Her Last Mistake - Detective Gina Harte Series 06 (2020) Read online

  ‘Did he assault you?’

  ‘No! For heaven’s sake, he fancies me, Mum, that’s all. Look, it was nothing. It’s not like some guy hasn’t got all spaghetti hands on me before. He stopped. He left me alone when I asked him to. It was nothing so let’s leave it at that. Goodnight, Mum.’

  Hannah ended the call. Gina opened the fridge door and slammed it hard, rattling the two old bottles of tonic in the fridge. Thoughts of Avery turning up to see Hannah, his hands snaking around her daughter’s body while she pushed him off, filled her mind. What also angered her was that Hannah’s acceptance of his behaviour had normalised it to the point she’d even talk to him the next day as if nothing had happened. Her mind whirled with thoughts of Hannah and Greg and the many possibilities of what might be going wrong between them.

  The kitchen door creaked open and Briggs peered through. ‘Everything alright?’

  ‘I’ll fill you in over a drink. Gin and tonic?’

  ‘I won’t be able to drive home if I say yes.’ His gaze met hers.

  She leaned closer to him and smiled. ‘I have a very comfortable couch and my cat would love a slumber party.’

  Ebony meowed as she ran over to her dinner bowl and crunched on a chunk of dried food.

  ‘I just love sleeping on a couch.’

  Gina poured the tonic over the gin and passed him a glass. He took a sip and cocked his head to one side while shutting one eye. ‘There’s a lot of gin in there, Gina.’

  ‘There certainly is.’ She took a swig. ‘It’s been a long day and I need to sleep – the gin will help. Why are you here?’

  ‘Can we sit?’

  She nodded and followed him into the lounge. He’d lit a small fire and the log had just taken hold of the flames. They both sat in the dark room, staring at the flames that danced away.

  ‘You don’t trust me, I know you don’t. I understand why you wouldn’t trust anyone. I needed to come here and remind you of what you have on me and the power that secret holds.’

  She scrunched her brows and gave a small laugh. ‘You haven’t killed anyone.’

  ‘I threatened to set a suspect up with a crime he hadn’t committed and I did it to keep him off your back.’

  ‘Is this about Stephen?’ Terry’s brother, the man who was so similar to her abusive ex-husband.

  ‘It still plays on my mind. You know me, I’d had a clean career up to that point. Only you know that I threatened to pin an unsolved historical murder on him by creating evidence.’

  ‘But there was no real evidence. You couldn’t have followed it through.’

  ‘He didn’t know that and he still doesn’t. What I’m trying to say is that this bit of information could absolutely ruin me; pension, reputation, the lot. You could arrest me at any point and I’m sure Stephen would happily shout about the injustice of it to all who would listen. I will keep your secret forever and I know you’ll keep mine. I just wanted you to trust me, that’s all. I want you to know, I’m on your side.’

  She shook her head and placed her gin glass on the coffee table. ‘Those two things aren’t in the same league, are they?’

  ‘No, my crime was well calculated, yours was a result of years of abuse. I know who’d be demonised more. I know who would have a harder time in prison. The abused wife against the corrupt DCI.’

  He was right. She’d never thought of things that way. He slipped off his shoes and put his feet up on the sofa, lying on the cushion as he watched the logs crackle. The glow of the flames flickered in his irises. She slipped her own shoes off and curled into his body, allowing him to spoon her. He placed his large hand over her shoulders and placed his chin on her head as he kept her warm. Soon the fire would burn out and a chill would bring them back to reality.

  She shivered as she thought back to Avery and her daughter. With her alarm set for five thirty, she’d be back at the station soon, sifting through all the new leads, if indeed there were any. A gentle snore filled the room. It had been a long day. Gina wouldn’t be sleeping through that but, equally, she didn’t want to leave him to go to her cold bed upstairs. Her phone flashed. It was a message from Bernard. Carefully, she slid her arm out of Briggs’s embrace and selected the message. Finally, they had their forensics link between the two murder scenes.

