He’d been in the house the whole time. Had seen everything. And now he knew they were onto him for Tessa Darby’s murder.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
‘I don’t understand,’ Greg Ainsworth said. ‘Why wouldn’t Josh have told me about something this important?’
Ferreira was wondering the same thing. They clearly weren’t the closest of brothers but something as significant as this … surely, Ainsworth would have needed to unburden to someone.
‘Maybe he didn’t expect the child to be his,’ she suggested.
‘Still, it’s huge news.’ In the background she could hear cartoons playing and a relentless tinny drumming as one of his boys bashed away at what sounded like an upturned saucepan. ‘Finn, please stop doing that, Daddy’s on the phone.’
‘Do you have any idea who the mother might be?’ Ferreira asked. ‘Did Josh mention anyone he’d been seeing recently?’
‘Apart from Portia?’ he asked.
‘We’re speaking to her again.’
‘It wasn’t necessarily a relationship, was it?’ he said tentatively. ‘It might have been a one-night stand.’
Ferreira had been thinking the same thing, knew that if that was the case they were relying on the woman coming forward at a time when she had absolutely nothing to gain by helping them. All she’d be doing was potentially putting herself in the frame for murder.
‘You don’t think that’s why he was killed?’ Greg carried on, horrified. ‘If he’d been sleeping with someone who already had a boyfriend and they found out?’
‘It’s a possibility,’ Ferreira admitted. ‘But until we can identify the woman, it’s very difficult for us to understand if it has anything to do with his death.’
The banging at Greg’s end intensified, accompanied by a high, atonal singing, and then a dog started to bark and he sighed heavily. A sliding door opened and closed and the sound was muffled as he went outside.
‘Was the test positive?’ he asked. ‘Was Josh the father?’
‘It’s a positive match, yes.’
He let out a small groan, sounding genuinely upset. ‘Well, what happens now? We must have some rights, right? The baby is our family too. Mum and Dad are going to want to know about this. They’ll want to be involved.’
Ferreira didn’t know what to tell him, felt out of her depth.
‘I mean, if the woman is involved, if she goes to prison or whatever, what’s going to happen to the baby?’ he asked. ‘Will we be able to adopt or something? I’ll have to talk to my wife but I’m sure she won’t want her niece or nephew going into care.’ The panic was rising in his voice, sending him babbling, and she felt a sharp stab of sympathy for this sweet-natured man and his protective instincts. ‘I don’t understand how you can’t know who she is. There must be records somewhere.’
‘We don’t have Josh’s phone,’ she explained. ‘It’s pretty much impossible to find out who she is if we can’t access his communications. Not unless somebody can tell us who she is. What about your parents? Is there any chance Josh talked to them about it?’
‘No, if Mum knew about this I’d have known about it two minutes later.’
She promised Greg that she would contact him if they found the mother, knowing she could do nothing more than encourage the woman to contact them herself.
Unless she was the killer.
Ferreira ended the call, thinking about how the woman must have given Joshua Ainsworth the DNA samples, that she must have wanted him to be the father because why do it otherwise?
What did she want from him? Financial support or something more significant?
He clearly hadn’t believed he was the father, or why even take the test?
Unless the DNA test was because there was another candidate for paternity, she thought, as she unpeeled the lid of her avocado and quinoa salad.
That was definitely the kind of thing that could lead to murder. And it might explain how the mere fact of the test had escalated into violence before the results were through.
A love triangle rumbling along, suspicion and accusation. A relationship already in the process of ending and then the question of who the daddy was to push it over the edge.
Everyone was assuming the child was a baby but what if this was something that had been going on for years? A man having raised a child as his own, then beginning to suspect it wasn’t …
Portia Collingwood was the obvious suspect but Ferreira found the idea of her as the mystery mother didn’t quite sit right. It was a long-term affair, seemingly mutually satisfying as a standing arrangement. No reason for that to change. Not that they knew of, anyway.
They’d found no evidence of another relationship but nothing to disprove it either.
If it was someone he worked with there might not be a lot of evidence. Someone he didn’t need to call and text regularly because they were together all day.
She thought of Ruth Garner. Wondered how many other female members of staff at Long Fleet might be in the frame. If only they could speak to them.
She called his parents and got his father, who immediately passed the phone over to Mrs Ainsworth. Ferreira could hear her hastily finishing another call as she came to the landline.
‘Love you, bye. Bye. Yes, I’ll call you back. Bye. Bye-bye.’ She picked up the handset and in a slightly different voice, said, ‘Greg just called me. Why don’t you know who this woman is?’
Ferreira went through the same conversation she’d had with Josh’s brother, but a prolonged and more circuitous version this time as if his mother wanted to talk about Josh just for the sake of talking.
Ten minutes later Ferreira ended the call no wiser than she’d been before it.
She finished her salad, trying to tune out the inane conversation Bloom and Weller were having as they ate their own lunches. She thought they’d hit rock bottom during last month’s obsession with Love Island, but now she realised this was their default setting.
