Silas Nash Book !: Hush Hush Honeysuckle. Chapter Thirty B

Nash and Renshaw avoided contaminating evidence in Amanda Keys’ kitchen. Nash felt ill. This one was on him, and he felt the burden of guilt pressing down on his breakfast. He was warned but chose to make light of it. He should have done more.

‘The Florist was waiting for her when she got home,’ Renshaw said. ‘The poor cow didn’t stand a chance. I hope you haven’t eaten yet. It’s not nice in there.’

‘Is Robinson here?’

‘Yes, he arrived half an hour ago. Done the preliminaries, and I think they’re ready to bag and tag her.’

‘I want a statement from the patrol outside her house. Didn’t they see or hear anything? What’s the bloody point of them when they let a murderer walk in under their nose and kill the person they’re supposed to be guarding?’

‘Sir.’

Nash followed the noise into the victim’s parlour. While the rest of Amanda’s house was bright and modern, this room was more subdued, with soft lighting and a calm atmosphere. In her line of work, it was dressed differently, but it’s what the rest of us might call an office. SOCO had finished dusting for fingerprinting and photographing the body and were filing out when Nash arrived.

‘Here we are again,’ Robinson said. ‘I can talk you through the scene, but it speaks for itself. Sicko.’

‘Time and cause of death?’ Nash asked.

‘Sometime between ten and two last night. This is corroborated by the patrol guy outside. It’s another slashed throat. Sharp knife. Smooth blade, no serrated edge. It’s a single clean cut. Confident. No dummy runs to test the blade. Grabbed her hair from behind to pull her head back and expose her neck. One slice and it was all over. It wouldn’t have taken her long to bleed out. A couple of minutes at most. As to all this theatre,’ Robinson spread his hands to indicate the staging. ‘You can make of that what you will.’

‘Thanks, Bill. The Florist likes to get our attention. This took time and effort, and while he had her tied to that chair, our officers were drinking coffee and eating fairy cakes fifty feet away in her drive.’

‘You reckon?’

‘What do you think? He took her because it was easy, and it shouldn’t have been.’

‘He’s a brazen bastard. If she’d got one scream out, we’d have had him.’ Nash shook his head. This one was personal, and he was angry. He’d taken her from underneath Nash’s nose. He looked around at the mockery in the form of an elaborate tableau. It had taken hours to create. He worked on it while Amanda was tied to the chair. She must have been terrified.

The action was centred around Amanda Key’s séance table. He assumed every good medium should have one. The table was an expensive piece of furniture. He’d seen some on TV with pentagrams and all kinds of devil-worshipping stuff on them, but this one was whittled in good-witch wood. It had carved doves, shaking hands and hearts around the stunning inlaid marquetry. All the fluff ruined what was a beautiful piece of furniture, in Nash’s opinion.

Amanda was staged with both hands flat on the table, with her fingers touching the other hands. She was dressed in traditional Gypsy Rosa-Lee garb that was less than original. Nash took a point off the killer for that one. She’d had a long veil covering her face that had been photographed and then pulled back with tweezers for identification. There was a lot of blood, most of it in a spreading stain across the inlay of the table.

Amanda wasn’t seated alone. The sick bastard had brought her four guests to make up the séance. Equally distanced around a Ouija board were four shop mannequins. Their hands were on the table and spread to join the people on either side of them, making a circle with Amanda Keys at the centre. They had been dressed to look like certain characters in his sick game. This had taken a lot of planning. The four dummies resembled Paige Hunter, Zoe Connolly, Catherine Howard—and Jessica Hunter, the only one that was still alive. ‘Oh shit. The Hunter sister is in danger. He’s after Jessica.’

‘It could be him playing, sir.’ Renshaw didn’t look convinced.

‘No, I’m telling you this is his calling card and our invitation to the next scene. Get some officers to her house now and check on her. I don’t care if she’s at work. Bring her into protective custody. Lock her in one of the cells if you have to. I don’t care what you do but keep that girl safe. He’s not getting this one.'

‘Sir.’ Renshaw turned to leave the room, and Nash shouted for Brown to come in.

‘Sir,’ Brown said, averting her eyes from the table.

‘Get onto every outlet selling mannequins in a fifty-mile radius, and then see if there have been reports of shop dummies being stolen. Go back six months. No. Go back as far as you have to in order to find this animal. Our clue is in finding out where these dummies came from.’

‘I’m on it.’

He motioned to one of the SOCO team with a camera. ‘Get a picture of this part of the table. I want to see this writing more clearly.’

‘We already have, sir.' He handed Nash the camera showing the high-resolution image.

'When you go to print, make this one a priority. I want a blow-up of this photograph as soon as we can,' Nash said.

