‘Me, Phil and Mark.’ He turned to Pippa with a sad smile. ‘You and Mark were meant for each other. I couldn’t compete with him. He was a good bloke.’ He shook his head. ‘I knew you knew I fancied you, but when you said you had a leaving present for me, I didn’t think you meant…’ His voice trailed off, and we all knew what that leaving present had been. ‘I shouldn’t have done it, but I was leaving and I had no intention of coming back, and I thought, as long as he never found out… Did Mark know? Did he know that he wasn’t the father?’

  Pippa shook her head, but looked doubtful. ‘No. At least, I never told him. We did try for another baby, but it never happened, and all the time Lee was looking more and more like you… I don’t know. Maybe he guessed. But he never mentioned it.’

  ‘So,’ said Nathan, ‘all the time we’ve been assuming that poor old Santa was the intended victim, we’ve been barking up the wrong tree, haven’t we? It was Isaac you were after, not Steve.’

  ‘I get that you might have a bit of a grudge against Isaac for getting you up the duff as a teenager,’ I said, ‘but what I don’t get is why you would want to kill him now? What good would it do you? If it was me, I’d be suing him for child maintenance back payments, although even that seems a bit harsh, as he obviously knew nothing about it. And your son’s all grown up. What’s the point of dredging all this up?’

  ‘The point,’ shot Pippa, and I took a step back, because she appeared to be on the verge of becoming completely unhinged. Nathan took a warning step towards her. Up to this point, she hadn’t seemed very dangerous, but the blood-soaked Santa Claus impersonator upstairs said otherwise.

  Pippa took a breath to calm herself. ‘The point is, he did know. I told him.’

  Everyone turned to look at him as Isaac gasped in disbelief. ‘When? I haven’t heard from you since that night. I heard about you, I knew you and Mark got married and had a baby after I left, but you never told me the baby was mine.’

  ‘Liar.’ She stared at him, her face a mask of calm hatred. But the rest of her obviously wasn’t quite as calm, because she wobbled and put out a hand to steady herself against the wall. Nathan reached out and pulled over a chair, gesturing to her to sit.

  ‘Tell us your side of the story, Pippa,’ he said, firmly but gently. She took another deep breath.

  ‘I knew I was pregnant, a few weeks after you left,’ she told Isaac. ‘And I knew it was yours, because Mark and I had never done it. You were my first.’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Isaac, looking even more wracked with guilt. ‘If I’d known, I wouldn’t have gone along with it. Your first time should have been with Mark, not me.’

  ‘That was my choice. I knew you would never come back, and anyway, although I fancied you, I didn’t want to be with you, I wanted Mark. So I slept with him and told him the baby was his.’ She looked up at the faces of everyone watching her. ‘What? I was sixteen years old, what else was I supposed to do?’

  ‘Tell the truth?’ suggested DI Jones. James shot him an exasperated look.

  ‘Easy to say when you’re not the one holding the baby,’ he said, and I had to agree with him.

  ‘Mark was a wonderful husband and a brilliant dad. We never had much money, but we were happy. We used to see you in the paper, see how successful you were, and Mark was so proud of you, even if you never bothered with us anymore. I knew I’d picked the right bloke to bring up my son. He wasn’t selfish like you.’ Isaac hung his head in shame, and James reached out to touch him on the arm. I remembered our conversation in the kitchen the night before, although that now seemed like it had been weeks ago. Isaac had been selfish, throughout his life, and he knew it. But he’d tried to make amends. Surely if she had contacted him, he would have helped her?

  ‘Mark died when Lee was fourteen. We had no savings or life insurance – we’d barely been able to get by as it was, let alone put money away – and without his wages, I couldn’t afford to pay the mortgage. We were on the verge of being kicked out of our home. I didn’t know what to do.’ She looked up at Isaac and smiled grimly. ‘And then there you were, on the news, having just paid off this woman who said you’d knocked her up at a tech conference a couple of years before. You’d been denying it was yours, and then suddenly you agreed to settle out of court, so you must’ve been lying. You gave her some ridiculous amount of money, like half a million or something. All I wanted was twenty grand to pay off my mortgage. That’s all I was asking for, some help to keep the roof over our son’s head.’