  Chapter Forty-One

  ‘So, that’s the state of things,’ Gina said as she added Samuel Avery to the board under Francesca Carter’s photo. Everyone in the room now knew of her daughter’s involvement with this man. Wyre had almost offered her deepest condolences. She grabbed a pain au chocolat from the packet that Jacob had brought in and she took a bite. Briggs brushed past O’Connor and PCs Smith and Kapoor, before catching Gina’s gaze for a second.

  He sat at the head of the table. ‘Bernard, can you kick off? I know you have something to say.’

  Bernard flicked through the many pages of his report. ‘All findings so far have been emailed to you all. As you all know, we are still working through evidence gathered at Cleevesford Manor and the clearing. We are trying to compare as much as possible to evidence collected at Francesca Carter’s house and we now have a link. The size nine shoe impression that was discovered just outside Francesca Carter’s back fence is a direct match to a partial print we found in the clearing in the woodland at the back of Cleevesford Manor. The Cleevesford Manor print was the hardest to distinguish. As it was only a partial print, we had to scrutinise it closer but a person’s gait is quite unique, there is a slight wearing at one side of the shoe. The print at the Carter household was deep and a cast was taken, giving us all dimensions.’ He reached into his folder and pulled out a photo of the cast with measurements and dimensions overlaid. ‘See that wear on the sole? It is an exact match of one of the partial prints found at the clearing. Same make, same size.

  ‘There’s something else. We recovered a couple of visible prints on the slabs by the gate of the Carter’s garden. It looks like the perpetrator had stepped on the grass, leaving prints leading from the garden. The visible prints show us a splayed softer version of this person’s footprint with the impression just coming through lightly. When magnified there is pattern to the print, such as that of the material used on boot covers. The covers are again a common brand, the same as those used by estate agents and tradespeople when they work in our homes.’

  ‘So our perpetrator went well prepared?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘Anything else for the time being other than what we’ve received in your initial findings report?’

  He shook his head. ‘We’ll keep ploughing on and I’ll keep feeding you any new information. I know budgets are tight but we’ve been working around the clock. One of my colleagues messaged me with this news in the early hours. I’m back onto it as soon as I’ve finished here.’

  ‘Thank you. Smith, any news on Samuel Avery, Phillip Brighton or Edward Powell? All three were not where they should have been at the time of Francesca’s murder.’

  ‘Uniform have reported that Edward Powell arrived home in the early hours.’

  ‘I want to speak to our groom. We’ll head back to the Powell household after we’ve finished here. Wyre, O’Connor, can you keep trying to find out the whereabouts of Samuel Avery and Phillip Brighton? As we know, Avery turned up at the Cleevesford Cleaver to see my daughter, Hannah, at ten in the evening last night. I want to know what he was doing before that.’

  ‘Yes, guv,’ Wyre replied.

  O’Connor took his second pain au chocolat and bit into it.

  ‘Do we know when Francesca Carter’s post-mortem is scheduled?’

  Bernard glanced at his notes. ‘Sixteen hundred hours, today.’

  ‘Thank you. Wyre, O’Connor, can you two attend and feed straight back to me when it’s over. I want to know if they find something in her throat.’

  Placing his pain au chocolat down, O’Connor clapped his hands to dislodge the greasy crumbs. ‘I think I’ll save this for later, much later.’

  Gina glanc
ed at the receipt from Piccolo’s. ‘This receipt from around a month ago which Charlie Carter found in his wife’s bag shows her to have ordered a couple of sharing platters. The vegetable and the meat. Then we have the couple of bottles of wine. We need to find out who she was with. It is odd that she’d go there when this was her and Mr Carter’s special place. She never mentioned it to him at all. Who was she with? Why had she hidden it from him?’

  She put the receipt down on the table.

  ‘Jacob, you said you have something to share.’

  He nodded as he scraped his chair bringing himself closer to the central table. ‘This is where it gets interesting. One of the other people at the party has a juvenile record for sexually assaulting one of his classmates at Cleevesford High School ten years ago. Robin Dawkins, also known as Elvis. He was serving that night.’

  ‘We need to put him at the top of our list.’

  ‘Do we know anything about the case?’

