Close to Home (A DI Mitchell Yorkshire Crime Thriller Book 4) Read online

  “He couldn’t say over the phone?”

  Stephen shrugged. “I asked, but he insisted we come round.”

  I pulled a face of confusion, but didn’t mind too much. “We haven’t got any other pressing leads,” I said. “Might as well go. When did he say to come over?”

  Stephen glanced at his watch. “Anytime from ten. We could leave now, if you want to go.”

  I’d been getting up to put my coat on, but paused when Stephen spoke. “If I want to go?” I repeated. “Do you not?”

  “I don’t mind.” Stephen got up and snagged his jacket. “He might just want some company, Mitch. Don’t get your hopes up.”

  Maybe it was because I wasn’t running on a lot of sleep, but that rubbed me up the wrong way, and I frowned at him. “That’s a bit harsh. He was helpful when we met him, wasn’t he?”

  Stephen held up his hands, palms outwards. “I was just saying, mate.”

  “Well, don’t,” I said tartly, walking away towards the stairs. Stephen silently caught up to me, and we headed out of the building and over to the car.

  My shins had been feeling better so far today and weren’t hurting as we walked across the car park. No doubt they’d flare up if I tried to run again, but it was a step in the right direction, and I was grateful to see some concrete progress after all the frustrating resting and icing I’d been doing.

  “And you wouldn’t believe who I saw there,” I said to Stephen as we drove over to Alan’s, talking of Sam’s gym and our date the night before.

  “Who?”

  “Isabel Davies. Teaching some kind of fitness class, of all things.”

  “Really?” Stephen looked as surprised as I’d been. “I guess it’s useful to know where she works, if we need to track her down.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said.

  We pulled up outside Alan’s and climbed out. The door was already being opened by the time we’d passed the sentinel of clustered gnomes on the small lawn and reached the porch.

  “Morning,” Alan said, and nodded to us in greeting, gesturing for us to follow him inside.

  I pushed the door closed behind me, taking another look around the narrow hallway of Alan’s house before following him into the sitting room.

  “I know you’re busy folk,” Alan said before we’d even sat down. “So I’ll get what I wanted to show you, and you can have a gander and see what you think.”

  He headed out of the room again, leaving Stephen and me alone. “I thought he was going to tell us something he’d remembered?” I asked.

  Stephen held up his arms. “That’s what I thought too, that’s what he said, like.”

  I shrugged, settling back into the well-worn sofa to wait for Alan to return. He didn’t take too long and, from the sound of his slippers shuffling over the carpet floors, I sat up straighter when he came back inside.

  “Here y’are,” he said, bringing a small book over towards us. He put it in my hands first, since I was closest, and I obligingly looked down at it. It was filled with spidery handwriting, and I realised that it was his diary, open to last week.

  “My memory’s fading these days,” Alan said as he hovered by the side of the sofa. “After you two left, I thought to have a look at my diary and see if there was anything there for you. And look,” He reached over, holding a small pair of glasses onto his nose, and poked the page near the top, “I did write something on the girl you were asking about.”

  “Isabel Davies,” I said absently as I narrowed my eyes at the writing, trying to untangle the shaky letters, formed in an old fashioned style with the ‘r’ written backwards.

  The entry was brief, but near the end, Alan had said that, as he was writing, there was an argument going on in the street, between the ‘bad-tempered over the road and her man’. What’s more, the entry was dated to the very evening when I’d stumbled on poor Maddie lying at the bottom of the stairs.

  Blinking in surprise, I silently passed the diary over to Stephen, pointing out the relevant passage.

  “This is really useful, Alan, we appreciate it a lot,” I said as I pulled out my phone, intending to photograph the page.

  “Well that’s something,” Alan said, apparently satisfied, and went to take a seat in the armchair across the room.

  Stephen made a soft noise of surprise beside me as he finished reading and I took the book back to snap a picture of the entry, the date included.

  “Can you remember what time you wrote this?” Stephen asked, as I was taking the photo.

