Part 12 (1/2)

'We found your husband's car, Mrs Merritt,' she said. 'A blue Ford Focus?'

'Oh, yes. I didn't think about the car. Where was it?'

'It had been parked at the side of a road near Oxlow Moor. It seems Mr Merritt left it there and walked the rest of the way to the Light House across the moor. It's possible he intended to get nearer, but was prevented by a road closure.'

'Road closure?'

'The fires.'

'Of course.'

Fry could see that the woman was having difficulty. In these circ.u.mstances, the mind tended to go round in circles, unable to cope with the facts it was being presented with. Unless she was guided, Samantha would keep coming back over and over to the ninth circle of h.e.l.l, which wasn't helpful at all.

To concentrate Mrs Merritt's attention, Fry leaned forward and clasped her hands tightly together until the knuckles turned white, forming a focus point they could both see. She waited for the woman's eyes to settle on her hands.

'Mrs Merritt, have you any idea why your husband would have gone to that pub? It had been closed for six months.'

'The Light House, you mean? Aidan went there a lot.'

'Yes, but there could have been no point this time. It was closed,' insisted Fry, spelling out the words slowly and clearly. 'He must have known that.'

'Of course. Well ... yes, I'm sure he did.' Samantha stared vaguely at Fry. 'I can't imagine. I don't know what he was thinking of.'

'Didn't he talk to you about it?'

'Not about where he was going. He must have gone up there right after school. He sometimes had to stay behind for a meeting or to do some marking or something like that, so I didn't expect him home straight away. He didn't drink heavily, but now and then he went for a drink with a few of the other teachers. They like to get together and have a good moan, you know.'

She laughed. It was that short laugh with the slightly hysterical overtones that Fry had heard from relatives before. It could mark the beginnings of denial, an insistence that nothing as ludicrous as the story she'd just been told could possibly have happened. But I only spoke to him that afternoon, they'd say, as if the whole world had taken an unbelievable turn of events in the meantime.

'He was a teacher at Edendale Community School,' said Fry. 'Is that right?'

'Yes. Aidan is ... was an English teacher. He was good at his job. Oh, does the school know? I'll need to tell them. They'll be wondering where he is. Aidan isn't the type to call in sick, you see.'

'We'll deal with all that,' said Fry. 'There's no need for you to worry.'

There was a family liaison officer sitting in the room, a young female PC who'd made the tea now standing on a table in front of Mrs Merritt. Fry could see that it was untouched and going rapidly cold, a sc.u.m forming on the surface.

'The Light House,' repeated Fry. 'Why would Aidan have gone there? Please try to think what his reason might have been. Did he mention the pub at all recently?'

'Aidan never mentioned the Light House, once it had shut,' said Samantha. 'He started going somewhere else. Actually, he's been going to several different places. He never settled on a regular pub after the Light House.'

'Did he talk about meeting anyone?'

'No. Not that I can remember.'

'Didn't you go to the pub with him sometimes?'

She shook her head. 'I don't like pubs. I do take a drink now and then, but I prefer to stay at home with a nice bottle of wine and watch a DVD.'

'Perhaps you can give me the names of the other teachers,' said Fry.

'Who?'

'The ones he used to drink with sometimes after school.'

'Oh, certainly. I can give you one or two.'

Fry offered her a notebook. 'Please write them down while you're thinking about it.'

Mrs Merritt did as she was asked, scrawling two or three names with a shaky hand and pa.s.sing the pad back to Fry.

'I need to ask you ...' she said.

'Yes?'

'How did he die exactly?'

Fry had a copy of the post-mortem report right in front of her. When Mrs Merritt asked the question, she instinctively covered the file with her hand, in case any details were visible.

'Blunt-force trauma,' she said, repeating the Home Office pathologist's practised phrase.

Most murders in the UK were the result of blunt force or a bladed weapon. Bas.h.i.+ng or stabbing a the two methods favoured by the British for doing each other in.

Samantha nodded, balling a tissue in her fist.

'Do you know what he was. .h.i.t with?'

'Not exactly. Something heavy, made of wood. We're doing more tests, of course. We're hopeful of getting some forensic evidence that will help us catch the person who did it.'

'You haven't found the ... weapon, then?'

'No.'

Fry knew that Mrs Merritt had identified the body of her husband earlier. Although Merritt had been cleaned up in the morgue, it would have been obvious what his fatal wounds were. It was impossible to conceal head injuries in the way the mortuary staff could sometimes keep damage to other parts of the body from the family.

The report in front of Fry talked about the results of the blows on Aidan Merritt's skull. There had been brain injuries both at the site of impact, and on the opposite side of the skull due to the contrecoup effect of the brain ricocheting within the skull.

In fact there had been three blows, the pathologist said. The first two had not been immediately fatal, but they had cracked the skull and certainly concussed the victim. They had also caused the leaking of cerebrospinal fluid, cerebral contusions, lacerations to the scalp and haemorrhaging of the skin. If Merritt had survived those two injuries, he might well have been left in a coma and suffered permanent brain damage. The bruising from the floor, the gla.s.s cuts to his face and hands a they seemed almost irrelevant.

But the third blow, the one that had struck Aidan Merritt when he was already on the ground, was the one that had pulverised the right side of his brain.

'Mrs Merritt, did your husband ever talk about David and Trisha Pearson?' asked Fry.

She shook her head in confusion. 'Who? Do they work at his school?'

'No. They were two visitors to the area who went missing a couple of years ago.'