Stop Dead (18 page)

Stuffed with pasta, Geraldine drained her one small glass of wine and decided against drinking any more. Instead, she ordered coffee and took a few deep breaths, determined to clear her mind of the investigation so she could return to work with a fresh eye. Life wasn’t so bad. She was happy with her neat little flat, her own private territory where she was free to do whatever she wanted, and she was fortunate to be pursuing a challenging career. Despite its frustrations she enjoyed her work, and didn’t understand why she was feeling so dejected. She wondered if it was the investigation that was dampening her spirits, but she was accustomed to the problems of working on a murder investigation, and anyway it wasn’t going too badly. They had several leads and if forensics could come up with a match for the DNA found on Henshaw’s body, it was even possible they might get a confession for both murders and wrap up the case within a day.

Gazing around as she waited for her bill, she couldn’t help noticing that she was by no means the only person eating alone. On a nearby table a young woman was intent on a kindle while she waited for her food to arrive; a little further off a middle-aged man sat contentedly tucking in to a large plate of noodles. It struck her that life in London was very different to Kent, where she would probably have been the only person sitting by herself. Even so, everyone she knew seemed to be settled in a relationship. Reg Milton and Nick Williams were both happily married, Sam had been rushing off on Saturday to see her new girlfriend while Geraldine had spent the evening sitting at home on her own watching rubbish on the television to take her mind off the case.

The morning had been a waste of time and she was feeling increasingly despondent. She was sitting at her desk when her phone rang. It was the pathologist.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘there’s good news and bad news. First of all we’ve got the results back from the lab concerning the female DNA we found on Henshaw’s body.’

Geraldine’s breath caught in her throat and she was suddenly aware of her heart pumping rapidly. There was a pause. She waited, picturing the pathologist’s boyish features twisted in thought as he searched for the words he wanted.

‘Yes?’ she prompted him impatiently.

‘The tests confirm DNA found on Patrick Henshaw’s body came from a woman, but the bad news is that it doesn’t appear to be a match with either Amy Henshaw or Stella Hallett. In other words, he had intercourse with another woman some time shortly before he was killed, but the sample of DNA found at the scene isn’t a match with either of your suspects.’

‘Damn. Are you sure?’

‘There’s little room for error these days, but –’

Geraldine’s spirits lifted for an instant.

‘But in my opinion, this couldn’t possibly be a match. It’s too improbable. And you certainly couldn’t use this to make a case against either of your suspects. You’d be laughed out of court.’

‘There’s more. This might help. The hair on the back seat of the car is a match with the DNA on the body –’

‘So the woman he was with on the day he died had dark brown hair,’ Geraldine finished the sentence.

‘Exactly.’

‘So who was she?’

Geraldine couldn’t contain her impatience any longer. This was it. All they had to do was find the woman who had been in the car with Henshaw on the day he died, and they would be able to start tracking his last movements. They would discover what he had been doing near the Caledonian Road, what his movements had been before he arrived there. She might even turn out to have witnessed his murder, if she hadn’t actually carried it out herself.

‘I’m afraid I’ve told you all I can.’

‘Whose was the DNA?’ she insisted, but it was a desperate question to which she already knew the answer.

‘We don’t have a match.’

Although she knew what he was going to say, disappointment hit her like a slap in the face.

‘That’s it, I’m afraid. We don’t have a DNA match. All I can tell you is that she has dark hair, probably shoulder length, and split ends, but that’s about all we can say with any certainty because – well, there’s nothing else as yet, nothing that can help your enquiries.’

His voice petered out as though he too was overwhelmed with disappointment. Listening to him, Geraldine felt a wave of lethargy flow through her. After the rush of excitement that his call had provoked, they were no closer to finding the truth about Henshaw’s death.

‘Thank you for letting me know,’ she said automatically before she hung up. Letting me know nothing, she added under her breath. They were no closer to tracing the woman Henshaw had spent time with on the day he died, for all their forensic expertise. The thought of spending hours trawling through CCTV to find images of dark-haired women entering or leaving the street where Henshaw’s body had been found made her groan out loud.

