After You Die (37 page)

‘We have an awful lot of questions that lack satisfactory answers and I want those answers before charging an eleven-year-old boy with murder.’ He gave Ferreira a pointed look. ‘As of right now Nathan has no motive, an alibi we haven’t even looked into and potential forensic evidence which undermines his guilt. These things need clearing up one way or the other.’

He moved over to the board, heads turning to follow, and picked up a red pen.

‘Our main focus is going to be on the night Dawn was murdered.’ He ringed a point on the timeline. ‘So we’re going back through her phone logs and internet history and we’re going to piece together what exactly she was doing in the hours leading up to her murder. Parr, Murray – that’s you two.’

Half-hearted ‘yes, sir’s from that side of the office.

He pointed at Wahlia. ‘Bobby, I want you to dig up absolutely everything you can on the Campbells. We’re going to be speaking to them very soon and it would be good to have something useful to hit them with.’

‘Apart from the knife?’ Ferreira asked.

‘You were there for the search,’ Zigic said. ‘What kind of vibe did you get off Julia?’

‘Defiant, angry, a bit scared. She didn’t want Matthew there, for some reason.’

‘Okay, bring her in. Let’s see what she’s got to say for herself.’

Ferreira grabbed her bag and strode out of the office.

‘Alright then, everyone knows what they’re doing.’ And none of them looked particularly inspired by it. ‘Crack on, folks.’

He left them to it, returned to his desk and the page full of questions.

An email was waiting for him, flagged as urgent, from the pathologist. Brief and concise the way the man always was.

Yes, one of the wounds to Dawn’s chest showed signs of tearing consistent with the knife being removed at some point after death. At least twenty-four hours later.

Yes, the downward angle of the slash across her throat suggested an attacker slightly taller than Dawn. He gave the details in metric and imperial – used to dealing with older coppers who hadn’t adapted to the conversion yet. Dawn was five foot six, her killer somewhere between five seven and five nine.

Nathan was far shorter, incapable of landing that precise blow.

Zigic rocked back in his chair, seeing one theory unspool and another begin to knit together. Somebody in the Campbell household had hidden that knife in the shed.

One of them had murdered Dawn and left Holly to die.

Then they’d set Nathan up to take the fall.

For a long time after the police left Julia couldn’t move. She listened to them pack their things away, doors slamming in the lane outside, brash voices and laughter which stabbed at her, as she imagined what about the disintegration of her life they found so damn amusing.

She’d seen them bagging up the contents of the rusted old incinerator and she knew they’d found the knife which killed Dawn hidden in the shed.

Bile rose in her throat and she lunged for the kitchen sink, but nothing came out. She stared at the bright white porcelain, a few tea leaves dotting it from the pot she’d made after Matthew and Caitlin left the house, and wondered how long she had before there was another knock on the front door and someone came to take her away.

Part of her knew she should sit down and think through what she would tell them, but she couldn’t bring herself to admit that her innocence was in doubt.

She turned on the tap and watched the water swill away the tea leaves, leaving the big butler’s sink perfectly clean.

It would take more effort to tidy the rest of the house.

Nothing was broken but everywhere she looked she saw things moved from their proper positions and left slightly askew. In her workshop each and every drawer had been opened, contents rifled, shoved back clumsily. There was water on the floor around the wood burner and a scattering of ash where the forensics officer had emptied it, more charred remains to be checked through. She let out a small gasp of horror when she saw the ripped back of her club chair, horsehair stuffing hanging in clumps. But her eye strayed away from the chair, up to the shelves behind it which showed gaps now where bottles had been removed. Not all of them, not even most, but when she worked out which ones were missing she realised they had taken anything which might have been used to start a fire.

Julia went back into the kitchen and called Matthew’s mobile again. Lunchtime now and there was no reason for him to have his phone switched off. Still he didn’t answer and she didn’t bother to leave a message because he had ignored the earlier ones and would ignore this one too.

He was avoiding her. He’d barely spoken this morning, only the briefest answers given when she asked if he wanted breakfast, if that shirt could do with ironing, and his impatience with Caitlin was so marked that she turned to Julia behind his back and made a face of pure incomprehension.

