The Missing Hours (20 page)

I x

Leah closes the e-mail, scrolls through the inbox. ‘Okay, day of the murder. Ah … 9.15 a.m.’

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

I booked the theatre. It’s 10th. Second row. Put it in your diary!

I x

‘Awesome.’ I sigh heavily. ‘Love’s young dream.’

‘Finn?’

‘What?’

Leah is staring at the screen. ‘Look.’

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Why the fuck haven’t you answered your calls? I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day. I know you’ve turned your phone off, and you’ve got that bitch of a receptionist on it. I keep calling the office and she won’t put me through.

Grow the hell up, Dom. You can’t avoid me for ever.

All right, you want to do it over e-mail because you’re too chickenshit to look me in the eye? Fine. I know what you’ve been doing. I know you’ve been cheating on me. Don’t even try to deny it. At least do me that courtesy. I can’t believe you would do this to me, you fucking bastard.

COME HOME!!!!!!!

We are going to fucking talk about this. I’m serious, Dom. Come home now. This is not fair. Do you have any idea how crazy I’m going here? I thought you loved me. I thought we were a family. That’s what you said to me, remember?

I need to see you now. If you won’t come home, I’m coming there.

WE NEED TO TALK!!!

Life beyond

DS Finn Hale: Thursday, 11.24 a.m.

‘SO,’ I MOVE
into the outside lane, pass a Fiat doing twenty-eight, ‘this is fun.’

Leah glances at me. ‘What?’

I gesture to the radio, the clanking music loud. ‘The wipers on the bus go swish, swish, swish …’

Leah grins, looks younger suddenly.

I had hurried back into the SIO’s office. Or bounced, as Leah termed it. Whatever. The e-mails, the anger punching through them, it was something, a damn sight more than we’d had before. Boss, I think we need to go and interview Isaac again. He studied me, a look of long-stretched patience, opened his mouth, I’m pretty sure to suggest bringing Isaac into the station, his words vanishing under my enthusiasm. If you’re okay with it, sir, I’d like to keep him in his home, play it softly-softly. I think he may be more willing to open up there. And with Leah. She’s good at that. People like her.

Leah is watching the landscape, mounding mountain ranges beneath an iron-grey sky.

‘You okay?’ I ask.

She glances at me, a look of fear shooting across her face. ‘Yes. Why?’

‘I just … you’ve seemed, I don’t know, quiet lately. Everything’s okay, right? At home?’

I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know why I’ve gone all Oprah.

Leah looks away again, her voice distant. ‘Yeah. You know. Marriage.’

‘Yeah. So …’ Shut up, Finn. Just stop talking. ‘You and Alex … you’re okay, right?’

I think she won’t answer. Think, hope, I don’t know.

‘It’s just … we feel a long way apart these days. I don’t know if it’s the kids or life or …’ She drifts off, staring out of the passenger-side window. ‘Things happen, you know, when you’ve been together a long time. And it’s just, how do you get back to seeing that other person as the one you fell in love with?’

I want to make an inappropriate joke, a flippant comment, something a bit more within my milieu. But I restrain myself, shifting a little in my seat. ‘Maybe you don’t.’

Leah glances at me again, sharp, and I have the uneasy feeling that we are discussing more than generalisations.

I soften my voice. ‘Maybe there is no way to go back to how things were. Maybe you have to just push through and build a new way of seeing each other.’

There is a long, weighty silence and then Leah makes a noise. For a horrifying second I think she has begun to cry. Then I realise she is laughing. ‘Jesus, Finn. When did you get to be so sensitive?’

I grin. ‘I’ll have you know I’m maturing rapidly, thank you very much.’

I ease off the accelerator, a speed camera up ahead.

‘So …’ Leah says, not looking at me but studying the road in front. The lights turn to green and I pull away. ‘Not Beck.’

‘Not Beck,’ I agree.

I open my mouth. Try something new. ‘To be honest, I feel like a bit of a twat.’

‘Why?’

I take a left, weaving through the roadworks that litter the road into the country’s capital. ‘I made the arrest. It was on me.’

‘You followed the evidence. That’s all. It led towards Beck Chambers for a while. Now that it doesn’t any more, you’re following it somewhere else.’