  Isaac looked at her, his face a picture of misery. ‘Oh God, Phil, if I’d known…’

  ‘You did know! I wrote to you!’

  ‘When? I never got any letter.’ Isaac pulled up a chair and sat next to her. ‘I swear to you, I would have helped you if I’d known, of course I would.’ He sighed. ‘If you’d told me when you got pregnant, I—’

  ‘What? You’d have come back to rescue me?’ said Pippa, her voice heavy with sarcasm. Isaac shook his head.

  ‘No, not if you didn’t want me to. But I would always have made sure you had money.’

  ‘After you settled with this other woman – I bet you had all sorts of people saying you’d done this or that, trying to get money out of you?’ Nathan asked. He nodded.

  ‘I did. All these women coming out of the woodwork, saying we’d had affairs or one-night stands.’ He sighed. ‘Like I told you last night, Jodie…’ I saw Nathan prick up his ears; was he feeling a bit jealous, maybe? ‘I wasn’t a nice person in those days. I was young and rich and a cocky little bugger, and a lot of women seemed to like that. So yeah, I probably had slept with some of them, but most of them I didn’t know. Some of them were accusing me of having sex with them in cities I’d never even been to. They didn’t even try to make their lies very convincing. But I never saw anything from Pippa.’

  ‘You told me you had a crack legal team, who used to – how did you put it? – insulate you from fall-out. If someone tried to sue you for your actions in the boardroom, your legal team would make it all go away.’ I was thinking aloud, but it made sense to me. ‘Maybe they tried to make your actions in the bedroom go away, too?’

  Isaac stared at me. ‘You mean there could have been more women out there, saying stuff like that, and they never even told me about them?’

  ‘There could even be more babies out there,’ said DI Jones. Isaac looked horrified while Nathan shot Jones another exasperated look.

  ‘That’s not up to us to speculate about, DI Jones.’

  I turned to Pippa. ‘Did you get a reply to your letter?’ I asked. She nodded.

  ‘Yeah, I got one all right. Telling me that Mr Barnes completely refuted my allegations and that he didn’t recall ever meeting me. They said it was up to me if I wanted to pursue it, but if I made my allegations again they would take me to court for defamation or something.’

  ‘But surely you could have had a DNA test done? You could have proved it?’

  ‘Lee had just lost his dad – his real dad, not the sperm donor. I didn’t want to go to court and have him find out about Isaac. I didn’t want him thinking it had all been a lie.’

  ‘So you left it at that?’ asked Nathan.

  ‘I did try again. I wrote back and explained that I was a very old friend from Cornwall, but they sent me some legal letter telling me I had to leave Isaac alone.’

  ‘A cease and desist letter?’ I asked, and she nodded.

  ‘Phil – Pippa – I am so sorry,’ said Isaac. ‘I honestly had no idea…’

  ‘We lost the house,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘The house where my son had grown up, where I’d had happy years with my husband, where all my memories of him were. We got put into emergency housing. I got very depressed and they took my son away from me.’ She wiped at her eyes, and I felt tears coming to mine, too. This poor woman had made mistakes (not the least of which was lying under a sheet in a bedroom upstairs, waiting for the ambulance to take him away), but she had suffered a lot, too. Some people might judge her for hiding her son’s true parentage, but she’d been little more than a child herself at the time. Teenagers do stupid things, and most of the time they don’t get caught out; but when they do, how are they supposed to cope? Teenagers don’t have a team of lawyers and legal experts to get them off the hook, not like millionaire businessmen do.

  ‘What happened then?’ I asked gently.

  ‘I got lucky.’ She snorted. ‘God knew I was due some good luck. I got the job here, with the gatehouse to live in. I got my Lee back. But he’d been with foster parents for almost a year by then. It was the worst year of my life.’

  ‘So why didn’t you just confront Mr Barnes when you saw him yesterday?’ asked Nathan.

