Chapter 33
Henley stood at her front garden gate watching her house and wondering if it was still a place of safety.
She’d done everything to protect her family refuge, made herself ex-directory and had no social media presence to speak of, yet Sian Fox-Carnell had found her.
She looked over her shoulder at the street.
A jogger ran by and the family who lived three doors down – the young twins dressed in their judo gis – walked home.
Life looked normal but Henley knew that it was an illusion.
Sian Fox-Carnell wasn’t the only one to breach the wall and cross her boundary.
Peter Olivier had been the first one to show her that she and her family were not untouchable.
Henley could feel sharp splinters pushing through the soft flesh of her palm as she gripped the garden gate.
Most of the time she could convince herself that she was ok and that she had survived but that wasn’t the truth.
Her PTSD wasn’t gone but was just buried in a shallow grave in her body.
The anxiety was silent to the external world, but it was like a pneumatic drill in her chest, she was irritable, the hours she slept were getting shorter and she wanted to hide, to avoid the world.
The pace of her heart was erratic, her breathing laboured, as she approached her front door.
‘For god’s sake,’ she said under her breath, her hand shaking too much to unlock the door. She jerked back as the lock pulled away from her and the door opened. She looked up to see Rob standing in front of her with a tea-towel over his shoulder.
‘What’s wrong, what’s happened?’ he asked.
Her answer was swallowed by choke-filled tears as she fell against him.
‘I didn’t know you were going to be home. I thought you’d changed your Manchester days this week,’ Henley said as she walked back into the warm kitchen an hour later. Despite the hot shower, her body ached with exhaustion.
‘I texted you.’ Rob took a shepherd’s pie out of the oven and placed it on the counter. ‘There was another change of plans at work. The journalist who was covering the crypto conference at the Excel this week is sick, so I said I’d cover it.’
Henley reached for her bag that Rob had hung on the back of the chair. ‘Crypto? I thought you said it’s all a scam.’ She took out her phone, scrolled through the text messages including another text from Eloise, until she found the message that Rob had sent her at 11.14 a.m..
‘It is all a scam,’ Rob said, dishing up.
‘How did you know that I was at the door?’ She was grateful that Rob had decided to come home early and cook comfort food.
‘The doorbell app. I keep forgetting to turn off notifications for motion. I looked and I could see your face. It brought back memories of when you were home on sick leave just after we found out you were pregnant. You looked broken. As though the world was about to come crashing down on you.’
It wasn’t lost on Henley that Rob had avoided saying ‘When you were on sick leave after you were stabbed.’ She knew that time had been just as painful for him as it had been for her.
‘The problem with my job is that death isn’t the end, it’s the beginning,’ Henley said.
‘And it’s never straightforward. When we’re dealing with a person’s death it comes with all of these complexities and emotions that aren’t even your own.
You don’t have room for yourself, and you can’t close the door at 5.
30 p.m. and leave it all behind. That person’s death follows you. ’
Rob ate silently for a few minutes, the news drifting from the TV next door. ‘It doesn’t have to be this way for you,’ he said.
‘Rob, don’t—’
‘No, don’t worry. I’m not going to start banging on about you leaving the SCU or the force. We’ve gone up and down that road and we end up in the same place. A stalemate. I’m just saying I want you to know that you’re not on your own. I’m your safe place.’
‘I’m sorry for making our marriage hard.’ Henley reached out and touched his face.
‘It’s not all on you. Sitting on a train travelling up and down to Manchester every week has given me a lot of time to think and … it won’t be easy, but it will be better, after all it’s not just us. We’ve got Emma and Luna.’
‘Yes, we do, and it would make her day if you were the one to pick her up from Dad’s tomorrow.’
‘That won’t be a problem. I’m interviewing the keynote speaker at 3 p.m. and I’ll leave straight after,’ said Rob as Henley’s phone began to vibrate across the kitchen table. ‘Is there anything else going on with you or is it just the case?’
Henley groaned as her argument with Pellacia and the arrival of DC Copeland entered her head. ‘My mum always said that half the battle when working in a team was managing people and their egos.’
