The Infirmary (DCI Ryan Mysteries prequel)(22)

“Alright for some,” Phillips remarked.

“Sharon had one child from that marriage. William, a twenty-four-year-old dentistry student.”

Ryan nodded towards the image of Will Cooper he’d tacked onto the murder board. On the outer edge, perhaps, but still firmly on the board.

“As far as we know, there’s no suggestion of a new man in Sharon’s life. She’d dated over the years and used several online sites including LoveLife, but not recently. In summary, she was a woman devoted to her work and her son.”

There were murmurs of assent around the room.

“The statements taken from her friends and neighbours corroborate that, sir,” Lowerson chimed in. “Nobody recalls seeing a man visiting the house, except her son.”

“Which was a couple of weeks ago, in any event.”

Lowerson shook his head, rifling through his file with quick fingers.

“No, sir. Her neighbour at Number Five says she saw Will Cooper arriving the night before Sharon died.”

Ryan looked up sharply, thinking back to his discussion with the man only a few hours before. He was a grieving son, some might say. He was entitled to forget things, to make mistakes. On the other hand, there were some things you just didn’t forget and that included the last time you’d seen your mother alive.

Without a word, he slipped off the edge of the desk and moved the photograph of William Cooper closer to the smiling picture of his mother in her dress uniform. While the room watched the action with dawning comprehension, he rapped out the next order.

“Phillips? Light a fire up the magistrate’s arse. I need to know if Will Cooper had a motive. Easy enough for somebody to replicate an MO, if he was privy to that kind of information.”

“On it, boss.”

Phillips shrugged off the sense of betrayal, the uneasy knowledge that Sharon would have hated her son being implicated, and reminded himself that she was not here to defend anybody. If there was ever a time to be objective, this was it.

“Alright, let’s piece together what we know about Sharon’s last movements. Working backwards, we entered her home at around two o’clock yesterday afternoon, shortly after a response team was called out to the property. John Dobbs committed suicide an hour before that and Cooper was uncontactable throughout that time. Just after eleven o’clock, DCS Gregson received an e-mail sent from Cooper’s mobile phone, triangulated to her home address and copied to DC Hitchins and DI MacKenzie, telling them that she needed to take a couple of hours’ personal time and to continue with the surveillance until further orders—”

“Aye, and that was weird,” MacKenzie interjected. “I knew Sharon, but I wasn’t assigned to her investigation. I don’t know why she would have sent me an e-mail like that.”

“The pathologist thinks Sharon died no earlier than seven o’clock yesterday morning, no later than nine,” Ryan answered. “That being the case, it’s likely her killer sent that e-mail and selected recipients from her contacts list.”

MacKenzie cast her mind back.

“I sent Sharon an e-mail asking how she was faring and whether she wanted to have a quick drink after work if she could spare the time,” she murmured. “He must have seen it and assumed we were working together.”

Ryan nodded.

“You had no way of knowing,” Phillips murmured, surprising them both. “There’s nothing you could have done to prevent what happened.”

MacKenzie looked into his warm, button-brown eyes and wondered: had her emotions been clear for all to see, or was Phillips more perceptive than she had imagined?

“I—thanks, Frank.”

He shuffled in his chair, clearly embarrassed by his own insight.

“I’d say the same to anybody,” he replied.

MacKenzie turned away to resume the discussion with Ryan.

“So, if Cooper didn’t send those messages and the pathologist puts her death between seven and nine, we have to assume her killer gained access to her home around that time or even sometime before?”

Ryan nodded, bracing his hands against the desk while he skim-read the pathologist’s notes.

“Pinter thinks she was tortured for over an hour and she didn’t die until her arteries were severed, which would have brought on a severe cardiac arrest. It’s possible her killer accessed the house as early as five or six yesterday morning. We’ve already had it confirmed that Cooper made two outgoing phone calls yesterday morning. One was to her voicemail service, presumably to check messages, at five-fifteen. The other one was to DC Hitchins to check on the surveillance at around five-forty. Hitchins tells us Cooper sounded fine, if not a bit tired. She was planning to head into the office soon after. That narrows down the timescale.”

“Sir?”

Lowerson had his hand up again and Ryan reminded himself to have a word with him about it. They weren’t in a classroom, for pity’s sake.

“Jack, you don’t need to call me ‘sir’ all the time,” he went so far as to say. “Just…speak.”

“Thank you, s—” Lowerson swallowed the rest of that sentence and tried again. “Um, I was wondering how he managed to enter DCI Cooper’s home. She was an experienced officer—I don’t know how he could have managed it.”

Ryan laughed shortly.