‘And I need a time of death, please. It would be useful to know if he was drugged before he was stabbed as well. It looks like it to me, but it may give the daughter some comfort to know he was out of it when he was killed.’
‘I’ll see what I can do, but that will almost certainly have to wait for blood tests.’
Watson appeared a few seconds later, walking on the plastic sheeting in latex overshoes. ‘Keeping us busy this time,’ he said.
Dixon didn’t take the bait. ‘The daughter tells me there should be some photographs, the proper ones, printed and in a green paper wallet like the old days. My parents have got boxes of them at home.’
‘I know what you mean.’
‘There are some pictures of a fire at the Palace Hotel, Torquay.’
‘I’ll keep an eye out for them.’
‘Let me know straight away if you find them.’
‘I’ll scan them and email them over to you.’
The pathologist had appeared in the doorway behind Watson, and they both stepped to one side to allow an officer to lay stepping plates along the length of the hallway. ‘I can see why he was stabbed and not strangled, in case you were wondering. He’s had a laryngectomy. Cancer probably. They remove the larynx and he breathed through a hole about here.’ He was tapping a spot just below the knot of his tie. ‘Dead about twenty-four hours, I’d say, and I can’t confirm whether or not he was drugged without a tox screen, I’m afraid.’
‘The fire had been on. Did I mention that?’ asked Dixon.
‘No.’
‘It was just running out of gas when I got in there at five-seventeen.’
‘Marvellous,’ muttered the pathologist, disappearing back inside the cottage.
‘That coincides with what the neighbour that side says.’ Louise was standing under the gazebo behind Dixon. She had been helping with the house to house and looked soaked through. ‘About five o’clock yesterday, a visit from someone, she didn’t see who, just heard the doorbell go. Nothing since then and she hasn’t seen Geoff all day, not that that’s altogether unusual.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Mark and Sarah are here. They’ve got someone down there with a doorbell camera so they’re having a look at that.’
Dixon’s phone was buzzing in his pocket and had been for some time; a persistent buzzing. Someone was leaving it ringing until it cut off, then hitting redial. Over and over.
He slid his phone out of his inside jacket pocket and looked at the screen. Eight missed calls.
All from Jane.
‘Must be something going on. Jane’s been trying to get hold of me.’
Then Louise’s phone rang. ‘Hi Jane,’ she said. ‘Everything all ri—?’ She looked at Dixon, her eyes wide. ‘Yeah, he’s here. Hold on.’
Dixon reached out for the phone, a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good. That much was clear from the look on Louise’s face. ‘What’s up?’ he asked.
‘My father’s had a heart attack.’
It hadn’t taken long. Louise had said she’d get a lift back with Mark and Sarah, the patrol car blocking the lane had reversed out of the way, and Dixon was on his way to Weston-super-Mare hospital. He hadn’t even bothered to tell Jane to drive carefully because she wouldn’t have listened; that much was clear from the engine noise in the background of their call.
Rod and Sue had adopted Jane at birth and hadn’t batted an eyelid when she’d found her birth mother. Couldn’t have been easy. Not that the relationship had lasted long, Sonia dead from a drug overdose after only their second meeting.
The good that had come of it had been Lucy, Jane’s half-sister. Rod and Sue had become grandparents to her, of sorts, which fitted because Jane behaved more like Lucy’s mother than her sister.
Lucy was proof that things could go well, despite everything. In and out of care all her life, her mother an abusive alcoholic, and here she was, a police cadet about to sit her GCSEs.
Jane had come into her life at just the right time.
A heart attack. The poor old sod. Not always fatal these days; it did mean one thing though. They’d need to get a wriggle on and marry sooner rather than later if Rod was to walk Jane down the aisle. It had been postponed once already, although everyone had understood the reason.
Jumbled thoughts popping in and out of his head like the wisps of fog hanging over the rhynes as he raced across the Somerset Levels, lights on full beam.
The whole bridge team of six was accounted for now, all three pairs either dead, murdered or suffering from dementia. Surely that would be an end to the killing?
And what had happened during that fire?
Plenty of time to worry about that tomorrow. Louise, Sarah and Mark could handle it in the meantime.
He parked in the car park outside the Accident and Emergency Department, next to Jane’s VW Golf, Monty standing on the driver’s seat, his front paws up on the steering wheel.
Through the swing doors, walking confidently, with his warrant card in his hand, he pretended not to notice the receptionist tapping on the glass screen to attract his attention. Through the security doors as someone else was coming out, then he walked along the line of cubicles, the curtains drawn, until he recognised the voices inside.
‘How is he?’ he asked, through the gap in the curtains.
‘I’m fine,’ said Rod, his voice mumbled behind an oxygen mask. ‘They’ve got me wired to all these bloody machines.’ Patches had been stuck to his chest, a cannula in the back of his hand; there was even something clamped on the tip of his index finger.
Dixon glanced at the line moving across the screen, the blip coinciding with a loud bleep.
