Sophie Hannah - The Other Half Lives aka The Dead Lie Down

Simon paced the room, chewing his thumbnail as he often did when he was concentrating. ‘Seed was the opposite-not changeable at all. He was very controlled. At first I thought he had to be asylum material, but… he didn’t seem it, even though he was insisting on the impossible and wouldn’t listen to anything I said. Twenty-eight times, he told me something I knew couldn’t be true; tried to use logic, even, to make me believe it.’

‘How do you mean?’ asked Charlie.

‘I asked him to describe the woman he killed, which he did in great detail. Point for point, his description matched the woman I saw and spoke to this morning.’

‘You’ve met Mary Trelease?’ The idea made Charlie feel funny; she wasn’t sure why.

‘I have and Gibbs has. We’ve both seen her passport, her driving licence. Today she showed me the deeds of her house with her name on, all the paperwork from her solicitor from when she moved, her bank statements…’

‘Why so much?’ said Charlie. ‘Passport and driving licence should have been enough.’

‘I think she was worried one of us was going to turn up every day and ask her to prove all over again that she’s who she says she is. She gathered together a stack of stuff to show me how absurd the whole thing is. She acted like… like she was afraid I was trying to steal her identity or something.’

‘Afraid, literally?’

Simon considered it. ‘Yeah, underneath her chippiness, I reckon there was some fear there.’

Two frightened women. Charlie didn’t like the feel of this at all. ‘So how did you get dragged in? You said Seed saw Gibbs first?’ She waited to be told that Seed had at some point requested Simon’s involvement, asked for him by name. She wasn’t quite ready to believe this wasn’t all a cruel hoax aimed at her. If Ruth Bussey and Aidan Seed knew she and Simon were engaged…

‘Kombothekra said Gibbs was needed elsewhere,’ Simon told her, ‘Reading between the lines, he didn’t trust him with it.’

‘He doesn’t think Gibbs is capable of checking if someone’s alive or dead?’

‘Mary Trelease wouldn’t let him in,’ said Simon. ‘He didn’t see the house. Most importantly, he didn’t see the master bedroom, the one facing the street. According to what Seed told Gibbs yesterday, that’s where he left Mary Trelease’s dead body, in the bed in that room…’

‘Hold on. When did he say he’d killed her?’

‘He wouldn’t say. Nor why, though he did say how: he strangled her.’

‘Ruth Bussey said Seed had told her he’d killed Mary Trelease years ago.’

Simon blinked a few times. ‘Sure?’

‘Me or her? I’m sure she said it, and she seemed convinced that was what he’d told her. I think she quoted his exact words as, “Years ago, I killed a woman called Mary Trelease.” ’

‘Makes no sense,’ Simon muttered, turning to face the window. Which was why Sam Kombothekra hadn’t wanted Gibbs on it, thought Charlie. Most of what CID were called upon to investigate had some logic behind it. People hurt or killed each other over money, or drugs, usually some combination of the two. They stole from shops, disturbed the peace or terrorised the neighbourhood because they saw it as the only way out of a hopeless life-it was grim, but you could see the reasoning.

Charlie was about to ask Simon what he’d meant about Seed trying to use logic to convince him Mary Trelease was dead, but Simon was already saying, ‘He killed her years ago, left her body in the front bedroom at 15 Megson Crescent, and expects it to be there, undisturbed, for us to find several years later when he decides to confess? No.’ Charlie watched him junk the hypothesis. ‘Trelease didn’t live in that house years ago. She bought it in 2006, from a family called Mills.’

‘That’s two years ago,’ she pointed out, knowing what the response would be. Would she ever be able to hear ‘2006’ without experiencing a small earthquake in the pit of her stomach?

‘The phrase “years ago” implies longer,’ said Simon, on cue. ‘You know it does.’

She couldn’t argue. Ruth Bussey had said Seed had confessed to her last December, at which point 2006 would only have been ‘last year’. ‘What else did he tell you, apart from that Trelease’s body would be on the bed in the master bedroom and that he strangled her?’

‘In the bed, not on. He said she was naked, she’d been naked when he killed her. And her body was in the middle of the bed, not on one side or the other-he made a big point of that. Apart from saying several times that he didn’t rape her, that was all he told me.’

‘Ruth Bussey mentioned none of this.’ Charlie pulled a cigarette out of a packet on the window-sill. She had nothing to light it with. ‘Was he in the bedroom with her when she took her clothes off? Had they gone to bed together?’

‘He wouldn’t say.’

‘Did he have his clothes on when he strangled her?’

‘Wouldn’t say.’

Charlie doubted she’d be able to come up with a question Simon wouldn’t have put to Seed. Everything Gibbs would have neglected to ask, Simon would have asked several times over.

‘He answered some questions willingly and in great detail-others, he wouldn’t open his mouth.’

‘His girlfriend was exactly the same,’ said Charlie.

‘I’ve never come across anything like it before.’ Simon shook his head. ‘You know what it’s like normally: people talk or they don’t. Sometimes there’s nothing doing at first, then you twirl them and they spill the lot. Other times they spout crap until you point out to them how they’ve landed themselves in it, at which point they clam up. Aidan Seed: none of the above. It was like he had this… this checklist in his head. Two lists: the questions he was allowed to answer and the ones he wasn’t. When I asked him the questions on the first list, he went out of his way to be informative. Like I said, I got every detail of Mary’s appearance, from the tiny caramel-coloured birthmark beneath her lower lip-he actually said “caramel-coloured”-to her small earlobes, her wiry, curly hair, black with the odd strand of silver.’

‘Is she attractive?’ Charlie asked. ‘Don’t look at me like that. I’m not asking if you fancied her. I just wondered.’

‘She’s not pretty,’ said Simon after some thought.

‘But striking? Sexy?’

He shrugged. ‘Dunno.’

Aidan Seed’s not the only one with a list in his mind of questions it’s not safe to answer, thought Charlie. ‘Did he say if he killed her in the bed or moved her body there later?’ she asked, a question she knew would be on Simon’s acceptable list. Is there anything I wouldn’t do to please him? Would I take early retirement and roam the country with a set of golf clubs, wearing dreadful sweaters?

‘She was in the bed when he killed her, he said. But… listen to us.’ Simon took a swig of his beer. ‘ “Did he move the body?” If Seed and his girlfriend are mad, we’ve nearly caught them up. What body? Mary Trelease is alive.’

‘You said “the questions he’s allowed to answer”,’ said Charlie. ‘Who’s doing the allowing? Ruth Bussey? She also seemed eager to talk, but only in response to certain prompts. And then I’d ask her something else-in most cases, the obvious next question-and she’d button it. Not a word, not even, “Sorry, I can’t answer that.” ’

‘Could there be a third person involved, someone who’s telling them what they can and can’t say?’

‘Mary Trelease?’ Charlie suggested.

Simon waved the idea away. ‘Why would she tell them both to go to the police and pretend Seed believes he killed her? Why would they go along with it?’ He didn’t wait for an answer, knowing she didn’t have one. ‘Gibbs asked Trelease if she knew an Aidan Seed. She said no, but he thought she was lying. I asked her again today, told her he was a picture-framer, how old he was. She said no. Seemed genuine enough, but then she’d had a day to polish up her act. Seed, though-he wasn’t acting. He feels guilty about something, that’s for sure. Whatever’s in his head, I wouldn’t want it in mine. He kept saying, “I’m a murderer.” Said he’d felt like he was dying himself when his hands were round her neck, the nail of his left thumb pressing into his right thumb…’