Deadly Wishes (Detective Zoe Finch Book 1) Page 3

  She’d looked down at it. The green set off the tone of her skin and made her feel younger than her nondescript sixty-three years.

  “You like this dress. You said so when I bought it.”

  “That was five years ago.”

  “Ten years, actually.”

  He bit his nail and spat. She tried to make out where the fragment had landed.

  “Exactly,” he said. “You look like mutton dressed as lamb. You’re not wearing it.”

  She’d taken a breath, about to object, but then decided better of it. It was just a dress. No one at this awful party would care what she looked like. If she wore something drab she could fade into the background, get it all over with.

  She’d dragged herself back upstairs, a headache forming behind her eyes.

  Now the emerald dress lay on her bed still. She’d been intending to put them both away after the party, knowing that Bryn would still be downstairs and wouldn’t have to see the thing. She’d been looking forward to lifting it off the bed, holding it against herself and admiring it in the mirror. Her eyes sparkled when she wore green. It made her look alive.

  Alive.

  How could she be thinking about dresses when Bryn lay dead in the next room?

  Bryn was sixty-five years old, and he’d had that mini stroke. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t thought about his death before. He wasn’t a healthy man. He had his paunch, and panted when he walked up more than a few stairs. But he’d bragged about the long years of retirement he would enjoy. The rounds of golf that would provide the exercise he’d been missing since trading a response vehicle for a desk.

  Ten years, maybe twenty if he’d had his way. Twenty years of insults, and restrictions, and fear.

  Now there would be none of that.

  Margaret had spent thirty-four years in his orbit, her every move calculated with regard to his reaction. She’d learned what annoyed him, and what pacified him. What kept him away from her, and what encouraged contact. She’d become an expert on Bryn Jackson. It was a full-time job.

  Now, she was nothing.

  She shuddered. The policewoman leaned in. She was impossibly young, surely not much older than Margaret’s teenage granddaughters. The bulky uniform made her look tiny.

  “Is there anything I can get you, Mrs Jackson? Anyone I can call?”

  “I just want to find some clean clothes.”

  “That’s fine. Please leave the clothes you’re wearing on the bed, and we’ll take them. You won’t miss them, will you?”

  “No.”

  Margaret heaved herself up, pulling at the hem of the dress. It was stiff, crusted with blood. Not just his, but her own. She’d cut her hand on the knife when she’d picked it up from the desk. No one had mentioned that. No one had talked about treating the gash that ran down her palm.

  “I might need to go to the doctor,” she whispered.

  “Of course. You’ll be needing something to help you sleep,” the girl replied.

  “No. Not that.” She hadn’t thought about sleep. It seemed so unimportant now. “My hand.”

  She held her palm up. The constable winced.

  “Sorry, we should’ve seen that earlier. We’ll get someone to come and treat it for you.”

  “Thank you.” Margaret stood up. Her legs were heavy.

  There was a knock at the front door.

  “Don’t worry, Mrs Jackson. PC Khaled will get it.”

  Margaret didn’t like other people answering her door. She rarely had visitors, but supposed she would be inundated with them now. Well-wishers. Bryn’s myriad friends and associates. Maybe one or two of her own.

  A woman put her head round the kitchen door. She was tall with red-brown hair that had been tied back in a hurry. She looked nervous. As she entered the room, her height became even more apparent. Margaret had seen this woman before, at the party. But there, even though she’d been standing while everyone else sat, she’d seemed smaller. Less significant.

  “Mrs Jackson,” the woman said. She had a strong Birmingham accent and sounded almost as tired as Margaret felt. “I’m Detective Inspector Zoe Finch.” Her gaze flicked across Margaret’s dress. “I’m very sorry about your husband’s death.”

  Margaret’s neck muscles tightened. “Thank you.”

  “It’s my job to secure the scene.” DI Finch turned to the constable. “Have you been anywhere else in the house, other than this room?”