  Pippa looked at us mutinously. ‘I was going to, but when he turned up, swanning around like he’s the Messiah, like money cures everything… It wasn’t that he didn’t give me the money I needed all those years ago – how would that money help me now? I already lost my home. But when he wouldn’t even admit to knowing me, because I’m just some ordinary woman from Cornwall, a cleaner for God’s sake, not a fancy businesswoman or glamorous actress – you can shake your head, Isaac, but I’ve seen photos of you with your girlfriends, they’re all young and blonde. You were my first, and you couldn’t admit you knew me. Or worse, you didn’t even remember me.’ She turned to me. ‘I wasn’t going to kill him. I just wanted to scare him, or shout at him, I didn’t really know what I wanted.’

  ‘But you took the sword,’ said Nathan. ‘That sounds like premeditated murder to me.’

  ‘No! It wasn’t like that – I was just going to leave it in his room. I wanted to freak him out.’

  ‘It’s a symbol of his family’s betrayal…’ I said, and she nodded. Nathan looked confused. ‘Lily told us about the history of the sword. Isaac is related to the family who lived here in Elizabethan times. They worked here. They dobbed in the owners for being Catholic, and were given the house as a reward. That sword was also given to them, to remind them of the great service they’d done the queen – it was used to behead the owner. But it was also a constant reminder of their betrayal, and eventually it drove the head of the family mad.’

  ‘You wanted to remind me of my betrayal?’ asked Isaac. Pippa nodded. ‘But I didn’t even know I’d betrayed you!’

  ‘I got the idea about leaving the sword after Lily told everyone the story about it,’ said Pippa. ‘I’d already taken it out of its glass case earlier, to keep it away from the kids at the party. It was easy to tuck it under my coat when I left and went home.’

  ‘That still doesn’t explain how the sword ended up sticking out of the victim’s chest,’ said Nathan.

  ‘Or how you could mistake him for Isaac,’ I said. ‘He was twice the size of him.’

  Pippa shook her head. For the first time she actually looked remorseful.

  ‘I didn’t kill him. I don’t know how the sword ended up in him, I honestly don’t. I never meant to hurt anyone, least of all that poor man.’

  ‘What did you do, Pippa?’ I asked gently.

  ‘I was just going to leave it on the desk, so Isaac would see it when he woke up,’ she said. ‘When I made up the room that evening, before I left, I moved the desk away from the secret door, so I could get in without making a noise. I waited until three in the morning, so that Isaac would be asleep. But when I got there, the bed was empty and the bathroom light was on, and I thought, if I could leave it in the bed, it would be even better. It would be more disturbing.’

  ‘You left a sword in my bed, knowing that my eight-year-old son was sleeping there as well?’ Isaac looked at her in disgust. She hung her head.

  ‘I know, I know. I didn’t care about you but I would never hurt a child. I thought about leaving it under the bedclothes, but I was worried that you wouldn’t see it, and your little boy would get in and cut himself on it – it’s still really sharp. I thought it would be really dramatic if I left it sticking out of the bed, so I stuck it in the pillow. I didn’t want to slash the mattress because it would cost Trevor more to replace. But the hilt of the sword was so heavy that it made it fall over.’

  ‘So you tried standing it up the other way…’ I said. I could kind of see now what she’d done. ‘Was it you that tied the leather belt onto the bed post?’

  She nodded. ‘I didn’t have much time to think about it. The belt was on the floor next to the bed – I stood on it, and I thought I could use it to tie the sword to the bed post or something. But I couldn’t get it tight enough, so the sword still wouldn’t stand up, and I could hear Isaac – or Steve, as I now know it was – finishing in the bathroom. There was a big pile of pillows and blankets on the bed, so I held the sword upright and stabbed a couple of pillows onto it…’ She demonstrated, using her hand in place of the sword.

  ‘Like a kebab?’ I said. ‘You skewered the pillows onto the sword and then left it standing upright, with the hilt at the bottom and the pointy bit sticking up, weighed down by the pillows?’

  She nodded. ‘I wrapped a blanket round it, too, to help keep it in place. It only had to stand up long enough for Isaac to see it when him and Joshua left the bathroom. And that’s how it was when I left it.’

  ‘With the sheets pulled back so the sword was in full view?’ asked Nathan. I could see by his face that he was imagining it too. She nodded.

  ‘Yes, I swear. I was sure that Isaac would keep the bathroom light on at least until Joshua was safely in bed, so I was certain they would both see it.’

  ‘But you were wrong.’ Isaac shook his head, his eyes never leaving her face. ‘What if whatever happened to Steve had happened to Joshua?’

