Under a Silent Moon Read online

  I last saw Polly when I visited the farm at the end of September or beginning of October. I spoke to her briefly in the yard and we parted on good terms. Polly told me she had found someone special she wanted to be with, but I did not ask who this was. I said goodbye to her and went straight home. This was the last time I saw Polly and I had no further contact with her either by email, phone, or in person after that.

  On 31 October 2012 I spent the day painting in my studio. I do not remember what time I went to sleep. I slept in the studio and carried on working the next morning until my father telephoned me to tell me that Polly had been found dead.

  I do not know of any reason why someone would want to harm Polly and I do not know who might have killed her.

  Section 4—Signatures

  __________________________

  __________________________

  WITNESS: (F Maitland)

  OIC: (M Gregson DC 9323)

  * * *

  16:20

  Even though she was under caution, and therefore free to leave at any moment, Flora agreed to help the police with their inquiries until late afternoon. They’d written down all their questions and all her answers to them, had got her to sign several times to say that she agreed with what they’d written. Then she had written out her statement and signed it.

  All the searches were complete. Flora’s flat had revealed nothing of any interest; Polly’s phone was still unaccounted for. Now that the shot put had turned up at the quarry, the investigation had once again veered off in the direction of Barbara Fletcher-Norman. The opportunity to search the farm and all its outbuildings had been thoroughly exploited.

  Unfortunately, nothing had come to light there, either. Nigel’s solicitor had been called as soon as the team turned up. He observed every part of the process and commented on everything. Their warrant was in relation to Flora Maitland, who did not work at the farm and did not even live there anymore. He tried his best to argue that there was no justification for the police to remove anything pertaining to farm business, including computers, files, or paperwork. With the warrant they could have taken whatever they wanted—computers, files, the lot. But in the event, Nigel’s offices, including the second office at the far end of the barn housing his 4×4 and his Mercedes and the Porsche convertible, had yielded nothing they could use. In the loft above the office, a large safe stood empty, its door open. Whatever had been in there had been moved.

  The frustration in the MIR, when Lou returned to it after a visit to the farm to discuss progress with the search coordinator, was evident.

  “He must have been tipped off,” Les Finnegan was saying. “That’s all there is to it.”

  “Well, at least you got him to give a statement,” Ali said. “That’s bloody impressive, if nothing else.”

  “It was hardly worth bothering,” Les muttered.

  Hamilton came in at that moment, interrupting the debate.

  “Andy,” Lou said. “How are you getting on with Flora?”

  He leaned back on the edge of Sam’s desk, unbuttoning his jacket. “Well, the good news is she never called that wanker of a solicitor.”

  “He was busy with us at the farm,” Ali said gloomily.

  “That’s the good news? Did we get anything useful out of her at all?”

  Andy sighed. “She claims the last time she saw Polly was weeks before she died, and that was at the farm. Flora said she hadn’t been near the farm since then.”

  “What about the phone?”

  Jason said, “We still don’t have a subscriber for that number that Polly was calling.”

  “Why not? Have we chased it up?”

  “They’ve been having computer problems at the service provider. No subscriber checks are going through—I chased it up an hour ago.”

  That was typical, Lou thought. “Well, how long’s it going to take—do they know?”

  “They said they would update me, but I’ll ring them back if they haven’t got back to me in an hour.”

  “I don’t think it’ll help,” Andy said. “So she was visiting someone in Briarstone on the night she died. That’s not so surprising, is it, given what we know about her? She went for a fuck somewhere, came home, and in the meantime the mad old woman from across the road had decided to confront her. Got herself covered in blood, pissed up, drove to the quarry full of remorse, and there you go. Over the edge. Job done.”

  “Incredible,” Sam muttered.

  “I’m talking about evidence,” he said. “You’ve got the weapon, the blood, the motive for it, everything. I think we should stop wasting resources on the Maitlands and concentrate on Barbara and Brian. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Brian that Polly was meeting that night. She met up with him somewhere in Briarstone—away from the farm and the Barn—for a quick shag. Barbara caught them out somehow and saw red.”

  He might not be putting it in the nicest of terms, Lou thought, but he had a point.

  “So Flora was seeing Polly,” Sam said. “But so was half the village, including Brian. We don’t know who else she was involved with, do we?”

  There was a momentary silence.

  Lou sighed. “I think we need to bear in mind that it’s still really early days,” she said. “We’ve found out a lot already, and yes, it would be nice to have an arrest, but we have some good strong leads and plenty to keep us busy, right?”

  Everyone looked as tired as she felt.

  * * *

  MG11 WITNESS STATEMENT

  Section 1—Witness Details

  NAME: Nigel MAITLAND

  DOB (if under 18; if over 18 state “Over 18”): Over 18

  ADDRESS: Hermitage Farm

  Cemetery Lane

  Morden

  OCCUPATION: Farm owner

  Section 2—Investigating Officer

  DATE: Saturday 3 November

  OIC: DC 8244 Les FINNEGAN

  Section 3—Text of Statement

  Polly LEUCHARS was employed by my wife, Felicity MAITLAND, to assist at the stables, which are part of the farm business. I saw Polly infrequently and I cannot remember the last time I saw her. I do not know of anyone who might have wanted to harm her.

