Close to Home (A DI Mitchell Yorkshire Crime Thriller Book 4) Page 9

  “Oh!”

  An exclamation of surprise made me look up, and my face went hot when I saw who it was.

  “Sam,” I said as I awkwardly stood upright, wincing slightly as I put my foot down.

  She frowned slightly, looking me up and down. “You’re in pain? Are you injured?”

  I laughed quietly, rubbing the back of my neck in embarrassment. “Not really.” When she didn’t say anything and just looked at me, I clarified, “Shin splints.”

  “That’s sore,” she said gently before she gestured behind her into the lab. “Come in and sit down, won’t you?”

  “I’m alright, really,” I tried to deflect, but she just wouldn’t have it.

  “I was on my way to see you, actually. I’ve got some news, and you might as well hear it in the lab, right?”

  I couldn’t exactly refuse, and I didn’t especially want to, and I followed her inside. She perched herself on a tall stool, and I sat down opposite her, releasing a breath as I took the weight of my leg.

  “You really ought to be resting those,” Sam said. “Have you been icing them?”

  I smiled, equal parts amused and mildly irritated to have her so concerned for my health, mother henning me just like Stephen liked to do.

  “Yes,” I told her. “And I am resting, I’ve been taking the lift, and I’ve not been running.”

  The last point wasn’t quite true, since I had carried on running since my shins started being sore, but I’d stopped for now, once I’d realised that bulldozing through the discomfort was only making it significantly worse. Not that it should have particularly surprised me.

  “It was running that caused it?” she asked. Sam’s obvious curiosity made me raise my eyebrows briefly, but I answered her questions.

  “I’m meant to be training for the York Marathon,” I told her. “It’s not so far away-”

  “So you hate not being able to train,” Sam finished my sentence for me, nodding sympathetically. “Injuries are never easy, even when you don’t have a goal in mind.”

  I tilted my head at her. I knew I should direct our talk back towards the results she had for me, but I found myself curious about her, too.

  “You’re a runner too?”

  She gave me a small smile and shook her head, making her ponytail bob back and forth. “Afraid not. I run sometimes, but my main addiction is boxing.”

  “Yeah?” I said, both surprised and impressed. “How long have you been doing that?”

  We got into an in-depth discussion about both our sports and I was laughing at a joke she’d made when her colleague returned from his break, clearing his throat pointedly.

  I realised I’d drifted forwards, so that I was leaning closer to Sam and that she’d done the same, so we both pulled backwards like caught school children when the other lab scientist came in.

  “So,” Sam said, clearing her throat. She couldn’t quite keep the lingering smile off her face, and neither could I. “Those results.”

  “Oh aye, the results,” I said with a nod. We’d been sitting here for twenty minutes or more, and I dreaded to think what Stephen would say when I went back. Sam’s expression became more serious as she moved into professionalism.

  “The fluid you found in the kitchen was indeed blood,” she said, “but it wasn’t the victim’s.”

  I blinked. “Do you know whose it was instead?”

  She shook her head. “Not yet. We haven’t had a chance to run further tests yet, but I wanted to let you know.”

  “It could belong to Banks, the suspect,” I wondered aloud. “Perhaps Maddie fought back?”

  Sam gave a nod. “We have his DNA on the system, and he’ll be the next one we check it against.”

  “Okay,” I sighed, “thanks for the heads up, I appreciate it.”

  She gave me an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry it’s not what you were hoping for.”

  I smiled back. “That’s not your fault. Just means there are still some holes in our understanding of what happened.” I stood up from the stool and patted the table as I said, “We’ll find out the truth.”

  Sam gave me a look that looked surprisingly like fondness. “I’m sure you will,” she said, blushing slightly. “You’ve got an impressive record, DCI Mitchell.”

  “Oh, aye?” I said, taken aback. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “Modesty doesn’t suit you,” she teased me, before she noticed how her colleague was pointedly ignoring us and she grimaced, stepping back. “See you around, Darren.”

