Chapter 64

chapter sixty-four

Now

‘Your family has been very worried about you, Mrs Delaney.’

Christina managed to keep her voice steady as she thought of the time and resources she’d spent trying to prove this woman’s murder. She thought of her boss’s face.

Accept nothing. Believe nothing. Check everything.

She hadn’t followed her own rules. They should have turned around once they got the information from the plastic surgeon about Savannah speaking to Joy on the same day she disappeared.

‘But I don’t understand,’ said Joy Delaney. She stood next to her husband, holding his hand in hers, patting it distractedly. She looked well rested and tanned. ‘Why would you call the police, Stan? You knew exactly where I was, I left you a note.’

‘I never got a note,’ said Stan shakily. He was a plant returning to life in front of Christina’s eyes: back straightening, shoulders dropping. ‘There was no note, Joy.’ He exhaled hard. ‘At first I thought you were just making a point, but this last week, you know, I really started to think something terrible had happened to you.’

‘There was so a note!’ insisted Joy. ‘I put it on the fridge door so you couldn’t possibly miss it.’

‘There was no note on the fridge,’ said Stan. ‘Where have you been?’

‘But I left it right there! It was a very nice note! I put a lot of thought into it.’

Stan said, ‘Did you use the London Eye fridge magnet, Joy?’

‘Oh,’ said Joy. She grimaced. ‘That was stupid. Oh dear.’

‘This fridge magnet is top-heavy,’ said Stan to Christina. He was almost chummy with her now. ‘Bad design. It keeps falling off the fridge.’

‘It’s a pity because it’s a lovely magnet,’ said Joy. ‘It has a picture of us on the London Eye.’

‘You didn’t see the note on the floor?’ said Christina to Stan, still treating him as a man with something to hide.

‘I did not,’ said Stan.

‘But surely you called the children, Stan! I texted them!’ said Joy.

‘The text made no sense, Joy,’ said Stan. ‘It was gibberish.’

Joy looked at Christina and Ethan. ‘Has he even offered you a cup of tea?’

‘We didn’t expect a cup of tea,’ said Christina. ‘We were in the process of arresting him.’

The dog pattered into the room and happily licked Joy’s shoes. Christina shuffled out of its way. She’d met Steffi a few times now, and the animal seemed harmless and cute enough, but she wasn’t a pet person, and she had the strangest feeling that this one actively disliked her.

Joy fondled the dog’s ears. ‘Hello, Steffi, did you miss me?’

Stan said, ‘You know, I’ve got a good idea what happened to that note.’

‘Oh, Steffi,’ said Joy.

‘The dog eats paper,’ Stan explained to Christina as Joy bent to pick up the keys she’d dropped and was suddenly transfixed by something she saw on the floor.

‘Stan,’ she said.

She put her hands flat to the floorboards and looked up at him.

‘You like it?’ He beamed.

‘It looks beautiful,’ she said rapturously. ‘Oh my goodness, it looks beautiful.’

Joy straightened up again, her eyes still on the floor. ‘We had this awful purple carpet in here.’ She corrected herself quickly. ‘Well, it wasn’t awful, it was just – not really my style.’

Stan said, ‘It’s okay. It was awful.’

‘Anyway, while I’ve been away, Stan pulled up all the carpet and polished the floorboards! Doesn’t it look beautiful!’

‘I sanded the floorboards myself,’ said Stan.

Christina looked at Ethan, and knew that he too was replaying the CCTV footage they’d seen, not of a man carrying his wife’s body but a man struggling to carry a roll of old carpet, a man finally doing a particular task his wife had probably been asking him to do for years. She thought of the witness who had seen him with bloodshot eyes and covered in dust, not because he’d buried his wife but because he’d been sanding back hardwood floors.

Joy’s smile faded. ‘I’m sorry, did you say you were about to arrest Stan? Arrest him for what?’

There was a moment of silence. Right now Stan Delaney couldn’t look any sweeter or more innocent if he’d tried. He couldn’t take his shining eyes off his wife.

Christina reminded herself that every one of her colleagues would have made an arrest based on the facts at her disposal.

‘Speeding?’ guessed Joy. ‘He has got a terrible lead foot.’

‘No, not speeding,’ said Christina evenly. She closed her eyes and tapped a fingertip against her forehead. Her mother had recently got into ‘tapping’ for stress relief. ‘We were arresting him for your murder.’

‘Murder?’ said Joy. Her eyes widened. ‘You thought he murdered me?’

‘The evidence was compelling,’ said Christina, almost to herself.

‘But how could it possibly be compelling?’ Joy held out her arms wide. ‘I’m alive!’

‘Yes,’ said Christina. ‘You certainly appear to be.’

‘Surely you spoke to our children,’ said Joy to Christina. ‘They would have set you straight. Didn’t Stan give you their telephone numbers?’

‘They had that t-shirt.’ Stan spoke to Joy as if they were alone. ‘The one we used to wrap up your foot when you cut it on the oyster that day at the beach. Remember? They found it “buried” out the back. They thought I buried it.’

‘Of course I remember,’ said Joy. ‘I thought I put it in the bin. I bet Caro’s damned cat ran off with it. Otis steals laundry all around the neighbourhood.’ Her voice trailed. ‘I don’t understand. Are you saying you thought it was . . .’ She looked at Christina with a sick expression. ‘You thought it was my blood?’

