Dont let him in, p.22
Don't Let Him In, page 22
Connor’s office was opulent by the standards of the town he operated in, with large smoked-glass windows and modern office furniture. His PA was, of course, young, female and beautiful. She wore a short black dress and high heels and Rebecca wondered if that was her personal choice or at Connor’s insistence. The PA brought in a tray with matching china cups filled with coffee and a plate of biscuits. She ignored Rebecca but set this down on Connor’s desk then left.
Connor entered a moment later and went straight to Rebecca to greet her with a handshake. He gripped her right hand firmly with his, then tilted so that his hand was over hers, a dominance trick Rebecca recognized and was as unimpressed by as the strong whiff of aftershave that reached her at the same time. He was wearing another sharp suit and the signet ring was matched by a gold tiepin. He moved to the leather chair behind his desk and sat down. She noticed her seat was lower than his. Another device to make him appear more important than her.
Connor reached into his suit pocket then and, with some ceremony, withdrew a sealed envelope, white this time, which he handed to Rebecca. Her name was typed on the front. He said nothing, just waited for her to open and read it.
Inside was a formal offer to buy her father’s house, with his company’s name on the letterhead and the amount he was prepared to pay for it written in a larger font size and bold lettering to get her attention. The amount alone was enough to do that. As Alan would have put it, Connor had certainly sharpened his pencil.
Rebecca had done some research on asking prices for houses in the town and this offer was definitely on the generous side, reflecting Connor’s urgent need to own all four houses so he could knock them down and build his apartments. He gave her a moment to take it in, then smiled indulgently. ‘You drive a very hard bargain, Rebecca.’ He stretched across the desk to offer his hand again. ‘Now, do we have a deal?’
Instinctively she hesitated. This was a much better offer but she didn’t appreciate being pressured like this. Even without her doubts about Connor, she would have liked some time to think about it. When Rebecca did not immediately clasp his hand again or betray any emotion at all, he said, ‘You should know this is my absolute final offer.’
‘But money isn’t the only factor here.’
‘What else is there?’
‘You.’
‘Me?’ He turned his head to one side to show his bemusement. ‘My credit’s good. The cheque won’t bounce, Rebecca.’
It was always money with Connor Owen. He couldn’t see beyond it. ‘I want to know I’m doing business with someone I can trust,’ she told him.
He clearly didn’t understand. ‘There will be a contract. You can get a lawyer to look at it. It’s no different from you selling your house to anyone else out there.’
‘Except they most probably weren’t a suspect in a murder case.’
She had wanted to drop this on Connor suddenly to see how he would react. Would he deny it or perhaps betray his feelings if the accusation was thrown at him unexpectedly? Connor looked shocked and immediately she could tell the cogs were whirring inside his head. She guessed he would be trying to work out what she had heard, what she knew and who had told her.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I know you were having an affair with Rose McIntyre.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Let’s just say I worked it out.’
‘Gossip and lies,’ he said, ‘from my enemies.’
‘You have enemies?’ She would have rolled her eyes at that suggestion if he hadn’t looked so serious.
‘Jealous people,’ he explained.
‘I’m not jealous of you, but I’ll only trust you if you tell me the truth.’
‘Rose died a very long time ago. I don’t understand what this has to do with you.’
‘Firstly she didn’t just die; she was brutally murdered, and it may have been a long while ago but my father was killed more recently.’
‘Your father was killed?’ Was he genuinely shocked to hear that or overacting? ‘I hadn’t heard that.’
‘Under the circumstances you’ll forgive me for not wanting to sell his house to someone implicated in a murder, however long ago.’ She stopped short of making a direct link between the death of Rose and her father.
He held up his palms. ‘All right, OK, I did have a bit of a fling with Rose, but it wasn’t anything that intense. She was young and good-looking, so I messed around with her for a while, but it’s not as if I was planning to, you know, leave my wife or anything.’
‘Did your wife know about Rose?’
‘God, no. Melissa is not the forgiving kind. She’d have taken me to the cleaners.’ His face darkened. ‘She did that anyway, about five years ago. Divorce cost me a bloody fortune.’
‘You knew it would, even when you were seeing Rose.’
‘Which proves I never would have run off with her.’
‘And that gives you a motive.’
‘What?’ He seemed shocked.
‘If she told your wife about the affair, it would have cost you a great deal of money. You just said as much.’
‘Yeah, no, well, what I meant was … Look, it wasn’t like that with Rose and me. She didn’t want to be the next Mrs Owen.’
‘Then why was she seeing you?’
‘I was good in the sack.’ Rebecca queried this with a look and he said, ‘Her words not mine.’
‘You must have been shocked when she was killed.’
‘I was devastated.’
‘But you kept your feelings to yourself. You and your father even persuaded the police to keep quiet about it.’
‘I was married. What else could I have done?’
‘You sorted out your alibi pretty quickly, though. I mean, you would have been a suspect without it.’
‘I didn’t sort out my alibi. I was in a meeting with my father at the time.’
‘Your father was your alibi?’
‘Not just him. There were others in the meeting too.’
