‘Are you positive it’s my turn to pay?’ Parish said to Doc Riley.
‘Definitely.’
He glared at Richards. ‘Mark it down in your notebook, and don’t lose it this time.’
‘I didn’t lose it last time.’
They were standing in the slow-moving queue in the hospital cafeteria. An obese woman with three toddlers and a baby in a pushchair was complaining about the attitude of one of the catering staff, while those directly behind her were jeering and telling her to move out of the way. She decided that she wanted to see the hospital’s Chief Executive and promptly sat down on the floor. The children began screaming and wailing, security were called and it all got very messy as they dragged the family out.
‘Do you think we should get involved?’ Richards said.
‘You can if you want to, but leave me out of it.’
‘And me,’ Doc Riley added.
Eventually, they reached the till and Parish paid. Richards and Doc Riley had the Bacon and Raclette Rösti, while he ordered the Chicken Schnitzel. By the time they’d helped themselves to pastries and drinks he didn’t get much change from thirty pounds.
‘Daylight robbery,’ he mumbled, as they found a table to sit at.
‘I don’t think you’d have any trouble playing Scrooge in the Christmas pantomime,’ Richards said, taking a sip of her bottled water.
‘Is that right?’
‘Yes, that’s right. What do you think, Doc?’
‘There’s definitely a resemblance.’
‘Enough about my finer qualities. Have you got anything for us, Doc?’
She slid a folder across the table. ‘The post mortem report is in there. In summary, there’s not much new. No sexual assault. We found small deposits of an unknown DNA around the mouth and nose, but there’s no match on the database. We did match it to the samples Dr Toadstone found on the rake, the paper and the wire, but that doesn’t help us identify the killer. Between us, we have enough DNA evidence to convict the killer – you just have to find him or her.’
‘Easier said than done,’ Parish said, taking a swallow of coffee to wash down a mishmash of chicken schnitzel, chips and coleslaw. ‘At the moment, we have nothing.’
‘You’ll still have nothing once you leave here. If you hadn’t called me earlier I could have told you about the paralytic Fentanyl, but you’ve had that already. No change to the time of death – between three forty-five and four forty-five. No change to the cause of death – suffocation.’
‘You made us come all this way to tell us you had nothing?’
‘You were paying for lunch, I wasn’t going to jeopardise a free lunch.’
‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch.’
Doc Riley smiled. ‘Yes there is. I just had one.’
‘I didn’t realise you were so desperate, Doc.’
‘Well, there you have it. A free lunch with two police detectives is the extent of my busy social life.’
Richards pulled a face. ‘I know what you mean.’
‘There’s something wrong with the world when an attractive young woman can’t get a man to take her out for a meal . . .’
‘. . . Without them thinking it’s a down-payment for something else,’ Richards added.
‘Exactly,’ Doc Riley said. ‘There’s no such thing as a date anymore . . .’
‘. . . It’s a military operation.’
‘Exactly. We have to be on our guard all the time. Do you know that men think about sex every seven seconds . . . ?’
Parish stopped eating and said, ‘That’s a myth. A study was conducted by the Kinsey Institute at Ohio State University in 2011 for the Journal of Sex Research, and the median number men think about sex was nineteen times a day. Women thought about it ten times a day.’
‘That’s still double the number women think about it,’ Doc Riley said.
Richards stared at him, ‘I’m more interested in why you were reading the Journal of Sex Research.’
‘I’d expect nothing less from you, Richards. Where would I get a copy of that?’
‘That was going to be my next question.’
‘It was merely a titbit on the news that caught my attention.’
‘Really? Why was that?’
‘Focus on the investigation, not on my reading habits. What are we going to tell the Chief and the press this afternoon?’
‘Maybe Paul will find something,’ Richards said.
‘And maybe a sinkhole will appear and swallow us up before then.’
‘You have no suspects?’ Doc Riley asked.
Parish shook his head. ‘The cupboard is bare.’
