Chapter 59
Fifty-Nine
Thursday
EMILY
The knock comes just after nine the next morning. I don’t rush to answer. I already know who it will be.
I’d given a brief statement last night after emergency services arrived at the Walker-Dent house, but I knew there would be a follow-up today.
When I open the door, the detectives are framed on the step, the August light spilling in behind them. DI Adebayo smiles, careful and professional as always, and DS Blair gives a brief nod, his expression unreadable.
‘Mrs Sharpe,’ DI Adebayo says. ‘May we come in?’
My breath feels thin and uneven, as if my body is trying—and failing—to prepare itself for what is about to come. I try to blink the grit from my eyes as DI Adebayo watches me carefully.
I step aside, pulling my cardigan tighter around me, and they follow me into the kitchen. I’ve been cleaning again, started at 4 a.m., trying to control the storm in my head. The kitchen looks almost sterile now, stripped of warmth, like the day we moved in.
I gesture to the sofa beside the French doors and offer coffee.
‘No, thank you,’ DI Adebayo says. ‘We won’t keep you long.’
She looks at me with that maddeningly assessing gaze she’s had from the start.
‘You’ll want to know where things stand,’ she begins. ‘Your husband has just been cleared of the murder of Vanessa Lambert.’
Her words hit me and I feel hot and dizzy. Relief is there—violent and immediate—but it’s tangled up with something else. Disbelief? Suspicion? Fear of what they might now know about our past.
Before I can say anything, DS Blair leans forward.
‘However, he remains in custody for the time being.’
I knew it . . . they’ve found the other stuff. My fingers curl tighter around the edges of my seat.
‘Oliver didn’t kill Vanessa,’ DI Adebayo says. ‘But he did intend to take her money under false pretences.’
DS Blair continues. ‘We’d established that Mrs Lambert was about to transfer a substantial sum to the bank account your husband provided details of.
She believed he was acting as her agent in the purchase of a Spanish property.
In reality, and without her knowledge, the offshore bank account belonged to Timothy Walker-Dent. ’
The name drops like a dead weight.
‘Tim?’ I repeat.
‘Yes. We believe Mr Walker-Dent orchestrated the entire sequence. They had agreed Oliver would navigate the payment to Walker-Dent’s “untraceable” account and split the proceeds later. But Mrs Lambert cancelled the payment at the last minute for reasons we don’t yet know.’
‘Seems she rightly smelled a rat,’ DI Adebayo adds. ‘She texted Oliver to tell him she’d stopped the payment and that she intended reporting the matter to the police. Texts he deleted but which Forensics later extracted from his mobile phone.’
‘This is crazy,’ I murmur for their benefit, while imagining exactly how this would have played out.
‘When Oliver told Walker-Dent about Vanessa’s change of heart and her threat to go to the police, Tim saw an opportunity to take matters into his own hands.’
‘He gained access to Mrs Lambert’s house—she apparently left a key under a pot outside the back door—and laced the wine in the fridge with GHB,’ DS Blair says.
‘He planned to drug them both and to enter the house to reactivate the transfer himself and keep all the funds instead of keeping to the split.
‘But his plans went wrong. When he entered the house, Oliver was already out of it and a still-conscious Mrs Lambert put up a fight, threatening to tell the police everything. Walker-Dent tried to pressure her to complete the transfer of funds, but she refused. That’s when he lost his temper and struck her.
A single blow to the head that killed her. ’
‘So then Tim panicked and left Oliver to take the hit?’ I finish.
DI Adebayo nods. ‘He knew all signs would point to your husband as the killer. He’d planned to walk off with the money but left with nothing.’
I feel like I’m going to vomit.
‘Why?’ I whisper. ‘Why would Tim do that?’
‘Pure greed,’ DI Adebayo says simply. ‘And fear. We’ve uncovered evidence suggesting that he and his wife, Lara, have been running scams of their own for years.
Walker-Dent was deeply in debt—which his wife was unaware of.
He needed Mrs Lambert’s money to avoid bankruptcy.
In the end she scuppered his attempts to get the funds but, sadly, paid with her life when she threatened to expose their fraud. ’
Oliver had been well and truly played by another player.
‘Walker-Dent is currently in hospital with internal injuries from the stabbing,’ DI Adebayo says. ‘We’re waiting for word from the doctors as to when we can speak to him.’
‘But how do you know all this, if you haven’t spoken to him yet?’
The detectives glance at each other.
‘Lara Walker-Dent’s camera recorded him confessing in a panic to her about what he’d done,’ DI Adebayo says.
‘What?’ My hand flutters to my throat. ‘Lara knew?’
‘I’m afraid so. And she kept the recording—why, we’re not sure—but it was recovered by the forensic search team.’
She knew. Lara knew. All the time I was in that house, all the moments she supported and comforted me. The detectives are still watching me.
‘You never really know who your neighbours are,’ I say quietly, the irony not lost on me.
‘Which brings me to the incident yesterday with Rachel—now known to be Jane Guthrie,’ DI Adebayo remarks.
‘She was involved in a car crash five years ago and had tracked down the person she believed killed her husband and their unborn child. She was certain that Tim Walker-Dent was responsible. We are now investigating her claims.’
I think of Lara’s face, all twisted with fury when Rachel came to the door.
I close my eyes. The truth settles, heavy and irrevocable.
