CHAPTER 46
I step back in shock as Dennis walks further into the room.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before,’ he says. He looks so benign, so grandfatherly standing there in his cable-knit cardigan, trousers and checked slippers, yet, for the first time ever, I feel afraid of him.
I shrink back against his desk. ‘Did … did Dorothea know who you were?’
He shakes his head sadly. ‘I thought you might work it out. The anagram. Sidney S. Crane. Dennis Creasy.’
Of course. I’ve always been rubbish at anagrams.
‘I wanted to tell her, but I …’ He looks unsure. ‘I was hoping, when it was finally published, she’d see it for what it is.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘A love letter, of course. I loved her, you see. I loved her from the first moment I saw her, and my love for her only grew stronger day by day.’ He looks so sad that, despite everything, I feel a twinge of pity.
‘Was it you who left that postcard in her garden?’ I suddenly ask, remembering what Annette had said about it. ‘It had something scribbled on the back, apparently, alluding to the past.’
He looks genuinely baffled. ‘No, I didn’t. But I did drop off a batch of postcards to the local bookshops in the area, and they promised to put them out on the counter.’
‘Is that why you were attacked, Dennis? Because of this book?’ I’m still holding it in my hands and I jiggle it in front of him. He steps forward and calmly takes it from me and places it back on his desk on the neat pile.
Then he turns back to me, rubbing his beard thoughtfully. ‘I don’t know why I was attacked. But I don’t think it’s because of the biography.’
I can’t get all this straight in my mind. Did Dennis know that Dorothea killed Bobby?
‘Did you move here on purpose? To be closer to her?’
He hangs his head and thrusts his hands into the pockets of his trousers.
Despite being in his seventies there is something little-boy-lost about the gesture.
‘No, I didn’t even know that she was this famous artist when I first met her.
But then we got talking, and over the years she revealed more and more about her life, and she was so fascinating. ’
‘But she didn’t tell you everything, did she, Dennis? She didn’t tell you Bobby was abusive.’ And she didn’t tell you that she killed him, I add silently.
‘No,’ he admits. ‘She never told me that.’
‘So how did you get your information? I can’t believe Dorothea would have told you her innermost secrets and all about her childhood.’
‘She told me bits and pieces over the years and I did my own investigations. When she said she’d been born in Clayton Rocks and worked at a textiles factory there, it wasn’t hard to find someone to talk to in the area who once knew her.
That’s how I found out about Bobby. I’m afraid I wasn’t entirely truthful with you earlier – Dotty didn’t ever talk about him to me. ’
I was a fool to trust this man because he looked like a kindly grandad.
Then something occurs to me. ‘It was you! You were the man who visited Scarlett in Clayton Rocks, weren’t you? Is that where you were when Harry was hanging around your house?’
‘I wanted to check I hadn’t missed anything. For the epilogue.’
‘You must also have had a source. Journalists always do. So who was yours, Dennis?’
‘Oh, now, I’m not a journalist …’
‘Was it one of Dorothea’s friends? Was it Gabe? I know he’s not doing well financially. Did you pay him to leak information to you?’
It’s a shot in the dark but I can tell by his expression that I’m right.
‘Did you tell him about the secret sculpture?’
A flush forms on his cheeks and he picks at his beard. ‘It slipped out. I didn’t mean it to.’
‘For goodness’ sake, Dennis. Does he know where it is?’
He nods.
‘Her death is suddenly quite lucrative for you, isn’t it? Now that it’s been released to the press that she was murdered.’
His head shoots up. ‘What I do isn’t so different to what you do, my dear.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You were a journalist. You wrote exposés on people all the time.’
‘Yes. Bad people,’ I splutter, shocked that he’s comparing us. And I know Dorothea killed Bobby. I know she’s not innocent but she wasn’t a bad person. ‘Dorothea didn’t do anything to deserve you probing into her life like a … like a snake. Pretending to be her friend!’
‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘Well, if it was all above board then why weren’t you honest about it?’ I snap. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to leave.’ Despite my bravado I feel a flash of fear when he steps in front of the door.
‘I thought – hoped – we could try and figure this thing out together. We need to find out who killed Dotty.’
‘I need to leave, Dennis.’ My heart races when he doesn’t move. ‘Dennis?’
He steps aside and lets me pass and I run downstairs and grab Solly, taking him out the back door before Dennis can follow.
When I reach the villa I double-lock the front door and call Josh.
He doesn’t pick up. I check the Find My app.
He’s not at the office but at the Filton flat again.
I need to ask him why he keeps going there.
I’ve mentioned a few times that we should go over and sort it out, ready to rent it out, but he said we need a few repairs done before that can happen.
The house suddenly feels too spacious, too silent, and when someone buzzes the intercom on the main gate I jump in fright. Dennis must have followed me here. It buzzes again, and I run up the stairs and down the hallway to speak into it. I relax when I see it’s DI Shirley.
I open the front door as she drives through the gates. She gets out of the car and follows me down to the kitchen. I can tell by her body language she’s still annoyed with me. Once she’s sat at the table I tell her everything that has happened, right up to finding out Dennis is Sidney S. Crane.
