Chapter 11
SELLERS / GIBBS
Okay, so he wasn’t imagining it. Sellers had been right: Lottie Stelling had him under surveillance.
Each time he came up to the top floor, she was there too, only a few seconds behind him.
Wasn’t trying to hide it, either. She was in white pyjamas now, with a large white towelling robe over them that obviously belonged to someone larger.
Alarmingly, her face seemed to be smeared in what looked like goose fat.
Unlikely, thought Sellers, who had encountered no geese in the grounds of Devey House so far.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I know it looks gross. I’m slugging.’
Suzanne’s voice travelled up from the landing below, ‘Lotts! Come and do your teeth!’
Lottie gave Sellers a ‘she’s so clueless’ look. She said, ‘I love Suzanne to bits, don’t get me wrong, she’s my godmother and everything, but …’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t know how she thinks I’m going to be able to sleep tonight.’
‘I’m really sorry for your loss,’ said Sellers.
‘Oh.’ Lottie looked surprised. ‘Thanks. I just meant … I’m not going to be able to stop thinking about it all. I mainly still don’t believe it’s happened.’
‘Did you love Marianne to bits?’ Sellers asked her, interested to see where her ‘yes’ would fall on the scale of heartfelt to perfunctory to downright unconvincing. If he’d understood correctly, she’d just tried to tell him that she was more shocked than sad.
‘She loved me.’ Lottie looked away.
Interesting.
‘So, tell me,’ Sellers changed the subject. ‘Is it me, or is it this room?’ He pointed at the open door to Marianne’s empty former study. ‘It’s got to be one or the other. Every time I come up here, you’re tailing me.’
‘Just want to see what you’re doing up here.’ Lottie chewed the inside of her lip. ‘There’s nothing in here, but you keep coming up.’
‘This time it’s because it’s the quietest floor of the house, and I had to take a call.’
‘If you say so.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Sellers.
‘Nothing.’
‘Tell me, Lottie. I won’t mind, whatever it is.’
Her expression was severe. ‘You didn’t need to come up here just because your sergeant rang you. There are loads of quiet rooms on the ground floor, rooms no one ever uses.’
She knew Sam had rung him. Had she eavesdropped, heard the whole conversation? Probably. Sellers’ half, at least.
‘Lottie Nancy Stelling!’ Suzanne yelled again from downstairs. ‘Get yourself down here before I have to come up and drag you down by force!’
Lottie half smiled and rolled her eyes at the same time. ‘Talk about loco parentis,’ she muttered, twirling her finger next to her head to signify insanity.
‘Hadn’t you better go?’ said Sellers.
She ignored his question. ‘I think you’re wanting to find something in Marianne’s study, even though it’s empty,’ she said. ‘Same with me.’
‘What are you hoping to find?’ Sellers wished Simon Waterhouse was here.
He’d have known the right questions to ask.
Not that he was particularly good at communicating with teenage girls – Sellers nearly laughed at the idea – but he was the best at getting to the bottom of anything that made no sense, the best Sellers had ever known.
Where was he? He’d asked Sam, who had dodged the question.
‘Your sergeant told you it couldn’t have been any of us, didn’t he?’ said Lottie. ‘We were all somewhere else when Granny was killed.’ Again, Sellers noticed the switch between ‘Marianne’ and ‘Granny’.
So she had been eavesdropping. ‘You ought to think about a career as a detective,’ he told her. Yes, that was what Sam had said: everyone’s whereabouts were accounted for, even this Oliver Mayo person who had briefly fallen under suspicion when Marianne was attacked in November 2012. Although …
Could the thirteen-year-old kid in front of him have done it?
If she hadn’t been ruled out, would he suspect her?
The police doctor had said it could have been a female killer; no particular strength or brute force is required if you’re not squeamish and willing to keep stabbing until you’re sure your victim’s dead. But a thirteen-year-old?
Pointless to speculate, since according to the update Sellers had just had from Sam, Lottie had been seen standing outside her house near Little Holling with Paddy Stelling at 5.
45 p.m., just before he’d set off to drive to Devey House, which meant neither of them could have been stabbing Marianne between 5.
15 and 5.30. Equally solid, unfortunately, were the alibis of Jemma Stelling, Suzanne Lacy and Oliver Mayo, who had been, respectively, at Spilling Station, at work in the headquarters of the DWC exam board and at his therapy practice in Cambridge at the relevant time.
Gareth Upton, meanwhile, had been Zoom-meeting with work colleagues.
