Page 24

TWELVE

GARETH

‘So, say that word again, but a bit slower?’ I asked Fran as I leaned as far back in the car seat as I could, scraping the tips of my fingers across the roof. Across the quiet road, I watched a woman carefully watering the plants in her front garden.

‘Progesterone,’ Fran said to me, sounding out the word. ‘It’s a hormone test that checks if I’m ovulating.’

‘And they just take your blood?’

‘Yep. Easy as pie, so hopefully we’ll have a few more answers when those results come back. How’s your day going?’

‘It’s…fine,’ I said, as I kept stretching until I finally felt the satisfying crunch of my spine clicking into place. ‘I just feel…cream crackered. Vivian has got me doing this admin work rather than my actual job.’

‘Why’s that, my love?’ I could hear the concern in her voice.

‘I don’t know. I think that she thinks I’m burnt out or something. Maybe this trying-for-a-baby thing is having more of an impact than I thought,’ I lied. I didn’t want to ruin her peace of mind any further with the news that she could be a suspect.

‘Yeah, I know, it’s tough,’ Fran said. I heard her pause as a thought must have drifted into her mind. ‘Hey, why don’t we just press stop for a little bit after the tests today? We can take a minute to just let ourselves recuperate. It’s not like we have to race this. We have plenty of time.’

‘That is a…great idea,’ I said, pushing my palm across my face and into my hair. ‘I love you so much, my beautiful girl.’

‘I love you, too, my handsome man. Look, I’d better go, but just come home early tonight, okay?

Let’s go to the cinema or something. We need to do something to take our minds off things.

It’s been kind of non-stop. I’ve got to go, but I love you, okay?

’ Fran made some vague kissing sounds before hanging up.

I smiled to myself as I pushed Fran’s phone back deep into my pocket.

I didn’t ask her about the notes app, but the fact that it would be easy to connect the list there to the current situation with Mr O’Neill had to just be one of those weird coincidences, didn’t it?

Clean the wine stain? Fran was the clumsiest person around; she’d probably just spilt something and corrected it before I’d even realised.

I was always nagging her about not drinking red on the living room sofa.

Reset the camera? That may have just been an autocorrect about fixing Beryl’s; maybe ‘replace’ was what she’d meant to write.

It was probably all just vaguely connected, but it didn’t incriminate Fran in any way. I knew I was overthinking this hugely.

But my mind still found itself thinking: what if?

But, look, Fran hadn’t killed O’Neill. I knew it, and deep down, I just felt it.

This was the woman I’d married, the woman I was trying to have a child with.

And she had no reason to do it. No one just wakes up one day and decides to kill their neighbour.

Besides which, Fran always told me literally everything, from the grossest details about her bodily functions to the most embarrassing and humiliating stories at university.

There was no way she could ever keep anything like that from me.

I sighed, and turned my attention back to the woman carefully tending to her daffodils.

She was middle-aged with long, mousey-blonde hair, glasses and a thick woolly cardigan.

She looked like the type of secondary school English teacher who’d force-feed you Of Mice and Men .

I knew this wasn’t exactly in line with official police regulations, but I thought it couldn’t hurt to at least talk to her.

I had stumbled upon her details in the reams of paper we’d found in O’Neill’s attic – a small scrap of paper that simply said ‘Maeve’, followed by this address.

I had my hunch about who this could be. But more importantly, she might have something that could lead me to the killer and get Fran out of Vivian’s crosshairs before they found their way over to her.

I gently got out of the car and waved as I approached her. The woman shot me a suspicious glance as I drew closer.

‘Hello,’ I said, doing my best to channel friendly Neighbourhood Gareth. ‘Sorry for disturbing you. Are you Maeve Chatterly?’

She didn’t answer right away, just glared at me, narrowing her eyes slightly. ‘Who’s asking?’ she said, not entirely hostile, but certainly not friendly either.

‘My name’s Detective Donoghue. I’m just here to ask a few questions, if that would be all right.’

‘About David?’

I shook my head, assuming David to be her son or partner. The way she asked me made me think that David was an individual who often found himself in trouble with the law; I’d probably arrested him before.

‘No, about your father: Gordon O’Neill.’

