by Nick Louth
Gillard said nothing. This unexpected confession completely explained the young woman’s state of mind, and her unhappiness. Everything in her life seemed to be transactional. She’d lost her father and her lover in the same shooting, her mother and abuser in a bomb.
They were almost back at the hall now. Gillard had to get ready for the noon incident room meeting in just over half an hour, and before that there was more electronic evidence from Oleg’s hard drive to be examined. So after confirming with Anastasia that she would still be at Westgrave Hall throughout the weekend he arranged to interview her again later that afternoon, after he got back from re-interviewing Oleg at Staines police station. It was going to be another frantic day.
‘And I’d still like to examine your phone,’ he added.
‘I’m sorry. I have had my privacy violated enough for a lifetime. I don’t need more. Besides, the video is on there. Ironically it’s my only picture of lovely Bryn.’
Gillard knew he could get a warrant, but it might be easier to find the same evidence on Jason Lefsky’s phone. Though the device was destroyed, there would be copies on various external provider servers, especially if he’d sent them to her to force her submission.
The world is full of bastards. It’s the solid truth.
* * *
Gillard had only been back a few minutes when there was a firm knock on the Khazi door. It opened with a gust of cold damp air. The duty constable leaned in. ‘Someone to see you, sir, says it’s important.’
‘Okay, just a mo.’ Gillard threw a dustsheet over the whiteboards which detailed the investigation and stood aside as Mary Hill made her way up the wooden steps and into the mobile incident room. She was dressed in an old grey anorak with green wellingtons and was carrying an ancient canvas tool bag.
‘What can I do for you, Mrs Hill?’
‘I need to talk to you, confidentially.’
Gillard nodded at the constable that he could leave them alone. When the door was closed, Mary placed the tool bag gently onto the desk where Gillard was sitting.
‘I’ve come to confess to the killings.’
His jaw dropped.
‘I was just fed up with them, the whole lot of them parading their money and their entitlement—’
‘I’m sorry, you said you killed them?’ Gillard was tired, exhausted even, but now he was hearing things.
‘Yes, I planted that car bomb,’ she said simply. ‘It was shortly after that appalling son of theirs—’
‘Mrs Hill, sit down and just tell me exactly what you did.’ Gillard reached for his notebook, and when he turned back was looking down the barrel of a revolver, snatched from the toolbag. His throat went dry. She was holding it correctly, right arm straight, left hand braced on the grip, over her right, both thumbs forward. Her aim was steady and the safety catch appeared to be off. This woman knew what she was doing. She’d been trained.
‘I could just finish it now, couldn’t I? Shoot you, then myself. Then it would be over.’
‘Calm down, Mrs Hill.’ The detective moved his legs slowly from under the desk, hoping to be able to lunge for the weapon, but she stepped back, into a position where she could cover him and see the external door too. ‘Don’t try anything. I may be seventy-three, but you’ll find I have quite quick reflexes. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for another death.’
‘Put the gun down, please.’
She sighed heavily. ‘I’ve struggled with this, really I have. I never expected it would work. When nothing happened for a few days I was secretly relieved. But now this, and outside Buckingham Palace of all places.’ She closed her eyes briefly, as if uttering a silent prayer. ‘I’ve not decided what to do, but if you try to disarm me, I’ll shoot.’
‘I’m not going to do anything, Mrs Hill, so long as you stop pointing that thing at me. But please do tell me exactly what you did.’
Mary Hill lowered the gun. ‘I built a bomb.’
‘How?’
‘I have all the requisite knowledge.’
‘But where did you get the explosives?’
At the mention of the word, she again lifted the weapon and pointed it at him. ‘I’ve had the explosives for many years. And some of the other components. My husband, my first husband William, that is, served in the army in Northern Ireland, in the Royal Engineers. He uncovered a bomb factory near Newry in 1981, and secretly brought back things from it that he thought might be useful one day. Seven or eight pounds of Semtex, some lead azide detonators, that sort of thing.’
‘What on earth was he intending to do with them?’
She laughed softly. ‘He used to joke that they would come in useful in case Anthony Wedgwood Benn ever became prime minister. I don’t think he ever really intended to use them.’ She stopped and her eyes grew unfocused. ‘A year later our car was blown up by a culvert bomb in South Armagh. He was killed, and I lost part of a leg. For years I fantasised that I should like to use the IRA’s weapons against them.’
