Summer was conscious enough to know that this was not good news. And the pain was still there, consuming her whole body like fire. A nurse had picked up her hand and was checking her pulse. Summer did not miss the urgent, concerned glance she gave to the doctor.
‘The pulse is very low,’ said the nurse.
Doctor Shaw pointed towards the door, ordering everybody into action. ‘We need to get her to theatre now,’ she said urgently. ‘Has anyone been called, is anybody with you?’ asked the doctor as Summer could feel her bed being pushed along. She was scared, so scared, she could feel the life beginning to drain out of her body,
‘Am I going to die?’ whispered Summer, trying to lift her hand off the bed.
Dr Shaw put her hand over Summer’s. It felt warm and strong. ‘Who should we call?’ she said kindly. Summer could read the older woman’s face. A flash of pity, concern and sadness that the doctor could not disguise.
‘My phone,’ whispered Summer, ‘my phone is in my bag. Molly Sinclair.’ Their disagreements were suddenly irrelevant. She wanted her mother to be there.
Her bed was being wheeled faster now, through some swinging doors, the bright lights of the hospital almost blinding her. Summer’s hands were trembling. If she was going to die, she didn’t want to die alone. It was becoming too difficult, too draining to speak. She lifted her hand off the bed to motion to the doctor, but drifted into unconsciousness once more.
Detective Chief Inspector Michael Wright sat in the semidarkness of his two-bedroom flat in Putney. It was a cramp
ed space, sold to him as ‘a bijou apartment in the best part of London’. He snorted to himself as he took a cold beer from the fridge, thinking about Karin Cavendish’s palatial home. Not that all her money did her a great deal of good, he thought, lifting the beer to his lips. He rubbed his temples and groaned. What a day. He’d spent three hours interviewing Evan Harris, but had still not been able to charge him. His solicitor had been particularly sharp and aggressive; it appeared that the boy’s parents had money and had instructed some expensive hotshot to help their son. Michael knew he should be at the station, but he was so tired he couldn’t even think straight any more, and the cold beer sliding down his dry throat was the only pleasurable experience he’d had in days.
He sat in a frayed armchair, not bothering to turn on the light. The glow from the street cast a dim light that suited his mood. It was moments like this when Michael Wright found he could think most clearly, when his mind was relaxed by alcohol and he sat alone with no distractions, slotting the pieces of his case together, like a jigsaw, until it all made sense and the picture became clear. As he turned the pieces over in his mind, Wright felt a sense of unease; something in the investigation didn’t seem right. All the signs pointed to Harris: the boy’s bedroom had been full of newspaper cuttings about Cavendish, he had a harassment order against him and, mostly importantly of all, when the prints of Karin’s windowsill had matched those in the file, Harris had finally admitted to being in Karin’s garden the night of her death. He was an obsessive, an eighteen-year-old loner who clearly had abandonment issues. Whilst he still lived with his parents, it was obvious Evan saw little of them; from what Michael could sense he was desperate to love and be loved by somebody. But that didn’t make him a murderer.
What troubled Wright the most was the lack of forensic evidence. Michael doubted Karin had struggled. He had worked on countless assault and murder cases where the victim had put up a fight. There was always something: tell-tale blood spots, fibres from the murderer’s clothes, skin or hair under the victim’s fingernails. But in Karin’s case, the initial pathologist’s report suggested that there was nothing. She hadn’t struggled. She had been caught unaware. And that meant she probably knew her attacker.
The previous day’s evening news had gone heavy on the death of Karin Cavendish; since then information from the public had begun to filter through. Two of Karin’s neighbours had both spotted a grey sports car parked outside her townhouse between around eight and half past. Michael wasn’t sure how significant the detail was. A sports car parked in a Kensington street was hardly unusual, but he filed it in his mental database anyway.
Michael stretched out his legs and held the beer bottle to his forehead. What had Evan said about a phone call? The kid had claimed that, when he’d been standing by her window, Karin had received a phone call from someone called Maggie. Of course, he had asked the telephone company for a list of calls to and from Karin, but the process was slow. Suddenly, he jumped up and walked over to a sparse bookshelf. Michael wasn’t a big reader: he didn’t have time. There were a few golf magazines, a DIY manual, some picture books on World War Two and a handful of thrillers. He pulled out the book at the end of the shelf: The Big Book of Baby Names. He had always wondered why this book was on his shelf. When he had left the marital home three years ago, it must have been slipped into his hurriedly packed box of belongings. He smiled at the memory of him poring through the pages with his ex-wife Lynn, with her bloated pregnant belly and their giddy excitement about parenthood: he’d been unable to throw the book away; it was a connection to happier times. Before the drink problem kicked in, before work consumed his life. Before Lynn began to hate him for never being there.
He flipped through the yellowing pages before he came to the section on girls’ names – M. He put on his glasses and began to read the names, saying them out loud: ‘Maggie … Mandy … Molly.’
He grabbed a piece of paper and scribbled them all down.
66
At 8.30 a.m. DCI Michael Wright walked into the Midas Corporation building for his appointment with Adam Gold, suffering only slightly from a hangover. Many people would have thought it was strange that a grieving man should be in work, but years in the force had taught the detective that people responded to grief in different ways; for some the best method of coping was for business to carry on as normal. After being shown into Gold’s office, Wright settled into a chair opposite Adam’s desk and fixed him with a searching look. God, he looks worse than me, thought Michael. There were bags under Adam’s eyes and a permanent crease between his brows.
‘Can you tell me if the name Maggie means anything to you, Mr Gold?’ he began.
Adam simply shrugged and shook his head.
Michael pressed on. ‘What about Mandy, or Molly?’
‘Molly? Yes,’ said Adam, looking up alarmed. ‘Molly Sinclair is in our circle of friends.’
‘Molly Sinclair the model?’ asked Michael. ‘She was a friend of Ms Cavendish’s?’
Adam nodded. ‘Although I have to say that Molly and Karin have never particularly seen eye to eye.’
Wright made a note and looked up curiously. ‘What do you mean by that? Did they have a falling out?’
‘No, no specific reason that I am aware of.’ He paused. ‘I guess it was just social competitiveness.’
‘Competition enough to be a motive for murder?’ asked Wright quickly.
Adam scoffed. ‘Molly Sinclair is many things, but a murderer is not one of them.’
So what is she exactly? thought Michael, thinking back twenty years to police college when a picture of Molly Sinclair had been sellotaped to the inside of his locker. Legs as long as Africa. That famous tumbling tawny mane of hair. She had more sex appeal than those skinny page three girls, was more natural and earthy than any Playboy centrefold. She must be roughly his age now. Mid-forties. Was she married? Wealthy? What if she wasn’t? Perhaps Gold was right, thought Michael, perhaps there was an element of jealousy. It couldn’t be easy to sit back and watch younger women like Karin Cavendish snagging the handsome, rich men she would once have attracted.
‘So, what about Harris?’ asked Adam. ‘I thought you had arrested him. Is there any reason why you’re extending the investigation?’
Michael Wright smiled to himself. How many times did coppers make that mistake? Spending all their time trying to nail the prime suspect when the real killer was roaming free, reading the papers and laughing at the police. Michael Wright wasn’t one of those men. Until he was absolutely sure that Harris was his man he was going to keep an open mind, and that if that meant digging deep, then so be it.