‘His contractors. Men who relied on him for their livelihoods.’
He didn’t ask her how she knew that. ‘You actually think they would lie about a murder for money?’ He sounded very surprised, even though money appeared to be his prime motivating factor in life.
‘Money can persuade people to do a lot of things.’
‘You’re very cynical for one so young, Rebecca. Look, there must have been a dozen men round that table. We were in Newcastle in a meeting room. The police didn’t just accept my word for it. Everyone there had to vouch for me, including the deputy manager at the hotel. I can get you the details. They’ll be filed away somewhere.’ He looked around the room as if he might be able to actually see the documents from his desk.
Rebecca could see he was flustered but she was tempted to believe him. A guilty man would have been calmer, less outraged by her suspicions, dismissive even. She could tell just by looking at Connor that his main worry was losing the deal on the table. This was currently in jeopardy because of her suspicions about him and he was desperate to allay them. It wasn’t a good look but it was enough to calm her fears about him.
‘Maybe you can find those documents for me then.’
He seemed to become suspicious. ‘Is this about the bid? Are you looking for more? I won’t be blackmailed, Rebecca.’
‘No one is blackmailing you, Connor,’ she said calmly.
Again, he took her lack of emotion as a sign she was holding out for more. ‘This is Alan, isn’t it? He thinks you hold all the cards because it’s the last house on the block. Well, don’t listen to him, darling. That property is only worth what I think it’s worth and I could leave you stuck there high and dry.’ He let out an exaggerated sigh, as if this was all so unreasonable of her. ‘Don’t you want to make a fresh start?’
Darling? It appeared the twenty-first century had not yet reached Connor Owen’s office. He was still living in the last one.
‘I’m not sure I do. I’ve been thinking I might stick around.’
‘In Eriston?’ His tone was disbelieving. ‘To do what? There’s nothing here.’ Then he must have realized how that sounded. ‘Not for a bright girl like you anyway.’
‘Maybe I’ll get a job in Newcastle,’ she said.
‘I will renovate those other houses,’ he assured her, ‘even if I can’t pull them down. Do you really want to live next to all that crashing and banging for months with all the dust?’
‘Maybe not,’ she admitted.
‘Well then.’
‘But I have to live somewhere.’
He looked impatient now. ‘What do you want exactly, Rebecca?’
‘This is a good start,’ she conceded as she held up the letter. ‘Now, why don’t we talk some more?’
36
When she left Connor’s office almost an hour later, Rebecca immediately checked her phone. No text from Alan. What was he playing at? Had he still not seen it or was he playing games?
There was another possibility. He had wanted her but wasn’t all that bothered about a repeat performance. He’d finally shagged his old girlfriend and now he was moving on. Maybe he had someone else. By the time she returned home Rebecca had convinced herself this was the most likely explanation and had begun to feel angry at being duped.
It was not until hours after her text that there was a knock on her door and she opened it to find Alan standing there on her doorstep looking apprehensive.
‘What?’ she asked him, her tone sharper than she had intended. So much for playing it cool.
‘I’m sorry. I lost my phone. I thought I’d left it at home but I hadn’t. I finally found it in the door panel of the truck. I didn’t see your text, else I’d have been straight round.’
Rebecca’s relief at discovering her old boyfriend was not really a twat who had instantly discarded her was replaced by a more urgent need. ‘You’re here now,’ she told him, as she took him by the hand, brought him inside and closed the door. This time they made it as far as the living room.
Her doubts about Alan well and truly put aside, Rebecca agreed to meet him for a meal later. Now she could let her mind revert back to obsessing over the Eriston murders. Though she felt as if she and Dominic had made some progress, the truth still remained tantalizingly out of reach, just as it appeared to have done for her father. For days she had pored over every word he had written. He had investigated every suspicious death in the region in exhaustive detail and though he was often able to question the findings of the police he was not able to solve the cases for them. His book shed new light on old murders and had at least convinced her of Simon Kibbs’s innocence but the jailed man had yet to even reply to her letter, so the prospect of speaking to him in prison was a distant one. What the book lacked was a conclusion that unmasked the real killer. If her father had been murdered because of something he had discovered, that revelation was not to be found within its pages.
If you added everything Sean Cole had written to the facts that she and Dominic Green had uncovered between them since his death, there was a hell of a lot of information to go on but still the truth evaded them. She had to find a way to cut through all this somehow.
Hours later, while she was waiting at the hotel bar for Alan, she resorted to a technique her father often favoured. ‘If you can’t understand it, write it down,’ he used to urge her, ‘then sometimes you start to see it for what it really is.’ He always preferred the clarity of the written word.
Rebecca took out the Sheaffer Sagaris ballpoint, opened her notebook and started with a clean page. She began by listing all the factors that had to be present for someone to be the killer, assuming he was responsible for both murders twenty years ago and at least some of the others since then.
The first factor was age. The murderer had to be in his late thirties at least, to have killed the two women back then. If she assumed the killer had to be an adult, she could rule out anyone who was not at least thirty-eight years old now.
