Duplicity Read online

  ALSO BY SIBEL HODGE

  Fiction

  Untouchable

  Where the Memories Lie

  Look Behind You

  Butterfly

  Trafficked: The Diary of a Sex Slave

  Fashion, Lies, and Murder (Amber Fox Mystery No 1)

  Money, Lies, and Murder (Amber Fox Mystery No 2)

  Voodoo, Lies, and Murder (Amber Fox Mystery No 3)

  Chocolate, Lies, and Murder (Amber Fox Mystery No 4)

  Santa Claus, Lies, and Murder (Amber Fox Mystery No 4.5)

  Vegas, Lies, and Murder (Amber Fox Mystery No 5)

  Murder and Mai Tais (Danger Cove Cocktail Mystery No 1)

  Killer Colada (Danger Cove Cocktail Mystery No 2)

  The See-Through Leopard

  Fourteen Days Later

  My Perfect Wedding

  The Baby Trap

  It’s a Catastrophe

  Non-Fiction

  A Gluten Free Taste of Turkey

  A Gluten Free Soup Opera

  Healing Meditations for Surviving Grief and Loss

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2016 Sibel Hodge

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503941106

  ISBN-10: 1503941108

  Cover design by @blacksheep-uk.com

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE OBSESSION

  THE OTHER ONE Chapter 1

  THE DETECTIVE Chapter 2

  THE DETECTIVE Chapter 3

  THE OTHER ONE Chapter 4

  THE DETECTIVE Chapter 5

  THE DETECTIVE Chapter 6

  THE OTHER ONE Chapter 7

  THE DETECTIVE Chapter 8

  THE DETECTIVE Chapter 9

  THE OTHER ONE Chapter 10

  THE DETECTIVE Chapter 11

  THE DETECTIVE Chapter 12

  THE OTHER ONE Chapter 13

  THE DETECTIVE Chapter 14

  THE DETECTIVE Chapter 15

  THE OTHER ONE Chapter 16

  THE DETECTIVE Chapter 17

  THE DETECTIVE Chapter 18

  THE OTHER ONE Chapter 19

  PART TWO REVENGE

  THE OTHER ONE Chapter 20

  THE OTHER ONE Chapter 21

  THE OTHER ONE Chapter 22

  THE OTHER ONE Chapter 23

  THE OTHER ONE Chapter 24

  THE OTHER ONE Chapter 25

  THE OTHER ONE Chapter 26

  THE OTHER ONE Chapter 27

  THE OTHER ONE Chapter 28

  THE OTHER ONE Chapter 29

  PART THREE DUPLICITY

  THE DETECTIVE Chapter 30

  THE OTHER ONE Chapter 31

  THE DETECTIVE Chapter 32

  THE OTHER ONE Chapter 33

  THE DETECTIVE Chapter 34

  THE OTHER ONE Chapter 35

  THE DETECTIVE Chapter 36

  THE DETECTIVE Chapter 37

  THE DETECTIVE Chapter 38

  THE DETECTIVE Chapter 39

  THE OTHER ONE Chapter 40

  THE DETECTIVE Chapter 41

  THE OTHER ONE Chapter 42

  THE DETECTIVE Chapter 43

  THE OTHER ONE Chapter 44

  THE DETECTIVE Chapter 45

  THE OTHER ONE Chapter 46

  THE DETECTIVE Chapter 47

  THE OTHER ONE Chapter 48

  PART FOUR LOVE

  THE ONE Chapter 49

  TWO WEEKS LATER THE DETECTIVE Chapter 50

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PART ONE

  OBSESSION

  THE OTHER ONE

  Chapter 1

  People always complain about their childhoods. My mum wouldn’t let me have any freedom. My dad wouldn’t buy me the latest trendy gear. My sister was the favourite.

  Honestly, they have no fucking idea how shit it can really be.

