CHAPTER 5
‘Have you found anything?’ asked Prichard, feeding cat treats to Dave, who was once again on his lap.
‘Only this on his WhatsApp from Derek. By the way, it is Derek on the front of the phone,’ she added. ‘Look, it’s the same photo as his WhatsApp profile thing.’
‘Right.’ Prichard nodded. ‘I can’t help but think …’ His voice trailed off. He sniffed uncomfortably, scratched the side of his head and then leant forward.
‘So earlier, Derek apologises for the argument they’ve had and asks Henry to forgive him.
’ Pat tried her best to ignore the guilty feeling of invading her patient’s privacy, even in death.
‘He says, “I was wrong about us. Shall we try again?” And Henry appears to be keen.’ She sat back in her chair, staring at the messages, and slowly shook her head.
‘That will annoy Sue, all that hard work she did to extricate Derek from the flat, only for Henry to agree to go back to him. It’s classic coercive-control victim behaviour.
The push-pull where someone feels mistreated but can’t quite detach.
They may feel hurt, but the hope for change keeps them tethered.
Derek goes on to say, “Let me make it up to you. How about a night in this gorgeous little place by the sea, near where we were the other week.” Look.
It’s Fin du Monde. Those are the double rooms with the view; I’ve seen the photos.
So that’s why Henry was here the night before! He was going to meet Derek.’
‘So we have our man!’ declared Prichard, standing up and vigorously tapping Derek’s name on the Post-it note in the middle of the noticeboard.
‘But Henry doesn’t reply.’
‘That doesn’t mean anything. We were right! We are right! Derek is the prime suspect, and now we know why Henry was here and who he was meeting. Derek was the last person to see him alive. We should take all this to the police.’
It took Pat a little while to agree. The theory made a kind of sense, but she wasn’t in the habit of leaping from plausibility to certainty.
People were complicated, motives layered.
Just because Derek had invited Henry to a night at Fin du Monde didn’t necessarily mean he was responsible for his disappearance.
Correlation was not causation, as she reminded her clients often enough.
Her instinct was always to listen, watch, hold things lightly until the picture became clearer.
Eventually, though, she agreed it might be best if she took Henry’s phone to the police herself.
It would, as Prichard put it, arouse a little less suspicion.
Of what exactly, she wasn’t entirely sure.
Pat parked her never-washed, moss-growing twenty-year-old Lexus outside the old red-brick Victorian police station in Southbourne, the nearest town, just as another number 12 pulled up to take a party of tourists to Westlinke.
As usual, none of them had prepared for the elements, opting instead for fashionable, photo-ready clothes: short skirts, knee-high boots, and the occasional floaty frock that offered no protection from the wind.
She watched them through her filthy windscreen.
Catching her reflection in the mirror, she forced a smile.
There it was: her best approximation of pleasant cooperation.
Her happy face. Or what passed for it under pressure.
As she walked into the station, she was immediately hit by the smell of old alcohol and a recent slosh of Domestos.
Still damp after their daily mop, the light blue plastic floor tiles were tacky underfoot as she crossed the hall.
She had always heard Sue talk about the ‘modern-day Met’ being institutionally this or institutionally that.
But here in Southbourne, the police weren’t institutionally anything; you could barely call the place a building, more like a neglected afterthought.
Scruffy, shabby, with curling faded posters urging members of the public to See it, say it, sorted or to keep their distance due to Covid restrictions – that notice must be at least three years old, thought Pat – the reception area was in desperate need of updating.
There were a couple of chairs pushed up against the cracked and peeling pistachio-coloured walls, and some glaring strip lights whose shades seemed to be housing a colony of dead flies.
Opposite the main door, which slammed loudly as it shut, was the front desk.
The pale cheap pine veneer was finished off with a thick glass half-barrier and a small cubbyhole window that the officer on duty was forced to peer through.
‘Hello again!’ breezed Pat.
‘Oh, hello,’ said the young man behind the glass. ‘What can I do for you, Dr Phillips?’
‘It’s more what I can do for you, PC Footer,’ replied Pat, bending forward to speak through the window.
‘Oh yes?’ Footer said, plucking a Rolo out of its golden foil on the desk in front of him and popping it in his mouth.
‘I have found Henry Clayton’s mobile phone.’
‘You have?’ He sat up. ‘Where did you find it?’
‘On the cliff near Birling Gap.’
‘Well, of course. It must have fallen out of his pocket before he jumped.’ He nodded.
How could they justify the lack of a proper search? Pat wondered. They would have found the phone had they made any sort of effort.
PC Footer pushed his dimpled hand through the gap in the glass and placed it on the counter. There was a smudge of chocolate along the side of his finger. Pat touched the outside of her anorak to make sure the phone was still in her pocket.
‘It explains why he was in Westlinke in the first place,’ she said. ‘He was going to meet his friend Derek.’
‘Right,’ nodded Footer.
‘They were going to stay the night at Fin du Monde – you know, the old lighthouse that’s now an Airbnb.’
‘I do. I think perhaps you should come and speak to the boss.’
‘I think I should too,’ agreed Pat, feeling strangely elated. ‘I think that would be a good idea.’
PC Footer pressed a buzzer under the desk, which opened a side door to let Pat into the station. ‘If you follow me,’ he said, ‘I’ll take you to her office.’
Pat followed his back into an open-plan office containing ten or twelve desks each with a large square-screened computer. None flickered with any life. In fact, the whole room buzzed only with the sound of a broken air-conditioning unit, and exuded inactivity.