They’d argued last night, about whether Nathan should return to the house now that Rachel had found him. Julia wanted him to come home, Matthew refused, no negotiation, no softening his position even when she begged. It would only be for a few days, she pointed out, and they did need the money. At that he snapped, shouted things she couldn’t bring herself to think of again, and stormed upstairs to bed.

It wasn’t the argument they needed to have, the one they’d started and aborted months ago. Maybe if they’d finished it then none of this would have happened, but they were both avoiders. She backed down from him, he ran away from her, and the problem festered between them.

She went through into the hallway and busied herself tidying the mess the police had left behind, realigning the coats on the rack and the shoes underneath it, making the drawers in the console sit straight and true again.

In the living room the sofa and armchairs had been pulled about and she took her time straightening them and refolding the throws she draped over the arms, ready for the coming autumn when they’d sit under them watching TV. Just her and Matthew because the children would be gone.

She punched her fist into a tweed cushion, ostensibly plumping it up, but she threw a second shot it didn’t need and a third which made her feel petty and stupid.

A thought was sneaking up on her and she kept moving, walking away from it, leaving it sitting in his usual chair by the fireplace only to find it waiting for her at the top of the stairs where a rag rug sat wrinkled across the floorboards.

The thought tracked her through the children’s bedrooms, hovering at her shoulder as she made everything nice and tidy for Caitlin when she came home. It was a sly, stealthy thought, which somehow hung around the smug look that policewoman gave her as she left.

What did she know?

The master bedroom showed less overt disturbance than the rest of the house and she cursed herself for not making the bed as soon as Matthew left this morning. A keen-eyed officer would have noticed that only one side had been slept on, and she didn’t doubt that such small insights could be blown up into questions of fidelity and guilt, that even now the state of her marriage bed was being discussed.

Did she suspect him? Did he suspect her?

Julia knew she wouldn’t hold up well under interrogation. She’d never been a good liar.

Not like Matthew.

She smoothed down the duvet cover and puffed up his pillow, thinking of him tossing and turning there last night, replaying the argument just as she had done in Nathan’s narrow pine bed, picking apart the long run-up to it and everything they hadn’t said but would eventually have to.

Things the police might already know about him and her and Dawn.

She’d made a mistake confiding in Sally. She was a terrible gossip and that was fun when Julia wasn’t the subject of it, but what if she’d already told the police? She would say anything to move their attention away from Warren.

Downstairs again she went into Matthew’s study, found the books he kept lined up so precisely sitting messily on the shelves, spines all higgledy-piggledy, box files out of order. He’d taken his laptop to work with him so they’d been denied the chance to go through that, and she wondered what they would find when they finally seized it. She’d never been the kind of woman to snoop but now she wished she had. So that at least it wouldn’t be a surprise when they told her he had a gambling problem or a fetish for Asian women who looked like children.

She drew the curtains back at the small, leaded-glass window although very little light ever made it into this room. She’d painted it dark blue, almost black, at his request, and it resembled a teenage boy’s room, albeit a very pretentious teenage boy, with the French film posters framed on the walls and the collection of prog rock on vinyl he never played because he’d broken his turntable years ago and hadn’t replaced it.

There was nothing but a notepad of ideas for his lesson plans on his desk, and she sat down in the leather chair, taking in the smell of his secretly smoked cigarettes, touched her fingers to a watermark on the walnut veneer; not water, but whisky, another pleasure he took when the door was locked.

He was in here Thursday night when she left the house.

She’d made him a coffee after dinner and he said he had marking to do – that lazy lie of his – didn’t answer her when she shouted a goodbye, leaving for her book club.

She’d expected to find him still locked away when she returned. Had been mildly surprised to discover him in the back garden, changed into stained cords and his wash-faded gardening shirt, with the incinerator glowing nearby, thin branches sticking out of the top, licked by the flames.

There it was again; the doubt she couldn’t shake off, the sergeant’s triumphant air.

