YOU’VE CHANGED your hair.
Joanne couldn’t imagine someone saying such a thing after being told that their wife may be rotting at the bottom of the lake.
She drove back to the crime scene, where Oliver Black would be working by now. Her witness had not given her anything interesting. He was an unemployed tree surgeon, which Joanne thought was interesting in itself, since there was nothing but trees around here. He must have been pretty terrible at his job, or else downright dangerous, not to be employed. He wore a camouflage fleece, and a red neckerchief on his head. The neckerchief was knotted at the nape of his neck in much the same way Joanne’s mother used to wear one, back in the seventies when she worked in the garden, or had the stepladder out for something.
When Joanne questioned her witness about his work situation he became hostile and defensive, telling her that his last boss was an absolute twat, and that if he went around accusing his best workers of stealing the machinery, then he could shove his job. All this to say that he was temporarily employed to dog-sit for an elderly couple who owned the land on which the Volvo was parked and who were currently holidaying in Santorini. He had been walking their four dogs when he found the car.
‘Did you touch it?’ she asked, and he shot back, ‘No.’ Fast. A little too fast for Joanne’s liking.
‘Are you sure you didn’t touch the car?’ she said. ‘Because we’ll be taking prints and we’ll need to eliminate you from our inquiries.’
Kicking the ground with the toe of his paratrooper boot, he admitted to ‘having a little poke around’.
‘Did you remove anything from the scene?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘You’re certain about that?’
‘Certain.’
A pause.
‘Well, nothing except for a couple of Booths carrier bags from the boot,’ he said.
Joanne rolled her eyes. ‘Carrier bags containing?’
‘Some minced beef, carrots, onions…nothing major. I thought I could knock up a shepherd’s pie.’
Joanne wondered if anything was sacred any more.
‘We think a woman may have died in that car,’ she said, annoyed, and he shrugged, giving her a look as if to say, Well, I wasn’t to know that.
She took his details, handed him a card and told him that he could leave. They’d be in touch, she said, and she could see him regretting ever getting involved. He’d given her his mobile number, stalling on one of the digits, and Joanne suspected he’d switched the 3 from a 4 or else a 2. She did it herself sometimes, with acquaintances she had no interest in forging a friendship with, or when she was caught by someone on Kendal High Street conducting a survey. ‘My mobile number?’ she’d say innocently, before reeling off a jumble of figures that was totally unworkable. Anyway, she thought, watching the witness skulk off through the trees, she could catch up with him whatever his number was. She knew where he was staying.
You’ve changed your hair.
Surprisingly, after Noel Bloom had made this comment, she found herself giving him and his two daughters a lift to Bowness to collect his car. He told her he’d left it outside the Italian restaurant last night after drinking a little more than he’d planned, which was evident from the stench of alcohol on his breath. His girls chatted away pleasantly in the back seat. They did not seem remotely distressed by Karen’s absence, Brontë, particularly, peppering Joanne with questions about her work as a detective.
‘Have you ever seen a dead body?’ she asked.
‘A couple,’ replied Joanne.
‘Do the police have to call you ma’am, like they do on TV?’
‘No. They call me Joanne.’
‘What about your boss?’ she asked. ‘Do you have to call her ma’am?’
‘No. We call each other by our first names.’
‘Do you have your own gun?’
And so on.
When she’d taken a look around the house she’d found only one thing of interest. She’d been on the hunt for bloodied clothing, so the first place she headed to was the utility room, where she checked the laundry basket, the washer and the dryer. In the dryer, she found one lone white polo shirt. It had a Reid’s emblem on the breast and, by the size of it, Joanne assumed it belonged to Verity. Strange to dry only one item of clothing, Joanne thought, so she questioned Verity about it.
‘It was dirty after cross-country,’ she explained. ‘I needed it again for today.’
‘You have only one?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you didn’t think to wash any other clothes while you were at it? Strange to wash one thing, don’t you think?’
‘Not really.’
‘Where did you run?’
‘Near school. We have a fixed route.’
Near school was where Karen’s car had been found.
Joanne made a note of it.
Noel didn’t want to tell the girls about Karen’s car having been found, telling Joanne he would ‘deal with it later’. And when she had questioned him about Karen’s parents, asking if they’d heard anything from their daughter and could they shed any light on her whereabouts, Noel’s eyes had flicked sideways, evasively, before he mumbled, ‘They weren’t in.’
‘How about you try them again?’ she’d pressed.
And he’d said, ‘Leave it with me.’
