CHAPTER 14
Back at Ivy Cottage, Pat and Prichard sat down to a hastily heated bowl of tomato soup for an emergency meeting. The unexpected arrival of the chief perp, Derek, required the highest degree of urgency.
‘Fi’s reaction was exuberant, that’s for sure,’ said Pat, spooning up some hot soup. ‘I haven’t seen that much youthful enthusiasm in someone over the age of forty in a long time.’
‘Well, I’m not surprised,’ said Prichard. ‘He’s a very good-looking man. His car was a little, well, low-rent, but apart from that, you can see why she sprinted down the steps like a gazelle on heat.’
‘Except when you suspect who he is, and what he might be capable of.’
‘What is she doing with him? And how do they know each other?’ Prichard looked up at the board and squinted at the new ‘Fiona’ Post-it that Pat had scrawled as soon they’d raced through the door.
‘And is she now in the frame, d’you think?
’ He bent forward and slurped his soup. ‘What’s she got to gain from Henry’s death? ’
‘Not a lot, so far as we know,’ agreed Pat. ‘Unless there’s something more sinister about her connection with Derek. What did she say he was doing? Helping her with her brand? That he was a marketing guru? Marketing? Henry never mentioned that.’
‘What did he say Derek did?’
‘He didn’t, I don’t think. I’ll have another listen to some of the sessions. But I’m usually focused on other things – emotions, responses, patterns of thought – not the finer points of someone’s partner’s job. I’m not sure I even asked.’
‘And what about Dorna?’ asked Prichard, raising a thicket of an eyebrow.
‘Did you see her hand? That’s definitely not an RSI injury. It was scratched and swollen, like she’d been in a fight.’
‘So you think it’s her?’
‘I don’t know. But it does seem very useful for her that any objection to her thirty-seven-million-pound development died along with Henry.’
‘Is that how much it is?’ Prichard scratched his chin.
‘That’s a lot of cash. Certainly worth smoking some bats out of a barn, that’s for sure, and if she’s capable of that, well, who knows what else she’s capable of.
I’ve seen a documentary about that, it’s called Don’t F**k With Cats.
A man tortured kittens on video. Posted it online.
A group of internet amateur sleuths hunted him down by tracking plug sockets, vacuum cleaners, hotel carpets. ’
‘Ugh! But why is this relevant to us?’
‘Because it escalated. He started with cats – in our case it’s bats – and then progressed to murdering humans. Kittens were the gateway drug, like with the ganja.’
‘What do you mean?’ Pat’s brow furrowed.
‘The ganja is the gateway to the heroin, obviously. No one just jumps straight to the smack.’
‘I’m not sure that’s always true,’ she said mildly. ‘But anyway, statistically speaking, Dorna’s far less likely to be a murderer. Men do most of the murdering.’
‘But she’s a feminist,’ Prichard opined. Pat stared at him. ‘She told me as much. She believes in equal opportunities, and that can’t mean just the good stuff like jobs and money and promotions and trousers.’
‘Trousers?’ Pat laughed. ‘So you think murder should be an equal-opportunities employer?’
‘Yup,’ he said, sploshing his spoon back into his soup.
‘Well, statistically women are less likely to kill for personal gain. When they do kill, it’s often in response to sustained threat.
Self-defence or desperation. And they tend to use methods that don’t involve direct physical violence.
Poison is more common than blunt force. What happened to Henry looked brutal.
Up close. Personal. The kind of violence that comes with rage.
There were cuts and bruises, signs of a struggle.
That suggests something sustained. Something physical.
Derek’s got history for that. Dorna? I’m not so sure. ’
Rat-tat-tat-tat! There was a loud banging, a rapping at the kitchen window, and both Pat and Prichard leapt in their seats and swiftly turned their heads towards the sound. Three white faces were pressed flat against the glass, their noses snubbed, their black eyes peering blindly into the kitchen.
‘Jesus!’ exclaimed Pat.
‘Oh goodness! Jal jasseo!’ yelled Prichard, jumping out of his seat and waving.
‘Jal jasseo. Jal jasseo!’ He whipped open the front door and hurried outside, repeating his phrase, grinning and nodding.
He was met with what sounded like giggling.
‘Jal jasseo. Jal jasseo!’ he said again, to more giggling. ‘Pat,’ he called. ‘Come here!’
Outside, on the grass verge of pain, were three Korean girls, all clutching short denim jackets around them.
