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‘Is he here today?’
They find Darryl at his desk, drinking coffee from a branded mug. ‘Tom Booth was a legend. A pleasure to do business with.’
‘Do you remember him at the event?’ Hal asks.
‘Yeah. Lovely guy. He said he used to work as a mechanic but him and his wife won the lottery. I didn’t believe him at first. He was almost embarrassed. But he called me for a test drive a few days later and I sold him a Quattroporte.’
‘Did he speak to anyone other than you?’
Darryl smiles. ‘He spoke to the girls. I mean, that was their job, to hand out merch and pull in the guys, make them feel comfortable.’
‘Did he speak to any one of them in particular?’
‘Not that I remember. I mean, I didn’t know their names. We only hire them in for the day. Eye candy.’ He winks at Hal who tenses just as Jen does beside him.
‘Thank you,’ he says.
‘Please give our regards to the widow,’ Mick says.
‘Sure,’ he says, but he has no intention of doing so. He suspects they only want to buy the Maserati back off her.
In the car park, he looks at Jen over the roof of their car.
She says, ‘I’m used to it. Every woman is.’
He nods. ‘I’m wondering if it was Tom Booth who stalked Martha. Why else would he have her business card? She said she didn’t give any out, so he has to have got it from the break-into her university room. I think we need to know if Martha Hayward has an alibi and whether anyone else might have taken offence at someone stalking her.’
‘Ifhe did,’ Jen says. ‘Meeting her doesn’t mean he stalked her. It doesn’t sound like him. We only have her word for it.’
‘True,’ he says. They both thought well of Martha Hayward, but that doesn’t mean she’s reliable.
‘Why do I feel as if stalking isn’t something our Tom would do?’ Jen asks.
‘Perhaps because everyone talks about him as a stellar guy? The guy who wouldn’t hurt a fly.’
Sometimes, it’s Hal’s greatest wish to meet murder victims. He gets to know them so intimately in death that he can find himself mourning their loss, even if they’re far from perfect. People talk about detective work as the process of solving crime, but it can also be the process of making a victim rise from the dead, bringing them alive through all the traces they left, on paper, online, through the words and memories of others, to try to find out what happened to them. It’s a part of his job that fascinates him: the slow unboxing of someone’s psyche.
But the jury’s out on Tom for him, still. Jen has good instincts, but he’s not sure she’s right in this instance. Hal has met plenty of men and women who present as mild or inoffensive, as the boy or girl next door, but who are capable of terrible things.
‘You think he could have done this? It seems so out of left field,’ Jen says.
‘I want someone to take another look at his devices to see if we can find any trace that he stalked Martha Hayward.’
‘Surely, we’d have found something already. Stalking is a behaviour pattern,’ Jen says. ‘If he did it to her, he might have done it to others. Do we ask Nicole Booth about it?’
He winces. ‘Not yet. Let’s dig around first. If you were stinking rich, how would you go about stalking someone?’
Jen has a think. ‘Send very expensive unwanted gifts instead of crap ones.’
‘She didn’t mention gifts.’
‘I’m not sure money makes a difference.’ She thinks through the classic stalker traits. ‘I suppose he could pay someone to damage her property, if that was his game, but there’d be no point in getting another person to follow her because the point is that she sees him.’
‘We should check the sat nav on his car for previous destinations.’
‘That could be useful. But I don’t buy it, Hal.’
He feels a little irritated. ‘We don’t have to buy it. We have to investigate it.’
