Under a Silent Moon: A Novel (42 page)

Sam, calm as ever, tried a different tactic. “I’d like to point out, Brian, that this morning you’ve claimed that you don’t remember anything about the phone calls made that night, but I believe you’re not telling the truth. You told us when you were interviewed before that your memory of the night had come back, that you remembered having an argument with your wife and then you went to have a bath and went to bed. And now you’re claiming that you don’t remember making phone calls in the early hours of the morning all around the county. That’s going to look very bad. Do you understand?”

At last he cleared his throat and leaned forward in his chair. “All right,” he said, “all right.”

Simon McGrath started to speak but Brian raised his hand to wave him away. “There’s no point, is there? It’s all going to come out sooner or later, isn’t it?”

Brian looked up again, right into Sam’s eyes. She was struck with how afraid he appeared, his eyes desperate for help.

“I can’t help you, Brian,” she said, quietly, “unless you tell me the truth. Let’s start from the beginning again, shall we?”

“I killed her,” he said.

Sam’s heart skipped a beat. She took a slow, deep breath in, not allowing the mask of calm to slip. “Who?”

“Barbara. My wife. I pushed her over the edge of the quarry. So what is it you want me to tell you?”

10:27

This was all taking too long. It wasn’t just the traffic. Flora felt as though time itself had slowed and she was fighting against it. Fighting against everything, now.

Going to the police station had been a mistake. What did she expect them to do? What could she prove? Nothing. They wanted evidence. And what evidence could she give them? All the stuff in the boxes, there was no point in giving them that. Apart from the voice-mail message she had left on that phone, none of it had anything to do with Polly. And the message, by itself, proved nothing. They would take it and keep it on file and nothing would happen.

They were all scared of Nigel and Joe Lorenzo, the police. He was too difficult for them to touch. It made them reluctant to do anything, and as a result he kept getting away with it. He had been getting away with it for years.

Flora took a detour past the studio, to check that everything was as she had left it. Her intention had been only to check the car park, to look for the Land Rover or the Mitsubishi pickup, but once she was there and saw the car park was completely empty, she pulled in and turned off the engine.

Upstairs, the air was freezing cold. She glanced around the main studio, but nothing had been disturbed. The kitchen, too, was as she had left it this morning: her blanket in a pile on the floor, unwashed mugs in the sink, the radio on the counter. She pulled open the cupboard door, and inside were the two boxes.

She could take it with her.

She had thought this before. In fact, over the past few hours the thought had been there, persistently at the front of her mind, nagging, pestering. She could take the gun, threaten him with it. See if that did the trick.

A few minutes later, back out in the car, Flora was heading toward Morden again.

10:45

When Taryn had arrived at the police station she had been tense and tearful. Sam Hollands had phoned her at home, and when she heard the words “I’m calling about your father,” her immediate thought had been that he’d suffered another heart attack and died. She barely registered what Sam said next, because her reaction to the thought of him dying had taken her completely by surprise. Despite how she’d felt, especially recently, being forced into being nice and kind and all the things she thought she was anyway, she had never thought for one moment she would feel this dramatic wrench of sorrow.

And then Taryn realized that Sam wasn’t calling to tell her he was dead, after all, and she had to ask Sam to repeat what she had said.

Arrested.

Immediately she had so many questions:
Where? When? What do I need to do?
And all she could think was how Barbara had somehow engineered this, must have somehow set him up to take the blame. She had come directly, phoning Flora on the way, fretting and panicking and working herself up into a state because Flora wasn’t answering, and everything was made worse because she couldn’t find a parking space.

“Mrs. Lewis?”

Taryn looked to her right and saw a smartly dressed young woman holding open the door that led back toward the front counter.

“My name is Detective Chief Inspector Lou Smith,” said the woman, offering her hand. Taryn shook it, confused. “Can I call you Taryn? I wonder if we could have a quick word? Let’s go in here, shall we?”

They were in a small interview room, nothing in it but a desk and two chairs either side of it.

“Have a seat. I was hoping to talk to your friend Flora. She was here earlier but she left. I don’t suppose you know where she is?”