  “No ma’am.”

  “Good. You stay in here. Mrs Jackson, I’d be grateful if you could stay in here with PC—?”

  “PC Bright, ma’am,” said the constable.

  “PC Bright. She’ll get you a cup of… you already have one. And I’m sorry, but we’ll need your dress.”

  Margaret looked down at the dress again. “Of course.”

  “Can I ask what happened?”

  Margaret’s legs felt weak. “I don’t know. He was… I found him…”

  “Did you see anyone enter your husband’s study? Anywhere in the house?”

  Margaret shook her head. She felt dizzy.

  “Don’t worry, ma’am. It’s alright.” PC Bright rushed to Margaret’s side.

  The detective narrowed her eyes. She eyed the dress, then seemed to come to a decision. “Will you be comfortable in here, at least for half an hour or so? Then we can help you find somewhere else to go.”

  “No,” said Margaret.

  “Sorry?”

  “I don’t have anywhere else.”

  “No family, friends?”

  Margaret thought of her grown-up children. She couldn’t burden them with this. Not in the middle of the night. Paul would blame her. And Winona…

  She crossed herself.

  “Do you have a neighbour you can go to?”

  “No. There’s only here. I’ll stay here.”

  The detective frowned. “We don’t normally…” She licked her lips then put on a false smile. “Let’s talk about it shortly, then we can work something out.” She gave the constable a look that made Margaret expect more questions.

  “I want to stay here.”

  “Like I say, we can work out what’s best later. You stay in here, for now. Please. There’s a settee, maybe you can make yourself comfortable.”

  Margaret looked at the sofa by the window. She never sat there. That was Bryn’s spot, the place where he lounged while she made him drinks or served up his dinner. He would wait for it there, his beady eyes on her, then take it to his study. Leaving her to eat alone at the kitchen table.

  “I’ll try,” she said.

  The detective had been at the party. Newly promoted. Margaret knew Bryn’s death was an opportunity for her.

  “Thank you.” The detective scanned the room again then clenched her fists. “I’ll be as quick as I can.”

  Chapter Seven

  No matter how long Zoe worked in the force, she never got used to the sight of a dead body.

  She’d seen thirty-two of them in her seventeen-year career in West Midlands Police. Eighteen in her two years in uniform, and the rest in CID.

  There’d been two she’d known. An old school friend in a road traffic accident and a frequent arrestee in a drug death. But in both cases, she hadn’t known in advance that she would recognise the body.

  This was the first time she’d had to prepare herself to see the body of someone she’d met.

  She’d only met him the once, and she hadn’t exactly warmed to the man. But she felt a kind of maternalism towards murder victims, and felt she had to do right by them. With Bryn Jackson, this was magnified by the fact he’d been her boss.

  The study where Jackson had died was next to the kitchen. The door hung open and the lights were low. A lamp sat on the desk in the centre of the room, a modern reproduction of something you might have found in an Edwardian mansion. It was lit, along with a tasselled floor lamp in the corner by the window.

  The room measured four to five metres square, with heavy, full height curtains at the back
and a small side window. The window was open, just a crack.

  Zoe ran through procedure in her head. Secure, protect, preserve. PC Khaled was at the front door to log anyone who came in and out. A back door led off the corridor that had taken her to the kitchen. She’d stopped to check it after speaking to Mrs Jackson. The key had been in the lock and it was bolted. She’d fished an evidence bag from her pocket and dropped the key inside. It was metal with a long handle, heavy in her pocket.

  The only other entrance was through the doors which led into the garden from the study, behind those curtains. The killer could have come in that way, or they might have used the main door. Unless the killer had already been in the house.

  She stood at the threshold, swallowing hard as she let her gaze fall to the body. Jackson lay on the floor where the paramedics had put him. His face was angled towards her, along with the wound that had probably caused his death. A deep gash in his neck, crusted with blood. Bloodstains blossomed on the white wing-collared shirt he’d been wearing at the party. The tie she’d seen draped around his neck was wound neatly on a sideboard. He’d had time to do that, then.

