Brutal, page 24
That was exactly what Frank would have done if Jo hadn’t contacted him as soon as she’d landed in Australia. And she wasn’t young, vulnerable, and alone, like that poor girl in the next room had been; she was a married woman with a sensible head on her shoulders and a husband to protect her.
Thinking about the word ‘alone’, his thoughts turned, as they so often did, to Evan, but he shut the images out before they had a chance to take hold. Evan was fine, he told himself firmly. OK, maybe not fine, but at least he was safe, wherever he was, because Karel needed him to keep Frank on track, so he wasn’t going to let anything happen to him. So, as long as Frank was still necessary to the plan, Evan was safe – and that was what he had to cling to in order to keep himself from doing something stupid.
Like trying to escape now there was only one man around to stop him.
One man who had been ordered to shoot not only him, but also Irena and Viktorya if anything happened.
Shaking his head, Frank dismissed the idea as quickly as it had entered his mind. He was in his bedroom with an unlocked door for the first time in weeks, yet still he was powerless, and he began to understand why Irena had given up.
43
‘It’s been declined.’
The girl pulled the bank card out of the machine and shoved it across the counter, while simultaneously pulling back the bag containing a litre bottle of vodka and four tins of dog food.
‘What do you mean, declined?’ Marie asked, her cheeks flaming when she heard one of her neighbours, who was behind her in the queue, whisper something to the woman standing next to her. ‘Try it again.’
The girl rolled her eyes and shoved the card back into the machine. Sure that she must have hit a wrong digit the first time, Marie re-entered her pin. But the girl shook her head and pulled the card out again.
‘Declined,’ she repeated, her voice unnecessarily loud, Marie thought, as she added, ‘Insufficient funds.’
‘But that’s wrong,’ Marie argued. ‘I’ve got money in my account.’
‘You’ll have to take it up with your bank,’ the girl said unsympathetically.
‘It’s nearly ten o’clock,’ Marie reminded her. ‘They’re shut.’
‘So, wait till morning,’ the girl snapped. ‘Now, unless you’ve got cash, or another card you want to try, you need to move and let me serve someone else, ’cos we’re shutting in a minute.’
Too embarrassed to continue arguing, Marie snatched her card off the counter and barged her way out of the shop. How could her account be empty? It didn’t make sense. There had been seven thousand in there the last time she’d checked.
But when had she last checked?
Oh, God . . .
Realizing that it had been in the week before Evan had left, and that she’d been too wrapped up in misery to think about checking it since, Marie rushed home and logged into their online banking account. Her fears were confirmed when she saw that Evan had transferred six thousand pounds into another account the day after leaving, and the one thousand he’d left had already been swallowed up by the rent and various direct debits. The rest, she had spent on food and booze – more booze than food – leaving her with precisely seven pounds and eighty pence.
‘No . . .’ She stared at the screen in disbelief. ‘He wouldn’t do this to me . . .’
But he had, and she let out a roar of anger, causing the dog to jump off the sofa and run for cover.
‘You bastard!’ she screamed, slamming her fist down on the tabletop. ‘You absolute fucking bastard!’
The fury made her want a drink, but all of the bottles lined on the hearth were empty, so she lit a cigarette and took a deep drag. Soothed by the nicotine, she closed the banking screen and brought up Facebook. She’d given up on searching for Evan after the confrontation with that bitch at the car showroom and his friends at work, but she wanted – needed – her share of the money they had saved, so she would have to find another way to track him down.
It took several attempts before she managed to crack the password on Evan’s Facebook account. He claimed not to bother with the site, but he’d already been proved to be a liar, so she wanted to check his relationship status, to see if he’d changed it from Married to In A Relationship.
He hadn’t, which dashed her hopes of finding the name of the woman he’d run off with; and he hadn’t updated his status, or commented on anything in over a year. Next, she opened up his messages, to see if he’d been chatting to some bitch behind her back; maybe arranging to meet up with her.
Nothing.
He’d never bothered setting up a Twitter or Instagram account, but he and Marie shared this laptop, so she closed his Facebook page and went into the history to see if he’d logged in to any online dating accounts.
Again, nothing.
At a loss as to what to do next, Marie sighed when the dog slunk back into the doorway and whined. Remembering that he hadn’t been fed, she slammed the laptop lid down and heaved herself out of the chair. Thanks to Evan, there was no dog food, but there was a chunk of stale Spam in the fridge, so she would give him that.
She was on her way into the kitchen when the doorbell rang. Telling the dog to wait a minute, she went to answer it. A man and a woman were standing on the step, and the woman said, ‘Mrs Peters?’ when she peered out at them.
Wary, because they looked official, and she thought they might be from the council, that maybe someone had reported the dog for barking again, Marie folded her arms.
‘Yes.’
The woman flashed a police badge at her.
‘I’m DS Strachan, and this is my colleague, DC Ogden. Is Evan Peters your husband?’
Marie frowned.
‘Yes. But if you’re hoping to find him here, you’re out of luck, ’cos he walked out a month ago, and I haven’t seen him since.’
‘Can we come inside?’ Strachan asked, her face giving nothing away.
