Cherie went to punch her, but the woman reached for her fist and pushed her back. She stumbled onto her bottom, trying to grip anything as she went down. Her fingers dug into the mud and stone but everything was slimy.
The skies above were beginning to whirl into the trees. What had she been injected with? She never saw things like this when she’d been drinking?
‘A little bit further.’ The voice boomed in her ear, repeating that line over and over again in different voices. She heard Penny saying it, then Isaac, then Marcus followed by Christian and her children. The face in front of her morphed into her own and she backed into the coffin to escape the monstrosity. Sliding a little further, she felt her body drop as she landed in the box. Stiff with fear, the next thing she saw was the lid closing.
No one ever comes here. This is where we come to hang out. We can share a drink without being caught. We can hide from everyone and have a good time.
No one was coming. Maybe she was destined to forever haunt the pond, the new lady in the lake. Maybe the ghost Penny had seen was Cherie coming back from the future, warning herself of what was to come. As the drug took hold, she imagined that she was trapped under a layer of scum, ingesting pondweed as her lungs filled with rancid fluid. She reached up higher and higher but all she could do was sink. She was going, whirling into a huge sinkhole, down the plug and all she could hear was the woman’s laughter. That’s when she knew it was too late. She’d walked into a trap.
Chapter Sixty-Four
Gina and Jacob hurried to the door. She knocked hard.
Christian Brown answered. ‘I don’t know what’s happened here.’ He ran his hand over his head and left the door open as he went into the lounge. ‘I just came back to get some clothes and I saw this. I can’t get hold of Cherie. I’ve tried to call but her phone is off. I don’t know what to do. I shouldn’t have left but it got too much. I… I…’
‘Mr Brown, shall we go through to the kitchen?’ The living room was covered in glass, not a safe place to sit and talk.
‘It’s not much better in there.’ He stood for a second before pushing through and opening the kitchen door. Coffee granules covered everything in the room but there was something else that bothered Gina more. The black material on the worktop, torn and cut to shreds. The only thing she could identify on it was the hood. ‘We can’t touch all this. We need to go out to the car.’ As she turned, the back of the door was smeared in ketchup and she made out a finger drawing of what looked like a ghost.
The man looked like he might cry or scream in frustration, but he kept calm and followed them out to the car. ‘Can you call the station and update them. We need forensics here as well.’ She knew they were stretched to the limits and she could tell by Jacob’s grimace that he thought that too. They had a huge team at the building site, a part-team at the graveyard and now this. It was all kicking off at once. She opened the car door for Christian and closed it once he’d got in. She turned to Jacob and spoke in a hushed tone. ‘Did you see that cut up coat? Possibly our long black coat?’ She glanced at the oncoming police car.
PC Kapoor pulled up and two officers got out. ‘Alright, guv. We got here as fast as possible.’
Jacob nodded to Gina. ‘Right, we need to seal the house off. Put a cordon up and someone needs to stay on sentry duty and wait for forensics. You could be waiting a long time.’
‘We’re on it.’
Gina got into the driver’s seat. ‘I’m so sorry, Mr Brown. We are deeply concerned about what has happened in your house given that two people your wife knew have already been murdered.’
‘What? I thought there was only one, Alex.’
‘There’s been another and I’m afraid the person seen at the location of that murder was wearing a long hooded black coat, just like the one that is shredded in your kitchen.’
‘No, no, no, no, no. Are you saying my wife did this? She may have problems, but she’s not a killer.’ He wafted his hand across his face as he took a few deep breaths.
Gina turned the key in the ignition and opened the back window and an icy breeze drove a few raindrops onto the back seat. ‘We’re not saying your wife did this, but you can see how it looks. We need to bring her in and ask her what happened. Your wife has become a person of interest. I’m so sorry.’ Gina was trying to keep him calm and keep him on side. Cherie was more than a person of interest. She was very much a suspect and at the very least, the key to solving the case.
‘Damn. Why did I not do more? She’s been struggling. I should have been there but no, I walked out and took the kids.’
Gina wiped the sleep away that had formed in the corner of her eye. ‘Can you tell me what you mean by struggling?’
Jacob got into the back passenger seat and smiled over the headrest as he pulled out his pad. ‘Carry on.’
‘Over the past few days Cherie hasn’t been herself. She’s been drinking again.’ He paused. ‘I thought she’d recovered, as an alcoholic, but things have been getting worse. She was coming and going at all hours. She thought I didn’t hear her leaving the house in the night. She’d go out in the car and try to convince me that she’d been nowhere and accuse me of getting at her. Then I’d find drink bottles in her bag.’
‘Did she ever attend any AA meetings?’
‘She did back then, they were at the church on the high street. Anyway, with her drinking, I knew it was all happening again. There was something else?’
‘Go on.’ Cherie had been going to AA meetings at the church. Had she been back over the past couple of weeks? Had she attended a service and planted a Bible passage into the vicar’s mind?
‘On the night of our dinner party, last Saturday, Marcus, Cherie and Isaac seemed to be casting weird looks over the table. I felt a couple of kicks by my feet and the room had gone silent a couple of times. They all knew something. Then, while Joanna and I were cleaning up, the others went in the garden to smoke. Marcus seemed really upset but I later found out that Penny had left him, which in my book explained it, so I didn’t think any more of it. The kids stayed at my parents’ house on Saturday and I joined them yesterday. I need to protect my children from whatever’s going on, from their mother. She walked out on her job too, that just showed how badly things were going. I just want her to get better. I want to go back to how we were before she started drinking again.’ He stared out of the window like a broken man, shoulders slumped. ‘She didn’t kill anyone. She wouldn’t hurt a fly. I mean, she cared for old and vulnerable people for a living.’ He shook his head and scratched his chin. ‘At least, that’s what I wanted to believe. I’ve been so stupid.’
‘Tell me what you mean by that?’
‘Last week she walked out on her job. She said she couldn’t cope. There were far more than the pressures of working at the care home on her mind.’
Gina retied her hair. ‘Why did she start drinking?’