Had the police talked to their neighbours already? They were overlooked on all sides and a fire burning on a pleasant, late-summer evening wouldn’t have gone unnoticed, smoking out people’s al-fresco suppers and polluting their washing.

Had they arrested him?

Was that why he wasn’t answering his phone?

A car pulled up outside the house, music blaring for a second after the engine stopped turning and she felt her stomach plunge, knew they were coming here even before the door knocker sounded three hard cracks.

Julia opened the door to the dark-haired sergeant, whose name her brain refused to remember.

‘We need you to come into the station, Mrs Campbell.’

Her hand went to her chest. ‘Is it Matthew?’

‘Should it be?’

‘Why do you need me to come with you?’

‘Just to make a statement,’ the woman said, the hard lines of her face at odds with the simplicity of the request. ‘It shouldn’t take long.’

Something had changed, that was the only explanation. Something significant had been unearthed since the police had left this morning and deep in her gut Julia knew what it was.

They must have spoken to Matthew. He was a good liar with her but not to them, perhaps. She couldn’t imagine him keeping it together under police questioning.

He’d told them everything and now they knew that the only person in the house with a reason to murder Dawn was her.

Rachel was in the corridor when Zigic went up to the Domestic Violence unit, holding a one-sided phone conversation, shoulders hunched, frown deeply set. Whoever was on the other end was doing all the talking. Nearby, in one of the lounges, a woman was crying, the sound muted by a heavy door but the helplessness clear from the pitch of her unbroken wails. Rachel pocketed her phone and looked towards the noise.

‘This isn’t the ideal place for Nathan to be right now.’

‘A few more questions, then we’re done,’ Zigic said. ‘I’ve brought him some lunch.’

She eyed the sandwiches he held and the bottle of juice. ‘Nothing for me?’

‘Do you want me to go down to the canteen again?’

‘Forget it,’ she said wearily. Her initial bullishness had worn off and now she looked so tired and deflated that he actually felt sorry for her.

Nathan was still sitting on the edge of the sofa, a well-read comic discarded on the table in front of him. There was nothing in the room for a boy his age, the facilities set up for younger children who could be distracted from the horrors these four walls bore constant witness to by stuffed bears and toy cars and dolls with unconvincing smiles painted on their faces.

‘I thought you might be hungry.’

Zigic set the food down and Rachel told Nathan to say thank you as he began to fiddle with the plastic packaging around his ham sandwich.

‘I need to ask you about the evening Dawn died,’ Zigic said. Nathan dropped the packet, apologised even though he didn’t need to, and picked it up again.

‘I dunno what happened.’

‘That’s okay.’ Rachel opened the package and handed it back to him. ‘Just tell Dushan as much as you can remember.’

‘It was a Thursday,’ Zigic said.

Nathan looked at him blankly, as if the word meant nothing, and he realised that the days of the week were likely all the same to the boy. He wasn’t going to school, he stayed in most of the time. You could lose weeks like that, no routine to differentiate a Thursday from a Monday.

‘Julia goes out on Thursdays,’ Rachel said. ‘To her book club. Remember?’

He nodded.

‘Did she go out last week?’ Zigic asked.

‘Yeah.’

He made a mental note to follow up on that. Nail down the exact time she left the house and when she returned. She’d neglected to mention it when they spoke previously and that bothered him. Most people were quick to supply their alibis in murder cases, whether they were asked to or not.

‘So Matthew looks after you both that night,’ he said. ‘Can you remember what he was doing?’

‘He don’t do anything,’ Nathan said. ‘He goes in his office and listens to music.’

‘What were you doing?’

‘Watching a film.
Spiderman
. Julia got me them on DVD.’

Zigic smiled. ‘They’re good films. My boys love them.’

It didn’t elicit any reaction from Nathan. He was tired, Zigic realised, from being here and from the days spent on the run, alone and scared. All of the weeks before that, knowing what lay ahead of him, fearing the process of giving evidence and what came afterwards. Did he know what would happen to him once Rachel had what she needed? Was he scared of that too?