Darkness Falls (Kate Marshall, #3)(11)

There was another long silence, and then DCI Featherstone started to go through Fred’s official statement. Kate stopped the tape and the voice recorder on her phone.

“Why didn’t Bev tell us about Fred’s affair?”

“Maybe she has this idea of them being happy together,” said Tristan. “She didn’t mention that Fred was questioned. The police thought he had motive.”

“The neighbor and Famke gave him an alibi. Is it there?”

Tristan flicked through the files and found a piece of paper. “Yes . . . She gave the police a written statement . . . She arrived at Fred’s house just after two p.m. and stayed for two hours, until just after four p.m.,” he said, scanning the signed statement. “Then she left via the back door, along the footpath running behind the row of houses, and went back home.”

“How far is Upton Pyne from Exeter?” asked Kate.

“Not far, about four miles,” said Tristan, flicking through the other files in the box.

“Fred had an alibi until four p.m. the day Joanna went missing, but Bev told us Joanna didn’t leave work that day until five thirty p.m. . . .”

“Fred’s neighbor Arthur Malone gave the police a statement to say he saw Fred on and off all day on Saturday, September seventh, and Fred’s car didn’t move from outside the house until later that evening, around seven thirty . . .”

“Which is when Fred got concerned why Joanna hadn’t come home from work, and he drove into Exeter to go to Bev’s flat,” said Kate.

Tristan was looking through another file and whistled. He held up a contact photo sheet with four images taken from a CCTV camera.

“What’s that?” asked Kate.

“The police took a statement from Noah Huntley, the MP Joanna did the exposé on,” he said. “These are photos of them meeting at a petrol station.”

Kate took the contact sheet from Tristan. “Look at the time stamp; the CCTV is dated August twenty-third, 2002 . . . ,” she said.

“Two weeks before Joanna went missing.”

“And the CCTV images were taken from the Upton Pyne Texaco petrol station. Why would Joanna be meeting Noah Huntley two weeks before she went missing, and so close to home?”

“Noah Huntley says in his statement that Joanna asked to meet him because she had applied for a job at the Daily Mail newspaper and he was on the board of the company, and she wanted to make sure that there wasn’t any bad blood between them,” said Tristan. “He also had an alibi for when Joanna went missing. He was away at his house in France.”

He handed Noah Huntley’s statement to Kate.

“We need to talk to Fred and get his side of things. Bev mentioned none of this. It makes me wonder what else she hasn’t told us.”





6


Fred Duncan agreed to talk to Kate and Tristan on the following Monday afternoon. He still lived in the same house he’d shared with Joanna, in Upton Pyne, a village twenty minutes from Ashdean, on the outskirts of Exeter.

The house was on a narrow lane of cottages and houses set back from the road and bordered with high redbrick walls and hedges that were bursting into leaf. Fred’s house looked very different from the run-down, grimy little place they’d seen in the case file pictures. The thatched roof and windows looked new, and the brickwork had been sandblasted, cleaning away the staining from years of smog to reveal the original deep-red color of the bricks. There was a large front garden surrounded by a high redbrick wall with a curved top. A giant tree dominated the front lawn, its enormous bare branches reaching out over the garden to create a canopy. The spring sun was warm, but in the shade cast by the branches, the air felt chilly.

Kate pressed the doorbell, and a distant clanging bell rang inside. Moments later, Fred opened the door. In the case file photos, he’d been a thin, wiry man who wore baseball caps and casual clothes and had a permanent dark stubble. The man in front of them looked filled out and healthy with a light tan. He was barefoot and clean shaven, and his thinning hair was cropped close to his head. To Kate, he looked like a new-age guru. He wore loose white linen trousers and a baggy linen shirt open at the neck, showing a hairy chest with a chain of rosary beads and a small silver cross around his neck.

“Hello, welcome,” he said, smiling broadly. “Please take off your shoes. Do you want slippers?” he added, indicating a rustic wooden box by the door filled with identical sheepskin slippers. Kate and Tristan both removed their shoes but declined the slippers.

“I’ve got the underfloor heating cranked up, so you should be fine in your socks,” he said. “My wife, Tameka, didn’t want to be here.” He led them through to the kitchen. “She’s taken our little girl, Anika, into the city.”

On the wall above the kitchen table was a collage of wedding photos. At the top was a large group photo of Fred’s wedding. It had been a traditional Indian affair, and the guests looked to number a hundred or more. Fred and his pasty-white elderly parents stuck out among Tameka’s Indian family and friends. There were two photos of Fred and Tameka in brightly colored traditional Indian dress. She was taller than Fred and strikingly beautiful.

“When did you get married?” asked Kate.

“We just had our third anniversary,” said Fred, following Kate and Tristan’s gaze over to the photos. “Tameka has a big family, lots of relations came over from Mumbai. Would you like coffee? I’ve only got soy milk,” he added. “We’re vegans.”