Saturday evening,’ she’d said, as she folded towels in the pristine white laundry room behind the equally pristine black kitchen.
The young woman had returned to the room as soon as she’d let them in, hurried back to her work as if she didn’t have a second to spare in her day, not even to
