‘No.’
‘It came on a USB drive, in a beautifully wrapped box with my name on it. A courier delivered it. But I don’t know who sent it. I suppose whoever it was wanted to create problems for Robert in his marriage. Though it took an expert less than a day to prove it was a fake.’
‘I’m sorry, but just to be clear, we’re talking about the video where Robert is in his office, uh, with a woman—’
‘Yes,’ Vanessa cut across her.
Judith digested that information. ‘And you said there was a letter?’
‘It wasn’t really a letter. Just a sheet of paper, with a weird quote on it.’
‘Can you remember what it said?’
‘I do.’ Vanessa paused. ‘Does it matter?’
‘It might.’
Vanessa looked at Judith in a moment of careful assessment. The facade of perfection cracked a little, and Judith could see the tiredness in the other woman’s eyes.
‘It said, “I tried to get help. That was a huge mistake.” Does that mean anything to you?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ Judith said, even as her mind turned the words over, then turned them over again.
The dog had spotted something more interesting on the other side of the street. He started to pull on the lead.
‘I have to go,’ Vanessa said. ‘But I want you to know, we won’t pursue the complaint Robert made against you. As a family, I mean.’
Judith wasn’t sure what to say. ‘Thank you,’ she said in the end.
‘Good luck, Detective,’ Vanessa Walker said as she walked away.
Judith watched her leave. ‘Good luck to you too.’
Chapter Eighteen
Judith went into the station and took the lift up to the tenth floor. It was quiet in the squad room, and she was too preoccupied to do more than nod a brief hello to the few officers who were there. She went straight to her desk, pulled a notebook out of her drawer, and started to write. Her thoughts always seemed to solidify and clarify when she had a pen in her hand.
She quickly jotted down the key facts in bullet points. Alexis Turner’s allegations, lies and disappearance. The video, sent to Chloe the influencer, and to Vanessa Walker, which according to Vanessa was a fake. Walker’s murder. The gun in Jack Miller’s hands.
Judith tapped her pen on her notepad, thinking. She turned on her computer and logged in to the Robert Walker murder file. She turned to the transcript of Miller’s interview with Rocky and Lucy and confirmed what she already knew. Jack had said that the gun had been sent to him, ‘wrapped up with that red velvet bow, and that weird arse letter’. And Vanessa had received a ‘beautifully wrapped box’ with her name on it, and a letter too. Judith searched the evidence section of the Robert Walker file until she found it—a scanned copy of the letter that Jack Miller claimed had been sent to him with the gun. The writing was familiar. It mirrored exactly the writing used in the note left on Robert Walker’s desk, the note that had saidJudith Lee did this.What the hell?
Judith copied the words of Jack Miller’s letter down on her notebook, and wrote the words from Vanessa’s letter directly underneath.
He’s still here, sometimes, but he doesn’t want to be.
I tried to get help. That was a huge mistake.
Judith tried, but she couldn’t extract much meaning from the letters. She ran an internet search, on the off-chance that they were quotes from something, but got nothing except Reddit posts about break-ups. She’d talk to Rocky in the morning, tell him about Vanessa’s letter and the USB. See what evidence could be gleaned from both. Jack Miller’s letter had been handwritten. If the handwriting in both letters was the same then surely that meant Jack was telling the truth. Someone... that elusive someone... was trying to set him up for Walker’s murder.
Except, no. The letters didn’t prove Jack’s innocence. Jack could have sent the letter and the USB to Vanessa Walker. He could have written the second letter found in his apartment himself, intending to send it to someone else.
Judith got up and went to the coffee machine, thinking, thinking all the way. When she got back to her desk, she went through the Robert Walker file again, looking for anything she could find on Miriam Hall.
There wasn’t much about Miriam in the file. Rocky had looked into her death as part of the larger investigation into Jack, and discovered quickly that she’d been a suicide. Lucy Phillips had thought to search through Robert Walker’s patient records looking for links to Jack, and she’d hit the jackpot when she found Miriam’s name. Judith had to acknowledge that that had been good work. Lucy Phillips had also requested the Coroner’s report, but she hadn’t gone much further than that, or if she had, she hadn’t yet recorded her work on the file.
Judith found Miriam’s date of birth on the Walker file, and ran a search for her in the wider LEAP environment. She found nothing other than the short event history noting Miriam’s suicide. She’d died at twenty years old, leaving behind a ten-month-old little boy, Cameron. No criminal record. Had she expected to find one? She couldn’t remember if she’d taken the time to look Miriam up on the system, ten years before. She didn’t think she had.
Judith stood up. She brought her half-drunk coffee to the kitchenette, dumped it in the sink, and set about making another. She didn’t want another coffee, but she needed to move her body. She was missing something. It nagged at her, an itch at the back of her brain that she just couldn’t scratch. She brought the coffee back to her desk, took out her phone, and checked the list of foster kids that Katy had given her. Three names from the bottom of the list she saw a name that made the skin prickle at the back of her neck. She called her friend.