‘Well, it was your blood,’ said Stan reasonably.

‘But for goodness sake, Stan, surely you explained! It was very simple to explain!’

‘Of course, I was going to explain, but by the time they found the shirt, it was obvious I was in trouble. I decided not to say anything until I had my lawyer with me,’ said Stan.

‘Your lawyer?’ scoffed Joy. ‘What lawyer? You don’t have a lawyer!’

‘Brooke found me a criminal lawyer. Nice young fella. Turns out his father was that Ross Marshall, who used to play at the club back in the eighties, remember him?’

Watching Stan talk, Christina was reminded oddly of herself. She wasn’t a big talker. Nico was the talker. But when they were back together after any time apart, she suddenly became Chatty Cathy, desperate to tell him everything she’d been saving up.

‘The one with the underhand serve?’ asked Joy vaguely.

‘That’s the one!’ said Stan. ‘He plays lawn bowls now. Probably suits him better.’

‘You can’t genuinely have thought he murdered me,’ said Joy to Christina.

‘I had those scratches on my face,’ said Stan. ‘It looked like you scratched me.’

‘That’s because I did scratch you!’ said Joy. She splayed her right hand to display her fingernails. ‘I felt terrible about that.’

‘So you didn’t get it from a hedge,’ said Christina to Stan. At least her instincts had been correct there.

He met Christina’s eyes. ‘I knew how that might have looked to you.’

He’d lied in a criminal investigation. She could charge him with perverting the course of justice. Depending on his wife’s actions, she could charge her with public mischief. She was going to bloody well charge someone with something today.

Joy sank suddenly onto the couch. ‘This is quite upsetting.’

‘It has been quite upsetting, yes,’ said Stan dryly. He sat next to her, so close their legs touched. The dog sat on the floor in between them, her tail sweeping back and forth.

Joy pulled a cushion out from behind her back and placed it on her lap. ‘I hope people don’t hear about this.’ The dog rolled over on her back and displayed her tummy, which Joy began to rub with her foot.

‘People have heard about it, sweetheart. There was a press conference,’ said Stan. ‘You’re a missing person. It was on the news. There were helicopters. People tramping through the reserve looking for you.’

‘Looking for me? Like I was hiding under a bush? Oh my Lord.’

‘So let me get this straight. You’re saying your dog ate the letter you left,’ said Christina. ‘And your neighbour’s cat ran off with the bloodied t-shirt.’

‘Lot of pets involved with this case, Detective Khoury,’ commented Ethan soberly.

‘So it seems, Constable Lim.’ Christina shot him a look. His eyes danced. She bowed her head and squeezed the bridge of her nose while she considered the absurdity of this case.

Perhaps on the way home she and Ethan would rescue a kitten caught in a tree while the townspeople cheered.

‘Why did you clean your car, Mr Delaney?’ asked Christina. ‘Two days after your wife went missing?’

Why did you insist on doing everything possible to make yourself look guilty?

‘Joy has been saying for months that the car smells of sour milk,’ said Stan.

‘I spilled a banana milkshake,’ said Joy.

‘So I thought I’d surprise her.’ He beamed at Joy. ‘It smells like a brand new car now.’

‘Oh, Stan.’ Joy’s hands went to her mouth in the classic gesture of a girl whose boyfriend has gone down on one knee. ‘You paid someone to clean the car? Did it cost a fortune?’

‘It was highway robbery,’ said Stan. ‘I also bought a mobile phone. Also highway robbery.’

‘You did not,’ said Joy. Her foot stopped rubbing. The dog looked up at her hopefully.

‘I’ll give you my number,’ said Stan.

They were looking straight into each other’s eyes.

‘So you can always contact me,’ said Stan. ‘Always. I’ll never turn it off. I’ll always answer.’

Joy took his hand in hers. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Okay, then.’

The words were not startling, but it felt somehow as if they were witnessing a startlingly intimate conversation and Christina found herself politely looking away from the couple and at the floorboards. Nico said there were good floorboards waiting beneath the vile carpet in the house they’d just bought. Amazing to think something beautiful could lie beneath the ugliness and all you had to do was peel it away.

She felt her irritation dissolve beneath a slow-moving but inexorable tide of elation. Joy Delaney was no longer missing, presumed dead: she was alive and in excellent health.Christina no longer had to spend her nights at the office preparing the brief of evidence, wondering resentfully which witness statements the DPP would ask them to retake because it was their job to doubt every piece of evidence.

Like she should have done.

She and Nico could share a bottle of wine tonight and sleep late tomorrow. They would have sex tonight and in the morning and probably the afternoon.

This wasn’t a career case that would put her face on the front page of the newspaper. It was a cute dinner party story she’d tell with Nico’s arm slung around the back of her chair. Or more likely Nico would tell it for her and she’d make small factual corrections.

She glanced at Ethan, who was smiling sentimentally at Joy and Stan as though he were father of the bloody bride. He caught her looking and abruptly adjusted his face.

‘Perhaps we could speak privately, Mrs Delaney,’ she said to Joy. ‘You can tell us what’s been going on and where you’ve been all this time.’