to kill you, Con.’ Kit weeps into my hair. ‘I couldn’t have stopped her, not without . . . doing what I did.’ He kisses the back of my neck. I clamp my mouth shut to keep in the scream that’s ringing in my head.
‘I killed her to save you,’ Kit says.
Chapter 24
24/7/2010
Charlie had finished her pint and needed another one, but she knew that if she went to the bar, she’d miss too much and struggle to catch up; that was her – what had Simon called it? – her firmly ingrained personal-experience-based assumption. The other two seemed to have forgotten that there were thirsty bodies attached to their brains; Charlie tried to do the same.
‘Remember your point about simple solutions, in Spain?’ Simon said. ‘When there’s an unknown, a puzzle, the simplest answer’s usually the right one?’
‘You disagreed with me,’ said Charlie. ‘We managed to pack some interesting arguments into our half-hour honeymoon,’ she told Sam.
‘Jackie Napier was banking on Ian Grint subscribing to your way of thinking, not mine,’ said Simon. ‘Like a lot of highly imaginative people, she assumes most people she comes into contact with have more straightforward, prosaic minds than she does, and she’s right. Grint finds that someone’s hacked into Lancing Damisz’s computer network – who’s the obvious non-suspect? Jackie Napier. Why would she need to hack in when she works there and can access the system legitimately whenever she wants? If a woman might or might not have been murdered at 11 Bentley Grove, who’s the obvious non-suspect? Jackie Napier again – she drew herself to the police’s attention, saying she’d seen the body, supporting Connie Bowskill’s story, a story no one would have wasted five minutes on if Jackie hadn’t come forward – Connie would have been dismissed as a delusional neurotic. It was thanks to Jackie that Grint moved on the possible murder, did the whole forensic bit, found out about the computer hacking. Simplistic assumption? That Jackie can’t have been responsible for any of it. The possibility that she might be wouldn’t occur to Grint or to anyone – no one draws their own crimes to the police’s attention, crimes they would otherwise get away with.’
‘But . . . you’re saying Jackie did?’ Sam asked.
‘I think so, yeah,’ said Simon. ‘I’m not sure why, though.’ He looked angry. ‘I might be an imagination person, but I’m nowhere near her level.’
‘You’re talking as if you know for a fact that Jackie’s a liar,’ said Charlie.
‘I do. If you’d come with me to Lancing Damisz and the Cambridge Property Shop today, you’d know it too.’
Charlie didn’t point out that he had neither told her where he was going nor invited her to join him.
‘For starters, Jackie hasn’t been to New Zealand any time recently, and she hasn’t got a sister,’ said Simon. ‘The holiday part was true. She took her disabled mother to a B&B in Weston-super-Mare. She does it every summer, apparently.’
Weston-super-Mare. New Zealand. The distance between the lie and the truth was enough to make anyone feel jet-lagged.
‘Jackie sold 18 Pardoner Lane to the Gilpatrick family in 2003,’ said Simon. ‘In 2009, they decided they wanted to move again. Jackie, still working for Cambridge Property Shop, sold them another house: the one opposite Professor Sir Basil Lambert-Wall’s. She bought their old house herself.’
‘What?’ Charlie wasn’t sure she’d heard right.
‘Jackie Napier bought 18 Pardoner Lane, in March last year,’ said Simon. ‘She was the agent handling the sale, she put the house on the market – and then bought it herself.’
‘So . . . why bother putting it on the market?’ asked Sam.
‘Did she have to pay herself commission?’ said Charlie.
‘No idea.’ Simon looked away; he hated not knowing. ‘But that’s where Jackie now lives – in the house Kit Bowskill was gagging to buy in 2003, the house he wanted so much that he allowed his proud mask to slip and begged his folks for fifty grand.’
Charlie looked to Sam for help, saw her confusion mirrored in his face.
‘In February this year, Jackie switched jobs – she moved to Lancing Damisz,’ said Simon. ‘I spoke to Hugh Jepps, one of Cambridge Property Shop’s senior partners. He’s felt guilty ever since about the glowing reference he wrote her, and was only too willing to let me hear his confession. The reference was only glowing because he was keen to get rid of Jackie – he’d have sacked her, except that then the story of what she’d been up to might