Snapshot

8

Ellen and Scobie were in Mount Eliza, where Bayside Counselling Services occupied a new but nondescript two-storey building in the main street. The bistro and the delicatessen on either side of it might have been lifted from one of the lifestyle magazines, and were inhabited, so far as Ellen could tell, by people who’d stepped from the pages of a lifestyle magazine. She wondered if they ever made independent decisions, and said so.

‘Sorry?’ said Scobie.

‘Never mind,’ Ellen said. Scobie Sutton liked to think the best of people. There wasn’t a sour bone in his body.

They went in, finding an unoccupied reception desk. Ellen picked up a glossy brochure and showed it to Scobie: Janine McQuarrie was a good-looking woman, if surfaces counted for anything. The face in the brochure was contained and humourless.

Just then a man approached the reception desk, looking furious. He was about fifty, balding and as neat as a pin. Ellen disliked him immediately. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ she began.

‘Yes?’ he snapped. He didn’t meet her gaze but addressed a point several centimetres above her head.

‘We need to see-’

‘Make an appointment-when our esteemed receptionist returns from wherever she is.’

‘It’s important,’ Ellen said. ‘We need to see someone in authority.’

‘And you are?’

They showed their warrant cards. ‘Well, I’m Dominic O’Brien, one of the senior partners,’ the man said, still refusing-or unable-to make eye contact.

‘Mr O’Brien, I’m afraid I have some bad news. Your colleague, Janine McQuarrie, was found murdered in Penzance North earlier this morning.’

There was a moment of silence, a throat-clearing cough, and O’Brien said, ‘Sorry? Who did you say you were? What are you saying?’

Ellen repeated herself. O’Brien’s voice gained in strength and passion. ‘And you thought you’d just bowl up and drop this little bombshell on me?’

Oh God. Ellen said gently, ‘I’m terribly sorry, Mr O’Brien, of course you’re right, but there’s no easy way to break this kind of news, and we need to act swiftly. Do you know why Mrs McQuarrie was in Penzance North this morning?’

‘No idea.’

‘Was she seeing a client? I understand that she was a psychologist, a counsellor.’

‘She was. Are you suggesting one of her clients murdered her?’

‘I don’t know. Do you think that might have happened?’

‘You’d better come into my office,’ O’Brien said.

He took them upstairs to a vast, oppressive corner room. God help the poor soul who seeks solace here, thought Ellen. ‘We need to see Mrs McQuarrie’s files,’ she said.

O’Brien was on firm ground now; resistant ground. ‘Janine appointed me to look after her records in the event of anything happening to her. It’s standard practice,’ he said, to forestall any objections that the police might like to make.

‘May we see those records? We need to identify anyone who has a volatile background and rule out everyone else.’

‘A fishing expedition? Request denied. You’ll need a warrant, and even then you’ll need a good reason, and we’ll challenge it.’

Ellen sighed. She knew that a magistrate would grant a subpoena without hassle, for this was a murder inquiry, but only if the police could present a compelling case for the murderer being one of the dead woman’s clients rather than anyone else. ‘All right, then perhaps you can tell me the sorts of people Mrs McQuarrie counselled.’

O’Brien breathed out heavily. ‘Children-bedwetting kids and troubled teenagers. People grieving the death of a loved one. Women finding the strength to leave unhappy marriages. All kinds of ordinary afflictions, and none that might give rise to the impulse to murder, I wouldn’t have thought.’

Ellen agreed privately. According to Challis’s descriptions of the circumstances, Janine McQuarrie’s murder had been a carefully arranged contract killing, not the product of impulsive or skewed reasoning. Her mind drifted. Women finding the strength to leave unhappy marriages, she thought. Is that what I need?

Scobie Sutton broke in. ‘We’ll need to see her desk calendar, and talk to everyone in the clinic, before the press do.’

O’Brien rolled his eyes. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

He showed them to the conference room and for the next hour they interviewed the staff: O’Brien, three other therapists, the office manager and the receptionist, all of whom had solid alibis for earlier than morning. The office manager, a vigorous, no-nonsense woman named Iris, was the most helpful, but her information merely bore out in clearer terms what everyone was saying: that Janine McQuarrie had been a real piece of work, not only considered a poor therapist but also reviled. A woman whose bitter personality had permeated the building, she had minions, not friends. She was manipulative, a gossip, and would spread rumours against those whom she believed had wronged her. At staff meetings she liked to chuckle over her clients’ sad secrets and off-the-wall phobias. She wasn’t motivated to help, Iris said, but to bring down people and institutions, and she was obsessed with money: accumulating it, not spending it.

Scobie Sutton stirred, as if money, or all of this dirt being spread about Janine McQuarrie, was distasteful to him. ‘Was she a gambler?’

‘Not her,’ Iris said. ‘Gambling is a sign of weakness, quote unquote.’

‘Any irregularities in the firm’s bookkeeping?’

Iris bristled. ‘I keep the books.’

Scobie back-pedalled. ‘I mean, did she have access to the books? Was she keeping income back from the firm? Anything like that?’

‘Not that I’m aware of…’

‘Her clients,’ said Ellen. ‘Were any of them unstable enough to murder her? Did she offend any of them?’

‘She whisked them in and out, or met them elsewhere, so I wouldn’t know,’ Iris said.

‘What about her private life? Anyone in the background? Friends? Enemies?’

‘Look,’ said Iris. ‘We pitied her more than anything. We avoided her. She was most probably lonely, but everything about her said “back off”. I wonder how on earth she found herself a husband and mothered a child, frankly.’

‘Do you know who she was seeing this morning?’ Ellen had examined Janine McQuarrie’s desk calendar, and the day’s entry was typically cryptic: Penzance North 9.30.

‘No.’

That was all they could get. Ellen called Challis’s mobile number. ‘We’re on our way back to Waterloo.’

‘Good. I want a quick briefing before we talk to the super’s granddaughter.’

‘Be there in twenty minutes,’ said Ellen.