A noise from downstairs woke me at 2.55 a.m. – a suppressed but distinct cough. I remember jerking awake, the digital clock on my bedside table imprinting the neon-green time on my bleary, drugged retinas. Foxes often came into my garden, crashing around in the shrubbery and having screaming sex sessions, both of which activities sounded scarily human. But after that cough there was no crashing or shrieking, just an ominous silence … and then, my heart swooping into my throat … a creak on the stairs.

I must have imagined it. Surely I had! I swallowed hard, and my heart changed its mind and decided to try and hammer its way out of my chest instead. I switched on the bedside lamp and leaped out from under the duvet, darted across the room and carefully turned the key in the lock. And that was when I saw the door handle move, slowly and silently.

38

Present Day
Gemma

‘Excuse me. I have to make a call – I’ll go outside.’

Gemma left Meredith sitting in the kitchen, looking as stunned as if someone had just told her this shocking news, instead of the other way around.

She let herself out of the back door and walked a little way from the house, her heart pounding. Shit, she thought. This changed everything. She felt simultaneously furious with and sympathetic towards Meredith, for not saying anything sooner.

But then, if you shagged your mate’s husband, you really wouldn’t want to admit it, would you?

‘Boss, sorry to call you out of hours but there’s been a big development,’ she said when Lincoln picked up the phone. She could hear loud music in the background, something grungy that she would never have expected Lincoln to enjoy; the Smashing Pumpkins or Nirvana or something from the nineties. He’d turned it down to a background hum before she could identify it. It could even have been Cohen.

‘I’m at Meredith Vincent’s cottage. She says Ralph Allerton died in an abandoned ice house in the grounds of Minstead House and that someone dumped his body in the pond later.’

She heard a splutter. Lincoln had presumably taken a swig of whatever he was drinking at the wrong moment.

‘What?’

‘Meredith Vincent just confessed to finding his body and not saying anything.’

‘Why the hell not?’

‘Because they got pissed at the office staff lunch the day his wife reported him missing, and had a sneaky shag after work. Meredith said he was fine when she left him in the ice house, but she realised she’d dropped her keys, and when she went back for them, he was lying on the floor, dead. She did mouth-to-mouth but he was definitely gone.’

Gemma heard Lincoln whistle with incredulity. ‘Good grief. This is astonishing. Do you believe her?’

‘I think so, boss. Obviously we need to bring her in, but she was clearly very fond of the man.’