The House in the Woods (Atticus Priest Book 1) Read online

  “Can I talk to you about it first? You could tell me if it’s important.”

  “We can do that,” Mack said.

  There was a knock on the door and Mack got up and opened it. Patterson was waiting outside with two cups of coffee in her hands. She came inside, closing the door with her foot, and set the mugs down on the table.

  Sandeau thanked her.

  Patterson took a pad of paper and a pen from the table.

  “DC Patterson is going to take a note,” Mack said.

  “That’s fine. How do we start?”

  “Just tell me whatever it is that you want me to know,” she said.

  Sandeau nodded. “I’m a psychiatrist,” she said. “Until quite recently I had a practice in Bath. One of my patients was Cameron Mallender.”

  Mack felt a quiver of anticipation. “Go on.”

  Sandeau took the coffee and sipped at it. “He came to me at the start of last year. He was in a bit of a mess.”

  “There was never any suggestion that Cameron was seeing anyone.”

  “Why would there be? He wasn’t referred to me. It was his decision. He was a private client—I’m not sure he would’ve told anyone else. He never said that he had.”

  “Why did he come?”

  “He had a problem with his emotions. Anger, especially. It was a long-standing condition, but it had been getting worse. We had a series of sessions over the course of last year. The last one was in November. I didn’t see him again. And then…” She let the sentence trail off before finishing it. “And then he was murdered.”

  “Why was he angry?”

  “He had a very difficult childhood. He was abused by his father.”

  “What kind of abuse?”

  “Sexual,” she said. “Did you know?”

  She shook her head. “We didn’t.”

  “He said it started around the age of six and continued until he was ten. His father would come into his room at night and touch him. He told me he’d been suffering with memories of what had happened for years—he couldn’t sleep, got flashbacks. Abuse like that can cause PTSD, and he showed classic symptoms. Hypervigilance. Intense physical reactions when he recalled what had happened. Hyperacusis—reduced tolerance to loud noise. Irritability and anger.”

  “How long did you see him for?”

  “Seven months. We had two sessions a week at the start; then we dropped down to once a week. He certainly made progress, but that kind of experience isn’t one that you can ever forget about. I tried to teach him some techniques that would help him to deal with it. And, of course, just talking about it is therapeutic.”

  “So, are you here now because you think he might have done it?”

  “What? Murder his family? No. Definitely not. It couldn’t have been him.”

  “But if you’re saying his father abused him—”

  “Oh, he hated him,” she cut in. “He really did—but his anger didn’t express itself that way. He directed it inwards. Towards himself—he had expressed suicidal ideation and had tried to kill himself twice prior to coming to see me. The second time was the trigger to find help. He didn’t want to die. Cameron was in a pattern of self-destructive behaviour, but he wasn’t dangerous to anyone else.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because I’ve seen a lot of patients with his kind of issues, and I know how to identify someone who might be a threat to others. And, added to that, if he was still on the same medication as he was when he saw me, it would have made that kind of violent act very difficult indeed.”

  “Can I ask what he was on?”

  “Of course. Haloperidol decanoate. It’s an antidepressant—he was on two-hundred-milligram doses. Trifluoperazine, too. That’s an antipsychotic. He would have been docile. Low energy. It helped him keep his emotions at a level that he could easily control.”

  Patterson noted that down, drew a line under it and then turned to a fresh page.

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Mack said. “That’s helpful. Go on.”

  “I read what Ralph Mallender is saying about Cameron—that he was responsible, killed the family and then himself—and I didn’t feel I could stay silent. The poor boy is dead—he can’t defend himself. But I can report what he told me, and I can give my professional opinion. Even if we allowed the possibility that he might have acted with violence towards his father—which I don’t believe is likely—I don’t believe that there is any possibility that he could have harmed his mother and sister. He was devoted to them both.”

  Patterson kept writing. Mack instinctively knew that this was valuable. The defence was going to focus on the suggestion that Cameron had killed his family and then himself; this was strong, unbiased, professional evidence that would refute that suggestion.

  “I have to ask,” Mack said carefully. “It’s very late in the day to come to us with this. The trial has started.”

  “So why didn’t I come to you earlier? I’m afraid it’s been one of those things. I haven’t been in the country for six months. I’m French. My husband stays in Paris while I work here. Stayed in Paris, I mean. He was diagnosed with cancer just after Christmas. I took a leave of absence to nurse him. Unfortunately, it was a particularly aggressive cancer and he died last month.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that,” Mack said.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’ve only just returned to the country—yesterday, actually. I read everything I could find about the case and then called you. It’s awful. Absolutely awful.”

  “And you’d be prepared to give evidence?”

  “What would that entail?”

  “We’d take a statement and then ask you to answer questions at the trial.”

  “And it would be helpful? For Cameron?”

  “Very.”

  She nodded. “I still have responsibility towards him as a former patient, but, in the circumstances, I also have a duty to help you in any way that I can. If you think it would be helpful, I’d be happy to do whatever is necessary.”

  Mack asked Sandeau if she wouldn’t mind waiting and went outside with Patterson.

