by Ben Cheetham
Steve spread his hands. “That’s up to you. She’s living in your house not mine.”
“Are you saying I shouldn’t trust her?”
“All I know is I wouldn’t sleep very well at night if a woman like that was looking after my kids.”
“A woman like that?” Jack retorted loud enough to draw curious glances from nearby colleagues. He lowered his voice. “I thought you liked Butterfly.”
“I do.”
“Then how can you talk about her like that? Whatever she was before, that person died when Ryan Mahon put a bullet in her head.”
“I’m sure you’re right, Jack. I’m only trying to look out for you.” Steve tapped a printout of Karl Robinson’s criminal record. “You still haven’t heard the worst of this. In 2008 the MET tried to get Robinson on attempted murder. He beat a fellow scumbag called Bryan Hall so badly the guy ended up in a wheelchair. Apparently it was common knowledge on the street that Robinson had done it. He and Hall had some sort of beef going on, but Hall refused to press charges. He was too scared to finger the guy who crippled him. Do you know what that tells me? We shouldn’t play around with Robinson. We need to find him and come down on him like the proverbial ton of bricks.”
“What was the beef over?”
Steve shrugged. “What are these things always about? Money? A woman?”
“A woman,” Jack echoed uneasily, his gaze returning to Karl’s mugshot. He looked at it with a pinched brow, then said, “Alright, Steve. We’ll do it your way.”
Steve nodded approvingly. “I’ll circulate Robinson’s particulars. I suggest you get yourself home and keep an eye out for him.” He handed Jack the printout. “Make sure Butterfly knows exactly what she’s dealing with too.” As Jack stood to leave, Steve added, “Listen, sorry about what I said before. Thing is, if I let anything happen to you Laura will have my bollocks.” His tone was only half-joking.
Jack smiled. But his smile rapidly faded as his thoughts turned to Butterfly’s confession that she’d almost hit Charlie. He knew she was capable of extreme violence. He’d watched her do to Ryan Mahon what she’d threatened to do to Phil Beech and Dale Sutton. But Ryan had abducted her child and tried to kill her. She could never turn that part of herself against her family. Could she? He shook his head in an attempt to dislodge the question, but it kept nagging at him as he headed for his car.
Chapter 7
Jack scanned the street outside his house. No Porsche. He headed inside to a familiar scene. Naomi and Charlie were playing in the living-room. Butterfly was simultaneously preparing a meal, sterilising baby bottles and sorting through a mound of bibs in the kitchen. As Jack looked at her beautiful, tired face, he felt a stab of guilt. She’d fought tooth-and-nail to get her baby back. Now she was fighting through constant pain to look after her family. How could he have questioned whether she was capable of hurting the ones she loved? He put his arms around her and held her for a moment.
“So what did you find out?” Butterfly asked as they drew apart.
Jack handed her the printout. A cleft formed between her eyes as she flipped through the pages. She put the printout down as if she couldn’t bring herself to read any more, lowering her head and closing her eyes. Thud… thud… went the drum at the centre of her brain.
“So now we know who I was,” she murmured.
“Not for sure.”
Butterfly looked at him from under heavy eyelids. “No more kidding ourselves, Jack. I was no better than the lowlifes you lock up.”
“Maybe, but you’re not that person anymore.”
“Aren’t I?” A tremor ran through Butterfly’s voice. She pressed her fingers to the scar on her forehead. “Sometimes I feel like there’s something inside of me. Something that’s looking for a way out. It scares me, Jack.”
He made to put his arms around her again. “Whatever happens, we’ll deal with it together.”
Butterfly moved away from his touch. “I’m so tired, Jack. I don’t know if I’ve got the strength to deal with it.” She pointed at the printout. “Or with him.”
Jack’s voice hardened. “You don’t have to deal with him. I’ll do that.”
Butterfly gave him an uncertain look. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to talk to him. That’s all. Let him know he’s not welcome around here.” A faintly apprehensive note found its way into Jack’s voice. “He’s not, is he?”
