Chapter Forty-Four
Edward needed to act fast. He jumped from the computer and grabbed his phone. The message to Kim! He opened WhatsApp and saw – thank God – the ticks against the message were still grey, so she had not seen it. He deleted the text as the doorbell rang.
Ah, Stevie would help. He could see the blonde frizz just above the line of the frosted panes in his front door. He threw the door open before she could ring the bell again, startling her.
‘Did your dad bring you?’
‘Yes, he’s—’
The car engine revved on the road. Edward rushed past Stevie into the darkness, almost pushing her, trying to catch the car. ‘We need him to take us … Hey! Hey, vicar!’
He sprinted towards the rear lights as they receded, hoping the man in the front seat might look at his rear-view mirror, see the shape in pursuit and stop the car. But he did not. Stevie was walking towards him down the street.
‘“Hey Hey Vicar” was a Sixties song, wasn’t it?’
‘Wendy,’ was all he could say.
‘What? Get your breath back.’
‘Wendy … the photos of the scene …’
‘Man, you need a cup of tea and a sit-down. What the fuck is wrong with you? You look like Heart Attack Jack.’ Then, with unusual softness, she asked: ‘What’s eating you, Edward?’
He barely heard the words, relying on the movement of her lips. ‘Come upstairs to my wall,’ he said. ‘Quickly.’
She did as requested, the stairs creaking under their feet. Almost to herself, Stevie said: ‘You know, when this place goes off the cliff, you may not get a warning? You’ll just get creaking like this.’
‘I lost my hearing aid if you’re speaking,’ said Edward in front of her. ‘I need to face you. Apologies.’
‘How does a person lose a hearing aid?’ muttered Stevie.
In the Post-it room, Edward went through his routine. He switched on the spotlight and picked up a laser pen. ‘Take a look at the words on the squares. Remember what you said?’
‘No,’ said Stevie a little bolshily. ‘You’ll have to be more specific.’
He turned on the laser pointer and a red dot appeared in the circle of the ‘O’ of TOPPINGS. ‘I’ve focused on this side, because I thought we were done with the Wrigley case.’
‘Um, I thought we were too.’
‘Well, I took her to that spot in the forest and found the tree. I know it was the right tree, by the way, because I looked at the crime scene photos just now. In the forest I found the hole drilled into the tree and used Wendy’s spoolie to get at what was inside.’
‘You did. You told me.’
The laser dot had swept left to the word ‘Spoolie’ now.
‘But what I hadn’t thought of until now was she told me she was allergic to a lot of make-up on the day we met, and she specifically mentioned mascara.’
‘It would explain why the brush wasn’t like everyone else’s,’ said Stevie.
‘When you showed us the silk handkerchief with the explosive on, I remember thinking it’s the first time I’ve seen a mascara brush without loads of shite caked on it.
’ There was a pause. ‘So why the hell did she have the brush then?’
‘Because she bought it for the purpose. She brought it for me, Stevie,’ said Edward. ‘The neat white silk square, too, I’ve no doubt. She knew what we were going to find because she had put it there. Right down to the powder in that hole.’
‘What?’ said Stevie. ‘No, no.’
‘Yes! And she made sure I had the tools. I just looked at the crime scene photos. I didn’t even bother before because we’d tied the whole thing up, or so I thought.
I zoomed in on the tree; there was no hole in the trunk.
She drilled it later. She drilled it for me.
’ He kicked the wall. ‘And I thought I’d been so bloody clever,’ said Edward, turning off the laser pen and dropping it into the shoebox on the floor.
‘Thought we’d solved it. What an absolute plonker.
’ He pulled the sticky note marked ‘Forest’ off the wall.
‘I went into the forest with Wendy, looking for the spot, and she said, “A clearing is a place without trees, but this was a clearing with a tree. How do you see a guy from the air if he’s underneath a tree?” And like the mug I am, I thought I’d got the answer ahead of her.
I thought she hadn’t understood the clue she gave me, but she knew right enough.
She might as well have directed me there. ’
‘It’s sounds like you’re dealing with a criminal brain here.’
‘Oh, and the accidental remark which I didn’t clock at the time – “I have a phone signal, good old Chittlehamholt.” She wouldn’t say that if, as she claimed, she hadn’t been there before. Reliable, trusty Chittlehamholt. Wendy swore it was her first time.’
‘But she can’t have killed him. She was in the cinema.’
‘Watching her first Marvel film, on an afternoon? But maybe someone else killed him and she was in on it.’
‘But why?’
‘Let me show you something.’
