‘Thanks, Laura. I think TW could possibly be murder. Foxy’s checking for the presence of...’ Jack was about to say the words ‘drug enemas’ when he looked up to see the waiter hovering with a card machine in one hand and a small silver plate in the other, with the bill and a couple of mints. Jack chose not to traumatise the poor lad any further.
As Jack walked through his front door, he was greeted by the normally beautiful aroma of fish pie. But tonight, the thought of any more food made him feel sick. He’d have to come up with an excuse for not eating.
In the kitchen, Hannah was banging a wheel-less toy car down onto her plate, while Penny drew patterns in the potato topping on the fish pie with the back of a fork. ‘Your favourite!’ she beamed with motherly pride.
Jack smiled and nodded, doing his best to pretend that he was hungry.
‘Look at this, darling.’ Penny moved towards Hannah, who instinctively raised her arms to be picked up. Penny took Hannah’s socks off, stood her on the floor and told Jack to kneel down a short distance in front of her. He knew what was coming. He knelt down, held out his hands to his daughter and encouraged her to come to him. Hannah gripped one of Penny’s fingers and wobbled back and forth at the hips. Her perfect little toes curled downwards in an endeavour to grip the lino. Her mouth gaped open under the effort of concentration. When she was ready, she let go of Penny’s finger. Hannah stood like a starfish, legs wide and arms out to the side. Her hips wobbled every time she shifted her weight slightly in an attempt to lift one foot and take that first step. She’d achieved this wobbly stage about one week ago but until now she’d always just dropped to her knees and crawled because it was quicker. Today was different. Today, she wanted to walk. After a few seconds of working herself up to the big event, Hannah took her first step. She screamed, reached for Jack’s outstretched hands and made a stuttering run for it. Four steps later, Jack threw her into the air and loudly announced that she was a genius.
Ten minutes later, Maggie came home from work. Ten minutes after that, she and Jack were kneeling on the kitchen floor encouraging their daughter to walk between them. By the time she was ready for bed, Hannah could walk twelve whole steps.
After dinner, which Jack had not had the heart to refuse, he and Maggie tidied the kitchen whilst Penny had an early night. ‘A DC Lyle called the hospital today and asked if he could speak with me. I couldn’t. Not today, because of the workload Mr Wetlock’s absence has left us with. But he’s asked me to go to the station tomorrow afternoon.’ Maggie fell silent for a second before continuing. ‘Penny says you asked her not to mention how bad Tania was when she came here.’
Jack was firm about the fact that he’d not asked Penny to lie. ‘I asked her to stick to the facts and not be over-dramatic. They found a champagne bottle with my prints on in her bedroom. And they asked me not to leave the country. They know my wife is a doctor so assume I have access to prescription drugs. Police work, Mags, is a process of elimination, but until I’m eliminated from their enquiries, Mum telling them that Tania ran out of this house looking like she’d been attacked, crying and calling me a bastard, isn’t going to help my case!’
‘Well...’ Maggie whipped the tea towel onto her shoulder and began putting the clean plates away. ‘Fortunately for you, I was too drunk to be able give your DC Lyle a coherent statement.’
Chapter 32
Jack lay on his back with one arm tucked beneath his head and the other wrapped around Maggie. They often fell asleep cuddling, then he naturally rolled away at some point during the night. But, tonight, Jack had not yet been to sleep, so their position had not changed.
There was so much his team didn’t know because they weren’t leading. There was so much deemed irrelevant to the murder investigations, yet relevant to the drugs investigation. But Jack didn’t trust anyone except his own team to make such important calls. Jack hated being so far away from the front line. He had to focus! Which was hard because his mind didn’t move in a linear fashion. Jack was happy to be distracted by details when they leapt out of a pile of evidence like luminous signals screaming, ‘Follow me!’ When the evidence spoke, you listened. Always. But some officers didn’t know how to. Steve Lewis certainly didn’t.
A thought from days ago suddenly resurfaced in Jack’s tired mind. ‘Last I heard, he’d gone straight because he bagged himself a beautiful young girlfriend — titled, I think. Then she OD’d on sodium pentothal.’ Julia shook her head in disgust. ‘Wonder where she got that from.’
Jack was suddenly wide awake and thinking hard. It was 3.42 a.m. when he looked at the clock for the last time before finally falling asleep.
As soon as the clock on Jack’s mobile screen ticked to 7.30 a.m., he deemed it a sociable enough time to phone Laura. He needed her to send him copies of all documents given to them by Arnold Hutchinson pertaining to the inventory of ‘stolen’ items from Avril Jenkins’ home, and all insurance companies involved with the Jenkins property across the years.
‘Why are you working, Jack?’ Laura asked. ‘Why aren’t you... gardening? I’m not saying this for your benefit, you understand, I’m saying it, so you’ll stop distracting me from the work I’m meant to be doing.’ Jack thanked her for making time to indulge his hunches.
Jack sat at the rear of the library in front of a microfiche machine. He was now working on two trains of thought at the same time: firstly, he wanted to try and find the beautiful girlfriend who had tempted a younger Elliot Wetlock back onto the straight and narrow, before herself OD’ing on sodium pentothal. Julia had implied that she would have needed a trusted and constant supplier, which described Wetlock perfectly. Jack suspected that it was also the role he played in his daughter’s life — the similarities between the deaths were too striking to ignore.
Jack did not have any dates to help him in relation to the girlfriend’s death, although he did know from Maggie that there was nothing in the hospital’s gossip mill about dead girlfriends. So, it must have been long ago. Jack searched back thirty years with no luck, so he took a break, opened his mobile phone and downloaded the insurance attachments sent from Laura in relation to the Jenkins case.
The various lists of precious items were so contradictory that Jack went right back to the original inventory from Frederick Jenkins. This had to be the list that all others should be measured against. Jack spent a couple of hours scrolling through paintings, antiques and other collectable items including valuable books to get an accurate steer on the overall value of the Jenkinses’ collection. At which point, he was starting to get hungry. He joined the library and took all of the relevant art books home with him.
It took him forty minutes to walk home, and all the while he was desperately trying to figure out how high-value items could vanish from one list to the next, whilst seemingly not being recorded as sold or reported as stolen. He decided the truth must be that many items had never been listed and never insured: that’s how they vanished without raising any kind of alarm. As Jack rounded the corner into his own street, he looked forward to being able to think things through properly.
Jack’s office at home was his sanctuary. His pure, serious thinking space into which normal life was not allowed to intrude. Or at least, that’s what it was supposed to be.
As he sat at his desk beneath the window, his blinds angled so that he could see the world, but the world could not see him, his eyes were drawn to the pile of boxes and bin bags in the corner of the room. Bloody Maggie! Within weeks of Jack getting his office up and running, she’d started using it as a storage space for all the clothes and toys that Hannah had already grown out of. ‘They’ll go on eBay when I get the time,’ Maggie had said. ‘Just ignore them.’