Free The Killer Inside by Lindsay Ashford Page A

am. I don’tknow what made me go looking for Moses Smith’s grave. But I never expected to find…’ She bit her lip, knowing it sounded lame.
    To her surprise he put out his hand and grasped hers. ‘It must have been a shock, finding…what you found. I’m sorry – I shouldn’t have come in here accusing you like that.’
    Her eyes stung. She felt inexplicably close to tears. He thought this show of emotion was about finding the baby. He had no idea just how upset that had made her. But it wasn’t that now: it was the fact that he was disappointed with her; that she’d taken advantage of him.
    ‘No, you’re right,’ she said, ‘I should have warned you.’ She could feel the warmth of his fingers squeezing hers. She knew she should pull her hand away. ‘I saw the ground had been disturbed but it was getting dark, so I went back next morning, very early.’ She told him about meeting Delva; about swearing her to secrecy about Carl’s death. And all the time he kept hold of her hand.
    ‘But when you found the baby there was no way of keeping quiet about Carl,’ he nodded. ‘I see that now.’ For a long moment he gazed into her eyes. He had lost that accusing look. She gazed back like someone paralysed. The longer it went on, the more compromised she would be. Never had she overstepped the mark like this. In all the prisons, all the one-to-one sessions with inmates she had held over the years, she had always behaved with absolute propriety. What was it about this man that was making her so reckless?
    ‘Dom,’ she said, smiling as she unwound his fingers from hers, ‘you’re going to get me into trouble.’ She patted his hand before crossing her arms and leaning back in her seat. He smiled and shrugged, his movements mirroring hers. To her relief he seemed untroubled by her pulling away. But she felt as if she’d touched a live, bare wire.
    ‘What did you think when you heard about the baby?’Her voice sounded high and unnatural. She coughed and tried again. ‘Had Carl ever mentioned a child?’
    He shook his head. ‘All he ever told me was his victim’s name and the fact that he was buried in St Mary’s. I got the impression he didn’t really know him from Adam. He was just some guy who pushed his luck too far and had to be sorted.’
    ‘Did he mention if there were others involved in the murder?’ She watched his expression for tell-tale signs. An awful thought had crossed her mind. Something quite at odds with the way she felt about him. Dom Wilde was in jail because he’d killed a man. So what if it was him? He had, by his own admission, been the last person to see Carl alive. What if he was feeding her this stuff to divert attention from himself? And the hand-holding – had that been part of some plan to soften her up?
    He gave her a blank look. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Were there?’
    She nodded, her eyes fixed on his face. ‘According to the newspaper report there were three of them. There was also a partner in the flat when they broke in. Apparently they left her alone.’ She paused. His expression hadn’t changed from that look of blank puzzlement. The voices in her head were subsiding. She wanted to believe he was being straight with her, wanted it with a ferocity that scared her. ‘They had a child too,’ she said.
    ‘Not the baby…’ he tailed off, his eyes wide with alarm.
    ‘Who knows?’ she replied. ‘The newspaper article didn’t say how old the child was and I’ve drawn a complete blank with tracing the partner. But who ever the baby belonged to, why was he put on top of Moses Smith’s grave?’
    ‘And was he put there before or after Carl died?’
    Megan told him what the pathologist had said about having the box analysed. ‘If you hadn’t told me about Moses Smith I doubt the baby would ever have been discovered. Ifsomeone wanted to draw attention to the link between Carl and Moses they could have made it a lot more obvious.’
    Dom frowned as he weighed this