Silent Kill: A Gripping New 2020 Detective Novella From a Sunday Times Bestselling Author by Jane Casey

Author:Jane Casey [Casey, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B07JK7WWPH
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-08-05T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

The last passenger on our list to interview was the elderly woman who had travelled the length of Northcote Road beside Minnie Charleston. Pete Belcott had grudgingly agreed to talk to the four Spanish students about what they had seen, which involved waiting around for an interpreter and an appropriate adult just so he could get four different versions of the same unhelpful story. On the whole I preferred our job, especially since where we were going was a definite step up from the council estates we’d visited first.

‘What do we know about Mrs Helena Griffiths?’ Maeve asked me as she pulled into a parking space on one of the parallel residential roads that led from Northcote Road to Wandsworth Common. There had been nowhere to stop outside the house, a red-brick Victorian villa that faced the common, beautifully kept and with a shiny Mini on the drive.

‘She lives in a nice house.’

‘She does indeed.’

‘Umm … She’s a pensioner. A widow. She lives alone in her nice house. She agreed to talk to us, but she can only give us twenty minutes of her time.’ I leafed through my notes. ‘That’s about it. I can’t think this is going to be very useful.’

‘You never know,’ Maeve said mildly.

‘She’s hardly a suspect.’

‘Everyone’s a suspect at the moment.’

‘Even Ashton Mayfield?’ I still felt guilty about assuming the worst of him.

‘He’s not top of my list, but he’s not off it either.’

‘I’m inclined to think we should take a closer look at Wilf Potter,’ I said slowly. It felt risky to reveal what I was thinking, in case I was dead wrong, but Maeve was looking encouraging. ‘He was tired and stressed. He could have snapped. Lashed out at her. He admitting leaning on her – maybe that was to disguise that he was actually stabbing her at that point. If someone told us she’d cried out as he was standing up, he’s explained it.’

‘Just because she annoyed him by being asleep?’

‘Maybe. Or maybe he knew who she was.’ I was trying to put it together, fumbling towards a reason. There was something he’d said that had caught my attention … not about the cat but before that. His wife? ‘He ran for the bus, didn’t he, even though he had the baby. He was determined to catch it. There are loads of buses on that route – he could have waited for the next one fairly easily.’

‘Good point. But we don’t have any evidence at the moment that he did anything. And we don’t have a motive.’

We had watched the CCTV many times, paying particular attention to the shove that Potter gave our victim before he got off the bus, but if he had the scissors or something else sharp in his hand, we couldn’t see it. The CPS would tell us they needed more than that if we approached them about charging Wilf Potter, and they would be right. No jury would want to send a man to prison for life based on what we currently had.

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