“That was Eric. He’s on his way out here but wanted to let us know Holly’s phone is active again. Connected to the same two towers as last time, has been for the last thirty minutes.” Janssen’s brow furrowed. He was thinking the same as her. This was Mark’s endgame. At least he hadn’t already played it out. “We still have time.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“If it was done, I think he would have turned the mobile off, or chucked it.” Janssen appeared to agree with her. Looking over her shoulder at the police car approaching them up the access track, a jumble of possibilities bounced through her mind. “You said you know where he will be?”
“I think so. Mark always goes to one place in particular if he’s stressed or looking to get away. It’s where his mother used to take him,” Janssen said, gesturing to the uniformed officers, clambering out of their car, to stand down. They acknowledged him and waited for further instruction. “It’ll be faster to walk it from here, across the fields. There’s a bridleway.”
“In this?” she asked, referencing the fog closing in around them. Getting lost or surprised by a potential killer wasn’t appealing.
“It’s a more direct route. We can send the uniform along the road but they should hang back at the entrance to the path until we know what we’re dealing with. Similarly, we don’t want to spook the boy into doing anything rash.” It was a sensible suggestion although the counter argument that he’d already passed that point could easily be made. Nothing about Mark struck her as indicative of a killer but there were many people she’d come across in her career who made one lapse in judgement and spent years suffering the consequences. “I know the way. It’s not far.” His confidence swayed her and she agreed. “What should we do about them?” Janssen indicated back towards the house.
“I reckon they have enough to talk about until we’re done.” The love triangle between Ken, Jane and Callum was worthy of the best gossip the village could produce. Throwing in the extra dimension of Ken’s sexual involvement with Holly, Callum’s son’s girlfriend, added an even greater twist that would no doubt be the talking point to entertain for years to come, provided that is that Mark wasn’t about to outdo everything that went before. The more she learned about these people, the more she felt they deserved each other. “Mind you, it’s probably a good thing Eric’s on his way here to supervise. Callum has admitted to arson, Jane to tampering with a witness and who knows what will go off if Callum works out she tried to fit him up.”
“The red heels?” Janssen asked. She nodded. Jane must have known her husband was with Holly on the night she died. Even if she thought he was innocent, although possibly even if she thought not, her desire to cover up for Ken in the past pointed to the stark reality she put her needs and those of her children ahead of the truth. Jane wouldn’t think twice about planting Holly’s shoes at the McCall house. Whether to frame Mark or Callum, she wasn’t sure. Callum was stirring things up and posing something of a threat to her marriage, the family security. Seeing him sent down at the same time as clearing her husband removed two problems with one simple action. “I doubt her prints will be on the shoes. She’s too calculating for that.”
“You’re right. We might not be able to prove it.” Even when they knew what was going on, with everything slotting into place, the frustration would be ensuring admissions were on the record. The evidence was circumstantial and that irritated her. Janssen instructed the armed officers in where they should place themselves and firmly ordered them to hold back unless they judged them to be in imminent danger.
Janssen indicated the way they should go and they circumvented the house, leaving through the rear gate to the yard. At the front of the house, he led them to a stile and they climbed over and set off along the path. Janssen’s rolling gait and large strides set quite a pace and soon Tamara was struggling to keep up. Her calves burned as the path inclined steeply uphill towards the coast. She didn’t ask him to slow down, for one she didn’t want to lose face and at the same time figured he probably wouldn’t listen such was his desire to get there. Their route appeared to bear to the left but it was hard to tell as the further they went the thicker the fog became, decreasing their visibility to barely a few yards. The sun was obscured now, a blurred smudge in a dense bank of grey.
“I’m cutting across here,” Janssen said, abruptly coming to a halt. She looked around, there was no fork in the path and he made to climb over a stone wall that looked likely to collapse under his weight. “If I go this way, I’ll come in above him. Stay on the path and you’ll come in from his right.” Testing the steadiness of a particular stone, he hoisted himself up not waiting for a reply.
“We should stay together, Tom! We don’t even know if Mark’s there.” Dropping to the other side of the wall, he looked back with a stern expression on his face.
“He’ll be there and I don’t want to give him two targets.” With that, he disappeared into the gloom. The density
