‘I don’t understand.’
‘Me neither. But believe me, I will.’
Her voice hardened. Raw anger, he thought, on the behalf of the victims. He’d heard the same edge of furious determination before, in the days when his father lived at home.
‘What do you think it means?’ When she hesitated, he said. ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t ask.’
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘If you really want to know.’
A moment of intimacy, like the night before. He had to give her the chance to change her mind, and back away.
‘I don’t want you to breach confidentiality.’
‘It’s not against the rules to think aloud,’ she said. ‘OK, here goes. Bethany Friend was afraid of water, George Saffell was terrified of pain and dreaded losing his book collection, and Stuart Wagg was claustrophobic. Their lives all ended in circumstances that they would have found truly appalling.’
Hannah’s heart beat faster as she dropped the phone into its cradle. Mustn’t let thoughts of Daniel distract her; she had enough on her plate. It had seemed strange, to wake up alone, even though Marc often stayed away from home, when exhibiting at book fairs, or visiting collectors with books to sell. But this morning was different. The draughty, echoing house felt too big for her. She didn’t know when he’d be back. Or if.
She checked her mobile to see if he’d sent a text. Nothing. The mean sod. If he was staying with his mother, he’d soon tire of the tug of her apron strings. OK, let him sweat. No way was she going to make the first move. Not today, at any rate.
Number one priority was to report that Bethany Friend had worked for Amos Books before moving to the university. Whatever she said to Daniel in rare moments of bravado, if she screwed this case up, her career would be flushed down the pan. Lauren would have to be told that Marc knew Bethany, but first she wanted to break the news to Fern Larter. She texted Fern, asking to see her before the joint team briefing. The reply was instant. Fern was in a buoyant mood, pleased with her crack-of-dawn radio interview and that the investigation into George Saffell’s death, stalled for so long, was at last on the move.
The grass outside Undercrag did not look frozen, but when she stood on it to de-ice the windscreen of the Lexus, it felt as hard and crunchy as icing on a cake. The frost had preserved countless deer slots and Hannah wondered if, while she slept, a large number of the animals had roamed outside her home in the moonlight. Or maybe a handful of them had danced round and round in ever-decreasing circles. She knew exactly what that felt like.
The fog clutched at her throat as she locked the front door, and turned the journey to Kendal into a nerve-wracking crawl. Hannah hated fog, and the way it stagnated in the valleys, transforming the Lakes into a cold and alien land. And she hated driving through it even more. You could never tell what lay round the next bend. A car without lights, a multi-vehicle pile-up.
The twists of the road demanded all her concentration. But she couldn’t rid her mind of a single image: the rictus of anger on Wanda Saffell’s face, on New Year’s Eve, as she threw red wine over Arlo Denstone’s white jacket. Wanda was drunk that night, and a woman scorned. But did the incident reveal a dangerous lack of restraint? Was she capable of much worse than making a scene at a party? Or was Hannah simply hoping so because she’d hinted that Marc had slept with Bethany?
She made straight for Fern’s office. Fern organised a coffee for each of them and spent five minutes putting things into perspective. Marc needed to be interviewed, for the record. If he could contribute anything more to the inquiry, fine. But Bethany had finished at the bookshop months before her death. She’d had countless previous jobs if you included all her part-time stints behind bars or waiting on table. It was no big deal.
‘Marc has moved out,’ Hannah said.
Fern swallowed a mouthful of coffee. The slogan on her coaster read Well-behaved women seldom make history.
‘After you read him the riot act?’
‘He ought to have been upfront, and admitted that he knew her. Not leave me to find out from Wanda Saffell.’
As she spoke, she realised she sounded flinty and uncompromising. Mulish was how Marc described her in this kind of mood.
‘Yeah, but we don’t always do the right thing, do we? He must have worried that you’d react badly.’
‘He was right to worry.’
Fern put her head on one side, as if this might help her read Hannah’s mind. ‘You’re not seriously thinking that he might have anything to do with Bethany’s death?’
‘No…’
‘Well, then.’ Fern stood up. ‘With a bit of luck, he’ll come to his senses. And so will you. All right, let’s marshal the troops.’
The joint team briefing threw out questions like sparks from a Catherine wheel. None of the radiators were working, but for once nobody complained. The detectives working for Fern on the suspected murder of George Saffell had run into a brick wall. Discovering fresh lines of inquiry gave them an adrenaline rush.
Fern reported that CSIs continued to swarm over Stuart Wagg’s home in the hope of finding forensic evidence to link his murder with the fatal fire in the Ullswater boathouse. Differences in the MO did not disguise similarities between the cases. Two wealthy professionals, who moved in the same social circles, and even shared the same expensive hobby, both killed at home. Nobody believed the choice of victims was random. The murderer must be known to both victims. Throw into the mix a possible sighting of the culprit’s car, and no wonder the room buzzed with anticipation.
A farm worker had spotted a small purple car parked across the road from Crag Gill for three-quarters of an hour shortly after the last known sighting of Stuart Wagg by Louise Kind. The car was tucked away among the trees, but the man had seen it from his tractor cab, as he travelled to and from a nearby field. The windows were steamed up and he’d supposed a couple of teenagers were getting it together inside. If only he’d given a more precise description; in a perfect world, he’d have noted the registration number too. But the world wasn’t perfect, and he knew more about tractors than cars. Maybe it was a Nissan Micra, maybe something else. Even so, the sighting was a break.
Now Hannah had raised a possible link with the unexplained drowning of Bethany Friend in the Serpent Pool. Bethany, like the two men, had a passion for books — and she’d worked for both their firms. And then there was the connection between the psychology of the victims. Each of the three victims had died in terror.
‘Should we call in a profiler?’ asked a young DC called Ciaran who had the manner of an eager puppy.
Hannah ignored the mutterings from the sceptics, Greg Wharf among them, who stood at the back of the room. For some detectives, psychological profilers ranked with witch ball-gazers and folk who offered racing tips, but you couldn’t ignore any tool in the box.
‘We’ve put a call in to Trudy Groenewald at Lancaster University. She’s due here to look over the files this afternoon.’
‘Why the six-year gap between the crimes?’ a DS in Fern’s team asked.
‘Of course, we’re keeping an open mind about whether the deaths are connected. Bethany’s hydrophobia might just be a coincidence. But if the same person or people are responsible for all three deaths, there may be various explanations for the years of inactivity.’
‘For example, that the killer hasn’t been inactive,’ Hannah added. ‘There may be other deaths in the meantime where a connection hasn’t been identified. Think of the MO in the Bethany Friend case. Drowning didn’t exclude the possibility of suicide. With Saffell, the killer didn’t try so hard to disguise the murder. And Wagg couldn’t have killed himself. We have a progression, a murderer becoming increasingly reckless. And we can’t rule out that there were other victims, after Bethany and before Saffell.’
‘Ciaran, I want you to check the records,’ Fern said. ‘Do any other cases fit the pattern? Remember, assumption is the mother of all cock-ups. But if we’re just looking at these three deaths, we need to focus on sadists who spent the past six years out of circulation. In prison, for instance — anyone released last autumn who fits the bill? A job for you, Roz.’