‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘Well, if it was all above board then why weren’t you honest about it?’ I snap. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to leave.’ Despite my bravado I feel a flash of fear when he steps in front of the door.
‘I thought – hoped – we could try and figure this thing out together. We need to find out who killed Dotty.’
‘I need to leave, Dennis.’ My heart races when he doesn’t move. ‘Dennis?’
He steps aside and lets me pass and I run downstairs and grab Solly, taking him out the back door before Dennis can follow.
When I reach the villa I double-lock the front door and call Josh. He doesn’t pick up. I check the Find My app. He’s not at the office but at the Filton flat again. I need to ask him why he keeps going there. I’ve mentioned afew times that we should go over and sort it out, ready to rent it out, but he said we need a few repairs done before that can happen.
The house suddenly feels too spacious, too silent, and when someone buzzes the intercom on the main gate I jump in fright. Dennis must have followed me here. It buzzes again, and I run up the stairs and down the hallway to speak into it. I relax when I see it’s DI Shirley.
I open the front door as she drives through the gates. She gets out of the car and follows me down to the kitchen. I can tell by her body language she’s still annoyed with me. Once she’s sat at the table I tell her everything that has happened, right up to finding out Dennis is Sidney S. Crane.
‘Wow, you really have been a busy bee,’ she says as she scribbles this all down in her notebook, and she doesn’t make it sound like a compliment.
‘You need to show me the sculpture.’ She eyes me sternly; her fluffy hair is a puffball around her face and she looks like she slept in her clothes. She’s a police officer, a detective, I remind myself. She helped put my dad away. She was kind to me and Alison during the trial.
She looks up at me expectantly when I don’t say anything. ‘Well? Can I see it?’
‘What … what will happen to it?’
‘We’ll have to take it away, of course. For evidence.’
Reluctantly I get up and grab my keys and together we walk through the woods. As we do so, I tell her about Lila seeing a man with flowers on Saturday andI explain about the patch of teal satin I found. ‘Dennis told Dorothea’s agent, Gabe, about the sculpture and I think it might have been him, looking for it.’
‘I’ll talk to Gabe Mitchell, don’t worry.’
DI Shirley looks perturbed when I show her the sculpture. She takes a series of photographs with her phone from all possible angles. Of course she’s going to be interested in the sculpture, I tell myself. It could give clues as to who killed Dorothea.
I wait by the bench while she examines it and then she turns to me, her expression serious. ‘Please don’t allow anyone else down here. I don’t want this contaminated any more than it might already be. I’ll be sending a team in to carefully remove it.’
Then she climbs the stairs out of the bunker and I follow her. Solly, as usual, sits guarding the door.
‘Can I ask you a question?’ I say as I show her out.
‘Of course. But don’t expect me to answer if it’s about this case.’
‘It’s about my mum.’
She stops by her car. ‘Go on.’
‘Alison has started to doubt that my dad killed her.’
DI Shirley’s eyes narrow. ‘I see.’
‘She wants us to go and visit him in prison. But you were one of the officers on that … case …’ I swallow. It sounds so sterile calling it a ‘case’ when it’s about my own parents. ‘Could there have been any doubt?’
‘A jury found him guilty, Imogen. They found him guilty beyond reasonable doubt. Can we ever be onehundred per cent sure? Of course not. But all the evidence supported his conviction.’
‘And … the evidence was …?’
‘You were at the trial,’ she says gently.
‘Not all of it. I was too young. I didn’t sit through all of it.’ And I’ve never wanted to know the full details, deeming it too painful.
‘Oh,’ she frowns. ‘Right, yes. You were there for the verdict, I remember that.’