  ‘I could never have lived with myself—’

  ‘You don’t think maybe that would be worse than not paying child maintenance for a son I never even knew I had?’ Isaac’s normally calm and controlled tone of voice was rising. James put his hand on Isaac’s arm, but he shook it off. ‘I’m fine. I’m not going to lose it over her.’

  ‘I wouldn’t blame you if you did,’ said Pippa in a quiet voice, quite unlike the one full of spite and vitriol she’d used earlier. I realised now that she’d been in a state of shocked denial since discovering Steve’s body, and the enormity of what she’d done was only now coming home to her.

  ‘OK, so you left the sword in a highly dangerous place,’ said Nathan, reasserting his authority over the conversation. ‘So what happened? How did Steve end up dead?’

  ‘I think I might know,’ I said. ‘But we need to go and look at the crime scene again, I think.’

  Nathan and I went back up to the Dyneley Suite, DI Jones following somewhat sullenly behind us. Nathan leaned in close to me.

  ‘This would be a lovely place for a romantic night away, wouldn’t it?’ he murmured. I laughed.

  ‘I thought that too, until Steve got himself killed. I think I’d rather find somewhere without a dead body in the next room…’

  We reached the landing, then had to stand to one side as two men, sombrely dressed in black trousers and polo shirts, wheeled a trolley along the hallway towards us, their cargo a large black body bag that stopped our light-hearted banter in its tracks.

  ‘Poor Steve,’ I said. ‘He didn’t deserve such a nasty end.’

  ‘No one does,’ said Nathan simply. ‘Come on.’ We let the mortuary men pass us, then headed for the crime scene.

  The ME had packed away her things and was chatting to the forensic team. She smiled at Nathan.

  ‘I’m all done. I’m putting time of death between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m.’

  ‘That fits in with what we’ve been told,’ he said. She looked surprised.

  ‘You’ve got the guy already? You don’t hang around, DCI Withers.’ She pulled off her latex gloves and balled them up, throwing them into a rubbish bag just outside the door. ‘I look forward to seeing you at the post-mortem.’

  ‘I think I’ll be passing that particular pleasure on to DI Jones,’ said Nathan. Jones, who had been talking to one of the SOCOs, looked up at the sound of his name. The ME nodded, picked up her bag and left.

  ‘So come on then, Ms Parker,’ said Nathan. ‘Tell me what you’re thinking…’

  ‘I’m thinking we need to retrace Steve’s steps,’ I said. I walked over to the door of the en suite bathroom. ‘He was in here when Pippa came in through the secret passage.’ I went in and stood in front of the toilet.

  ‘Please tell me you’re not pretending to stand there and pee like a man,’ said Nathan behind me. He really did know me too well.

  ‘Gotta get in the zone, haven’t I?’ I said. I pretended to zip up my fly.

  ‘He was naked,’ pointed out Nathan. ‘No flies to do up.’ I unzipped my invisible fly.

  ‘Better?’

  ‘Oh, miles better.’ Nathan grinned at me. ‘So he’s finished pointing Percy at the porcelain, what now?’

  ‘He’s got the light on, remember,’ I said, turning and walking back to the door. ‘And he’s drunk, and he’s probably taken a sleeping pill. Debbie reckons they’re really strong ones, too. So he’s pretty out of it. He might even have been to sleep, then got up for a pee. You know when you do that thing, where you stagger out of bed, half asleep, not wanting to wake up properly because you’re going back to bed in a minute? He might even have kept his eyes half shut so as not to fully wake up.’

  I stood in the doorway. From here, I could see the head of the four-poster bed, but the post that the leather belt had been tied to was mostly obscured by the lamp on the bedside table. And apart from that, the sword itself had been propped up just off the centre of the bed. ‘He wouldn’t have seen the sword or Pippa messing about on his bed from here,’ I said, ‘even if he’d stopped to look at it.’

  ‘If he was that drunk, and if he was sleepy from the pills, he wouldn’t have been very alert or observant,’ said Nathan. ‘Which also explains how Pippa was able to faff about with the sword and the belt and everything without him hearing her.’

  I reached up and turned on the bathroom light. An automatic extractor fan clicked on with it.

 

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