What to Do When Someone Dies (22 page)

I sat in the living room and stared at the empty grate. Greg used to love making fires. He was very good at it, very methodical. He would never use fire-lighters, saying they were a cheat, but started instead with twisted pieces of paper, then kindling. I remembered how he would kneel and blow on the embers, coaxing them into flames. I hadn’t lit the fire since he died and I thought about doing so now, but it seemed too much effort.

Out of the blue a thought occurred to me that was both trivial and irritating. I tried to brush it away, because I was done with my botched attempts at amateur sleuthing, but it clung like a cobweb in my mind: why hadn’t Greg written down his appointment with Mrs Sutton, the old lady I had met on the day of his funeral? I was sure she had told me she’d arranged to see him on the day after his death, but it hadn’t been in his diary.

I told myself it didn’t matter, it was meaningless. I made myself a cup of tea and drank it slowly, sip by sip, then rang the office.

‘Can I speak to Joe?’ I asked.

‘I’m afraid Mr Foreman isn’t here.’

‘Tania, then?’

‘Putting you through.’

After a few seconds, Tania was on the line.

‘Tania? It’s me, Ellie.’

‘Ellie,’ she said. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine. Listen, Tania, can you do me a favour?’

‘Of course!’

‘I need the number of one of Greg’s clients.’

‘Oh,’ she said doubtfully.

‘I met her at the funeral. A Mrs Sutton, I think – I don’t know her first name. She was very nice about Greg and there was something I wanted to ask her.’

‘All right.’ There was a pause and then her voice again: ‘It’s Marjorie Sutton and she lives in Hertfordshire. Have you got a pen handy?’

‘Hello?’ Her voice was crisp and clear.

‘Is that Marjorie Sutton?’

‘It is. Who am I speaking to?’

‘This is Ellie Falkner, Greg Manning’s widow.’

‘Of course. How can I help?’

‘I know this sounds peculiar, but I was tying up loose ends and there was something I wanted to ask you.’

‘Yes?’

‘You told me you were going to see Greg the day after he died.’

‘That’s right.’

‘You’re quite sure about that? Because there’s no record of an appointment in his diary.’

‘He’d only arranged it the day before. It must have been just before the accident. He was very insistent that he should come and see me.’

‘Do you know what it was about?’

‘I’m afraid not. Is there a problem?’

‘No problem,’ I said. ‘Thank you very much.’

I put the phone back in its holster and returned to my chair by the empty grate.

Chapter Twenty-nine

I saw a nature documentary once that showed a baby seal lying in a little hole in the Arctic ice sheet. Above, in the outside world, it was about fifty below but in the hole it was warm, at least by baby-seal standards. It must have felt safe as well. But it wasn’t. Miles away, a mother bear, desperate to feed its cub, had caught the scent of the subterranean baby seal and smashed her way through the snow and ice to get at it.

That was more or less how I felt when DCI Stuart Ramsay came to see me in my work shed. It felt wrong. The whole point of me being there was to pretend that people like him didn’t exist.

‘I was working,’ I said.

‘That’s fine,’ he replied. ‘Don’t mind me.’

‘All right.’ I continued with my sanding while he wandered around the room, picking up tools, occasionally glancing at me with a look of puzzlement, as if I was doing something unimaginably exotic.

‘What are you working on?’

‘It’s a storage chest Greg and I found in a skip months ago. I said I’d repair it and they could have it in the office. It’s really quite nice – look at the carvings on the top. I thought, after Greg died, I wouldn’t bother with it, but now I’ve decided I’m going to do it for them anyway. Joe will like it.’

Ramsay picked up a plastic squeezy bottle and sniffed at the nozzle. He pulled a face. ‘What’s this?’ he said.

‘It’s a laminate,’ I said. ‘It’s the sort of thing teenagers sniff and then go to hospital.’

He put the bottle down. ‘My gran used to hate old furniture,’ he said. ‘She said she hated the idea of sitting in a chair that a dead person had sat in.’

‘It’s a point of view,’ I said.

‘When people got married, they were supposed to buy themselves nice new furniture. That was the tradition then.’ He knelt over one of the chairs I had dismantled. ‘This is the sort of thing that would have been put on a bonfire in the old days.’

‘I guess you haven’t come to hire me,’ I said, ‘so why are you here?’

‘I’m on your side, Ms Falkner,’ he said. ‘You may not think so, but I am.’

