She decides to call Ottilie.
‘Hey, you,’ she says, on answering. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Are you still in London or have you flown off somewhere?’
She chuckles. ‘You make my life sound a lot more glamorous than it is. I only ever go to Germany to see my dad. Anyway, I’m in London. Is everything okay?’
She sighs. ‘Not really. There’s so much to tell you. So much I’ve found out. God … can we meet?’
‘I can’t today. What about tomorrow?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes, let’s do lunch.’
‘Do you mind if you come to the flat?’ she says. ‘I’m sitting my friends’ cat this weekend, they’re away for the bank holiday, and she’s quite nervous.’
‘No worries. I’ll bring some nibbles.’
‘Fab. Tell me all then. Looking forward to it.’ She blows a kiss down the line and then is gone.
Usually she’d feel pacified after talking to Ottilie, but still the doubt nags at her. She has to tell DI Murray what she knows. Even if she’s wrong. She can’t leave it another second and have a clear conscience. She stops to dial her number, fingers trembling, then waits. DI Murray answers almost straight away: ‘Yep.’
‘It’s Emilia Ward. I –’
‘Oh, Emilia. I’m glad you called.’ She sounds like she’s by the sea. ‘I was just about to ring you. I’ve had a phone call from one of my colleagues at the Met to say a witness has come forward about Louise Greene’s death.’
Her heart speeds up. ‘Right.’ She stops under the shade of a tree and closes her eyes, leaning against the trunk. Is this it? Did someone see Trevor?
‘Someone was seen fleeing on a bicycle around the time of Louise’s death.’
‘A man?’
‘They think so, yes. They had on a hoodie and a dark tracksuit. And my colleagues have found an abandoned bike in the field behind Louise’s flat. A bright green one. They’re searching the serial number now.’
A bright green bike. Elliot’s.
‘I think the bike belongs to my husband,’ she begins. And then tells DI Murray everything.
53
Emilia explains it all to me, everything she’s worked out over the past few days. I sit on the wall outside another bedsit, watching children paddling in the sea in their shorts or swimsuits, making the most of this glorious bank-holiday weekend, unaware of the horrors just a few streets away. My shoulders have started to burn but still I sit, rooted, while Emilia talks. She talks fast, breathlessly, but there is another inflection to her voice, emotion. Her words catch when she speaks about her father-in-law, and I can only imagine the betrayal she must be feeling.
‘Louise targeted me on purpose,’ she says. ‘She found out who I was married to, who my father-in-law is … but what I don’t understand is, if she believed Trevor was the man she’s been looking for all these years, then why didn’t she go to the police? Did she …’ She clears her throat. ‘Do you know if she ever made a complaint about Trevor? Is that why he left the force?’
‘I’ll look into it, but I suspect she didn’t have any evidence, so couldn’t really go to the police. Why did she tell you the story when she did?’ I ask, as it occurs to me that Louise could have done so at any time. Why wait until she had known Emilia for nearly two years?
‘Because she’d found out that he’d struck again after a sixteen-year break, and wanted the truth about him out there, I presume. In the public domain. And it coincided with my writer’s block. Maybe she thought if I wrote about it, Trevor would think she’d told me and that he’d do something …’
‘That would have put you in danger, though.’
She sighs and her voice wobbles. ‘I think she was so hell bent on revenge, she didn’t care whom she hurt. I mean … she did all those things to me. Made my life a misery for months and then sat there at the restaurant, while I told her … Elliot says he’s not Ash. And I want to believe him but …’
I frown and push my sunglasses onto my head. ‘You can’t jump to conclusions, Emilia. Leave the police work to me. But thank you for letting me know, and I’ll look into your father-in-law. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can,’ and I end the call. I light a cigarette and sit there, inhaling deeply. When I get back to the station I’ll look into Trevor Rathbone but, in the meantime, I need to get back to work.
I hop off the wall, feeling a hundred years old, and head back to the bedsit where another praying-mantis victim is waiting.
54
Emilia is still thinking about her conversation with DI Murray when she pulls onto the driveway. She feels as if a weight has been taken off her shoulders. She’s passed the baton to someone else now, and they can run with it. She knows Elliot will be furious with her, but she had no choice.
She turns off the ignition and sits for a while, her heart heavy, summoning all her strength to go into the house and face Trevor, remembering DI Murray’s warning about jumping to conclusions.
She swallows, acid burning the back of her throat. You can do this, she tells herself, getting out of the car and heading into the house. She can hear voices coming from the kitchen. The door is open: a man is standing talking to Elliot and Trevor by the island. She vaguely recognizes him, and when he introduces himself as DS Shawn Watkins, she remembers where from. She’d met him the night she found Louise’s body.
‘I’m here to talk to your husband, Mrs Rathbone, about a bicycle,’ he says.
Emilia turns to Elliot but he doesn’t say anything. He continues to stare straight ahead at the detective. Her attention is back on DS Watkins now as he repeats what DI Murray had told her on the phone just half an hour ago.
‘We checked the bike’s serial number and it’s registered to your husband, Mrs Rathbone.’ She can tell by the look on Trevor and Elliot’s faces that they’ve just been told this before she walked in and interrupted. DS Watkins is holding something. He steps forwards and passes it to her husband. It’s a photograph of a bike in a lurid green. It looks like Elliot’s.
‘Is this your bicycle, Mr Rathbone?’ asks Watkins.
Elliot clears his throat. ‘Well, yes. I mean, it looks like it. It’s the same colour. But …’ his eyes flicker towards Emilia for the first time since she arrived ‘… it was stolen. About a week ago, wasn’t it, Em? We have evidence. It’s on the app.’
Emilia gets out her phone, her fingers feel too big as she fumbles for the right app. She spools back to the night the bike was stolen, remembering how they’d thought the person who took it had been Louise. It was the night before she died. ‘Here,’ she says, handing it over. ‘You can clearly see someone making off with it.’
DS Watkins glances down at the footage. ‘It’s very grainy,’ he says. He looks up at Elliot. ‘Why didn’t you report it?’
‘I told him not to,’ says Emilia, taking back the phone from the detective. ‘Because I recognized the brand of hat and thought maybe Louise had taken it.’
‘DC Greene? And why would she do that?’