‘We haven’t ruled out a man being the killer, but we definitely think it’s a woman,’ Richards said.
‘A woman,’ the Doc mused. ‘It’s hard to believe a woman would kill a child . . .’
‘My point exactly,’ Parish interrupted her.
‘. . . But they do, don’t they? I’ve carried out about twenty post mortems of children already this year where the mother has been directly responsible for the child’s death. You only hear about the horrific cases, but there are lots more.’
Richards turned the plastic water bottle round and round in her hands. ‘I was reading that a mother killing her own child is called maternal filicide.’
‘We’re not talking about mothers killing their own children,’ Parish said. ‘In nearly every one of those cases, the mother is mentally ill. They kill their own children out of desperation, loneliness, isolation, depression – they’re not in their right minds when they commit filicide. What we’ve got here . . .’
‘I was merely illustrating that women do kill children,’ Doc Riley said.
‘As a consequence of untreated mental illness women kill their own children, they don’t kill other women’s children. And in the majority of those cases where they kill their own children, we feel sorry for the mother . . .’
‘Do we?’ Richards said.
‘Yes. That their lives reached a point where the only course of action open to them was to kill their own children, and usually themselves as well, is more a reflection on an uncaring society than on the mothers themselves. Anyway, what I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted was that what we’ve got here is a cold-blooded and well-planned murder. Paul Gifford wasn’t killed by his desperate mother. If he was killed by a woman at all, then it was another woman.’
‘She must be mentally ill,’ Richards said.
Doc Riley nodded. ‘I agree.’
Parish stood up and picked up the folder containing the post mortem report. ‘You could argue that anybody who murders another human being is mentally ill – temporarily or permanently. It doesn’t really help us.’
‘Are we going?’ Richards asked.
‘You’d like to stay here and chew the fat with the Doc, would you?’
‘Can I?’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’
‘Thanks for the report, Doc.’
‘Sorry I couldn’t be more help.’
‘Hardly your fault. Come on Richards stop dawdling.’
‘Huh!’
***
Bronwyn stuck twelve A4 sheets of paper next to each other on the wall behind the door in her room with tape folded over so that it became double-backed, and then began mapping out what had happened at 24 Somerset Gardens in Hornchurch on January 15 last year.
The case had been in the papers, on the television, and all over the internet. She’d read snippets, but hadn’t formed any opinion on whether the husband was guilty or not. Initially, they’d arrested Manning Naseby, but an application for bail had been successful – as long as he handed in his passport. Since then, the story had died a death. But now, it was filling up the pages of newspapers, swamping airtime on the television, and swallowing up gigabits on the internet.
It intrigued her that Heidi Naseby had a lover who the police couldn’t find. Why couldn’t they find him? It wasn’t that hard to find someone these days. Somebody must have seen them together. She must have told somebody – a friend, a relative – who he was. Did Manning Naseby know his wife had a lover? Did he come back that morning and find that his wife had been with another man? Was it a crime of passion? Did he kill his wife, or did he – as he said – return to find her already dead? If he did, who had killed her? Was it her lover? If it was, where did he go? And why was there so little evidence of him in the house. If Naseby had planned to kill his wife, it was the worse plan she’d ever heard. The whole story was riddled with inconsistencies. None of it added up.
Someone had conducted an internet survey, and asked people if they thought Naseby had killed his wife or not. Forty-nine percent thought he had, fifty-one percent thought he hadn’t.
The murder had happened thirteen months ago – what evidence was she likely to find now? Well, all she could do was try. As far as she was concerned, the key to unlocking this mystery was Heidi Naseby’s secret lover, and that’s who she’d focus on. She’d do what she did best – hack into servers, computers, phones and CCTV systems. It would feel good to be doing something illegal for money again.
***
‘When you’re ready, Mrs Ferguson,’ the judge said.
