As he drove out of Thorpe Wood, Bliss noticed Sandra Bannister standing outside chatting with fellow journalists, a number of TV news crews close by. This was going to be a big story, and he wanted no part in it. Like ants at a picnic table they swarmed around his vehicle, shouting out their inane questions. Photographers snapped away, and the experienced camera crews were finding the right spots from which to shoot. Bannister appeared to hold back the moment she saw who was behind the wheel. For that reason alone, Bliss waved her forward. He motioned for her to join him inside the car, which she did, amidst howling protests from the crowd.
Bliss drove to the Woodman, parked up and killed the engine, but remained in his seat behind the wheel. When he eventually turned to Bannister, he noticed how fatigued she looked. The reporter had clearly not been sleeping well, and he thought he knew why. Nodding to himself, he said, ‘Go on. One free shot. Any question you like. If you’re the person I think you are, I already have the answer for you.’
Her smile was half-hearted and insincere. ‘There are so many I could and probably should be asking, but if you’re reducing me to just the one, I’ll have to give it some thought.’
‘No, you won’t,’ he said. ‘Not if I’m right about you, Sandra.’
Her lips puffed out in annoyance. ‘You are such a frustrating man, Jimmy Bliss. All those times I asked you to call me by my first name, and now here you are doing it willingly yet again when it doesn’t count.’
‘I think it does. I think we have professional fences to mend, even if our personal ones are beyond repair.’
He let his observation sit with her for a few seconds. Finally, she turned to him, and the earnest look she gave him told Bliss he had been right all along. ‘Okay – one question. Did my holding back information for my story cost lives?’
Bliss’s shake of the head was firm. ‘No.’
‘How can you be so certain?’
‘That’s a second question, but I’ll make allowances and continue to answer the first one. Believe it or not, amidst all the crud coming my way over these past few days, I did take time out to consider the same question. I asked myself if I could have done more, done what I did any sooner. And I started to reflect on how and when information had come to my attention.’
‘And what conclusion did you arrive at?’ Bannister went rigid, and Bliss could tell she was anxious about his answer.
He gave it to her straight. ‘If I’m remembering the sequence of events correctly, you and your colleague did wonder if the slice of flesh left for us here in Peterborough had anything to do with Ben Carlisle – mainly because of the book your colleague noticed when you were in his home. And in fact, it was the one real lead to come from that source, because Mrs Carlisle was unable to give us anything to go on. So, yes, if I’d known about the book earlier I would have looked at it sooner, which in turn would have led me to Phil Walker ahead of when we finally figured out his involvement.’
‘Phil Walker? The man you arrested yesterday? What did it have to do with him?’
Bliss told her about the library barcode he’d discovered. He also mentioned Walker’s influence regarding the method Stephen Price had used to inflict his own form of torture on his mother’s killers.
Bannister loosened off a low whistle. ‘So, the book wasn’t merely happenstance after all.’
‘It doesn’t look like it, no. I mean, Price said so without saying anything, if you get my drift. If there was a stroke of luck, I suppose it was that Ben Carlisle borrowed it from Walker and never bothered to return it. Not that it would have made a huge difference either way. Eventually, we would have entered Walker’s home and found the book there if it had never been loaned to Carlisle.’
‘Not necessarily. It was a library book. If Carlisle had given it back, it might have already been returned to the library.’
Bliss knew she was looking for something that wasn’t there. ‘That’s not the case. I checked it out. The book was three years overdue, and the library has closed down. Don’t go searching for the fatalistic, or looking too hard at all the ifs, buts and maybes. That way leads to madness. Believe me, I’ve been there. Better to concentrate your efforts on the things we know transpired, rather than dwell on what might have been.’
He waited while her brain scanned all the information and began reassembling it to provide a larger, clearer picture of the whole thing. After a moment, she seemed to reach the same conclusion as Bliss. ‘I suppose I’m trying to make sense of the nonsensical. There will always be aspects we never fully understand, which is something I need to accept.’
‘That’s true enough. You’re carrying a weight around with you and you’re not sure if it’s justified. But I’m confident that by the time the first bag was left for us, Walker had already quit his home and taken himself off the grid. I genuinely don’t believe we would have put all those pieces together in time to have helped or saved anybody had you come forward earlier.’
The look of relief on her face was all the reward he needed, but he asked for more anyway. ‘I can see knowing the truth means a great deal,’ he said. ‘So I’m going to ask a favour in return.’
‘Name it.’
‘Thank you. Sandra, if in the coming days and weeks you find you can’t take it easy on me, please don’t go especially hard on me, either.’
‘You? But you were the one who put an end to all the mayhem, weren’t you?’
‘Yes and no. I think it had run its course by the time we wrapped things up. Plus we still have three dead men out there somewhere, unaccounted for. Somebody will have to pay for us not getting a complete result.’
‘And you’ll be their scapegoat. How can that be fair?’
‘It’s not about fairness or otherwise. I ran the joint task force. There’s nobody else to blame. Just – please don’t speculate. There’s a major debriefing tomorrow morning. What I’m asking you to do is follow the official statements and not add anything. I’ll feed you what I can if I think something important has been omitted.’