‘Why the hell couldn’t the woman at least have had ginger hair?’ she asked.

Nick gave her a sympathetic smile.

‘We’ve found the haystack,’ she explained. ‘Now all we have to do is find the needle – a woman with shoulder-length dark hair who was near the Caledonian Road on Sunday evening. That narrows it down a bit, doesn’t it? And to cap it all, our chief suspect is blonde. It just gets better and better.’

T
he identity of the dark-haired woman who had travelled in Henshaw’s car and had sex with him shortly before he died remained obscure. In the meantime Reg was keen to put pressure on Amy and Guy. Expecting to gain most from Henshaw’s death, they remained the obvious suspects. As it turned out they became worse off after he was killed, but neither of them had been aware of the financial disaster his death would bring them. Ironically, they had both anticipated the exact opposite.

Amy was escorted in from a different interview room where she had been kept for a brief period with a uniformed female constable standing at the door. She had been left there for long enough to unsettle her, but Geraldine’s hopes that the widow might be cowed by her incarceration were dashed as soon as Amy entered the room. Her hair was immaculate and her make-up apparently so freshly applied that it looked as though she had touched it up while waiting. She sashayed into the room heralded by a scent of expensive perfume, a fake smile fixed on her painted lips, looking like a hostess at a corporate lunch.

She sat down gingerly on the hard chair, and smiled at Geraldine and Sam in turn before addressing herself to the former.

‘Good afternoon, Inspector. I take it this is about my poor husband? I hope you’ve found out who’s responsible.’

‘I’m afraid we can’t divulge any details to you just yet –’

‘Not even to me? His widow? I find that preposterous. I have a right to know who did this to my husband.’

‘I understand you may be feeling impatient, Mrs Henshaw, but rest assured we are doing our job very thoroughly and whoever killed your husband will be brought to justice. Make no mistake about that. The person or persons responsible are not going to get away with it.’

‘Are you telling me you have no idea who did this terrible thing?’

‘That’s not what I said. Now, Mrs Henshaw, if you don’t mind, we’ll get through this a lot faster if you let us ask the questions.’

Amy Henshaw sat very upright in her chair, a bored expression on her face. But her eyes revealed her anxiety.

‘Did you have a close relationship with your husband?’

Pencilled eyebrows rose. She was clearly startled at the direction the interview was taking.

‘Close? Yes, of course we were close. We’d been married for twenty years.’

Her eyes flicked to Geraldine’s left hand.

‘Are you married, Inspector?’

Ignoring the question, Geraldine continued.

‘It seems a reasonable question under the circumstances. Your husband left you nothing in his will after your twenty years of marriage, during which you were conducting a long-standing affair. So I’ll ask you again, was your relationship close?’

‘My relationships in and outside of my marriage are none of your business.’

Amy was unnerved, her composure beginning to slip. With luck it wouldn’t be long before she lost control of herself. Geraldine leaned back in her chair and scrutinised the widow’s face, focusing solely on her left eye, until Amy began to fidget.

‘Not only did he leave you destitute, he didn’t even warn you about the position he was leaving you in, did he? And it’s not as if he was a very young man, not like Guy. He was an experienced business man who understood very well what he was doing with his money. I’d say that leaving you saddled with a mortgage you couldn’t possibly repay was pretty harsh, after twenty years. It’s not as if you walked out on him. You were still his wife.’

Amy didn’t answer but she looked tense.

‘Why would he do that?’ Geraldine pressed her, ‘leave you so badly off without preparing you for what might happen?’

‘Because he’s a bastard, that’s why.’

Geraldine nodded sympathetically. Leaning forward, she spoke gently.

‘Tell me about Patrick.’

To Geraldine’s relief, Amy began to talk. Geraldine already knew she had met her husband when she was only nineteen, but she kept quiet and let her talk.

‘I was a child,’ Amy said. ‘I didn’t know anything and he was forty-five when we met. He was so much older than me, he swept me off my feet.’