  She turned to PC Khaled, at the other end of the Jacksons’ echoing hallway with its sweeping staircase.

  “Have you been past this door?”

  “Briefly. I had to pull Mrs Jackson off him.”

  “Was that before the ambulance arrived?”

  “Yes, ma’am. We were first here.”

  “How did you get in?”

  “The front door was open.”

  She frowned and looked at the door behind him. It was blue and heavy, with an ornate knob in the centre.

  “So you went in there, pulled her off, dragged her out, waited for the paramedics, and no one has been in there since?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Has anything been removed?”

  “Not that I’ve seen.”

  She thought back to Mrs Jackson, in the kitchen with a cup of tea going cold in front of her. The beige dress she had been wearing at the party was heavily bloodstained, crusted in places.

  “We need her dress.”

  “PC Bright has already asked Mrs Jackson to leave it on her bed.”

  “Tell me when that’s been done.”

  “Will do.”

  “Thanks.”

  She turned back to the study. The blood smelled heavy and metallic against a background tang of wood and furniture polish. A pool of it settled under Jackson’s body and seeping into the wooden floor.

  Zoe had a protective suit in her car. But she couldn’t step into that room until the Forensic Scene Manager arrived.

  She leaned in to get a better view. A faint smear of blood ran across the floor to the doorway, maybe where PC Khaled had dragged Mrs Jackson away. It petered out before reaching the doorway. She noted that PC Khaled hadn’t left footprints.

  The Assistant Chief Constable’s face was pale. It looked stark against all the blood. The tie on the chair looked incongruous, too tidy. The rest of the room was tidy too, although not as sparse as the rest of the house. The hallway was minimalist to the point of being museum-like, and the kitchen felt cold and bare. This room was well-ordered, but also well lived in. She wondered if he hid away here and his wife lived in the rest of the house.

  On the floor about two feet from him lay what looked like an ornate hunting knife. An antique, maybe. It was smeared with blood but looked like someone had wiped it. Had the paramedics touched it, she wondered.

  A knife like that, if it belonged to Jackson, would have been on display. This was that kind of room. Certificates lined the walls, with photographs of the ACC posing next to various bigwigs. Two of them currently in detention following the Canary case. And there were paintings, too, what looked like originals. But there was a space on the chimney breast, where a picture should have hung. A dark line marked its top edge, where the dust would have settled. A safe sat in the centre of the empty space.

  Still in the doorway, she scanned the room for the picture. It could be leaning against the other side of the desk. But Zoe had a feeling it was gone.

  A burglary gone wrong, maybe? The safe was closed, no obvious sign of having been unlocked.

  She turned back to the hallway, checking the smooth, pale walls. Here there were pictures too but spaced out like a gallery. So, Jackson had been a collector. Or maybe his wife, but Zoe would bet it wasn’t her. The largest ones, the ones that looked like they might be expensive, were in the study.

  She took a few steps towards one of the paintings. It was a landscape, blue-green fields approached by an ominous storm. The sky had flashes of yellow and black and the grass below was peppered with dark patches. It made her shiver. Too bleak for Zoe’s taste but something she could imagine other people coveting. Another similar one faced it. Both about three feet square and signed in the bottom right hand corner. They were mounted without frames.

  She went back to the office doorway. If they’d only taken the one painting, then Jackson might have disturbed them before they’d got the rest. He could have arrived home from the party, gone in there, discovered them in the act. They grabbed his knife – she frowned, wondering where the knife had been displayed – and stabbed him with it. Then made off through either the patio doors or the front door.

  Occam’s Razor – the simplest explanation was normally the best. But there were flaws. That tie, for one. And what kind of burglar would kill for a panting? What vehicle would they have needed, to take a stash of delicate paintings? No one had said anything about a van.

