Chapter Sixty-One

‘Claude must have been hiding and listening,’ Mike said. ‘He just seemed to step out of the shadows. He was holding some kind of cosh, lead piping wrapped in bandage or something, and he swung it hard.’

Mike wiped his hand across his eyes, his teeth clenched, anger in his voice now.

‘Poor Nancy didn’t even have time to look around,’ Mike said. ‘It got her right on the back of the head, knocked her face hard into the table. Blood flew over me, went onto the table, everywhere. Nancy just slithered onto the floor. She wasn’t moving.’

‘I thought you said you killed Nancy,’ Joe said, scribbling notes.

Mike looked at Joe and nodded slowly. ‘I did, because she wasn’t dead then. But I didn’t know that.’

‘So what did you do?’

Mike looked up as a tear tumbled from his lash. ‘I panicked. Claude was waving the cosh around, saying he was going to hit me next, but as Nancy stayed on the floor he started to panic too. I don’t know if he meant to hit her that hard. Maybe he was just listening and became angry, couldn’t control himself, but as Nancy bled on the floor he became frantic. I became frantic. I wanted to leave, but he said that if anyone found out then everything would come out. Her affair with me, the baby, and so Mary…’ He stopped and looked at the ceiling. ‘…Mary would find out.’

Joe looked surprised at that. ‘Mr Dobson, the woman you claim you loved is lying in a pool of blood on the floor, and you decide to say nothing?’

Mike banged his fist on the table. Alan jumped, but Joe stayed still, his eyes on Mike all the time.

‘I know that it sounds like the wrong thing now,’ Mike said, his teeth gritted, ‘and it was the wrong thing, but I wasn’t fucking thinking straight. I’d seen what happened to Nancy, but we had spent the night talking about what we were going to do.’ He ran his hands over his face. ‘I was going to lose her anyway,’ he said, more distant now. ‘I didn’t mean as much to her. I was a stop-gap, a replacement Claude, some below-stairs affair. So why ruin everything for something I couldn’t change? I thought she was dead, for Christ’s sake. Claude talked me into saying nothing, but that’s what he does, isn’t it? He’s a lawyer. I sell insurance, or double-glazing, or plastic guttering, but Claude sold lies, and sold them well. I was sucked into them. He would live with the guilt, not me. He’d hit her. All I had was the loss.’ Mike put his head down and wiped his eyes. ‘We decided to bury her.’

‘Why bury her in the garden?’

Mike’s chin trembled as he looked at the floor, and his hands wiped the tears into grubby streaks across his cheeks before he looked up again.

‘Because it meant we didn’t have to carry her anywhere.’

‘What did you think Gilbert was going to do after that?’ Joe asked.

‘I don’t think he knew,’ Mike said. ‘It just sort of happened. Maybe he was going to dump her out at sea and forge a suicide letter. Perhaps that’s why he put her in a cavity, because he would know the forensic stuff, and so some time away would give him the chance to work something out. Then he would just dig out the soil again, and she would be there, under the boards.’

‘Except that she wasn’t dead.’

Mike shook his head. ‘No, she wasn’t dead, but we didn’t know that then. She hadn’t moved for a while, and there was blood everywhere, and so we dug and then we ripped out the planks from the shed. We carried her out and then took off her clothes so there would be nothing from us on her and just, well, we just dropped her into the hole.’

Joe leant forward and spoke with his voice low. ‘So what happened next?’

Mike put his hand over his mouth and sucked in air. He thought he was going to be sick, his stomach turning over fast.

‘I heard the banging,’ he said. ‘It started off light at first, and I thought it was the soil landing on the planks, or maybe it was my pulse—but it got louder.’ He had to take a few short breaths and he licked his lips. ‘I realised then that she was alive and I wanted to get her out of there, but Claude said that it was too late to go back, that it would be attempted murder and my life would be over anyway, that we would go to prison together, that we had to keep going.’ He shook his head, his eyes filled with disbelief. ‘We filled that hole and I walked away, so that she would die down there.’

Joe and Alan exchanged glances, both quietened for a moment, before they turned back to Mike as he started to talk again.

‘I thought I could still hear the knocks coming from under the soil when I walked out of the garden,’ Mike said, his words coming out in a rush, the tears pouring faster now. ‘I left Nancy in there to die because I am a coward. I was too scared to do the right thing when Claude hit her, because I was too scared to face Mary, because I didn’t want to hurt her if she didn’t need to know. And then when I knew Nancy was still alive I became scared for myself, that I would go to prison for the rest of my life. I was naive and cowardly and frightened, thinking that I could go back to my life. But you know what? I couldn’t. The knocking stayed with me, that fucking bang-bang-bang, because all the time I could imagine Nancy underground, frightened, panicking, clawing at the wood, carrying my baby, the child I knew I would never have with Mary…because, you know, you have to actually get close to have a chance.’

‘Some might say that’s very convenient for you,’ Joe said.

Mike looked surprised and wiped the wetness from his cheeks. ‘It doesn’t feel convenient,’ he said. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re a suspect in Hazel’s case, and so you know we’ll take your DNA. You don’t know what evidence we have in Nancy’s case, and so you give us an account that blames someone else. But there are problems with your story.’

‘It’s not a story.’

‘The first problem is that Nancy Gilbert’s child wasn’t yours,’ Joe said.

Mike jolted in his chair and he gripped the edge of the table.

‘Do you think we hadn’t considered a jealous rage, the possibility that she was carrying someone else’s child?’ Joe said. ‘Checks were done, and it was Claude’s child.’

The detective’s voice seemed to swirl around Mike, as if he was talking from another room, all faint echoes.

‘But she told me it was mine,’ Mike said, almost to himself.

‘She got it wrong then, because it wasn’t. Maybe her and Claude got on better than you thought. If you killed her to stop Mary finding out about your child, then you made a mistake. It was Claude’s baby.’

Mike shook his head, his eyes scared now. ‘No, this isn’t right. Nancy told me, she was sure.’

‘And there’s something else too,’ Joe said. When Mike looked at him, confused now, Joe bent down for something that he had stored under the table. It was a large brown paper bag; when Joe put it on the table, it made a loud clunking noise.

Mike looked at the bag, and then back at the detective. ‘What’s in there?’

Joe reached in and pulled out another bag, this time clear plastic, sealed with a red tie. Joe held it up. Mike could see red smears on the inside of the bag, and there looked to be a piece of metal, heavy and long, with a bandage wrapped around one end.

Mike had seen it before, twenty-two years earlier. His lip started to quiver. What was going on? He didn’t understand.

‘We found this in your garage,’ Joe said.

Mike tried to say something but then he realised that he didn’t know what to say.

‘It was wrapped up in a towel, covered in blood,’ Joe continued. ‘Fresh blood. Hazel’s, we reckon.’

Mike’s hands became clammy.

‘Do you want that lawyer now?’

Mike nodded, and then the room seemed to fade out as he slithered slowly to the floor.