Kind of Cruel by Sophie Hannah Page A

covered in scaffolding and blue plastic sheeting. He knows , thought Simon.
    ‘Gibbs and Olivia are . . . having a thing. It’s been going on since the night of our wedding.’
    Colin Sellers shook his head, looked angry. Simon had exposed a man who was cheating on his wife, and, in doing so, breached the only principle Sellers held dear.
    ‘Would this be the same Gibbs whose wife is expecting twins next April?’ The speed with which Proust asked convinced Simon he’d known too. Sam hadn’t; that much was obvious from his face. ‘Gibbs and Olivia Zailer. So my star chart guess wasn’t too far off the mark – he does your bidding and gets his very own Zailer sister. Can I refer to a booby prize without it being mistaken for smut?’
    ‘I’ve just told you the only thing you’d find out from reading the letters in Charlie’s notebook,’ said Simon. ‘So now you don’t need to read them, and I’d appreciate it, and Charlie would definitely appreciate it, if you didn’t.’
    Sam Kombothekra nodded.
    ‘None of my business,’ said Sellers.
    ‘Theoretically, we might find out more than the bare facts from reading the notebook.’ Proust made a show of flicking through its pages. ‘We might find out, in great detail, how betrayed Sergeant Zailer feels, her reasons for feeling that way, and how good she is at holding a grudge. Among other things. I wonder if we’d find out anything about you, Waterhouse.’
    ‘I’m going to interview Amber Hewerdine,’ said Simon, on his way out of the room.
    Proust’s voice came from behind him. ‘Not unsupervised. I’ll join you.’
    ‘You?’ Simon stopped. Turned. ‘You want to interview a witness?’
    ‘No. I couldn’t care less about your witness. She isn’t going to tell me anything useful.’ Proust dropped the notebook on the table with deliberate carelessness. ‘I want to watch you conduct an interview, Waterhouse. Do you know what I’d really like to do? I’d like to watch clips from all your filmed interviews, back to back: the frustrating ones, the dull ones, the half-hearted ones where you’re going through the motions. Nostalgia’s always been a weakness of mine, and today I’m feeling nostalgic about your career as a police detective. What say you treat us all to one final display of your investigative prowess and figure out why that might be?’
     

     
    ‘This is a photograph of Katharine at her graduation,’ Gibbs told the angry woman across the table from him. Her resentment of him was making him feel claustrophobic in the small interview room, with its custard-yellow walls and its window that offered a sick-joke view of an internal neon-lit corridor. Or perhaps it was his resentment of her. He’d decided he couldn’t stand her when she’d told him that he had to pretend to be a feather-duster salesman for the benefit of her children. A fucking feather-duster salesman . Why would anyone do something as stupid as that for a living? ‘Katharine was murdered in her flat in Spilling, on 2 November. She was twenty-six.’
    ‘How many times are you going to tell me that?’ Amber Hewerdine aimed her grey eyes at him like a weapon. ‘Surely I know everything I need to know about her by now? She was twenty-six, a primary school teacher, unmarried, lived alone, grew up in Norfolk . . .’
    ‘In a village called Pulham Market,’ Gibbs supplied a new piece of information.
    ‘Oh, well. That changes every thing,’ Amber extended her voice in a sarcastic drawl. ‘Katharine Allen from Pulham Market? That Katharine Allen? Why didn’t you say so? I’ve known that Katharine Allen for years. When you asked me if the name meant anything to me, I assumed you were asking if I knew a Katharine Allen who wasn’t from Pulham Market in Norfolk.’
    ‘The more I tell you about her, however irrelevant it seems, the more likely we are to find a connection between the two of you,’ said Gibbs.
    ‘I’ll ask you for the twenty-fourth time: what makes you