Chapter 28
SIMON
Jason Moorhouse, when he turned up twenty minutes late to the Lannanta Blue Hotel, looked less like a former Cambridge college chaplain than Simon had imagined he would, though maybe it was the ‘former’ that should have given the clue.
Moorhouse was tanned, with a forehead that was all wrinkles but smooth skin on the rest of his face, which made it hard to guess his age.
He was wearing faded jeans, gleaming white trainers that looked fresh out of the box and a grey T-shirt bearing, in black, the slogan ‘ANGLICAN FUNDAMENTALIST – BASED AF’.
Both his arms were tattooed: a series of what looked like small bird and animal skulls on the left and ‘Belynda’ in curly letters on the right.
That would be awkward if he ever bumped into Belynda Simmonds’ husband on his way to St Ives, Simon thought.
As I was going to St Ives, I met a man who had one wife – with a very unusually spelled name that I’d stupidly had inked into my arm, so I got my head kicked in.
Simon could happily have started an argument about the T-shirt, too.
He didn’t consider himself a Catholic any more – hadn’t been near a church in years, much to his mother’s disgust – but he could still join in with the part of being religious that he’d always enjoyed most: disapproving of others.
What kind of Anglican fundamentalist betrays his wife and his God at the same time by committing adultery?
Luckily, Moorhouse turned out to have no illusions about his own moral character.
‘What can I say?’ He spread open his extensively vandalised arms with a chuckle, then pointed up at the ceiling.
‘I was tested by Him Up There, and I failed about as badly as it’s possible to fail.
Still, you’ve met Belynda, haven’t you? Then you’ll know what I’m up against. Temptation doesn’t come much stronger.
But here’s the thing about Jesus: who did he focus on?
Who did he used to consort with? Sinners!
That’s one of the things I always loved about him as a kid. ’
‘So when you and Belynda lived in Cambridge—’
‘He’s still the centre of my life, is Jesus, even though I’ve left the church.’ Moorhouse pressed the flat of his hand against his chest. ‘Still my daily companion, still my best friend.’
Lucky you. Some of us have to make do with Colin Sellers and Chris Gibbs. Simon tried again. ‘When you and Belynda were still in Cambridge, did she ever talk to you about her psychotherapist, Oliver Mayo?’
Moorhouse nodded. ‘She certainly did. I got quite jealous, the way she talked about him: “Oliver thinks this, Oliver says I should do that.” And she’d never miss a session with him, not for anything.
I said to her, “I don’t want to see you on Thursdays from now on, not after you’ve been with him – all you do is witter on about how brilliant he is. ”’
So that was that, Simon thought: 8 November 2012, the night someone had tried to kill Marianne Upton, had been a Thursday. They were all telling the truth: Moorhouse, Belynda Simmonds, Oliver Mayo.
It made sense, because – yes, this was it, this was what had been prodding at the edges of Simon’s awareness for a while now – if it had been Mayo who’d attacked Marianne in 2012, then it was all too convenient to be plausible.
Simon went over it again in his head, the Guilty Mayo version: he wants to kill Marianne and, lo and behold, he’s got Belynda Simmonds, a loyal client, willing to lie for him.
Conveniently, Thursday nights are when she sees him for therapy – and this has been going on for fourteen months by the time the attack on Marianne happens.
No one sets up an alibi that far in advance, surely.
And Thursday also just happens to be the one night Marianne can be guaranteed to be the only adult at home at Devey House; her husband is always away for work on Thursdays, and Paddy and Jemma Stelling are at a hotel for their weekly date night, trying to save their marriage – that’s been going on for nearly a year too.
In other words, if Mayo was guilty, then all the surrounding circumstances were conspiring like crazy, well in advance, to help exonerate him.
It would be an every-murderer’s-dream scenario, especially when you factored in Marianne insisting he hadn’t done it, even though she’d initially claimed he had.
Whereas if someone else, not Oliver Mayo, had tried to kill Marianne in 2012, there was no implausible coincidence to grapple with, only several different people doing their various activities on Thursday evenings.
Maybe Simon needed to think less about the living and more about Marianne herself.
Why had she said ‘Oliver’ when asked in 2012, if he hadn’t done it?
He thought back to what Jemma had told him at her house, while they’d been busy confiding in each other in a way Simon never had with anyone before: Marianne had almost insisted Jemma stay with Paddy, after the one-night stand with Mayo in 2010.
Why? Why try and persuade anyone you cared about to stay with a weed-addicted loser who went from one dead-end bar job to another?