The dog bounded into the hall and started barking. Grabbing his collar to stop him from going for the pair, Marie said, ‘Just give me a sec to put him in the kitchen,’ and closed the door.
Something in the woman’s tone had unsettled her, so she locked the dog away before letting the officers in.
‘Sorry about the mess,’ she apologized, rushing into the living room ahead of them and scooping up the empty bottles on the hearth, and the chocolate wrappers littering the floor and sofa.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Strachan said, sitting on an armchair as Ogden took a seat at the end of the sofa.
Conscious of the stench of stale cigarette smoke and unwashed dog, Marie perched at the other end of the sofa and stuffed the rubbish out of sight down the side.
‘So what’s going on?’ she asked, looking at them in turn.
‘A car was found last week in Derbyshire,’ Strachan said, resting her elbows on her knees. ‘It was burned out, but we’ve managed to salvage the chassis number, and it came back as a Volvo estate registered to this address. Could you confirm that your husband still owns it?’
‘As far as I know?’ Marie shrugged. ‘But I haven’t seen him since he walked out, so he could have sold it, for all I know.’ Then, frowning, she said, ‘Here, I hope you don’t think I set it on fire to get revenge, or something, ’cos I don’t even know where he is.’
‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but there was a body inside the vehicle,’ Strachan said. ‘And we’re trying to establish if it’s your husband.’
‘What?’ Sure that she’d misheard, Marie drew her head back. ‘Are you serious?’
Strachan nodded, and Ogden said, ‘I’ll make a brew,’ when Marie’s face drained of colour.
He left the room, and the dog started barking again, followed by the sound of the back door being opened, and claws skittering across the floor tiles before it closed again.
‘I know this is a shock,’ Strachan said. ‘So is there someone you’d like to call before we go on? Someone who can come over and sit with you?’
Marie stared blankly down at the floor. Frank had been ignoring her calls since their argument, and her own parents were holidaying at their caravan in Wales. She didn’t want any of her nosy neighbours coming in and seeing the state of the place; and none of her so-called friends had been round to see how she was getting on since she’d told them about Evan leaving, so she wasn’t about to ring them.
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘But I’ll be OK.’
‘Are you up to answering some questions?’
Marie nodded and clasped her hands together between her knees.
‘You say your husband’s been gone for a month?’ Strachan started. ‘Can I ask why you didn’t report him missing?’
‘Because I didn’t think he was,’ Marie replied truthfully. ‘I assumed he was at his dad’s, like last time.’
‘Last time?’
‘Yeah, we had a misunderstanding a few months back, and I kicked him out,’ Marie said, blushing at the memory of the scene she’d caused in the pub. ‘He stayed at his dad’s for a week, but they had a falling-out and he came home. We cleared the air, and everything was fine. Or, at least, I thought it was.’
‘So he didn’t seem unhappy or depressed this time?’
‘No.’ Marie shook her head. ‘He went on a bit of a downer at Christmas, but that was understandable, ’cos it was the first since his mum died, and him and his dad still weren’t talking. Frank – his dad – had moved some woman in, you see, and Evan and his sister weren’t happy about it. That’s why they’d fallen out, but I could tell Evan was missing him, so I made him talk to him on Christmas Day.’
She paused when the door opened and Ogden came in carrying a cup of tea. Thanking him when he handed it to her, she took a sip to lubricate her dry mouth. She wasn’t sure why she was offloading on the woman like this, but now she’d started, she couldn’t seem to stop.
‘It didn’t go too well on the phone, so Evan drove over there the next evening. He was there for a few hours and said it was all sorted when he got home, and I was pleased when he told me he was planning to go there after work the next day to help his dad with his cars. He said it might turn into a late one, so I wasn’t concerned when he didn’t come home that night. But he didn’t come back the next night, either, and neither of them was answering their phones.’
‘Didn’t you go over to try and talk to him?’
‘Not straight away, no. I wasn’t very well that week, and Frank’s never really liked me, so I didn’t want to mug myself off by going over there, like I was desperate, or something. But when it got to a week, I couldn’t take it any more – the not knowing, and that. So I drove over there to have it out with him. Only Frank said he hadn’t even been there, and then his girlfriend made a dig about Evan being a liar, so we had a row and I came home. And then Evan’s sister rang and told me he’d kissed Frank’s girlfriend, and that’s when I realized he’d only come back because Frank had kicked him out and he had nowhere else to go.’
The hurt and anger about the betrayal had returned, and her hands were shaking so badly, she spilled scalding tea on her thigh.
‘Shit!’ she hissed, slamming the cup down on the table and rubbing her leg. ‘Sorry . . . it just makes me so mad to think about all the lies. I thought we were back on track, I really did, but he was using me.’
‘He didn’t seem unhappy?’ Strachan asked.
‘No!’ Marie snapped. ‘I already told you, I thought he was fine. Why do you keep asking that?’
‘I’m trying to establish his frame of mind the last time you saw him,’ said Strachan. Then, reaching into the bag she’d placed at her feet, she took out a sheet of paper and handed it over. ‘Do you recognize this jacket?’