I nod, speed up to pass a bin lorry.

‘So,’ I say, shifting us on to safer ground. ‘Isaac.’

‘Yeah,’ says Leah. ‘Isaac.’

You cast people into roles. The hero, the villain. The victim. I did that with Isaac Fletcher. I watched his tears and, maybe because I am getting sensitive, I dismissed the thought that they might be of the crocodile variety. And so I cast him as the victim of the piece. Even though I know how often it happens, how many times the world has seen those closest to the victim weeping as though their hearts will break, only to later be revealed as the villain. Always look to the partner first.

I did.

And I dismissed him because he cried.

It takes Isaac Fletcher a long time to open the door, and when he does, I take a step back. The guy smells, a hanging stale scent of alcohol, old cigarette smoke. He looks like someone different, is wearing jogging bottoms, stained on the thigh, a T-shirt with a tear on the sleeve. His eyes are glazed, red, hair standing up on end, thick with grease.

‘Isaac,’ I say. ‘DS Hale? You remember?’ I feel like I am talking to one of my nieces, that I have slowed my voice down so he can keep up. His gaze weaves across me, unsteady. ‘This is DC Leah Mackay.’

It’s slow, but he gets there in the end, figures out just who I am. He takes a sharp step back into the hallway. I’m seeing him differently now, what with the old booze and the dead-man stare. Now I’m looking at the biceps that curve from underneath his sleeve, the long rope veins that clamber down his arm. I’m thinking of the e-mail, the fury in it. A row that goes too far. And Isaac, grabbing a knife.

He has shifted his weight, and for a moment I think he is about to slam the door in our faces, that life is about to get a whole lot more interesting.

But then Leah moves past me, smoothly rests her palm against the door. Her smile is wide but gentle, designed to disarm, and I don’t need to look down to know that she has wedged her foot against the door. ‘Isaac? Hi. How are you doing? I was so sorry to hear … Look, let’s get you inside.’

She turns him, a lamb suddenly in her capable hands, steers him back along the hallway into the living room. I follow, pushing the door closed behind me, trying not to gag at the smell of smoke, gone-off food.

‘Here, let me move some stuff so you can sit down. There. I was just … heartbroken when I heard. I worked with Dom a lot. Such a lovely guy. Mind,’ Leah slots herself on to the sofa next to Isaac, ‘he was a pain in the butt as a solicitor. Too damn good. But it was fun, you know. Almost like playing chess with him.’

Isaac is watching her, and you can see that he’s losing his resolve, weakening in the face of her kindness.

‘I just … I can’t imagine what this must be like for you, Isaac. I really can’t. To lose someone, that is hard enough. But to lose someone in these circumstances … I just, I can’t tell you how very sorry I am that you have to bear this.’

A tear spills down Isaac’s cheek. I sit on the boxy leather armchair. Am prepared to bet that he would hand Leah the pin number to his bank account right now.

‘Dom used to talk about you all the time,’ Leah says. ‘Said you’d booked for …’

‘Antigua,’ offers Isaac, voice like cracked glass.

‘Antigua, of course. He was so excited about that. Said he couldn’t wait to spend some time, just the two of you, that he’d been so busy with work. He wanted to spoil you.’ She watches Isaac, his head bowed so that his chin almost rests upon his chest. ‘Mind,’ it seems that something has occurred to her, ‘it’s never easy, is it? My husband and I, we can drive each other insane sometimes. Dom said, well, I got the impression that things had been … tough lately?’ She waits, bait laid.

Isaac frowns, looking at her. ‘Why? Why do you say that?’ His accent is more noticeable now, the Welsh tint washed away in his grief, leaving behind pure Midwest American.

‘No, just something Dom said. I mean, we all have our problems, don’t we?’

He bristles, pulls back. ‘Things were fine.’

Leah nods. I wait.

She leans closer, her voice honey. ‘The thing is, Isaac, we’ve heard different things. People saying you guys had some issues. Now, like I said, it happens to all of us. I don’t know a single couple who haven’t had their share of arguments. But, the case being what it is …’ She pauses, watching him. ‘Isaac, I need you to tell me the truth. We want to make sure we investigate Dominic’s murder properly. If you lie to us, we’re going to end up chasing our tails figuring out that you’re lying to us, and then we’re going to have to start wondering
why
you would lie. And all that is time when we’re not out looking for who killed Dom. So it is so important that you just be honest, and then we all know what we’re dealing with.’