‘I can’t believe they’d come after you again, Jimmy. No matter how things finished up, it’s over now. Why can’t they be happy with achieving a perfectly respectable result?’
‘And I can’t believe you have to ask.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Because you lot won’t be satisfied. You never are. You’ll probe and you’ll dig and you’ll hypothesise and you’ll print or say things that will have two plus two making five – not you, specifically, but reporters in general. Others. They’ll spot weaknesses and tear into them like a pack of hyenas.’
‘Says a lot for my chosen profession.’
‘And we both know your chosen profession is not what it used to be. Standards have declined. You’re up against bloggers, social media, YouTube… and they have absolutely no professional standards to play by. We both know there are plenty of people willing to believe whatever you tell them and repeat it all over the internet. On this occasion, it’d be nice to have our local newspaper on my side. And if your editors won’t agree, at least convince them to let you stand on neutral territory and not come for my throat, teeth bared.’
‘I won’t do that. I promise you. You were honest with me just now, and it meant a great deal. I’ll concentrate on the official statements, but I’ll also be guided by anything you have to say as well. No matter what our differences, I won’t bury you, Jimmy. You don’t deserve that, and I hope you know I’m not that kind of journalist anyway.’
‘I do. I also don’t expect it from your newspaper, but these are tough times and hysterical headlines are great clickbait. I said at the beginning I was asking for a favour, but in reality all I want is a fair shake.’
‘I can guarantee you’ll get that – from us, at least.’
It was all he could ask for. Bannister had taken a cab to the police station, so after reaching their agreement, Blis
s drove her back to the Telegraph building in the city centre. As she unbuckled her seatbelt, she turned to him and said, ‘Jimmy, I’m sure this will work itself out. It always has in the past, and you’ve been in worse situations before.’
Bliss knew this was the case. In truth, he wasn’t overly worried. And that, ironically, bothered him more than the threat of having the finger of blame pointing in his direction.
Forty-Five
The post-op debriefing took place on Monday morning at nine o’clock. In attendance at Thorpe Wood were every available officer and detective from the station who had worked on the case, plus all relevant senior personnel, including those from London and Wiltshire – DI Max Riseborough excluded. The tables and chairs in Major Incident Room One had been arranged into a large rectangle, with no head of table; this was not an inquiry, though everyone there knew otherwise. However, Chief Superintendent Feeley had been invited to chair the meeting, which did not augur well.
It was standing room only as Bliss eyed the clock above the whiteboards. Fifty minutes in, and they were fast approaching the events of Saturday afternoon and evening. His contributions thus far had been succinct, mostly to clarify specific points arising from the sharing of information. He knew things were about to change dramatically; he was going to become the subject of in-depth questioning. He took several deep breaths, telling himself he had nothing to worry about.
Bliss batted away the initial volley of questions with ease, confidently outlining the process that had led them to Epping Forest, the collection of SD cards, and the subsequent viewing of the footage they held. There was a sudden shift in atmosphere as Feeley zeroed in on the final moments prior to him leaving the room on Saturday.
‘Now, Inspector. It’s evident that at some point during the viewing of the footage, something significant occurred to you – something you felt required individual examination ahead of bringing it to the attention of your team. Would you elaborate on that for us, please?’
Bliss took a sip of water, not wanting his voice to become brittle. ‘Of course. As we watched the unidentified figure in the woods, I became aware of some kind of subliminal message in the footage that was not immediately apparent. I asked for the film to be replayed a few times, though I can’t recall precisely how many. Afterwards, I realised the subject’s movements were speaking to me, specifically in the way he appeared to stagger every other step or so. As many people in this room are aware, I am intimately familiar with the effects of imbalance, and I recognised the particular gait of somebody recently exposed to that condition.’
‘And this tied in with Walker how, Inspector Bliss?’
‘Well, at first my thoughts turned to Geraldine Price’s brother. We’d checked him out, but as far as we knew he was in Toronto, and records suggested he had not left there during this period. He has Ménière’s disease, the same condition I have, and that’s what drew me to him. But I couldn’t see how he had managed to be here in the UK while his passport suggested he had never left Canada. I had also spotted another reason for the imbalance. Or, rather, saw something I believed strongly indicated it.’
‘Which was?’
‘His left arm. Its movements were not natural. At first, I couldn’t quite make out why, but later on I realised it was possibly disabled, or at the very least incapacitated.’
‘But we’re talking about a man whose left hand was removed entirely. Surely that must have been apparent to everybody.’
Bliss shook his head. ‘The angles provided by the cameras were not ideal, and at no point did we get a clear view of the man’s lower extremities. We saw perhaps down to his elbows or just beneath, but it was impossible to see the complete picture. However, as soon as I considered the possibility of him being disabled in or around the arm, my mind immediately went to his hand and whether it was missing.’
‘That’s a bit of a leap, wouldn’t you say?’
‘No, sir. I wouldn’t. If we were working any other case, I would agree with you – but this one already included two severed hands. I would have considered it an oversight not to have at least asked myself the question.’