  “I’ll look forward to it,” I told her genuinely before I left.

  Stephen’s ribbing was exactly as bad as I’d imagined when I returned to my desk.

  “You’re not worried about it all turning out, you know, awkwardly?” Stephen asked after we’d had lunch.

  “What do you mean?” I asked absently, focusing on the report I was writing up for Gaskell.

  I was trying to present the information we’d gathered in the clearest way I could, so that the superintendent couldn’t be in any doubt. The problem was that, while I was writing it, I couldn’t help but think about Sam saying that the blood in the kitchen wasn’t Maddie’s. Whose was it, then? It would make fair sense if it was Alec’s, but I couldn’t help but ask: what if the blood wasn’t Alec’s either?

  We had CCTV of Alec running away, alongside the evidence of a row in Alec’s apartment, his history of domestic abuse, and him being in a relationship with the victim. It was the saddest fact of policing that the people victims trusted the most were often the ones to hurt them. Still, as compelling as those facts were, I found my mind turning the problem over, looking for loose stitches in the fabric Stephen and I had constructed.

  “Well,” Stephen said, pulling me from my thoughts, “what if you guys fall out and it all gets a bit messy? You can’t really avoid her here at work.”

  I turned to stare at him blankly, my mind still on the case and the parts of it that seemed to have inconvenient holes in. “What were we talking about?”

  “Darren!” Stephen groaned, pressing a hand to his face. “Christssake, you need a break, mate. We were talking about your love life.”

  “Not much to say there, is there?” I sent him an unimpressed look. “And we weren’t talking about it. You were just nosy while I was trying to work.”

  “Okay, okay,” Stephen chuckled. “Get up and have a walkabout, at least. Get a coffee or something. You’re gonna start growing moss if you sit in that chair any longer.”

  I gave a token protest, but honestly, I could do with stretching my legs and a fresh cup of coffee since I’d forgotten about my last one and it had gone cold, taking on the appearance of discarded squid’s ink.

  It occurred to me, as I was making a fresh cup, that if the case was lacking information, I could do worse than ask Keira in the tech department to look into it. That woman had a frankly awe-inspiring ability to dig into someone’s digital past and find the dirtiest parts of it. She was absorbed enough in her work that it took me clearing my throat from less than a yard away before she looked up, blinking up at me.

  “Mitchell,” she said after a moment, her brows furrowing into a slight frown.

  I gave a small laugh. “Don’t look too happy to see me.”

  She sent me an unimpressed look. “I’m working on three hours’ sleep here. What do you want? I’m busy.”

  “Ah, sorry,” I said reflexively. “I was hoping you could look into someone for me, but I can ask someone else.” I glanced around the room, made warm by all the computers packed into the space.

  Keira sighed. “Give me a name. I’ll squeeze it in.” She pointed at me in warning. “If it’s difficult, I’ll pass it off to someone else.”

  “Alec Banks,” I said, before giving a brief outline of what we did know about him. “And thanks, Adams.”

  She waved me away with a flick of her fingers, and I left her alone before she changed her mind, though I didn’t get the impression that she was genuinely irritated,
just tired and overworked.

  I found myself thinking about Peggy saying that she’d heard someone come up the stairs behind her and couldn’t quite convince myself that the woman had remembered wrong. Which meant that there were still pieces missing in our understanding, or that someone was lying, because none of the residents had said that they’d been moving around the building at that time.

  I was pinning my hopes on Keira being able to look at the case with new eyes and spot some snag that we’d previously missed. Most likely, any new information would only clear up the points of uncertainty in our current theory and confirm it as the right one. But there was always that small voice in my head that asked the ‘what if’ question.

  Eight

  Friday came as both a relief and a surprise, following a week that felt like it’d been both a year long and over all in a rush.

  “You’ve got a look like you’re thinking of running away to become a goat farmer in Iceland,” Stephen said when I came over to my desk. I knew there were dark half-moons under my eyes and that my hair was a day past its best.

