Jane Renshaw - Watch Over Me

It was an accident.

I told the police you’d fired the arrow at her while the two of you were arguing, but that was a lie. I told them that because I hated you. I hated you for being horrible to me when we were supposed to be friends. But you didn’t fire the arrow. You tripped and let it go.

And once I’d told the lie, it took on a life of its own and I didn’t have the courage to take it back. Until now.

I hope it’s not too late to put right some of the damage I’ve done. I’ll go to the police a week after I’ve posted this.

So sorry

Gail

Charles looked up at Flora, his grin widening. ‘But this is dynamite! You say it won’t influence the appeal, and in theory it shouldn’t – but I learned a long time ago that there’s no such thing as impartiality. We need this all over the press so whoever hears the appeal can’t help but be aware of it. This is great.’ And he half reached across the table towards her hand. ‘Write back to Gail, tell her how much this means to you – urge her to go to the press. And if she doesn’t, we will.’

Flora nodded. ‘I still can’t believe it.’

‘You never thought of contacting Gail yourself?’

‘No. I suppose I just accepted her version of what happened because, as she says, I must have blanked it out… Well, I remember tying Gail to the tree, and Tricia yelling at me to shoot her, and I remember the arrow… I remember it going into her eye…’ She swallowed. ‘But nothing in between. Although –’ She shrugged. ‘I suppose I always felt it was wrong, that I wasn’t the person everyone said I was, this – this psychotic girl called Rachel Clark. This monster. I couldn’t think of myself like that.’

‘Of course you couldn’t.’

‘By rights,’ said Brian, ‘Gail Boyle should be charged with perverting the course of justice.’

‘Oh – I wouldn’t want her to get into trouble.’ Actually Flora didn’t care if they locked Gail up and threw away the key – as Gail herself had said, she’d had forty years to put this right and hadn’t – but it was almost as if Flora had been handed back her virtue. As if she had to live up to everyone’s new idea of her.

‘She was a traumatised child,’ said Charles. ‘They won’t charge her with anything.’ He grinned at her. ‘So, don’t you want to hear the best part?’ He was like a favourite uncle about to present the birthday girl with the best gift of all.

She nodded.

‘In the light of the evidence Brian’s unearthed, the police are reopening the investigation.’

Flora could only stare at Brian.

Such an unlikely saviour.

‘What evidence?’

Brian sighed, and opened the laptop on the table. ‘Finally got the CCTV footage off Eden Security. The outfit who installed your system. And I’ve been through the lot, minute by minute, for the day of the murder.’

Brian turned the laptop round so Flora could see the screen. ‘This is footage from one of the cameras covering the east side of the house. 9:42 a.m. on the morning of that day.’

The shock of seeing the house, their house, their home, on the screen was physical. The footage was of a section of the driveway and the side of the house facing the garage, with the window of what had been the old pantry and was now a storeroom to the left, and the downstairs loo, and then the dining room which they never used. On the dining room windowsill she could see the dusty dried flower arrangement she and Beckie had made years ago, and through the frosted glass of the loo window, the vague shape of the ‘Victorian’ pendant light fitting.

At 9:42 Alec was probably inside, in his study, little knowing…

‘Watch the dining room window… Now!’

The dried-flower arrangement suddenly jumped to the left.

Brian reached over to the keyboard and rewound the footage. ‘Now watch the time at the top left… See? Jumps from 9:52 to 10:22. Same with the camera next to it. This system, which lets you switch the cameras on and off remotely, doesn’t show a blank screen when the camera is off – the footage is continuous.’

‘Oh my God. They switched off the cameras and got in at the dining room window?’

Charles nodded. ‘And in doing so, accidentally moved the flower arrangement.’

Brian sighed. ‘According to Eden Security, someone logged into the system at 9:52 a.m. and switched these two cameras off. Talk about negligence. Some PC Plod’s had the footage from eight cameras to go through, right, and he’s looking for an intruder, he’s not looking at the time, he’s fast-forwarding and he goes for a bite of Mars Bar and he’s missed it. He’s missed the outages from 9:52 to 10:22 on these two cameras.’

‘But how could the Johnsons have switched the cameras off?’

‘That is the problem. Your system’s state of the art, right? Sure it’s communicating over the net, but the data’s encrypted like something out the bloody Pentagon.’

Charles shrugged. ‘They must have hacked into it somehow. The lad Connor works at PC World. He’ll be IT savvy.’

Brian looked mournful. ‘A wee laddie from PC World up against programmers this good?’

‘How else could they have done it?’

‘Haven’t got a bloody clue.’

‘But however they switched off the cameras,’ Flora said, ‘we kept all the windows locked. And the police checked them all, and they were all still locked. Apart from the one I broke, obviously.’

Brian nodded. ‘I’m thinking one of them must have got into the house at some point previously to unlock the dining room window. They could have remotely switched off the camera covering one of the doors, snuck in, unlocked the window, snuck back out again, and switched the camera back on. I’ve been checking through the footage for another outage and haven’t found anything as yet, but I’ll keep looking.’

‘But how would they have got in? I was always careful to keep the front door locked, and the patio doors at the back.’

‘What if you were in the garden? Very few people lock the door behind them if they’re in the garden.’

‘Oh. No, of course. If I was in the garden, I’d leave the patio doors unlocked.’ She frowned. ‘Okay, if they managed to sneak into the house at some point while I was in the garden, that would explain how they unlocked the window, but on the day that… after they’d… after they’d killed Neil, and got back out through the window… How did they lock it after them?’

‘No idea.’ Brian snapped shut the laptop. ‘It’s sometimes possible with the locks on these old windows to manipulate the mechanism through the gap between the sashes… Magician’s trick kind of thing.’

‘But however they did it, the important thing is that there’s evidence of tampering with the cameras to create an opportunity of entry,’ said Charles. ‘And there’s more. Jasmine Young has made a statement to the police to the effect that she saw a man in a boiler suit going in at your gate at approximately ten to ten that morning. Which dovetails nicely with the camera evidence.’

Flora blinked. ‘ Jasmine? ’

‘Yes.’ Brian sighed. ‘I had a word with the neighbours, badgered them a bit maybe, went back to the Youngs a few times because I thought there was something there, you know?’ He rolled his eyes as if to say The people I have to deal with . ‘Last time, the daughter’s saying “Mum, we should –” but the mum, Ailish, shuts her down. So I stake the place out and a couple of days later, Jasmine’s coming out the door with her earbuds in, oblivious, and I follow her into town. Make like it’s a coincidence when I bump into her in French Connection, buying a present for the wife. And I tell her straight: “Jasmine, if you know something that could get an innocent woman out of prison and back with her child, you have to go to the police.”’