At this point, DSI Conway interjected. ‘And from this you immediately began to suspect Mr Walker?’ He asked the question as if doubting the logical pathway Bliss was mapping out for them.
‘Not quite. We of course knew Harrison’s and Walker’s hands had been removed, because they were in our possession. But just because we hadn’t been left the hands of either Ben Carlisle or Earl Dobson, didn’t mean they had not been removed. So, at the point at which I realised we were looking at one of the victims, the only person I knew it couldn’t be was Freddy Swift.’
Feeley had taken the opportunity to polish his spectacles on a small black square of cloth. ‘So how did you eventually arrive at the conclusion that, of the four possible victims, the figure in the forest had to be Walker?’ he asked.
‘The first thing I did was go through the information we had obtained in relation to Andy and Stephen Price’s clients. I found a couple of connections; one to Walker and another to Swift. Stephen Price had represented Walker’s son, while Andy had acted on behalf of Swift himself on a number of occasions in connection to his porn empire. I then ran a general search on Walker, looking into his online presence over the past couple of decades. Given that he had once been a notorious gangster, and was now running a lucrative business which was currently fighting hard for contracts across Europe, the US and the Middle East, there were a lot of articles to wade through.’
His glasses back in place, Feeley blinked rapidly to adjust his vision. ‘And you did not consider bringing your team in to help at that point?’
‘Had my search gone on longer, then yes, I would have roped them in to assist. But I happened to hit upon a piece in the Daily Mail from 2017. It referred to Phil Walker having partially recovered from a severe stroke, and I recalled DS Chandler mentioning this to me previously while we were discussing his background. I had my suspicions as to why it was deemed a partial recovery, and in reading further I found I was correct. He had, in fact, suffered irreversible nerve damage and lost the use of his left hand. That knowledge sparked an idea I couldn’t let go of.’
Bliss took a longer sip from his glass, looking around at the faces staring back at him. He coughed up a choked laugh. ‘Now I have some idea of what it must be like to be a prize exhibit in a zoo,’ he said.
Amid the polite laughter, Bliss sought out DCI Warburton, whose smile and nod of encouragement boosted his confidence. The feeble joke seemed to have lifted the oppressive anticipation inside the room. Buoyed by this, he continued. ‘Those of you closest to the operation will already know I originally had Walker down as my chief suspect. But no sooner had I put him in the frame than his hand was left for us to find, and he immediately turned from suspect to victim.’
‘It does seem like a logical assumption to have made,’ Superintendent Fletcher offered encouragingly, nodding at her colleagues.
‘Yes, ma’am. I never liked Swift as a suspect, and we were always of the opinion that either Andy or Stephen Price, or both, were involved. But after finding Walker’s hand, we were left with Freddy Swift as the accomplice – well, either him or someone who hadn’t yet been picked up by our radar. Of course, what we encountered in Epping Forest on Saturday put paid to any notion of it being Swift.’
‘Naturally,’ Conway conceded, as if the issue required no explanation.
Bliss was about to let it pass, but felt he should at least offer up an alternative line of thinking; it was reasonable to assume every conversation would eventually have to appear on a statement. He cleared his throat and said, ‘Except… I briefly toyed with the idea that Swift might still be our man, and that perhaps one of his victims had escaped and paid him back in spades. It was a reasonable theory. Swift could have been the person who took care of the abductions and bag drops, with one of the Prices – or both �
� carrying out most of the butchery. In which case it was also possible one of the men managed to free himself, lured Swift into a trap and took care of him. But I couldn’t get past my feelings about Swift. The man was a poor excuse for a human being, and it looks increasingly likely that he was involved somehow in Geraldine Price’s abduction, torture, and murder. In the end, I truly couldn’t imagine any of his victims recovering sufficiently from such awful mutilation to take their own revenge so quickly.’
Chief Superintendent Feeley snorted. ‘You thought it more likely that Walker either chopped his own hand off or allowed it to be removed, to throw us off the scent?’ he said. ‘I find such an admission extraordinary, Inspector Bliss.’
‘Extraordinary or not, it was also entirely possible,’ Bliss shot back. ‘The stroke was severe enough to render his hand useless. The way I viewed it, he felt the pressure of our investigation and saw an opportunity to remove himself from our thoughts entirely. No, that’s not right – in fact, what it did was force us to regard him as a fresh victim. All he had to do was lose an appendage which was of no use to him anyway. In many ways, it was a perfect strategy. So yes, I thought it possible. Not probable, perhaps not even likely. But possible.’
Feeley moved them on. ‘Which was when you came up with the idea of feeding information to the Prices and waiting for them to give themselves away.’
‘Them and, hopefully, the third party. By this time, I’d dismissed Freddy Swift as the accomplice, which left Walker as the most likely candidate. I was confident phone calls would be made following our chat with Andy Price. I thought either he or his son would seek out our man and attempt to silence him. I admit I was surprised by the meeting they arranged, but it worked in our favour because it gave us time to put people in the right positions to end it that same day.’
Slow Slicing (DI Bliss Book 7) Page 33