Dead Man's Shoes (DI Fenchurch Book 7)

by Ed James

‘You’ll what?’ Fenchurch blocked Bell getting back into the interview room. ‘Jason, I really need to speak to him.’

  ‘How about you let me finish first?’

  ‘I’m dealing with a murder.’

  ‘That doesn’t trump my strategic investigation, you know? I’ve got explicit instructions from Julian that I’m not to be interrupted.’

  ‘And how’s that going?’

  ‘Brilliantly.’ Bell shooed Fenchurch away from the room. ‘Now, can you please bugger off and let me do my job?’ He opened the door and slipped back into the interview room.

  Fenchurch had no option but to return to the Observation Suite, tail between his legs. His burrito bag was sitting in there, so he got it out and bit into it, his brain fizzing as he chewed.

  Onscreen, they were still going at it about Younis, but the volume was so low Fenchurch couldn’t hear much. Liam had been in a police interview for hours now and Bell didn’t seem to even be limbering up to asking him about what Liam had been feeding Tom Wiley.

  As much as Fenchurch wanted to get in there, he’d winged it with interviewing Summers and that almost cost them. He couldn’t chance it again, not with Loftus and Bell breathing down his neck.

  On-screen, Bell and Kate were still speaking to Liam, but it was more like he was leading the interview than them.

  Christ, Fenchurch remembered a time when senior cops were good at the interview side of things. Okay, so half of them were bent or had big anger issues, but they were masters of the basics. Like how to shape an interview. How to get a suspect talking, how to get a confession.

  Jason Bell was yet again proving that he was beyond useless.

  Fenchurch’s mobile rang on the desk, blasting out The Smiths, “Bigmouth Strikes Again”.

  Reed Calling…

  He answered it and got to his feet. ‘Kay. Just having my lunch.’

  ‘Let me guess, a burrito?’

  ‘You know me too well.’ Fenchurch picked up the Rangers mug and slurped tea, but it didn’t quell the fire. He knew he’d pay big time for that. His acid reflux had been under control, but he’d slipped. ‘How’s Wiley doing?’

  ‘Still hanging in there, guv. Spoke to the doctor and she says it’s touch and go, slightly more touch than go.’

  ‘Is that a phrase?’

  ‘She used it. Look, I’ve been speaking to Mrs Wiley. She’s confirmed that she was born Francine Summers.’

  ‘So Edward Summers is Wiley’s brother-in-law?’

  ‘No, guv, he was adopted by a colony of lions and—’

  ‘Kay, I’m really not in the mood.’

  ‘Okay, so yeah, that tale Summers was spinning you, at least that part rings true.’

  ‘Right. What about the key?’

  ‘Tom was supposed to be looking after the cat? Called Deandra, I think?’

  Perfect, he didn’t even have to tell her the name. ‘Thanks, Kay. Did she mention anything about Tom losing a key?’

  ‘Not to me, no.’

  ‘Okay. Catch you later.’ Fenchurch killed the call and dumped his phone back on the desk. He took another bite and sat there, chewing slowly. One way to beat the acid reflux, maybe.

  What did that give him?

  A genuine connection, proof that there was a solid reason for Tom Wiley to be in Edward Summers’s flat.

  Validation of Edward Summers trying to save his brother-in-law’s life.

  Did another tick in the box for Summers mean he was telling the truth about everything? And did that make two plus two equal four or five?

  Fenchurch had less than a quarter of his burrito to go. Sod it, he pushed it into his mouth and swallowed it down as he walked from the Obs Suite to the interview room. He finished swallowing, then hauled the door open and charged into the room.

  Liam looked up with that perpetual grin on his face. ‘Si, what brings you here?’

  Fenchurch squatted as low as he could manage.

  The grinding and crunching made Liam look down. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Just fine and dandy.’ Fenchurch drummed his fingers on the table. He felt Bell touch his arm, but he ignored him. ‘So, Liam, you’ve been in here a while. Any chance you could explain to us why you’ve held back the fact that you’ve been speaking to Tom Wiley?’

  Liam looked over at Kate, but didn’t say anything.

  ‘Mate, she won’t help you.’ Fenchurch put his face between them. ‘You need to talk to me. Tom Wiley seems to think you had proof about who killed his son.’

  ‘Where did you get that idea from?’

