‘It’s not all on you. Sitting on a train travelling up and down to Manchester every week has given me a lot of time to think and … it won’t be easy, but it will be better, after all it’s not just us. We’ve got Emma and Luna.’
‘Yes, we do, and it would make her day if you were the one to pick her up from Dad’s tomorrow.’
‘That won’t be a problem. I’m interviewing the keynote speaker at 3 p.m. and I’ll leave straight after,’ said Rob as Henley’s phone began to vibrate across the kitchen table. ‘Is there anything else going on with you or is it just the case?’
Henley groaned as her argument with Pellacia and the arrival of DC Copeland entered her head. ‘My mum always said that half the battle when working in a team was managing people and their egos.’
‘No, it’s more than that,’ said Rob. ‘There’s been something bothering you for a while. Even when we were on holiday there were times when you just seemed to disappear into yourself. You had the same look on your face that Emma gets when she’s trying to work out a puzzle.’
Henley exhaled sharply. There were times where she was so focused on their marital problems that she forgot how well Rob understood her. Rob had an ability to see through her defences and to support her without being overbearing. She couldn’t blamehim for questioning her decisions to stay in a job which had brought danger to their front door on more than one occasion. She counted to five in her head and then she spoke. She told Rob all about Eloise’s belief that Rhimes had been murdered. Rob let Henley talk, only interrupting to ask questions when the journalist in him took over.
‘Fuck,’ he said when Henley had finished. ‘And you’re sure in regard to the medical evidence that Rhimes was strangled and didn’t die from—’
‘Death from asphyxiation, not suicide from asphyxiation,’ said Henley. ‘Linh has the toxicology report and there was no carbon monoxide poisoning in his blood.’
‘You can’t breathe it in if you’re already dead.’
‘Exactly. Someone staged Rhimes’s death to make it look like a suicide.’
Rob pressed his lips together as he leaned forward, placing his hands in a steeple. He was thinking, percolating his thoughts. ‘What have the others said? Stanford, Eastwood, Pellacia.’
Henley flinched. Preparing herself to hear Pellacia’s name followed by an accusation, but it never came.
‘Stanford and Eastwood don’t know about any of this. Eloise told Pellacia what I was doing but he doesn’t know what I’ve found,’ said Henley. ‘I didn’t want to burden them.’
‘Anj, come on, man. I’m looking at my wife andyouare burdened.’
‘Rob, I can deal with this on my own.’
‘Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should. I don’t want to see you—’ Rob paused as Henley’s phone began to vibrate across the kitchen table again. ‘Maybe you should tell Pellacia everything. The one thing I know is that he won’t let you break.’
Henley felt an anxious flutter in her chest. She had betrayed her husband on more than one occasion and he was entrustinganother man with her well-being. She reached for her phone. It was Linh. She held it up, showing Rob. He pulled a face, stood up and cleared the table.
‘I’m not sitting here listening to your mate talking about post-mortems or her latest escapades. Not tonight. I’ll be in the front room.’
‘I’ll join you in a bit.’ She accepted the call. ‘What can I do for you, Dr Choi?’
‘You sound bright, Detective Inspector Henley. What happened, did that husband of yours come home early and give you a good seeing to or was it the other one?’
‘Thank God I don’t have you on speaker. For the record, yes, he did come home early, and the second bit is none of your bloody business.’
‘You’re no fun. Well, let me give you some news about the case. Nathan Hall’s legs were pulverised. In my opinion he was hit with a mallet of some kind. Both knees and shins smashed.’
‘I can’t even imagine the pain,’ said Henley.
‘Even if he had survived, there would have been no way to save those legs. He would have been looking at amputation,’ explained Linh. ‘Moving up. Broken pelvis, again looked to have been smashed with a mallet of some kind and then we have his face. Broken jaw, broken collarbone and fractures to his skull and, as you already know, he was scalped.’
‘Are you able to say if all three victims were scalped with the same knife?’
‘I won’t know that until tomorrow. I’ve sent the photos of Nathan Hall and Tabitha Ashcroft to the knife expert to compare against Fox-Carnell,’ Linh replied. ‘But, what you really want to know is cause of death. Asphyxiation. He was still alive when he was hung from the top of the staircase. Hall also had cocaine and alcohol in his system, but it wasn’t enough to impair him. He would have known exactly what was going on.’
‘God,’ Henley groaned. She got up and removed two wine glasses from the cupboard.
‘Do you think there will be more? There’s something about these scalpings that rub me the wrong way. It’s not just wicked. It’s cold, Anj. You have to put thought into that. It’s not something you do on a whim.’
‘That’s what concerns me,’ said Henley. ‘Someone acting on the spur of the moment is going to be careless and make mistakes but when it’s planned like this. It just seems more dangerous.’
‘I don’t envy you. In fact, I never envy you.’
