‘Catch him out.’ Rachel gave a nod of understanding, a glint in her eyes. ‘I want to go for tier three.’ Janet caught a glimpse of the girl’s ambition, her hunger to learn. Now all she needed was to apply that willingness to all the areas of the job instead of just the bits she liked.
Sean appeared to be calmer than on the previous day. Numb around the edges. Eyes still bloodshot, though. Had he slept?
Janet had decided she would open with the phone call to Lisa. This wasn’t one of the three key areas, but it remained an anomaly. Would his story have changed? ‘Yesterday, you told me that you rang Lisa shortly after one o’clock. And we’ve been able to confirm that from phone records. Please can you tell me again what the phone call was about?’
‘I wanted to know when she’d be back, like,’ Sean replied, ‘and she said about half three.’ Although she was practically home by then.
‘Was there anything unusual about the call?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘You told me yesterday that Lisa had gone shopping, that’s correct?’
‘Yes,’ he agreed, perhaps a tinge of uncertainty underlying the answer.
‘What was Lisa going to get?’
‘Don’t know. Some clothes, I think.’ He tried to sound casual, but Janet could feel the tension rising in the room. He rubbed at his chest, a soothing gesture. Was his heart racing? His breath becoming hard to catch?
‘Did she buy anything?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. He looked at Janet, but his gaze soon slipped away.
‘When you came back to the flat at half past three, was there any shopping there?’
He gave a little sigh, almost a moan, and laced his fingers together. ‘No, I didn’t see any.’
‘We have been able to establish that Lisa got a taxi home from town and she was carrying five bags of shopping. The taxi took her home. Yet you say when you went to the flat there was no shopping. Can you explain that to me?’
‘Dunno, maybe she put it away,’ he said hesitantly.
‘And the shopping bags? We didn’t find those in the flat either. Can you account for that?’ He didn’t speak. Janet saw his jaw tighten. She waited a few seconds, then: ‘Where did Lisa usually keep her phone when she was at home?’
Sean moved in his seat, reacting to the new topic. ‘What d’you mean?’ Buying time.
‘Where would her phone be when she was in the flat?’
‘In her pocket or… on the table.’
‘The coffee table?’
‘Yes.’
Janet remembered the photographs, the table topsy-turvy, Lisa’s body wedged alongside it. ‘Yesterday, you said you didn’t see Lisa’s phone when you went to the flat. Is that true?’
