Chapter 36 #3
‘It was the white trainers that first started me off down the right track,’ says Simon.
‘I was in Cornwall, talking to an ex-Cambridge college chaplain. Yes, that one,’ he tells Ollie.
‘Belynda Simmonds’ bit on the side. He was wearing bright white trainers, and I realised I’d seen some that looked brand spanking new like that somewhere else recently.
Then I got it: Marianne was wearing trainers like that, in the background of your Zoom work meeting, the one I’d watched with my team that supposedly proved beyond doubt you couldn’t have killed her.
Her trainers were clearly visible, which means she can’t have been in the room with you – she had to have been much further away if we could see her feet, when we could only see your top half, sitting at your desk.
Plus, she was dusting things in the video and putting them back on shelves, and there aren’t any shelves in your home office, are there?
There’s very little in there – just computers of every possible size. Some huge.’
‘Some huge,’ Dad repeats.
‘So Marianne must have been in her study, across the landing,’ says Simon.
‘Now, you might think, so what? So what if she wasn’t in your office with you?
So what if she was in her study? She was still there, wasn’t she?
In the video, demonstrably alive at 5.10 p.m.?
Here’s the thing: Marianne had stripped that room of all of its contents long before Monday 30 October.
On 7 July, she showed Jemma the completely bare, empty room. ’
‘What a fool I am,’ Dad says, and it sounds as if he’s reminiscing fondly about a complete failure whom he loves in spite of everything.
I hope he does. I hope he can go through the rest of his life liking himself, feeling okay about himself. If I need to spend the next however many years convincing him of all the reasons why he should love himself, I’m ready to do it.
He saved your life. You only succeeded in saving the life of Marianne – the woman who’d have killed you. He saved yours. Don’t be too hard on him, Jemm.
Tears fill my eyes as I realise that wasn’t my inner voice talking to me: it was Mum.
‘To plan what you really believe is the perfect murder and neglect such a fundamental detail …’ Dad shakes his head.
‘You’re not the first,’ Simon told him.
‘I didn’t think of her study and whether it was full or empty, or whether it would be visible, or noticed – not for a second. I was too busy counting myself lucky that she wore the same outfit every Monday to go to her yoga class.’
‘You had a lot on your mind,’ says Simon.
‘Planning a killing is stressful. And if it’s any consolation, I’d begun to suspect you even before I saw those white trainers in Cornwall and made the connection.
You were the only one on the list whose alibi was a Zoom, not an in-person encounter.
Everyone else had been seen in the flesh by another person at the relevant time, in a place that meant they couldn’t have been here killing Marianne: Jemma, Paddy, Lottie, Suzanne Lacy, Oliver Mayo – much as I wanted it to be you for a while,’ Simon tells Ollie with an apologetic half smile.
The mention of Suzanne’s name gives me a heavy feeling in my stomach.
Will she ever speak to me again? She promised she would.
‘Hey,’ she said, ‘if our friendship can survive you marrying one man I disapprove of, then why not two? You’re off into the sunset with a guy who claims to love you, having withheld the truth from you for seventeen years?
Great! If you’re happy, if he makes you happy, I promise not to keep saying inconvenient things like this. ’
Still, I’m worried about me and Suzanne.
I don’t want to have to feel ashamed whenever I think about her, and don’t know how to forget that I’ve lied to her for the first time in our decades-long friendship.
I told her it wasn’t Ollie who attacked Marianne in November 2012.
The rest of the truth I was happy to share with her, but not that.
And I won’t tell her about Dad either. For the same reason Ollie didn’t tell me all the secrets for so many years: fear.
I can’t be sure Suzanne wouldn’t go straight to the police.
‘Even Tom Tulloch had an alibi provided by real people, albeit biased and unreliable-seeming ones,’ Simon tells Dad.
‘And the other day Charlie and I – that’s my wife – we were arguing about whether I could have saved myself a drive to Cornwall by just Zooming with the people I went there to see.
I said to her: “Talking to someone on Zoom isn’t really talking to someone”, or words to that effect.
Which is true – seeing someone on a Zoom isn’t actually seeing that person.
It’s seeing an image of them. When I watched your Zoom meeting with my team … ’ Simon shakes his head.
‘Image quality?’ Dad grimaces. ‘It was inconsistent, wasn’t it? The trouble is, the recordings sent out after those meetings are made by different people, with different Wi-Fi connections, on different machines—’
‘That was one clue among many,’ says Simon.
‘Your face was all fuzz and stripes, but no one else’s was.
One guy had a vase behind him. You could see every movement that man’s face made, as well as the initials of the pottery maker at the bottom of the vase: TKC.
I thought: why would Gareth Upton have so much worse video quality than everyone else?
I mean, it could have been your Wi-Fi signal, but again … ’
‘Someone in my line of work would make sure he always has a fully functional internet connection,’ Dad says.
‘That’s exactly what I thought,’ said Simon.
‘Which led to me wondering how hard it would be for someone with your tech expertise to … I don’t know, get a massive screen, much bigger than the one that’s doing the recording of the Zoom, and set it up so that it’s positioned in the one and only spot that’d make it look like he’s sitting there in his room.
