Page 31 of No Safe Place
A long pause.
‘We haven’t spoken for a while,’ Penny said. ‘He thought – we thought it would be easier. Clean break, for now.’
David’s phone download was back from Digital Forensics already. Field had checked it herself before she left the station – it had been three months since their last contact.
Field filed the wordestrangedaway for later.
Penny was coming across as cold, possibly uncaring. But was that just shock? Was she just the buttoned-up repressed type who found it hard to process things?
Field gave a supportive smile. ‘Do you mind telling me why you split up?’
Penny gave a jerky shake of the head. ‘No. I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘I know,’ Field urged. ‘I’m divorced myself, and I know it’s awful. But it might help us.’
Penny nodded and covered her eyes with her palm. ‘I was jealous.’
Field waited.
Penny shook her head behind her hand, then pushed her hair away from her face.
‘I was jealous of his work, his obsession with his work. Jealous of hispatients, even.’ Her voice was clipped, and she turned her head slightly, not meeting Field’s eye. ‘He kept up his NHS clinics, still lectured long after all his colleagues stopped. Private patients in the evenings, even weekends sometimes.’
‘That must have been hard for you,’ Field said, shifting forward in her chair, to avoid a ray of sun that kept blinding her. ‘Had you tried to resolve it?’
‘I gave up work a few years ago – withstress.’ Penny said the last word like it was a source of great shame. ‘He didn’t mind but that made it worse, just sitting around all day.’
Penny straightened in her chair, sitting straight-backed and rigid.
Field could sense her distress beneath the stoicism. ‘What did you do, Penny?’
‘Community work. A nurse, for the British Heart Foundation.’
‘Okay, thank you. Sorry, you were saying—’
Penny sniffed. ‘I told David to take a sabbatical. He was nearly fifty – he needed a break. We could finally spend time together, do some work on the house—’
Field took a second to process what Penny was saying. She had been awake for almost twenty-four hours and the warm, scented air wasn’t helping her focus. ‘And David said no?’
She nodded, hands clenched in her lap. ‘That’s when I told him I wanted a divorce. He wanted to be their doctor more than he wanted to be married to me.’
Penny had given David an ultimatum and she’d ended up with the unfavourable outcome – but he was still wearing his wedding ring when he was attacked. He hadn’t let go of the marriage yet.
‘You said you had to give up work with stress, Penny. Did that contribute to the situation, do you think?’
Penny gave her a puzzled look, as though trying to gauge the relevance of this question. Finally, she responded, in a low voice. ‘I supported David through everything. I met him when I was young and spent the best part of two decades supporting him. But when I needed support?’ Penny lifted a hand to her forehead and rubbed at it, like she was getting a headache.
The thought seemed to trail off. A lawnmower started up in the distance.
Field moved on, raising her voice to be heard. ‘Penny, this next question may seem confusing, but it’s our job to investigate all possibilities. Our attention has been drawn to a paper David published in 2010—’
It was a clumsy, abrupt shift in topic – but there was no natural way to bring up David’s study.
Penny blinked, slowly. ‘That was fifteen years ago.’
‘I know—’ Field hesitated. ‘And I know it seems strange,me asking about it. Do you remember that paper, by any chance?’
‘I – yes, of course. It kick-started his career.’
