The Trawlerman, стр. 42

She knew, though, that Toby McAdam would be disappointed if she didn’t. Police officers loved to tell stories about each other and if nobody told stories about you, you barely existed in the force. ‘To be fair,’ she said, ‘I’ve seen worse-looking people in dresses like that.’

‘So? What are you here for?’

‘I think I have just worked out who killed Ayman Younis and his wife. And it’s not Bob Glass.’

He exhaled; walked to the living-room door and closed it so no one could overhear. ‘I don’t think it’s appropriate to discuss this with you, Alex. You do understand why, don’t you?’

‘You think you’re trying to help me, don’t you?’

He frowned. ‘Of course.’

‘If you don’t listen to me now you are going to end up in the shit. You have an innocent man in custody. Five minutes. Please.’

He looked at her, moving his head slightly to one side, as if trying to judge if she was crazy or not, then said, ‘OK. We’d better sit down then.’

He took her to his study, a room at the front of the house, and he sat and listened, while she told him about the balloon and the flash of silver light that Kenny Abel had seen, which he thought had been carrying souls up to heaven.

‘What’s this about? I don’t get it, Alex.’

‘You never found the gun that Bob Glass is supposed to have killed Ayman Younis with, did you?’

He looked irritated by the question. ‘He had plenty of time to dispose of it.’

She looked at the silver-framed photos on his desk of Colette and the boy and the girl whose name she could not remember. ‘He didn’t dispose of it. Ayman Younis did.’

‘But . . .’ Some time in the last year he had developed crow’s feet at the side of his eyes. You could only see them when he smiled or frowned.

‘Did he have life insurance?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then it wasn’t a murder. It was a murder suicide. Ayman Younis had money saved up to look after his son, Callum. I’m guessing that the money he lost in the Biosfera scam was pretty much everything he had in that pot. Maybe he wanted to increase it. Maybe he was just being greedy. But either way, he lost it all, and with it the prospect that his child would be cared for privately.’

McAdam said nothing, just narrowed his eyes a little more.

‘And because of that, maybe he was too ashamed to admit it to his wife. He wanted a perfect life, and while it may not have been perfect, what they had was being taken away from them. From what I gather they were a couple who kept up appearances. Ayman did, that’s for sure. I think he gambled that and lost, and rather than face up to the humiliation, he tore it all down instead. Some men are like that. I don’t know. But I do know that he had life insurance. If he just killed himself, Callum wouldn’t get anything at all. But if he made it look like murder, Callum would have enough money to last him a lifetime.

‘So,’ she continued, ‘he killed Mary by cutting her throat. He put the body downstairs so the delivery woman would find her the next morning. Made it look like the work of a madman. Then he went outside and shot himself with a gun tied to a weather balloon. There was a north-west wind that day. I checked. Nobody found the gun because it’s probably somewhere at the bottom of the Channel. I presume the knife was on there too. He ordered a pack of four balloons. There were two left. One would have been a test run, to see how much a balloon would carry. The second was outside, holding the gun to his head.’

Cradled against her last night, Zoë had been silent as she had explained this. Alex had known why; her teenage daughter would have been imagining the dead hand slipping off the trigger, the silver ball full of helium rising upwards with the deadly metal cargo beneath it, thinking about the knife and the gun floating away on the night air, falling somewhere indeterminate, far away from here.

‘And that’s what this man saw? The balloon?’ said McAdam incredulously.

‘That’s why there are no fingerprints of anyone else at the house,’ she said. ‘Because there never was anyone else there anyway.’

She recognised the look of apprehension on his face as she talked. He had locked up an innocent man who was mentally ill on a charge of murder. There would be repercussions for him.

‘It gets worse,’ said Alex.

McAdam’s face tightened.

‘I don’t know for sure, I’m guessing now, but I think this is what happened. Ayman Younis was so ashamed of losing the money they had saved for their son that he killed his own wife rather than tell her. Her pacemaker said she died at four minutes past ten, right? To the exact minute. He shot himself at about seven minutes past ten, because that’s when the balloon went up. We know he cut her throat on the bed upstairs. He probably thought he had killed her then. He thought she was dead when he arranged her body at the bottom of the stairs to make it look like the work of a madman. And he killed both of their dogs too. He wrote the message on the mirror and then cleaned the place up. Three minutes was not enough time for him to do all that.’

He had his hand in front of his mouth now.

‘How long would that have taken? Twenty, thirty minutes? Longer?’

‘And you’re saying she was alive all that time?’

‘Yes. She died where you found her at the bottom of the stairs. Everybody talks about what a nice man Ayman Younis was. How much he cared for his son. He may have thought he had killed her, but she was not dead. Her own husband. You have to hope that she wasn’t conscious.’

When she