Gollum stood up. ‘Thank you, my Lord.’ She turned to DS Foster. ‘Sergeant, you stated that my client was sitting on the stairs holding the murder weapon, that he was covered in blood and that he said to you, “It’s my fault she’s dead.” Is that correct?’
‘Yes, my Lord.’
‘So naturally, your first thought was that you had your man – the killer?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you do next?’
‘I called for back-up.’
‘What does “called for back-up” mean exactly? I’m sure there are many in this courtroom who do not watch American police television series.’
‘Uniformed officers, a forensic team, DCI Reid and so on.’
‘Thank you, Sergeant. What did you do then?’
‘I asked Mr Naseby to put the knife down.’
‘And did he?’
‘Yes. Well, he let it drop from his hand. It bounced down the stairs and landed on the tiled floor in the hallway.’
‘Did you pick it up?’
‘I still had my plastic gloves on, so I carefully slipped it into an evidence bag that I removed from my jacket pocket.’
‘Carry on, Sergeant.’
‘At this point, I didn’t know Mrs Naseby was dead upstairs, but I was responding to an anonymous report that a murder had been committed at the address. Also, the knife, Mr Naseby’s bloody appearance and his admission of guilt led me to believe that he had killed his wife. I told Mr Naseby that I was arresting him for murder, and cautioned him that he didn’t have to say anything . . .’
‘Yes, yes,’ Gollum interrupted him. ‘And?’
‘I handcuffed him to the stair handrail. I then followed the blood trail upstairs into the master bedroom and found Mrs Naseby sprawled naked on the bed in a pool of blood.’
‘Did you check for any signs of life?’
‘No, there didn’t seem much point. Her eyes were open, and I reckon she must have lost about ten pints of blood.’
‘The human body only contains eight pints of blood, Sergeant.’
Laughter rippled through the public gallery.
Judge Calthorpe banged his gavel. ‘Silence. I don’t see that the horrific death of a beautiful young woman is any laughing matter.’
The courtroom went quiet.
Gollum continued as if there had been no interruption. ‘Did you see anyone else?’
‘No.’
‘Did you stop to look at her wounds?’
‘Yes. Would you care for my opinion?’
‘Please do,’ Gollum said.
Jerry had the distinct feeling that she was leading him into a trap.
‘It was a frenzied attack. I couldn’t count the number of stab wounds, because there were that many. Also, her face, breasts and abdomen had been slashed repeatedly. I’ve been a murder detective for a few years now, and I’ve seen some terrible things. This ranks up there with the worst.’
‘And you had no doubt that Mr Naseby had caused these terrible injuries to his wife?’
‘None whatsoever.’
‘You didn’t consider any other alternative?’
‘No. As far as I was concerned at the time, there was no other alternative.’
‘What about now, Sergeant?’
‘I still think he did it.’
‘What do you think my client meant when he said, “It’s my fault she’s dead”?’
‘That he’d killed her.’
‘Did you ask him what he meant by it?’
‘No. It was obvious what he meant.’
‘Obvious? I see . . . My client has maintained his innocence throughout the past eighteen months, and made a statement that he returned home to collect the Chuka file that he’d left in his study, and called up to his wife to let her know he had entered the house. When she didn’t answer, he went upstairs and found her lying in a pool of blood with the knife stuck in her chest. He rushed to her, pulled the knife out of her chest and tried to revive her. After some time, and in a state of shock, he wandered downstairs with the knife in his hand and sat on the stairs.’
‘I’ve read his statement.’
‘Bearing in mind that we now agree there was a third person in that bedroom at some point, is Mr Naseby’s account of what happened another alternative?’
‘Well . . .’
‘The bloody clothes were obtained from trying unsuccessfully to revive his wife, and the fingerprints on the knife were the result of pulling the weapon out of her chest. Why he picked it up again and carried it down the stairs he doesn’t know, but people do some strange things when they’re in shock.’
‘What about the confession?’
