Like This, for Ever (38 page)

The line went dead. The call would have cost the other woman a small fortune in prison currency. With everything screaming at her to get up and get moving, Lacey took a few moments to look back through the Facebook postings. The prisoner had quoted them absolutely correctly. Was there really any doubt? None that she could see. OK, this was no time to play the Lone Ranger.

‘Gayle, it’s Lacey,’ she said, when her call was answered. ‘I need to run something past you.’

‘HAVE YOU FOUND
my son yet?’

Each time Dana had seen Stewart Roberts this evening, he’d changed, and not for the better. The crisp, steel-grey of his hair seemed to have seeped down and stained his skin. His forehead and cheeks were more lined than before. His hands were shaking and, in spite of the heating in the room, he shivered continually. He might be a guilty man about to crack. Equally, he could be a normal parent terrified for the safety of his son.

Wreck or not, they hadn’t been able to break him yet. They’d talked to him twice. Both times he’d denied being at the boat at any time since the one-off day in January when he’d gone to deal with water damage.

‘We’re looking,’ she told him. ‘Sergeant, can I have a word?’

‘I don’t believe you,’ Stewart called after her as Anderson rose to follow Dana from the room. ‘You’re looking for that other kid. You’re not interested in mine.’

As Dana and Anderson left the room, Stewart’s solicitor put a hand on his client’s arm and spoke to him in a low voice. The door clanged shut.

‘How’s it going, Ma’am?’ asked Anderson, rubbing his eyes.

‘We’ve had the coroner’s report into the death of Karen Roberts, Stewart’s wife,’ she told him. ‘He’s off the hook for that, at any rate.
She spoke to a relative on the phone after Stewart and Barney left the house, and she’d been dead at least an hour by the time they got back. He couldn’t have killed her.’

Anderson nodded, then shrugged. ‘We’re getting nowhere in there,’ he said, indicating the interview room. ‘He claims the internet research he’s been doing is background work for a lecture he’s got coming up. All the renewed interest in vampires gave him the idea, apparently. And Gothic literature is his specialist subject, so naturally he’s going to have all sorts of spooky books. He’s hiding something, but until he starts talking, we’ve got nothing other than the word of an hysterical – and missing – kid.’

‘Oh, we’ve got a bit more than that,’ said Dana, letting a small smile creep on to her face. ‘We’ve got a cabinet full of blood-clotting drugs and hypodermics, which don’t strike me as everyday toiletries, and we’ve got traces of blood on the houseboat.’

Anderson looked instantly awake again. ‘You’re kidding me?’

‘Too soon to say whose, of course. We’ve also got a magazine dated the first week in February. A woman’s magazine, interestingly, but it still puts the nail on his story about not being there recently. What do you say we have another word?’

‘After you, Ma’am.’

Dana picked up her case. This time, when they opened the door, the eyes of the solicitor met them. ‘Mr Roberts is ready to make a statement,’ he told them. ‘In return, he wants an assurance that you are doing everything possible to find his son.’

‘Of course,’ said Dana. She picked up the phone and requested that someone bring a progress report down to the interview room. If Stewart was about to tell them something valuable, she didn’t want it compromised down the line when he claimed undue stress as a result of worrying about his son. She took her seat and Anderson dropped heavily into the chair beside her.

‘What would you like to tell us, Mr Roberts?’ she said.

Stewart looked her straight in the eye. It was the first time he’d done so except when he’d been asking about his son. ‘I was at Deptford Creek on Saturday the sixteenth of February,’ he told her. ‘On my father-in-law’s old boat. I arrived at around seven in the
evening. I left just after one in the morning, when I judged the police had finally left the site.’

Dana told herself to stay calm, not to react with anything more than polite interest.

‘I’ve also been going to the boat most Tuesday and Thursday evenings,’ he went on, ‘since the middle of November. There was a period over Christmas and the New Year when the keys went missing and I had to get the locks changed. I couldn’t use it then. And I haven’t been the last couple of weeks. With everything that’s going on, I haven’t liked to leave my son alone and he hates babysitters.’

‘Why do you go to the boat?’ asked Dana, with an odd urge to reach out and squeeze Anderson’s hand. If more had ever depended upon an answer to a question, she honestly couldn’t remember it.

Roberts looked down at the table, then at his solicitor, then back at her. ‘I go to meet my girlfriend,’ he told her. ‘I didn’t tell you earlier because I was trying to protect her. It’s become obvious that that isn’t going to be possible.’