‘I’ll try to get it to you within the hour.’

Robinson stood beside Nash. ‘The killer must have left the room before she was dead. How hasn’t he seen this if we have?’ he said.

‘It could be that he did see it and is throwing us a few crumbs. Being a cocky bastard. For all we know, he might have written it himself. We’ve had Jon Finch under surveillance for days. He’s been nowhere near here. According to patrol, every second of every day is accounted for. I don’t get it. How have you done it? How’ve you pulled it off, Jonny boy?’

Nash looked at the photo again. ‘I want to see this in better detail back at the office. In the meantime, Bill, we’ll have the writing properly tested, but is there any fast way of knowing whether she wrote it or he did?’

‘Can’t tell and wouldn’t like to make a guess. However, if you had my hand tied behind my back and had someone kick me in the bollocks, I’d say probably her. Female, small writing. She either kept it small so that he wouldn’t see it or didn’t think to make it bigger. That’s putting a lot of trust in police forensics.’

‘Thanks, Bill. Even if we can’t say for sure until we get it tested and get handwriting samples, it’s something to go on. If we think Amanda wrote it, I’m more likely to trust it and not think it’s just another white-rabbit run-around from The Florist.’

He adjusted his mask to ensure that his breath wouldn’t move or contaminate any evidence. Nash put his face close to the writing. The blood almost touched his nose from this angle, and he could smell it. Nash got his head as close to the position that Amanda Keys was in when she died. He wanted to see what she saw. She may have had the foresight to move her head to the left as she’d died to hide the word from her killer.

The last note and her dying testament read:

Jon si

‘I failed to protect her, and she wrote her last thought to me. This is a message to help me after I let her down. She’s telling me. It’s Jon, Silas.’

‘Who’s Silas?’ Robinson asked.

‘I am.’

Since Maxwell Jones had been cleared, Jonathan Finch had been the primary suspect. It looked as though they were on the right track, and it was time to bring him in.

Nash flinched as he heard a voice he recognised. And he knew the tone, too.

‘What’s going on? Is Amanda okay? Let me get in.’

He left the crime scene and headed Jessica off at the pass. Taking her elbow, he guided her away from prying eyes.

‘Can we get in my car, please, Ms Hunter, and we can talk?’ He was taking his whites off and putting them in a yellow crime scene waste bag.

‘Tell me. Is Amanda all right?’

‘Not here.’

‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’

‘Bloody hell, woman. Will you just get in the car before you announce to the whole world that something’s happening?’

‘Sorry.’

She had tears in her eyes by the time Nash opened his passenger seat for her and guided her in. He went around the other side and drove away.

‘She’s gone, isn’t she?’

‘I’m afraid so. Yes.’

‘You bastard. You absolute bastard.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘It’s too late to be sorry. This is on you.’

‘You think I don’t know that?’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Somewhere quiet where we can talk.’

‘You didn’t listen to her. You were supposed to protect her.’

Nash stopped the car on the seafront, and they watched the waves breaking on the shore. It was cold, and there was only one dog walker on the sand throwing a ball from a plastic launcher while two golden retrievers chased after it. Jess was still pointing out Nash’s failings, and she was crying—albeit quietly, thank God.

‘Right,’ Nash said with a gentle touch on her coat sleeve. He leaned over her and searched in the glove box for a packet of tissues. ‘I want you to tell me everything that was said between you and Amanda. Every word from the beginning.’

‘There were a lot of them, Inspector because while I went into it as sceptical as you, I gave her the time of day and listened. I still don’t believe in ghosts and the afterlife and all that crap, but I was open-minded about it, unlike you.’

‘Stop talking, woman. Can’t you hold your flapping mouth for even a second? You could be next.’

That stopped her. Her hand was raised to point at him. No doubt to list another failing on Nash’s part, maybe for not inviting the lady in white, the silent monk and the headless horseman to dinner. She stopped dead. He had the conscious thought—alive, not dead. He wanted her to stay that way. This woman was vibrant and young. She had all the answers and opinions that were the right of passage for a person under thirty. He had to keep her alive. Forget the rest of the force. Nash knew her. It was his responsibility.

The killer must know her too. He’d have done his homework. Jessica Hunter was the only living person at the séance table. He doubted he only knew her as Paige Hunter’s sister. By the fact that he’d chosen a dummy of her to take that fifth seat, he had to assume he knew about her involvement with Amanda too.

‘You’re not going to be alone for a second,’ Nash said.

‘Okay, but keep them outside. Nobody in the house. I can’t have strangers parading in and out and upsetting my parents more than they already are.’

