Free Separated at Death (The Lakeland Murders) by J J Salkeld

‘wrong number?’ after it. Even Jane’s point about it being unusual for a pay-as-you-go SIM to be used in a car didn’t really stand up to close scrutiny. What if a passenger made the call? What if that passenger was a child who’d simply dialed a wrong number in the dark?
     
    But if that was the case why had Amy called back? So perhaps it was a friend calling from her parents’ car, or using a sibling’s phone maybe, or perhaps Jane was right and the exchange of calls was significant. Hall decided to keep an open mind.
     
    He wrote ‘Why no witnesses?’ on his pad. That was odd. Plenty of people had been near the entrance to the wood that evening, but none reported seeing Amy walking anywhere nearby. So had she gone into the wood elsewhere, or might she have arrived by car?
     
    The background file was thickening by the shift, so Hall looked again at everything that had been added that day. He was in no rush to get home.
     
    Amy seemed like an absolutely typical teenager; not an angel, but far from a bad girl either. She had been working hard at school, and apart from following up on that lad in the club there wasn’t anything in her personal background that felt remotely like a line of enquiry. But Hall added ‘night club - CCTV’ to his to-do list and moved on.
     
    The immediate family didn’t seem any more likely to yield a lead. The mother and her new bloke seemed clean. She’d picked up a generous financial settlement after the divorce, and had re-married that summer. There were no really pressing financial issues, no CCJs or current HMRC interest, and the couple were on reasonably friendly terms with Amy’s father.
     
    John Hamilton continued to run the family business, and though he’d had a couple of relationships since his marriage had ended nothing had been of any duration. The business was solvent, but its profitability had really taken a hit during the recession. And John owned his house outright, and had no debts.
     
    Hall wasn’t too good with high finance, because beyond paying off his mortgage early and keeping a few grand in rainy day money his only investment of any value was his Police pension, so he wasn’t sure exactly what the figures added up to. But as far as he could tell John Hamilton’s cash resources were quite depleted. Because as well as paying off his wife he had recently bought his younger brother Simon out of the business. He’d owned 25%, and when the annual dividend stopped coming in because of the recession Simon Hamilton had asked to cash in his chips.
     
    The notes were a bit vague, but it sounded as if there’d been a bit of a falling out between the two, because John’s final offer was much lower than Simon’s own valuation of his shares. But the deal had been done a few months previously, suggesting to Hall that Simon either really needed the cash, or sensed that the business was in long term decline and wanted to get out.
     
    Either way, there was certainly nothing in any of Amy’s or the wider family history to point towards a motive for murder. It just looked like another broken family, albeit a wealthy one, and as he’d read the notes Hall had been aware that he had been subconsciously building a picture of what the process of divorce had been like, especially for John Hamilton. And then, for the first time since he’d read the email, he started to think about his wife’s email, and about what lay ahead for him and his family.
     
    He closed the file, got up, closed his office door, turned off the light and sat down again at his desk. No-one in the open office outside noticed. And an hour later, at 9pm, when Ian Mann got up from his desk and looked over at Hall’s office he decided that he must have already called it a night and gone home. But Ian Mann was wrong.
     
    Hall sat in the half light for another ten minutes. He had been thinking through how it might go with his wife when he got home. By now she and the kids would have eaten, so