  I grew up on a rural dairy farm in the middle of nowhere. My dad was this big, beefy man. Always angry. Always wanting something different out of life but never willing to change anything. Always taking it out on my tiny little mouse of a mum. He was bitter and twisted. But it was never his fault. Oh, no, of course not. Why would it be? There was always someone else to blame. He was insane. But then so was my mum to stay with him and put up with it. Me, I had no choice back then, and Mum wasn’t the only one Dad liked to punish.

  Maybe some of the things I’ve done are wrong. Bad. But the thing is, if you grow up without love, you don’t know what it is. I don’t have the same kinds of feelings as other people. I don’t feel guilty. I don’t feel much, most of the time. Not about humans, anyway. From what I’ve seen, they’re all a waste of oxygen. Give me an animal over a human any day. They’re much more worthy. They’re uncomplicated, transparent. What you see is what you get. They nurture their babies. Do everything they can to keep them safe, unlike humans. Everything animals do is about survival, not about ugliness or viciousness. Not about making you suffer. They only attack to protect their young or territory or food. They don’t attack for the hell of it.

  So you can’t judge me. Not unless you were there. Not unless you know what that does to a person. And to be honest, I’m way past caring what anyone else thinks, anyway. It’s how I survived it all.

  My earliest memory was when I was about four. The cows were continually pregnant, of course, to make them produce milk, but I didn’t understand any of that back then. All I knew was that one of them was about to give birth. Dad didn’t name the cows. They weren’t important enough for names. They were just things to him. A commodity to exploit – a bit like me and Mum. They had an ear tag to identify them and that was it. But I named the pregnant one Jennifer. I have no idea why. When Jennifer was just about to calve, she was separated from the others and put into a concrete pen where she duly gave birth.

  I stood watching with amazement as this new little life entered the world. Apart from the bloody bits, the calf was beautiful. And he was going to be my new pet. I pictured myself feeding him. He would contentedly follow me around the farm everywhere I went. The nearest neighbour was ten miles away, and I had no friends. I didn’t even go to school then. But the calf would be my new friend. Maybe I could even sleep with him in my bed. And whenever the shouty arguments started between Mum and Dad, I could press my head against his warm hide for comfort and listen to his heartbeat instead to block everything out, and that would make everything OK. I’d love the calf and he would love me.

  I listened to Jennifer calling out to her newborn baby. Watched her nuzzling him on the ground where he lay, unsteady and bewildered. I felt her happiness in the air like something fizzing on the breeze. I slid my fingers through the metal bars and touched the calf, deciding on what to call him.

  My wonder was broken quickly by Dad flinging open the metal door to the enclosure and dragging the calf by his legs into a wheelbarrow. His face was an angry blob of fire, muttering swear words as he wheeled the calf out and yanked the enclosure door closed.

  Jennifer bolted towards the bars, body-slamming against them, crying for her baby. The calf strained his wobbly little head back towards her calls, trying to search for his mum.

  ‘Daddy, what are you doing? Jennifer wants her baby!’ I cried.

  ‘It’s no use to me. It’s a boy,
’ he snapped.

  I hurried to keep up with him as he walked away. ‘But where are you taking him?’

  ‘Never you mind.’

  ‘Can’t I have him instead?’

  ‘They’re not pets!’

  ‘But . . . why not?’ My little legs pumped harder next to him as I tried to keep up. I reached out a hand to stroke and comfort the calf as he made desperate little noises. ‘Daddy, please let me have him. I’ll look after him, I promise.’

  He grabbed my arm and flung me away so hard that I fell down on to the concrete path and grazed my elbow.

  I burst into tears.

  He stopped pushing the wheelbarrow and looked down at me, eyes screwed up with hatred. ‘Great! I’ve got another bloody crier to put up with. You’re just like your useless bitch of a mother!’ He left me there and wheeled the calf away.

  Jennifer’s screams echoed in my ears. I can still hear them now. And all the other screams afterwards that came to mingle with my own.

  That was just the start of all the shit to come.

