He removed the document from his inside pocket and handed it across the desk to her. She studied it for a few seconds, then looked back at him, her demeanour turning slightly defensive. ‘Yes, we drew up this will.’
‘Thank you,’ Grace replied. ‘We think it may be significant in our enquiries that her husband has been excluded and that the principal benefactor is her line manager at the firm where she works, Mutual Occidental Insurance. We appreciate your duty of client confidentiality, but we are in a very serious situation, in which her husband is claiming he’s not seen or heard from Eden since last Sunday afternoon. But the fact is there’s been very little to indicate she is still alive since the previous Thursday, August the twenty-ninth. We are extremely concerned that she may be dead. Or, maybe, she has run away and is pretending to be dead? Any information you can give us would be extremely helpful.’
She opened out her hands and a bunch of bracelets slid, jangling, down her wrist. ‘What information are you looking for from me?’
‘Did this will supersede a previous one?’ Branson asked.
She looked at both officers. ‘I shouldn’t say so, but in light of the gravity of the situation, yes, it did.’
‘The previous one leaving everything to her husband?’ Branson pressed.
‘Pretty much, yes.’
‘You drafted that one, too?’
‘Yes, Mrs Paternoster has been a client for a number of years. Normally any conversations would be subject to client confidentiality, but I am prepared to relax that on this occasion given that I am worried about what might have happened to Eden.’
‘If you can cast your mind back to when she asked to change her will, Ms Riddle,’ Grace asked, ‘did she seem normal to you? Did she say anything by way of explanation? It’s a pretty unusual situation where someone in a marriage changes their will to exclude their partner, isn’t it?’
She smiled sardonically. ‘Not as unusual as you might think. I’m afraid, doing probate, I see it all. Not much surprises me. And — I’m not saying this is the case here — but I’ve known people take masochistic pleasure in deliberately excluding someone who would be expecting an inheritance. They leave it to a dogs’ home or some other charity. I had a client, some years ago, and now long deceased, who left an estate of over £4 million to her cat, just to stop any of her children, whom she’d fallen out with, from benefiting.’
‘So, clearly,’ Grace said, ‘Eden Paternoster didn’t want her husband to benefit. But leaving it to her boss strikes us as strange. Did she say anything to you about her reasons for that?’
He held back on revealing the information his team knew — that Rebecca Watkins was having an affair with Eden’s husband — wanting to hear the solicitor’s reply.
‘She did, yes, she told me her reason. She told me her husband wasn’t very tech savvy. She’d become suspicious that he was cheating on her, after reading texts on his phone. From what she told me it seems she confided in her boss — her line manager, Rebecca Watkins — and one thing had led to another. In a short space of time she realized she had fallen in love with this woman, and this was where her true feelings lay. She told me she felt liberated, as if she’d shaken a monkey off her back.’
Grace and Branson looked at each other in utter astonishment.
‘That’s why she changed her will?’ Grace asked.
‘There’s more to it than that.’ She gave both Grace and Branson a hesitant look. ‘When she came to see me back in March’ — she glanced down then looked up again — ‘March the twentieth, she was in an agitated state.’
‘For what reason?’ Grace asked. ‘If she gave one?’
The solicitor hesitated, as if wondering if she should say any more. Finally, she nodded. ‘Yes, she did. One night, while her husband was out doing his taxi work, she’d looked at his computer. Perhaps, she told me, he didn’t realize that text messages were stored on that as well as his phone. Whatever, she found a string of messages between him and some other woman. The last one said that he had a plan to “get rid of” Eden. Such a clever plan, he boasted, no one would ever be able to prove a thing.’
‘Was it serious, do you think?’ Grace asked.
‘I asked her about this. She said there were times when he’d been violent before, where he threatened to kill her — particularly around the time his business went bust. She said his mood swings frightened her.’
Branson said, ‘So he was in turmoil. Perhaps he saw her doing well in her career and resented that she was now the bread-winner? That’s ugly.’
‘When we interviewed him, he struck us as being pretty macho, the kind of man who might resent the little woman doing better than himself. A big ego?’ Grace probed.
She gave a thawing smile. ‘From what Eden told me, that’s a pretty accurate assessment.’
‘How frightened was she by these mood swings?’ Grace asked.
‘She was scared — very scared.’
‘But she was never scared enough to go to the police?’ he continued.
Jill Riddle looked at each officer in turn, then laid her palms flat on the surface of her desk. ‘All too often in my experience, officers, it isn’t that people in abusive relationships, both male and female, are not scared enough to go to the police,’ she said. ‘It’s that they are too scared to go.’
97
Back outside on the pavement in the bright sunshine, the lunchtime crowds out on the streets, enjoying the last few weeks of the summer rays, Glenn Branson said, ‘That’s something I seriously was not expecting — that she’s in — or was in — a relationship with her boss.’ He pulled his shades out of his jacket pocket and put them on.
Roy Grace looked nonplussed. ‘In this job, always expect the unexpected.’
‘Indeed.’
‘Remember that and you’ll seldom be disappointed.’
Branson pursed his lips thoughtfully. ‘And didn’t your old mate Nick Sloan once say, “No matter what happens, at the end of each month the golden goose will shit into your bank account”?’
Grace grinned. ‘I miss his humour.’ Instantly, he looked serious again. ‘Eden’s in a relationship with her boss and her boss is in a relationship with her husband. It’s all a bit Jeremy Kyle, don’t you think?’
Branson glanced at his big, loud watch. ‘Ten to one — want to grab a quick bite before we head back to the office?’
The Detective Superintendent checked his more modest watch, too. ‘Are you thinking healthy or a carb fest?’
Branson looked wounded. He patted his six-pack midriff. ‘Healthy.’
‘But not too healthy, eh?’ Grace suggested.
They ended up, a few minutes later, perched on stools in a sandwich bar, Branson munching on a vegan wrap and Grace a tuna one with a bag of crisps on the side. Branson drank bottled water and Grace a Diet Coke.
‘Too scared to go to the police,’ Grace pondered.
‘Yep,’ Branson said, through a mouthful of food. ‘Too scared of what their partners might do when they found out. Or too scared of being on their own, on the shelf. That’s what abusive bastards do, isn’t it? They destroy their other half’s self-esteem to the point where they believe they are such rubbish human beings that no one else would ever want them. So they stay on in the relationship, in some kind of desperation, rather than risk being alone for the rest of their lives. What’s the stat? Something like the average person in an abusive relationship endures an assault thirty-nine times before going for help.’