Left You Dead

96

The offices of the law firm Cardwell Scott were in a red-brick building occupying a corner site diagonally opposite the piazza in front of the modern glass edifice of Brighton Library.

Roy Grace and Glenn Branson walked in through the front entrance and up to the curved reception desk, behind which sat a woman with elegant, dark hair. She gave them a polite smile.

They showed their badges. ‘Detective Superintendent Grace and Detective Inspector Branson of Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Team,’ Grace led. ‘We would like to speak to Jill Riddle.’

She glanced at her computer screen, then looked up at them. ‘Do you have an appointment, officers?’

‘No,’ Grace said. ‘But we need to speak to her urgently on a potential murder investigation we believe Ms Riddle may be able to help us with.’

‘Take a seat, gentlemen, and I’ll see if she’s free.’ She indicated to a sofa in front of a table with a spread of newspapers and local magazines, then lifted her handset.

‘How was your day, yesterday?’ Branson asked, his voice sympathetic. ‘And how’s Cleo taking it all?’

‘She’s pretty cut up.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know — I never thought she had much fondness for Bruno, but clearly she cared for him a lot more than I realized. But we had an OK day, thanks. Noah tried to make scones, which basically meant covering most of the kitchen — and Humphrey — in flour. He’s turning into a little rascal, nicking the cheese when Kaitlynn wasn’t looking.’

Branson grinned.

‘Then Jack came over and we did a Sunday roast. Good to have a bit of normality. But I haven’t really slept.’

The receptionist replaced her handset and looked at the detectives. ‘Ms Riddle has a fifteen-minute window before her next client.’ She pointed over to her right, to a lift. ‘If you go to the fourth floor, her assistant will meet you.’

They entered and rode the irritatingly slow lift upwards. Finally, the doors jerked open to reveal a neatly dressed, middle-aged woman with a wavy fringe shaping her face standing on a small, sterile-feeling landing. She greeted them with an uncertain smile. ‘Follow me, please, gentlemen,’ she said.

They walked along a corridor, past a number of closed doors. She rapped on the last one, then opened it and ushered the detectives through. Grace led, followed by Branson, into a small, tidy office, with one wall lined with bookshelves filled with legal tomes, and a window overlooking the library.

A woman with wild grey hair, wearing a blue two-piece over a white blouse secured at the neck with a looped, bootlace-thin black bow, gave them a quizzical look. On her desk were several stacks of documents bound with ribbons, as well as a silver photograph frame showing two young men, seemingly twins, dressed in mortar boards and graduation gowns, and another of two Golden Doodles. There were more bound stacks of documents arranged on the floor next to the desk. On another wall Grace clocked a practising certificate and a large framed photograph of a women’s hockey team.

She stood up. ‘Gentlemen, good morning.’

Grace and Branson showed her their warrant cards. ‘Jill Riddle?’ Grace checked.

‘Yes, what is this about?’

‘I’m Detective Superintendent Grace from Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Team and this is my colleague Detective Inspector Branson. We appreciate your seeing us at such short notice,’ he said. ‘We’re investigating the disappearance, under suspicious circumstances, of Mrs Eden Paternoster, whom we believe is a client of yours.’

She nodded. ‘I’ve been reading about this in the Argus.’ She indicated the two chairs in front of her desk. ‘Please sit. Can I offer you any tea or coffee?’

‘We’re fine, thank you, and we know you’ve only got a few minutes, so we’ll keep it brief. We believe Mrs Paternoster may have been murdered and her husband, Niall, is currently our prime suspect. Our investigating team have located a will on a computer hard drive which appears to have been drafted by you. I have a printed copy of it here.’

He removed the document from his inside pocket and handed it across the desk to her. She studied it for a few seconds, then looked back at him, her demeanour turning slightly defensive. ‘Yes, we drew up this will.’

‘Thank you,’ Grace replied. ‘We think it may be significant in our enquiries that her husband has been excluded and that the principal benefactor is her line manager at the firm where she works, Mutual Occidental Insurance. We appreciate your duty of client confidentiality, but we are in a very serious situation, in which her husband is claiming he’s not seen or heard from Eden since last Sunday afternoon. But the fact is there’s been very little to indicate she is still alive since the previous Thursday, August the twenty-ninth. We are extremely concerned that she may be dead. Or, maybe, she has run away and is pretending to be dead? Any information you can give us would be extremely helpful.’