  “What do you want me to do, boss?” Patterson asked.

  “We’re going to need to take a statement. Call Lennox. Get him to come in—the two of you can do it together. I need to speak to Abernathy. This is important.”

  Patterson said that she would do that, and hurried away to make the arrangements.

  Mack went to the vending machine outside the CID room and paid for another cup of cheap coffee. It was midday now, and they would need to get the statement ready for disclosure to the defence tomorrow morning. They were going to be busy for the next few hours. It wasn’t ideal, especially at the weekend, but there was nothing that could be done about it.

  She would make it up to Andy and the kids, but, until the trial came to an end, she had to put work first.

  56

  Atticus took the tennis ball that Bandit had delivered to him, wound his arm back and threw it as far as he could. The dog rushed away, his paws pounding a drumbeat over the ice-hard playing field. It was a cold day, and they had it to themselves. The Avon wound its slow course ahead of them with the water meadows beyond it, both providing a bucolic foreground to the majesty of the cathedral. Atticus often wondered how much the view had changed in the eight hundred years that the cathedral had stood. This particular aspect contained only a few buildings, and it wasn’t difficult to erase them and imagine what the cathedral must have represented to local inhabitants who would have shared this view in years gone by. Some of them, living in medieval squalor, would surely have been dumbstruck by its majesty. Constable had been similarly taken and had painted some of his most impressive landscapes from vantage points along the route of their walk. Atticus had one of them—Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows—as the screensaver on his laptop.

  Bandit trotted back, his tail swooshing left and right, and dropped the ball.

  Atticus reached down to collect it when his phone
started to buzz in his pocket. He took it out and glanced at the screen. It was a landline that he didn’t recognise.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Allegra Mallender.”

  “Afternoon,” he said.

  “I need to see you,” she said. Her tone was undercut with excitement. “Actually, we all do.”

  “I’m out with the dog at the moment,” he said, playing it out.

  “It’s urgent.”

  “Why? Is everything okay?”

  “There’s been a development in the case. I’ll explain when you get here.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Cadogan’s office. Can you come?”

  Atticus had been expecting the call, although he couldn’t say that. He knelt down to grab Bandit’s collar.

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  Atticus hooked up Bandit’s lead and led him through the North Gate to Cadogan’s office on the High Street. He knocked on the door and, rather than the receptionist, it was opened by Cadogan himself. He glanced down at the dog and looked as if he was about to protest; Atticus walked inside before he could say anything.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  “I’ll tell you inside,” Cadogan said. “We’re in the conference room.”

  He led the way along the corridor and turned into the first room on the left. There was a table with ten chairs around it. Allegra Mallender and Christopher Crow were there already, engaged in conversation. There was a pile of stapled documents on the table.

  “Good afternoon,” Atticus said.

  Allegra turned around. Her eyes shone with excitement. Atticus unhooked Bandit’s lead, and the dog trotted over to her and nuzzled her hand until she scratched his ears.

  “Take a seat, Mr. Priest,” Crow said. He was wearing jeans and a baggy jumper and looked very different without his robes and wig.

  “What’s happened?”

  Cadogan sat down, reached for the documents at the top of the pile, and slid them across the table. Atticus made a show of looking through them.

  “What is it?” he asked guilelessly.

  “Emails between Freddie Lamza and Steve Hawkins.”

  “Steve Hawkins?”

  “He’s a journalist. Please—read them.”

  Atticus looked through the emails, feigning ignorance as to their contents, and then turned to the contract that had been attached to one of them.

  “What? Lamza has already done a deal with the press?”

  “Indeed he has,” Crow said. “He’s already received the first payment, too. That, in itself, would be damaging for his credibility. But that’s not the worst of it. Look at the email at the top of the pile—the one sent last week.”

  Atticus knew which message he meant, since he had read it in the café near Waterloo just a few hours earlier. Nevertheless, he had to play along with the charade, so he picked out the correct page and read it.

  “‘It’s in your interests to make your evidence as compelling as possible. It goes without saying that you need to be truthful, but the more interesting your story, the better the chance that we would be able to secure additional interviews for you once the case has come to an end. And, of course, there will be little interest in what you might have to say in the event that Ralph is acquitted.’”

  “Can you believe it?” Allegra said.

  Atticus put the paper on the table. “So Lamza has a financial motive for sensationalising his evidence?”

  Crow nodded solemnly. “I think there’s the beginnings of a strong case for perjury against him.”

  “And perverting the course of justice against Hawkins,” Cadogan added.

  “Even if we can’t get far enough to show that,” Crow said, “all of Lamza’s credibility as a witness is gone. His evidence is prejudiced. It’s worthless.”

  “Isn’t it the best news?” Allegra gushed.

  “It’s great,” Atticus said. “But how did we get this?”

  Cadogan leaned back in his chair and looked at him from hooded eyes. “It was emailed to me this morning.”

  “By?”

  “We don’t know,” Cadogan said. “It was sent anonymously.”

  “So how did whoever sent them get hold of them? These look like private emails.”