‘I wasn’t thinking about it.’

‘It’s just that you make it difficult for someone to be on your side.’

‘You’re a policeman,’ I said. ‘You’re not meant to be on anybody’s side. You’re meant to investigate and find out the truth.’

He looked dubiously at my workbench, then leaned back on it, half sitting. ‘I’m not really here,’ he said. He consulted his watch. ‘I finished work half an hour ago. I’m on my way home.’

‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ I said. ‘Or a drink?’

‘My wife’s waiting at home for me,’ he said, ‘with a drink. Cold white wine, probably.’

‘Sounds nice,’ I said. ‘But if you’re not on duty…’

‘I just wanted to tip you off that things might get a bit messy.’

‘Why do you want to tip me off?’ I said. ‘And why should they get messy?’

‘Obviously it’s all rubbish. You – Well, it sounds stupid even to say the words, but I’m going to anyway. You obviously couldn’t have been involved with the death of your husband, could you?’

I’d been carrying on intermittently with my piece of sandpaper, but now I stopped and stood up. ‘Are you waiting for me to say no?’ I said.

‘You’ve been going around making yourself look suspicious but it still doesn’t work.’

‘It doesn’t work because it isn’t true,’ I said.

‘We don’t work on truth. We work on evidence. Even so. The death of your husband was recorded as an accident. You were the one who was going around screaming that it wasn’t. I’ve tried to think about it as a double bluff, or a triple bluff, but I can’t make it work. And then not only did you claim you didn’t know about your husband’s infidelity, you actually made a bloody… Well, you kept claiming it was all a mistake, that they weren’t even having an affair. Even when you found evidence that they were.’

‘But the evidence doesn’t work.’

‘Evidence is always messy.’

‘Not messy,’ I said. ‘Impossible.’

He was rocking himself back and forth on the bench. ‘You really didn’t know about the affair?’ he said. ‘I mean before your husband’s death.’

‘I don’t believe he was having an affair.’

‘Did you have an argument on the day of your husband’s death?’

‘No.’

Ramsay stood up and walked across the room to look out of the window. ‘Do you need planning permission for a shed like this?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Interesting,’ he said.

‘Is that relevant?’

‘I’ve been thinking of buying one,’ he said. ‘Somewhere to go that’s out of the house. To get back to what I was saying, you’ll notice I’m asking you these questions informally, not taking an official statement. If I had been, it might have seemed I was trying to catch you out.’

‘How?’

‘We’ve been talking to various people.’ He took a notebook from his pocket and flicked through several pages. ‘Including people in your husband’s office. Mr Kelly, for instance, who was in the office that day doing a software update. He said that early on the afternoon of the day your husband died, he heard one end of an argument on the phone between your husband and someone Mr Kelly assumed was you. Perhaps it wasn’t you.’

‘Fergus said that?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s right. It was me.’

‘You said you hadn’t had an argument.’

‘It wasn’t an important argument.’

‘What was it about?’

‘Something completely trivial.’ Ramsay didn’t reply. He was clearly wanting to hear more. ‘It was about him coming home late.’

‘You had an argument about that?’

‘All our arguments were about trivial things. Oh, for God’s sake, I’ve still got the text he sent me afterwards.’ I picked up my mobile phone and scrolled down to one of the messages I hadn’t been able to delete. I handed the phone to Ramsay. He extracted some reading glasses laboriously from his top pocket and put them on.

“‘Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry. Im a stupid fool.” That’s a lot of sorries. Do you mind if I take this?’

‘It’s my phone. I need it.’

‘It’ll be returned to you. Pay-as-you-go phones are available in the meantime.’

‘What do you want it for?’

Ramsay put the phone in his pocket. ‘A cynical person would say that your husband doesn’t say what he’s sorry about. He could be sorry that he’s been unfaithful.’

‘He wasn’t unfaithful.’

‘I’m sure you’re right.’

‘Your wine will be getting warm.’

‘I’m not cynical,’ he said. ‘I’m on your side. I know you’ve worked hard to incriminate yourself, but you haven’t done a good enough job. That crash, with your husband and Milena Livingstone. You couldn’t have done that on your own.’

‘Why do you say on my own?’

‘No reason. Besides, who would you do it with? I’ve talked to her husband as well. Her widower. We don’t really say “widower”, do we? I’ve always wondered why. He didn’t seem like someone to arrange a murder. He seemed more like the tolerant type. If you see what I mean.’