She opened out her hands and a bunch of bracelets slid, jangling, down her wrist. ‘What information are you looking for from me?’

‘Did this will supersede a previous one?’ Branson asked.

She looked at both officers. ‘I shouldn’t say so, but in light of the gravity of the situation, yes, it did.’

‘The previous one leaving everything to her husband?’ Branson pressed.

‘Pretty much, yes.’

‘You drafted that one, too?’

‘Yes, Mrs Paternoster has been a client for a number of years. Normally any conversations would be subject to client confidentiality, but I am prepared to relax that on this occasion given that I am worried about what might have happened to Eden.’

‘If you can cast your mind back to when she asked to change her will, Ms Riddle,’ Grace asked, ‘did she seem normal to you? Did she say anything by way of explanation? It’s a pretty unusual situation where someone in a marriage changes their will to exclude their partner, isn’t it?’

She smiled sardonically. ‘Not as unusual as you might think. I’m afraid, doing probate, I see it all. Not much surprises me. And — I’m not saying this is the case here — but I’ve known people take masochistic pleasure in deliberately excluding someone who would be expecting an inheritance. They leave it to a dogs’ home or some other charity. I had a client, some years ago, and now long deceased, who left an estate of over £4 million to her cat, just to stop any of her children, whom she’d fallen out with, from benefiting.’

‘So, clearly,’ Grace said, ‘Eden Paternoster didn’t want her husband to benefit. But leaving it to her boss strikes us as strange. Did she say anything to you about her reasons for that?’

He held back on revealing the information his team knew — that Rebecca Watkins was having an affair with Eden’s husband — wanting to hear the solicitor’s reply.

‘She did, yes, she told me her reason. She told me her husband wasn’t very tech savvy. She’d become suspicious that he was cheating on her, after reading texts on his phone. From what she told me it seems she confided in her boss — her line manager, Rebecca Watkins — and one thing had led to another. In a short space of time she realized she had fallen in love with this woman, and this was where her true feelings lay. She told me she felt liberated, as if she’d shaken a monkey off her back.’

Grace and Branson looked at each other in utter astonishment.

‘That’s why she changed her will?’ Grace asked.

‘There’s more to it than that.’ She gave both Grace and Branson a hesitant look. ‘When she came to see me back in March’ — she glanced down then looked up again — ‘March the twentieth, she was in an agitated state.’

‘For what reason?’ Grace asked. ‘If she gave one?’

The solicitor hesitated, as if wondering if she should say any more. Finally, she nodded. ‘Yes, she did. One night, while her husband was out doing his taxi work, she’d looked at his computer. Perhaps, she told me, he didn’t realize that text messages were stored on that as well as his phone. Whatever, she found a string of messages between him and some other woman. The last one said that he had a plan to “get rid of” Eden. Such a clever plan, he boasted, no one would ever be able to prove a thing.’

‘Was it serious, do you think?’ Grace asked.

‘I asked her about this. She said there were times when he’d been violent before, where he threatened to kill her — particularly around the time his business went bust. She said his mood swings frightened her.’

Branson said, ‘So he was in turmoil. Perhaps he saw her doing well in her career and resented that she was now the bread-winner? That’s ugly.’

‘When we interviewed him, he struck us as being pretty macho, the kind of man who might resent the little woman doing better than himself. A big ego?’ Grace probed.

She gave a thawing smile. ‘From what Eden told me, that’s a pretty accurate assessment.’

‘How frightened was she by these mood swings?’ Grace asked.

‘She was scared — very scared.’

‘But she was never scared enough to go to the police?’ he continued.

Jill Riddle looked at each officer in turn, then laid her palms flat on the surface of her desk. ‘All too often in my experience, officers, it isn’t that people in abusive relationships, both male and female, are not scared enough to go to the police,’ she said. ‘It’s that they are too scared to go.’