Dunlow arrived home as we finished searching the main house. I stepped out of the front door and he strode into my personal space.
‘What the hell is going on?’ he spat, his face a map of blotchy reds.
The blue lights on top of one of the cars flashed. Dunlow whipped his head around. Alice leant against her car door, a taser hanging lazily from one hand.
Dunlow took a step back. ‘Show me the bloody warrant.’
He snatched it from my hand. While he read, I dipped my head at Alice. I hadn’t needed saving but didn’t relish the idea of facing up to a man much taller and broader than myself.
Leo emerged from the black BMW his dad had stormed out of. His eyes darted between me and uniformed officers chatting beside another car.
‘We’re ready to go over to the garage now.’ Juliet exited the house, followed by David and his team.
‘This is a disgrace.’ Dunlow threw the warrant at me.
‘We’re done with the main house. You may want to stay there for the rest of the search.’ I folded the paper I’d caught with my fingertips and slotted it into my pocket.
I left my hand there. Dunlow didn’t need to see he’d rattled me. He was fully aware of how he cut through the rest of the world, and he had to know how standing over a smaller person would make them feel. I wondered when he’d stopped being able to do that to his sons and had to resort to other forms of intimidation instead.
Dunlow sneered. ‘And let you rifle through the rest of our things alone? Leave them in a goddamn mess when you’re done? Not bloody likely.’
‘I assure you, Mr Dunlow, our searches are carried out with the utmost care.’ David pulled down the hood of his white suit and his ginger hair sprung free in a staticky jumble. ‘Every item taken is carefully logged and will be returned as it was found.’
Dunlow narrowed his eyes. ‘Even so, I’ll observe the next portion.’
‘Off you go,’ Juliet said to the forensic team.
David and the rest of the white-suited group led the way over to the garage. They started downstairs, checking expensive four-by-fours and shiny BMWs. Only after they’d swept through did Juliet and I run our hands around the linings of spotless boots and take a look at the keys hanging on the wall. When I enquired about the missing keys, Dunlow told me in clipped sentences that he and his sons had some elsewhere.
‘The spare for my BMW was lost months ago.’ He flicked his hand at one of the empty hooks. ‘Need another sent over.’
Upstairs in the den, we disturbed Terence. He’d let us into the main house earlier but hadn’t accompanied us on our search. He heaved himself up from a beanbag and stood next to his father and brother in the doorway.
The room was huge, spanning the length of the garage below, but was set into the eaves. The sloping ceilings limited the amount of usable space. Terence and Leo had shoved as much clutter into the long room as possible. There were two desks, a couple of sofa beds, a mini fridge humming in one corner, and a TV with various gaming equipment trailing across the floor.
Their rooms in the manor were nothing like this. I glanced over at Dunlow. His mouth twitched, his upper lip curling in distaste. He might have allowed his sons this space, but he didn’t enjoy being confronted by it.
Leo’s eyes switched between his father and one of the messy desks.
‘Have you looked at this?’ I asked David as I walked over.
He nodded, distracted by bundling a duvet into an oversized evidence bag.
I shuffled through the papers and books on the desk. All academic, much more advanced than anything I’d studied at school. The drawers held more of the same, but I found a laptop power cable coiled in the bottom one. I pawed through the drawers and the stuff on top of the desk.
‘Any idea where the computer is?’ I asked the family gathered in the doorway.
Both sons whipped their heads back and forth. Their brown eyes didn’t leave the desk. Terrible liars.
I pulled out the chair and crawled underneath. The floor was littered with sweet wrappers and a wonky pair of glasses. I knocked on the wooden backing of the desk and scooted out.
The desk wasn’t flush with the sloping wall. There was a triangle of dark space behind it. I grabbed a dusty lamp and aimed it into the recess.
‘David, can I borrow you for a minute?’ I looked around. Terence clenched his jaw while Leo watched my progress with wide eyes.
‘Something back there?’ David got down onto his knees and reached a gloved hand behind the desk. ‘Ah.’ He straightened, pulling an expensive looking laptop out of the gap.
‘Whose is that?’ I turned to the Dunlows.
Leo swallowed. ‘Mine.’
‘Must have fallen,’ his father said.
‘Right.’ I looked at the desk. No way the laptop fell. It had been hidden, and badly at that.
‘We’re done here.’ David slipped the laptop into a clear bag. ‘We’ll head out to the gun store and barn, then over to the cottage?’
‘I don’t need to see any more of this,’ Dunlow announced. ‘Leo, come to the house. You, stay with them.’
Leo and Dunlow disappeared, leaving Terence to dodge out of the way as the forensic team filed past, their arms full of bags. His neck pulled taut. It didn’t take a genius to figure out he was being punished. Perhaps it was for letting us onto the property, but there could be more to it. Only one person was alerted to our search and had time to hide anything incriminating. Maybe Dunlow was annoyed Terence had done a bad job.
Terence stood outside the gun store with me while the forensic team poked around inside. There was a locked cabinet, and we’d already checked the registration paperwork was in order. Juliet stood in the doorway, conferring with David. Her face stayed a controlled blank no matter how many times he spoke over or contradicted her.
‘We haven’t been able to get hold of Mr Hogan yet.’ I kept my gaze on the stone and thatch building.
Terence snapped his head around. ‘Benny will get back to you when he can. He’s a busy man.’
I pursed my lips. ‘If he confirms he was with you but won’t tell us what you two were doing, that leaves us with a lot of unanswered questions.’