‘If you mean do I agree that he didn’t kill his wife, I do.’

‘And your husband.’

‘Well, of course.’

‘And then there’s Frances Shaw.’

‘I didn’t kill Frances!’

‘I’m just playing devil’s advocate here, trying to construct the sort of theory that a hostile person might. It might be seen as an unfortunate coincidence that you worked for the company run by your husband’s lover.’

‘It wasn’t a coincidence,’ I said. ‘And she wasn’t his lover. I was working there to prove that. Or to find the truth.’

‘I mean, how would you really do it?’

‘What?’

‘Kill two people and make it look like an accident.’

‘I thought you were talking about Frances Shaw.’

‘We’ll come to Frances Shaw. I was thinking about the car. How would you do something like that? Tamper with the brakes, the way they do in films?’

‘How do you tamper with brakes?’ I said. ‘Anyway, what would that do, driving in London? You don’t kill two people driving along at thirty or forty miles an hour. At least, not reliably.’

‘Sounds right,’ said Ramsay. ‘So what do you do?’

I broke the promise I had made and made myself think about the event once more as I had hundreds of times before.

‘They would have to be already dead. And you drive them to somewhere quiet…’

‘Like Porton Way,’ said Ramsay.

‘That would be a perfect choice,’ I said. ‘Where you can steer the car over the edge, set fire to it and then get away.’

‘Making sure you don’t leave any traces,’ said Ramsay. ‘Or drop anything.’

‘Do you think I’d have left my scarf behind if I’d committed the murder?’

‘You wouldn’t believe what people leave at murder scenes. False teeth. Wooden legs. I’m sure it’ll never come to this, Ms Falkner, but if you’re ever called upon to construct a defence, I wouldn’t stress the point that leaving evidence at the scene is an argument that you weren’t there.’

‘I was there. I went later.’

‘Obviously the case with Frances Shaw is very different. Traces of your presence were found everywhere at the scene, including on the body.’

‘I worked there,’ I said, ‘and I pulled the body clear. I wasn’t sure she was dead.’

‘That’s what the emergency services are for,’ said Ramsay. ‘They can revive people who might seem completely dead to civilians like you and me.’

‘She was dead.’

‘I believe this argument has been had before. My point was that there’s no doubt you were there, even though you fled the scene. But while there’s obvious motive for you to kill your husband and his lover, even though you couldn’t have done it, there’s no motive at all for you to kill Frances Shaw, is there?’

There was a pause because I didn’t know what to say. I wondered if he knew something and was waiting to catch me out once more. If there was damning evidence –
more
damning evidence – it was better coming from me. And now was the time to give it. There was a moment when I thought, Why not? I had this feeling that somehow everything was closing in on me, everything was turning out bad. Why not go along with it? What if I was blamed for it, convicted and imprisoned? How did that matter, really? But I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t think of the words with which to say it.

‘We got on well,’ I said. ‘She thought of me as a friend. I felt bad about deceiving her. I meant to tell her but…’

‘So you’re sticking to your story that you didn’t know about your husband’s affair and you had no problem with Frances Shaw…’

‘I didn’t say no problem.’

‘Nothing that would be a motive for violence, I mean.’

‘Of course not.’

‘Although you accuse her husband of having an affair with your husband’s lover.’

‘He
did
have an affair with her – and she wasn’t Greg’s lover. And his wife was also having an affair, don’t forget.’

‘Hmm.’ He scratched the side of his nose. ‘You can see why we’re so confused, can’t you? The problem is that it’s all these negatives, proving that someone didn’t know something, that they didn’t have a motive. I’m not clever enough for that. A knife with blood and fingerprints. Preferably caught on CCTV. That’s what I like.’

He looked around. ‘Do you ever make new furniture?’ he said.

‘I have, as a sort of hobby. It’s more expensive than old furniture.’

Ramsay seemed disappointed. ‘I can’t afford either on my salary. I’ll stick with Ikea.’ He paused and appeared to remember something. ‘You’re not playing any more of your games, are you?’

‘Like what?’

‘Pretending to be someone else.’

‘No.’

‘It wasn’t even funny the first time.’

‘I’ve got an alibi.’

‘Ah, yes. It seems we’re going to have to look into that.’

I told him about the delivery on the day of Greg’s death. I even went into the house, found the name of the solicitors’ office, then wrote out the address and the phone number for him. ‘You can check yourself.’

‘I will,’ he said.