All of this had checked out, Sam said: several of his fellow IT boffins had confirmed Upton’s presence on the Zoom, and one had already sent the official video recording of the meeting.
‘There’s a problem that your sergeant probably didn’t tell you about, because he hasn’t found it out yet,’ said Lottie.
‘What’s that?’
‘There’s nobody else.’
Sellers waited for her to say more.
‘Marianne didn’t really have friends, just people she knew slightly from around the village. That’s it. No one else would have wanted to kill her, apart from the people the sergeant said can’t have done it.’
‘Well, someone must have,’ said Sellers, thinking about Tom Tulloch, whose name Sellers had heard for the first time on the phone with Sam just now.
Uniforms hadn’t managed to track Tulloch down yet, but it sounded like a promising lead.
Only one thing made no sense to Sellers: why would Jemma Stelling confess to it all, pretending she’d decided not to do it, if she’d decided the opposite?
Surely she’d know any sentient detective would think what Sellers was thinking now: that she and Tulloch had to be the killers, with him doing her bidding.
And the longer he remained unreachable, the stronger those suspicions would get.
Instead, Jemma could have set herself up with a nice alibi that wasn’t based at Spilling nick, and said nothing to anyone about Tulloch.
He had no connection to Marianne and could have stayed out of the picture altogether.
Lottie made a small, impatient gesture: a quick shake of the head. She’d found Sellers’ pat response irritating, and he didn’t blame her.
‘It’s possible your gran knew someone in the village more than slightly,’ he tried again. ‘It’s also possible she didn’t know whoever did it. That happens sometimes.’
‘What, a complete stranger?’ Lottie said scornfully. ‘That’s not a thing.’
Sellers seemed to be disgusting her more with every word he said, but he wasn’t about to give up. ‘I’ll tell you why I’m up here,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a colleague, DC Simon Waterhouse. He’s not here, though he should be. If he was, he’d be all over this empty room.’
‘Why?’ asked Lottie.
The answer felt so obvious, it took Sellers a few seconds to convert it into words.
Marianne’s study, locked and secret for many years, then destroyed, then revealed to Jemma in a way intended to taunt her, according to Sam. ‘Waterhouse would think it was a puzzle,’ he told Lottie. ‘A puzzle at the heart of a murder victim’s home – he’d think that was worth paying attention to.’
‘It’s just an empty room, isn’t it?’ She was sounding sneery again. ‘I don’t get why you’re deeping it.’
Yeah, well, maybe there’s quite a lot you don’t understand, despite the endless amounts of worldly wisdom you’ve managed to accumulate over the last thirteen years.
‘You mentioned dreams,’ he said. ‘You used to dream about this room?’
Lottie nodded.
‘What happened in the dreams?’
‘Nothing much. Just boring stuff, like being by the sea and in this room at the same time. With Granny and Grandad and Mum and …’ Lottie stopped. She looked caught out. As if she’d done something wrong and then realised she’d been about to give herself away.
‘And your dad?’ Sellers guessed.
‘I mean … maybe.’ There was no mistaking the tone: she’d said it resentfully.
Sellers was about to ask what she’d meant, when Paddy called upstairs: ‘Lottie? Suzanne’s looking for you. Can you come down? Now?’ He didn’t sound to Sellers like a man who expected to be obeyed or was even convinced that he wanted to be.
‘Saved,’ Lottie said under her breath as she left the room.
Sellers knew he hadn’t caught her parting remark by accident. She’d wanted him to hear it.
Gibbs had eaten too much of Suzanne Lacy’s lasagne, and had already loosened his belt once.
He might have to do it again in a second; his stomach seemed to be still expanding, though they’d finished eating an hour ago.
He consoled himself with the thought that his waistline wasn’t the only casualty.
Sellers’s veganism had also gone for a Burton.
‘You’re a dead man if you breathe a word to Sondra,’ Sellers had threatened him, and Gibbs had felt a pang of nostalgia for the old days, when protecting his friend from consequences had involved lying about more exciting things than eating prohibited pasta dishes.
‘You wanted to ask me something?’ Suzanne appeared in the doorway just as Gibbs was wondering if he ought to start clearing the kitchen table while he waited for her.
She was still wearing the blue and white striped apron of Marianne’s that Lottie had found for her in the pantry.
‘Christ, look at the mess,’ she muttered.
The debris of the meal was evenly distributed around the room: countertops, table, kitchen island.