Blood Relative (4 page)

‘We’re already checking that,’ said Yeats.

‘Good. Then you’ll find that I called Mariana at about 4.30, from Alderley Edge. She was still at the office then. She said she was planning to head home at five to make sure she was there when Andy, my brother, arrived.’

‘What was the purpose of your brother’s visit?’

‘He’d come up north to visit our mother. She’s in a nursing home near Harrogate and Andy lives down near Ashford, in Kent. It made sense for him to spend the night at our place.’

‘So your brother went alone to see your mother? You didn’t think you should go too …’

‘I visit my mother regularly, Chief Inspector. But she suffers from dementia – Alzheimer’s – so she easily gets confused. It’s better if we go one at a time.’

That wasn’t the truth: not the whole truth, anyway. But it seemed to satisfy Yeats.

‘I see. And what was the purpose of the call you made to your wife at 4.30?’

‘I told her the meeting looked like it was running late.’

‘Why was that?’

‘That’s not relevant,’ Khan intruded. ‘My client has already told you that you can confirm his movements.’

‘So he says, yes,’ Yeats agreed. ‘But the more detailed Mr Crookham’s account is, and the more it tallies with the accounts given by other possible interviewees, the more I’ll be inclined to believe what he says.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said to Khan, then I looked across the table at Yeats: ‘If you must know, Michelle Norris wasn’t happy with the stone tiles in the front hall. She thought they were too dark. We had to sort out getting some new ones trucked over from Italy. Anyway, I didn’t leave till about half-six and I called Mariana again an hour later, from the car – hands-free, before you ask – to let her know when I was getting home.’

‘I’m not interested in traffic violations, Mr Crookham. Go on …’

‘Well, Andy and I had been planning to have a drink at the Queen’s Head before dinner, but I told her we’d have to scrap that.’

‘So this would be at approximately 7.30?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re sure about that?’

‘Yes. I was listening to Five Live. They were doing the build-up to the United game at Old Trafford. Kick-off was 7.45, so it must have been about 7.30.’

‘Was this a long call?’

‘No, a couple of minutes at most. Not even that, probably.’

‘Because you were just informing your wife that you wouldn’t be going down the pub with your brother?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you speak to your brother?’

‘No.’

Yeats frowned: ‘That’s odd. You didn’t feel like saying hello, telling him yourself?’

‘Actually, I wanted to talk to him.’

‘So why didn’t you?’

‘Because …’ Suddenly it hit me why Andy had not come to the phone, but I didn’t need Samira Khan to tell me to keep to that to myself. I just answered the question truthfully: ‘Mariana said he couldn’t talk to me. She said he was on his own phone.’

Yeats leaned forward like a hound picking up a scent. ‘I see … and how did she sound? When she said your brother couldn’t talk …’

Khan leaned across and whispered in my ear: ‘You shouldn’t answer this.’

Then she spoke up: ‘A witness cannot be forced to incriminate their spouse, you know that Chief Inspector.’

‘Really?’ the detective replied. ‘Show me the statute of criminal law that says that. It’s common law at best: at worst just a legal urban myth. In any case, Ms Khan, you’re missing my point. We don’t have a formal time of death yet, but it’s clear that Andrew Crookham had been dead for at least two hours before the pathologist examined his body. If your client’s alibi holds up, he cannot possibly have committed the murder. Meanwhile his wife, who almost certainly was in the house at the time of the death, is covered with blood. She appears to be in a very disturbed state of mind. A knife, also covered in blood, was recovered at the scene of the crime. It will be examined for fingerprints and DNA evidence. In the meantime it would be very helpful to be given some idea of Mrs Crookham’s mental state at the time her husband arrived home.’

‘If she’s ever charged, maybe it would be,’ said Khan, ‘but not before.’

‘The closer to the events described, the more powerful the evidence.’

‘I’ll answer your questions,’ I said. I didn’t care how much evidence the police said they had, it was inconceivable to me that Mariana could be guilty.

Khan glared at me: ‘Well then you do so against my advice.’

Yeats looked pleased at his victory. ‘So, your wife: how did she sound?’

‘Odd. Flat. A little spaced-out. Like she wasn’t quite with it.’