  Section 4—Signatures

  __________________________

  __________________________

  WITNESS: (N R Maitland)

  OIC: (L Finnegan DC 8244)

  * * *

  17:40

  Lou had been running through the intelligence and comparing it with Jason’s latest charts and timelines, which he’d left on her desk. They went from the last sightings of Polly in the days before her death, right up to the discovery of the possible murder weapon in the quarry. Adele Francis had already been shown the shot put and agreed that it was “likely.”

  Of course, if the shot put was the murder weapon, then pretty much everything was still pointing to Barbara Fletcher-Norman as the offender. Tomorrow she would get Jane and Ali to pay another visit to Brian and try to get more out of him about the fatal night. She made a mental note to put in a medical disclosure form to Brian’s doctors—it wouldn’t do to put pressure on him when his health was so fragile. The last thing the case needed was another death.

  She thought Jason had gone home, long ago—or gone over to the King William with the rest of them—until a gentle knock on the door frame made her jump.

  He looked tired, the black eye was yellowing a bit around the edges.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey, yourself. Come in.”

  “I was hoping for some results from the download of Brian’s phone,” he said, sitting down, “but they won’t have anything until Monday at least. They’ve got a backlog, apparently.”

  “They’ve always got a backlog,” she said a tad sourly.

  “It would have been a whole lot easier to just check the phone before we handed it over to the CCU.”

  Lou smiled. “Unfortunately, we have to comply with RIPA. Can’t have anyone accusing us of tampering with evidence, ca
n we? I know it feels like we’ve been doing this for weeks, but really we’re only into the second day.”

  “Two days, huh?” he said. “You’re right. Feels longer.”

  “Are you finished?” she asked. “You should get home. You’ve done a brilliant job and I’m really grateful. And it’s Sunday tomorrow, so you are definitely taking the day off.”

  He smiled at her. “I guess I should stop hanging round here late at night. I’m looking way too keen.”

  Lou looked up in surprise. “Keen? You mean on me?”

  He looked back into the empty office behind him. “Yeah, keen on you. Nobody else here right now.”

  “Oh.”

  “You’re really sexy when you blush, Lou.”

  She tried a stern look. “Jason. This isn’t happening here, okay?”

  “Sure. Just—you know. Whenever. You want me to make you some dinner?”

  God, how tempting, how very tempting to just go home with him again. And maybe, this time, stay the whole night and not on the sofa either.

  “I’d like to . . .”

  “I can hear a ‘but’ coming on.”

  “I’d like to. But I can’t do this. Not at the moment. I need to focus on this case, and I’m spending too much time distracted, thinking about other things . . .”

  “. . . like what we could be doing if we went back to my place?”

  Lou looked at him for a long moment, drinking him in while there was nobody else watching. He matched her gaze and the longer she looked, the more tempting it was.

  “You know Hamilton is a huge asshole, right?”

  “What brought that on?”

  “It’s just the way he speaks to people. Arrogant piece of shit.”

  “He gets the job done, Jason,” Lou said, wondering where this was coming from.

  “He’d do it much better if he could stop showing off all the time.”

  Lou sighed. “Unfortunately he’s still my DI. Much as I wish he wasn’t sometimes.”

  “Right. Just know that we’re not all shits like that, huh? And when this case is over, or when it quiets down, or when you just need a bit of moral support, I’ll be here waiting for you. For whatever it is you want, or you need.”

  21:44

  Flora was thinking about lying in Polly’s bed in Yonder Cottage, the late-summer heat drifting lazily in through the open window with the scent of the farm and the white lilies in a vase on the windowsill, naked, too hot for covers. She was gazing at Polly, the almost unbearable beauty of her.

  “Flora, don’t look at me like that,” she said, smiling.

  “Like what?”

  Serious, all of a sudden. “Don’t fall in love with me, Flora. I’ll break your heart if you do.”

  Of course, it was too late. Flora only found out what she meant a month later.

  I can’t stand it, she thought. I miss her too much.

  She heard Tabby coming in, heard the door bang. Heard her muffled conversation with Chris, the kettle going on, mugs clinking in the kitchen.

  “She’s upstairs. Been there since you phoned.”

  “. . . try to talk to her?”

  “I don’t know . . . thought she was asleep.”

  All those text messages between Polly’s phone and hers. They were always texting, even when Flora was working at the farm and Polly at the stables. It was like a secret between them, a delicious secret that nobody else could be involved in. At the stables, once, Connor, who had a crush on Polly like everyone else did, was mucking out while Polly brushed Elki’s coat and Flora kept interrupting her with messages:

  You look so sexy when you bend over

  And she’d laughed and Connor had demanded to know what she was laughing at, and that had made her laugh harder, shaking her head so her blond ponytail swished from side to side like Elki’s tail.

  And the replies Polly sent, late into the night, all of them saved on Flora’s phone:

  You are all mine. Later. Wear your red shirt. P x

  This weekend I am planning to not get dressed at all. Shall we go to the Lemon Tree naked? What will yr mum say?? P x

  Well, the police had her phone now. They would have seen all those messages, everything that had been private between them. Would they tell Felicity?