Taryn reached into her bag for her phone, checked it. No missed calls, no texts. “I didn’t know she was here. I tried to ring her, but she didn’t answer. Is she all right?”

“I don’t know. I have to say I’m quite concerned about her.”

“Are you?” Taryn said.

“Before you arrived, she asked to see me. She seemed quite agitated. And yet when we had a few minutes to talk, she seemed uncertain and confused.”

“I don’t think she’s been sleeping. She’s been so upset, you know. About Polly.”

“Understandable,” Lou said. “I believe she and Polly were in a relationship for a time.”

“Yes. She was devastated by what happened. I’m worried she’s not coping.”

“Taryn, I have some news about your father. We’ve just charged him with murder.”

Taryn didn’t answer for a moment. Unlike Flora, unlike her father, she had never felt any distrust of the police. In fact, she had rather liked that tall, chunky one who had met up with them in the café. Sam Hollands had been so kind to her, and now this woman, who seemed so genuine too. She couldn’t think of anything to say.

“He’ll be taken before the magistrate in the morning. We’ll continue to interview him until then, but we will make sure he gets plenty of rest and the custody nurse will be keeping a close eye on him, so you don’t need to worry.”

Taryn cleared her throat. “Can I see him?”

“Maybe a bit later. It’s all a bit hectic right now. I’ll make sure we keep you updated.”

“Thank you,” Taryn said, as though Lou had offered her sympathies. She hadn’t. Then another thing occurred to her: “Does he need anything?”

“I’ll make sure someone asks him. He might like a suit to wear in the morning.”

“Of course.”

Lou smiled. “We’re doing everything we can to minimize the stress of the situation, so try not to worry. But I’m afraid we’re running an investigation into a very serious offense. We need to establish exactly what happened as quickly as possible.”

“And you think my dad killed Polly?”

Lou’s eyes flicked up to meet Taryn’s. “What makes you say that?”

“You said he’d been arrested for murder . . .”

“He’s been charged with the murder of Barbara Fletcher-Norman.”

Taryn was confused again. “But I thought she killed herself? She drove herself over the edge of the quarry, didn’t she?”

“There are still a lot of questions we’re trying to answer.”

Taryn said, “He said something really strange to me, on the phone. He called last night to tell me he was being discharged from the hospital today, he asked me to come and pick him up . . . and we were talking about Barbara, and he said, ‘She liked to kill people.’ I didn’t know what he meant. I mean, I assumed he meant Polly, but even so . . . it was such a strange thing.”

“You’re sure he was talking about Barbara?”

Taryn didn’t answer.

Lou Smith leaned forward in her chair. “Taryn. I think it’s really, really important that I find Flora. Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”

11:14

It was only when she parked outside Yonder Cottage that Flora noticed her hands were shaking. She gripped the steering wheel tighter to see if that would help. Deep breaths. She needed to chill out. She needed to think.

But there was no time to think anymore.

She got out of the car and slammed the door behind her, setting off up the driveway. A moment later she was passing the stables. Behind them, in the paddock, Elki stood by the gate, chewing, watching her. The other horses were all out in the field with her, where she had left them this morning.

She carried on round the bend at the top of the driveway. Of course, she could have driven all the way up and parked outside the barn, but she needed a few moments—cold air on her face, the smell of the farm, a chance to get her bearings.

The door to the barn was open, the Land Rover parked outside. She walked in without hesitation, over to the office. Nigel was sitting inside, watching her approach through the glass panel in the door. He had a glass in his hand, whiskey already even though it wasn’t even lunchtime. His face was florid.

Flora did not knock, just opened the door and went in.

“You might as well sit down,” he said, after a moment.

She sat.

“You look worse than I thought you would,” he said. “Where did you sleep?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t sleep.”

“Figures.”

He offered her the bottle of whiskey and she took it, gulping it back in the hope that it would help, somehow give her the courage that she desperately needed.

“So,” he said. “What is it you want, Flora? I’m guessing you’re here because you want something.”

“I want to know what happened,” she said.

