Chapter 6 #2
Colin declines a coffee. He snaps open his notebook.
‘Major crime analysts have traced the anonymous 999 call to a phone box. There’s no CCTV in the immediate area, but we’ve put out an appeal for dashcam footage – it’s adjacent to a busy road, so we’re optimistic.
’ He makes a swift mark on his page, ticking off item one on his agenda.
‘On that note, officers carried out house-to-house enquiries in this street yesterday and identified a number of properties with door cameras. All the footage has been seized and is being reviewed.’
Tick.
Nadeeka listens mutely as Colin lists the extensive enquiries the police have already carried out, none of which gives her the answers to the question she has carried around since arriving home yesterday, which is, why would someone want to kill Jamie?
‘We don’t know the answer to that yet,’ Colin says.
‘The circumstances lead me to believe this was a very specific attack on Jamie, not an opportunist break-in. Establishing a potential motive would be a big step towards identifying his murderer – or murderers. Do you happen to know any of the passwords Jamie used?’
‘I don’t know his laptop password, but the PIN for his phone is 6490.’ Nadeeka thinks of Jamie’s insistence that she know it; his constant reassurance that he wasn’t like Scott, that he’d never cheat on her.
‘That’s really helpful, thank you.’
‘I thought he was having an affair.’ Nadeeka blurts it out.
Colin’s expression shows no reaction. ‘The woman you heard?’
‘Not only that.’ Nadeeka shifts in her seat.
She knows she needs to tell the police everything, but it feels wrong to talk about Jamie like this.
Speaking ill of the dead, Kath would call it.
‘Jamie’s behaviour changed over the past month or so.
He started staying late at work, and, when I asked what project he had on, he just said it was nothing exciting, or changed the subject.
He always looked away when he said it – that’s a sign of lying, isn’t it? ’
‘So they say. Did you suspect Jamie of cheating on you with anyone in particular?’
‘I don’t have a clue.’ Nadeeka sighs. ‘I didn’t even know if my instincts were right, or if I was just being paranoid because of what my ex did.’
‘I ask because . . .’ And now it’s Colin who looks away, seemingly uncomfortable. ‘One of your neighbours told us they’d seen a woman visiting the house. At least three times, maybe more. Always when you were at work.’
Nadeeka looks at the clock on the wall and watches the second hand glide silently past the jaunty orange numbers. She swallows. ‘Did they say what she looked like?’
Colin flicks backwards through his notebook. ‘Dark brown, almost black hair. Slim build. Between thirty and thirty-five.’ He looks up. ‘Does that sound like anyone you know?’
Nadeeka thinks of Scott’s Spanish girlfriend. She shakes her head. ‘It could be anyone.’
‘It’s a little vague, certainly. And it might be nothing. A delivery driver, perhaps.’
He’s trying to make her feel better. Nadeeka changes the subject.
‘I know we can’t have a funeral until after the post-mortem, but do I need to speak to the undertakers anyway?
And I suppose I need to register Jamie’s death?
’ She takes out her phone. ‘I wrote a list. I need to notify the DVLA and cancel Jamie’s credit card, and in order to register his death I need the medical certificate, is that right?
And I have to call his parents and let his work know, and . . .’ She starts to cry.
‘I can help with some of that,’ Colin says.
‘That’s why I’m here with you and not in the incident room with the rest of the team.
Jamie’s death certificate won’t be issued until after the inquest, but you’ll be given an interim certificate, and I’ll give you a link for a service called Tell Us Once, which will cover all the government agencies, like the DVLA, as well as HMRC and the passport office. ’
‘Oh! I didn’t think of those two.’ Nadeeka stares in dismay at her list. What else might she have forgotten?
‘Death was certified by the force medical examiner,’ Colin says, ‘and it’s that document you’ll need in order to register the death. But if you’d like, I can do that for you?’
Nadeeka feels a rush of relief. ‘Yes, please. I can’t bring myself to . . . It’s so final, I suppose.’
‘Leave it with me.’ Colin makes a note. ‘Is there anything else I can do?’
Bring him back.
Nadeeka shakes her head. ‘You’ve been very kind.’
‘Not too kind, I hope?’
She laughs, the sensation already alien to her after less than twenty-four hours. ‘Thank you.’
‘I’ll call you later.’
The house is too quiet when he’s gone. Nadeeka doesn’t know what to do. Where to start. How to be. None of this seems real. How can Jamie be dead?
A sharp ringing slices through the silence and Nadeeka claps a hand over her mouth, stifling her cry of alarm.
It’s just the doorbell, Nadeeka. Your own bloody doorbell.
She’s halfway to the door when she thinks that maybe this is exactly what Jamie was doing this time yesterday. The last thing he ever did.
Her feet begin to slow. Jamie opened the door to someone who killed him.
Nadeeka doesn’t move an inch. The door is painted white, with scuff marks where Nadeeka uses her foot to close it when she has her hands full of groceries. On the doorframe, pencil marks show how the girls have grown each year.
The doorbell rings again. And then Nadeeka hears the distinctive sound of a key sliding into a lock.
Her lock.
