21

Jessica was visibly annoyed when Geraldine returned to her house. She was reluctant to answer more questions and agreed to sit down with her only after Geraldine insisted.

‘I need to be with my mother,’ Jessica said. ‘We’ve just lost my father and we still don’t know where Daisy is. Don’t you realise I’m here all on my own? Do you think it’s easy being in the house by myself? I don’t have time for this.’

‘I’m afraid “this” is a murder investigation,’ Geraldine replied, ‘and we need to speak to everyone who was close to the victim.’

‘We weren’t that close,’ Jessica muttered. ‘I really don’t have time to talk to you. I have to go and be with my mother.’

‘So let’s do this now, while we’re both here,’ Geraldine continued, ignoring the interruption. ‘Otherwise we’re going to have to ask you to come along to the police station to speak to us, and that will waste even more of your time.’

Pursing her lips, Jessica sat down, and Geraldine pressed on. She was slightly taken aback at the change in Jessica. No longer anxious and unsure of herself, she seemed quite assertive, almost aggressive in her attitude. But grief and worry could alter people’s behaviour and no doubt Jessica had not been sleeping well since the baby had vanished. Her irascibility could be down to lack of sleep.

‘Where were you on Saturday evening?’

‘If you think you can pin this on me, you’re going to end up wasting a lot of time. Yes, my father and I didn’t always get on too well, but you’ve got no proof I laid a finger on him. Anyway, I expect I’ve got an alibi. When was he killed? Well? Go on, tell me when it was and I’ll prove it couldn’t have been me.’

Experience had taught Geraldine that unforced confessions were not uncommon, so she sat back and listened, but Jessica said nothing that might incriminate herself, or her husband.

‘Were you aware of any bad feeling between David and anyone he knew?’

Jessica scowled. ‘I told you, my father was one of those people who fall out with everyone. I don’t think he meant to. I don’t know that he even appreciated the effect he had on other people. He wasn’t deliberately nasty, nothing like that, but he was –’ she hesitated. ‘He always thought he knew best.’

Geraldine watched Jessica carefully as she put her next question.

‘You asked me when your father was killed?’

Jessica nodded, her expression solemn.

‘He died yesterday evening, but –’ Geraldine hesitated, unsure how much to reveal at this stage.

‘Well, there you go then. I was here all evening. You can check our security cameras if you don’t want to take my word for it. My mother insisted we had them installed all round the house. My father paid for it all,’ she added with a shrug, as if to say she thought it an unnecessary expense.

Geraldine nodded and thanked her for her help. Her claim to have been at home all evening could be a deliberate deception, as could her apparent ignorance of the way David had been killed. The suggestion that the police check the security camera might be a bluff. In any case, Jessica could have slipped out of the back door of the house and walked crouching down to avoid the camera. All the same, she arranged for the camera to be removed so the film could be examined.

Driving back to the police station, Geraldine thought about how Jessica had spoken, as though being at home alone was something difficult. Although Geraldine had never struggled with her own company, having lived with Ian for only a few months, she no longer wanted to be on her own. But she was too busy to have time to worry about her own circumstances. That afternoon, Eileen had summoned the team together to discuss the toxicology report. The findings at the post mortem had already established that the threat to David’s life had been serious.

‘The victim was drugged before he was suffocated,’ Eileen reminded them.

‘It wouldn’t have been difficult to give him the pills without his knowing. He then drank a couple of glasses of whisky on top of that before going out, intending to drive, if Anne is telling the truth,’ Geraldine said.

‘He could have taken the pills himself,’ Eileen pointed out. ‘He certainly knew he was drinking.’

‘Are you saying you think he was intending to kill himself before he was murdered?’ Ariadne asked.

Eileen shrugged. ‘That’s what we’re going to find out. All we know right now is that he swallowed some chemical combination that caused him to fall unconscious and choke, before someone came along and took the opportunity to finish him off.’

‘Did SOCOs find any evidence of cetirizine in the house?’ Ian asked.

‘The house hasn’t been searched yet. I daresay we’ll find them, but that won’t prove anything. Even if he bought them himself, his wife might have handled the bottle. They are a common treatment for allergy relief, and he could have asked her to buy them, or to fetch the bottle for him,’ Geraldine replied.

‘What about the letter?’ the detective chief inspector asked. ‘Only David and Anne’s prints were found on it so the writer was careful to avoid touching it with his bare hands.’

‘Or her hands,’ Ariadne added. ‘His daughter described him as a bully.’

‘We’re checking her CCTV to try to establish whether she might have left the house on Saturday afternoon or evening,’ Geraldine said. ‘We might not be able to follow her journey very far once she left the house, but we could establish whether she was lying.’

‘I wonder if he bullied his wife?’ Eileen mused aloud.

Geraldine had been wondering the same thing. Anne would have found it relatively easy to drug her husband. She had the opportunity, and could easily have acquired the means. All that was missing was a motive.

‘It can’t have been easy, being married to a bully all those years,’ Geraldine suggested tentatively.

‘They were married for twenty-six years,’ Eileen said. ‘That’s a long time, but she could have snapped.’

‘Or perhaps she met someone else?’ Geraldine asked.

Eileen gave her a sharp look, and Geraldine wondered if the detective chief inspector knew about Ian’s situation. He was, after all, still technically married to Bev, who had a young baby.

‘Anne was twenty-one when Jessica was born,’ Geraldine said, forcing her attention back to Anne Armstrong. ‘So she married quite young.’

‘When she was twenty,’ Eileen replied. ‘Since then by all accounts she’s been reliant on her husband for everything. Both she and her daughter said as much. I suppose if she married at twenty, she’s never really had to look after herself. I wonder how she’s coping?’

Geraldine declined an invitation from Ariadne to go out for a drink after work that evening. She dreaded being questioned about what was going on in her own life. While she was doing her best to continue as though nothing had happened to disturb her equilibrium, she suspected her colleagues knew more about her affair with Ian than they were letting on. Several times she had caught Ariadne giving her quizzical glances and once or twice her friend had appeared to be about to say something but had then looked away in apparent confusion. For the first time in Geraldine’s life, her independence weighed her down, but the only person she could imagine sharing her home with had returned to his wife. With a sigh she forced herself to dismiss Ian from her thoughts and began reading over her notes on Jessica.