‘Are they making progress with anything?’
‘Some.’
‘One step forwards, two steps back I suppose.’ As she heard the phrase, Kim stepped towards the kitchen.
‘You didn’t use the oven, Mum?’
‘Of course I did. There’s some chilli on the hob.’
‘Wait – you used the oven?’
‘Of course I did.’
Heart in mouth, Kim saw the casserole on the hob. God alive, had she cooked the chilli inside the oven? She slowly opened the oven door. The other casserole dish was still there, but she thought she could smell ashes …
What does a million quid smell like when it’s burnt?
She pulled out the pot. Placed it on the hob.Please Mum,she thought,don’t be the person who puts the oven on preheat even if you’re just using the stove.She lifted the lid.
The cash was intact. The smell of ashes was probably just her mum’s cooking.
She was so dazed by what had happened in Edward’s garden two nights earlier that she could do nothing but stare. She was now certain that those awful customers, Tank and Fire, had lied about their relationship (the slap was the clue) and lied about the source of their money (in a cashless age, who sends a box of banknotes?). The idea that they were both retiring to Devon having made enough to live off for the rest of their lives was crap. They were buying her beautiful penthouse – she really did think of it as hers – to hide the cash they had made with their crimes. Parachute meant drugs. A million pounds from drugs.
Kim knew what she had to do.
Chapter Forty-Nine
The death of the Hearst twins at the bottom of Ladram Bay during what was described as a ‘police operation’ caught the imagination of the town. Edward’s feet had barely touched the ground since the nightmare had played out at his house, and he had been desperate to see Kim. But the police had urged them not to be in touch with each other at all while their statements were taken, as defence barristers would seize on that in court. If there was a court case.
Since that evening, he had rung Kim only twice. Her reply simultaneously confused him and put his mind at rest:
I’m gonna be a bit private for a few days. I know you’ll understand.
It was strange, having the full story and being able to say so little on air. Jordan Callintree had got all the information and begged Edward to give out only the broadest details – not to say, for example, that the Hearst twins had fallen from his own garden or what the circumstances of their final hours were. No one anywhere connected the Hearst deaths with the Toppings crash or the Wrigley murder.
A huge memorial was planned for them in Exeter Cathedral, which made Edward nauseous. Wendy Wrigley was still missing. Edward understood that Jordan needed to be the one to solve it, and they agreed that Jordan would present the solution as a scoop on Edward’s show. Aspinall was getting jumpy but Edward no longer cared.
He did his nightly programmes. The calls were on the vandalism of six ‘Branscombe in Bloom’ flowerbeds and the unlikely proposal to reopen Sidmouth Train Station, which had been closed in the Sixties and was now a tyre-fitting business. ‘How can you have a train station without rails?’ asked one listener, pointing out that the old railway line to Ottery St Mary and Tipton St John, laid in the 1880s, was now mainly a footpath.
There was only one public development in the pizza parlour case. The council, still considering the whole incident a mystery, proposed renaming a street in the centre of Sidmouth ‘Nina Lopez Alley’. They faced a backlash because the cobbled alley in question was not an attractive route. It ran down the side of Boots to the swimming centre car park and smelled when it rained. A middle-aged man rang Edward’s show to say, ‘We knew our council couldn’t run a tap. Now this.’
Edward found himself wondering how the Hearst/Wrigley network had operated. They could not advertise. Their daily work must have connected them with dozens of terminally ill patients. Perhaps Jonathan Wrigley went along with it – until money entered the equation. No wonder that enormous couple, the Boyds, were angry with Edward. Lily, in and out of her wheelchair, always in pain, had been promised release; and then the motorbike accident triggered so many questions that the operation was shelved. The Boyds blamed Edward for all the questions. Fair enough. Poor, lost souls. In a way they were victims of the gang too. And yes, they had definitely stopped him falling from the cliff. The crazed stamping he would have to forgive.
He had only one unanswered question now: why was Jonathan Wrigley in a white suit that day? He imagined his friend Hubert persuading him to walk in the forest, bring the crossbow, kill some rabbits or just use it for target practice. But surely he would not have worn a white suit at Hubert’s request? It was an odd thing to go walking in. Yet it helped the Hearsts, because it meant Wrigley was seen from the air and his death timed almost to the minute.
Perhaps at the start Jonathan Wrigley and the Hearsts were motivated by compassion for those poor, hurting people, sick and lonely in big rural houses or rattling around in council flats, aware of their dementia or with tumours fit to burst. Bone cancer, Parkinson’s, Motor Neurone Disease, Huntington’s. Would this case ever get to court, if Wendy Wrigley was ever found? He imagined the expressions on the faces of twelve jurors being asked to understand what on earth it was the brothers had done with a centrifuge and Actinium from their radiotherapy unit to create the perfect murder weapon: like a disappearing dagger.
He booked himself an appointment at the audiologist to get a new hearing aid.
‘What happened to the last one, sir?’
It was stamped on by a man with a New York City cop outfit who thought I’d stopped his wife dying.No, he wouldn’t trouble them with that.
‘Um, a cat ate it,’ Edward lied.
‘We can clean it if—’
‘No, no thank you. I couldn’t do that.’ As the hearing tests got underway, he felt a text arrive and hoped it was Kim.
