Chapter 45
FORTY-FIVE
DAN
Tilly had come all the way down the stairs and up to the front doors of the apartment building to see me off.
‘It’s the furthest I’ve got in the last day or so,’ she said. ‘I don’t feel safe in the outside world anymore. I almost had a panic attack in Tesco’s when I went shopping for a few essentials yesterday. Maybe I’ll do it online from now on…’
‘All this terrible mess, eh?’ I said as I touched her shoulder, gently. I can tell that she doesn’t want me to leave. ‘I’ll be back to see you soon, Tilly. Don’t leave the country, eh?’ I don’t know why I said it, the poor wretched woman can’t even leave her own home.
‘Will you, Dan?’ She suddenly threw her arms around my neck. ‘Thank you,’ she signed to me as she pulled away. ‘Thank you for everything you’ve done.’
‘You’re welcome, Tilly.’
‘Mmm,’ she said, with a strange look on her face as she stood back from me. ‘You smell… lovely.’
It must’ve been that tiny squirt of Baccarat Rouge I’d give myself in the bathroom, though I wasn’t going to tell her that. That would be giving the game away that I’d been poking around her personal things.
‘It reminds me of something Samantha used to wear,’ she says, leaning in closer – a little too close perhaps. ‘… Or I suppose I should now say, Erin.’
Davis has her feet up on one of the desks in the incident room as I enter.
‘Come with me.’ I knock them off, stoop down to whisper in her ear as I pass.
‘Boss?’ She jumps up in surprise, follows.
‘I’ve just been to see Tilly Ward,’ I say as she closes the door behind her.
‘I know. You said she’s identified Santos as Samantha Valentine in the mugshot photo.’
I chew at my thumbnail, nibble at a tiny piece of loose skin at the quick.
‘Yes, yes, she did. But there was something off, Lucy, something not quite right about her.’
‘About Tilly Ward?’
‘Yes. Something different.’ I chew some more.
‘Such as…?’
‘I can’t put my finger on it.’
‘No, and you won’t be able to put your thumb on it either if you keep gnawing at it like that.’
I drop my hand down into my lap.
‘I’m going to go through all the tapes again… the interviews we did with Tilly…’
‘Now, boss? But that’ll take ages.’
‘Pull up a chair, then,’ I say, ‘get comfortable. I need to know what it is that was different about her, because I know it’s something.’
Davis sighs. ‘Okaaaay…’
‘Any news from Down Under yet – has Shona Valentine sent in those school photos?’
‘It’s only been a few hours, boss. Why?’ She’s eyeing me suspiciously.
‘Would it be strange,’ – I turn to look at her – ‘if you were Tilly Ward, I mean, and if you were going through what she’s going through, and if you’d done what she’s done, to paint your fingernails scarlet red just a few days later?’
It sounds a bit ridiculous when I say it out loud, judgemental even.
Only it’s my job to be judgy sometimes. And it’s not so much a judgement in of itself, more a kind of moral question, a question of character, I suppose.
‘Imagine. You’ve just killed a man, in self-defence or otherwise.
You’re out on police bail. You’ve lost your job, your life, your mind, most probably…
with all of that going on, would you think to give yourself a manicure? ’
Davis shrugs.
‘Maybe she just wanted to cheer herself up, boss, take her mind off everything. People do strange things in shock and trauma. I shouldn’t read too much into it.’
‘Yes, you’re probably right, Lucy… but she had that perfume in her bathroom cabinet, a brand-new bottle by the look of it, hardly used.
’ The perfume is bugging me. Along with the red nails, it somehow seemed so out of context.
Why would Tilly have a bottle of that exact same perfume, expensive perfume, that Samantha supposedly wears?
‘You searched her bathroom cabinet, boss?’ She gives me a look.
‘What? Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have done the same, Davis, because I won’t believe you.’
She opens her mouth to object, but, knowing I’m right, thinks better of it.
‘So, you found a bottle of Baccarat Rouge in her bathroom cabinet?’
‘Yes. Tucked away behind all these other basic, unbranded, cheap products – just sitting there, like a jewel.’
‘Maybe it was a present from someone. Maybe Samantha gave it to her?’
‘Maybe…’ I say. ‘Roll the footage, Davis.’
We’re about twenty minutes into the recording when the first thing catches my attention. And as I suspected, it had something to do with shoes.
‘… and so we take our shoes off! And then we place them behind the door.’ It was the way Tilly had said it, or rather, sung it during the interview – melodic, and on the beat, like a song lyric, the way you might tell a child to help them learn.
I stop the footage, rewind it and listen again.
Those were the exact words, spoken – or sung – in the same way that Erin had described Samantha’s words to her on the night they met.
‘No, no, no… Ari says, we take our shoes off! And then we place them behind the door!’
Was it just a coincidence? It’s not like people don’t take their shoes off before they enter theirs, or other people’s homes – most people do. It’s just that most people don’t say that exact same phrase, in that exact same sing-song voice, when they do it.
To be fair, I’d picked up on the whole shoe thing right at the start, when I first walked into the crime scene – those boots sitting neatly by the front door. I had thought it odd then, that anyone would stop to remove their shoes in the middle of an emergency.
‘Maybe Tilly didn’t realise the seriousness of the situation when she first walked into the scene.
Maybe she didn’t know how bad it was…’ Davis was right to play devil’s advocate.
Tilly’s boots by the door and her sing-song paraphrasing are not evidence of anything.
Only I need to tell my intuition that, because it’s setting off bells inside me – the alarm kind.
I let the footage roll on for a while longer, watch and listen as a tearful and traumatised Tilly recounts her story to Davis and Parker and, later, to me. It’s during the interview that I conducted with her that I suddenly spot it.
‘There!’ I jump up from my seat. My sudden movement causes Davis to do the same. I rewind the footage, pause it on Tilly’s face.
Davis blinks at the screen.
‘What am I supposed to be looking for, gov?’
‘There. Behind her left ear…’
She moves in for a closer look. ‘The hearing aid, you mean?’ She turns to me blankly.
I nod. ‘OK, now look…’
I roll the footage onto the interview that was recorded the following day. I hit the pause button again, look up at Lucy. ‘Here, it’s behind her right ear.’
Her eyes widen.
‘Now what do you make of that, Davis?’