The House in the Woods (Atticus Priest Book 1) Page 7

  17

  Mack had gone back to the station after court to prepare for the second day of the trial. The first day had gone well. The opening statement was persuasive, and Robson had established the start of the timeline that they would be relying on. Abernathy had been satisfied and had departed with a cheery farewell, adding that he was looking forward to getting his teeth into the case properly in the morning.

  Lennox was in the office with her. He was nervous about his own turn in the witness box tomorrow. His evidence—particularly the statement that he thought he had seen someone moving inside the house—was likely to be contentious. He still thought that he had seen someone and, given that Ralph was outside the property at the time, standing next to police witnesses, it was not helpful to the prosecution case that pegged Ralph as the murderer. But Lennox had reported it at the time and had noted it down. It was part of the case now, for better or worse.

  Mack couldn’t discuss his evidence with him—and she certainly couldn’t coach him—but reassured him that he would be fine and that he had more than enough experience to handle anything that was thrown his way.

  “Thanks,” Lennox said.

  She leaned back and stretched. “I mean it. You’ll be fine.”

  “It doesn’t come as naturally to me as it does to you.”

  “You think it comes naturally? I won’t sleep a wink before mine. Nerves are fine. You should be nervous.”

  “And I’m worried about… you know.”

  “About what you think you saw?”

  “It’s their best evidence.”

  “Probably.”

  “And if I hadn’t said anything, this would have been finished already.”

  “Probably not. There’s plenty of evidence against him. And there’s no choice—you have to say what you think you saw.”

  “Even if it means he gets off?”

  “Just say what you think you saw, and the jury can decide. Abernathy is briefed. You know he has it all under control.”

  “I know,” he said. He exhaled and looked at his watch. “Fancy a pint?”

  “Not tonight. I’m late as it is. Andy is going to kill me.”

  Lennox nodded. He got up and stretched his arms. “I might go and see if anyone’s there for last orders.”

  “Just one,” she admonished. “And then get to bed. I want you fresh as a daisy in the morning.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said with a grin.

  18

  Mackenzie and Andy Jones had a house in Bishopsdown. It was a thirty-minute walk from the station, passing by the crematorium and Aldi and the small business park gathered around the roundabout that marked the start of the A30’s north-westward exit from Salisbury towards Andover and the M3 to London. It was a peaceful district of new builds, with a nice community spirit, two new schools, quality housing stock and good access to the city. Being able to walk to work was a bonus, made easier since the station had moved from the old building on Wilton Road to its present location near the Greencroft. Mack didn’t have time for scheduled exercise, so she often walked. It was good thinking time, too, an opportunity to consider work on her way in and how she might improve family life when she returned again. Family life. She had been thinking about that this evening as Lennox had driven them back to the nick.

  Mack looked at her watch as she crossed over the pavement and walked up the drive: it was twenty past ten. She had promised Andy that she would be home an hour and a half ago. She braced herself. She wasn’t worried about an argument—they never argued, not like that—but that he would express his annoyance more subtly, with long silences and standoffishness; in some ways she would have preferred an up-and-down row. At least that way they would have had to work to find their common ground.

  She opened the door and stepped into the hall. She could smell chicken cooking in the kitchen and could hear her husband’s music playing. She took off her coat, left it on the bannister and went through into the kitchen. Andy was at the oven, his back to her. There was a chopping board on the work surface with diced chilli, onions and peppers.

  “Hello,” she said.

  Andy turned and smiled at her. “Hello, stranger.”

  “Sorry. I know I’m late.”

  “It’s all right,” he said. “There’s wine in the fridge.”

  She saw that he had half a glass left on the counter next to the board. She took a glass from the cupboard, collected the wine, refilled his and then poured herself one.

  “How were the kids?”

  “Fine,” he said. “Asleep. They missed you.”

  “I missed them, too,” she said.

  “How did it go?”

  “Okay, I think.”

  “Still confident?”

  She took a gulp of wine, nodding as she swallowed. “Early days.”

  “It was on the news,” he said. “They were outside the court.”

  “The gallery is full of press.”

  She sat down on one of the chairs next to the small dining room table. Daisy’s maths homework had been left there, her sums half finished. She had a test tomorrow, and Mack was about to ask why she hadn’t finished them all when she realised that, under the circumstances, she was not in any position to criticise. Sebastian’s toys were scattered over the floor, a Transformer locked in combat with a plastic T-Rex.

  She took off her shoes and crossed her legs so that she could knead the arch of her right foot. “How was your day?”

  “Not bad.”

  He gave her the potted version. Andy worked part-time for a web developer, three hours a day so that he could keep his hand in. He had taken a career break for eight years so that he could look after the children while Mack climbed the ladder at work. That, perversely, had led to difficult conversations between them. Mack loved her children dearly, but they had decided together that she had more to sacrifice and the most long-term potential. She was a DCI at thirty-eight, and the confidential nods and winks that she got from higher up the chain suggested that she had further still to climb. Andy had accepted that and had sacrificed his own career for hers. It was only now that the kids were both at school that he had the time to take decisions for himself.

