Chapter 7: What Marlene Did Next
I met with a solicitor of my own on Monday morning.
Her name was Patricia Vane — a woman in her late fifties with reading glasses on a chain and the manner of someone who had heard every variety of human disaster and remained unshockable.
Ray had recommended her.
I laid everything on her desk.
The letter.
The photograph.
The payment records from the envelope Stephen had given me.
My father's unsent letter.
Ray's notes on the prepaid phones.
Patricia read without speaking.
She turned pages slowly, went back to reread two sections, and then set the papers down and looked at me over her glasses.
"The phone records," she said.
"How were these obtained?"
"Through a private investigator.
Legally."
"Good." She tapped the letter Marlene had written to Claire.
"This is a threat.
In writing.
With a specific demand and a specific consequence.
That matters." She picked up my father's letter.
"And this establishes a pattern of controlling behaviour your father himself documented." She set it down.
"The prepaid phones are the most serious element.
Two calls on the night of the accident, to and from untraceable numbers, never used again.
That is not something I can take to the police on its own.
But it is something a detective with the right motivation might find very interesting."
"Can we go to the police?"
"We can.
And I think we should — but not yet.
Not until we have one more thing." She folded her hands.
"We need to know who was on the other end of those calls.
The prepaid phone your mother used is a dead end.
But the receiving phone — if it was used for anything else, even once, there may be a trail."
"Ray is already looking."
"Good.
Tell him to look at anyone connected to your mother in the twelve months before the accident.
Business contacts.
Old family friends.
Anyone she might have trusted with something she needed done quietly."
I wrote that down.
"In the meantime," Patricia said, "I want you to do nothing that signals to your mother that this has moved beyond a family dispute.
No confrontation.
No accusations.
No contact unless she initiates it, and if she does, keep it brief and neutral."
"She left me a voicemail.
She wants to talk."
"Don't call her back yet.
If she calls again, answer and tell her you need a few more days to process everything.
Keep it calm.
Keep her thinking she still has time to manage you."
I nodded.
"One more thing." Patricia looked at me steadily.
"Your daughter.
What she heard that night.
A child's testimony is complicated, but it is not worthless.
At some point, if this goes where I think it may go, someone will need to speak with Lily.
A professional.
Someone trained in this.
I want you to prepare for that possibility."
"She's six."
"I know.
And she has been carrying this for two years." Patricia's voice was even but not unkind.
"The sooner she has someone to talk to, the better.
Not for the case.
For her."
I drove home and sat in the car in the driveway for ten minutes before I went inside.
Lily was at the kitchen table doing a drawing.
She had her tongue between her teeth the way she did when she was concentrating.
The drawing was of a house with a garden and two figures standing in front of it — a tall one and a small one.
"Who's that?" I asked, sitting down beside her.
"Us," she said.
"And Mummy's watching from up there." She pointed to a yellow circle in the top corner of the page.
"That's not the sun.
That's her."
I looked at the yellow circle for a moment.
"That's a good drawing, bug."
She went back to colouring.
"Dad.
Is someone going to find out what happened to Mummy?"
I looked at her bent head.
At the careful way she was staying inside the lines.
"I'm going to try very hard," I said.
She nodded, still colouring.
"Good," she said.
"Because I don't think it was an accident."
Four days later, Ray called.
"I found the other phone," he said.
"The receiving number.
It was used one other time — three months before the accident.
A call to a man named Gary Fenn.
He has a record.
Petty crjme mostly, but also one charge of vehicular negligence that was dropped eight years ago."
May you like
My hand tightened on the phone.
"He lives twenty minutes from where Claire's car went off the road," Ray said.
