Into the Water(53)

But it wasn’t all right. ‘That’s what she was doing,’ I said. ‘Don’t you understand? She was getting rid of the evidence.’





FRIDAY, 21 AUGUST





Erin


THE COTTAGE BY the river, the one I saw when I went running, is to be my new home. In the short term, at least. Just until we sort out this business with Henderson. It was Sean who suggested it. He overheard me telling Callie, the DC, that I’d almost run the car off the road this morning I’d been so knackered, and he said, ‘Well, we can’t have that. You should stay in town. You could use the Wards’ cottage. It’s just upriver and it’s empty. It’s not luxurious, but it won’t cost you anything. I’ll get you the keys this afternoon.’

As he left, Callie grinned at me. ‘The Wards’ cottage, eh? Watch out for mad Annie.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘That place by the river that Patrick Townsend uses as his fishing cabin – it’s known as the Wards’ cottage. As in Anne Ward? She’s one of the women. They say,’ she said, lowering her voice to a whisper, ‘that if you look hard enough you can still see the blood on the walls.’ I must have looked nonplussed – I had no idea what she was talking about – because she smiled and said, ‘It’s just a story, one of the old ones. One of those ancient Beckford stories.’ I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to century-old Beckford stories – I had fresher ones to concern myself with.

Henderson hadn’t been answering his phone, and we’d taken the decision to leave him alone until his return. If the Katie Whittaker story was true, and if he got wind that we knew about it, he might not come back at all.

In the meantime, Sean had asked me to question his wife, who, as head teacher at the school, is Henderson’s boss. ‘I’m certain she never had the faintest suspicion about Mark Henderson,’ he said. ‘I believe she thinks rather highly of him, but someone needs to talk to her and it obviously can’t be me.’ He told me she’d be at the school, and that she’d be expecting me.

If she was expecting me, she certainly didn’t act like it. I found her in her office on her hands and knees, her cheek pressed to the grey carpet as she craned her head to look under a bookcase. I coughed politely and she jerked her head up, alarmed.

‘Mrs Townsend?’ I said. ‘I’m DS Morgan. Erin.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Yes.’ She blushed, putting a hand to her neck. ‘Lost an earring,’ she said.

‘Both, by the looks of it,’ I said.

She made an odd sort of huffing noise and indicated that I should sit. She tugged at the hem of her blouse and smoothed her grey trousers before sitting herself. If I’d been asked to picture the DI’s wife, I’d have imagined someone quite different. Attractive, well dressed, probably sporty – a marathon runner, a triathlete. Helen wore clothes more suited to a woman twenty years her senior. She was pale, and her limbs soft, like someone who rarely went out or saw the sun.

‘You wanted to speak to me about Mark Henderson,’ she said, frowning slightly at a pile of papers in front of her. No small talk, then, no preamble – straight down to business. Perhaps that’s what the DI likes about her.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You’ve heard the allegations made by Josh Whittaker and Lena Abbott, I take it?’

She nodded, her thin lips disappearing as she pressed them together. ‘My husband told me yesterday. It was, I can assure you, the first I’d heard of such a thing.’ I opened my mouth to say something, but she continued. ‘I recruited Mark Henderson two years ago. He came with excellent references and his results so far have been encouraging.’ She shuffled the pages in front of her. ‘I have specifics if you need them?’ I shook my head, and again, she started speaking before I could ask the next question. ‘Katie Whittaker was conscientious and hard-working. I have her grades here. There was, admittedly, some slippage last spring, but it was short term, she’d improved again by the time … by the time she …’ she passed a hand over her eyes, ‘by the summer.’ She sank a little into her chair.

‘So you had no suspicions, there were no rumours …?’

She cocked her head to one side. ‘Oh, I didn’t say anything about rumours. Detective … er… Morgan. The rumours that fly around the average secondary school would make your hair curl. I’m sure,’ she said, a twitch around her mouth, ‘that if you put your mind to it, you might be able to imagine the sort of things they say and write and tweet about me and Ms Mitchell, the PE teacher.’ She paused. ‘Have you met Mark Henderson?’

‘I have.’

‘So you understand, then. He’s young. Good-looking. The girls – it is always the girls – say all sorts of things about him. All sorts. But you have to learn to cut through the noise. And I believed I had done that. I still believe I’d done that.’ Again, I wanted to speak, and again, she pressed ahead. ‘I have to tell you,’ she said, raising her voice, ‘that I am deeply suspicious about these allegations. Deeply suspicious, because of their source and because of the timing.’

‘I—’

‘I understand that the allegation came first from Josh Whittaker, but I’d be surprised if Lena Abbott isn’t behind all this – Josh dotes on her. If Lena decided that she wanted to deflect attention away from her own wrongdoing – purchasing illegal drugs for her friend, for example – I’m sure she could have persuaded Josh to come up with this story.’