  I looked up to catch Alan’s response to Stephen’s question and was disappointed when the older man shook his head. “I couldn’t say, lad, I didn’t so much as remember the thing happening ‘til I read it again. But,” he added, holding up a finger, “I’d guess it was somewhere between nine and ten, since that’s when I usually turn in. I write up the day’s happenings before I sleep, see.”

  I made a quick note of that in my notepad. “That’s great, Alan,” I said. My heart had sped up slightly at this new information, so unexpectedly handed to us. “Can you remember anything about the contents of the argument? Anything they were saying?”

  “Do you think my hearing is that good still?” Alan smiled and shook his head. “No, I heard ‘em shouting, but no words or anything, I’m afraid.”

  “Did you see what he looked like?” Stephen tried. “This man she was arguing with?”

  “You wrote ‘her man’,” I added, pointing to the diary. “Who was that, exactly?”

  Alan hummed, frowning slightly. “Let me have a look at that,” he said, and I stood up to give the diary back to him. While he was re-reading what he’d written, I leaned towards Stephen.

  “Have you still got that picture of Alec?” I asked, and he nodded. “We’ll show it to him again in a minute.”

  Alan looked back up, taking his reading glasses off his nose and carefully folding them up and setting them on the side. “I don’t remember it clearly, if I’m honest. I suppose I meant the dark-haired one who comes round now and then, not that I’ve ever seen him up close, like.”

  “Yeah?” I said hopefully. I nodded to Stephen, and he got out Alec’s picture, bringing it over to where Alan was sitting in the armchair. “We showed you this photo last time,” I told Alan as he put his glasses back on.

  “I recognise it,” Alan said with a nod.

  “Is this the man you meant? That Isabel was arguing with?”

  Alan looked up with an apologetic expression. “I can see you want me to say so, but I can’t say that I know. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the lad up close. I couldn’t swear this was him, but I wouldn’t say it wasn’t, neither. I’m sorry.”

  “Nevermind.” I sighed, and Stephen folded the picture up again. “Thanks for being honest. That’s better than a false positive.”

  Alan gave me an approving nod. “I’ll let you know if anything else comes to mind.”

  That felt a natural conclusion to our visit, and I thanked him for his help, saying our goodbyes, before we saw ourselves out.

  “Think it was worth going now?” I couldn’t help but say to Stephen when we were back in the car.

  “Shut up.” He gave me a none too gentle shove. “You might as well just say ‘told you so’, it’d be shorter.”

  I chuckled. “Told you so.”

  Stephen jabbed at the button that turned the radio on and proceeded to ignore me for the ride back to the station, though the crooked smile at his lips told me that he wasn’t truly irritated. I took the opportunity to think over what Alan had told us and, the more I turned it over in my head, the deeper my frown grew.

  “Pulling a face like that’ll give you a headache,” Stephen said as we pulled up in the station car park.

  “That’s my normal expression,” I replied as I climbed out.

  “Nah, you’re frowning more than normal.” He grinned when I sent him a look. “I know you by now. You’re stressing over something.”

  I sighed, shaking my
head. It was a bit early for lunch, but by mutual agreement, we headed over to the shops.

  “If it was Alec that Alan heard arguing with Isabel,” I said as we walked, “how the hell does that fit into the case?” I didn’t think that Stephen would be miraculously able to answer my queries, but it helped to talk it through outloud.

  “Do you think it was? Alec, I mean?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “There’s a lot of ‘dark-haired’ men. But it does seem like a strange coincidence, there being this argument on that night, at Isabel’s house.”

  “Yeah,” Stephen agreed, “and the timing doesn’t clash with when he was on the CCTV, so it’s possible.”

  We fell quiet, both in our own thoughts, as we stepped into the moderately busy shop and picked out what we wanted.

  “The question is,” I continued once we were away from possible listening ears again, “if it was Alec, why on earth would he go to his ex-wife, his estranged wife, after pushing his girlfriend down the stairs? She reported him for domestic abuse, for God’s sake.”

  “I’ve no clue.” Stephen frowned, tilting his head back to look up at the gloomy, pebble-grey sky.