Irritation flashed in Butterfly’s eyes. “What do you want me to say, Jack? Am I going to get back together with him? Of course I’m not. Part of me hopes I never see him again. Another part has a thousand questions it wants to ask him.” She clasped the sides of her head. “Sometimes I feel like that’s all my life is. Fucking questions!” Seeing the hurt in Jack’s eyes, she added quickly, “Sorry, I didn’t mean that.”
He summoned up a small smile. “I know. And I get it. It’s like with my job. The questions never end. Why did this guy murder his wife? Why did that guy rape someone? Sometimes you just want to close your eyes to it all. But you can’t. You have to know the answers, even if they make you sick to the pit of your stomach. But I can’t let those answers define who I am. If I did, I’d…” He trailed off. He’d been about to say, I’d chuck myself off the nearest cliff, but an image of Rebecca rose into his mind. His voice thick with pain, he continued, “Rebecca allowed herself to be overwhelmed by those types of questions.”
Now Butterfly moved to put her arms around Jack. “I’m not Rebecca. I know what I’ve got here and god help anyone who tries to take it away from me.”
The fiercely protective edge to Butterfly’s voice chased away Jack’s pain, but he still held onto her as if afraid she might dissolve through his hands. They drew apart as Naomi entered the kitchen, carrying Charlie on her hip. “Yuck, get a room,” she said at the sight of them.
Smiling more broadly, Jack stretched his arms towards her and Charlie. “The hug monster’s gonna get you!”
They both squealed with delight as he enveloped them. From the corner of his eye, he watched Butterfly put the printout into a drawer.
Karl Robinson and all the rest of it receded from thought as they sat down to eat. Mealtime was the usual fun and games. Jack and Butterfly spent most of it trying to prevent Charlie from decorating the walls with his vegetable gloop. Afterwards, Jack took Charlie upstairs to bath him.
It wasn’t until Charlie was in his cot that Karl returned to Jack’s mind. As he closed the curtains, his gaze swept the street. Again, no Porsche. Maybe he’s given up and gone back to London, he said to himself. He seriously doubted it. Assuming Karl’s accomplice in the Kensington burglary was Butterfly – or rather, Io – he’d kept his mouth shut for five years. That wasn’t the behaviour of a man who gave up easily.
Jack peered into the cot. Charlie was asleep on his back with his arms stretched over his head. “Sleep tight, little man,” murmured Jack before tiptoeing from the room.
He found Butterfly at the kitchen table poring over the murder case files. “What if this Karl knows something about the killings?” she said.
“What can he possibly know that we don’t? We have access to all sorts of information that he doesn’t.”
“Except for my memories.”
Jack tapped the files. “It’s all in there. Tracy told the police everything that happened.”
“Did she though?” The old shadow crossed Butterfly’s features. “What if there were things she was too scared or ashamed to tell them?”
“That’s just your survivor’s guilt talking. Believe me, Butterfly, if you’d known anything that would have helped capture the killers, the police would have gotten it out of you.”
“Did you speak to Eric?”
Jack nodded. “Briefly. There wasn’t much to talk about. Beech still works as a gamekeeper and lives in the same house. Sutton lives in Seascale. He hasn’t worked since being sacked from his caretaker job. Apparently he spends most of his time drinking White Lightning on benches
around town. They both live alone. Beech has no family. Sutton has a daughter from the schoolgirl he got pregnant, although for obvious reasons he has no access to her. I’d say they both have pretty shitty lives.”
“Is that supposed to be some sort of consolation?” Butterfly asked with a warning glint in her eyes.
“Of course not. I’m just…” Jack sighed. “I suppose I’m just trying to make you feel better about all of this.”
“The only thing that would do that is finding the killers.”
“I hate to say this, but I’m not sure that’s ever going to happen. Not after all this time.” Jack gestured to the papers spread over the table. “I mean, what have we got to work with besides a truckload of circumstantial evidence? Yes, Beech knew the Ridleys were going for a walk on Low Lonning. So did the landlord of The Rose and Crown. So did the two men drinking with Beech that lunchtime. Those men worked at Bleng Farm less than a mile from the crime scene. They had access to shotguns. Why not focus on them instead of Beech and Sutton? You passed three farms on the drive out to Low Lonning. Perhaps the killers came from one of those farms. Maybe Alistair Bray, the farmer who phoned the police was involved. Have you considered that?”