There is a taut stillness, and I feel my mouth open. I don’t know why. I don’t know what the hell I feel I need to insert. But Leah senses it, looks up at me, her eyes warning. I shut my mouth again.

Then Isaac begins to cry. ‘I loved him. I loved him so much.’

We sit. We wait.

‘Things were good. Things were so good,’ he says. ‘Then … they just weren’t. They changed. You know when you just know that something is going on? Like, you have no proof but you can feel it in your gut? That was how it was. I could feel it. And then, of course, you start looking for things, and the signs, they were everywhere. He was working late, and I mean, all the time. He got really defensive if I asked questions, started locking his phone, taking it with him everywhere … I just knew.’

I see Leah nod from the periphery of my vision. Keep my eyes on Isaac.

‘A couple of days before Dom’s … before his death, he went in the shower and forgot to take his phone. So I looked. I’d been paying attention, I’d seen him unlock it, so I’d figured out the code. I didn’t have long to look at it. I was afraid. I didn’t want him to catch me. But that day, there had been all these calls to this number.’ Isaac sucks in a deep breath. ‘I wrote it down. Put the phone back. See, I wanted to be sure, before I said anything.’

‘What happened?’

‘I think … I think he guessed that I’d been on his phone. I don’t think I put it back in the right place, and so he got really … antsy, argumentative. And I just, I lost it.’

I’m thinking I’m going to hear about the kitchen knife, the blood, the panic. I’m thinking that I need to call Willa, get a forensic search done on this apparently immaculate apartment.

‘I hit him. I punched him in the face. I’d never done that before. Neither of us … that wasn’t who we were.’ Isaac isn’t looking at us, his words spilling out in a low drone. ‘I think it shocked us, both of us, that we had taken it that far. Dom said we needed to talk, that he was late for work, but that when he got home, we would talk properly, work things out.’

‘What happened then?’ asks Leah.

Isaac laughs sourly. ‘He was late home. Again. I got tired of waiting. So I rang the number. If he wasn’t going to tell me who he was sleeping with, I was going to find out on my own.’ He shakes his head. ‘You know what made it so much worse?’

‘What?’

‘It was a woman. He was cheating on me with a bloody woman.’

Held hostage

DC Leah Mackay: Thursday, 3.00 p.m.

ISAAC IS CRYING.
He sits on a tubular dining chair, pulled up close to the floor-to-ceiling windows, like he is enjoying the view. But his head is down, tears pouring down his cheeks in a steady stream. The search team is moving through the apartment, a flock of geese flying in formation. They work quietly, every now and again someone looking over their shoulder at Isaac and his tears. I suppress a shiver. I don’t know if he is lying. I don’t know if what I am seeing is grief or guilt. But then why not both? How many of us do not carry a weight of blame in our relationships, even without resorting to murder?

Finn is standing beside me, drumming his fingers on his folded arms. Do you believe him? he asked me quietly as we stood to one side, allowing the search team to sweep past us. I looked up at him and shrugged. I just don’t know.

They are searching for blood. They are searching for signs of a struggle. For anything that will place Dominic’s death here, in this apartment overlooking the bay. I watch Willa move from room to room, her perfectly made-up face a study in concentration.

Do I want her to find something?

No.

Yes.

I don’t know.

I look away, out to the bowl harbour, the rain that has just begun to beat against the windows, then turn to watch Isaac. He has found a square of paper, from the colour of it a Post-it note, is shredding it into centimetre-square pieces. How must it have been for him when that knock on the door came? One minute you have a life, imperfect and yet whole. In the next moment it is gone, stolen away by the thrust of a knife. I watch him shred, his long fingers shaking. Or was he simply waiting? Had he been there, knowing that in a minute, an hour, the knock would come, his hand still throbbing from the force of the thrust as he stabbed Dominic in the neck?

My phone rings, a shuddering vibration against my leg, and I pull it free.

‘DC Mackay.’