Dana told herself not to panic. ‘Why the secrecy?’ she asked.

‘Because she’s married. But I imagine you already guessed that.’

It might not be true. It might be a delaying tactic. If he didn’t admit the girlfriend’s name straight away, that would be a sign that he was just playing with them.

‘We’re going to need her name,’ said Anderson.

Stewart nodded his head. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Her name is Gillian Green. She’s my son’s form teacher. Her husband is his games teacher. You can see now why I can’t entertain her at home.’

No. They could not have wasted the past three hours on a man who was guilty of nothing more than an affair with a married woman. She was going to kill Lacey Flint.

‘Was she with you at the boat on the sixteenth of February?’

‘She was. When we heard the fuss going on around us, and talk of the police being called, I told her to slip away quietly. I was going to follow when I’d locked the boat up. I didn’t get chance, so had to wait till it was all over. I sat on the dark boat and waited. Your people knocked at exactly 11.42. I ignored them.’

Dana could feel the tension building again in the back of her neck. He didn’t look as though he was lying.

‘Why do you meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays?’ she asked him.

‘Her husband coaches a football club till eight, then does his own circuit training at a local leisure centre. After that, he goes to the pub. He’s rarely home before midnight.’

Dana felt Anderson’s eyes on her. She turned. His eyebrows were raised.
Daniel Green
, he’d written on the pad in front of him. She nodded.

‘And the black glove you’ve been getting so excited about is hers, by the way,’ Stewart went on. ‘It’s not a child’s glove, it’s a one-size stretch glove. She uses them for playing tennis.’

He had an answer for everything. Did he? She reached into her case and pulled out an evidence bag. ‘Can you tell me what this is?’ she asked, putting the bag on the table in front of Stewart. He bent forward to look at the clear plastic vials inside.

‘It’s my medication,’ he said.

‘For what?’

He looked directly at her. ‘I’m a haemophiliac. I inject myself a couple of times a week as a preventative measure. Otherwise, if the knife slips when I’m chopping the carrots, I could bleed to death. Actually, I don’t use knives if I can avoid it. Hardly worth the risk.’

No, this was not all slipping away from her. ‘Your GP will confirm this?’

‘Of course. Would you like her name and number? I also made a point of telling your custody sergeant when he booked me in. Did he not mention it?’

An answer for everything.

‘So why was your son surprised to find it?’ asked Anderson, who seemed a lot more on the ball than she was. ‘Why did he mention it to one of our officers?’

‘Barney doesn’t know about my condition. Wisely or not, it’s one of several things I decided to keep from him.’

‘Why?’ asked Anderson. ‘Surely it would be a precaution for him to know. In case anything happens.’

‘Barney is terrified of blood. Probably because he found his dead mother in a bath of it when he was four. I’ve always taken the view that knowing I’m in danger of bleeding to death as well would be a bit too much for him to deal with.’

‘We’re going to have to talk to Mrs Green,’ said Dana.

‘I know. Is it worth my asking you to be discreet?’

Dana stood. ‘My godson could be in the hands of a killer,’ she said. ‘And you’ve already wasted enough of my time. Frankly, saving your girlfriend’s marriage isn’t high on my list of priorities.’

‘One second, Ma’am.’ Anderson’s hand was on her arm. ‘There’s another matter we need to ask Mr Roberts about.’

Was there? Christ, she really wasn’t up to this. Thank God for Neil.

‘Our crime-scene investigators found traces of blood on your boat,’ said Anderson, as Dana sat back down. ‘We can’t identify whose yet, but we will. Anything you want to say?’

Stewart glanced at his solicitor. ‘Where was the blood?’ he asked.

‘Why don’t you tell me?’ said Anderson.

Stewart sighed. ‘Gilly cut herself a few weeks ago,’ he said. ‘She bled quite a lot. On the bed and the cabin floor. I thought I’d cleaned it up.’

Anderson glanced at Dana. She nodded. The report had referred to traces of blood on the wooden floor of the boat and to a half-washed-out stain on bed-sheets that was almost certainly blood.

‘How did she cut herself ?’ asked Dana.

Stewart looked down at the tabletop. ‘She was trying to take the foil off a bottle of wine with a knife,’ he said. ‘It slipped. Can I go now? I want to look for my son.’

Dana got to her feet again. ‘You’re going to have to leave that to us for a while,’ she said. As she left the room, Stewart dropped his head into his hands. It could have been a gesture of guilt, but it looked an awful lot like grief and fear to her.