Geraldine thought about Amy’s twenty-three year old boyfriend but said nothing. Bowled over by the attentions of an older man Amy had readily succumbed to his courtship, flattered and excited by the glamour of the wealthy lifestyle he was offering her. But the reality of their marriage had been a miserable failure. The more Amy talked, the angrier she became, while Geraldine sat listening in silence, waiting for her to slip up.

‘You think if you marry an old bloke like that with so much money you’ll be sorted for life, but it didn’t work out that way. And now, after putting up with his foul temper and disgusting habits all this time, the bastard’s gone and left me without a penny to my name and a bloody great mortgage hanging over me.’

With increasing vehemence she described the breakdown in her marriage which, in her opinion, was entirely the fault of her self-centred husband who often came home drunk and, on more than one occasion, behaved violently towards her.

‘He hit me, properly. He really hurt me. And he had no respect for women. You know what I mean. Only of course I didn’t find that out until it was too late.’

Under other circumstances Geraldine would have felt sorry for the abused and emotionally neglected woman, but she was concentrating on unpicking the truth from Amy’s narrative, and couldn’t afford to sympathise with a woman who was a suspect in a murder investigation.

‘That’s what he was like,’ Amy concluded, ‘a selfish vicious brute. He was a real pig.’

‘You must have been relieved when you heard he was dead,’ Geraldine said quietly. ‘Before you knew about the will, that is.’

Amy nodded.

‘I was pleased alright. It was the best news I’d ever had. And I’ll tell you something else. I’m still pleased he’s gone, even with all the money trouble he’s left me in. That’s just typical, that is. I mean, what husband does that to his wife? You’re absolutely right in thinking I’m pleased.’

‘I said relieved,’ Geraldine pointed out.

‘Relieved, pleased, you name it. What’s the difference? Can you imagine what it was like, living with him, never knowing from one day to the next if he was going to come home off his face, ready to fly off the handle. Talk about walking on eggshells – I slept on eggshells for twenty years. You have no idea what it was like.’

Geraldine kept her voice steady.

‘And yet you never lost your temper with him, never answered back or packed your bags to leave? You just stayed there and put up with this appalling treatment, day in day out, without once complaining?’

‘That’s about the measure of it.’

Amy looked away, refusing to be drawn any further, although Geraldine did her best to needle her into confessing that she had finally been provoked into retaliating.

‘All I want to do now is get shot of that wretched house – God, when I think of the hours I put into it – and settle down somewhere else. Of course we won’t be able to afford to live in London-’

‘
We
?’ Geraldine asked. ‘That’s you and –?’

‘Me and Guy. There’s nothing to stop us moving in together now –’

Geraldine pulled a face and shook her head.

‘What?’ Amy demanded, her eyes stretched wide in annoyance. ‘What are you looking at me like that for?’

With a show of reluctance Geraldine explained that Guy had appeared very shocked to learn of Amy’s financial straits. Amy was immediately incensed.

‘What the hell did you go and tell him that for? You had no right to share my private affairs –’

‘Guy told us you had no secrets from each other, so naturally we assumed he knew all about the will. It’s hardly something you’re likely to forget to mention, is it?’

Amy was pensive for a few seconds.

‘How did he take it? The news of my mortgage. Was he OK with it?’

‘OK?’ Geraldine hesitated. ‘No, I wouldn’t say that exactly, would you?’

She turned to Sam for confirmation.

‘Well, he didn’t seem too pleased when he heard that, instead of securing a luxurious lifestyle with a wealthy older woman, he’d got himself involved with a woman who was not only old enough to be his mother, but penniless as well.’

Sam made a show of searching through her notebook.

‘No,’ she said at last. ‘I can’t find it. But he said something about having to start all over again.’

Geraldine frowned, afraid that Sam had been too obvious, but Amy started forward, a horrified expression on her face.

‘He said that? You mean, he’s going to look for someone else?’

‘Words to that effect,’ Sam mumbled.

She glanced nervously at Geraldine. They both knew it was a lie.

‘So he was only interested in my money all the time,’ Amy fumed, unconscious of the irony. ‘A gold-digger. Well, he can just whistle for it now, because he won’t get a penny from me.’

‘Oh I think he knows that,’ Geraldine said cheerfully.