Two desks were manned by police officers, both of whom were eating sandwiches with their feet up, one reading the sports section of a red-top newspaper and the other scrolling his phone. PC Footer turned around to catch Pat’s puzzled expression.
‘It’s nearly lunchtime,’ he said, by way of explanation.
‘Oh,’ Pat replied. Note to self: don’t become a victim of crime between 11.30 a.m. and 1.30 p.m. on a Tuesday in or around the region of Southbourne.
‘She’s just in here.’
Footer paused at the glass door. DS Stevens was on the telephone, her chair turned, her brown bun facing the glass. Pat watched as she pulled a strand of hair out of the bun and began to curl it around the length of her finger while her chair swung gently from side to side.
‘She looks busy,’ Footer said. Busy flirting, thought Pat.
‘Shall we come—’ But before he could finish his sentence, DS Stevens had turned around, noticed her audience and quickly put down the phone without so much as a goodbye.
PC Footer knocked on the glass; DS Stevens nodded. They were allowed to enter.
‘Footer,’ she said as he opened the door. ‘Dr Phillips? To what do we owe the pleasure?’ she asked in a tone drizzled with annoyance.
Pat was immediately irritated. ‘I have found Henry Clayton’s phone. His mobile. On the cliff between the Fin du Monde lighthouse and Birling Gap.’
‘Well, that’s very helpful,’ Stevens replied, in a manner that implied it was anything but. ‘It must have fallen out of his pocket before he jumped.’ She put out her hand, the one with the engagement ring, and wiggled her fingers.
‘That’s exactly what I said,’ enthused Footer, his fleshy cheeks pinking. ‘It must have slipped out before he jumped.’
‘Or maybe it fell out of his pocket during an altercation.’ Pat stared at the moving fingers. Was Stevens asking for the phone to be placed in her hand? ‘It wasn’t close to the edge. It was next to a bench.’
‘Maybe he sat there before deciding to die by suicide,’ replied the detective.
‘Or maybe there was a struggle, and the phone fell out of his pocket.’ Pat knew she sounded belligerent, because she felt it.
‘And the reason he was in Westlinke in the first place was that he was meeting his friend Derek.’ She toyed with the idea of saying ‘boyfriend’, but she sensed that might make Stevens even less enthusiastic about investigating Henry’s murder.
If that were at all possible. ‘They were staying at Fin du Monde,’ she added. ‘The lighthouse Airbnb.’
‘I know the place very well,’ said DS Stevens.
‘Well, you’ll be able to check easily then. Henry was going to patch things up with his friend. Without giving away too many confidences, the friendship had fallen apart, and Derek had asked that they meet to discuss it.’
Pat slowly took Henry’s phone out of her pocket.
Prichard had suggested she ‘bag it’ as evidence, so they’d found a zip-lock freezer bag below the sink that had only been used once before, for cold chicken on a picnic.
He’d rinsed it out and dried it with a paper towel, then popped the phone inside.
Now Pat placed it carefully into DS Stevens’ still open hand.
‘And you found all this information out how?’ Stevens’ lips twitched with something too thin to be called a smile as her fingers clamped around the device.
‘By looking at his phone,’ replied Pat. ‘It’s got lots of evidence on it. The messages from Derek, the suggestion of the night at Fin du Monde, it’s all in there.’
‘You accessed his phone?’
‘I found it on the grass and needed to find out who it belonged to.’
‘And you knew the code?’
‘I worked it out. I’ve written it on a sticky label on my evidence bag.’
‘You were tampering with evidence?’
‘Not exactly. And anyway, evidence of what? This isn’t a murder investigation, apparently,’ Pat shot back. ‘But I think Derek has something to do with it – a lot to do with it. You should at least speak to him.’
‘The thing is, Dr Phillips, we have. Spoken to him. Derek.’
‘When?’
‘Before we came to see you.’
All the oxygen left Pat’s lungs. They had already spoken to the prime suspect? She tried to compose herself but could feel her cheeks flushing.
‘He was the one who told us that Henry was depressed. Very depressed. He was the one who said he was seeing a shrink for his issues. Mental health and all that.’
Pat’s heart started to pound loudly, so loudly she felt Footer and Stevens might hear it. She dug her nails into her palms as she felt her face burn with the irritation that was coursing at great speed through her veins. If blood could ever boil, this was what it would feel like.
‘Henry Clayton was not depressed,’ she said very slowly, enunciating each word as if she were talking to the hard of hearing, or indeed, in DS Stevens’ case, the hard of listening. ‘He was just dissatisfied with a certain part of his life. That is all. There is a difference.’
‘Well, his boyfriend, Derek Jones, said otherwise. And he knew him very well.’ Stevens paused, then leant forward and patted the back of Pat’s hand.
‘I’m sure you tried your best.’ Her nose wrinkled with contrived compassion.
‘But we all have bad days at the office. I should know.’ A little laugh escaped.
Pat reminded herself that she had to breathe.
‘I’d like to see the photographs of Henry.’
‘What photographs? The post-mortem photographs? I’m afraid that’s not possible,’ replied DS Stevens, crossing her arms.
‘He was my client.’
‘I’m sorry, Dr Phillips.’ She smiled tightly.
‘It’s still a negative. Listen.’ She stood up suddenly and glanced at her wristwatch.
‘Thank you for the mobile. I’ll be sure to return it to his next of kin.
Forensics have yet to report, but just to repeat, we are not looking for anyone else in connection with the death of Henry Clayton.
We have spoken to his partner, who confirmed he was depressed at the time, that he was on his way to see his psychotherapist. There’s nothing more for us to do.
’ She shrugged. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some detecting to do. PC Footer will see you out.’