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‘Not really. Just that he had longish hair and possibly a scrappy little beard like all the young men seem to these days.’
‘How old do you think he was?’
‘He could have been anything between twenty and thirty. I honestly can’t say more accurately than that. I only glimpsed him. I assumed he was on his way to the reserve. He had the look of a twitcher.’
‘Was he carrying anything that made you think that? Binoculars?’
‘Not that I can remember. Sorry.’
‘You’ve been very helpful,’ Jen says. ‘Thank you.’
As she walks back to the station she thinks about this man. He might have been a walker, but there have also been one or two reports recently of young men sleeping rough in rural areas around Chepstow. She’ll ask Hal if they can organise a search of all the woodland on the peninsula. The original search just took in the Glass Barn’s grounds and the accessible areas close by. If this man did harm Tom Booth, he’s probably long gone by now, but there might be traces of him.
At the station, she goes direct to Hal’s office. His door is open and he beckons her in.
‘I spoke to Nicole Booth,’ he says. ‘She can’t think of anything that might have caused her husband’s head injury.’
‘Okay,’ Jen says. This is fast becoming a strange, complicated case, where evidence is either lacking, like the failure of the security cameras, or hard to explain, like the business card found in Tom’s pocket. Enquiries to masseuses called Sadie haven’t thrown up any reasonable suspects. Most of them live nowhere near here. Locally, there are none who advertise publicly. They traced the number on the card and discovered that it’s attached to a burner phone.
Jen shows Hal a message she’s received from a local journalist, Dave Gittins, who has got wind of Tom’s death.
‘Ask him to put a lid on it,’ Hal says. ‘Do you want me to call him?’
‘No, no,’ she says. ‘I’ll handle it. I don’t think I can put him off long, though.’ The Glass Barn, the lottery win, the unexplained death in the swimming pool: the headlines will write themselves. She thinks Dave might respond better to a soft approach from her than to Hal laying down the law.
‘How’s Nicole doing today?’ she asks. She hasn’t made her daily call to Nicole, yet.
‘She was upset that I asked about what might have caused the injury. She’s still insistent it was an accident. She’s presenting like a textbook grieving widow, but I feel uneasy about her.’ He stands up. His energy is taut. Jen loves the intensity with which he approaches his cases. ‘I mean, you can miss someone even if you murdered them. You can still feel grief for them. And she has no confirmed alibi yet. I don’t love that the video cameras at the Barn were down. It’s a heck of a coincidence.’
‘Did anyone locate the fudge vendor from the show?’ Jen asks.
‘Not yet. There were over fifty food stalls. A lot of them sold fudge. Joe’s still checking. We confirmed there was no CCTV anywhere on site, either.’
‘Any road cameras between here and there?’ Jen asks.
‘Not one. The route’s too rural.’
‘I’ve been wondering if it’s possible to see what actions were taken on the security system,’ she says. ‘Like, is there a log of what Tom or Nicole did to it? Is it possible to see whether the systems were disabled on purpose or if they malfunctioned?’
‘That’s a good idea,’ he says. ‘Make a note to get that followed up. Forensics have Tom Booth’s laptop. What do you make of Nicole and Tom’s relationship? Do you think they were happily married?’
Jen reflects for a moment. ‘It’s impossible to tell. I mean, she paints it as a happy marriage, and so do the neighbours. But you can be happily married until suddenly you’re not. That’s not the feeling I’m getting from her, though. I believe she truly loved him. But, like you say, you can murder someone you love. Maybe she knew all about the Sadie on the business card and couldn’t forgive him for being unfaithful. If she did it, I can’t believe money was a motive. They have so much they could divorce, and both walk away with millions.’
‘It depends on whose ticket it was,’ Hal says. ‘In terms of who’s entitled to the cash.’
‘Would it, though? At this point? They claimed the win together and spent large sums of money together.’
He shrugs. ‘I suppose that would be for lawyers to sort out if they split. But if she’s greedy, she might want it all.’
Jen thinks about it. Did Nicole strike her as greedy? Impossible to tell from the little she’s seen of her. ‘We know they had a combined annual income in the region of 46K before they won the lottery, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘And now their combined wealth stands at ten million quid, which they won just over two years ago. So how do you get that greedy, that quickly, to go from living apparently happily on 46K to wanting all of the ten mill for yourself? I mean, wouldn’t you still be getting used to having that much money? How do you even handle it?’
‘It’s enough to steal your daydreams if you have it all,’ Hal says. ‘But perhaps not if you have half.’
‘What do you mean?’