She scoffed and then abruptly picked up her watering can and stormed back inside, slamming the door shut behind her. I knew better than to follow her. Safe to say O’Neill’s daughter was firmly a dead end.

As I was driving back from Maeve Chatterly’s, feeling slightly defeated, an alert pinged through on my phone.

It was a message from Cis, asking to meet in the station car park ASAP.

It was a slightly peculiar message to receive from her; we were local police detectives, not rogue MI6 operatives.

Nevertheless, when I finally pulled into the station, I spotted her straight away, leaning against her car near the back of the basement, arms folded, as if she’d been waiting for me for hours.

‘I heard you’re kicked off the case,’ she said, glancing over each of her shoulders, vigilantly scanning for eavesdroppers.

‘Yeah, something like that,’ I murmured, exiting the car and slamming the door shut behind me.

‘This feels like a very poor attempt to be clandestine, Cis. Is this the part where you tell me we need to go off-grid? Throw in our badges and become vigilantes in the police station car park?’ I said in the best Dirty Harry accent I could attempt.

Cis sheepishly looked downwards, focusing on a loose thread in her trousers. She fiddled with it, still not turning her head up to look at me. A lot of people didn’t want to make eye contact with me today.

‘I’m telling you this as a friend, but they’re calling in your wife for official questioning,’ she said, still not meeting my eyes.

‘Not arresting her, just under the guise of a witness statement. Vivian thinks she could be a suspect, so has asked Darren and Steve to go and get some answers from her.’

I felt a deep, cold rage begin to bubble and froth inside me as Cis spoke, but I just did my best to look pensive in response.

‘Right,’ was all I could manage to say, biting back everything else I wanted to yell at her.

I knew Cis was just the messenger, but still, part of me was mad at her for even being the one saying it to me.

I ran my hands nervously through my hair again, tugging on tight to the back of it.

It may have been my imagination, but I could have sworn I felt at least ten hairs leap off my scalp to their deaths. ‘So why? On what grounds, exactly?’

Cis didn’t say anything. Her eyes now seemed transfixed on the ground.

‘Tell me,’ I said, still trying – but not really succeeding – to control the tone of my voice.

‘Forensics have found a lot. We found bone cartilage and the remains of organs in O’Neill’s shower drain. We think he was murdered in his bedroom and then cut up in his shower, and his remains were disposed of somehow.’

‘Shit,’ I groaned, placing my hands on my face. ‘But nothing that directly incriminates Fran?’

‘No. This is the thing, Gareth. Nothing that directly incriminates her at all.’

‘And no motive?’

‘No motive whatsoever. But look, they have something else too that I think you should know about. Off the record, but I think this could help the case.’

‘You mean, that could lead to the arrest of my wife.’

Cis shot me an exasperated and frustrated look, her eyes meeting mine for the first time in this conversation.

‘You know that’s the last thing I want, Gareth, and I believe just as much as you that Fran didn’t do this.

But we need to stop seeing this as Fran being incriminated, and rather as a chance to get her vindicated.

She tells her story, proves her innocence, and all this goes away.

This is that opportunity, okay, darling?

’ she said, grabbing both my arms and giving me a light, reassuring shake.

I forgot how good Cis was in a crisis, the right kind of calm and collected person you needed by your side.

‘What’s the other thing you need to tell me?’

‘Now this you can’t tell anyone, but I need to get ahead of the curve.’

‘Okay, sure, fine, whatever,’ I mumbled as she reached into her bag and yanked out a file, passing it to me. She did another quick spin of her head, scanning the park for any colleagues who may walk into this secretive rendezvous.

It was a screenshot from Beryl’s video doorbell, dated a few weeks before Mr O’Neill’s disappearance but about a week after Fran and I moved in.

It was a Wednesday, midday, so both Fran and I were away at work.

It was a blurry, distorted image of a car pulled up outside our house.

Another taxi. I moved my eyes up the image and saw a man walking towards Mr O’Neill’s house.

The picture was pixelated and grainy, so it was hard to make out any real defining characteristics.

‘Do you recognise this figure?’ Cis asked. ‘You may not, and that’s fine, but I need to know.’

I squinted and looked at the body more closely. I didn’t know him well, but I certainly recognised him.