‘You understood what he said as a confession, but all he meant was that he had failed to lock the front door when he’d left the house at 0805 hours.’
‘That doesn’t make sense.’
Gollum smiled. ‘It does if Mr Naseby knew nothing about his wife having a lover.’
‘But . . .’
‘Now, if we can continue, Sergeant. You say there was an anonymous caller at 0835 hours who reported the murder?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did the person who called know there had been a murder in that house?’
‘Maybe they saw something from outside.’
‘Or inside?’
Dryden stood up. ‘My Lord.’
‘Mrs Ferguson?’
‘All will become clear shortly, my Lord.’
‘I’ll allow you a smidgen of latitude.’ He held up his hand and indicated what he meant by a smidgen with his thumb and forefinger open about half an inch.
‘Very kind, my Lord.’ She turned back to Foster. ‘The chances of anyone seeing a murder take place in the master bedroom of 24 Somerset Gardens is nearly impossible. She moved to an easel that had a professionally-drawn layout of the house propped up on it, so that the jury could visualise what had happened throughout the trial. ‘This is a wonderful drawing. However, what it fails to show is the boundary of the house. I took the liberty . . .’ She removed the drawing and propped it up against the oak panelling.
Dryden popped up again like a plastic duck at the carnival. ‘My Lord! I wasn’t . . .’
‘Mrs Ferguson?’
‘They are merely enlarged photographs of the house, my Lord. Unless you’d prefer I take the jury by coach to . . . ?’
‘Absolutely not. I’ll allow it, but no more surprises.’
‘Of course, my Lord.’
‘You can sit down now, Mr Dryden,’ the judge said.
Jerry smiled. Gollum had the judge eating out of her hand.
She pointed at the photographs one by one. ‘As you can see in this one, there is at least thirty feet between the electronic gates and the house.’ She revealed the second picture. ‘In this photograph you can clearly see that walls and hedges obscure any other view of the house, and that – as I suggested previously – it is nearly impossible to see through the window into the master bedroom, and totally impossible to see a woman being murdered on the bed.’ She moved back to the podium. ‘Sergeant, I suggest to you that the anonymous caller was actually the killer.’
‘No.’
‘Then how do you explain someone who couldn’t possibly have seen or known about the murder of Mrs Naseby – unless he was in the house – calling central despatch to report the murder?’
‘I can’t.’
‘And there is the problem. The only way that the caller would have known there had been a murder is if he had been in that house, specifically in the master bedroom.’
Foster said nothing.
‘Do you know where the call was made from?’
‘Yes, there’s a phone box about five hundred yards along the road.’
‘Did anyone see the caller?’
‘No.’
‘When you say “No”, what exactly do you mean by that?’
‘I mean that no one saw the caller.’
‘Who did you ask?’
‘There’s one house – number 37 – across the road from the phone box, but the owners were away on holiday at the time. We also positioned a board close to the phone box requesting help from drivers – or anybody else – who might have seen the caller.’
‘How many people came forward?’
‘None.’
‘Did forensics test the phone box for fingerprints and DNA?’
‘Yes, but none of what they found was relevant to our investigation.’
‘Specifically, what did forensics find?’
‘The phone box had been wiped clean.’
‘Of fingerprints and DNA?’
‘Yes.’
‘And didn’t you find that odd?’
Foster shrugged. ‘It had no bearing on the fact that Manning Naseby killed his wife.’
‘Yes, so you keep saying. Did you arrange for the caller’s voice to be heard by the public?’
‘No.’
‘So, you stopped trying to discover the identity of the anonymous caller after knocking on one door and putting up a board that received no response?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think it would be appropriate to hear this anonymous 999 call.’
Judge Calthorpe leaned forward and peered down at Gollum. ‘Before you do, Mrs Ferguson.’
‘Yes, my Lord?’
‘I think everyone would benefit from a fifteen minute comfort break.’
‘Your Lordship’s timing, as always, is perfect.’