  ‘I finished my cup of tea and it was a fresh leaf cup, so it had leaves in the bottom, and they spelled out a message for me.’

  ‘Sarky bastard.’

  ‘Liam, you have been speaking to him, haven’t you?’

  ‘I won’t name my sources.’

  ‘We’ve found his body.’

  ‘He’s dead?’

  ‘Nope. Alive.’

  ‘He spoke to you?’

  ‘Sadly, he’s in a coma. Touch and go whether he’ll live. Could’ve suffered serious brain trauma. Might not be able to speak, let alone tell us who attacked him. And who killed Damon, your flatmate.’

  ‘It wasn’t me.’

  ‘Okay, well that’s a good start. You want to tell me who it might’ve been?’

  ‘No idea. Sorry.’

  ‘Liam, we know that Tom Wiley was hassling Damon. Fine, cool. Whatever. But you’ve been hiding the fact that you’ve been speaking to him as well. And you’ve been whispering poison into Tom Wiley’s ear, haven’t you?’

  ‘So I’ve spoken to him? So what? It’s all logged. It’s all above board.’

  ‘What were you telling him?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Liam, someone’s given him the impression you have evidence that James Kent killed Micah.’

  Liam seemed to laugh, but hid it with a shake of the head. ‘That what you think?’

  ‘Tell me it’s not right.’

  Liam sat back and smiled at Kate, then Bell. ‘I’d rather go back to talking to these two about Travis. They’re actually getting somewhere.’

  ‘Liam, I don’t give a shit about Travis. I don’t really give a shit about you, even after all we’ve been through together. You’re hiding something and it’s making me sick.’

  Liam stared up at the ceiling. His neck had a nasty-looking shaving cut, not far from the Adam’s apple.

  Fenchurch stood up again, trying to drag Liam’s attention away from the ceiling. ‘You don’t get it, do you? This isn’t a game. This isn’t copying and pasting tweets onto your paper and pretending it is news. Liam, these are people’s lives you’re messing with. They’re broken and twisted and distorted by the murder of their children. You’ve got to stop messing about and grow up.’

  Liam looked over at him, but he couldn’t hold his gaze. ‘Okay, so one of my sources is someone who worked the case. I think you know who, but I’m losing track of what I’ve told you lot.’

  Fenchurch knew who that source was. An officer with nothing to lose, sidelined because of a long-term injury she was struggling to cope with. Yeah, Dawn Mulholland had an axe to grind with Loftus and didn’t seem to care who got caught in the crossfire.

  Not that he was going to confront Liam about it.

  Liam looked back at Fenchurch, his eyes full of knowing mischief. ‘My source passed me some interesting evidence. Stuff from the case files.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Turns out, the alibi James Kent gave for Micah’s death was indeed rock solid. It’s why he wasn’t charged with his death. Trouble is, for Hermione, he didn’t even offer one. And Julian Loftus needed a conviction, didn’t he? My mates were all over this, loads of editorials full of “why, oh why” about the Met. So poor James Kent got railroaded.’

  Fenchurch didn’t give him the satisfaction of a question, and just stood there, silent.

  ‘I’ve got evidence about where Kent was the night of Hermione’s murder. You caugh
t the wrong person.’

  The little punk believed it too. ‘Liam, if this has the slightest chance of being true, you should be sharing this—’

  ‘Simon, I’d never share the information with the police.’

  ‘Why?’

  Liam shrugged. ‘Because I’ve shared it with Kent’s lawyer.’

  20

  As much as Fenchurch expected to revel in it, seeing Julian Loftus suffering wasn’t a pretty sight.

  He sat on one of the guest chairs in Fenchurch’s office, left leg crossed over his right, and just stared into space. Whatever went down five years ago, the unravelling of it clearly had an effect on him.

  Fenchurch would go for the jugular, attack the problem, search for a solution and force everything until it was done, even with his inner turmoil boiling over into pure rage.

  With Loftus, sure enough there was that foaming anger, but his calm veneer was clearly part of how he’d got to the position he was now in, and wherever his career trajectory would take him next. He swapped his legs over and picked up his phone, wetting his lips as he read the screen. Maybe a text message from higher up. He looked over at Fenchurch as he got to his feet. ‘I’ll be a moment, Simon.’