  ‘It was at an end of year school disco. The girl called Jill Snaith said she’d fallen asleep by the lockers after being given a few shots of vodka that some of the other kids had brought with them. They were both fifteen at the time. She’d gone to her own locker to retrieve a bag of crisps she’d left there at lunchtime and had felt a little tipsy, so she sat on the floor in the dark. She awoke to him trying to pull her underwear off. He had his trousers pulled down and lay on top of her. Eventually, she managed to push him off. There had been another witness at this point who verified that it looked like Jill had been asleep. Anyway, he pleaded guilty to sexual assault and did a year before coming back out. No record since.’

  ‘That certainly puts him in the spotlight. Bring him in. I think we have reasonable grounds there.’ Gina closed her notepad. ‘There’s also our other bridesmaid, Lilly Hill. Given what happened to Holly and Francesca, we need to look out for her. Right, I’ll be out for a while. First stop, Edward Powell.’

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Gina tapped on the door and listened out for footsteps. Edward Powell’s black SUV was parked up on the drive. It hadn’t been there when they’d spoken to Kerry the night before.

  ‘Aha, I can see him coming down the stairs,’ Jacob said as the young man opened the door.

  With a towel in one hand, Edward began to dry his dark hair. He glanced at his reflection in the door glass. His baby blue shirt hung over his trousers and he’d left his green striped tie looped around his neck. ‘Are you here to talk to Kerry? She isn’t in at the moment.’

  ‘We’re here to talk to you actually. DI Harte and DS Driscoll. May we come in?’

  ‘I’m just getting ready to go to work. I’m already late.’

  ‘This won’t take long.’

  He glanced at the clock over his shoulder. ‘I really have to get going. I don’t know anything about what happened to Holly, she was Kerry’s friend.’

  ‘Have you spoken to Kerry since last night?’

  He finished towel drying his hair and ran his fingers through the tangles. ‘We haven’t spoken since last night. When I got home, I found a message on the answering machine saying that her mother had collected her. She’d taken her to the family home and she wanted me to call when I got back. It was a bit late so I haven’t managed to phone yet. Wait.’ He frowned. ‘Is everything okay? Nothing’s happened to Kerry, has it?’

  Gina shook her head. ‘It would be best if we came in.’ She wanted to go into the house, see if there was anything lying around that would give her more of a clue as to what Edward had been up to the previous evening.

  ‘I’ll just message the office and let them know that I’ll be late. Come through.’ As he typed out a text, he led them to a formal dining room through a door on the left. The table was surrounded by ten hardwood chairs, and a large candelabra adorned the centre of the runner. The huge brick fireplace gave the house an older style even though it looked to be fairly modern from the outside. A framed silhouette photo of the happy couple staring out to sea as the sun set, took pride of place on the hearth. ‘Have a seat.’

  Gina and Jacob sat by the fireplace while Edward sat at the head of the table in the carver chair.

  ‘Last night, Francesca Carter was murdered in her own home. Could you tell me how well you knew her?’

  The bulge of his biceps showed through his shirt as the sleeve stuck to a damp patch on his arm. ‘I had no idea. Poor Frannie.’ He paused. ‘I should’ve called Kerry last night but I didn’t want to disturb her. If I’d heard what happened to Fran, I’d have called straight away.’

  ‘How well did you know Francesca?’

  As he leaned back, the chair creaked a little. Deep in thought, he rubbed the index finger and thumb of his left hand together. ‘She was just Kerry’s friend, going back to her schooldays. Fran, Holly and Lilly would come over and they’d all drink wine and chat away in the kitchen for hours. Most of the time, I left them to it. Conversation was far too deep for me.’ He let out a slight laugh. ‘They’d talk about how we’re ruining the planet with flying, meat and plastic. They all went vegan at one point; Holly lasted the longest at three weeks. That’s the sort of thing they would talk about. Me, I’m simpler. I don’t worry about anything. What will be, will be.’

  ‘Apart from Francesca coming over to visit your wife, are you saying you didn’t really know her?’

  He slowly nodded. ‘That’s right. I don’t know anything about her family, her job, or anything. I just know she’s Frannie, Kerry’s friend.’