‘Are you suggesting she was under the influence of alcohol, or drugs?’

‘No. Mariana isn’t a heavy drinker. And I’ve never known her to take drugs.’

‘I see. So how did the conversation end?’

‘She just hung up on me.’

‘You didn’t try to call her back?’

‘No, there didn’t seem any point. I was going to be home soon enough. If there was any problem, I thought I’d sort it out then.’

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Khan give a rueful shake of the head, as if to say, ‘I told you so.’

‘What sort of problem did you think there might be?’ asked Yeats.

‘How can he answer that?’ Khan interrupted. ‘It’s pure conjecture.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ignoring her. ‘I suppose I thought they might have had a row or something.’

Yeats said, ‘Did they do that often, have rows?’

‘No, they always got on fine.’

‘So why would they start arguing now?’

‘I can’t think of a reason. It was just a possible explanation for her to sound the way she did.’

‘Flat … spacey?’

‘Yes.’

‘And now what do you think?’

‘My client will not answer that question,’ said Khan, as much to me as to Yeats.

The Chief Inspector changed the subject: ‘So your relationship with your wife, how’s that been lately?’

‘Again, irrelevant,’ said Khan.

‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ Yeats insisted.

‘My marriage has been fine, thank you very much.’ I said. I wanted it on the record, for all the world to know.

‘There’s no one else involved?’

‘No! My wife is the love of my life, Chief Inspector. She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Why the hell would I want anyone else?’

‘Plenty of men cheat on beautiful wives.’

‘Not this one.’

‘Has she cheated on you?’

‘No, I’m sure she hasn’t. Why can’t you just believe me? We were happy.’

‘I’m not trying to cast aspersions on your married life, Mr Crookham. I’m trying to work out why your wife would lash out with a knife and repeatedly stab your brother in a frenzied attack that led to his death. And one reason why a woman attacks a man is sex. Maybe she was defending herself. Is it possible your brother might have tried to force himself upon her?’

‘What, so my wife is an adulterous murderer and my brother is a failed rapist? Has it occurred to you that they might both be victims? Why aren’t you looking for someone else, an intruder? Criminals break into people’s houses all the time and if there’s anyone there they kill them. Or it could be some kind of loony, a schizophrenic or something. Anyone could have done it. But all you want to talk about is my family.’

‘That’s because one of your family’s lying dead in the mortuary and the other’s currently being examined by a police doctor, prior to a full psychiatric examination,’ said Yeats. ‘Meanwhile there is no evidence of any break-in: no forced locks, no broken windows, no footprints, nothing. So excuse me if I don’t waste my time looking for people who don’t exist. Now, let’s get back to your story. What time did you arrive home?’

I talked him through the sequence of events from the moment I got out of the car until the arrival of the police. When I finished the Chief Inspector said, ‘Thank you, Mr Crookham. I’ve just got two more questions.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘First, for the record, did you kill your brother, Andrew Crookham?’

‘No, I did not.’

‘And second, do you have any information that might help us to establish why your wife would have killed your brother?’

‘Absolutely not.’

The Chief Inspector spoke into the microphone to state that the interview was being terminated and gave the exact time before he switched the tape recorder off. Then he got up from his chair, paused before leaving the room and said, ‘Thank you for your cooperation, Mr Crookham. I’m sorry for your loss.’

Samira Khan and I were left alone in the room. She walked to the far wall, directly beneath the camera, then motioned me across to her.

‘They can’t see us here. The camera’s supposed to be switched off at the end of the interview, but you can’t be too careful. I just wanted to ask: that information you gave, about the site visit and the phone calls: it’ll hold up?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘You didn’t touch the knife?’

‘No.’

‘Then they’ve got nothing on you. You’ll be all right, I’ll make sure of that. It’s your wife you need to worry about.’

6

Of course I didn’t sleep. How could I? Even if my mind hadn’t been picking away at the events of the past twenty-four hours like a fingernail attacking a scab, police procedures demand that suspects held in cells are checked every thirty minutes to make sure they’ve not tried to harm or even kill themselves. The officers don’t actually come into the cell. But the sound of a metal panel sliding back and forth across a hole in the door, and the sudden shaft of light from outside and the unsettling sense of being examined by an unseen eye are more than enough to stop anyone who isn’t obliterated by drink or drugs from getting any rest.

