58 LOUISE
Partridge Bark
Irina (Hamish’s Mum)
Yaz (Hercules’s Mum)
The girl from the Bells cleared her throat. She hadn’t given me the information I’d hoped for, but what she’d said had opened up a few new possibilities. ‘Okay,’ I decided, handing her the twenty. ‘It’s yours.’
She smiled, tucking it into a pocket, before turning off the canal path, still heading north.
I felt a tug on Klaus’s lead. ‘For heaven’s sake,’ I sighed, allowing him to pull me over to the same discarded pair of jeans that we’d seen on the way up the canal. Klaus sniffed at them from every angle and raised a leg. ‘You marked them on the way to meet Grace. Then on the way here. And again now? Who exactly do you think claimed them in the last, like, half hour?’
Luther waited for Klaus to finish, then urinated on the same spot, his amused eyes watching me.
A woman. A young woman. That was a twist I hadn’t expected.
‘Who hated Phil enough to kill him?’
The dogs didn’t have an answer, so we turned round and headed for home. Luther lunged for a duck, forcing my attention off the theories just in time to keep the big guy from diving into the canal.
Irina had said there’d been drugs in Phil’s system, but there’d been no visible signs of an overdose. Also no visible signs of a fight. His knuckles hadn’t been bruised. No visible defensive wounds, Andy’d said.
Phil wasn’t a pushover. He wasn’t huge, but he was big enough to fight back if there had been some sort of confrontation.
The key word was visible. Had there been bruises I hadn’t seen, hidden by his clothes?
The wildcard was the diazepam. If he’d taken too much it would have affected his behaviour and surely someone in the pub would have noticed. Maybe they’d have called 999, or chivvied him out the door. But regardless, who would go to the trouble of getting rid of the body?
It would have taken all three of the people I’d just seen in there to lob Phil over the fence if he’d passed out, or OD’d. And someone would have seen that, surely?
Was that why they were being so cagey about it?
Was it why the young woman had given me the story about the woman who’d met with Phil that night?
Something didn’t feel right. There was no way an average woman would have been able to get Phil over the fence on her own. And statistically speaking, there just weren’t that many female murderers compared to men. Or at least, not if you took out of consideration women who killed in self-defence…
No. If a woman really was mixed up in this, then she was probably working with someone else.
Jake’s words rang in my mind; the killer in his book was the person who’d gotten close to the police investigation. I’d joked that in this case that would mean it must be Irina, but what if I’d got it wrong? What if the killer wasn’t trying to get closer to the police’s investigation, but to ours? What if he wasn’t working alone, but had roped in a woman?
But who? And what hold did he have over her?
Did she like to kill, like some sort of Bonnie to his Clyde?
Or did she just care that much for him?
Muttering to the dogs, I texted Gav and then Irina. And headed faster down the canal.