Page 15 of Twisted Lies

Kim needed to establish a timeline.

‘Two days ago,’ she answered.

Although everyone expressed their grief differently, Kim was surprised that DianePhipps hadn’t yet cried. It was as though her own emotional reaction had been shelved in favour of something else. How she was going to tell those boys might be at the forefront of her mind, Kim reasoned.

‘It was Saturday morning. He left to get a paper like he did every Saturday. After an hour, I called him but his phone went to voicemail. I tried again later, but the same thing happened.’

‘So what did you do?’ Kim asked as her gut began to react.

‘I called my sister, and she came to stay with me.’

‘Did you call his friends, colleagues, places he liked to go?’

Diane shook her head. ‘He’s a loner. He doesn’t really have friends. He works in construction, for J. Norris and Sons, but he doesn’t really mix with any of the others.’

‘Did you report him missing?’ Kim asked, trying to accept the story at face value.

‘It’s not the first time,’ Leanne interjected as Diane shook her head. ‘Now and again he goes on a bender, disappears for a few days, comes back like nothing ever happened.’

‘He had a drinking problem?’

‘He wasn’t an alcoholic,’ Diane defended quickly.

‘Just needed to blow off steam a bit probably, which is why Diane didn’t call the police. She didn’t want to waste anyone’s time. She expected him to walk back through the door at any minute.’

Kim appreciated Leanne’s response, but she would have preferred his wife to be answering the questions. She again turned her attention to the woman most affected by the news. ‘Mrs Phipps, can you think of anyone who would want to hurt your husband?’

‘Definitely not. No. He was a kind man. He didn’t mix with many people,’ she said, shifting in her seat.

‘Could he have upset anyone on one of his benders?’

A drunken brawl would hardly have been a motive for what he’d suffered, but Kim desperately needed some kind of foothold on the type of person Keith Phipps had been.

‘No, I don’t think so. He wasn’t that kind of drunk. He wasn’t aggressive or confrontational. He was gentle and… Oh my God, how am I going to tell our boys?’

Again, Leanne stood. ‘I think that’s enough for now. She needs to get her head around all this before you ask her any more questions. I’d like to assist with identifying the body, and I think it needs to be done immediately so that Diane can accept that he’s gone.’

Kim really felt like telling the woman to stay in her lane but wondered if she might find out more if Leanne was away from her sister, maybe details of the couple’s marriage.

‘Okay, I’ll make a call on the way to the hospital. Do you want to come—?’

‘I’ll take my own car,’ she said, taking her keys from the windowsill. She turned to Diane. ‘I’ll pick the boys up from school on the way back.’

‘Mrs Phipps, we are so sorry for your loss,’ Bryant offered quietly as Leanne held open the front door for them to pass.

At the last second, Leanne turned back into the room and said something that Kim didn’t catch, followed by something that sounded like ‘and make sure you lock the door’.

Ten

‘What the hell was that in there?’ Bryant asked as soon as they were in the car.

‘You felt it too?’

‘Is that a serious question? I’m steady not dead. Weirdest dynamic I’ve ever seen between two sisters. Not one tear shed by either of them, and one of them can’t wait to bloody see him. Very weird.’

‘I’m wondering if she’ll be any less strange alone.’ Clearly she wasn’t close to her brother-in-law, but Kim was now just as interested in the dynamics of the Phipps’ marriage.

‘Is that why you agreed to the early identification?’ he asked. ‘I thought you were going to tell her to jog on with her demands.’