So I lay on that hard slab of a bench with just a single rough blanket to cover me, trying to come to terms with what had happened. And this is where I have to make a confession. I know I ought to have been thinking about Andy. He was my brother and he was dead. I should have mourned him, grieved for him, run through scenes from our life like home movies in my head. But I didn’t. All I could think about was Mariana.

I went right back to the day we met. At that point I’d been divorced from my first wife Stephanie for two years. Steph was nice, kind, sweet, modestly attractive, averagely unexciting: the perfect woman for the man I was then. She was a pharmacist. When we bought our first and only home she chose a nice little three-bedder in a new development because she preferred the cleanliness of a new build. We very rarely got angry with one another. When we split it was all very civilized. There were no children, no recriminations and the most depressing thing about it was my relief that the marriage was over.

Still, I made a poor job of being a bachelor. I told everyone I was too busy with my career to have time for a new relationship, and that was half true. The practice was still in its infancy so I had to work all the hours God gave just to keep the whole thing moving forwards. But it was also a good excuse to avoid a repetition of the kind of relationship I’d had with Stephanie. We’d stopped being individuals and become Peter-and-Stephanie, the Crookhams. Pete’n’Steffi to our friends. I’d really had it with that.

It was an unusually warm day in May when Mariana Slavik arrived at our office, looking for a summer internship. She was twenty-four years old; German, though her English was excellent; studying for her postgraduate diploma in architecture at Sheffield University. It’s not a bad faculty by any means, highly regarded in fact, but I was curious about why she’d come to England at all. Germany is hardly short of first-rate places to study our profession.

Mariana tilted her head to one side, pouted very slightly as she thought for a moment and then explained with a shrug that there was nothing for her in Germany any more. Her father had left home when she was a girl and made no effort to stay in contact. Her mother had just remarried for the second time, ‘And this one is even worse than the last.’ She had no siblings. ‘I broke up with my boyfriend,’ she said. ‘He was such an asshole.’

It didn’t seem to bother her that she had brought her private life into a job interview, or used a mild obscenity. She just gave a dismissive, almost noiseless, ‘Puh!’ with such natural comic timing that it was all I could do not to burst out laughing. I tried to look very serious as I shuffled through her references, qualifications and drawings, all of which were excellent: far too good, in fact for the menial coffee-making, photocopying, errand-running work we had in mind. When I glanced up again, Mariana was sitting calmly, awaiting my next question. Behind her, however, Nick Church was grinning lewdly and giving me a massive thumbs-up. Our secretary, Janice, was shaking her head in silent despair at male idiocy. And our two junior staff, Jake and Laurie, were staring, as goggle-eyed and slackjawed as goldfish.

Frankly, my performance had been little better than theirs. Mariana had walked into my life wearing a sleeveless orange T-shirt and jeans, with a big brown leather bag slung over one shoulder. Over the years, I’d get used to her entrances and the ripple of people’s expressions as she walked down a street or across a room. But this was the first time, and its immediate effect was to make me suddenly nervous, slightly sweaty and hopelessly incoherent. I felt as though she were interviewing me, rather than the other way around.

As I would discover from being with Mariana, extreme beauty is a force of nature and a form of power. It strikes at some deep, primal, instinctual level of our animal selves. It defines its owner as an alpha-female. And Mariana was certainly that.

‘That’s a one-woman argument for Intelligent Design,’ Nick said to me in the pub after work. ‘You’d have to have God-like genius to dream up a body like hers. There’s no way random genetic mutations could do the job.’

I smiled at the truth as much as the humour of the joke. Any half-decent architect knows that the measure of a building isn’t in the flashiness of its exterior or the money that’s been spent in tarting it up. It’s all in the detail, from the craft that’s gone into the joinery of a timber roof, right down to the smallest light switch. And it was the details that I came to know and love in Mariana: the parabolas described by the curves of her eyebrows; that arrow-straight nose that was almost, but not quite, too long for her face; the way the line of her lips was so precise, yet the flesh of them so full and pillowy; the arch of her back as she cat-stretched first thing in the morning, lying next to me in bed; the velvet touch of her skin beneath my fingers.