The screen playing the video would need to be quite a bit bigger than the one recording it, I reckon.
I know I couldn’t make it work myself, but I didn’t doubt that you could.
And you could arrange it so that it looked like Marianne came in and spoke to you at the moment you wanted, and rang you at the moment you wanted – because that all happened, didn’t it?
Just not on Monday 30 October. But you remembered a previous Zoom work meeting, same people, in which all of that happened. ’
‘It was a Zoom call from several months ago,’ says Dad.
‘The physical set up was easy enough to do. I’ve got several computers in the house with larger screens.
Well, I did have, until your team and their helpers carted them off.
’ He smiles at Simon to show he’s not trying to be critical.
‘And I’ve never once said a word, or been called upon to do so, in any of those pointless, interminable meetings, so I reckoned I was safe enough from that point of view. ’
‘You must have killed Marianne long before 5.25, right?’ Simon asks him.
‘4.25,’ says Dad. ‘Pretended I’d found a problem with the car and asked her to come outside so I could show it to her.
Earlier that day I’d hidden my change of clothes – same ones I’d worn for the Zoom I was planning to pass off as me in real time – in the woods near where we park our cars.
I … did the unthinkable, then got changed and carried the plastic bag full of bloodstained clothes and shoes and the knife I’d bought back to the house. ’
‘And hid them where you’d previously hidden the pictures Marianne gave you from her study,’ says Simon. ‘The doctored family photos with Paddy taken out and Oliver added in.’
Dad nods. ‘And the three pictures I stole from Jemm’s bedroom many years ago, so that Marianne couldn’t destroy them. Yes.’
‘Where did you hide so many things, Dad?’ I ask. ‘Must have been somewhere pretty spacious, for clothes and shoes and everything. In the house? How come DS Kombothekra and the others didn’t find them? I thought you said they searched the entire house and grounds.’
‘They did,’ says Dad.
‘I thought exactly the way you’re thinking,’ Simon tells me. ‘Yeah, everywhere had been searched, so if your Dad was the one who’d done it, which by then I knew he was, where had he put all the evidence? I felt pretty pleased with myself when I worked it out.’
‘What did you work out?’ Ollie asks, as desperate as I am to know.
‘It seemed obvious once I thought of it,’ says Simon. ‘The massive computers our SOCOs had removed from this house – from your home office, Gareth – and taken to the nick in Spilling.’
‘You can hide a lot in a full tower case if you take out all the other components,’ Dad says.
His face twists, as if at a sudden spasm of pain.
‘Isn’t it funny how you can think you’re being so clever while being a fool of the first order?
I thought it was perfect. Foolproof! No one would ever convict me of a crime someone else was confessing to wanting to commit at the very moment I was supposedly doing it.
I knew about the diary file on your computer, Jemm.
Marianne had read it and told me all about it, so I knew that on Monday between five and six you’d be at the police station.
“Perfect”, I thought. “Jemma can’t be blamed.
She’ll have the most solid alibi imaginable: vouched for by the police.
” And I thought my clever Zoom recording plan would work just as well for me. ’
‘And you didn’t think about the conspiracy to murder charge that would almost definitely have been coming Jemma’s way,’ Simon says, with a small shake of his head at Dad’s reckless stupidity.
‘How can we be sure that won’t still happen?’ Ollie asks him. ‘The conspiracy charges.’
‘We can be sure because …’ Simon reaches for a slice of cucumber from the bowl in the middle of the table.
Instead of eating it, he starts to pull it apart with his fingers.
‘What murder plan?’ he says. ‘What laptop diary? Is anyone going to step forward and say they’ve seen such a thing, or read it, or even heard of it? No. They’re not.’
‘I see,’ says Ollie. ‘Thank you so much.’
Thank you.
I’m too overwhelmed to speak. I don’t care if Simon’s doing all this for me and my family or for his own strange reasons, but I don’t care. I’ll be grateful to him for the rest of my life.
‘I want to make it very clear …’ Dad starts to say, and for a second I nearly laugh, imagining he might be about to complain about Simon’s bad table manners and the shredding of the cucumber, but of course he doesn’t.
Instead he says, ‘After today and … everything we’ve all done, after all of this …
’ He gestures around the table. ‘You’re not the only one who’s going to be doing everything by the book from now on, Simon. ’
‘No. You are,’ Simon tells him. ‘The only one out of you and me, anyway.’
‘What do you mean?’ Ollie asks.
‘I don’t know,’ our strange police detective friend says. ‘I just … I don’t have it in me to live by anyone else’s rules, even if it means keeping a job I need. Never have and never will. That won’t change.’
‘I thought you said your wife wanted the two of you to make a deal with … gods you don’t believe in,’ Dad says.
‘True, and well remembered,’ Simon smiles. ‘But she’s about to find out, along with everyone else who knows me, that unfortunately for them, I’m still Simon Waterhouse.’ He reaches for another piece of cucumber. ‘To be honest, I can’t see myself stopping being Simon Waterhouse any time soon.’