‘Wow, you really have been a busy bee,’ she says as she scribbles this all down in her notebook, and she doesn’t make it sound like a compliment.
‘You need to show me the sculpture.’ She eyes me sternly; her fluffy hair is a puffball around her face and she looks like she slept in her clothes. She’s a police officer, a detective, I remind myself. She helped put my dad away. She was kind to me and Alison during the trial.
She looks up at me expectantly when I don’t say anything. ‘Well? Can I see it?’
‘What … what will happen to it?’
‘We’ll have to take it away, of course. For evidence.’
Reluctantly I get up and grab my keys and together we walk through the woods.
As we do so, I tell her about Lila seeing a man with flowers on Saturday and I explain about the patch of teal satin I found.
‘Dennis told Dorothea’s agent, Gabe, about the sculpture and I think it might have been him, looking for it. ’
‘I’ll talk to Gabe Mitchell, don’t worry.’
DI Shirley looks perturbed when I show her the sculpture. She takes a series of photographs with her phone from all possible angles. Of course she’s going to be interested in the sculpture, I tell myself. It could give clues as to who killed Dorothea.
I wait by the bench while she examines it and then she turns to me, her expression serious. ‘Please don’t allow anyone else down here. I don’t want this contaminated any more than it might already be. I’ll be sending a team in to carefully remove it.’
Then she climbs the stairs out of the bunker and I follow her. Solly, as usual, sits guarding the door.
‘Can I ask you a question?’ I say as I show her out.
‘Of course. But don’t expect me to answer if it’s about this case.’
‘It’s about my mum.’
She stops by her car. ‘Go on.’
‘Alison has started to doubt that my dad killed her.’
DI Shirley’s eyes narrow. ‘I see.’
‘She wants us to go and visit him in prison. But you were one of the officers on that … case …’ I swallow. It sounds so sterile calling it a ‘case’ when it’s about my own parents. ‘Could there have been any doubt?’
‘A jury found him guilty, Imogen. They found him guilty beyond reasonable doubt. Can we ever be one hundred per cent sure? Of course not. But all the evidence supported his conviction.’
‘And … the evidence was …?’
‘You were at the trial,’ she says gently.
‘Not all of it. I was too young. I didn’t sit through all of it.’ And I’ve never wanted to know the full details, deeming it too painful.
‘Oh,’ she frowns. ‘Right, yes. You were there for the verdict, I remember that.’
I nod. My stomach clenches when I think about that traumatic time.
She touches my shoulder and her expression softens. ‘There was enough evidence to suggest it was him. Testimonies from people at the party who heard him threatening her. CCTV along part of the road that captured his car. The mask he wore to the party found nearby.’
She hasn’t told me anything I didn’t already know.
‘The mask though’, I say. ‘Why would he be so careless, leaving it at the scene of the crime?’
‘It wasn’t premeditated. I think they got into an argument, and he pushed her. But his violent past, his threats to kill … it all went against him, Imogen.’ Her voice is kind as she adds, ‘I can see why you’d want to believe he didn’t do it. But he did. I’m sorry.’
I nod.
‘I’ll be in touch about the removal of the sculpture.’ She has her detective voice on again now. ‘Remember what I said. Please don’t allow anyone else down there.’
I watch as she reverses out of the driveway. I close the gate behind her.
When I’m inside I check Find My again. Josh is now back in the office. He won’t be home for a few hours, and I don’t want to stay in the house by myself.
‘Fancy a trip, Solly?’
He looks at me with his head cocked to one side.
I call a taxi and fifteen minutes later we are driving away from the villa towards Bristol.
It’s only been two weeks since we moved out of the flat, but it feels like a lifetime ago, and as I let myself in, it’s as though I’m breaking into someone else’s home.
The flat is smaller than I remember and Solly looks too big for the space.
I poke my nose around the kitchen door. There is a take-away Costa cup left on the breakfast bar.
Solly follows me eagerly into the living room.
Most of our things have been taken to the villa so I’m shocked when I see our old coffee table covered with some kind of equipment.
I move further into the room. Yes, there’s Josh’s laptop next to a monitor and a small computer.
I place my hand on top of the Apple Mac.
Expensive. When did Josh buy all this? And with what money?
I open the laptop and straight away it asks for a password.
We’ve been using each other’s names as our passwords for years and I tap it in, confident he hasn’t changed it.
And why would he? He wouldn’t expect me to come here.
The fact he has all this here and not at the villa means he doesn’t want me to see it, so naturally my curiosity is piqued.
But nothing prepares me for what I find.
At first I assume it’s just photos of the rooms in the villa.
But then I click and see that he has Camera 1.
LIVING ROOM, Camera 2. BEDROOM, Camera 3.
DOROTHEA’S STUDY and Camera 4. KITCHEN, and when I click on each one I can see it’s a live stream.
There are also cameras in the garden, side gate and driveway.
Obviously I knew about those, but I didn’t realize he’d set ones up inside the house too. He’d done all that without telling me.
The truth hits me like a punch to the gut.
Josh has been using the cameras to spy on me.