Jessica closed the living-room door behind her, leaving Deborah on the stairs as she and Rowlands strolled around the room. Her colleague spoke quietly. ‘It’s so . . .’
Jessica didn’t let him finish the sentence. ‘I know.’ She didn’t know what she expected to find from someone who may well have kept a secret for fourteen years.
On a side table midway inside the room, Jessica saw a wallet. She thought about how much easier things would have been if the man had picked it up on his way out those weeks ago. Had he forgotten it, or left it behind on purpose? She skimmed through its contents. Benjamin’s driving licence sat in a clear section at the front, with notes and receipts. Jessica checked each one just in case but, aside from a liking for fast food – and a bizarre obsession with keeping the receipts – there was nothing untoward. She returned the wallet to the table and continued to look around.
Rowlands was checking a bookshelf at the back of the room where another door opened into a kitchen. Jessica pushed it shut as her colleague started to speak quietly. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked. ‘What are we even looking for?’
‘I don’t know. You know what the search teams are like, they’ll tear this place apart, but sometimes, they’re so focused on the bigger picture of bodies under the patio and so on, they miss the little things. Look for anything that might connect him to the stolen car he was in, or the allotments. It’s got to link together somehow.’
‘If I find a spade in the shed does that count?’
‘No.’
Jessica had largely told the truth. She knew from experience things could get missed but if they stumbled across something then all the better.
Leaving Rowlands in the living room, Jessica walked into the kitchen. There were plenty of new-looking appliances but nothing she wouldn’t have expected. A second door from the kitchen looped back into the hallway and Jessica went through, finding Deborah still sitting on the stairs. She had placed the letters in two piles on the floor and, as Jessica entered, answered the question the detective hadn’t asked. ‘That one is junk, the other one is proper mail.’
‘I want to go upstairs for a bit if that’s okay?’ Jessica said, although she wasn’t really asking.
Deborah shuffled the mail out of the way. ‘Do you know how he is?’
‘I . . .’ Jessica stumbled but knew the time had come. Deborah was looking at her and she could see from the woman’s face she already knew the answer. ‘I’m afraid he’s dead, Mrs Sturgess.’ It was pretty brutal but Jessica had reached the point where she couldn’t continue to stall.
Deborah nodded gently, waving her hand towards the mail. She looked more resigned than shocked. ‘I knew something would be wrong when I saw all that. Even when we lived together, he would always pick up the post straight away and go through it. If we ever went on holiday, it would be the first thing he did when we got back, even above unpacking. Since we split, he’s never gone away without letting me know. Sometimes it would only be a few nights when he was off signing books. I think I probably knew something was wrong the moment you told me he’d gone missing.’
Jessica looked down at Deborah, wondering what her former husband was like. She had only seen him as a contorted body in the wake of a car crash but the woman in front of her actually knew him. She didn’t seem overly upset but they had been divorced for six years. Jessica blurted out the question without thinking. ‘Why did you keep your husband’s name, Mrs Sturgess?’
Deborah stared back. ‘Are you married?’
Jessica shook her head. ‘No.’
‘If you ever had been, you’d know how hard it is to get your name changed in the first place. You send forms off to banks, insurance companies, employers, the tax office, all sorts of people. Everyone needs to see the original marriage licence too, not just a copy. Believe me, if you ever change your name and go through that hassle, changing it back and going through it all again isn’t going to be high on your list of priorities.’
Deborah smiled slightly as she finished speaking before adding gently, ‘We didn’t break up on bad terms, everything just came to a natural end. Maybe if we’d had a bad break I would have been more interested in going back to my maiden name.’
Not for the first time in the past few weeks, Jessica wondered how many other ‘normal’ things simply passed her by. She had never really thought about it but just assumed that, once you were married, things such as changing your name were all done for you.
Deborah shuffled to one side of the stairs. ‘You go look around. I hope you find what you’re looking for.’
Jessica felt an obligation to make sure the woman was all right but wasn’t sure there was much else she could say. She stepped over the pile of letters and walked slowly up the stairs, careful not to miss a thing. At the top was a varnished wooden landing, Jessica’s footsteps echoing loudly as she walked across it. The upper level felt a degree or two cooler than downstairs. A few weeks had passed since she found Benjamin Sturgess in the front of that crashed car and the weather had certainly turned. Most people would now have their central-heating systems turned on during the day but this property had been empty for that time. Somehow the downstairs had kept a degree of warmth but Jessica pulled her jacket tighter around her as she struggled not to shiver.
She could feel a slight breeze and followed it to her left where a door stood ajar. It led into a bathroom where she saw a small window above the bath open a crack. Instinctively Jessica went to close it but stopped herself, wondering if, as implausible as it seemed, it could somehow prove crucial when the full search team came in. She closed the door behind her, walking back onto the wooden floor, conscious that each step she took could be heard downstairs. She was about to open another door when Rowlands called her. She went quickly down the stairs, into the living room. Rowlands was on the sofa holding two mobile phones.
‘Where were they?’ Jessica asked.
Rowlands crouched and pointed towards a small gap between the sofa and the side table where Jessica had found the wallet. ‘There are plug sockets down here. They were on the floor charging.’
‘Where’s Deborah?’
Rowlands shrugged. ‘I’ve not seen her.’ He handed one of the devices to Jessica. ‘What shall we do? Call the forensics team? They’ll want to look at these.’
Jessica took the phone from him. It looked a few years old, with a sliding front panel and none of the fresh innovations many of the new gadgets had. ‘So do I,’ she said, pushing the front upwards so she could access the keys.
Rowlands was holding a far newer model than the one Jessica had taken. She knew a few people who had two mobile phones; one was usually for work, the other was personal. She wondered why a writer would need two. When she was younger and worked in uniform, one of the constables had two phones. The first was the one everyone he knew had the number for, be it his girlfriend, colleagues, parents or friends. The second had a pre-pay SIM card in it and he only gave out the number to women he met while he was out.
Jessica weighed the object in her hand. She suspected any second number probably wasn’t used for giving out to women but wondered if the reason for Benjamin Sturgess having two phones was because of a similar type of duplicity.
She tried to find a call history but using an unfamiliar phone proved harder than she thought. It had taken her weeks to get used to her own and its various functions. After accidentally muting the device, then taking a photograph of the floor, Jessica found the contacts list but the italicised message made her even more convinced that she was on to something.
‘No contacts found’.
She found the call history similarly empty and there were no text messages in the inbox. Jessica was about to put the phone down when she noticed there was a ‘sent messages’ folder towards the bottom of a long list of options. She felt her stomach jump slightly as two messages appeared on the screen. Both were to the same number, the date matching the day Isaac Hutchings went missing.