  Polly was always teasing Flora about coming out. It was time, she said, for Flora to come clean to the world, release herself from the chains of parental expectation. For a while Flora thought this was because Polly wanted to be able to go out in public as partners and lovers, not just as friends. But in reality, of course, it was neither here nor there to Polly whether Flora came out as gay or stayed firmly in her little closet, because from her point of view there wasn’t a relationship. The word simply wasn’t in Polly’s vocabulary. After all these weeks of agonizing over what went wrong, Flora realized that it was simply because there was nothing Polly found more depressing than people who weren’t true to themselves. She’d phrased it exactly like that once, when they’d been talking about Felicity, whose inhibitions were more of the social-class variety.

  I wish I could talk to her, thought Flora. Just once more. I just want to tell her I love her, that I miss her, that I don’t care that she didn’t love me back. I just want to let her know I’m still here and I will always love her . . .

  The weekend after that first afternoon in the top field, Flora had taken Polly out for the evening to meet some of her friends. They had drunk too much, giggled like schoolgirls, and when the last of the friends disappeared off home, Polly had pushed Flora gently but insistently against a wall and kissed her hard. Flora had responded, at first uncertainly, and then with a force that surprised her. Polly’s hand cupped her firmly between her legs, while all Flora could think of was how soft her mouth was, how sweet her taste.

  They’d stumbled their way back to Flora’s flat.

  “Is this where you live?” Polly asked, astonishment on her face, as Flora felt through her pockets for the key.

  “Yes, why?”

  Polly’s face opened into a big, beaming smile. “No reason. It’s lovely, that’s all.”

  Inside, Polly took Flora by the hand and led her straight to the bedroom, as if she had been in the flat before, as if she knew exactly where everything was. And there she had stripped Flora gently, of her clothes first, and then her inhibitions, and held her as the tears finally came, hours, hours later, when the sky was turning gray.

  I never knew, she thought. All those years, I never knew it could feel like that. My heart and soul, so complete. So happy.

  22:40

  Andy Hamilton’s crap day had not been improved any by the transition into evening. Quietly sinking the last of his pint, he wondered whether Karen was in bed yet and whether he really should have phoned her—he checked his watch—about three hours ago.

  “Time to go home, gents,” the barman said, to Andy and some other poor souls who should also have made their way out a long time ago.

  The rest of the squad had gone looking for a curry house at least an hour ago. He’d stayed, claiming he just wanted to finish this one off and then he was heading home, but the truth was he didn’t want to. He wanted to be with Lou. Not forever, just for one more night.

  He wasn’t used to not getting his own way where women were concerned. Every time Lou kicked up a fight he felt a twinge of humiliation—and wanted her all the more. If she would just give in, let him fuck her one more time, he would be able to get her out of his system.

  Twice in the last few days he’d felt rejected by women he fancied: Lou last night, and that blond nurse. Although that wasn’t so much a rejection as a tease. What made it worse was that he knew that if he went home to Karen now, four hours after the end of his shift, reeking of beer, he wouldn’t get much of a welcome there, either.

  Still, beggars couldn’t be choosers. He tipped the dregs of his last pint down his throat and made his way outside.

  The night air was brisk and he debated going to fetch his car and taking a cha
nce on the five miles between here and his house, but even with his judgment clouded by alcohol he knew it was a risk too far. He wandered off in the direction of the high street, got lucky with a taxi driver who knew him heading back toward the rank.

  “All right, Andy?” Geoff said, as Andy collapsed into the backseat. “Big night out, was it?”

  “Something like that,” Andy said. “I’m getting too old for these things.”

  All the lights were off in the house. That was a bad sign. Andy walked up the driveway, tried his key in the lock. He couldn’t work out for a while why the door wouldn’t open, then he realized it was deadbolted and he didn’t have a key for that one.

  He banged on the door with his fist and a light went on somewhere across the street. Then he saw a piece of paper thumbtacked to the doorframe. He ripped it off and took it over to the streetlight so he could read it.

  TOOK KIDS GONE TO SARAH’S.

  Why had she bloody double-locked the door? She knew he didn’t have that key. He groaned, slowly, and lifted his head to see Geoff’s cab coming toward him. He’d been to the end of the road to turn the car around. Seeing his fare standing forlorn by the side of the road, the cabbie stopped, wound down his window.

  “Locked out, are you? Need a ride somewhere?”

  “Waterside Gardens,” Andy said, almost without thinking, and climbed back into the warm cab out of the drizzle that had developed in the cold, misty night.

  22:40

  Flora had managed to eat some of Taryn’s spaghetti Bolognese. It tasted great, the first proper meal she’d had in days.

  “I still say you need to go and see your father,” Taryn said.

  “He can wait. If they’d found anything at the farm, we’d all know about it by now.”

  “Even so! They had you in custody, Flora.”

  “It was a caution, that’s all. Helping them with their inquiries. And if they had anything on me, they would have arrested me, wouldn’t they?”