  THE DETECTIVE

  Chapter 2

  I wasn’t asleep when the call came at 1.25 a.m. Sleep was elusive enough since Denise, but even more so now that Spencer was gone. Add a dose of Richard Wilmott into the mix and that was enough to keep any self-respecting copper awake. Acting Detective Inspector Richard Wilmott, I heard the detective superintendent announce in my head from our meeting on Friday. Acting bloody DI indeed. It should’ve been me that was promoted. Not that I was bitter and twisted or anything, but, well . . . ADI Wilmott was a twat. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. Wilmott was an arse-kisser who’d made a career of perfecting police politics and doing very little else, whereas I questioned things I probably shouldn’t. Even so, I had more experience, more service in the job, more dedication. The only dedication Wilmott had was to his mirror.

  It was the Mackenzie case that had tipped things in Wilmott’s favour. I knew that. I was still mulling over the injustice of it all when I picked up my mobile. ‘DS Carter,’ I announced, even though it should’ve been Acting DI Carter!

  ‘Hi, it’s the control room. You’re the on-call CID tonight, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I sat up.

  ‘Inspector Pritchard is at the scene of a suspicious death in Waverly and is requesting CID, Sarge.’

  ‘Right. What’s happened?’ I swung my legs out of bed.

  ‘An intruder broke into a house and stabbed one of the occupants to death.’

  I scribbled the address down on a pad by the side of my bed as she carried on talking.

  ‘The deceased is the owner of the house, Max Burbeck. His wife, Alissa, managed to flee the scene and is currently at the hospital. She’s given a brief account but she was hysterical and in shock, so she’s been sedated.’

  ‘Did she know the offender?’

  ‘No. He wore a balaclava. She caught a brief glimpse of him before she locked herself in the bathroom and escaped through the window.’

  ‘Who’s at the hospital?’

  ‘PC Glover.’

  ‘Right, tell him I want him to keep a close guard on her while she’s there.’

  I heard her typing on her keyboard, recording every instruction for the incident log.

  ‘Will do.’

  I stood up. ‘Have SOCO been called?’

  ‘Yeah, they’ve just arrived at the scene. One of them has gone straight to the hospital, though, to collect any evidence from Mrs Burbeck. The Home Office pathologist is en route, too.’

  ‘Good. I’ll be on scene in about half an hour.’ I hung up and dressed hastily before brushing my teeth and heading out the door.

  Waverly was a small Hertfordshire country village. There was a mixture of terraced cottages at one end, before the streets opened up to reveal bigger plots and large mansions set back from the road, hidden from prying eyes behind the privacy of high walls and fences. It had a village pub called the Cross Keys, a small shop, and not much else. As I drove through the deserted lanes, lightning lit up the sky and thunder rumbled loudly overhead. Wind blasted through the trees on either side of me and a plastic bag flew across the road, attaching itself to the windscreen wiper. The storm that weather forecasters had predicted was here a day early. So much for the Indian summer they’d promised at the beginning of the year.

  The Burbecks’ property, called The Orchard, was slap bang in the middle of the village, but you couldn’t see any of it from the main road. I drove up the long, winding tarmac driveway and the house stood before me, large and imposing and smacking of money. The front garden was laid to lawn, with a roundabout in front of the house covered with topiaries sculpted from green bushes in various intricate shapes. In the centre was a fountain. There were two uniformed cars parked up, along with the scene-of-crime van, and a lone police constable stood outside the front steps.

  I called the control room on my radio to log my arrival at the scene and opened the car door, the wind instantly slamming it back against my arm. I tried again, heaving my shoulder against the door, and managed to get out. I donned a protective white jumpsuit – a forensic onesie – from a box inside the boot, and was sliding a mask over my face when I noticed Inspector Pritchard exiting the house and heading my way with a grave expression on his face.

  ‘Sir.’ I nodded, walking towards him.