“It’s not what you think,” he said.

“Don’t tell me what I think!” Her anger was swift, out of nowhere. She tried to calm it again with a big gulp of whiskey, fire going down her throat. “Just—just tell me the truth, if you can.”

He took a deep breath in, his bright-blue eyes studying her. “Here’s the deal, then. I will tell you everything that happened that night. You will then go and get the items you removed from Petrie’s house last night and bring them back here. After that, we will decide how we can move on from this. Agreed?”

So he knew. Despite the pulse pounding in her head, the fear that this was all some sort of trick, Flora nodded. “Agreed.”

“There was a delivery that night. Something went wrong and it turned up here at the farm instead of the place where the driver should have gone.”

He didn’t continue for a moment, looking across Flora’s shoulder as though he was remembering it.

“A delivery of what? People?”

He didn’t answer the question, but carried on as though he hadn’t heard. “It was late, it was dark, I had them on my phone telling me to sort it out and I was getting angry because all of this should have been straightforward.”

“Who’s ‘them’?”

“Friends of mine. Believe me, that’s something you don’t want to know.”

He drank from his glass as though it were water. Flora passed him the bottle so he could refill his glass, and then accepted it back from him and drank some more, pretending she wasn’t trying to match him gulp for gulp. If he wanted an anesthetic against this awful discussion, so did she.

“What’s that got to do with Polly?”

“Polly had been out somewhere. The lorry was blocking the drive so she couldn’t get in and she drove round the other way, to the farmhouse, and walked back down through the yard. She saw me and came over, asked me what was going on. I told her it was a feed delivery that had come in the wrong way.”

He stopped and his eyes went up to the ceiling. Flora realized he was actually showing some emotion now. She knew how that felt: recalling Polly, remembering her alive. Every thought of her, walking, talking, breathing, smiling—it hurt like a blow to the face.

“She didn’t believe a word of it,” he said.

“I’m not surprised.”

“I told her to go back to the cottage and stay there, told her to go to bed. But she was, I don’t know, weird. She’d been crying and she was unsteady on her feet, as though she was drunk. And she was all dressed up. She looked . . . she looked . . .”

He put the glass down carefully, deliberately, on top of the papers on the desk and ran his hand across his face, through his hair.

“Then what happened?”

“She kept demanding to know what was going on. And I got the impression she didn’t even really give a shit, she just wanted someone to shout at. She wanted an argument. And the driver, the driver of the lorry, he’d been making phone calls, I’d been making phone calls. And then the Petrie boy turned up with some others. I’d sent him off to get some help, meaning he should find somewhere else for the lorry to park up overnight and do the handover, and instead of doing that the stupid little fucker had gone and got half of his crazy family. And everyone was standing around arguing, and Polly was there, arguing too, even though it had nothing at all to do with her. I kept thinking the neighbors were going to hear, that Brian or that mad wife of his would hear and call the police.”

A tear slid down Nigel’s cheek, and the sight of it was somehow more alarming than anything she’d seen or heard today.

“I could have done something,” he said. “I had no idea it would end up the way it did.”

He rubbed the tear away, sniffed. “Anyway, in the end she’d had enough and she went back to the cottage. We managed to reverse the lorry out, went ahead with the rendezvous in a different location. It took hours, during which she phoned and left a message on my voice mail to have a go at me all over again. I tried to call back, but there was no answer so I assumed she must have gone to bed. I went back to the farmhouse. I hadn’t realized Polly’s car was still parked outside. The keys were inside, so I drove it round to the cottage. All the lights were off and I walked back round and went in the house.”

He fell silent again.

The whiskey was making Flora’s lips feel numb, and asking questions felt like a chore, like an effort.

“That’s it?”

“Yes. Flora, I don’t know for sure what happened to Polly.”

“But you think it was one of the men who were here? One of your friends?”

“It’s possible, although I don’t know why. They’re fucked in the head, half of them off their brains on gear of one sort or another. I don’t think it was Petrie, unless one of his uncles told him to do it. He may be weird, but I don’t think he could cope with that level of violence without giving himself away afterwards.”