Oliver Mayo, meanwhile, was charming, professionally successful …
True, there had been a baby on the way – Paddy’s baby – but still, what kind of stepmother would do everything she could to make her stepdaughter stay with an obvious loser she didn’t love any more?
Moorhouse was talking about his great relationship with Jesus again.
The laces of one of his trainers was undone.
The newness and shine of them made Simon wonder where he’d last seen …
That was it: Marianne had been wearing gleaming white trainers too, in the background of her husband’s Zoom meeting, before she left the house and walked over to her car and to her death.
‘How long have I been here, and no one’s offered me so much as a bread roll?’ Moorhouse said suddenly.
‘Sorry, I should have thought,’ said Simon, hoping he wouldn’t be required to watch him eat, or eat in front of him.
‘I hate hotels,’ said Moorhouse. ‘Horrible, impersonal places, most of them are. No one cares about good service any more. I’m glad Belynda and I aren’t reliant on hotels now we’re down here.
I live alone now, so … I tell you, the amount of money the Gresham Hotel in Cambridge made out of us.
’ He whistled. ‘We never spent a single night there either, that was the saddest part. All those nights we could have had together that were ours by right, all bought and paid for … but we both had to sleep at home, keep both sham marriages intact with no one wondering where we were overnight.’
Simon wasn’t fully paying attention. Something was wrong. It was the trainers, the untied laces … No, not the laces …
Then everything rearranged itself in his head and he knew what he’d missed. Not just him, either – they’d all missed it. Unbelievable.
Not wanting Moorhouse to think his attention had wandered, he said, ‘You and Belynda saw each other in the day, then?’
‘Yep. Still do. Midday on the dot. That’s always been our time.’
‘Before, you said …’ Simon shook his head. ‘Forget it.’ He was clutching at straws.
‘No, go on,’ said Moorhouse. ‘Ask me. Open book, me.’
It couldn’t do any harm, could it? Just to make sure.
‘You said you didn’t like seeing Belynda on Thursdays after she’d had a therapy session with Mayo.
I was just thinking: those sessions were 7.
30 at night – so if you’d ever seen her after one, that would have been 8. 30 or later – evening, not daytime.’
Moorhouse looked surprised, and was shaking his head. ‘No, she always saw him first thing in the morning on Thursdays, before the receptionists were in, even. “I’m his early bird”, she used to say.’
Simon leaned forward, his heart hammering. Unless there was something he was missing, Ollibi number one had just fallen apart.
He needed to move, quickly. ‘Excuse me a sec,’ he told Moorhouse. ‘Got to make an urgent call.’ Less than a minute later he was standing in the hotel’s main car park in the dark, wishing he had more than two bars of phone reception.
Sam Kombothekra picked up on the second ring.
‘Oliver Mayo wasn’t with a client on the evening of 8 November,’ Simon told him.
He raced through a summary of his day so far.
‘Incredible,’ said Sam. ‘We’ll need to look more closely at this other client, then, the one he was allegedly with on Monday between five and six.’
‘Don’t bother,’ said Simon. ‘That one’s legit. Mayo’s not the killer.’
‘How do you know?’
Shit. In his excitement, Simon had forgotten he’d vowed not to help any crimes get solved.
‘Don’t ask me that yet,’ he said.
‘Can I tell you something instead?’ Sam sounded hopeful.
‘Go on.’
‘The whole of Devey House and its grounds have been searched, top to bottom. Among other things, we’ve found lots of photos, quite a few with Jemma Stelling in – but she’s smiling in none of them.’
‘So?’ said Simon.
‘Gareth Upton told Sellers that Marianne had kept all the photos of Jemma smiling and looking happy in her locked study. He also said that when she stripped everything out of her study, the photos were moved somewhere else, put with the rest of the photos. But they’re not.
No happy, smiley photos of Jemma anywhere. ’
‘In that case …’ Simon thought as he spoke. ‘They might be in the same place as the killer’s bloody clothes and the murder weapon. Bet you haven’t found those yet either, have you?’
‘No,’ said Sam. ‘Where are they, then?’
‘Look closer to home,’ Simon told him. Shit. He had to stop giving the game away. How, exactly, was he going to resist the urge to tell Sam everything the moment they were face to face?
‘I told you, we’ve searched Devey—’
‘No, look closer to our home. The nick,’ said Simon. ‘Spilling Police Station. That’s where you’ll find everything the murderer wanted to hide.’