‘She’s lost so much,’ I say. ‘What will happen to her now?’
‘She’s been arrested and taken into custody,’ DS Blair says. ‘She won’t be formally interviewed until a full psychiatric assessment has taken place.’
DI Adebayo clears her throat. ‘There’s something else we need to tell you.’
‘We received an anonymous digital tip-off that directed us to emails arranging the planned payment by Mrs Lambert.’
DS Blair’s eyes flick briefly to DI Adebayo, as if checking how much he’s allowed to say. Then he says, ‘The tip-off came from Roman Thomson.’
My heart gives a lurch.
‘Roman?’ The name comes out like a cough and I force a surprised expression. ‘But Roman is just a kid.’
‘He involved himself in events in ways he shouldn’t have. Illegal ways.’ His mouth sets. ‘He accessed private accounts and data without consent. But some of what he pulled was relevant enough that we had to treat it as intelligence.’
DI Adebayo takes over smoothly. ‘Roman provided evidence that led us to Tim Walker-Dent’s involvement.’
I nod but say nothing for fear of revealing that I knew all about Roman’s digital meddling.
‘Roman involved himself in your husband and Mrs Lambert’s private affairs. Apparently, he wanted revenge for a humiliating incident that occurred out on the street.’
The removals accident the day we came to Orchard Lane . . .
‘We are not endorsing Roman’s methods. But the information he provided has materially affected our assessment of the murder allegation against your husband.’
My stomach drops in a different way.
‘Has Roman been arrested?’ I ask, hearing the tremor in my own voice.
‘Not yet.’ DS Blair exhales. ‘He’s currently in hospital.’
‘Hospital?’ My mind scrabbles for an image—Roman in his fleece, mouthy and too clever for his own good, swaggering across the lane.
‘He has a broken collarbone from a hit-and-run,’ DS Blair says. ‘The driver, we now know to be Tim Walker-Dent. When he discovered from his wife that Roman had been snooping into their affairs, he decided to take matters into his own hands.’
‘Roman was found in a ditch. If his friend hadn’t come looking for him when he did . . .’ DI Adebayo does not finish the sentence. ‘Walker-Dent then returned home to be confronted by Jane Guthrie.’
A cold shiver crawls up my spine. When Tim arrived at the door, calm and apparently upbeat, he’d just mown down Roman and left him for dead.
DS Blair makes a sound of incredulity in the back of his throat.
‘The whole Orchard Lane incident has certainly kept the hospital doctors busy. One kid with a fractured collarbone, one stab victim, also the driver in the hit-and-run, in hospital after stomach surgery, and to top it all, a retired banker visiting A&E after being attacked with a brass poker.’
I frown. ‘Who is the retired banker?’
‘A Mr Ron Windsor.’
For a second I don’t understand. ‘As in . . . Ron and Margaret Windsor? He was attacked?’
‘In his own home,’ DI Adebayo says. ‘By his lodger. Before she went to the Walker-Dent address.’
My mouth falls open. ‘Jane Guthrie attacked him?’
DS Blair gives a little shrug. ‘We assume she discovered that Mr Windsor was secretly filming her getting undressed in her bedroom.’
My stomach turns over like I’ve swallowed something rotten.
‘He filmed her . . .’ I repeat, horror-struck.
‘Via a covert camera hidden in her room,’ DS Blair confirms, grimacing.
‘But how do you know he was watching her?’ I ask.
DI Adebayo’s voice is steady. ‘Because we have evidence of Ron Windsor viewing the footage on his office computer, captured again by Roman Thomson.’
Roman. He really is the gift that just keeps on giving.
I think of Margaret’s warm smile. Ron’s self-righteous Neighbourhood Watch facade.
‘He’s confessed to staging certain things that have happened on the lane to facilitate him investigating as Neighbourhood Watch coordinator,’ Blair says. ‘One incident being the defacing of your bench.’
My mouth drops open. It was him! But that’s nothing compared to the other stuff he’s been doing. I think of Jane Guthrie in that house, in that bedroom, still struggling with the loss of her husband and unborn child, but believing she is safe in the Windsors’ home.
And then I think of Roman, lying broken somewhere in a hospital bed after what he did to protect me from the police inquiry.
Nothing about Orchard Lane is what it claims to be.
Not the couples. Or the houses.
Not even the one teenager there.
My throat tightens. Relief is still there, albeit flickering a little weaker. It still feels like I’m sitting in the mouth of a trap.
Oliver has been cleared of murder but remains in custody.
Tim Walker-Dent is in hospital, stabbed by a woman intent on revenge.
And Roman is badly injured after Tim tried to run him down.
The walls move in and out. I grip the edge of the sofa.
Roman. Fifteen, pale and anxious in my kitchen. Telling me the truth about what he’d done, how he’d erased evidence that would entrap me. He’d been trying to help me.
And what had I done? I’d told Lara that he had hacked half the street and in doing so as good as signed his death warrant when she relayed the information to Tim.
DI Adebayo’s gaze lingers on my face. Not accusatory, at least not yet. But I feel like she knows . . . suspects, something’s not quite right.
My heart flutters.
There is still time. A very narrow, dangerous pocket of opportunity where I could let Oliver take the full weight of the blame. Even if he tells them the truth, Roman has blurred the edges enough that it becomes my word against his. Suspicion but no proof.
I can stay quiet and survive this. They need never know the truth.