Too Good to Be True

9 The Hotel

Robert Anderson, the local detective in charge of the case, phoned back just as Perez was finishing dinner. Perez kept him on the line until he’d climbed the stairs to his room. He didn’t want anyone listening in to their conversation.

‘How’s it going, Jimmy?’

Perez took a chair by his bedroom window. ‘I had a wee look round Anna’s house.’

‘Did you now?’ Anderson seemed annoyed by his interference. ‘And what did you find?’

‘I think Anna had a visitor the evening she died.’

There was a moment of silence at the end of the line. ‘And what makes you think that?’

Perez explained about the note he’d found in Anna’s bedroom and the freshly cleaned glass in the kitchen cupboard. ‘That changes things, don’t you think?’

Another silence. ‘Perhaps,’ Anderson said at last. ‘Are you sure the note was in Anna’s handwriting?’

‘Certain.’ Perez remembered looking through the file in Anna’s living room. ‘I checked it against some lesson plans she’d written that were in the house.’

‘All the same,’ Anderson said, ‘we’ll need more than that to reopen the case. What do you plan to do tomorrow?’

‘I thought I’d go to Berwick to chat to Anna’s family. It seems that she knew Tom King before she moved to Stonebridge. They might be able to tell me more about the relationship.’ Perez moved to the window, but there was no sign of the man who’d been standing under the street light. ‘I’m wondering why they didn’t offer to take on Anna’s daughter.’

‘They have problems of their own,’ Anderson said. ‘Joan Blackwell has early onset dementia, and George, Anna’s father, is her full-time carer. They couldn’t cope with a growing child.’

Perez thought how unfair that was. The couple had problems of their own, and now they’d lost the daughter who might have supported them. He wondered what effect their troubles might have had on Anna. Could they have caused the young teacher more stress? Might they even have driven her to suicide? Then he thought how everyone had described Anna as a kind woman. If she knew that her parents had problems and might need her help in the future, wouldn’t that have given her a reason for staying alive?

‘I might go to Berwick all the same,’ Perez said, ‘just to find out more about her. Anna wasn’t in Stonebridge for long, and I don’t feel that anyone here really knew her.’

Except Tom King, he thought, and Sarah doesn’t want me talking to him.

He ended his call to Anderson, and on impulse phoned his ex-wife, Sarah. She answered softly, almost in a whisper. ‘Yes?’

‘I need to talk to you,’ he said.

‘You can’t come here because Tom’s home.’ She spoke normally now. She must have moved to a different room where she could talk in private.

‘Can you come to me? I’m staying in the hotel.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘If we meet in the bar, someone might see us. This place is nothing but gossip.’

‘I’m starting to realise that,’ Perez said. He gave her his room number, and it occurred to him that anyone listening in would assume they were having an affair. It was easy to jump to the wrong conclusions, and perhaps that was what everyone involved in this case was doing.

Half an hour later Sarah tapped on the door and he let her in. There were melting snowflakes in her hair and she was shivering, though the hotel room was very warm. He made her tea, struggling to open the tiny plastic pot of UHT milk, and gave her his chair. The only place for him to sit was the bed, so he perched there.

‘Why didn’t you tell me you tried to get rid of Anna from the school, even though you were in favour of her getting the job at the start?’

Sarah blushed but she didn’t speak.

‘I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me,’ Perez said.

‘It was a mistake to give her the post,’ Sarah said at last. ‘She was too young and too inexperienced. She let the children get away with murder.’ She realised what she’d said and blushed again.

‘Did Tom know Anna before she moved here?’ Perez felt so frustrated that he wanted to shake the truth out of Sarah. He wondered how he could have loved her so deeply, how he could have spent all those nights dreaming about her after she’d left him.

I felt sorry for her, he thought. Because she was desperate for a child and suffered one miscarriage after another. I blamed myself. It wasn’t a good basis for a marriage.

Sarah looked up at Perez over her mug of tea. ‘I thought Tom might already know her. I couldn’t be certain.’

‘What gave you that idea?’

‘I saw them together once in the health centre just after Anna moved here,’ she said. ‘Tom’s car was in for a service, and I’d called in to give him a lift home. Anna was in the waiting area when I got there. She didn’t have an appointment – she wasn’t there because she was ill. I think she was just hanging on until he’d finished work. It looked as if she was hoping to surprise him. Anna didn’t know who I was – she must have thought I was just a patient – and when he appeared she called out to him: “Tom! Look who it is!” It was as if she thought he’d be pleased to see her.’

‘Was he pleased?’

‘Well, I was there, so he just seemed awkward. But I could tell that he knew her.’ Sarah paused. ‘He lied to me. He said he’d never met her and that she must have mistaken him for someone else.’

‘And that was why you set up the petition to get Anna out of the school?’ Perez thought how childish Sarah was. She’d been hurt, so she’d wanted to lash out. She’d wanted to make the young woman pay. Again he thought how unfair life had been to Anna.

‘I looked at her daughter in that waiting room and it was like looking at one of my own children,’ Sarah cried suddenly. ‘Lucy had the same dark hair. The same smile. She looked so like Tom that I thought everyone in the village would see the likeness.’

‘You think Tom was Lucy’s father?’ Now Perez understood Sarah’s anger towards the young teacher. Perhaps anyone would have responded in the same way.

‘I can’t see that there’s any other explanation,’ she said.

‘And what did Tom say?’

Sarah set her mug carefully on the windowsill. ‘I’ve never talked to him about it. I was scared that he might tell me the truth.’ She looked up. ‘What will you do now?’

‘What you asked me to do,’ Perez said. ‘I’ll try to find out if Anna Blackwell committed suicide or if someone killed her.’ He met her eyes. ‘Do you think that Tom could have murdered her? Is that why you’re so frightened?’

She didn’t answer.

‘Where was he the night Anna died?’ Perez asked.

‘He was out on a call. He didn’t get back until late.’ Her voice was quiet. ‘But Tom’s a doctor. He wouldn’t kill anyone. And he often has emergency calls at night.’ She paused again. ‘I wondered if Anna was blackmailing him. I thought she might have asked him to help her keep her job at the school.’

‘And threatened to make their affair public if he didn’t?’

She nodded. ‘In the middle of the night, when things are going round and round in my head, I start having crazy ideas like that. I think I’m going mad. That’s why I called you. I have to know what’s been going on, even if I find out that Tom’s a killer.’ She stood up. ‘I must go. I told Tom I was just calling in to the village to drop a letter in the post.’ She slipped out of the room.

From the window, Perez watched her run from the hotel to her car. The shadow had returned to his post under the street light, and he was watching Sarah too. Perez tried to work out where he might have seen the man before, but the memory slid away.