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‘So I assume he didn’t mention it was evidence of how he chose these vulnerable women, how he pursued them, persuaded them to trust him, married them, before drugging and killing them?’
Connie doesn’t give me the opportunity to respond.
‘Come with me,’ she says as she climbs to her feet and strides towards the door. I struggle to put my notebook back in my bag quickly enough and have to jog a little to catch her up. ‘Where are we going?’ I ask but she doesn’t respond. We walk the length of her road, turn left at the junction and approach a row of houses. Connie marches up to a rear gate and unbolts it and I follow her into a neatly kept garden.
‘Whose property are we in?’ I ask cautiously.
‘My friend Walter’s.’
In the corner stands an old dovecote. She turns a bucket upside down, stands on it, and removes the dovecote’s roof and places it on the ground. ‘It’s all in here,’ she continues. ‘Letters, mobile phone recordings, medication, fake passports and driver’s licences with his different names on them. I have all of it. And I can tell you other things he did, like putting reflective film over Gwen’s bedroom windows so no one could see in, a padlock on her bedroom door, and he changed the locks to the house. And I know it isn’t enough on its own to prove anything and that he’ll just say that she asked him to, but alongside what I’ve been hiding, I have enough to nail the bastard.’
She stretches her arm to put a hand inside and fumbles around. There is a hole in each side of the construction. I assume it’s compartmentalised, as her hands move around it. However, her triumphant expression makes way for confusion.
‘I don’t understand,’ she says. ‘Where is it? I put it all in here myself.’ She fusses some more, shaking her head and muttering.
I read Connie’s criminal record before I came here. I know that for most of her life, she has conned and extorted people andserved time for it. Her mother did the same. And from what Paul suggested, I suspect she was likely planning to con Gwen before he came along. She has had years to perfect this ‘trying to deflect from your own behaviour by accusing someone else’ routine, so if I didn’t know what she was capable of, I might be convinced.
The same can’t be said for Paul, though, either when Gwen vanished or during his recent appearance at the station. I didn’t believe his explanation when he returned Gwen home and claimed their weekend away in Clacton-on-Sea was down to miscommunication. I also wasn’t persuaded that he is being harassed or extorted by Connie, even after he showed me the footage of her breaking into his properties. And I can’t deny that if what she has said about Paul changing the locks and attaching a lock to Gwen’s bedroom door is true, it’s highly suspicious behaviour.
‘What’s the problem?’ I ask her.
‘It’s gone. Everything I found at his house and took with me. I swear, it was in this box.’
‘Why did you leave it here?’
‘I thought it’d be the last place Paul would look when he realised it was missing.’
Her fingertips must have connected with something because her confusion is replaced by hope. She pulls out a small electronic device, like an old MP3 player.
‘Is that yours?’ I ask.
‘No.’ She presses a button and we fall silent as the opening bars of a song play. If I’m not mistaken, it’s ABBA’s ‘The Winner Takes It All’.
Connie’s shoulders slump, despairingly. She is either a deluded fantasist, one of the most accomplished liars I have ever come across, or she is telling the truth. And I can’t help but think she might be telling the truth. But without any proof to back up her claims, I’m restricted in what I can do.
‘I’ve got photos on my phone,’ she says suddenly and pulls it out to search through it. ‘I don’t understand,’ she continues. ‘They’ve all been deleted.’
‘Connie, Mr Michael says he doesn’t want to take it any further on this occasion,’ I continue. ‘But he has asked that we speak to you. He appreciates Mrs Wright’s death has put you under extreme duress and believes you have chosen to make him the object of your anger.’
She shakes her head. ‘I’m not, Krisha, I’m really not. He is a killer. He near enough admitted it.’
‘Do you have any evidence at all?’
‘Yes, but they’re all in graves. Eliza Holmes, Lucy Holden, Alice McKenzie and Gwen. Dig up their bodies, do blood tests and I guarantee you’ll find the same drug in all their systems. Omixinol. It’s a psychoactive that makes their confused state even worse. Paul gave it to them all before he killed them. I’m sure of it.’
‘And you saw this happen? You witnessed him giving these women that drug yourself?’
‘No. But just exhume them. Please?’
‘We can’t just go around digging up bodies based on an accusation. There are all kinds of procedures involved in a body’s exhumation.’
‘I’m telling you the truth.’
‘I believed you when you claimed you were Mrs Wright’s daughter,’ I say. ‘And then I discover you have criminal convictions including fraud and theft from elderly people and had conned Gwen into believing you were her daughter to gain her trust and her money. What you have done is committed fraud. So you must see how what you’re telling me appears from my perspective.’
‘I know, I know,’ she says, her voice shaking. ‘Some of what I’ve done in my past is unforgivable. But Gwen’s death has changed me. Honestly, it has.’
‘Yet you admitted to me that, rather than bringing us your evidence and saying, “This is what I found out about Gwen’s husband,” you confronted him and tried to blackmail him for your own gain.’