In the rear-view mirror, Joanne watched the girls climb into Noel’s Volvo.
For a strange second, when they’d got out of her car, she had thought Noel was going to lean over and kiss her goodbye.
Not that she wanted him to or anything.
‘How much blood?’ Joanne asked Oliver Black.
‘A lot, apparently.’
‘Like a lot lot?’
‘Yes. And there’s spatter on the dashboard,’ he said. ‘Of course, we can’t know yet if it’s Karen Bloom’s blood, but it doesn’t look good. They’re saying it’d been cleaned up. Not well – it’s smeared all over the front seats – but there’s been an attempt at a clean-up, that’s for certain.’
Joanne asked if they’d located blood anywhere else, and Oliver told her they’d found a couple of spots towards the lake. Trouble was, there had been high winds in the night, which had blown the leaves around to heaven knows where, so it was unlikely they’d find more. They were hoping to discover something in the soil samples taken from the shoreline.
DI Pat Gilmore was near the boot of the Volvo, wagging her finger at one of the CSIs. This was a habit of Pat’s which Joanne didn’t much care for. Joanne felt as if she was being lectured and, from the pissed-off look on the face of the CSI, so did he.
Pat called her over. ‘Joanne, what do you know?’
‘Husband hasn’t heard from her since yesterday morning. He called me last night to report her missing and—’
‘He called you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why you?’
‘I suppose he didn’t know what else to do. Too early to report her gone.’
The CSI cleared his throat. He’d pushed his mask up and was wearing it across his forehead rather than covering his nose and mouth. ‘Or,’ he said, ‘the husband was making it look like he was doing the right thing. Who better to call than the person who’d be investigating?’
Pat Gilmore rolled her eyes dismissively at the officer, saying, ‘Yes, yes, thank you, Miss Marple. We’ll all stick to our own jobs, if that’s okay with you.’
She turned back to Joanne. ‘Where was he last night?’
‘Took his youngest out for dinner and then stayed at home with his kids.’
‘And this morning, how did he seem to you? Nervous? Edgy? Frightened?’
‘Hungover.’
‘What did he say when you told him we’d found the car?’
‘Not a lot. He looked surprised. It seemed genuine.’
‘Upset?’
‘Not really.’
‘Don’t suppose he knows of anyone who’d want to hurt her?’
‘She’s had a few threats.’
‘Okay, well, let’s leave this in the hands of Jason here and head back. I’ll call North West Marine. We’re going to need divers, and we’re going to need dogs. Whoever left this car here scarpered on foot, so let’s see if we can trace them. And we’ll get the husband interviewed this afternoon, see if we have a wife killer on our hands.’
Was Noel Bloom capable of killing his wife?
Absolutely. Didn’t mean he did it, though.
As much as Joanne liked to concentrate on the hard facts in front of her, she tended to get a feeling for who was telling the truth and who wasn’t. Sometimes she got it wrong. Not often. And at the moment she couldn’t see Noel Bloom taking a knife to his wife and dumping her body. Granted, he was not as fretful as perhaps you might expect, but shock was a funny thing. Joanne had delivered enough bad news to enough people to know they didn’t do what they did on TV. Most didn’t cry. Most did everything they could not to cry in front of a police officer. As if bravery was the one thing the situation warranted above all else. Some laughed. That was the trickiest to deal with, since Joanne would have to wait it out, wait it out until it dawned on them that this was not a joke and they would now spend the rest of their lives reliving the moment, the moment when they got it so absurdly wrong. She’d never had anyone collapse or faint. But it didn’t mean she wasn’t ready just in case they did. What she hated most was silence. Silence was the worst.
They drove back to the station in convoy, DI Pat Gilmore in front of Joanne, Oliver Black behind. Pat Gilmore was on her mobile phone the whole way, and she wasn’t a great driver. She was doing less than twenty around some of the bends of the Crook Road and Joanne looked in her rear-view mirror to see Oliver Black miming putting a gun to his head, losing the will.
A lot of blood.
A lot of blood was indicative of repeated stabbing. And though Joanne had never dealt with a stabbing before, she knew about slippage.
Slippage occurred when the perpetrator’s hand, slick with the victim’s blood, slipped down the knife, causing wounds to their own palm. It was almost impossible to stab a victim more than a couple of times without incurring some slippage. So, with any luck, they’d find traces of the killer’s blood in the front of Karen’s car as well.
As Joanne drove, she cursed out loud.
Why the hell hadn’t she thought to check Noel Bloom’s palms?