The second factor hit her quite suddenly. They had to have known Katherine Prentiss or at least known of her as a reporter. Otherwise how could she have posed any kind of threat to them? It didn’t mean that whoever killed Katherine had to be a friend, colleague or lover, just someone who knew who she was and what she looked like. The newspaper had always put small photos of its reporters in the paper to accompany page-lead bylines, so that part was easy. They had to have worked out that Katherine was reporting on the graveyard murder and had somehow uncovered something significant, information that could destroy them, in fact. The list of people could then be narrowed down further, because it also had to be somebody who could set up a meeting with her in an isolated spot yet still leave her feeling safe. Katherine was no fool, yet she was fooled by someone.
Access. She wrote that word down too. They had to have had access to the other victims. Katherine and Rose were both killed outside in the open air and one of them in broad daylight but other victims were killed indoors, taken from their homes or picked up on their way back from a night out. Always when they felt least vulnerable, but who could have persuaded them to open their doors and admit a killer?
Journalists could.
She put Jason’s name on the list. From the way he behaved when she met him it seemed obvious he had a problem with women. Graham had said Jason was upset when Katherine died, but he could have been faking that.
A moment later she added Graham’s name. He claimed to love Katherine but she only had his word on that and love can sometimes turn to hate.
Both reporters could go to people’s homes and they would be glad to see them because they wrote nice things about their achievements. They would knock on your door and you would let them in.
Don’t Let Him In.
That was the name of the campaign the police had run, yet still the women let their killer in.
Who else would they trust apart from journalists?
The police.
On DI Hall’s own admission Simon Kibbs had apparently claimed he had seen a detective walking away from the graveyard that day, just before he encountered the dying woman, but why would he say that? Hall claimed that Simon didn’t know any detectives. Perhaps he did or at least knew what they looked like. If a detective knocked on your door, you would let him in. Rebecca had when DI Hall called. He or one of his detectives could visit a woman in her home on the pretext of asking a few routine questions, and Rebecca had never had a sufficient explanation for why these criminal investigations had been so poorly handled.
Rebecca wrote the names of Hall and his two detectives on her page and thought for a moment. In the interests of fairness she then added Dominic’s name to the list. It went against her better nature but he was old enough, just, and had gained the trust of everyone in the town … but why, then, was he so tireless in trying to catch the killer? She put his name down anyway.
Dominic Green.
Who else could gain entry where others could not? There was an obvious candidate now she thought of it. Gregg Poole, the locksmith, could open any door in town. She should not rule him out simply because he had been so accommodating on her arrival. Didn’t Dominic say he had been called out when Amanda Mayhew was burgled, months before she disappeared? He must have met her then and if he had fixed her lock, then surely he could open it again. He had made short work of the door barring Rebecca from her father’s house. That was not a comforting thought now, knowing he could get in at any time he chose. Gregg had worked with the police so no one in authority was likely to suspect him of being a murderer. Would he have known Rose and Katherine, though? Possibly.
Gregg Poole.
Then there was Connor Owen, a predator, at least in the business sense. He took ownership of properties he could buy cheaply, then turned a quick sale into a profit. He’d had no scruples about accosting her at her father’s funeral to try to buy the house. Clearly he didn’t like to hear the word no. Maybe he thought rules were for other people. Could a man like that kill? Possibly. Would a woman let him in? If he was offering her a deal, perhaps. He had been having an extra-marital affair with Rose McIntyre that would have cost him an expensive divorce if she had revealed it. His only alibi was from his own father and their contractors. Connor had promised to prove he was in Newcastle on the day Rose was killed but she had yet to see evidence of this.
Connor Owen.
When Rebecca was done, she looked at the list of people who could possibly fit all her criteria, based on age, access, motive and the ability to set up a secluded meeting with Katherine Prentiss without alarming her.
Possibles
Jason Booth – reporter
Graham Walker – reporter
DI Hall – detective
DC Fox – detective
DC Carpenter – detective
Dominic Green – police constable
Gregg Poole – locksmith
Connor Owen – property developer
Eight names. That didn’t narrow it down too much and it could still turn out to be a complete stranger. It was so frustrating. How the hell was she ever going to make a breakthrough?
Rebecca was so absorbed in her thoughts that she didn’t even notice Alan enter the hotel bar, but she was happy to see him.
‘That’s old school,’ he said. ‘No one uses a pen and actual paper any more. They’ve all gone digital.’
‘My dad drummed it into me. He used to say a reporter should never go anywhere without a pen, a pad to write on and a camera –’ she tapped the screen of her phone – ‘because you never know when you might need them.’
‘Whatever you say, Grandma.’
‘News has a habit of happening whether you are ready for it or not.’ She was actually quoting her father now. God, Rebecca, where did that come from? Now that he is gone, you’re turning into him.
‘What are you writing?’ he asked.
‘Oh, nothing.’ And when he gave her a questioning look, she deflected, ‘You’re late, Mr Miller.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I left but I had to go back to the job.’ Then he looked sheepish. ‘Forgot my phone, again.’