Marie stared at the black-and-white photograph. It was a still taken from CCTV footage, and the central image was a rear view of a man wearing a jacket with a distinctive logo emblazoned across the back of it.
‘It’s Evan’s work jacket,’ she said. ‘He was wearing it when he left that morning. But what does this mean?’
‘Given the condition of the victim’s body, a visual identification isn’t possible,’ Strachan explained. ‘Your husband’s the registered owner of the car, but he hadn’t reported it as stolen, and he himself hadn’t been reported as missing, so we decided to do a few checks before approaching you. This is not the kind of news we want to deliver if we’ve got the wrong person, as you can probably imagine.’
‘What kind of checks?’ Marie asked.
‘We tracked the vehicle’s movements prior to it arriving at the quarry,’ said Strachan. ‘The quarry’s located in a remote area which doesn’t have CCTV coverage, but we were able to pick up images of the car passing through a village several miles away. We hadn’t been able to see the driver’s face, so we backtracked from the point it went off the radar. This image was picked up at a motorway service station an hour before the car arrived in the village.’
Marie stared at the photo again, and frowned.
‘What is it?’ Strachan asked.
‘He looks like he’s lost weight,’ Marie said, her tone sad. ‘Evan really likes his food, so I’m guessing his new woman hasn’t been feeding him very well. Either that, or he’s been working it off – physically,’ she added bitterly, breathing in deeply at the thought of Evan having rampant sex with a faceless sex goddess.
The officers exchanged a surreptitious glance, then Strachan said, ‘If you look at the date and time in the corner, you’ll see that this image was captured at two fifteen a.m. on the twenty-eighth of December, Mrs Peters. And you said your husband left here on the morning of the twenty-seventh – is that right?’
‘Yeah.’ Marie nodded. ‘I remember because it was his first day back at work after the Christmas holidays.’
‘That image was taken the same night, going into the next morning,’ Strachan reiterated. ‘And there’s no way he could have noticeably lost weight in that time.’
‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’ Marie was confused.
‘OK, forget about the jacket for a minute, and take another look at the picture,’ said Strachan. ‘Would you say that’s your husband – from the shape of him, the length of his legs, the way he’s standing, etcetera?’
Marie stared at the picture again. Strachan had told her to forget about the jacket, but her eye was continually drawn to the logo, because that was the only real detail she could see. The figure did look slimmer than she remembered Evan to be; the shoulders not as broad, the legs maybe not as long. But that could be a result of the angle the picture had been taken from, she supposed. She’d once overheard two teenage girls discussing the best angles to hold a camera for the perfect selfie, and they had reckoned that an overhead shot made them look much slimmer and shorter than a straight-on shot. That, added to the fact that she hadn’t actually laid eyes on Evan in a while, made it possible that she’d exaggerated his size in her mind’s eye.
‘I honestly don’t know?’ She sighed. ‘Maybe. Yeah, probably. Oh, God, I don’t know.’
‘Take your time,’ said Strachan.
Marie looked again, then shook her head.
‘No, it’s not him. He’s bigger than that. The jacket’s definitely his, though. See that bit . . .’ She pointed out an untidy section where the material joined the waistband. ‘I sewed that, so you’ll easily know it’s his if you’ve found it, ’cos I made a bit of a mess of it.’
‘I’m afraid we don’t have the jacket, because all material items were destroyed by the fire,’ Strachan said, taking the picture back and putting it away. ‘I just wanted to see if you recognized it, because we didn’t get a visual of this person’s face, but he was tracked getting back into the car after purchasing a pack of cigarettes, which he paid for using your husband’s debit card.’
‘Doesn’t that prove that it was Evan, then?’ Marie asked.
‘Not exactly,’ said Strachan. ‘He used the contactless function rather than entering a pin, so it’s possible the card could have been stolen along with the jacket and the car. As I explained earlier, this isn’t the kind of news we’d want to deliver to the wrong family, so we do everything in our power to ascertain the victim’s identity before we approach their loved ones.’
Marie nodded her understanding. Then, chewing on her lip for a second, dreading the answer, she said, ‘Was – was anyone with him at the service station? A woman, I mean?’
‘As far as we can tell, he was alone,’ said Strachan. Then: ‘Can I ask if you have children? We managed to recover a sample of DNA from the scene, but your husband isn’t on our database, so we’ll need to check it against a close relative in order to see if it’s a match.’
‘We haven’t got kids,’ Marie said quietly. ‘We tried, but . . .’ She tailed off and shrugged. ‘That’s why I got the dog.’
‘It’s OK.’ Strachan gave her an understanding smile. ‘Now we know his father’s alive, we’ll see if he can provide us with a sample instead. Providing he’s your husband’s biological father?’
‘Oh, Frank’s definitely his dad,’ Marie said with certainty. ‘Evan’s the image of him, and Maureen wasn’t the kind to cheat.’ Unlike that bitch Frank’s with now, she thought but didn’t add.
‘One last thing,’ Strachan said. ‘Did your husband own or have access to any guns that you know of?’
‘No.’ Marie shook her head. ‘Frank used to own a shotgun when he was still farming, but I think he got rid of it when he had his heart attack. Why do you ask?’
