Chapter Twenty-Nine
JEN WOKE UP WITH A THUMPING headache and the certainty that she was about to throw up. Her head was swimming, and she was in pain. There was a memory on the edge of her mind, which generated a moment of panic. Her body was rigid. An adrenaline rush. Then the image floated away again.
She was lying on her back and all she could see was a ceiling. White, but shadowy. Was it evening?
‘Don’t move!’ The instruction was almost brutal.
It was hard to tell if a man or a woman had spoken because the words seemed to come from a long way off.
She was too tired to disobey. She didn’t think she could shift anyway.
Something was restricting her movement. Were her hands tied together?
Immediately afterwards, she drifted back into sleep, and the pain that seemed to have no defined source slipped away.
When she woke again, her head was clearer and this time, she knew that the pain was in her arm.
Sharp. Also clear, like a bright focused spotlight.
The memories became sharper too. Drinking coffee in a gloomy hotel lounge full of elderly people who were eating cake.
A woman’s face peering round a door, then disappearing as soon as she was seen.
Jen running. Bumping into a waitress who almost spilled a plate of scones and sandwiches onto the lap of an old geezer wearing a bright blue cravat, then out of a wide door and into the sunlight.
The woman was a long way ahead of her. She was older than Jen but far fitter and dressed for running in trainers, sweatpants, a T-shirt.
Jen had been wearing a skirt and sandals with a little heel.
The sandals were new and ill-fitting, smart but definitely not the most comfortable footwear for vigorous exercise.
Jen was aware, staring up at the ceiling, that she was no longer wearing those clothes. Not just the sandals. Everything else had been replaced too.
Back to the memory, because this was important.
She was looking down a steep and narrow road.
On one side there was a garden, very green, despite the lack of rain and the hosepipe ban.
Fleshy leaves, shiny in the sunlight. Exotic, almost tropical.
On the other a high stone wall. At the bottom of the hill, the steep street hit another road at a T-junction.
There, on the corner, Jen’s prey, Karen Kinzalow, was waiting.
Jen had slowed, assuming that the woman was waiting for her.
She remembered a moment of triumph that was close to joy and relived it now.
The sunshine bouncing off the plants, the nervous woman, waiting with a story to tell that might make sense of everything, Jen herself gasping after the short run, almost light-headed because she was so breathless, but happy and expectant. Finally, there might be answers.
Then, everything changed. Jen had been near enough to the woman to call her name, had shouted it despite her breathlessness, when a car appeared down the street.
This was what the woman had been waiting for.
It stopped and she climbed into the passenger seat.
The vehicle set off even before she closed the door.
Jen had been running down the hill, waving her arms, yelling for them to stop, and had almost reached it before it started pulling away.
She was going so fast that she couldn’t stop when she got to the road.
One of the sandals she’d coveted so much when she’d seen them in the shop window caught on the kerb and she fell, almost under the back wheel.
The car just missed her; she put out her arm in an attempt to break her fall, twisted and hit her head on the flagstone pavement.
‘They didn’t stop to help you?’
Jen told the tale to Venn when he came to visit.
Her left arm was broken. Not badly, everyone said.
She was lucky. She’d been given morphine for the pain and was told she’d have to stay in hospital overnight because she’d had severe concussion.
Venn looked more ill than she did. White-faced and anxious.
‘They must have phoned for an ambulance, though,’ Jen said. ‘It arrived soon after apparently, though that’s all a blur, and there was nobody else in the street. The car swerved away from me at the last minute, so it can’t really be classed as a hit and run.’
‘Who was driving the vehicle? I assume it was the husband. Geoff Kinzalow?’
Jen closed her eyes again and tried to picture the scene. ‘The sunlight was reflected from the windscreen. I couldn’t really see.’
‘It was their car? The four-by-four?’
‘Yes, I’m sure it was their car, so I don’t think anyone else could have been driving.’ Then she said suddenly, ‘I need to get home to look after Ben.’
‘Ben’s fine. Vanessa has called in to check on him. She offered him a bed for the night, but he said he’d rather stay there.’
Of course, Jen thought, he would. Much better his scuzzy pit, littered with pizza boxes and Coke cans and his gaming computer than one of Vanessa’s luxury en-suite bedrooms in her fancy house by the park.
‘She fed him, though,’ Venn said. ‘He didn’t turn down the chance of a meal.’
She lay back on the pillow. The sheets felt starched and clean. When was the last time she’d changed the sheets at home? This felt a bit like luxury too. She was in a single room, not a ward. Had Venn wangled that?
‘Are you still okay to talk?’ Venn said.
‘Sure.’ Using her good arm, she pulled herself into a sitting position. Her head swam and she felt a little sick and faint and then the nausea settled.
‘Ross spoke to Daniel,’ Venn said. ‘He recorded the interview. I’d like your opinion if you’re up to it.’
‘Sure,’ she said again, already feeling more normal. Suddenly starving. She wondered if they allowed takeaway pizza in hospital. Or beer.
Venn placed a phone on the bed and the interview began.
When it was over and Venn had switched off the recording, she looked across at him. Now, it was dark outside.
‘Ross did really well, didn’t he?’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’d have managed to get as much out of the lad.’ She thought of Ross as she’d first known him – cocky, eager, impatient. He still had his moments, but he’d changed a lot in the last few years.
‘What did you make of it?’ Venn was leaning forward, frowning.
‘It made me see Daniel in a completely different light.’ She shut her eyes for a moment. ‘And Lottie. I knew she must be pretty screwed up, but I’d never have described her as sad.’
‘Did you believe Daniel? That he stayed the night but there was no physical intimacy? That Lottie was alive when he left?’
‘Yes.’ The response came almost immediately. ‘Yes, I did.’ A beat. ‘I don’t think it’s something someone like him would make up. They’d be more likely to boast about their sexual prowess.’
‘So, we don’t think he was the killer?’
‘Of course, we have to keep an open mind …’ Jen knew Venn well enough not to sound too certain. ‘But unless he’s the best actor in the world, I don’t think he was.’
‘Of course, we learned one very important fact,’ Venn said.
‘That there was a car there on Saturday night, appearing at the end of the drive while the girls were skinny-dipping?’
‘Interesting, don’t you think?’
‘Certainly is! From Daniel’s description it sounds like the car that nearly ran me over. The car belonging to the Kinzalows.’
Jen started feeling sleepy again then. The desire for pizza had disappeared.
But Venn was still talking.
‘I got some interesting information from Appleyard. I think I know what the Americans are doing here. They’re booked on flights home on Monday, so we need to talk to them before then. But where are they hiding out?’
Jen was too tired to reply. Besides, she had no answer.