Murder on the Menu by Fiona Leitch

Author:Fiona Leitch [Leitch, Fiona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780008436551
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Chapter Eighteen

I woke up the next morning feeling … well, I wasn’t entirely sure how I was feeling. Part of me felt a little happier about DCI Withers; he had taken my lead about Roger Laity seriously enough to go and see him, and I couldn’t really deny that it seemed unlikely Laity had killed Mel, whom, as far as anyone knew, he’d never even met. His surprise upon hearing that she’d made allegations about his business also seemed more and more genuine, the more I thought about it. And yet…

Roger Laity was definitely hiding something, and without investigating it, was there any way of knowing for sure that it hadn’t somehow contributed to Mel’s death and Cheryl’s disappearance? He’d also looked really uncomfortable throughout our visit, and that sports bag… I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it now because (like Withers) I was trying to wrangle the evidence into fitting some kind of theory, but he’d subconsciously shifted the bag around in his hands the whole time they spoke. I knew from my experiences on the beat that if someone was carrying something they didn’t want you to know about, or if they’d hidden drugs or illegal goods in their home, at least seventy-five per cent of the time they would inadvertently give it away by a tell-tale flick of their eyes, or by standing in front of it or something. The trick was in being able to spot it. What was in the bag? Where had he been going?

Of course, I was probably reading far too much into all this. His wife was away, and he probably was genuinely going to see a friend, or even a mistress; maybe his bag had been full of saucy underwear! I shuddered at the thought of Roger Laity in a pair of budgie smugglers. Maybe the guy I’d bought my van from should’ve opened his fetish shop in Boscastle instead.

You’re not a cop anymore; get used to it, I told myself. I should just let Withers get on with it. He knew what he was doing. He wasn’t out to get Tony; he was just using his own experience to go with the most likely suspect first. And when they couldn’t find enough evidence to charge him (because he didn’t do it), they would have to let Tony go. I hoped to God they didn’t have enough evidence, because although I had told my mum in the past that innocent people don’t tend to get put away, it did happen. Not often – although prisons are notoriously full of ‘innocent’ people, and maybe more of them than we realise actually are – but it did.

But, assuming they did let Tony go, would they ever find out who the real murderer was? The longer an investigation goes on, the less likely it is to be solved. There’s a ‘golden hour’ in any investigation when the evidence is fresh, the crime scene uncontaminated, and potential witnesses and suspects haven’t had a chance to forget things, concoct alibis or generally make stuff up.

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