‘Birling Gap, Seven Sisters?’ one of them asked, and pointed down the track past Pat’s cottage and on towards Malcolm and Fi’s house. The other two looked blankly at Prichard and then more questioningly at Pat.
‘Jal jasseo,’ Prichard repeated again, and the girls laughed, covering their mouths with their slim hands.
‘I think you might stop asking if they slept well,’ said Pat. ‘As it’s half past two in the afternoon.’
‘It really is most unfortunate that I have forgotten my phrase book. The one time it might be useful.’
‘Never mind,’ replied Pat. ‘Birling Gap?’ They all nodded in unison.
‘Yes? Follow me.’ She led them back up the path towards the cattle grid and pointed towards the Downs, making a walking gesture with her fingers.
‘Twenty minutes.’ She looked down at their wedged fashion shoes.
‘Thirty-five minutes,’ she corrected. ‘Thirty-five.’ She showed them on her watch, and then added another finger-walking sign.
‘Thank you.’ The talking girl gave a grateful smile and a nod.
‘Jal jayo!’ Prichard replied with a forty-five-degree-angle bow.
‘Jal jayo,’ the girls replied before almost tripping over themselves in their desire to escape.
‘What does that mean?’ asked Pat.
‘Goodbye,’ said Prichard. ‘Or more specifically, “sleep well”.’
‘Great,’ replied Pat, giving his shoulder a squeeze. ‘That doesn’t sound creepy at all! Maybe you can learn some more appropriate expressions next?’
Prichard set off over the Downs about fifteen minutes later, after confirming with Pat that he would be back for an actual, non-safe-word chilli con carne.
Now that she had planted the seed in his head, and the semi-final of The Apprentice would be airing that evening, it had to be done.
The two of them often watched television together.
It was like wine, they had both concluded one day, better consumed with other people than alone.
Pat sat in her kitchen in silence and stared at the board with the yellow Post-its.
What was Derek doing with Fiona? And how was she related to all of this?
What was Derek doing in Westlinke at all?
Surely he would prefer to distance himself from the scene of the crime.
That was what a cold-blooded killer would do.
And yet here he was, less than a mile from where he might have pushed his boyfriend off the cliff.
Was it an accident? Had Henry fallen off because they were in a physical fight?
Or had he really taken his own life, just as the police believed?
And was Pat’s insistence on it being murder, or at least not suicide, rooted in something else? Guilt, maybe. Guilt that one of her clients had died on her watch. She’d handled plenty of complex cases over the years. Maybe it was more luck than skill, but she’d never lost a client before.
Some people were hard to reach. That was part of the job. The ones who’d learnt early that letting anyone in was dangerous, who lived instead with the inner-critical voice planted there in childhood. But even with them, Pat usually managed to find a way through. Somehow.
But Henry hadn’t seemed like that. He’d been engaged. Responsive. Willing to work, even when they disagreed. But now she wondered, was he just performing? Trying to be the ‘good client’?
Had she misread him?
She stood up from the table. She needed a swim to clear her head.
She peeled her thick black swimming costume off the warm radiator by the front door.
It was stiff like roadkill, but she folded it and put it in the pocket of the dryrobe she’d thrown on, along with her black knitted bobble hat, goggles and swimming socks, then headed out across the Downs, litter-picker in hand.
She walked slowly up the tarmacked track and over the cattle grid, pausing by the lay-by on the corner.
Had the tosser been this morning while she’d been travelling back from London on the train?
She paused and scoured the ground. There it was!
A crumpled Mars bar wrapper. She grabbed it with her picker and popped it straight into the bin.
Come Armageddon, the only thing to survive, along with the cockroaches, the rats and the fleas, would be the tosser, she thought as she turned and marched up the hill.
It was colder than she expected as she reached the top, and there was a sharp wind blowing off the sea that whistled into her ears and made her hunch her shoulders.
She rummaged in her coat pocket, pulled out two plugs of cotton wool and popped them in her ears.
That was better. She could do without earache on top of her hip ache.
It was always unpredictable out here on the Downs.
She could be sitting in the garden in her dressing gown, eyes half closed, soaking up the sun, only to be buffeted like a kite on a string as soon as she crested the brow of the hill.
Pulling her hat low, she walked up to the neon-orange sign hammered into the fence by the old barn with the red roof.
Braddon Designs & Development. She scoffed to herself.
It was already looking a little tatty. She exhaled deeply to try and calm herself down.
How was that Braddon woman allowed to get away with all this?