  I huffed at Stephen and downed several mouthfuls of scalding coffee before I managed to drag up something to say.

  “It’s the damn running,” I grumbled. “My tolerance for all of this,” I gestured vaguely, including both the station and the entirety of my workaholic life, “is seriously reduced when I can’t run.”

  “Why can’t you run?” Stephen said, sounding alarmed, no doubt because he knew me well enough to know that running was my own personal drug.

  I glanced at him, remembering belatedly that I hadn’t told him about the shin splints. I’d had ideas of keeping it quiet, letting it heal on its own, and Stephen never had to know that I’d been injured. Too late now.

  “Shin pain,” I muttered into my coffee cup.

  Stephen swore in a tone of sympathy and reached out to squeeze my shoulder. “You taking time off now to rest it up will help you get back to it faster in the long run.”

  “I don’t care about the long run,” I complained gruffly. “It’s the here and now that’s bothering me.”

  “Your future self will salute your suffering,” Stephen chuckled quietly.

  I said something rude about my future self, and Stephen shook his head at me. The smile quirking around his mouth told me that he thought I was off my rocker, but in an amusing way.

  His attention drifted away from me, and I turned around to see where he was looking. Sam was just heading into the break room, and I turned back to Stephen to find him looking at me with raised eyebrows and a broad grin.

  “Go get fresh drinks for us, ey, Mitchell?” he prompted, pushing his cup towards me. “But no more coffee for you, or you’re gonna dissolve into black goo.”

  “Alright, thanks, mother.” I rolled my eyes at him but headed over to the break room, anyway.

  Sam was there, waiting for the kettle to boil, and she looked up with a smile when I came in.

  “How’re the shins?” she asked as I was moving around, making cups of tea for Stephen and me.

  “Oh, not so bad,” I said. “I’m resting them.”

  She nodded in approval, the firmness of her expression giving me the impression that she would’ve had some pointed words for me if I’d said I was already back to running. I found the fact that she cared charming.

  We chatted easily back and forth as we made our drinks, lingering after they were finished like neither of us wanted to break the bubble between us, formed in the relative quiet of the break room.

  “Got any weekend plans?” she asked me, taking a sip of her tea. I found it endearing how she crooked her littlest finger, like a child pretending to be the queen.

  I hesitated, wondering whether I was too forward. “Not especially,” I hedged. “Well, I’d be available for a coffee date, if that was something you, ah, you might want?”

  Recently, I’d been lucky enough to encounter women who had no problem making the first move, leaving me out of practice in putting myself out there for possible rejection. I was almost certain that I’d been reading the signs of Sam’s interest right and that she’d just been too shy to take the first step, leaving it up to me to invite her out. But, in the pause before she replied, I hoped that I wasn’t rushing her and would make things uncomfortable between us.

  “That’d be great,” she said, and I released a relieved breath.

  “Yeah?” I said, my face splitting into a smile.

  She smiled back, reaching into her pocket to fish out her phone. “It’ll help if you have my phone number,” she said, gently teasing.

  I copied her details into my phone, and we parted ways. Stephen picked up on my buzzing feelings immediately, even though I was trying to stop myself from smiling like a loon.

  “What happened?” Stephen demanded, sitting bolt upright in his chair. “Did you kiss?”

  I snorted. “Slow down, tiger.”

  Stephen sat back with a huff. “Annie and I got engaged within a month of meeting,” he told me. “When you know, you know.”

  “She gave me her number and agreed to a date,” I said with a shake of my head. “I think we’re doing just fine.”

  Stephen grinned. “Yeah, not too shabby, mate. You’ve got another four weeks before you have to announce marriage.”

  I groaned, giving him a hearty shove. He pushed back, almost making me fall off my chair.

  Someone cleared their throat from off to the side and, like guilty school kids, Stephen and I froze and looked up. Keira stood there, looking down at us with an expression of disapproval but not a huge amount of surprise.