  He finished cooking and dished up. They took their plates into the sitting room and sat down; Andy found the recording of EastEnders from last week and queued it up. Neither of them particularly enjoyed it, but it was brainless and familiar, and that was often all they could manage at the end of the day.

  “Did you remember we’re going to see my mum and dad in London on Saturday?” he asked her.

  “Shit,” she said.

  “You forgot?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But it’s fine. They shouldn’t need me at the weekend.”

  “‘Shouldn’t’?”

  “Won’t.”

  “Please don’t forget. It’s her seventieth. It’s been in the calendar for ages.”

  “I’ll remember,” she said, more sharply than she intended. She was curt because she knew that Andy was right—she had forgotten and she did need the reminder—and because that lack of focus was a failing that she had been working hard to fix.

  Andy pressed play and the show started.

  “You want to finish the bottle?” she asked him.

  “Go on, then,” he said.

  She put her plate on the arm of the sofa and went out of the room. She went upstairs first, checking that the children were both asleep. Daisy was curled up into a tight ball, her long limbs tucked up against her body; Sebastian was sprawled out, his plush dinosaurs spilling out from beneath the covers. She crept inside, arranged the covers over him and corralled the toys so that he wouldn’t panic if he woke and couldn’t find them. She leaned down to kiss him on the head. His hair was damp and it smelled of citrus; Andy had washed and bathed them both, too. Mack sighed. She had missed bath time again, missed tucking them in, missed reading to them. She was missing a lot, and that needed to change.

  She went downstairs and into the kitch
en, collecting the bottle from the fridge and going back into the lounge. She emptied the bottle into their two glasses. She would try harder, she told herself. She had too much to lose.

  19

  Atticus went to McDonald’s to get his dinner. He walked back through the city with the paper bag and felt alone. He watched the other people around him going about their business: the families and couples in the windows of the restaurants that faced the Market Square, the others emptying out of the Odeon at the end of whichever film it was that they had been to see. There was one elderly couple, still holding hands despite the years that he imagined that they had spent together, and he felt a pang of regret. He pictured the life that they must have had: a shared trove of memories to bind them close, a couple of children, perhaps grandchildren, too.

  The prospect of a life like that seemed distant to him. Out of reach. There was no one that he would consider as a partner and, more to the point, he doubted that anyone would have him. He knew that this wistfulness had been provoked by his meeting with Mack earlier, but that didn’t make it any easier to swallow.

  He unlocked the outside door, went through the passage and opened the door to the office. Bandit was waiting for him upstairs, his tail wagging happily. Atticus sat down on the leather sofa and tore open the brown paper bag. The dog sat down immediately, his gaze switching between the food and Atticus’s face. His tongue fell out between his lips, and his tail wagged against the floor.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I got you one, too.”

  He broke up one of the two cheeseburgers and dropped it into Bandit’s bowl. The dog dipped his head to it and devoured it in five hungry gulps.

  Atticus took his time over his, finishing it and then the carton of fries while he studied the moves that had been taken in the three games of chess that he was playing simultaneously on Chess.com. Atticus had started playing again to fill the time after he had been dismissed from the force. It gave him puzzles to solve and something to distract him from the boredom that he had found so difficult to alleviate.

  The games were all on the correspondence basis, with each player making a move every day. Two of the games were humdrum, and Atticus had been toying with his opponents. The longest one was against a mouthy American with the username ChessCompressions16. Atticus had played an incisive Sicilian, and now saw that he could give up his rook for a bishop for a winning advantage. He made the move and waited for the inevitable abuse in the comments.

  The second game, against a French player—SansLimite—had moved into an endgame where Atticus was a pawn down but had the advantage of the two bishops and his opponent’s fragmented pawn structure. SansLimite had moved his knight to b5 and, after studying the board for a moment, Atticus took a calculated gamble by moving his king to h1. He suspected that he would be able to close out the position within the next three moves.

  The last game was the most interesting. His opponent was Jack_of_Hearts, and Atticus had played against him regularly for the last year. Atticus had no idea of the player’s gender, but knew from the miniature Union Jack next to his username that he was in the United Kingdom. He or she had proposed a game within a month of Atticus registering on the site, and had proven to be a worthy opponent. They had played fifty times, and Atticus was a whisker ahead with fifteen wins against twelve for Jack_of_Hearts and twenty-three draws.

  This game had seen the two of them play out an aggressive Sicilian Sveshnikov, and it had progressed to a position with Jack_of_Hearts better on the board and ahead on the clock after fifteen moves. Atticus had reviewed a series of possible moves before assessing that he could castle when his opponent advanced his pawns on the queenside. The trap had been closed, and Jack had gambled by moving his knight, realising, sometime after posting the move, that his position was hopeless. A wry note in the comments congratulated Atticus and predicted a resignation once the next move had been taken.

  Atticus finished the last of the fries, chose the move to tighten the noose, and pressed send.

