Chapter Eight
The Woman with the Second Key
Nora did not arrest Cecily Whitmore immediately. She had learned, over twelve years, that the gap between knowing something and being able to prove it was exactly where cases went wrong, and she had no intention of letting this one go wrong.
Instead she went away for five hours, to the incident room that had been set up at the station, and she pulled everything they had on Cecily Okafor-Whitmore, née Okafor, born in Lagos, educated at the London School of Economics, married Marcus Whitmore twenty-six years ago, no children, patron of three charitable foundations, former non-executive director of two companies.
One of those companies was a property development firm that had been a joint venture with Clive Hennick.
The other had provided due diligence services to Vincent Aldgate's holding company between 2015 and 2018.
Nora looked at this information for a long time.
Then she pulled the phone records that had been obtained by warrant an hour ago.
Cecily Whitmore's phone had received a call on the night of the murder — eleven forty-three p.m. — from a number registered to a prepaid SIM that had been purchased in cash at a service station outside the city. The call had lasted four minutes.
Nora also looked at the bank records, which required more paperwork and another two hours, but which eventually produced, buried in a series of transfers through three different intermediary accounts, a payment of forty thousand pounds into a holding account linked to one of Cecily's charitable foundations, made four days before the murder.
Not eight hundred thousand. Forty thousand.
The judge had been paid to acquit. The wife had been paid for something else.
"The theory," Nora said to Pillay, who had been her shadow throughout the day and who was managing on energy drinks and nervous attention, "is this: Aldgate's people paid Whitmore to deliver the verdict. But Whitmore got cold feet. Decided to do the right thing — or at least decided that the money wasn't worth what it was going to cost him in terms of being able to live with himself. He wrote the letter on the legal pad. He was going to, what? Hand it to someone? Come forward?"
"Maybe just having written it down was him deciding," Pillay said. "Sometimes people write things to make them real."
"Yes," Nora said. "And someone found out he was wavering. Foy? He's the intermediary, according to the letter. He was at the house that night. Did Foy notice something — a change in the judge's manner at dinner — and make a call?"
"The eleven forty-three call to Cecily," Pillay said.
"Right. So Foy makes a call. Not to whoever hired him — that would leave a trace they didn't want. He calls Cecily. And Cecily—" Nora stopped.
"Cecily was already part of it," Pillay said quietly.
"She was already part of it," Nora agreed. "The forty thousand. That wasn't for acquittal — that was already spoken for by the eight hundred. The forty thousand was for something else. Something that might become necessary." She looked at the phone records. "A contingency."
"Kill the judge if he changes his mind," Pillay said.
"Not quite that clean," Nora said. "I think it was simpler and darker than that. I think Cecily Whitmore had her own reasons for wanting her husband dead. And Aldgate's people offered her a way to do it that came with a built-in maze."
Chapter Nine
Priya Mehta's Phone Call
The piece that didn't fit was Priya Mehta.
Dr. Priya Mehta, the family physician, had stepped outside during the drawing room gathering to make a phone call. She had said, when asked, that the call had been to a patient — she was a GP, she was occasionally on call — and that she'd been outside for about seven minutes.
The phone records showed that the call she'd made was not to a patient. It was to a number that turned out to belong to a senior official in the courts service named Richard Laine.
Nora went to see Laine at ten the following morning, in his office at the courts building, and he was already expecting her, which told her something before she'd said a word.
"Dr. Mehta called you," Nora said.
"Yes," he said. He was a thin, cautious man with the look of someone who had spent his career being careful and was not sure whether that caution had brought him to this moment or would be sufficient to see him through it. "She called to tell me that Judge Whitmore might be in trouble."
"She knew about the bribe?"
"Not specifically. But Marcus had said something to her — Priya was his physician, and also his friend, and he had been less careful with her than he thought he was being. He'd alluded, she told me, to being under pressure. To having done something he was going to have to face. She was concerned enough to call me because she thought—" He paused. "She thought someone might need to know. In case."
"In case something happened to him."
"In case," Laine said carefully, "the trial needed to be protected. Whatever that meant."
"Why you? Why not the police directly?"
He looked at his hands. "Because she wasn't certain. She didn't have facts. And Marcus was her friend. She didn't want to—" He stopped. "She wanted someone to know without it becoming official before she was sure."