  “There are two options I can think of: he told her what happened, or he didn’t. Neither makes much sense. Why would he tell her, out of everyone possible? And if he wasn’t there to tell her, why was he there? What were they arguing about?”

  “Maybe it was an accident,” Stephen offered hesitantly. He saw my surprised look and lifted a hand. “I don’t really believe it, but hear me out. Maybe Alec and Maddie had a row, messed up the place badly, and Maddie ran out. She tripped and fell. Alec would know what it looked like, with his history and all. Maybe he went to Isabel for advice.” He grimaced. “Which would only make sense if they were still close, and on good terms.”

  I sighed. “Aye, it’s an option. But it all seems like a stretch, like we’re trying to make it fit, rather than it slotting in naturally.”

  “I wish she’d have spoken to us,” Stephen said.

  I just nodded. We passed into the warmth of the station, and I gave a shiver at the change of temperature. I’d need a warmer coat soon, with the sharp cold of autumn gathering in the air. Though York didn’t get as cold as Lockdale used to, when I lived there, close to the moors and quite a bit higher up.

  Stephen and I chatted over lunch, but I caught the frown at Stephen’s brow during the lapses in conversation and knew that his head was on the difficulties of the case, just as mine was.

  I was polishing off the end of my write-up on our visit to see Alan, uploading the picture of his diary onto our system, when Sam approached. With my mind so distracted by the case, I’d not given Sam as much space in my thoughts as she’d deserved, but my warm feelings returned when she came into sight. She was wearing a sleekly cut, dark-blue pantsuit today, and it made her long legs look like a model’s.

  “Hi,” she said warmly, her gaze meeting mine before flickering away.

  “Hey. How’s your day going?”

  “Not too shabby,” she said. There was a touch of a smile on her face for no particular reason, and I knew I was the same. Then she cleared her throat and became more serious. “I’ve got some results for you guys.” She looked over at Stephen for the first time, and he gave her an encouraging smile.

  “Go on,” I said, guessing from the little wrinkle at her forehead that they weren’t results we’d be happy to hear.

  “The blood sample you brought in,” she said, “didn’t match the suspect’s, Alec Banks’s, DNA either.”

  “What?” I said, sitting back. “You’re sure?”

  She sent me an unimpressed look, lips pressed together. “We’re always thorough, Darren-”

  I winced, putting up a hand. “Sorry, sorry. I’m just… surprised.” I passed a hand over my eyes, trying to understand how this could be fitted into what else we knew. “I don’t suppose it matches anyone else on the system?”

  “Afraid not.” She shook her head. Stephen leaned forwards slightly, making his chair creak, and I looked over at him.

  “Can you tell how old it is?” he asked. “Like, was it from a week ago, when Mad- the victim was hurt, or is it older?”

  “Good question,” Sam said approvingly. “That’s why it took a while longer to get the results. I wanted to try Raman spectroscopy on the sample and-”

  “Woah, ramen what?” I asked.

  “We use a laser to judge the age of the sample, based on the scattering of light,” she explained. “It’s a relatively recent technique, but it confirms that the sample is within fourteen days old, and it hasn’t been there for months.”

  “Brilliant,” I said, impressed. “That’s one question answered.”

  She gave me a small smile. “Glad to be of some help.”

  “Now, we have to find out who it does belong to.”

  “You’ll figure it out,” Sam said, with a level of confidence that I wasn’t sure I deserved.

  “We’ll do our best,” I allowed.

  She reached out to squeeze my shoulder before she gave Stephen a shy wave and headed back towards the lab.

  “You’ve got a smart one there.”

  I laughed quietly. “Don’t I know it. And she’s basically an athlete, to top it off.”

  “Feeling old?” Stephen teased.

  “Oh, hush. There are only five years between us.”

  “Is that all?” Stephen said, clearly winding me up. “Blimey, you’ve not aged well, mate.”

  I swore at him, laughing while I did it. “It’s putting up with you,” I complained. “Gives me grey hairs, it does.”

