69236538256563

JIM
By the time we got back to Kenneth Steele House, Woodley and I mud-stained and soaking wet from
the woods, Fraser had just gone into interview with Joanna May. They’d picked her up at Bristol
Airport waiting for a flight out.
We heard everything second hand. The incident room was fairly buzzing with the news. Relief had
broken out across everybody’s faces, though there was an undercurrent of muttering that Benedict
Finch was seriously unwell, that it was a wait and see job. Nobody was celebrating properly because
of that, nobody wanted to.
Fraser had left instructions for Bennett to get down to the hospital and for Woodley and me to go
and visit Joanna May’s parents at their house. She wanted us to get to the bottom of the alibi they’d
given their daughter and find out what else they knew.
It was 3 pm by the time we pulled up into their driveway on a quiet street of semi-detached
Victorian villas far enough out in suburbia that streetlights were few and far between.
When we arrived, two uniforms made a discreet exit, leaving Woodley and me with a couple, in
their seventies, who looked as though they wished the ground would open up and swallow them.
We sat in their lounge. There was no tea, or coffee. Vast windows inset with a band of decorative
stained glass gave us a view of a pair of raised vegetable beds, where bamboo canes protruded from
the dark puddle-pocked earth and were tethered into triangular shapes.
On an ornate marble mantelpiece a vase of flowers was crowded by family photographs, which
spilled over onto adjacent bookshelves that reached from floor to ceiling. Amongst the faces in the
pictures was Joanna May.
Hanging above the fireplace was a large mirror in a gilt frame, which threw back a reflection of
our sorry gathering: Woodley and I standing in the middle of the room, tall and dark like crows, Mrs
May sunk into an armchair, a walking stick propped up beside her, dressings visible on her legs
underneath thick brown tights; Mr May beside her in a matching chair, wisps of white hair over his
forehead, cat hair on his trousers; both of them looking stricken.
‘She was our fourth child,’ said Mrs May once Woodley and I had taken a seat on a rug-draped
sofa. Her voice was tremulous and careful. ‘We had five children altogether. Rory died, our eldest
son, when he was a toddler, but we were a happy family, weren’t we, Geoff?’
Mr May reached over and took her hand, squeezed it.
‘But she wasn’t right,’ he said to Woodley and me, ‘from the start. As soon as she started
interacting with other children, we knew she wasn’t.’
‘In what way?’ I asked.
Mrs May lowered her eyes.
‘She was so manipulative,’ said her husband. ‘She competed constantly for our attention, she
bullied her siblings to get what she wanted, and she was always lying. The lying was constant, it was
infuriating.’
It was painful to watch Mr May talk. Everything he shared with us stripped another piece of his
pride away, and undermined more completely the life this couple had built.
‘If somebody lies to you habitually, Inspector, you can’t ever trust them,’ he said. ‘It erodes
relationships, even between a parent and child.’ He ran a trembling hand across the paper-thin skin on
his forehead. ‘We knew the way she behaved was wrong, and that she wasn’t what you might call
completely normal, but we never dreamed it would lead to something like this.’