"And what did you do with the information?"
"Nothing," he said. "Not yet. By the time she called me, it was almost midnight. I told her to sit tight. I said we would talk properly in the morning." He looked up. "And then at one a.m. I got a call telling me he was dead."
Nora sat with this. "Dr. Mehta knew something was wrong before it happened. And told you."
"Yes."
"And neither of you did anything quickly enough."
Laine looked at his desk. "No," he said. "We did not."
Nora thought about Priya Mehta's red eyes in the sitting room. The way she'd held the water glass. She had not been crying for Marcus Whitmore, or not only. She had been crying because she had almost had the information in time, and had not moved fast enough, and a man was dead.
"I need her on record," Nora said. "Everything she knows."
"She'll cooperate completely," Laine said. "She came to me last night wanting to tell everything. I told her to wait until she'd spoken to a solicitor. She probably hasn't slept."
"Neither have I," Nora said, and stood up to leave.
Chapter Ten
The Gun That Wasn't There
The gun was a Glock 17 with the serial number filed down.
This was itself information, because people who file serial numbers are people who have obtained guns illegally, and people who obtain guns illegally are people with access to certain networks, and those networks were traceable in ways that the people in them preferred not to think about.
The forensics team, in the meantime, had produced something interesting: gunshot residue.
There was GSR on Judge Whitmore's right hand. This was consistent with suicide — the gun in his right hand, the shot fired — except that the wound angle was not consistent with self-infliction. The bullet had entered on a slight downward trajectory that was inconsistent with a man shooting himself in the chest while seated at a desk. The angle suggested the shooter was standing, and taller than the judge.
There was also GSR on the outside of the door handle.
Not the inside. The outside.
Someone who had fired a gun, or been in very close proximity to a gun being fired, had touched the outside of the door handle. Not gone out and then come back in. Touched the outside of the door handle and then — what? Walked away.
The picture was coming together and Nora didn't like the shape of it, because the shape of it was too clean, and things that were too clean usually meant someone had thought very hard about constructing them.
She went back to Carrow House in the afternoon, alone this time, and stood in the corridor outside the broken study door and looked at the distance from the study to the stairs and from the stairs to the drawing room.
Forty-two paces. She counted them.
Less than a minute's walk.
And during the window when Mehta was outside making a call, and Trant was in the bathroom, and Cecily was in the kitchen — the drawing room had contained: Hennick, Ashford, and Foy. All three, apparently watching each other, none of them anywhere near the study.
But GSR on the outside door handle.
She stood in the corridor and thought about what she had: a judge with residue on his right hand suggesting the gun had been placed there after death, or that someone had forced his hand around it. A shot fired while he was seated by someone taller, standing. A door locked from the outside with a key belonging to his wife. GSR on the outside door handle.
Two people. She was sure of it now. Not one person who had shot, staged, and left. Two people — one inside, one outside. One had fired the gun, set the scene, opened the door. The other had been waiting in the corridor, had taken the gun — no, wait. The gun was still in the room. So the second person hadn't taken the gun. The second person had simply— what? Received the first person? Locked the door behind them?
She went back to the stairs.
She looked at the staircase. At the angle from the top of the stairs to the study door.
And then she saw it.
Not something physical. A gap in the logic she'd been carrying for twenty-four hours. A place where she'd assumed rather than verified.
She got on the phone to Pillay. "The GSR on the door handle," she said. "Have forensics confirmed which side of the handle specifically?"
"I can check." A pause. "Sergeant — it says the residue was on the lower outer edge. The part you'd touch if you were pulling the door closed behind you."
"Or," Nora said slowly, "the part you'd touch if you were closing the door with your back to it. If you'd just come out of the room and were pulling it shut as you left."
"Right. Either direction."
"But here's what I'm thinking," Nora said. "If you'd just shot someone, the residue would be on your dominant hand, primarily. And you'd pull a door closed with your dominant hand. The lower outer edge — that's a pull-closed grip, but with the hand lower than standard height. Lower. Shorter."
"Shorter than—"
"Than someone five feet ten or above," Nora said. She closed her eyes. "I need the height measurements we took of everyone at the scene last night. All six guests and the household staff."
The measurements came back in twenty minutes.
The only person in the house that night who was five foot four — and who was therefore consistent with the door-handle GSR position — was Eleanor Ashford.