  Fenchurch stared out of his office window and watched a taxi trundle along the road, sluicing through the deep puddles from the steady stream of rain. Getting to that time of year where it felt like the skies started darkening as soon as you had your morning coffee.

  He took a drink from Docherty’s old mug.

  ‘You had any convictions overturned, sir?’ Ashkani was in the seat next to the one Loftus had just vacated.

  Fenchurch turned to her. ‘Most cops with ten-plus years in will have had that pleasure, surely. At least once.’

  She nodded. ‘I’ve had it twice.’

  ‘Hurts, doesn’t it?’

  ‘And it’s not like we’ve done anything wrong.’

  ‘What, other than making a mistake that robs someone of their freedom for a few years? An innocent someone?’

  She shrugged.

  Yeah, that case still got to him.

  Fenchurch took another drink of tea. ‘First time was an innocent accident on my part. The daft sod confessed and put in a guilty plea despite not being in the country.’

  ‘And you convicted him?’

  ‘Right. He was getting kicks out of all the attention. Eventually, we caught the actual perpetrator and our guy was let go.’

  ‘Some people, eh?’

  ‘Exactly. I was a DC, so it wasn’t like I was responsible. But still, I hauled myself over the coals for it, made sure I’d never make the same mistake again. Made sure everything was double - and triple - and quadruple-checked. I know you think I’m a cowboy, but I like to back all that action up with solid police work.’

  ‘Didn’t say anything of the sort, sir.’

  ‘But this case, Uzma. Who knows what the answer is?’ Fenchurch sat down at his computer and unlocked it. The screen opened to Hermione Taylor’s case file, all the key evidence in James Kent’s prosecution for her murder. His whereabouts for weeks either side, backed up by statements from many witnesses, and harder evidence like his phone’s GPS record.

  Closed off with a life sentence without parole.

  Justice for Clive Taylor and his daughter, Hermione’s sister.

  And Liam Sharpe was hoping to overturn all of that.

  Fenchurch looked over at Ashkani. ‘You’re a Hammer, aren’t you?’

  ‘For my sins, yeah.’

  ‘What this whole process reminds me of was when they introduced Video Assistant Referees into football this summer. The back pages stopped being about matches, about the joy and misery of millions of fans and tens of players. Now it’s all become about how VAR is ruining the game. Every single decision has been put under the microscope, with armpits judging offside decisions or handballs.’

  ‘It’s ironic, isn’t it? Policing isn’t a million miles away from the cesspit football has clawed itself into. All that clamouring for clarity over the years has just ended up muddying the waters.’

  ‘This will be some story, though. Liam will be dining out on it for years to come. Can you imagine? Post’s front page will be screaming it out loud, but for weeks afterwards, all the other papers and news sites will cover it, and he’ll be on the TV news, both here and abroad. He’ll have offers of big book deals, maybe even film deals.’

  ‘True crime podcasts, Netflix shows, Hollywood movies.’ Ashkani flashed her eyebrows. ‘The murder of a schoolgirl is big business, sir. And the overturning of the conviction for her murder is bigger still.’

  ‘Maybe Liam’s barking up the wrong tree.’ Fenchurch wondered if there was some reason Liam had stopped calling him, stopped replying to his texts, if he’d annoyed him somehow. Maybe that was why the little punk was betraying him now. Why he was playing a game like that.

  No, he needed to haul himself out of self-recrimination. This wasn’t about him, it was about Clive Taylor and Tom Wiley. About their families, their friends, their lives.

  Tom Wiley seemed to have almost met his demise hunting for justice for his own son’s murder.

  The door slid open and Loftus drifted back into the room, followed by a red-haired pixie woman, her look as severe as her fringe. She claimed one of the chairs, dumping her briefcase and tugging off heavy gloves. Sally McGovern, Neale Blackhurst’s number two at the CPS. The pixie image masked the reality of her being a ruthless prosecutor. And she wasn’t exactly a member of the Fenchurch fan club. ‘Simon.’

  ‘Sally.’

  She slumped in the chair, hugging her briefcase tight. ‘Have you managed to get hold of Dawn, Julian?’

  ‘Nope.’ Loftus kept his gaze on her. ‘DI Ashkani here is attending in DI Mulholland’s absence. She worked the case back in the day as a DS.’

