Tom smiled. ‘You’re not the first person to call me that, and it’s always been a pretty accurate description. Think about this, if you remember anything else, I am the first on your list to call.’
Holly popped her head around Tom’s office door. ‘You get anything on the rifle?’
He waved her in and told her the story he had heard from Graham Andrews.
‘It disappeared from his boot in about one minute? He expects us to believe that?’
‘So he says. The morning did have its moments. He asked if we had access to a Ouija board, because there was only Carla who had known about the rifle. We did give him a receipt for the journal, didn’t we?’
‘We did, but maybe he doesn’t realise the extent to which she would use one. Every single entry has been written without his knowledge. A lot of the entries say where she is while she is writing it. Occasionally she was sitting on that little wall outside the bookies having her lunch. Sometimes, if she took a proper lunch break, she would be in the café around the corner from her shop, and sometimes she would lock herself in the bathroom at home and write. What an awful life, Tom. She was frightened of him, and a couple of times she’s mentioned how scared she is that she would lose her kids if she left him. That’s the only reason she was still with him, he kept her in constant fear, fear of losing the kids the biggest one. And although I’m still only about a quarter of the way through the entries, this thing she has with Ben is growing. I think she loved him. I can’t speak for how he felt, obviously, but if he saw this journal he would know what her feelings were.’
‘We’ve still a long way to go with it then? You’re being thorough, I can tell. You sit at your desk and don’t move. Take time out, don’t overdo it.’
‘There’s almost two years of entries, and I read each one three times. I don’t want to miss even the slightest nuance. If I’d been Carla’s best friend for twenty years, I don’t think I would have known her any better than I’m going to know her by the end of this journal. We can’t give this back to that moron, Tom.’
‘No, we’ll enter it into evidence and get it locked away in the evidence room. Is it getting to you?’
‘A little, and I don’t think getting to me is the right word. I’m starting to know her, her feelings, her hopes for a future she didn’t have, even her kids are coming alive. But arching over everything is this love she’s discovering for Ben, and she’s afraid of admitting it to him because he’s younger than her. Can I have a quarter of an hour in a room with that bloody husband of hers, Tom?’
‘Hard, isn’t it? I’ve really laid it on thick this morning, told him if I have to speak to him about anything he hasn’t already revealed to us, he will be brought in here in one of our cars, and he’ll be formally interviewed. Know what he called me?’
‘Bastard?’
‘Too right he did. I told him a lot of people said that to me, and it was fully deserved.’
Holly had been reading for about an hour, and leaned back in her chair, stretching her arms into the air to release the stress and relieve a little of the pain in her neck and shoulders.
She thought about her own journal which was nothing like the one she was currently reading; hers was mainly lists. She monitored everything in her life, but it was trackers. She tracked her steps, she tracked cups of coffee so she didn’t end up unable to sleep due to a surfeit of caffeine, she tracked every damn thing there was to track, but her to-do list was the real eye-opener because it grew instead of shrinking. Nobody would be able to tell anything of consequence in her life if they read her journal.
Reading the journal with the one word on the front page had been a revelation. Holly hoped it would reveal even more by the time she reached the end.
25
Tom and Holly arrived in work within a minute of each other; they had no idea they weren’t fooling anybody by arriving in separate cars; it was plain to see something was happening between them.
As Tom explained at four that morning, she couldn’t expect to get much sleep when she had been wiggling her bum at him every time she walked out of his office. She hoped she would make it through the day without falling asleep on her desk.
She pulled the lined notepad towards her, and unlocked the drawer holding the journal. She lifted it out gently, these precious words of Carla Andrews’ deserved care.
It seemed to her that the violence meted out by Graham Andrews was increasing. So many times there were the little words Graham hurt me, or Graham made me cry or Graham hit me.
And then suddenly, on the 9 November 2017, Ben and Carla slept together. It was a glorious entry, written in red and decorated with little hearts everywhere. They had gone to a local hotel, she had stayed for the afternoon and then returned home to Graham. It seemed that Ben had stayed in the room all night, and they had managed to text a couple of times during the evening.
Holly almost felt like shouting the news aloud, but sensibly refrained. She wasn’t supposed to get involved, but she felt undeniably pleased that they had finally managed to do what had been building up for a long time.
So why had Ben denied it?
Holly put the journal to one side, sat back in her chair and let her thoughts roam. There was no way he was involved in this murder; he’d been sleeping with Carla six short months before she died, and it was a true affair of the heart, according to Carla’s notes. Ben had clearly thought it advisable to say nothing about it beyond the admission of a brief fling.
They needed to talk to him, and they needed to visit the hotel in question and get some proof of the afternoon rendezvous. Although Holly didn’t think Carla would have invented it, it was always better to have garnered the true facts before confronting somebody, suspect or not.
Holly made a note of the hotel and the date, and continued to read. After sleeping with Ben, the tone of Carla’s writing changed, and Holly really began to worry what Graham would do if he ever found out. Or even what Graham had done once he had found out.
The man in question was sitting in Kenny West’s kitchen drinking Diet Coke. They had been out for three hours, walking the streets, talking to people, asking if they had seen Isaac, looking everywhere.
They received lots of sympathetic shakes of heads, and said if Kenny wanted to organise a mass search they would be happy to help, but nothing more positive than that came from the hours spent trudging around in the sun.
Graham took a long drink, and looked at his friend. He had lost weight and aged ten years over the last few weeks, and now they had funerals to organise.
From what Kenny said next, his thoughts were mirroring Graham’s. ‘How can I organise Lorraine’s funeral while Isaac is missing? I can’t bury the lad’s mum if he’s not here. He’d never forgive me when he does come home.’
‘I don’t know what to advise. Why don’t you go and talk to the funeral people, explain the situation and see what they suggest.’
‘God, Graham, sometimes you’re so logical. Anybody’d think you worked in planning. I don’t really think I’ve much choice, that’s the only thing I can do. At least she’ll be out of that bloody morgue. I’ll make an appointment for tomorrow.’