‘I’ll get someone to bring down information-release forms,’ she said to Anderson, once the door had closed. ‘We might as well check the haemophilia business with his GP.’

‘So Stewart Roberts’s girlfriend is married to Huck Joesbury’s football coach, whom we still haven’t managed to track down,’ said Anderson, as they made their way back up the steps to brief the team. ‘Is this starting to feel a bit incestuous to you, Ma’am?’

‘It’s starting to feel a bit beyond coincidence.’

‘Are you going to phone Mark?’ Anderson asked, bringing a
picture into her head of Mark, alone at home, sitting in the dark, staring at the phone. Dana shook her head. She couldn’t do it. She simply couldn’t tell him they’d spent hours chasing a lead that was now slipping away.

Gilly Green had the sort of looks that other women rarely notice but that men find quietly intriguing. Dana, being a woman who habitually noticed other women, spotted her appeal immediately. She was slim, with clear, fair skin and a small, neat face that was pleasantly pretty rather than striking. Close to midnight, she was still dressed.

‘My husband isn’t back yet,’ she was saying as she led them to a small, snug sitting-room to one side of the hallway. ‘He’s not been answering his phone. Is there any news of Huck?’ She looked at the clock above the hearth and frowned.

A coal fire was burning in the grate and scent sticks in a jar gave off a smell of apples and cinnamon. The walls were a soft shade of mushroom and there was a lot of natural wood. It was the sort of room in which Dana felt instantly at home. There was a pile of exercise books by one armchair, one of them still open on the padded seat. Mrs Green had been marking class work, probably to take her mind off where her husband might be. ‘Has something happened to Daniel?’ she asked.

‘Not to my knowledge, Mrs Green,’ Dana replied. ‘And Huck Joesbury is still missing. Can I ask where you were on the evening of Saturday the sixteenth of February?’

Mrs Green stared at her for a second, glanced at Mizon, then seemed to shrink a little. She sat down, pushing the exercise book out of the way. To her credit, she made no attempt to look as though she were thinking about the question. She didn’t look puzzled, didn’t ask to see her diary, she just looked resigned. And rather sad.

‘I was on a boat at Deptford Creek,’ she said. ‘It belongs to a friend of mine. I left around eleven o’clock.’

Dana asked permission to sit down and then both she and Mizon perched on the edge of the sofa. ‘Were you aware the body of a young boy was found there that evening?’

Blue-grey eyes looked directly back at Dana. ‘Yes, of course. I saw it on the news the next day.’

‘And you didn’t think to let us know you’d been there? That you were a material witness in a murder inquiry?’

The woman’s head jerked back a fraction, registering the criticism. ‘If I’d seen or heard anything I would have been in touch with you immediately,’ she replied. ‘I teach children of that age. I teach Huck Joesbury. But I couldn’t have told you anything. I was below deck the whole time.’

‘Alone?’

Gilly shook her head. ‘I was with Stewart Roberts. He owns the boat.’

‘How long have you been having an affair with Stewart Roberts?’

Her chin lifted a little higher. ‘I don’t refer to it in those terms, but we’ve been seeing each other since last November. We meet at the boat, on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Not so much recently.’

‘The sixteenth was a Saturday,’ said Dana.

‘My husband was out, Barney was at a sleepover. It was an opportunity.’

‘Mr Roberts told us there was a period when you couldn’t use the boat. Is that the case?’

Gilly nodded her head slowly. ‘We couldn’t get into it over Christmas,’ she said. ‘The keys went missing. We still met up, though, we just had dinner or a couple of drinks.’

So far, their stories matched perfectly.

Dana reached into her bag and pulled out an evidence bag containing the black glove Lacey had given them earlier. ‘Do you recognize this, Mrs Green?’ she asked her.

Gilly peered at it. ‘It looks like mine,’ she said. ‘I’ve been missing one for a couple of weeks now. How did you—’

‘This fits you?’ Dana asked. Gilly’s hands weren’t big, but the glove looked to be half their size.

‘It stretches. It’s a one-size-fits-all. I’ll show you, if you want.’

Dana looked at the glove again. She didn’t want it removed from the bag. She could Google the make when she got back, but she doubted Mrs Green was lying about that, at least. One more thing
to try. Dana moved across the room to stand close to Gilly’s chair. ‘Can I see your hands?’ she asked her.