  “If you boys are done?” she said smartly.

  Stephen cleared his throat and pulled his chair back in close to his desk, and I did the same.

  “Adams,” I said, somewhat sheepishly. “What’ve you got for us?”

  She put a handful of print outs down in front of me. “What you asked for.”

  “Aye?” I said hopefully, scanning the papers she’s given me. “A marriage certificate?” I asked, confused. I couldn’t help but think of the silly conversation Stephen and I had just been having. But this had Alec Banks’ name on it, plus the name of his ex-wife.

  “That’s his wife,” Keira confirmed. “Despite the domestic abuse charge, they never divorced. Given more time, I could probably look into their phone records to see if they’re still in contact, but I don’t have the time for that.”

  “Still married,” I repeated, still taken aback by that. “So he was… cheating on his wife with Maddie?”

  Keira shrugs. “Depends on how you look at it,” she said, making it clear that she wasn’t interested in that. “The second point,” she said, gesturing for me to turn the page over. “He works as a builder.”

  “Okay?” I said, frowning down at an email from, presumably, Alec’s employer, confirming that Alec worked for him.

  “He doesn’t earn enough to rent his flat,” Keira said. “Maddie, on the other hand, is a solicitor, isn’t she?”

  I nodded vaguely. It was something I knew from looking into Maddie, but I hadn’t attributed too much importance to it.

  “She was helping him pay rent,” Keira told me.

  “So him killing her off makes no sense,” I said, more to myself than anyone else.

  “I couldn’t say. I supply the information, not the analysis.”

  I looked up to give her a grateful smile. “This is more than enough, thank you.”

  She dismissed my thanks with a wave. “Just doing my job,” she said, but seemed pleased all the same.

  She left the papers with us and headed back towards the tech team where she no doubt had plenty of other work to keep her occupied.

  “Well,” Stephen said, “I hadn’t expected that.”

  “That makes two of us,” I agreed.

  “Where do we go from here?” Stephen said, sounding slightly lost. “I’d have betted on Banks being the culprit, but this muddies things.”

  “It might
still be Banks,” I said, most of my attention still on the printouts Keira had brought us. “Just because it wasn’t logical for him to have pushed Maddie doesn’t mean he didn’t do it.”

  Stephen made a noise of agreement. “Could have been impulsive, a flash of temper.”

  “Aye, but it’s worth looking into.” I ran my finger under the maiden name of Alec’s wife on the marriage certificate: Isabel Davies. “Next step is talking to his missus, I’d say.”

  “I’ll look into getting her address,” Stephen said, logging back onto his computer to open up the system.

  “She filed the charge against him,” I said, thinking aloud, “and they’re clearly not living together, so why not divorce? The domestic abuse charge was two years ago. That’s a long time to let things lie.”

  Stephen pulled an expression of befuddlement. “Makes no sense to me either. Maybe she’s scared to ask him.”

  I shook my head slowly, rejecting that. “She could get someone else to serve the papers for her. Maybe one or both of them wanted to get back together.”

  “Surely not.” Stephen, his attention on his monitor, wrinkled his nose in distaste. “She’s living her own life, not under his thumb. And he’s got a girlfriend with whom he seemed fairly serious, if we believe his sister. So why wouldn’t they both want to cut ties? Bizarre, I think.”

  “I’m not disagreeing with you there.”

  “Here it is,” Stephen said, after a couple of minutes. I sipped at my half-forgotten tea, which had gone tepid. “Not too far, it’s off in Clifton Moor.”

  “Clifton Moor?” I sat back in surprise. “That was where Alec was headed when we were trailing his car.”

  Stephen tapped the table with his fingertips. “Yeah, you’re right. It could be a coincidence?”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “We might as well give it a go, see if she’ll talk to us.”

  “She no doubt works.” I checked my watch. “It’d be better to wait ‘til the end of the workday, I think.”