‘No, it’s more than that,’ said Rob. ‘There’s been something bothering you for a while. Even when we were on holiday there were times when you just seemed to disappear into yourself. You had the same look on your face that Emma gets when she’s trying to work out a puzzle.’
Henley exhaled sharply. There were times where she was so focused on their marital problems that she forgot how well Rob understood her.
Rob had an ability to see through her defences and to support her without being overbearing.
She couldn’t blame him for questioning her decisions to stay in a job which had brought danger to their front door on more than one occasion.
She counted to five in her head and then she spoke.
She told Rob all about Eloise’s belief that Rhimes had been murdered.
Rob let Henley talk, only interrupting to ask questions when the journalist in him took over.
‘Fuck,’ he said when Henley had finished. ‘And you’re sure in regard to the medical evidence that Rhimes was strangled and didn’t die from—’
‘Death from asphyxiation, not suicide from asphyxiation,’ said Henley. ‘Linh has the toxicology report and there was no carbon monoxide poisoning in his blood.’
‘You can’t breathe it in if you’re already dead.’
‘Exactly. Someone staged Rhimes’s death to make it look like a suicide.’
Rob pressed his lips together as he leaned forward, placing his hands in a steeple. He was thinking, percolating his thoughts. ‘What have the others said? Stanford, Eastwood, Pellacia.’
Henley flinched. Preparing herself to hear Pellacia’s name followed by an accusation, but it never came.
‘Stanford and Eastwood don’t know about any of this. Eloise told Pellacia what I was doing but he doesn’t know what I’ve found,’ said Henley. ‘I didn’t want to burden them.’
‘Anj, come on, man. I’m looking at my wife and you are burdened.’
‘Rob, I can deal with this on my own.’
‘Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should. I don’t want to see you—’ Rob paused as Henley’s phone began to vibrate across the kitchen table again. ‘Maybe you should tell Pellacia everything. The one thing I know is that he won’t let you break.’
Henley felt an anxious flutter in her chest. She had betrayed her husband on more than one occasion and he was entrusting another man with her well-being. She reached for her phone. It was Linh. She held it up, showing Rob. He pulled a face, stood up and cleared the table.
‘I’m not sitting here listening to your mate talking about post-mortems or her latest escapades. Not tonight. I’ll be in the front room.’
‘I’ll join you in a bit.’ She accepted the call. ‘What can I do for you, Dr Choi?’
‘You sound bright, Detective Inspector Henley. What happened, did that husband of yours come home early and give you a good seeing to or was it the other one?’
‘Thank God I don’t have you on speaker. For the record, yes, he did come home early, and the second bit is none of your bloody business.’
‘You’re no fun. Well, let me give you some news about the case. Nathan Hall’s legs were pulverised. In my opinion he was hit with a mallet of some kind. Both knees and shins smashed.’
‘I can’t even imagine the pain,’ said Henley.
‘Even if he had survived, there would have been no way to save those legs. He would have been looking at amputation,’ explained Linh.
‘Moving up. Broken pelvis, again looked to have been smashed with a mallet of some kind and then we have his face. Broken jaw, broken collarbone and fractures to his skull and, as you already know, he was scalped.’
‘Are you able to say if all three victims were scalped with the same knife?’
‘I won’t know that until tomorrow. I’ve sent the photos of Nathan Hall and Tabitha Ashcroft to the knife expert to compare against Fox-Carnell,’ Linh replied.
‘But, what you really want to know is cause of death. Asphyxiation. He was still alive when he was hung from the top of the staircase. Hall also had cocaine and alcohol in his system, but it wasn’t enough to impair him.
He would have known exactly what was going on. ’
‘God,’ Henley groaned. She got up and removed two wine glasses from the cupboard.
‘Do you think there will be more? There’s something about these scalpings that rub me the wrong way. It’s not just wicked. It’s cold, Anj. You have to put thought into that. It’s not something you do on a whim.’
‘That’s what concerns me,’ said Henley. ‘Someone acting on the spur of the moment is going to be careless and make mistakes but when it’s planned like this. It just seems more dangerous.’
‘I don’t envy you. In fact, I never envy you.’