“What did you do?” MacKenzie already knew that Mathilda had reported Claire as missing in the early hours that morning, scarcely before they had found her body underneath the sycamore tree.
“Well, I came downstairs and sort of hung around waiting. I felt a bit ridiculous, you know?” Mathilda lifted her shoulders and let them fall again, stroking the cat’s ears with gentle fingers. “Like I say, it got to midnight and I tried her mobile a few times, but it went straight to the busy tone.”
Interesting, MacKenzie thought. That meant that the phone had still been active; just switched off. She made a note to trace the mobile phone registered to Claire and hoped they might get lucky and track its location.
“I tried ringing the place she works – it’s the All American Diner, near the station in town,” she added helpfully. “Nobody was answering and I guess they’d packed up for the evening. So in the end I just called the local police station.”
“You didn’t think that she had gone home with somebody, perhaps? Or was just running late?”
Mathilda shook her head vehemently.
“You had to know her, to understand how organised her life was. She never did anything spontaneous, never deviated from schedule. That was just Claire. That’s how I knew that something was wrong.”
MacKenzie switched tack.
“Did she seem unhappy, or upset about anything?”
“No. She seemed fine, if a bit tired.”
“How about friends? You say she didn’t have many?”
“None that I saw, she was quite a loner. Only me, I suppose.”
“How about any boyfriends, or girlfriends?”
“I asked Claire once if she swung in that direction,” Mathilda smiled slightly. “Sadly for me, she didn’t. On the other hand, there weren’t any male admirers who came a-calling, either.”
“Could she have been seeing someone at work?”
“Not likely,” Mathilda scoffed. “She couldn’t stand the bloke who owns the place where she worked and the other ones were all a bit young.”
“OK,” Denise nodded. “You were saying she didn’t like the owner?”
“Nope. She said he had tried it on a few times, she’d said ‘no’ but he didn’t give up easily. I think she was starting to feel uncomfortable.”
“I see,” MacKenzie made a mental note to check out the owner of the Diner.
“Did she ever mention feeling seriously threatened?”
“No, I can’t say that she did. As far as I know, she just kept pushing him back.” MacKenzie opened her mouth to ask the next question but Mathilda continued, “I can tell you who definitely did make her feel uncomfortable. That pervy old git who lives at number 32.”
MacKenzie’s ears sharpened and she took out her biro, preparing to write down a name.
“Who might that be?”
“His name’s Colin. Colin Hart.”
Phillips found Steven Llewellyn on the golf course, which was a surprising choice for a man who had received the news of his daughter’s murder not twenty-four hours earlier. He seemed to be enjoying the perks of early retirement, if his tanned face and big-ticket golfing gear was anything to go by.
They were of a similar age, Phillips judged, but he had to admit that the other man seemed to be faring a little better than himself at this present moment. He felt like a duck out of water in his conservative grey suit and comfortable Hush Puppies. His tie might have added a little colour, but nothing in comparison with the unrepentant display of pastel shades that Steven Llewellyn was modelling. Where Llewellyn looked trim and tidy in the clinging sportswear, Phillips was already feeling fatigued after a second round of sandwiches over lunch.
He puffed over to where Llewellyn was teeing up the next shot and waited until he had taken it.
“Mr Llewellyn?”
Steven ran an assessing eye over DS Phillips and clearly had no memory of having met him the previous day. It made Phillips feel like a glorified monkey in a suit and it set his teeth on edge.
“Oh God, you’re not from the bailiffs, are you? I spoke to you arseholes last week. I told you, I’ll be in a position to pay off the last of it very soon. There’s no need to come all the way down here to try to intimidate me.”
Pride and confusion warred for a moment. It was flattering to think that he looked sufficiently ‘hard’ to be considered intimidating – those hours in the boxing ring as a teenager were clearly still paying off – but he didn’t much like the idea of being likened to a debt-collector.
Phillips drew out his warrant card.
“DS Frank Phillips,” he explained, watching recognition pass briefly across the other man’s face, followed swiftly by a shuttered, wary expression. “I’m here to talk about Amy.”