  ‘Fine.’ Didn’t seem it, but she also didn’t seem like she was going to push it.

  Loftus reclaimed his seat and picked up his coffee. ‘Can I get you anything, Sal?’

  ‘No, I had a coffee on my way over.’ She dumped her bag at her feet and shrugged off her overcoat. ‘But I suspect I’ll need another one before the night is over.’

  ‘Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves now.’ Loftus checked his wristwatch, some golden diamond-encrusted bling timepiece. ‘All we’ve got is the mere protestation of innocence and no actual evidence. This could all just be smoke and mirrors.’

  ‘And it could be about to blow up in our faces.’ Sally pulled out a yellow notepad and clicked her silver pen, ready to document every item in the disaster. ‘Let’s go back to first principles.’

  Fenchurch winched himself up to standing, feeling that dull pain deep in his knee. He needed to get that whole leg replaced by a machine. ‘We’ve been through the timeline already.’

  ‘And we’re doing it again, for my benefit.’ Sally scribbled away on her notepad, her handwriting the kind of cursive that a medieval monk would slave over for months. Neat, tidy, but with an elegance to it. ‘First, Micah Wiley was killed on the seventh of August 2014, in Limehouse. Stabbed in the heart from behind.’ She scratched a line on her pad. ‘Second, twenty-four hours later, Hermione Taylor was strangled in Hampstead.’

  Loftus’s smile was a lot brighter than the subject matter deserved. ‘Roughly eight miles apart, and those are London miles. A lot of distance between them.’

  ‘Quite.’ Sally didn’t look up from her notes. ‘Now, James Kent had a solid alibi for Micah’s murder on the seventh, which is on record from multiple sources. He had a confidential meeting with the school board.’

  Fenchurch frowned at her. ‘Confidential?’

  Sally unclicked her pen. ‘He didn’t have to disclose the nature of the meeting to us, just that he was there.’

  ‘It didn’t pertain to the case?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s a lot of trust to place in a school headmaster.’

  ‘Indeed. And the school headmistress in questio
n was kind enough to provide minutes for the session and an audio recording from which said minutes were derived.’

  Fenchurch slumped back in his seat again.

  ‘Anyway.’ Sally clicked her pen. ‘Kent didn’t have an alibi for Hermione. And he didn’t offer one, either.’

  Fenchurch waited for more, but Sally clicked her pen and sat back. ‘That’s it?’

  ‘What else do you expect?’

  Fenchurch pointed at his computer. ‘I’ve been through the case file and I expected that looking at it from such a summarised vantage point meant I was missing something. But I haven’t been, have I? This is shaky at best. You’ve basically found the easiest suspect, pinned it on him. That’s a load of—’

  ‘Simon.’ Loftus was gripping his thighs tight. ‘Whatever you say, please make it constructive.’

  ‘What about for Hermione’s murder?’

  ‘We’ve got the weight of evidence on our side. James Kent killed her.’

  ‘So why does Liam Sharpe believe he didn’t?’

  ‘That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?’ Sally shook her head. ‘James Kent refused to give an alibi for the time of her murder because he, and I quote, “probably did it, I just can’t remember”.’

  ‘Persuade me.’

  ‘You’re worse than any judge or jury, Fenchurch.’ Sally’s smile was cold as the rain lashing the window. ‘We’ve got multiple statements to the effect of a history of aggression from James Kent towards Hermione, in class and out. For starters, he was accusing her of plagiarising an essay for her A-levels.’

  And that part of his brain that Fenchurch had trained for so long led him right down the rabbit hole. He could picture the exchanges between them, the heated arguments, the pleas of innocence, but the insistence on justice. And that was all whether there was validity to it. Teachers were people, and they could be vindictive.

  Sally tapped her pen on her notepad. ‘The clincher was a series of Schoolbook messages from Mr Kent to her, highly aggressive but also suggestive.’

  ‘One way?’

  ‘Correct. Mr Kent had a drink problem, another contributing factor to his inability to provide an alibi. He claims to have not sent the messages, and they were extremely angry and poorly typed for a history teacher. They escalated when she appealed the school’s decision. Hermione’s boyfriend, Barney Richardson, had persuaded her to go to the headmistress to report the allegations. This appeal was the basis for the confidential meeting, where Mr Kent was put on suspension.’