Let Me Lie(82)

‘You owe me more than one, mate.’

The call finished, and Murray grinned at Sarah, filling her in on what the High Tech Crime officer had told him. He spun his notebook around, until the list of phone numbers faced Sarah, and marked an asterisk beside the only landline.

‘Do you want to do the honours?’

Then it was Murray’s turn to wait, while Sarah spoke to an inaudible voice on the other end of the phone. When she’d finished, he held up his hands.

‘Well?’

Sarah put on a posh voice. ‘Our Lady’s Preparatory.’

‘A private school?’ What did a prep school have to do with Tom and Caroline Johnson? Murray wondered if they were heading up a blind alley. The fake witness call, allegedly from Diane Brent-Taylor, had been made last May, ten months before the mobile had been used again with a different SIM card. It could have passed through any number of hands in the meantime. ‘Where’s the school?’

‘Derbyshire.’

Murray thought for a moment. He turned over the diary in his hands, remembering the photos that had fallen out from between the pages when Anna Johnson had handed it to him: a youthful Caroline, on holiday with an old school friend.

Mum said they had the best time.

They had been in a pub garden, a wagon and horses on the sign above them.

About as far as you can get from the sea.

He opened Safari on his phone and Googled ‘wagon and horses pubs UK’. Christ, there were pages of them. He tried a different tack, looking up ‘furthest point in UK from the sea’.

Coton in the Elms, Derbyshire.

Murray had never heard of it. But a final Google search – ‘wagon and horses Derbyshire’ – gave him what he wanted. Tarted up since the photo, and with a new sign and hanging baskets, but undeniably the same pub that Caroline and her friend had visited all those years ago.

Luxury B&B … best breakfast in the Peak District … free Wi-Fi …

Murray looked at Sarah. ‘Fancy a holiday?’





FORTY-EIGHT


I grew up with sand in my socks and salt on my skin, and the knowledge that, when I was old enough to decide where I lived, it would be miles away from the ocean.

It was one of the few things we had in common.

‘I don’t understand why people obsess over living near the sea,’ you said, when I told you where I was from. ‘I’m a city-dweller, through and through.’

So was I. Escaped the first chance I had. I loved London. Busy, noisy, anonymous. Enough bars that being kicked out of one didn’t matter. Enough jobs that losing one meant finding another the next day. Enough beds that sliding out of one never left me lonely.

If I hadn’t met you, I’d still be there. Maybe you would be too.

If it hadn’t been for Anna we wouldn’t be together.

We’d have parted ways after a few weeks, on to pastures new. Different arms, different bars.

I remember the first morning at Oak View. You were still sleeping, your hair messed up and your lips a fraction apart. I lay on my back and I fought the urge to leave. To tiptoe down the stairs with my shoes in my hand and get the hell out of there.

Then I thought of our unborn child. Of the stomach I’d once run my fingers over and now couldn’t bear to even touch. Taut as a drum. Big as a beach ball. Anchoring me to this bed. To this life. To you.

Twenty-five years of marriage. It would be wrong to say I was unhappy for all that time; equally wrong to suggest that I was happy. We co-existed, both trapped in a marriage that convention wouldn’t let us leave.

We should have been braver. More honest with each other. If one of us had left, we both would have had the lives we wanted.

If one of us had left, no one would have blood on their hands.





FORTY-NINE


MURRAY


‘What will you do if we find her?’ Sarah was navigating, the sat nav on her phone sending them up the M40 past Oxford. She tapped the screen. ‘Off at junction three.’

‘Arrest her,’ Murray said, then remembered he wasn’t a warranted officer any more. He would have to call in reinforcements.

‘Even though you think she was forced into it?’

‘That might mitigate the offences, but it doesn’t negate them. She’s still committed fraud, not to mention wasting police time.’

‘Do you think they’re together?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

Before they’d set off, Murray had called the Wagon and Horses and made enquiries about Tom and Caroline Johnson. Their descriptions hadn’t rung any bells with the landlady, and so coming up themselves had felt like the only option. Would he have done the same, had he still been a detective? He might have wanted to – a jolly on the DCI’s budget was always a perk – but there would have been more efficient ways of finding out if the Johnsons were in Coton in the Elms. He would have put in a request to Derbyshire Constabulary; asked officers to make enquiries; checked their intelligence systems. All of which was possible when you were a warranted officer, and none of which could be easily achieved by a retired DC, who had already had his knuckles rapped by the superintendent.

‘It’s nice to get away,’ Sarah said. She was gazing out of the window as though she was seeing rolling hills or ocean views, not a motorway service station on the approach to Birmingham. She grinned at Murray. ‘Like Thelma and Louise, but with less hair.’