He pulled the Post-it note with the two doctors’ names on. ‘Hurst Hurst.’ Those are Dr Jonathan Wrigley’s university mates who still live in the area. I met them, just sweet cancer specialists, nothing to see there, as gentle as monks. But that’s how I spelled the name – H.U.R.S.T.’
‘How else would you spell it?’
‘H.E.A.R.S.T. That’s the other spelling.’
Stevie was rubbing her forehead. ‘It’s dark in here and I have a headache. How does the other spelling help?’
‘Because Hearst is a scrambled version of “Hearts”, the doctor who signed Lev Malnyk’s rental agreement, the doctor who had Lev Malnyk as a patient, supplying him with a kidney dialysis machine that was then removed after Lev’s death.
He made his name untraceable when he signed that rental agreement, but he didn’t want to write an entirely false name down.
He writes “Hearts”, and it leads everyone astray. ’
‘Dialysis?’
‘I spoke to Andrea Lopez. You are genius, Stevie, getting that information from Cammell-Curzon. He saw a big machine in the flat. The police found those tubes. But they were nothing to do with drug use and the machine was not a 3D printer. It was a dialysis unit and those were the tubes you need to get the blood in and out. Oh,’ exclaimed Edward, ‘God alive, I’ve got it! I’ve got it! The lady with dementia—’
There was a banging at the front door.
‘Wait here.’
‘Who are you expecting?’
‘Hopefully Kim. Then I can tell her what I’ve told you and we can work out what the hell Lev Malnyk was doing carrying radiation around Sidmouth on his motorbike, and why it got Dr Wrigley killed. Hang on up here, I’ll bring her up.’
Edward felt a lightness of head he had never experienced before, as if clouds had parted in his mind. There was such a beauty to the solution, but the picture in his brain was like a painting with a circle cut out of the centre.
As he bounded down the stairs, he stopped for a second.
The stairs. That made him think of Les and Lily Boyd.
Their attack on him was not random. At their house, their violence had redoubled.
Lily was ill. She used a wheelchair when she wasn’t trying to kill radio presenters.
Unhinged, maybe dying. So why would a dying woman scream like that at him?
Why would they be furious about his “questions”?
Why, when he was not touching her, did she scream those five words—
You won’t let me go.
Something else came to him. When they had beaten him up in his garden, he thought they had tried to push him over the cliff.
But that grab of his arm – by Les Boyd, he was sure – was not to push him.
It stopped him falling. They didn’t want to go that far.
It was something other than psychopathic hatred. Stop asking questions.
He froze on the staircase.
What was he missing?
The second knock at the front door jolted him back to reality. He opened it. Kim was standing there in the porch light. Her expression was odd: lips pursed and eyes narrowed a little, as if she had just been bitten by an insect.
‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘I need to talk to you about Wendy.’
Kim’s brow furrowed. Wendy Wrigley herself appeared. She had been standing to Kim’s right, out of view of the front door. ‘That sounds serious, Edward. Why am I in danger?’
He said nothing for a second, just processing.
‘Your message to Kim said I was in danger. Why?’
‘It’s just a worry I have. Come in, both.’ He was about to say, ‘Stevie’s upstairs,’ and call her, but something stopped him.
‘We raced here after Kim got your message,’ said Wendy. ‘It sounds really scary.’
Had he got this completely wrong? No. The crime scene photos …
oh God, no. The police images were still on the screen on the PC in the lounge.
A zoomed-in photo of the tree trunk without a hole in it.
Would the screensaver have come on? Wrigley must be kept away from that room.
He spoke as naturally as he could. ‘I didn’t think you saw my message, Kim. ’
‘I did—’
‘But the blue ticks—’
‘Oh. Well, yes, I saw it on my lock screen. I rang Wendy and she came straight to me and insisted we come over.’
‘I’ll always be grateful to both of you if you’ve saved me from something horrible.
I do have money to make it up to you,’ she said.
‘Edward, you’ve already saved my reputation.
A solicitor has the details of what you discovered vis-à-vis the death of Jonathan, and he was stunned by how brilliant you were.
He believes we’ll be able to reopen the inquest and get our suicide verdict. ’ She added, ‘Tragically.’
And here we go, thought Edward. The child actor will now perform. Hadn’t she been in a TV soap once? And she had flannelled him about not being any good as an actor ‘because I’m just too truthful’. As if. Well, he needed to be at the same level and give nothing away.
‘I was worried,’ said Wendy. ‘If you know something more—’
He would give her Hearst and see the reaction.