Poisoned Blue (Jamie Stanley Crime Scene Investigation Series Book 1) (6 page)

Chapter Nine

Jamie looked at her whiteboard.
They had five key suspects.

“Read it out
again,” Danny said.

“The husband,
the cleaner, the husband’s lover, the work colleague and the ex-husband,” Jamie
read down the suspects column.

“I think we
can rule the cleaner out. Marion may have had a key, but she doesn’t seem to
have any possible motive.”

Jamie took her
red pen and drew a squiggly red line through the boxes concerning Marion, the cleaner.

“What do we
know about Greg?” Danny asked.

“He’s the
ex-husband, they had a daughter together and, as far as we know, he’s the last
person to have spoken to her,” Jamie said.

“About that,”
Carl said, “I’ve been looking at the records. It says here that they married in
December 2000, which would have made Sara nineteen, and they divorced in 2013,
the day before she married Neil.”

“That can’t be
right.” Jamie looked over his shoulder.

“They married
in St. Peters, the church down the road,” Carl said.

“That’s had
the same vicar for as long as I can remember. Let’s talk to him. He has to be
the person who married them,” Danny said.

“It’s not far,
let’s walk down now.” Carl got up from his desk and rattled the keys in his
hand.

Danny
shivered.

“It’s about a
hundred degrees in here, Dan,” Carl said. “Go home and go to bed.”

“No, I’m
coming with you. It’s just a little fever.”

Jamie grabbed
her coat, it might have been hot in the station, but it was cold outside.

“Sara June Longacre. I remember
her,” the vicar said. He took them through to a small office at the back of the
church.

“According to
our records, she divorced her ex-husband the day before marrying her new
husband. Is that right?” Danny was expecting him to say ‘no’.

“Yes. I’m
afraid that’s true.”

“Why would you
go along with something like that? What about all the forms you need and
stuff?” Danny was confused. Maybe his fever was affecting him more than he’d
originally thought.

“Sara was a
family friend. Her husband wanted to get married in a church, and she didn’t
want to let him down. More to the point she didn’t want to tell him that she’d
been married before. She pushed the date back as far as she could but divorces
can take a long time to settle sometimes.” He took a breath. “I was just helping
out an old friend.”

“That’s it.
You can’t tell us anything else?”

“That’s all
there is to say really.”

By the time
they got back to the station, Jamie was glad she’d had some of her lunch
earlier. With the other half of her sandwich in her hand, she stood by her
whiteboard.

She swallowed
a mouthful of cheese sandwich. “Back to Greg, the ex-husband, motive and
opportunity.”

“Opportunity, doesn’t seem like any,” Carl said, “from what we can see, although he’d
arranged for the daughter to see her, she never got to.”

“As for
motive, why kill your ex-wife? He wouldn’t gain anything from it and if he’d
wanted her dead purely so that Neil couldn’t have her, he would’ve done it
sooner.” Jamie poised her pen over the motive box.

“Wait a
minute,” Carl said, “he wouldn’t literally gain anything from her death, but he
would be given full custody of the kid.”

“But they have
an arrangement regarding the girl that seems to work.”

“Not according
to this, it doesn’t. It looks like Greg’s been attempting to gain full custody
of the kid since before the divorce.”

“So he has a
motive,” Jamie said.

“Yes. The
question is, is it a big enough reason to kill your ex-wife?”

Jamie rubbed
her finger along the bridge of her nose. “Let’s move on. Polly Sparks, the work
colleague.”

“May or may
not have been framed for something that Sara did,” Carl said.

“And then
there’s the parents’ car crash. I think someone needs to look into that, see if
there’s anything suspicious,” Danny added, feeling a bit left out of the
conversation.

“Right Dan, if
you try calling Polly Sparks and arrange for us to meet her, then I’ll look
into the
parents’
car crash,” Carl said.

“I meant that
I could–”

“The phone
number’s on that bit of paper pinned to the edge of Jamie’s board.”

While they did
their assigned jobs, Jamie continued to stare at the whiteboard. She couldn’t
help thinking that they were missing something. The only suspect who had an
opportunity had been ruled out.

“Polly Sparks
isn’t answering,” Danny said after the third ring.

“She didn’t
answer earlier either,” Carl said. “Maybe we should just go round there and
see.”

Jamie looked
away from her board. “None of this makes sense. Either someone’s not telling us
something or we’re going in the wrong direction.”

“I’ve asked
for the case notes from the parents’ crash, they’ll be here tomorrow morning.”
Carl stood up from his desk. “Let’s give this Polly Sparks a visit, my legs are
cramped from sitting still for so long.”