  There was nothing else she could get from this crime scene without donning her protective gear and stepping inside. The FSM would be here any moment.

  She knew better than to go in there alone. This case would be political. It would be delicate, closely monitored. She couldn’t risk being accused of contaminating the scene.

  In the meantime, she had a witness to question.

  Chapter Eight

  Margaret blinked at the young constable next to her. Someone had found a blanket, one from the second guest bedroom, if she remembered correctly. It draped around her shoulders.

  They were sitting on the sofa in the kitchen. She stared at the blank windows to the garden, wondering if she’d properly secured the gate.

  “Can I get you another cup of tea, Mrs Jackson?” The girl’s voice was harsher than you’d think from looking at her blonde hair and long eyelashes. She had a thick Black Country accent.

  Margaret shook her head. Then nodded. Then shook it again.

  She had no idea what she wanted.

  “Tell you what, how about we make one anyway, then it’s up to you if you drink it.”

  The girl stood and headed towards the kettle. “Strong, three sugars.”

  “No—” Margaret raised a hand.

  “For the shock, Mrs Jackson. It’ll make you feel better.”

  Margaret frowned but said nothing.

  Behind her, in the hallway and beyond, she could hear footsteps. Uniformed officers tramping all over the hardwood floors Bryn was so precious about. He’d insisted she polish them every week when they’d first moved in here, getting down on her hands and knees like a Victorian chambermaid. She’d learned to enjoy the task and felt satisfaction from seeing the wood gleam.

  She thought of the wood in his study, the antique carpet. The blood she’d watched spreading across it.

  She stood up. “I have to go to him.”

  The policewoman pulled her down. “Please, just stay here. You’ll see him later.”

  “He needs me.”

  Trish placed a mug of tea on the coffee table. “I know it’s hard, but the best way you can help him right now is to let CID do their job.”

  She’d used the blue mug, the one Winona had bought her two Christmases ago. Margaret hated that mug but brought it out religiously when her daughter came to visit.

  She turned to the constable. “What’s your name?”

  The girl smiled. “I’
m PC Bright, ma’am.”

  Margaret shook her head, feeling like it was full of wasps.

  “No. Your real name. What do your friends call you?”

  A smile. “Trish, ma’am.”

  “Please don’t call me ma’am.”

  Trish nodded but didn’t correct herself.

  There was more noise in the hallway. Cold air flashed in as the detective entered the room. Margaret had forgotten her name. The woman was in front of her before she’d had a chance to consider standing up.

  Margaret straightened as the detective looked down at her.

  She thought of Bryn, twisted back over his desk. The blood, soaking into the hardwood. His desk.

  Oh, my God. That desk. It was an antique. Mahogany with a leather inlay, ornately carved legs and detailing on the drawer fronts. It was worth… it was priceless.

  His desk would be ruined. He would hate that.

  She swallowed and closed her eyes. She felt sick.

  “Mrs Jackson, are you alright? You suddenly went very pale.” The detective looked perturbed, like a mother whose child is about to throw up into her face.

  Margaret held herself still. “I’m fine,” she lied.

  “Good.” The detective shot the young policewoman, Trish, a keep an eye on her look. “I’ve been checking your husband’s office. Am I right in thinking that’s what the room is used for?”

  “It’s his study. Yes.”

  “Is it a room you both used?”

  Used.

  “No. He liked to keep his space private.”

  “Can you tell me if there was a picture over the mantelpiece?”

  “The mantelpiece?”

  “In the study. It’s missing. I wondered if your husband had moved it.”

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry.” Truth was, she had no idea what was in that room. My husband kept me prisoner here. He locked me out of his room. He told me I was worthless. But this young detective knew nothing of all that. None of them did.

  “Thank you. You drink your tea now, and I’ll be back to talk to you shortly. I suggest you get some rest.”

  Margaret shook her head. Rest was the last thing on her mind. She could rest when she was with Bryn.