‘Like what?’ Terence asked, a line forming between his brows. He looked uncannily like his brother when worried, all his swagger swept away.
‘Like, what lengths would you go to, to keep your terrible secret from coming out?’ I didn’t look directly at him but could see him fidgeting with the sleeve of his jacket. ‘Or, even if you were away, who here might have helped get rid of someone who knew too much?’
‘No,’ Terence said. ‘None of that’s right.’
‘Maybe you needed Melanie gone.’ I shrugged, feigning relaxation. Even pushing a suspect this much made my heart race, but Terence was too wound up to see through my act. ‘And maybe you asked Karl to do it. Leo lured her onto the estate and, while you were away, your secret was hushed up.’
Throwing Juliet’s unsupported theory at Terence was risky, but it might pay off.
He rubbed his face with both hands. ‘No, no, no. You’ve got it all wrong. Bloody hell.’ He looked in the direction of the manor. ‘I can’t talk about this here; Dad could appear.’
‘Juliet?’ I called.
She stamped over in her sensible boots. ‘Yes?’
‘Terence has something he’d like to talk to us about.’ I smiled sweetly at him.
He clenched his jaw. ‘Not here. Come with me.’
Juliet fell into step beside me. ‘Good work,’ she whispered behind Terence’s back.
I grinned, inordinately pleased with myself even as my heart returned to its normal rhythm. I didn’t think it likely we’d solve Melanie’s murder right now, but hopefully we could remove one or two people from the pool of suspects.
Terence led us along a twisting path through the forest to the back of the barn. Yips mixed with the tinny sound of a radio. Terence yanked open the back door. We were welcomed by a booming bark from the nearest stall, followed by Artie’s head appearing at the top of his gate. I patted between his pointy ears and he vibrated with unsuppressed glee.
‘Shut up, Artemis,’ Terence snapped.
‘I’ve told you not to come in that way,’ Karl shouted, flicking off the radio. He spotted Juliet and me behind Terence and stilled.
‘It’s my barn,’ Terence said over the occasional bark and whine. ‘I’ll do what I like.’
Karl put down a brush matted with fur. He folded his arms over his chest, disrupting the cheerful pattern of horses across the front of his thick green jumper.
Terence flinched at another loud bark from Artie. ‘Let’s go outside. We’ll keep getting interrupted in here.’
‘A forensic team will be down soon,’ Juliet informed Karl as we walked out the main barn doors. ‘Will the dogs be okay with that?’
‘They’ll be fine,’ Terence answered.
It was that strange time of an autumn afternoon when the light outside had faded dramatically in the few moments we’d spent in the barn. Terence spun around and glared at Karl, his face half-hidden in shadow.
‘The detectives think we worked together to kill the girl. They think I got you to do it to protect my secrets.’
‘Oh.’ Karl raised his eyebrows, seemingly unconcerned that he’d been implicated for murder. ‘What did you tell them?’
‘That it isn’t bloody true,’ Terence growled.
Karl cocked his head to one side. ‘What else did you tell them?’
Terence’s face flushed in uneven patches. ‘Nothing.’
‘Gentlemen,’ Juliet interrupted. ‘I’m afraid we need more than this. You’re verging on obstruction of justice.’
‘Let’s start simple,’ I suggested when neither man spoke. ‘What’s the nature of your relationship with one another?’
Terence scoffed. ‘We have no relationship. He works for my dad, that’s all.’
‘That’s not quite all,’ Karl said. ‘Sorry, Ted, but I’m not going to lie for you.’
‘Don’t call me Ted,’ Terence snapped. ‘You promised you wouldn’t say anything.’
‘We need the truth,’ I interjected. ‘Otherwise we’ll have to draw our own conclusions.’
‘Tell them.’ Karl’s face hardened. ‘This is more important than your daddy getting in a snit with you.’
Terence’s mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water. Karl didn’t wait for him to compose himself.
‘I know something about Terence. Something he doesn’t want anyone to know.’
‘What is it?’ Juliet asked.
‘You can’t tell them,’ Terence butted in, sweat building on his forehead. ‘You promised.’
‘It isn’t anything serious.’ Karl looked away. ‘But it’s something he thinks his dad would disown him for, and where would he be without all this?’
Terence hung his head. ‘You can’t tell them.’
‘I’ve known about it for a while,’ Karl carried on. ‘I saw Terence, and I took a few photos. I told him about them and he asked me to destroy them, which I did.’
‘Did you blackmail him?’ Juliet demanded.
‘No,’ Terence said. ‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘What was it like?’ I asked, keeping my voice gentle.
‘He wanted me gone and I needed money for that to happen,’ Karl said. ‘I didn’t want to be treated like a lower class being anymore.’
‘Terence didn’t pay you to kill Melanie?’ Juliet asked. ‘Did she know his secret too?’
‘Ted’s careful.’ Karl looked at the other man. I couldn’t quite read the expression on his face. There was anger, mixed with something like pity or regret. ‘Melanie couldn’t have known, and he wouldn’t have had her killed even if she did. Money is more his style.’
‘Benedict will tell you.’ Terence’s chin trembled. ‘I was with him the whole time, was barely out of his sight. I couldn’t have orchestrated a murder. I didn’t even know the girl existed before she died.’
‘So that’s it.’ I looked between the two men. ‘But you’re still not going to tell us what you were doing while you were away?’
Karl stared at Terence. ‘I did promise.’
‘Thank you,’ Terence breathed. He stood up straighter. ‘Until you force me, arrest me or something, I’m not telling you anything.’