  ‘How about Holly? How well did you know her?’ Now he was rubbing both of his fingers and thumbs together. He looked almost like he was meditating except for the annoying movement of his digits. Gina looked away, not allowing herself to focus on his habit.

  ‘I didn’t really know Holly. Again, she was just Kerry’s friend. She visited the house, they went out together. It’s really getting on. I should be at work.’

  ‘I thought you sent work a message.’ Gina glanced over at Jacob’s notes. He too had spotted that Edward Powell seemed a little nervous.

  ‘I did, but I have to meet an external client in about an hour and a half and her office is in Warwick.’

  ‘We’ll try not to keep you too long.’

  ‘I heard that Holly was pregnant too. Kerry spoke to her mother.’

  Gina nodded. ‘That’s true.’

  ‘Such a shame for her and her baby.’

  ‘It is. It’s a terrible thing that happened. Her mother is devastated. Do you know who Holly was seeing?’

  He shook his head and wiped a finger across the bottom of his nose. ‘I heard Kerry talking to Lilly on the phone about this. They didn’t know who she was seeing either.’

  Gina cleared her dry throat. Most people offered them a drink. Today she’d have jumped at the chance to say yes, but the offer hadn’t been there. ‘What is it you do?’

  ‘I handle acquisitions for Reed Corporation. Normally Kerry and I work on them together but with all that’s been happening, she’s taking a short bereavement break.’ He reached over to the corner of the room, grabbed a pair of shoes and began lacing them up.

  ‘What are those?’

  ‘These?’ He held up the scrunched material. ‘Shoe covers. When I go into some of the premises just after the new carpets have been laid, I pop these on my feet.’

  ‘Where were you yesterday evening?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ He sat rigidly in the chair and linked both hands together firmly on the table. His fidgeting had finally stopped.

  ‘We’re asking everyone who knew Francesca. It’s just a routine question.’

  His stare moved from Gina to Jacob and then back again. ‘I was at the park, if you must know.’

  ‘Which park?’

  ‘Cleevesford Park. The one with the lake and kids play area. I walked around and then sat on a bench. We’ve been bickering, Kerry and I. Just over stupid things. She wants me to be here with her all the time but I need some space, just a bit of time on my own so I esca
ped to the park. I mean, we work together too.’

  ‘You’ve only been married a couple of weeks.’ Gina wondered why he wanted to get away from his wife so badly but she also understood how it felt to be stifled within a relationship. Her years with Terry had shown her exactly what it was like to feel controlled and in front of her sat a man who relied on his wife for everything, including his job. She wondered if she had him right. Was Kerry the one in control or was he? Their stories didn’t match up.

  ‘I know and I know it sounds weird. Since what happened to Holly, Kerry has been drinking a lot. When she gets drunk she accuses me of using her for the house, the job, her family’s wealth. I mean, it’s obvious this house isn’t all our doing. But, I’m not like that and she can’t get it into her head that I love her. The house and the money – it’s just a bonus. I’d choose to be with Kerry if she lived in a bedsit and had nothing. Anyway, last night, I’d had enough. She was lounging around, wallowing and started taking a few snipes at me. I needed to get away for a while so I went to the park.’

  Gina tried to stop herself from yawning. It had worked this time, but she might not be as lucky if she needed to yawn again. She hadn’t slept all night while wrapped in Briggs’s arms, even though he’d slept soundly. ‘Did you see anyone while you were there?’

  ‘There were people out with kids on scooters and bikes, dog walkers, joggers. I didn’t speak to any of them, if that’s what you’re asking, but there’s a good chance someone saw me. Wait – as it was getting later, a man threw a stick for his dog, it was a Red Setter. The stick landed by my feet so I picked it up and threw it onto the grass. I then stroked the dog and I might have mumbled some pleasantry. Maybe he’d remember me. Then it got dark so I just sat back and smoked while I watched the rippling water under the moon’s light. Like I said, I’m simple like that. I enjoy the simpler things in life. I like smoking. Kerry hates me smoking so I enjoyed being there while I puffed away.’