“Alistair Bray?” scoffed Butterfly. “He saved my life.”
“You saved your own life. All Alistair did was phone the police. He could hardly have done otherwise, that is unless his wife was involved too.”
Butterfly gave an incredulous snort. “Pam Bray was a forty-five-year-old housewife with two kids.”
“I’m not saying she was directly involved, but she could have been covering for her husband.”
Butterfly shook her head. “Pam stated that she, Alistair and their children were stacking hay in their barn shortly before I showed up. A farmer from Holmrook confirmed that he’d made a delivery of hay to Bray Farm that day. The Bray’s fourteen-year-old son, Neal, and twelve-year-old daughter, Hayley, both backed up their mum’s statement. Neither Alistair nor Pam has a criminal record. They didn’t hesitate to help me. Alistair owned a…” She leafed through several pages and read, ‘Cogswell and Harrison shotgun. He’d recently purchased the gun and had not yet shot it, as was confirmed by the absence of carbon residue or wire brush marks.”
“I agree, it’s extremely unlikely that the Brays had any involvement in the murders.”
“Just as it’s extremely unlikely that the landlord, Len Simmons, was involved, given that he was at a Cash and Carry in Whitehaven half an hour after the murders. He would have had to drive at a hundred miles an hour the entire way to make it from Low Lonning to Whitehaven in that time. That’s just not possible on the roads around there. And those two farm labourers who were drinking with Beech…” Again, Butterfly leafed through the well-thumbed files to the required page. “Kenneth Davies and Jeffery Gardner. They both spent that afternoon helping a local vet worm sheep. The vet and the owner of the farm vouched for their whereabouts. Which brings us back to…”
“Beech and Sutton,” Jack admitted with a sigh.
“Phil Beech left The Rose and Crown approximately five minutes after my family. Dale Sutton had no alibi for his whereabouts that afternoon. He claimed he was at home watching a rerun of Minder. In his statement he even talks about what Arthur Daley got up to in that day’s episode, as if that somehow proves his innocence. How fucking idiotic can you get?”
“Yeah, it’s idiotic,” agreed Jack. “That’s why it has a ring of truth. You should hear all the bullshit perps come up with. They drag in friends and family, anyone who might cover for them. Sutton didn’t do any of that. He gave a story that could have buried him. To me, that doesn’t feel like the action of a guilty man. Same with Beech. He claimed he was restocking pheasant feeder barrels in woods along the River Bleng north of Wellington. He had no one to back up his story either.”
“So what? So Beech and Sutton are a pair of psychopathic morons. What’s so difficult to believe about that?”
“Nothing. If it looks and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. I’m just telling you what my instincts tell me.”
Butterfly stared intensely at the case files as if she could will herself to see something that had so far remained hidden. Her finger drew rapid little circles around the entry wound scar. Jack looked on worriedly, resisting an impulse to gather up the files and dump them in the bin. He knew this was something she had to do. He simply had to let her work it out of her system, if that was possible, and try to make sure she came to no harm in doing so.
He rose and moved off to find Naomi. She was on her bed, staring into her iPad. He watched her with a faint frown. She and Butterfly had a lot in common. They were both incredibly strong-willed. When they wanted something, nothing could stop them. If not for sheer willpower, Butterfly might have been dead twice over. But there was a flip side to that coin. Refusing to back down was just as likely to land you in trouble as it was to get you what you wanted.
Jack found himself glancing out of the window in search of the Porsche again. A sardonic smile touched his lips. At least Karl didn’t drive a run-of-the-mill car. If all criminals went around in Porsches, it would make his job a lot easier.
“What are you looking at out there?” asked Naomi, eyeing him as if she sensed his tension.
Jack smiled at her. “Nothing.” As he stooped to kiss her head, his phone rang. He put it to his ear. “What’s up, Steve?”
