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Chapter 102

‘Onemore time, please,’ Poe said.

Tai-young Lee groaned but left the room again.

‘You OK, Tilly?’

‘I’m fine, Poe.’

They were in the drawing room. It was similar in size to Elcid Doyle’s study. Like the study, it had south-facing windows and bookcases lining the walls. It didn’t have a private bathroom or a secret strong room, but it was a close enough fit for what they needed. They had spent ten minutes arranging the furniture so it was as close as possible to the office layout. Anything surplus was humped outside. They used a dining table as the study desk and moved a coffee table and armchair to where the fireplace would have been. A sideboard was too heavy to move so Poe told Bradshaw and Lee to pretend it wasn’t there.

It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t bad.

Three times Lee had entered the dining room and carried out the actions detailed in Doyle’s statement, and three times Poe had seen nothing that explained why she’d had firearms discharge residue on her hands.

He moved to a different corner of the room for the fourth attempt. Hoped the fresh angle might offer new insight. Bradshaw checked her tablet and slumped in the makeshift office chair in the same position Elcid Doyle was found. She even shut her eyes and let her tongue loll out.

‘We’re ready for you, ma’am,’ Poe called out. ‘Don’t forget to hang your coat up before you enter the room this time.’

‘Piss off, Poe,’ he heard her mutter.

‘What was that?’

‘I said, I’m hanging up my coat now.’

After a few moments Lee opened the drawing-room door. She called out, ‘Dad?’ then approached Bradshaw.

‘Faster,’ Poe said. ‘She thought he was asleep when she said “Dad?” but now she thinks he’s had a stroke.’

Lee jogged across to Bradshaw then knelt down. She paused – Poe had put that in there as he imagined Estelle would have needed a few seconds to make sense of what she was seeing – before reaching out with her left hand to check for a pulse. Lee then stood, reached into her back pocket for her phone and pretended to dial 999.

‘From this point she said she didn’t touch anything,’ Poe said. ‘Said she waited beside her father until the police arrived. Have I got that right, Tilly?’

‘You have, Poe.’

‘Did you video this reconstruction?’

‘I’ve recorded them all.’

‘Let’s have a look then.’

They crowded round the table and watched the most recent video. Despite the new angle, Poe couldn’t see anything that might explain the FDR on Doyle’s hands.

‘Let’s go through the arrest photographs again,’ he said.

Bradshaw brought them up on her tablet. She let Poe swipe through them. By now he had been through them hundreds of times: Doyle in black jeans and an even blacker blouse; Doyle in a paper evidence suit; a close-up photograph of her face; another of her hands, bagged and un-bagged.

‘Hang on, her jeans are skin-tight,’ Lee said.

‘Other than when she’s in a post-mortem, she dresses like she’s in Siouxsie and the Banshees,’ Poe said. ‘If it’s not jeans, it’s pencil skirts and fishnets. I’m sure she does it just to make me squirm.’

‘I’m not commenting on her sense of style, Poe. Jeans as tight as the ones she was wearing are uncomfortable at the best of times. Try putting something bulky in the back pocket. It’d be like having a tumour on your arse.’

‘That’s why I prefer cargo trousers, Detective Chief InspectorTai-young Lee,’ Bradshaw said. ‘They have baggy pockets so I can comfortably carry cables and chargers and my phone. Poe says I look scruffy, but he’s one to talk. One time he came to work and he was using string as a belt.’

‘It was baler twine. And my belt had blood on it.’

Lee shook her head. ‘You two,’ she said. ‘And my point is this: what if her phone wasn’t in her back pocket?’