Danny groaned
as he stood up. His body was still slightly achy, and his neck had an annoying
crick in it.

“Her car’s in the drive, but it
doesn’t look like she’s here,” Carl reported, coming back round the side of the
house to the front door.

An upstairs
curtain twitched.

“Did you see
that?” Danny asked.

Jamie nodded.

“Someone is
definitely in there.”

“No doubt
about it. So, why won’t they open the door? If you saw two police officers and
a detective standing on your doorstep the only reason you wouldn’t open the
door is if you had something to hide,” Jamie said.

“If the side
gate’s unlocked and the back door is open, does it count as breaking and
entering?” Carl asked.

They both
looked at him.

“It’s just,
the back gate is unlocked and the back door is open.”

“Why has it
taken you this long to tell us that?” Danny asked.

Carl shrugged.

They shuffled
round the back of the house, through the gate and inside through the open door.
None of them knew whether it counted as breaking and entering – they just knew
it was their only choice.

Inside, the
house was silent.

“Do we shout
to warn her we’re inside or should we sneak up on her and see what she’s
doing?” Carl asked, routing for the latter option.

“Sneak,” Jamie
and Danny whispered in unison.

Carl was the
first one up the stairs, Jamie followed closely behind and Danny brought up the
rear.

“She was in
the front room on the right,” Carl whispered, signalling that they were going
to go right at the top of the stairs.

A red headed
lady was still standing by the window, peaking her head out through the
curtains. She didn’t see them approach.

The lady
gasped when she saw them. Her arms tightened around the thing she was holding.

“Polly
Sparks?” Carl asked.

She nodded.

“Can we speak
to you?”

She nodded
again and pointed over to the bed in the centre of the room.

They all sat
down.

The bed was
covered in tiny multicoloured flowers on a cream background. The background of
the duvet matched the walls perfectly. It was an odd place to interview someone
but they’d been in much stranger situations before.

Sitting down,
it was now clear to see what she was holding. A laptop.

“May I have a
look at that?” Carl asked, nodding towards the laptop.

She handed
over the laptop and wrinkled up her pale, freckled face.

“It’s Sara’s,”
she admitted, “I stole it from the office on Friday. The boss held me back to
tell me that I’d got the blame for this thing that went wrong. I was annoyed. I
knew it was Sara’s fault, and I knew that he knew that too. So I stole the
laptop.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.
I thought there might be something on there that I could use against her.”

“Was there?”

“I don’t know.
I couldn’t bring myself to look at it and then, when I heard that she’d been
murdered … there didn’t seem any point.”

Jamie looked
at the lady and saw herself, ten years ago. She couldn’t help feeling sorry for
the timid lady who’d been accused for something she didn’t do at work and her
gut told her that she didn’t kill Sara.

“We’ll need to
take that off you,” Carl said.

She handed
over the laptop without a second thought.

“Why didn’t
you hand it in to us earlier, and why have you been ignoring our phone calls
and refusing to open the door?” Danny obviously didn’t feel the same way about
her as Jamie did.

“I thought
you’d accuse me. I was scared.” Now that the laptop was gone, she hugged her
arms to her chest.

“You’ve wasted
police time.”

Her bottom lip
quivered.

Jamie lay her
hand on Danny’s arm.

He looked at
her.

“Thank you,
Miss Sparks,” Carl said. “Let us know if there’s anything else you think we
should know. We’ll be going now.”

“What was that all about?” Danny
asked as soon as they were back in the car.

“What was what
all about?” Jamie asked.

“The touching
my arm stuff. That woman is as likely to have killed Mrs Longacre as any of the
other suspects we have.”

Jamie sighed.
“If she was going to kill her, why would she steal her laptop?”

“We only have
her word for all this. For all we know, she killed Mrs Longacre and stole the
laptop from her house because there was something on there that she didn’t want
anyone to see.”

“Except the
laptop has a sticker on it which says
‘Custody of ABC  Productions, do not
remove from the property’
.”

“Oh. I didn’t
see that.”

“Motive nil,
opportunity nil,” Carl said. He was finding the situation a lot funnier than he
should have.

“Are we saying
that being blamed for something she didn’t do at work doesn’t count as a
motive?” Danny asked.

“Yes,” Carl
and Jamie said together.

“The story she
gave us was totally plausible,” Jamie added.

“I suppose
you’re going to do a red squiggly line through her row on the whiteboard when
you get back then.”

“Yep.”

They drove the
rest of the journey in silence with Danny in a strop in the front seat. Carl
was excited about the prospect of looking through their newly acquired laptop.

