Never Tell (May Moore Suspense Thriller 2)

“The money—the five hundred thousand dollars—it was supposed to be divided between Danny and me.”

“How did you extort it?”

“Danny wrote the letter and sent it. He used an anonymous email account. But he then provided my bank details. Because obviously he couldn’t use his own details, and my bank account is in my married name, which I don’t use anymore. Emily Brown. He said she’d never work out who that was, and if she did, she would be too scared to retaliate and that I didn’t need to worry.”

“And why?”

Emily made a face. “Look, it had to do with the Eastern European workers. There were irregularities there. I received a tip-off, anonymously, a couple of weeks ago, and I was planning on researching it for an article, but when I mentioned this to Danny, he came up with the blackmail idea as a better option. He said we should just do the demand, and not have the media digging into it. And because he was my ex, and I’d already written one incriminating article on the hotel because my boss told me to, and he sort of persuaded me, I left it at that.”

May’s eyebrows rose upon hearing that.

“Why did Danny say that?” she asked.

“Look, I don’t fully know what the issue was. I was a fool to go along with it. Danny can be very persuasive. But like I said, I didn’t write the email! Danny handled that side. He didn’t want me involved, and he wanted a complete circuit-breaker, as he called it, between the demand for money and the bank account.”

“And you were going to split it?”

“That’s right.”

“But then Danny died?”

Emily spread her arms. “I was devastated about that. I still am. We used to date a couple of years ago. You probably know that because I can see you have done your research. We were still good friends. I thought he was a wild kid, and I shouldn’t have gone along with that proposal, but I did.”

“Do you have an alibi for that evening?” May asked. “What were your movements on the night he died?”

“The night before last?” She made a face. “This is not going to sound good, I know. I met with Danny.”

“Tell us about that.”

“We met up at a bar near the hotel. It was nothing, really, just a friendly chat.”

But something in the way she mumbled the words made May think it had been more.

“Name the bar,” May said sternly. “Remember, we need a full account from you, and we may already know a lot of the information from other sources.”

Emily sighed, looking defeated. “It was the Bellevue Bar.”

“And what happened between you there?” May glared at her.

Emily looked down. “I’d just received the payment. And we argued about it. We had a fight. He wanted more of the money than we’d agreed. He started threatening that he’d tell Madeline who I was, and that I was an idiot, and that he’d really just engineered the whole thing to stop me from writing the article because it wouldn’t be good for the business to have it written. And that now my career was over and he would make sure I was destroyed. We ended up shouting at each other. It got so bad the bartender came over to ask what was wrong. He heard most of it. You probably know this already. Then he stormed out. I stayed and had another glass of wine, and then left.”

May couldn’t believe what she was hearing. This gave Emily an extreme, urgent motive for the murders.

“Any proof of when you left?” May asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t remember. But it wasn’t more than half an hour after he left.”

“And yesterday afternoon?”

Now Emily shook her head.

“I wasn’t with anyone. I was home alone. Look, I need my lawyer. I really need my lawyer. I can’t keep answering this way. I don’t have an alibi. I never thought I’d need one. I promise you. I didn’t do it.”

“Why did you run then?” Owen asked.

Emily let out a frustrated sigh.

“Because I knew that after what played out, and our argument, and the murders, it was extremely likely that the police would catch up with me and find that damned money in my account. Blackmail’s a felony, I am aware of that. I was involved in blackmail and now it looks like I’m a murderer, too. When I heard Madeline was dead, I knew how people would think. I’m a journalist. I see these stories all the time. I literally don’t know what to say here.”

She stared at May with desperation in her eyes. May saw she was about to cry. Her eyes were swimming with tears.

“We’ll be back,” May said. She got up and walked out.

Outside, Jack and one of the other officers who had been listening in the adjoining room were high-fiving each other.

“You got great answers out of her, May. I think we have enough to build a solid case,” Jack praised her. “What a stroke of luck you asked her about the bar. That will add a lot to the evidence.”

“Congratulations. You did awesomely. I didn’t think you’d break her, but you went right in and found her weak points,” Owen said.

May felt warm inside and grateful for their words of commendation. But inside, she couldn’t help feeling a creeping sense of doubt.

Was it just her own insecurity raising its head? she wondered with a chill.

Or were there really holes in this seemingly solid case that might come back to bite her at a later stage, when too much time had passed to find out the truth? After all, Emily hadn’t actually confessed. She’d said she had no alibi and she’d admitted to the blackmail. But she’d begged them to believe she wasn’t the killer, and the look in her eyes had seemed genuine and truthful.

May decided she wasn’t going to let even a moment’s negligence compromise the case. She couldn’t bear the thought of the wrong person being arrested or, worse still, the case going cold.

Whatever it took, she was going to try and fill the gaps in Emily’s story now. And she had a good idea where to start. It might be only a tiny gap she saw, but it was troubling her.