Toby begins his fidgeting again, touching his face and rubbing his thighs. ‘I… I don’t know. He’s just a guy.’
‘You expect us to believe that?’
‘Why not? Muggers don’t usually show ID, do they?’ He lets out a snort of laughter but curtails it when he sees the reaction.
‘Don’t play games. He wasn’t a mugger. We’ve already identified the man as Oliver Selby.’
‘I… I didn’t know that. I mean, at the time. I didn’t know it was him.’
‘I think you’re lying to us again, Toby.’
Cody decides it’s time to get heavy-handed. ‘I don’t think you realise just how serious this situation is. This is a murder inquiry. We’re giving you a choice here. Either you can help us find Alexa’s killer, or you can do everything in your power to make it more difficult for us. Now, when we find Oliver Selby, we’re going to ask him exactly what went on between the two of you. In the meantime, we’re going to bring in a lip-reading expert to examine this video and tell us what words you’re speaking. But understand this, Toby: if you insist on making us jump through hoops, you can be absolutely certain that we are going to throw the book at you. Now, what’s it going to be? Help us or obstruct us?’
Toby squirms a bit longer. ‘All right. He told me was Alexa’s husband, okay?’
‘Okay, so why didn’t you tell us this before? Why did you deny meeting him?’
‘Because… because I thought that if you spoke to him, he might say bad things about me, the way Alexa did. I didn’t want to get into trouble with the police.’
‘What kind of bad things? Why was he so angry with you?’
‘You know that already. Because of the stuff I said to Alexa. She must have told him about it.’
Cody lets out a long sigh of exasperation. ‘Oh, Toby, Toby. You really need to stop treating us like idiots. The fight on that video happened before your membership got cancelled. If Oliver was ordering you to stop talking to his wife, I think you would have done so immediately. She wouldn’t have needed to complain to the staff. I think this was about something else.’
‘No. It really wasn’t. I hadn’t done nothing else.’
‘No? Perhaps you’d like to explain these to us, then.’
He nods to Webley, who calls up the seductive images of Alexa on her computer.
‘For the recording,’ Webley says, ‘we’re showing image gallery SR1.’
They let the sequence run in front of Toby’s astonished eyes.
‘Where… where did you get those?’
‘From your various social media accounts.’
‘That’s illegal. You can’t do that.’ He turns to Cody. ‘Can she do that?’
‘If there’s one thing I know about the internet, Toby, it’s that once you put something out there, it’s there for ever, even after you think you’ve deleted it.’
Toby looks to be on the verge of tears. ‘I… they were just a bit of fun. I didn’t mean any harm.’
Webley says, ‘Oliver Selby didn’t see it that way, though, did he? In fact, I think he was pretty upset about it. That’s what the fight was really about, wasn’t it?’
‘I…’
‘WASN’T IT?’
Even Cody almost jumps at the sound of Webley’s raised voice.
‘YES!’ Toby shouts back. ‘Yes. Okay. I did post a few things about her. I didn’t expect… I mean, you saw how he was. I thought he was going to kill me. He was so angry. I had to tell him the truth to get him to calm down.’
‘The truth?’ Cody says. ‘What do you mean by the truth?’
‘That… that it wasn’t me. I didn’t create those pictures. Someone else did. I was just posting stuff that someone else had given me.’
‘Who, Toby? Who gave you the images?’
Toby wrestles with his conscience. And then he says, ‘The friend I told you about. Sam.’
* * *
The way Toby tells it, he didn’t really think it through when he posted the photographs of Alexa on his social media accounts. He didn’t name her in the posts; instead, he put comments alongside the images such as ‘Isn’t she the most beautiful woman in the world?’ and ‘Supergirl in the flesh.’ He certainly never imagined that someone would recognise Alexa and inform Oliver – a possessive, jealous man who, unaware that the images were fake, wasn’t going to stand idly by while someone was photographing his wife in her underwear.
Scared out of his wits during the attack by the furious Oliver, Toby gave up Sam’s name. In the immediate aftermath, he contacted Sam, who stopped going to the exercise class lest he suffer a similar fate or worse.
Now, his part in all this having been uncovered, Sam seems to have gone into even deeper hiding. By the time Webley reaches her house that Saturday night, the police have tried phoning him numerous times. They have even sent a couple of uniforms over to his flat, but they couldn’t even get him to respond to his intercom.
Webley doesn’t think it’s such a great loss. Yes, they’ll have to speak to him again at some point to close off that avenue of the investigation, but she’s not convinced that the whole Toby/Sam thing is the best use of police time. Far more important to chase up the Oliver Selby angle.
And then she thinks, But what do I know? Maybe that’s why I’m just a detective constable. Maybe a brainbox like Inspector Morse or DCI Vera Whatsherface would tell me that the unlikely suspects are precisely the ones I should be going after because it always works on the telly.
Worthwhile or not, Webley has no doubt that someone higher up will assign her the job of trying to contact Sam tomorrow.
She sighs as she reaches her front door.