‘Outside? Like we did for Amanda? If you sneeze, an officer is going to be next to you to hand you a hanky. You will shower with the door open and either talk—you’re good at that—or sing Happy Birthday for all I care, but the second they can’t hear you, my officers are in there. You will sleep with the bedroom door open and somebody guarding your doorway.’

‘You’re frightening me, DCI Nash.’

‘I’m scared too, kid, and that’s a good thing. It’s okay to be terrified because that’s what keeps us one step ahead. Here’s my promise to Paige. I won’t lose you too. I won’t.’

‘Will he come tonight?’

‘I don’t know, but when he does, we’ll be ready for him.’

‘You know the best thing about dying would be seeing Paige again.’

‘You aren’t going to die, and I thought you didn’t believe in all that afterlife rubbish.’

‘I don’t, so the best thing about dying is not dying.’

‘Here’s to living.’

‘What have you got?’ Bronwyn Lewis asked.

‘We’re stretched, Ma’am,’ Nash said. ‘Three teams deployed on around-the-clock surveillance. It’ll lighten the load when we bring Finch in today, but I’ve still requested another twenty bodies, as agreed.’

‘Apt choice of words in this case.’

‘Sorry. We’ve got Finch wherever he goes. We don’t think he suspects anything. Jones is Jones. He’s a pain in the arse and thinks it’s a game to keep losing his shadows. The killer’s adapting on the hoof. That is a big leap from his MO, and when a killer drops his form, it means he’s either very calculating and calm or he’s on the slide and coming apart. Both are equally dangerous.’

‘Tell me about Finch.’

‘I’ve got a horrible feeling about him.’

‘And when you have a feeling, Nash, we ignore it at our peril. Coffee?’ Bronwyn thumbed the intercom and ordered drinks for them. As an aside, she told the person receiving to bring two cakes in as well. Bronwyn Lewis had a great figure but lived her life on a diet. Or, Nash mused, maybe it was a continuous string of diets. When Lewis ate cake, it meant that she was worried. And when Lewis was worried, Nash had to keep his head down even lower than the troops. He was in the direct line of fire. ‘Go on,’ she said.

‘When we knew it couldn’t be Jones, everything—and I mean everything—pointed to it being Finch. It had to be him because he’s the only person close enough to Jones to have the necessary intel on him.’

‘Motive?’

‘In a court of law, it would be circumstantial. The motive is well covered, but it’s a strong one. It’s jealousy and resentment. This guy has watched Jones succeed his whole life, while Finch packs candles in boxes for a living. I’ve pulled his finances, and the bank balance isn’t great. There’s more going out than coming in every month. And it shows a big hit of cash from Jones every few quarters. They might be best mates, but I think there’s a whole world of resentment there.’

‘Is it enough to bring him in and hold him? We only get one shot at this.’

‘Are you suggesting that we leave him out there and give him more rope to hang himself or somebody else?’

‘Something like that, I think. What I’m saying is if we mess this up, we’re stuffed. We’ll have blown the element of surprise and lost our options. The second we bring him in, we’ve got ninety-six hours to charge him or let him go. We have to be sure about this, Silas. It’s too big to get wrong.’

‘We’ve had eyes on him for five days, and he’s so clean he’s squeaking. He does the school run. He goes to work. He comes home. Hell, last night before Keys was murdered, he stopped off at Booths and came out with wine and flowers. The team were betting on it being an affair, but he took them home to his wife. He was there all night as far as our officers could tell, but for all we know, he could have a secret tunnel in and out of his house.’

‘Could you be wrong?’

‘And here we have the problem. It has to be Finch, but a couple of things aren’t lying right with me and here’s that feeling I told you about.’

‘Hit me.’

‘Finch isn’t all that bright. He’s nowhere near as tuned in as Jones. Our killer is sharp. Look at the scenes. They are intricate and planned. And then, when every detail is in place, he goes in, and his timing and precision are like a surgeon making his first cut. The MO feels all wrong for Finch.’

‘Who else have we got?’

‘Jones mentioned one of his tenants, a bloke at Ulverston, but I’m not liking him for it. I’ve been into him with a fine tooth comb—a couple of parking tickets, always paid before they double, and that’s it. Not a blemish. Divorced with no problems, it’s all amicable enough, and he has regular access to the kids. New partner for a few years. All the children adore him. Doesn’t fit the profile. Loads of mates, and everybody seems to like him.’

‘Who else?’

‘Hell, boss, I haven’t got a deck of cards full of suspects. That’s it. Steve Hill, the tenant, but he’s a rank outsider, and Finch, who’s being pegged for it, but he feels wrong too. Nobody else. Nada.’

‘So where do we go from here?’

‘I have no idea.’