  ‘Hi, Warren,’ he said, dispensing with any further greeting and getting straight into the nitty-gritty. ‘The owner of the house, Max Burbeck, was found in an upstairs bedroom used as an office. It appears he’s been stabbed in the back of the neck. We were called by the next-door neighbour after Max’s wife, Alissa, fled the house and banged on her door for help. From the little PC Glover could ascertain before Mrs Burbeck was sedated at the hospital, she was in the bath at the time the attack happened. She didn’t hear anything because Mr Burbeck was playing music and she’d fallen asleep, but when she woke up, she went through the master bedroom and saw an intruder wearing a balaclava and brandishing a knife. She managed to retreat back into the en-suite bathroom and lock the door before climbing out of the window and running to her neighbour’s house.’

  I scribbled a few notes in my pocketbook.

  ‘SOCO have filmed the scene and they’re just photographing now. Forensic pathologist is on the way. The office is upstairs on the left.’

  ‘Good. Thanks, sir.’ I made my way inside.

  The house was a Georgian mansion with a chimney at either end of the building, covered with a trailing of ivy, and there were two white pillars above the front door that held up a balcony on the second storey.

  I walked up the elegant sweeping staircase in the centre of the entrance hall. The top floor branched off via a hallway to the left and right. I glanced to my right, counting one open door on either side and another straight ahead of me that must’ve led to the master bedroom. From where I stood, I could see the edge of a large bed, and past that an en-suite bathroom. The impressions of what looked like damp footprints were darker smudges on the cream hall carpet, coming from the bedroom and stopping just before where I stood. Yellow numbered markers had been placed next to the prints where they’d been photographed for evidence.

  A scene-of-crime officer who was bent over a claw-foot bath in the centre of the en-suite glanced over at me. Even though she was suited and masked, too, I knew it was Emma Bolton, the senior SOCO. There was no mistaking the dyed red hair peeking out from underneath her hood.

  ‘Body’s that way, Sarge.’ She jerked her head back down the corridor.

  ‘Is the bath full, Emma?’ I approached through the bedroom, taking care to step around the wet footprints.

  ‘No. Empty.’

  I stood just inside the doorway, taking in the scene. A walk-in shower took up the whole wall to my right. I swung my gaze left to the toilet and double sink with a creamy marble top.

  Emma stood and pointed to the window above the bath. A gold-coloured blind was in the down position but ripped from its roller at the
top along one edge. ‘Looks like the blind was yanked down in her haste to get away.’ She pulled it out further, creating a gap behind it for me to see the large picture window, which in daylight must’ve afforded views to the vast acres of woods that butted up to the rear of the property. The window housed two openings in white PVC Georgian style, easily big enough for someone to climb through. The one on the right side was opened wide, a brown towel snagged on the bottom of the frame, hanging over it.

  ‘She was naked when she arrived at the neighbour’s house. Looks like she lost the towel as she crawled out.’

  I leaned out the window, the wind blasting me with frigid air, and looked below me, spotting a flat roof about three metres down.

  ‘That’s the orangery down there,’ Emma said.

  ‘Orangery?’

  Her eyes creased at the corners behind her mask as she smiled. ‘A posh name for a conservatory.’

  ‘So, Mrs Burbeck escaped through the window, jumped down to the orangery, then down to the ground?’

  ‘Looks that way so far. It’s about another four metres’ drop from the orangery roof.’

  The heavens opened then, fat pellets of rain battering down from the sky, drumming out a heavy beat on the roof, the wind blasting them towards my face. I pulled away from the window.

  ‘Great!’ Emma sighed. ‘The weather’s not going to help when we do the outside.’

  I walked back to the bathroom door and examined it. It was splintered where it met the frame, and from the damage it was clear that it had been forced from the bedroom side. ‘Was this done by uniform or the intruder?’

  ‘Uniform. It was locked from the inside when they arrived so they forced it open.’

  I left her to it and dodged around the footprints again, heading down the corridor, taking a quick look in the two rooms on this side of the house, which looked like unused guest rooms.

  The first door past the stairs I’d just walked up was a room decked out as an office. A male body was seated in a leather chair, slumped over the antique mahogany desk in front as if he was asleep, exposing the knife wound at the back of his neck. There was very little blood from the wound, and no spatter that I could see. No signs of a struggle. Another SOCO stood over the body, taking photographs.