Chapter Ten

“It’s locked,” Carl complained.
It wouldn’t take a long time to crack it after he’d found the correct piece of
equipment, but he’d been hoping it wouldn’t be password protected – stupid
really since almost every laptop was.

“I think it’s
time to call it a day,” Danny said looking at the time.

“Great.” Carl
got up quickly, put the laptop in the safe in the cupboard and was out of the
door before anyone else had moved a muscle.

“It’s
Wednesday, half price drinks night at the pub,” he explained to Jamie and
reminded Danny.

“I think I’ll
just go home,” Jamie said.

“You can’t do
that,” Danny said, “call Alex and get him to join us at the pub. I owe him
one.”

Jamie debated
her options. Option A – go home and watch TV with Alex before having an early
night. Option B – go to the pub with her work colleagues for half price drinks.
She chose Option B, purely because that was the one she knew Alex would prefer.
Anyway, she could watch
New Girl
another day on
4oD
.

The pub looked different from the
last time she’d been there. It took Jamie a while to realise what had changed –
there was a smallish stage at the side of the room which made the chairs and
tables more cramped together than they had been.

“What’s that
for?” Jamie asked.

Carl pointed
at a poster stuck up on the wall.

Karaoke
Night – Wednesday 14
^th
May

Give
your song choice to the bar

Jamie laughed.

“We signed you
up,” Carl said.

“What?”

Now it was his
turn to laugh.

“Danny signed
us all up earlier.” He had to shout above the noise. The first song had begun
to play and a large, tone-deaf woman was on stage.

“Why?”

“He owed Alex
one, remember.” Carl winked, and Jamie wanted to hit him. “Oh come on, don’t
look like that. It’ll be fun.”

Karaoke was
not Jamie’s idea of fun.

“Hey sis.”
Alex came up behind her.

“Did you know
about this?” She looked furious.

Alex laughed.

“You know I
can’t sing,” she moaned.

Carl left them
to it.

“You said you
wanted to fit in. The way to fit in is to play along. Do what they do.”

“I don’t want
to fit in that much,” Jamie said.

“There are
three of you up there, you can probably get away with miming.”

“Is that
supposed to make me feel better?”

Alex pinched
her cheeks. “Cheer up, sis.”

“Is she still
moping?” Carl asked when he came back with the drinks.

Jamie took two
drinks from him. If she was going to get through this, she was going to need a
lot of alcohol inside her.

“Where’s
Danny?” she asked.

He pointed at
the stage. The large woman had left and the music had changed. Just as she
looked up, Danny came onto the stage.

“That knock to
his head must have been really bad.” She tugged Alex to the front of the stage
to get a better view.

“Do they do
this every week?” she asked Carl as he came up behind her.

“Na, last week
they did bingo. They always do something special though.”

They didn’t
speak through the rest of Danny’s performance.

“Thank you
everybody,” Danny said, bowing before he left the stage.

“He was pretty
good,” Alex said.

She rolled her
eyes at him. “Thanks for the encouragement.”

The next morning Jamie woke up
with the worst hangover she’d ever had.

“Toast?” Alex
shouted.

Jamie groaned.
Why wasn’t he suffering like she was?

“Alex’s
special hangover cure?” he asked.

“Yes please,”
she half said, half grumbled.

“Sorry, no
such thing. You’ll just have to suffer like everyone else who drinks half the
pub on their own.”

She slowly
manoeuvred her body out of bed, feeling as though it wasn’t attached to her,
knowing she couldn’t stay in the darkened room all day.

“I didn’t
drink that much,” she moaned as she shuffled across the kitchen floor in her
Scottie dog slippers.

“Nice jim
jams,” Carl said.

Jamie opened
her eyes wider. “What are you doing here?” she screamed, the banging in her
head made her wish she hadn’t.

“You don’t
remember, do you? I came home with you guys ‘cause your house was closer. Pink
really suits you, you know? Not keen on the baggy bottoms though.”

“They’re
pyjama trousers, what do you expect?”

“Something a
little sexier, maybe some lace.”

Alex, who had
stayed scarily quiet for the past two minutes, said, “Don’t you guys have
somewhere to be?”

Her stomach
turned at the sight of the bacon sandwiches on the table. She retreated to the
safety of her room.

Opening her
wardrobe, she picked out the first outfit she saw.

“Jamie, we got
to go,” Carl shouted.

“Just a
minute.” She slipped a simple, black, v-neck top over her head and tugged on a
pair of baby pink jeans. On her way out of the door she grabbed a chunky
necklace.

