The call came in from the front desk to let Caroline know Amie Tanner had arrived for her voluntary interview. It’d be a good opportunity to find out more about Martin and the sort of person he was. Although they didn’t yet have much to go on, it was often the case that you could get two very different impressions of the same person by speaking to two different acquaintances. Caroline’s maxim was Know the victim, and that had proven far more useful to her than any other tip or strategy she’d picked up in her years of policing. In the overwhelming majority of cases, people were killed because of who they were or what they’d done. If you managed to get to the bottom of who the victim was and what they’d been up to, you were — more often than not — mere inches from identifying their killer.
Caroline and Dexter made their way down to the interview room, where Amie Tanner was waiting for them. She seemed quiet — calm, but confident — and gave a slight smile from the side of her mouth as they entered the room.
‘Amie?’ Caroline asked.
‘Yes. Hi.’
‘I’m Detective Inspector Caroline Hills. This is my colleague, Detective Sergeant Dexter Antoine. Thank you for coming in to see us today. Do you live locally?’
‘Market Overton.’
Caroline nodded. Amie was clearly a woman of few words. ‘Can we get you a drink or anything?’
‘No, I’m fine thanks.’
‘Okay. Shall we get started, then?’
Amie nodded.
‘So you know by now that Martin Forbes was found dead this morning. He was your boss, is that correct?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what was he like? As a person, I mean.’
Amie sighed. ‘Well, he was alright. Friendly, I guess.’
Caroline got the distinct impression Amie would rather be anywhere else than here. ‘Have you been working there long?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, years.’
‘And have you always got along well with him?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘Pretty much?’ Caroline asked, starting to get more than a little annoyed with Amie’s brevity. She understood this wasn’t the most natural way to spend one’s day, but she’d expected a little more cooperation. On the contrary, Amie’s terseness was beginning to strike Caroline as a little suspicious.
Almost as if she’d clocked on to this, Amie shifted in her chair and began to speak. ‘Well, we had a bit of a disagreement last week. I’m guessing that’s why you’ve asked me to come in here. And why you’re asking about how we got on.’
Caroline really didn’t know how to process Amie. Although she didn’t like to generalise or put people in boxes, it was generally true to say there were certain “types” which applied to most people she came across in the job. But none of them seemed to quite fit when it came to Amie Tanner. Her paucity with words might’ve left Caroline with the impression Amie was shy, but there was a definite confidence about her. It wasn’t coldness, either. Try as she might, she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
‘What was the disagreement about?’ Caroline asked.
‘Just a work project,’ Amie said, sighing and easing back into her chair. ‘I thought we were going in the wrong direction with it. Martin disagreed.’
‘I see. Did you fall out often?’
‘No, not really. It’s just the way it goes sometimes. Clients hire us to do the work, pay through the nose for our expertise, then tell us they think we’re doing it wrong and try to tell us a different way of doing things.’
‘And Martin backed them up?’
Amie shrugged. ‘He’s all about following the money. I can see his point — it’s a business. But it’s a design agency too, and if we put out crap designs to please one client, we’ll easily do ourselves out of another ten.’
‘Makes sense to me. Was it quite a noisy disagreement, then?’
‘Probably. It’s not the first time, so I imagine a few frustrations boiled over.’ Amie looked at them, seemingly registering that Caroline and Dexter knew a little more than they were letting on. ‘I mean, I got a few funny looks from the others when I came out of his office, so I’m guessing most people probably overheard it and would’ve said it was loud.’
Caroline deliberately chose not to address her thinly-veiled attempt to find out who’d been talking. ‘What were the other disagreements usually over? Work, or something else?’
‘Yes, work,’ Amie replied, looking at her as if she’d just asked if she were a human or a frog. ‘That’s how it is at design agencies. You’ve got creative people at one end, business people at the other and people like me in the middle, trying to balance it all and keep everyone happy.’
‘Must be quite an interesting work environment,’ Caroline said, looking at Dexter. ‘I know if DS Antoine here argued with me and told me I was doing things wrong, I’d have him strung up.’
Dexter tried to keep a straight face. They both knew the professional structure at Rutland CID was far removed from most other police forces, never mind any other organisation.
‘Like I say,’ Amie replied, ‘design agencies are a whole different world of their own.’
‘So did lots of other people tend to have arguments with Martin?’
Amie gave a slight shrug. ‘I dunno, really. Some probably did. You know what it’s like. There are those who’re happy to put their views forward, and others who think the same thing but prefer to moan behind people’s backs. At least no-one can call me duplicitous or two-faced.’
Caroline could think of another few words she was sure no-one would use to describe Amie.
‘Anyway, it’s not out-and-out arguments you want to be looking into,’ Amie continued.
‘How do you mean?’
She sighed. ‘Between you and me, Martin liked to think of himself as a bit of a ladies’ man.’
‘I see. And is that something you had personal experience of?’
‘Absolutely not. No chance. But it doesn’t mean I didn’t know what was going on.’
‘And what was going on, Amie?’ Caroline asked, starting to become sick of her riddles and vague comments.
Amie looked at her. ‘If you want to know what’s been going on, it’s Monique you want to talk to. Not me.’
‘Oh? Is there something we should know?’
Amie let out a small harumph, a semi-sarcastic attempt at laughter, which sounded more like an overweight child landing on a bouncy castle. ‘Well, let’s just say she has a far more intimate knowledge of Martin than I ever would.’
In her career as a detective, she’d come across many cases where people had killed over petty arguments or what might have appeared to be minor disagreements. But those had tended to either involve snap reactions or highly unstable people. Amie was odd — there was no doubt about that — but she appeared stable enough. It seemed extremely unlikely that she’d kill someone in cold blood a few days after a professional disagreement over a work project. It didn’t quite stack up. But then there were a lot of things which were already failing to stack up when it came to this case. And — try as she might — Caroline couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something deeply unsettling about Amie Tanner.