Peter James - Dead Man’s Footsteps

She never talked about her private life and he often wondered what she went home to. A guy, a woman, a group of flatmates? One of his colleagues had once said that Bella looked after her elderly mum, but Bella never mentioned this.

‘I can’t remember where it is you live,’ he said as they climbed out of the car. A gust of wind lifted the tails of his camel coat.

‘Hangleton,’ she said.

‘Right.’

That sort of fitted. Hangleton was a pleasant, quiet residential sprawl on the east of the city, bisected by a motorway and a golf course. Lots of small houses and bungalows and neatly tended gardens. It was exactly the kind of quiet, safe area a woman might live in with her elderly mother. He suddenly had an image in his mind of a sad-looking Bella at home, caring for a sick, frail lady, munching away on her Maltesers as a substitute for any other kind of a life. Like a forlorn, caged pet.

He rang the bell and they were ushered in by a Filipino maid, who led them through into a high-ceilinged orangery, with a view down across terraced lawns containing an infinity swimming pool and a tennis court.

They were ushered into armchairs arranged around a marble coffee table and offered drinks. Then Stephen and Sue Klinger came in.

Stephen was a tall, lean, rather cold-looking man in his late forties, with greying wavy hair brushed harshly back, and his cheeks were a patchwork of purple drinker’s veins. He was wearing a pinstriped suit and expensive-looking loafers, and glanced at his watch the moment after he shook Branson’s hand.

‘I’m afraid I have to be away in ten minutes,’ he said, his voice hard and bland, very different to the Stephen Klinger they had interviewed yesterday in his office after what had clearly been a very heavy lunch.

‘No problem, sir, we just have a few more quick questions for you and some for Mrs Klinger. We appreciate your taking the time to see us again.’

He gave Sue Klinger an appreciative second glance and she smirked slyly, as if noticing. She was a serious looker, he thought. Early forties, in great shape, dressed in a brown brushed-cotton designer tracksuit and trainers that looked like they were fresh out of their box.

And she had real come-to-bed eyes. Which he caught twice in fast succession and then did his best to ignore, opening his notebook, deciding to focus on Stephen Klinger’s eyes, which might be easier to read.

The maid came in with coffee and water.

‘Can I just recap, sir? How long had you and Ronnie Wilson been friends?’ Branson asked.

Klinger’s eyes moved to his left, a fraction. ‘We go – went – back to our late teens,’ he said. ‘Twenty-seven – no – thirty years. Roughly.’

As a double check, Glenn said, ‘And you told us yesterday that his relationship with his first wife, Joanna, had been difficult, but it was better with Lorraine?’

Again the eyes moved to the left a fraction before he spoke.

This was a neurolinguistic experiment Glenn had learned about from Roy Grace, and he sometimes found it of great assistance in assessing whether someone was telling the truth in an interview. Human brains were divided into left and right hemispheres. One was for long-term memory storage, while in the other the creative processes took place. When asked a question, people’s eyes almost invariably moved to the hemisphere they were using. In some people the memory storage was in the right hemisphere and in some the left; the creative hemisphere would be the opposite one.

So now he knew that when Stephen Klinger’s eyes moved to the left in response to a question they were moving to his memory side, which meant he was likely to be telling the truth. So if his eyes moved right, then that meant he was likely to be lying. It wasn’t a failsafe technique but it could be a good indicator.

Leaning forward, as the maid put down his cup and saucer, and a china jug of milk, Branson said, ‘In your opinion, sir, do you think Ronnie Wilson would have been capable of murdering either of his wives?’

The look of shock on Klinger’s face was genuine. As was the double-take on his wife’s. His eyes stayed dead centre as he replied. ‘Not Ronnie, no. He had a temper on him, but…’ He shrugged, shaking his head.

‘He had a kind heart,’ Sue added. ‘He liked to look after his friends. I don’t think – no, definitely, I don’t think so.’

‘We have some information we’d like to share with you, in confidence at this stage, although we will be making a statement to the press in the next few days.’

Branson glanced at Bella, as if offering her the opportunity to speak, but she signalled back she was happy for him to continue.

He poured some milk into his coffee, then said, ‘It doesn’t seem that Joanna Wilson ever made it to America. Her body was found in a storm drain in the centre of Brighton on Friday. She’d been there for a long time and she appears to have been strangled.’

Now both of them looked genuinely shocked.

‘Shit!’ Sue said.

‘Is that the one that was in the Argus on Monday?’ Stephen wondered.

Bella nodded at him.

‘Are you saying that – that – Ronnie had something to do with it?’ he asked.

‘If I may continue for a moment, sir,’ Branson pressed, ‘we learned yesterday that Lorraine Wilson’s body has also been found.’

Sue Klinger blanched. ‘In the Channel?’

‘No, in a river outside Melbourne, in Australia.’

Both Klingers sat looking at him in stunned silence. Somewhere in the house a phone started ringing. No one made any move to answer it. Glenn drank some of his coffee.

‘ Melbourne? ’ Sue Klinger said eventually. ‘ Australia? ’

‘How on earth did she get there from the English Channel?’ Stephen asked, looking totally astonished.

The ringing stopped. ‘The post-mortem has shown that she has only been dead for two years, sir – so it doesn’t look as if she did commit suicide by jumping into the Channel back in 2002.’

‘So she did it by jumping into a river in Australia instead?’ Stephen said.

‘I don’t think so,’ Glenn replied. ‘Her neck was broken and she was in the boot of a car.’ He held back the rest of the information he had.

Both the Klingers sat very still, absorbing the impact of what they had just heard. Finally Stephen broke the silence. ‘By whom? Why? Are you saying the same person killed Joanna and Lorraine?’

‘We can’t tell at this stage. But there are some similarities in the way they both appear to have been killed.’

‘Who – who would have killed Joanna – and then Lorraine?’ Sue asked. She began twisting a gold bracelet on her wrist round and round nervously.

‘Were either of you aware that Joanna Wilson inherited a house from her mother, which she sold shortly before her death?’ Glenn asked. ‘It netted an amount of approximately one hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds. We are now trying to track down what happened to that money.’

‘Probably went to pay off Ronnie’s debts the moment it came into her account,’ Stephen said. ‘I liked the old bugger but he wasn’t too clever with money, if you know what I mean. Always wheeling and dealing, but never getting it quite right. He wanted to be a much bigger player than he had the ability for.’

‘That’s a bit harsh, Steve,’ Sue commented, turning to face her husband. ‘Ronnie had good ideas.’ She looked at the two detectives and tapped her head. ‘He had an inventive mind. He once invented a gizmo for extracting air from wine bottles that had been opened. He was in the process of patenting it when that – what’s it called? – Vacu Vin came out and cleaned up in the market.’

‘Yeah, but the Vacu Vin was plastic,’ Stephen said. ‘Ronnie made his out of brass, the stupid sod. Anybody could have told him that metals react with wine.’