Close to Home (DI Adam Fawley #1)(23)

AF: Hold on – what do you mean ‘when I got back’?

[pause]

SM: Well, if you must know, I popped out for twenty minutes. I had to get mayonnaise. I bought some the day before, but when I went to make the sandwiches I realized someone must have broken the jar. And since no one had bothered to tell me about it, I had to go out again.

AF: Why on earth didn’t you tell us this before?

SM: Barry doesn’t like leaving the children in the house alone.

AF: So you didn’t want him to know that’s what you’d done.

[silence]

Is there anything else you haven’t told us, Mrs Mason?

[silence]

So when exactly was this shopping trip of yours?

SM: I didn’t notice the time.

AF: But before your husband got back.

SM: He got in about fifteen minutes later.

AF: And the front door was locked?

SM: Of course the door was locked -

AF: And what about the side gate?

[pause]

SM: I’m not sure.

GQ: You said that it was open during the party. And presumably it’d been open the night before as well, when Mr Webster brought round the gazebo. Did you lock it after he left on Monday?

SM: I can’t remember.

GQ: What about your husband? Did he help Mr Webster with the gazebo?

SM: He wasn’t there. He was home late. Again.

GQ: And the patio door – was that open when you went to the shops for the mayonnaise?

[pause]

SM: I think so, yes. I was only popping out for a minute.

AF: So you left the house open and the side gate possibly unlocked. With two young children alone in the house.

SM: You can’t blame me. It’s not my fault.

AF: So whose fault was it, Mrs Mason?

[pause]

This mayonnaise, where did you buy it?

SM: I couldn’t find any. I tried that funny little place on Glasshouse Street but they’d run out, and then I went to the Marks on the ring-road roundabout but they didn’t have any either.

GQ: It must have taken you more than twenty minutes to do all that. Parking, going in, driving, parking again, driving back. I’d say half an hour minimum, even forty minutes. Especially at that time of day.

AF: More than enough time for someone to get into the house and take your daughter.

SM: I told you. The music was still on upstairs when I got back.

AF: But you have no idea if she was there to hear it. Do you, Mrs Mason?

*

When Everett and Gislingham get to Bishop Christopher’s the bell has just gone for lunchtime and two hundred kids are hording out of the doors.

‘Where do they get the bloody energy?’ yells Gislingham over the din.

‘Carbohydrates,’ grins Everett. ‘You know, that stuff Janet won’t let you eat any more.’

‘Don’t remind me,’ he grumbles, eyeing his gut ruefully. ‘Man cannot live by low-fat cheese alone, Ev. Not this one, anyway.’

He stops a moment and looks around at the whooping, shrieking children. ‘They don’t seem to be that upset about their fellow pupil, do they? I suppose it’d be different if this was a secondary school. They’d have counsellors, educational psychologists – the works. I suppose this lot are too young to understand.’

Everett follows his gaze. ‘Most of them, yes. But those girls over there – they know something’s happened. I bet they’re in her class.’

Three girls are sitting on the same bench, their heads close together. Two have hair in long plaits and another looks Chinese. As they watch, one of the girls starts to cry, and Everett sees the teacher on duty make her way across to them and sit down next to the girl in tears.

Inside the school the corridors echo with the silence. Gislingham stops a moment and takes a deep breath. ‘How is it all schools smell the same?’

‘A fruity little blend of sweaty socks, farts and chip fat, layered with ripe undertones of sick and disinfectant. Oh yes, quite unmistakeable.’

Everett looks around and spots a map of the site on the wall opposite. ‘So which way to the headmistress’s office, I wonder?’

Gislingham makes a face. ‘Blimey, that takes me back. Spent more time there than in class. Could have found my way with my eyes shut.’

‘It never ceases to amaze me that you ended up a copper, Gislingham.’

He shrugs. ‘I think they decided it was probably better having me on the inside pissing out.’

The head’s office is at the back of the building, overlooking a small square of dried-out scrubby grass, a chicken-wire fence covered in honeysuckle and a row of spindly poplars.

Alison Stevens gets up to greet them. She’s an elegant black woman, deftly dressed in an outfit designed to convey the optimum combination of authority and approachability: navy skirt just below the knee, soft powder-blue cardigan, tiny round earrings.

‘DC Everett, DC Gislingham, please – take a seat. This is Daisy’s form teacher.’

The young woman leans forward to shake their hands. She’s probably no more than twenty-five, red hair in loose corkscrew curls, a thin flowered dress over bare brown legs. Everett sees Gislingham square his shoulders a little. Men, she thinks, they’re all the bloody same.

‘Kate Madigan,’ she says in a soft Irish accent, her eyes concerned. ‘I can’t even imagine what the Masons must be going through. It must be every parent’s worst nightmare.’