Especially to Marc. Hannah wanted to believe she was overreacting. With any luck, he’d be fine, hunting mouldy books in some godforsaken attic or cellar. But in her heart, she suspected his luck had run out.
The case against their two suspects was circumstantial. Her team and Fern’s faced a huge task in assembling enough evidence to persuade the CPS to bring the couple to court. But even as she’d talked through her theory with Greg Wharf, Hannah found herself believing in it more strongly with each passing minute. Arlo and Cassie were guilty, she was certain of it. Between them, they had killed Bethany Friend, George Saffell, and Stuart Wagg.
The surging sense of success reminded her of one Good Friday years ago, after she and Marc had bought a flat-pack self-assembly cupboard over the Internet. When they opened the box, the components had seemed to bear no relationship to each other. The instructions were in Japanese, and the accompanying diagrams more inscrutable than the Beale Cipher. It had taken hours, but she still remembered their shared triumph when at last they figured out how to fit the pieces together to form something recognisable as furniture. Marc had carried her off to bed to celebrate their achievement, she remembered. They’d dumped the cupboard in a skip the day they moved into Undercrag.
What drove Cassie and Arlo on? She suspected folie a deux. Madness shared by two people, whose psychotic bond brought out their worst impulses. The key to detection was to separate the suspects, so they could be interrogated without being able to give each other mutual support. In view of her relationship with Marc, there was no way she could be involved in interviewing either Cassie or Arlo, otherwise the defence lawyers would have a field day. All she wanted to do was to find Marc, and make sure he kept away from the woman who was mad, bad and dangerous to know.
Thanks to the fog, traffic on the A591 was bumper-to-bumper, but Hannah strove for patience. Please God, this would prove a wild goose chase. But she owed it to Marc to check it out for herself.
She was on her way home to Undercrag. To make sure that her partner hadn’t taken Cassie there to commit the ultimate betrayal.
When Marc started choking on his own bile, the man tore the tape from his mouth. It hurt, and made his eyes fill with tears. He found himself spewing onto the rock beneath his feet.
‘That isn’t to allow you to talk, do you understand?’ the man said. ‘I’m not into dialogue. But I would hate you to choke on your own vomit. Too quick, too easy.’
This was Ro, had to be. But he was Arlo Denstone, the expert on Thomas De Quincey. Marc understood nothing, except that he was in danger. The man had brought him here to die.
His mouth formed a single word.
Why?
‘I don’t believe in explanations,’ Ro said. ‘Life and death, how can they be explained? De Quincey knew what I’m aiming for. Virginia Woolf said he was transfixed by the mysterious solemnity of certain emotions. How one moment might transcend in value fifty whole years. An impassioned man, Thomas, but he got his kicks from writing, not from the things he did. A difference between us, though I swear he’d share my taste for Grand Guignol. My destiny is to make nightmares come true, the way they came true for me.’
The dog made a dozy noise. A throaty rumble.
Ro nodded towards it.
‘A wild creature. I bought him illegally, and that isn’t my only crime. I didn’t feed him for forty-eight hours. And then I slipped something into his last supper.’
Marc forced his gaze away from the pit bull. His heart bumped inside his chest. Much more of this, and he’d have a coronary.
It might be for the best.
‘I named him Thomas, what else? Trust me, when he wakes from his sleep, he’ll be in a very bad mood. And he will be hungry. Ravenous.’ Ro threw a scornful glance at Marc’s skinny, trembling body. ‘He’s a carnivore. Not fussy about the quality of his meat.’
Tears ran down Marc’s cheek. He couldn’t help himself. Couldn’t dry the tears, either.
A noise attracted his attention. Someone was moving away the boards at the narrow window. He peered round and saw a face he recognised.
It was Cassie. Standing outside, looking in.
Through the opening in the wall of the tower, Marc saw no expression in the gaze she fixed on the man who called himself Arlo Denstone, but the faintest of smiles played on her lips.
‘Murder is a fine art,’ the man said. ‘But it evolves with time. It needs updating. This is an age when we watch the world go by, on our television screens or laptops. Cassie, and I, we have turned it into a spectator sport.’
‘Wagg was good in bed,’ Cassie whispered. ‘But nowhere near as good as you. No one is as good as you, my love.’
Marc wanted to scream. It’s a lie, a wicked lie. I only wanted to be her friend. I never even touched her.
But he knew nothing he might say could save his life, and no words came.
The man grinned at the dog. ‘Last week, I watched Thomas chew a rabbit that had escaped from a hutch next door. Call it a rehearsal. Took a while, but there wasn’t much left by the time old Thomas was done.’
Marc shivered uncontrollably.
Jesus, was the dog stirring?
Undercrag was melancholy in the fog, a sombre, hollow shell. Hannah was no longer sure she wanted to live here, but that was a decision for another day. Marc’s car was nowhere to be seen. Hannah searched the ground floor and then ran upstairs to look into each of the bedrooms. Nothing.
OK, it would have been extraordinarily crass for Marc to bring Cassie to their home for a quick shag. Hannah was ashamed of herself for having feared it possible.
But if he wasn’t misbehaving here, that begged the question of where he might be, and what he might be doing.
Hunger pangs assailed her. She needed to eat. This wouldn’t be a good time to fall down in a faint. She found an apple from a fruit basket in the kitchen, and was starting to peel it when her phone rang. She took a quick bite and shoved knife and fruit in her jacket pocket. Food would have to wait.
Greg Wharf’s Geordie tones filled her ear. ‘I’m just leaving Sir Julius Telo’s mansion.’
Sir Julius was the chair of the Culture Company. ‘What did he have to say about Denstone?’
‘He’s been fretting about the guy for weeks. He had a great CV, and he was brimming with enthusiasm as well as expertise. The clincher was that he offered to do the job for free. It sounded too good to be true.’
‘Did nobody wonder how he could afford to be so altruistic?’
‘He said he’d inherited money from his uncle, but the key point was that he loved the Lakes, and was crazy about De Quincey. He’d fought cancer and won, and now he wanted to make every day count, plus raise money for a good cause. This was only a six-month contract, and he saw it as a dream job. A challenge combined with a chance to put something back into the community.’
‘So, Sir Julius bit his hand off?’
‘Not the done thing to cross-examine a cancer survivor who behaved so selflessly. Especially if you have more money than brain cells. Sir Julius accepted his CV at face value, there wasn’t any due diligence. At least not until the Culture Company realised that the start date of the Festival was drawing near, and there was still a vast amount of work to do. The troops were becoming restless, and there was gossip about Denstone’s habit of disappearing for hours or even days at a time.’
‘To shag Cassie Weston, I suppose,’ Hannah said bitterly.
‘Some people guessed he was conducting an affair, and that was taking his eye off the ball. Sir Julius rang up the Australian university where Denstone was supposed to have held some senior post, only to be told that the guy’s track record was much less high-powered than he’d led everyone to believe. It’s the old story: there are lies, damned lies, and CVs. Arlo Denstone was a foot soldier who promoted himself to field marshal.’