  He picked up the notes that he had taken in his review of the documents. He had been thinking about the Mallender case and realised now that there was something about it that didn’t sit right with him. There was a case against Ralph—Mack was an excellent investigator, and she wouldn’t have moved this far with the prosecution unless she was confident in his guilt—but it still felt unfinished, as if there was a large piece of evidence that was missing and, without it, the puzzle couldn’t be solved.

  He just had to work out what it was.

  He would start looking into it properly in the morning. He was tired now.

  20

  Atticus lowered the Venetian blinds and went to brush his teeth in the bathroom. He didn’t have a shower here; he had been using the facilities at the gym near the Maltings, and resolved to visit tomorrow. He took off his shirt, washed and dried himself, and went back into the office. He locked the door, switched off the lights, and went through into the second room. He could hear Jacob in the flat above as he padded from one side of his flat to the other, his weight jangling the light fittings overhead.

  This room was smaller than the one that he used for his office, with enough space for a double mattress on the floor and a chair upon which he had stacked up a pile of clothes that needed to be washed. There was a low shelf that held some of his books: Blackstone’s Criminal Law, manuals on forensic odontology and toxicology, a general text on criminal investigation that he was reviewing for an online forum that he contributed to. He had more than twenty crates of books and had put those in a storage facility in South Newton until he had somewhere larger to move to. There was a third door that led out of the room to a metal landing and the stairs that descended to the gardens in the quadrangle below. Atticus had bought a child’s blackout blind from Mothercare and used the suckers to attach it to the glass so that the room was dark. He lowered himself onto the mattress and pulled his duvet over him. There was a plate on the floor next to the bed that he had been using as an ashtray; he remembered that he had a half-smoked joint there. He reached his hand down to it, fumbled through the ash until he found it, dug his matches out of his pocket and then lit it.

  He lay back, put the joint to his lips and breathed in the sweet-smelling smoke, holding it in his lungs and waiting for the gentle buzz to prickle his brain. He exhaled, blowing the smoke into the darkness above his head.

  He closed his eyes and let his thoughts drift to Mack.

  Their affair had lasted for six months. It had been secret at the start, and they had worked hard to keep it that way. Mack was married and she was also Atticus’s boss; there was no profit in anyone finding out about it until they were ready. They had been discovered by accident. Mack’s husband was a perceptive man, and, like most cuckolds, he had seen the small hints and clues that could only reveal the truth when they were put together. Some might have chosen to be wilfully blind, but he had allowed his suspicion to consume him and had eventually found her password and accessed her personal email account. Even then Mack and Atticus had been careful, but Andy found a receipt from the online drinks shop that Mack had used to buy Atticus a bottle of Chivas Regal for his birthday and, his suspicions freshly confirmed, had confronted her about it.

  She had admitted the affair, and, displaying a decisiveness that Atticus would not have credited, Andy had thrown her out.

  Atticus had been happy about that. He knew that Mack was miserable with her husband, and he had been telling her that she should leave him for weeks. She had resisted for the sake of the children. Atticus had seen what an unhappy marriage could do to a child—his own experience was instructive in that—and had argued that staying would not do them any favours in the long run, but she had resisted. In the end, the decision had been taken for her.

  Mack had moved into the house that Atticus had been renting. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but Mack was unable to put the children out of her mind. She had been loaded down with guilt, and their relationship had been unab
le to bear the weight. They argued and squabbled and, eventually, Mack had moved out and taken a room at the White Hart. Andy, knowing full well that Mack would not be able to abandon her children, had opted to be reasonable and played a waiting game. He had won. Mack had gone back to him and apologised, pleading for a second chance. He had given it to her on the condition that everything must end with Atticus. She had taken his offer.

  Atticus knew that what had happened next was all his fault. He hadn’t taken her decision well and had allowed his rancour to fester until it made working together impossible. He had been fired a month later, but that hadn’t been the reason. An anonymous complaint had been made that Atticus had been seen smoking a joint on the job. The drug test had come without warning, and he had tested positive. Atticus had been suspended on the spot pending a professional standards hearing, but he knew that the writing was on the wall. His career was over, so he had resigned, preferring that to the indignity of a disciplinary panel.

  He had bumped into Andy in the city the week after and had known, from the triumphant expression on his rival’s face, that it had been he who had made the call. Andy must have found out from someone at the station and passed the tip along.

  The marijuana might have been the precipitating event, but it was a symptom of Atticus’s malaise if not the malaise itself. The true cause of his dismissal was the implosion of his relationship with Mack. Smoking on the job was a stupid risk, but he hadn’t cared. He had known that he was sabotaging his career, and he had done it anyway. He realised now: he had wanted them to fire him. He had given them the ammunition and they had used it.

  The rest of what happened after that was inevitable: he had allowed his compulsions to get the better of him and had spent his savings on chemical distractions that had helped him to forget. He had smoked and snorted his way through a small fortune, lining Finn’s pockets at the expense of his financial solvency. He had cleaned himself up eventually, but the damage had been done. He was unable to afford the rent on his house without his police job and had been evicted.