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‘Mummy!’ She breaks into a run; I open the car door and let her in.
‘Hey, Bets. Looks who’s here.’
‘Sam!’ Her face is puffy and pale from lack of sleep but full of joy to find her big pal there beside me. She is much more excited to see Sam than me, her mother.
‘Hey there, Bets,’ Sam says with only the slightest tremor. ‘What are you doing up so late? It’s way past your bedtime.’
‘We had to find the baby! You were hiding like me under the bed when I cut my fringe. The baby’s called Tommy.’
‘Is that right?’
‘That’s pretty accurate, to be fair,’ I say.
‘It is.’
We are putting on a brave face for the sake of the child. I am still holding Sam’s hand. We are behaving like grown-ups. Like parents.
CHAPTER 62
At the station, Sam gives his statement and is taken to the cells. DC Jacobs drives me back to my place, where Joyce’s MG is still parked like the aftermath of the maddest night out. The Baxters don’t want him to go to jail, Jacobs tell me, but the CPS will most likely still charge him with abduction of a minor, a serious crime.
The following morning, Jacobs receives a call from DI Jennifer Whitehead in St Peter Port, who tells him that Naomi and her sister were arrested a little after 9 a.m. at Guernsey airport after Jo’s car was traced to Exeter airport car park. Seemingly they had a change of heart about their destination, perhaps thinking a plane would be their best bet but, bizarrely, choosing a small island to flee to.
As for the buyer of Joyce’s house, Mr Barnard, he offers to pull out of the deal, but Sam says no. There are too many bad memories. If he avoids prison, he will need a fresh start.
In custody, Naomi confesses to conspiracy to defraud, naming her sister as her accomplice. It seems that blood is not in fact thicker than water and that Naomi’s trust for her sister did not run to loyalty when the shit hit the proverbial fan. Joanne Harper is duly charged.
When they find Naomi’s letter to Sam, the police rearrest both her and her sister on suspicion of Joyce’s murder.
Sam is released on bail pending the CPS review. When I pick him up from the station, I tell him about Naomi’s arrest, and though his eyes are dead, he seems to take it in. I know he knows what Naomi did, but I worry the arrest will confirm the horrible truth of it somehow.
‘The prints found at the house match Jo’s,’ I tell him when it’s clear he isn’t up to speaking. ‘And the trainer prints by the back door were hers. They’re still searching for the murder weapon.’
‘She wanted me to find that letter,’ he says, his voice hoarse. ‘I can’t figure that out.’
‘It’s strange. They’d have found it on her laptop anyway, I guess.’
As part of the ensuing investigation, the police search the Baxters’ residence but find nothing. They also search the outbuildings at Joyce’s place as well as the house itself, even excavating the vegetable patch. They turn up nothing more. Jacobs stays in regular contact. Sam manages to have a cup of tea with Darren, who makes him laugh with anecdotes about the Colyton job.
‘Soon get you back to work, mate,’ he says when he leaves, and this moves me.
Finally – I think this is a day later – the police try Naomi and Sam’s former flat back in Bridport. Nothing is found in Jo’s room, nor in the rest of the flat. But in a small outhouse to the rear of the property, secured with a flimsy padlock, they discover a spade, and two keys on a cast-iron key ring. The keys fit Joyce’s shed and the back door of her house. The spade, which is covered in Naomi’s fingerprints, matches Joyce’s head injury, and there is a small sample of blood and hair, which turn out to be hers. The keys too are covered in Naomi’s fingerprints. It appears neither they nor the murder weapon were cleaned, simply hidden behind a load of old junk and wrapped in a threadbare towel.
When I relay this to Sam, he closes his eyes and sighs. I ask him if he’s OK and he says, yes, he’s OK, he’ll be OK, but he looks like a ghost, his eyes blank.
Naomi and her sister are charged with the murder of Joyce Moore. They plead guilty, we assume on the advice of their solicitor. Owing to a huge backlog of cases at Bournemouth Crown Court due to the pandemic, they are still awaiting sentencing. Their crimes are as notorious as they are odious to the people of Lyme Regis and beyond. Momentarily, the Harper sisters become a hotter topic than COVID.
As for rumours concerning Sam, they die along with early headlines such asLyme Man Abducts Child;Man Hides Stolen Child in Secret Underground Grotto.
Reading Naomi’s epic letter, it is hard to pick out what is true. She was after all a compulsive liar. My own, perhaps deeply biased feeling about why she did what she did is that, more than anything, she was offended. I know from talking to Darren that she had no shortage of male admirers, and Darren reckoned she picked Sam because she thought he’d be easy to push around. Sam never knew how good-looking he was, Darren said. Never knew when a woman fancied him. Naomi was convinced he wouldn’t leave her. And of course, he was the only living relative of a seriously loaded old lady, which can’t have hurt. So when Sam did leave, as well as her pride being injured, she lost out on the jackpot, and she couldn’t handle it. Hell hath no fury and all that. In this case, not infidelity but the sheer blind gall to walk out on her, Naomi Harper, a woman who did the finishing with and was never, ever the finishee – invented word, sorry, but I like it so I’m leaving it.
And yes, if you believe her letter, it is completely possible she suffered from depression after Sam left. When the police followed up her claims to have had counselling, they found that she had in fact attended three of six prescribed sessions with an NHS therapist called Dawn Mellors. When questioned, Ms Mellors said that the sessions came to an abrupt end but that she could not divulge the reasons for this due to patient confidentiality. My take on that, considering her words in the context of Naomi’s letter, is that Dawn said something Naomi didn’t like, by which I mean something that implied, or that Naomi felt implied, criticism. Naomi writes about taking responsibility for her own part in the failed relationship, but if you read that letter closely, she never did. She just pretended to, for her own benefit. I think to the end she blamed it, all of it, on Sam.
It was as if the longer she pretended to be in love, the more her feelings spiralled into hate. A hate that became self-fuelling, independent, almost, of its source; as if the reasons for it were altogether lost – a little like a terrible argument, or a war, when no one can really remember why it started. Again, my theory, for what it’s worth, is that her hatred for the world and the hand it had dealt her centred on Sam. Sam, of all people. Sam, who would lift a ladybird to safety. Sam, whose only crime was falling for her in the first place.
Right now, the situation is best described as dormant, but there are still days when I’m washing up or cooking or taking a break from a technical drawing and I stop dead in my tracks and think about those Harper girls.
I have become used to flying into other people’s heads of late, trying to imagine what they are thinking and feeling, and in these moments I see Naomi and Jo, dressed in their prison sweats, miserable and raging in their holding cells, full of the injustice of it all. There is the evil, yes, but mostly I am astounded at howstupidthey both were. Naomi was the so-called brains but, despite her flair at moving money, she was a perfect idiot as far as I’m concerned. So caught up in this all-consuming emotion, she chose to leave a venomous, self-righteous letter that would only incriminate her. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps because she just could not resist really driving home her punishment of her ex-boyfriend, who had done her a great wrong. The letter was the salt in the wounds she took such joy in inflicting.