At the
station, Danny was already looking through the file on the fatal car crash that
Sara’s parents had been involved in.

“Very little
here,” he said, showing Carl and Jamie the single sheet of paper. “There was
however, one survivor.”

“Who?” Carl
asked.

“You’ll never
guess … Greg, Mrs Longacre’s ex-husband.”

“Why didn’t he
tell us?”

“There are a
lot of secrets in this family. I think there’s a lot of stuff we’re not being
told,” Danny said.

“We need to
talk to him again,” Carl said.

“And, we still
need to talk to Mr Longacre about this mysterious woman.”

There was a
knock on the door, although it was left open the person didn’t come inside.

“Come in,”
Danny called.

Neil Longacre
walked into the office.

“Just the
person we wanted to talk to,” Carl said.

“I heard my
name mentioned from outside. I just came to see if you were any closer to
solving the case. When can I go back to my house?”

“Sorry, the
house is still a crime scene. We can’t let you back in there.” Danny waved for Neil
to take a seat opposite him.

“The house is
just sitting there. It’s not like you’ve been anywhere near it recently.”

“How do you
know that?” Danny looked curious.

“No reason,
the neighbours are just keeping an eye on it for me.”

“I thought you
didn’t get on with the neighbours.”

“We, I, don’t.
It’s not a crime that the neighbours are watching out for people going to and
from my house, is it?” He’d put his defensive front up again.

“No.”

“We have some
questions to ask you,” Carl said before Neil could reply.

“You always
seem to have questions for me. Maybe if you asked everyone else this many
questions you’d have solved the case by now.”

“We are doing
our best,” Danny said, “however when people keep hiding vital information from
us it’s more difficult.”

“I don’t know
what you’re talking about.” He stood up to leave.

“You’ve been
seen around the area with a woman, who is she?” Danny asked.

“I know a lot
of women, Mr Brookes.”

“This wasn’t
just any woman, you two were very close.”

“Probably just
a work client.”

“No,
definitely not a work client. My colleague saw you and this woman by the
waterfall in the woods.”

“I don’t know
of any waterfall and anyway, I haven’t been in the area.”

Danny was fed
up of playing games. “Show him the picture.”

Jamie slid the
printed version of the photograph out of its plastic wallet and showed it to
Neil. It was a little fuzzy, but you could clearly make out the two people.

“Ah,” Neil
said, realising he’d been caught out. “She’s just … um she’s–”

“Your bit on
the side,” Carl added helpfully.

“I guess you
could call her that.”

“Did your wife
know about this?” Danny said.

“Of course
not, Sara would’ve been devastated.”

“How long had
this been going on?” Danny asked.

Carl took a
pencil off Jamie’s desk and started jotting down notes.

“I don’t know
really. It wasn’t meant to be … ”

“No, it’s
never meant to be.” Danny gestured for him to sit down again. “So tell me, how
close were you with this woman?”

“It was only supposed
to be a little fling. Lots of guys have them. But then it turned more serious.
I guess it’s been about six months.”

“So half the
length of your marriage?”

“I suppose
so.”

“We’ll need
details of this woman,” Danny said.

“You need to
contact her? Why?” Neil looked more affected by this information than when
they’d first told him of his wife’s murder.

“Protocol.”

“I get it.
First you suspect me of killing Sara and now you’re blaming it on my partner.
Well fine, you can have her details. She wouldn’t have done anything. She’s
never even met Sara.” There were beads of sweat forming on his forehead.

“Thank you,”
Danny handed over a sheet of paper.

“You police
really are rubbish. You didn’t do anything about the crash Sara’s parents were
involved in and you’re not doing anything now.” He spoke while he wrote.

“About that.
Was there anyone involved in the crash other than Sara’s parents?”

“Now why would
you ask a question like that? As far as I’m aware there were two people in the
car and both of them died. Sara didn’t want me to get involved. It was a busy
time at work for me, and she didn’t want to distract me.”

“And, you were
perfectly happy with that?” Danny frowned.

“I was. I
didn’t like Sara’s parents and they didn’t like me. To be honest, our marriage
was a lot easier without them sniffing about.” He shoved the piece of paper
across the desk towards Danny. “Now, I really must go.”

“What a lovely
way to talk about your deceased wife’s dead parents,” Jamie said once he was
gone.

Danny shook
his head. “Tanya Goldsmith.”

“Never heard
of her,” Carl said.

“She can’t be
from around here.” Danny skim read the information on the piece of paper. “No,
she’s not from around here, so what were they doing in the area?”

“Carl, can you
do a background check on her?” Jamie asked.

“Sure.”