“We’ve located Robinson,” Steve declared triumphantly. “A traffic camera picked him up on Barlow Moor Road.”
Jack’s frown returned, more pronounced. Barlow Moor Road ran through Chorlton, passing the street they lived on. “Where is he now?”
“Sat in his car outside McDonald’s. A couple of constables are keeping an eye on him. They haven’t approached him. How do you want to play this?”
“Tell them I’ll be with them in five.”
“Will do. Don’t do anything without me, Jack.” Steve sounded as eager as a boy determined not to miss out on some mischief.
“Would I dare?”
As Jack hung up, Naomi asked, “Work?”
Nodding, he pointed to her iPad. “Don’t stay on that thing too long.”
He returned downstairs, wondering how much he should say to Butterfly. When he saw her still scrutinising the files, he decided to say as little as possible. “Steve called. I have to go out.”
Butterfly looked up from the files. “Is it about Karl?”
“No. I shouldn’t be long.” He hated to lie, but the tightness around her eyes told him her stress levels were already dangerously high. He didn’t want her worrying or, even worse, insisting on coming with him. He bent to kiss her.
She held him to her lips for a moment before murmuring, “Be careful.”
Chapter 8
Twilight was softening the sky as Jack drove along Barlow Moor Road past restaurants, bars and pubs just starting to fill with evening clientele. The police car was inconspicuously parked on the corner of Beech Road about a hundred metres away from McDonalds. Jack pulled over alongside it and wound his window down.
“He’s parked at the right-hand side of McDonalds,” the constable behind the steering wheel told him.
“Thanks,” said Jack. “You head off. I’ll take it from here.”
Jack cruised past McDonalds. Next-door to it was an auto repair garage that had shut up for the day. The Porsche was between McDonalds and the garage. Jack turned into a parking space in front of a takeaway joint on the opposite side of the road. He got out of the car and crossed the road. He turned at the sound of feet fast approaching from behind and saw Steve running towards him.
“I thought you were going to wait for me,” Steve said, giving him a puppyish aggrieved look.
“This isn’t your problem, Steve. I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
Steve grinned. “The only person I’m worried about getting in trouble with is your sister.”
“Alright, have it your own way, but no heavy stuff.”
&
nbsp; Steve pointed at himself. “Moi, would I?”
The Porsche was facing the street. Steve positioned himself in front of it. Jack approached the driver side door and rapped on its window. It slid down revealing a mid-thirties man with the telltale off-white pallor of a recent parolee. Karl was polishing off the remnants of a burger. He gave Jack a friendly smile that didn’t fool the detective for a second. Jack could see the tension coiled behind Karl’s dark, calculating eyes. Displaying his police ID, Jack said, “Karl Robinson?”
“Detective Inspector Jack Anderson,” Karl read out loud, showing no sign of surprise or nervousness. “What can I do for you?” His tone was almost jaunty. A soft drink cup gurgled as he sucked on its straw.
Jack couldn’t help but stare at the tattoo flaring outwards from Karl’s left eye. He found himself thinking that if you put Butterfly and Karl’s faces together it would make something quite beautiful in a grotesque sort of way. “Get out of the car.” His tone was neutral.
Karl got out, still sucking on his drink. He threw Steve a smiling glance. Steve responded with an unsmiling little wave.
“Have I done something wrong, officers?” Karl asked in a tone of disingenuous bemusement.
“Let’s cut the shit, shall we Karl?” said Jack. “I know who you are and what you want. I’m here to tell you it’s never going to happen.”
Karl’s smile didn’t falter. “Is that right?”
“Yeah that’s right, dickhead,” put in Steve. “So you might as well sod off back to whatever London shithole you crawled out of.”
“Shithole?” Karl let out a reedy laugh. “That’s rich coming from a Manc.”
“I don’t know what there was between you and Butterfly,” said Jack. “And frankly I don’t give a toss–”
“Who’s Butterfly?” Karl broke in with the same provokingly insincere tone.
“You know exactly who she is. Butterfly’s with me now.”