Nadeeka’s pulse is racing, but her feet are rooted to the spot. What do I do now? She feels outside of her body, impotently observing herself quaking with fear in her own house. Where is her phone? She’ll call DI Burton – no, she’ll call 999. Or should she run upstairs and hide, and—
In the event, she does none of these things, because, in the split-second it has taken her to make a decision, the door has opened.
‘Oh! Hello, love.’ Kath is carrying a foil-wrapped pie dish. ‘I thought you must be here, what with your car being outside, but when you didn’t answer I thought maybe you’d gone for a walk, and I didn’t want to leave this on the doorstep, not with so many cats about.’
As she talks, she makes her way to the kitchen, and Nadeeka presses her hand to her chest to calm her racing heart. ‘You scared me,’ she says, when she’s regained some level of control. ‘I thought . . .’ She shakes her head. ‘Stupid of me.’
‘Oh, love.’ Kath puts the dish in the fridge.
‘Thirty minutes, gas mark four, or whatever that is in new money.’ She moves to comfort Nadeeka.
‘It’s understandable you’re scared. We were burgled once – long time ago, before we had Scott – and I couldn’t sleep for a month.
Kept hearing noises and thinking someone was in the house. We had to sell up in the end.’
Nadeeka thinks that this is perhaps not the reassuring story Kath thinks it is. She doesn’t want to sell her daughters’ home. She just wants to feel safe here again.
‘Why don’t you all stay with me for a few more days?’ Kath suggests.
Nadeeka shakes her head. ‘Thank you, but we’ll have to come back here eventually, and the longer we leave it, the harder it will be.’
‘Could the police put someone outside, maybe?’
‘Maybe,’ Nadeeka says, unconvinced. She might not watch as many crime dramas as Kath, but she’s fairly certain police budgets don’t stretch to personal protection.
Last month at work someone had sealed shut the warehouse doors with industrial glue, and the police had closed the case within twenty-four hours.
A prank, they’d called it. A prank that had caused a backlog of work costing thousands of pounds . . .
‘Or like I said,’ Kath tries again, ‘I’m sure Scott would—’
‘No, thank you,’ Nadeeka says firmly. ‘We’ll be fine.’
Maybe if she says it often enough, she’ll believe it.
When Kath goes, she double-locks the front door, then checks the back door and all the windows.
This is how they will live now, she thinks.
Barricaded into their home, ready to fend off an unknown attacker.
She shivers. She thinks of all the times she’s longed for peace and quiet; now she can’t wait for the girls to be home, for their giggles and bickering to drown out her thoughts.
She goes upstairs, averting her gaze as she passes the open door to the living room, and wanders restlessly into the girls’ bedrooms; the bathroom; and, finally, the room she shared with Jamie.
The T-shirt he used to sleep in is stuffed under his pillows and she takes it out and presses it to her face, inhaling the scent of him.
How long will it last? Could she somehow preserve it?
Along with the musky warmth of Jamie himself, there’s a trace of his aftershave, sharp and fresh.
Nadeeka remembers noticing it the night they first kissed, then catching a trace of it in her hair the following morning.
She finds the bottle in the bathroom and dabs some behind her ears, her breath catching.
His watch is on the windowsill, and she takes off her own and puts on his.
It’s too big for her wrist, but she likes the weight of it, likes knowing that what was once against his skin is now against hers.
On the landing, in an awkward nook useful for nothing else, is a desk in which Nadeeka used to keep birthday cards and wrapping paper, and which she cleared out when Jamie had moved in.
You don’t need to do that, he had protested, when she’d showed him.
Nadeeka had insisted. I want you to feel as though you have a space that’s just for you.
Jamie had worked there occasionally, and played computer games that involved jets flying low over enemy ground.
Slowly, the drawers had filled up with paperwork and who knows what else?
Now, Nadeeka sits at the desk. She puts her palms flat on the pitted oak and presses them into the wood.
Why? she asks Jamie. Why did someone want you dead?
She pulls out the top drawer and starts carefully sifting through the paperwork.
She finds old receipts, HMRC letters, a laminated library card.
As she works, she becomes less careful and more frantic, desperate for answers, for anything that will tell her what happened.
The bottom drawer sticks fast and, when she kneels on the floor and yanks at it, it flies out with such force that she falls back, pulling the drawer with her.
She scrambles on to her knees again, but just as she is slotting the drawer into its runners she sees something in the desk cavity, stashed in the space between the runners and the floor.
It’s a framed photograph. The surround is black enamel with a silver trim, and it cost ￡12.
99 from Next. Nadeeka knows this because she was the one who bought it.
She had chosen it to showcase the photograph at which she’s now looking, which is of the four of them: Nadeeka and Jamie, Maya and Nish.
They’re laughing, posing for a selfie on Blackpool pier, at the end of a long but brilliant day of jumping waves and eating salty chips on the beach.
Nadeeka had printed out the photo and had it framed for Jamie.
He had loved it and taken it into work – Nadeeka had seen it on his desk one time, when Jamie had FaceTimed her from the office.
‘I like having you all with me at work,’ he’d said.
Nadeeka stares at the photo. If that was true, why would he bring it home and hide it in a drawer?