  “That’s impossible to say,” Crow said.

  “The obvious explanation is that either Lamza or Hawkins has been hacked,” Cadogan said.

  Atticus laid a finger on the topmost sheet. “But can we use them?”

  Crow nodded. “We can,” he said. “Mr. Justice Compton’s dictum has always been relevant: ‘It matters not how you get it; if you steal it, even, it would be admissible in evidence.’ There was a case two years ago that made it very clear that there is no prohibition of the use of illegal or covertly obtained evidence. The courts will allow it to be presented if it is relevant to the case. And this—plainly—is relevant. It goes towards the character of the main prosecution witness. The real issue is one for Mr. Cadogan.”

  Cadogan drummed his fingers on the table. “I could be struck off if I was involved in breaking the law to get the evidence.”

  “But you weren’t involved,” Atticus said, “were you?”

  “Of course I wasn’t.”

  “I’m sorry, then—I don’t understand the concern.”

  Cadogan and Crow both stared at Atticus from the other side of the table.

  “Let’s just be absolutely clear,” Cadogan said. “Did you get these?”

  “No,” Atticus replied. “This is the first time I’ve seen them.”

  “You’re absolutely sure?”

  “I’m sure. I’m not usually shy when it comes to taking credit, but this time I’m afraid I can’t.”

  Crow and Cadogan exchanged glances.

  “All right,” Crow said.

  “Well?” Allegra said. “What do we do next?”

  Crow got up. “We have work to do.”

  57

  Mack arrived at court with five minutes to spare and in a bad mood. It had been a struggle to get the kids out of bed, and they had been in a dreadful mood. It had been an exercise in diplomacy to get them to eat anything for breakfast and even more difficult to get them washed and dressed. Andy had slept badly, too, and was less patient than he normally was. He had barely spoken to her the previous evening, making it plain how annoyed he was that she had abandoned the family tradition to work in the afternoon. Mack had volunteered to drop the children at school, but the whole process had taken about twenty minutes longer than it should have. She was in a foul temper by the time she arrived at court.

  Sunday had been busy. Lennox and Patterson had taken a witness statement from Dr. Sandeau, and it had been emailed across to the CPS solicitor and to Abernathy. Both lawyers had then requested a conference, and Mack had ended up on the phone with them both for ninety minutes. They all agreed that Sandeau should be called as a witness and, while not impossible, there were procedural requirements that needed to be negotiated with the defence before that could happen. Introducing evidence at this late stage in the trial was unusual, but this was relevant and potentially important. It went to the heart of Mallender’s defence: they were arguing that Cameron murdered the family before killing himself, but here was evidence that said that he wasn’t violent and would likely have been rendered docile by his medication. Cameron wasn’t able to defend himself, so that job fell to the prosecution. Abernathy said that he would see the judge and Christopher Crow in the judge’s chambers before the morning’s proceedings began so that they could hash out the best way to proceed.

  Mack looked at her watch: 9.55. Abernathy would already have raised the question of adducing the new evidence. She wondered whether he had been successful.

  The courtroom was busy; the cross-examination of Freddie Lamza was scheduled for the morning and, given the explosive outburst from Ralph Mallender that had punctuated Friday’s evidence, it was obvious that the reporters were hoping for an encore.


  Mack scanned the rest of the court: Christopher Crow wasn’t here yet and neither was Dafyd Cadogan. Allegra Mallender was usually in the gallery by this time, but, as Mack turned to look for her, she saw that she wasn’t there, either. That was strange. Atticus was in the front row and, as he saw Mack glance across, he raised his hand in greeting. Mack nodded back at him in response, but he was distracted.

  Something wasn’t right.

  Abernathy emerged from the entrance to the judge’s chambers and made his way to his desk. He turned to address Mack and the CPS solicitor.

  “I spoke to Somerville,” he said in a low voice. “He’s fine with us admitting the evidence from Sandeau. I’ve disclosed it to the defence, and I don’t think they’ll have an issue with it.”

  “When will she give evidence?”

  “Probably tomorrow morning,” he said.

  “I’ll make sure she’s here.”

  Abernathy looked concerned, as if something was bothering him.

  “Is everything else okay?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Crow was nonplussed when I told him about Sandeau. He ought to have complained about it, but he didn’t—nothing beyond the perfunctory grumble, anyway. I’ve known him for years. He’s got something up his sleeve.”

  “What?”

  “He says they’re going to call Mallender’s solicitor.”

  “Cadogan?” Mack said. “Why?”

  “He said, ‘We shall have to wait and see.’ He wouldn’t give me anything else.”

  Mack turned back to the gallery and saw Allegra picking her way along the crammed seats to one that Atticus had saved for her. She looked different; there was something in her face that Mack hadn’t seen before. She was smiling, and, as she sat down next to Atticus, she turned to whisper something into his ear.

  Abernathy had seen it, too. “She’s happy about something.”

  “But what?” Mack said. “What can Cadogan add?”

  “I don’t know. But Christopher can be devious when he wants to be. I have a bad feeling.”