  Stephen snorted, shaking his head. “I keep you young.”

  “You drive me up the wall,” I tossed back as I got up to fetch myself another cup of coffee.

  “Oi, get me some tea, would you?”

  “After those insults?” I retorted as I walked off to the break room.

  Still, I did bring him back a new cuppa, like he’d wanted, and we settled back into the case.

  “What’re you doing?” Stephen asked a while later.

  “Looking at the CCTV for the thousandth time,” I said, angling the screen towards him. “That blood sample belonged to someone else, it wasn’t from Alec or Maddie. So, was someone else there that night?”

  “But,” Stephen said as we watched the CCTV which revealed nothing revolutionary, “no one else goes into the building, not on the camera.”

  “I know. It could be a resident?” I offered. The video continued to play out but, if it held secrets we’d not yet found, it was hiding them well.

  “Guess so,” he hummed. “They could’ve run back to their flat after it happened, avoiding the camera. They’d be back in their apartment for when we walked around, questioning them.”

  “It’s possible,” I said, but I wasn’t convinced. I’d looked briefly into all the residents when we were conducting our early research, and none of the residents seemed to have any particular link to Alec. “None of them seemed like they were lying, or especially nervous, when we spoke to them, did they?”

  I doubted my own recollection now and wondered whether I’d misjudged one of the residents and not seen that they were tied up in this.

  But Stephen shook his head, too. “They all seemed normal to me,” he said.

  I blinked as a thought occurred to me, taking a sip of my coffee, which was still too hot. “You know who else might be able to get in and out of the building without being seen?”

  “Who?” Stephen frowned in confusion. “A thief?”

  “A caretaker, I was thinking. Maybe there’s a back door, or a handy window on the downstairs floor.”

  Stephen nodded thoughtfully. “Have you ever noticed anything like that in the building?”

  “I’ve never particularly looked, to be honest.”

  Stephen sent me a small grin. “One perk of this case is that you can have a good poke around the crime scene, any time you like.”

  I huf
fed and shook my head. “Not sure that’s a good thing when it’s your home, mate.”

  Stephen’s mirth faded. “Ah, yeah, sorry.”

  I shrugged. “No worries. I’ll have a nose around after work, see if there is anything.”

  The rest of the day preceded slowly. Gaskell called us into his office for an update and to clarify parts of the report, but otherwise, we were left to ourselves. Stephen was keen to head off on time, and I had no reason to ask him to stay. I would’ve loved to run home, but even if I’d been willing to risk my shins, I’d driven in this morning. I couldn’t leave my car here overnight, even if it was unlikely it’d get nicked, parked right by a police station.

  The traffic was bad on the way home, and I let myself into the building feeling more frazzled than when I’d left work, completely opposite to the buzz running gave me.

  I climbed the stairs up to the ground floor landing, remembering finding Maddie lying there as I had every time I came into the building since it had happened. I wanted to head up to my flat, stick my feet up and put the kettle on, but instead, I had a good look around the ground floor.

  The door to Alec’s flat was still busted but hadn’t been opened; if someone had gone inside, they’d pulled the door shut behind them. The doors to the other flats looked normal. I walked deeper inside and found a short corridor off to the left that I’d never noticed before, since it wasn’t visible from the stairs. There was a glowing green sign fixed above the narrow hallway and, further down, I could see another emergency exit sign. The sign marked the presence of a fire door, one I’d not known was there or, if I had ever been shown it by an estate agent when I was looking around the building, I’d not remembered.

  The question was whether the door was alarmed, I thought, as I looked at it. A sign next to the door said that it was, but that wasn’t definitive. Perhaps it had been a caretaker who’d snuck in through the back, and disarmed the alarm, or perhaps the alarm wasn’t active, and an outsider had gotten lucky. Or somehow known that they could escape this way.

  Whichever way I looked at it, we were missing some key information. In tomorrow’s daylight, I’d have another look around and see if I could spot anything. For now, I headed up to my flat on tired feet and turned my mind towards more mundane plans.