‘And you assembled this bomb on your own?’
‘Don’t be so patronising—’
‘I’m not talking about your capabilities, Mrs Hill, I’m asking if you had an accomplice.’
‘No. You know, when I was in the WRAC I went on several bomb disposal courses. I came top every time, but of course they would never use women on the frontline in those days, except to search female shoppers in Belfast. I have a degree in electrical and chemical engineering, and William used to show me some of the devices he’d defused. I found it all fascinating.’
‘Is your current husband involved?’
‘Colin?’ she scoffed, with a brief peal of laughter. ‘No, Colin doesn’t know anything about this. He’d be shocked.’
‘Mrs Hill, I’m shocked. Anybody would be. You’ve confessed to committing an act of terrorism which has killed at least two people and changed the lives of many others.’
‘I know. It’s disgraceful. I regretted it weeks ago.’
‘I’m sorry, weeks ago? I don’t follow.’
She rolled her eyes as if talking to a particularly stupid child. ‘As I said at the beginning, it was after that road rage incident, in which Colin was assaulted.’
‘Sorry, when was that?’ Gillard had a vague memory.
‘Colin was assaulted by Oleg Volkov’s big security man on December 4th.’
‘Ah, yes. That would be Marcus Dolan.’ He remembered now. He’d seen the case report written by PC Zoe Butterfield. Insufficient evidence for prosecution.
‘The police just never do anything, do they?’
‘We most certainly do, when we have enough evidence.’
‘Nonsense. I just felt so frustrated! Your lot weren’t going to take it any further, and Colin has been completely spineless since he received that damn watch.’
‘I’m sorry, what watch?’
‘They bought him off! Just like Volkov bought off the minister over that appalling planning application, like they were some Mafia cabal. I mean, these foreigners, nothing more than ill-bred chavs with tainted billions to launder, just come over here and think they can buy anything. For heaven’s sake, this is Surrey, not Sicily. And some of us. Will. Not. Be. Bought.’ She slammed her free hand down on the desk between them.
‘How did you get access to the car?’ Gillard asked, watching carefully for an opportunity to seize the gun.
‘It took me two days to prepare everything, December 6th. I went out very early with the dog. It was still completely dark, and I cut through from the public footpath which runs along the edge of the Victorian walled garden. It’s pretty much hidden from view and takes me straight to the rear car park. There are always lots of vehicles parked there, and I was looking for that armoured car thing.’
‘Oleg’s Humvee.’
‘That’s it. I wanted to attach the bomb to that. Anyway, all I could find, apart from the more ordinary vehicles used by staff, was a whole lot of big pickup trucks, and the limousine. So I thought, if I get the limo I mig
ht get the whole dratted family.’
Gillard was beginning to understand. ‘Oleg’s Humvee is usually parked inside the big garage, which I think is alarmed.’
‘Well, it wasn’t outside, but the limousine was. I crouched down beside the car, and attached the device carefully.’
‘There’s not much ground clearance,’ Gillard said.
‘No, indeed. It was quite a stretch, but I’d used powerful magnets so it would stick easily. It was pretty much an exact replica of the one the IRA used to kill poor Airey Neave in 1973. Obviously I didn’t want it to go off anywhere round here.’
‘Did you use a timer?’
‘No need. The bomb used to kill Airey used a tilt mechanism designed to set it off on the gradient of the House of Commons car park. That wouldn’t have worked for me. I had no idea where that Russian family would be taking their car, so needed something else, something triggered by the type of traffic conditions that you might get in central London, but probably not around here.’
‘Like a sharp application of the brakes?’
‘Exactly. I used a modified version of an airbag trigger, a steel ball bearing within a tube, restrained by a relatively weak magnet behind it. Any severe braking would project the bearing forwards, overcoming the restraint of the magnet, and complete the electric circuit. The detonator was simply a small lamp bulb filled with lead azide, which ignites easily on electrical contact.’
Gillard reassessed this woman, who he had first written off as a local busybody. Now he was as impressed by her engineering skills as he was intimidated by her weapons training. MI5, GCHQ and the Met’s anti-terrorism unit SO15 seemed to be making the same mistakes as their US counterparts. Mesmerised by threat of Islamic terrorism, mainly knife and vehicle-on-pedestrian attacks, they failed to notice the rather more skilled capabilities of domestic groups. But then who would suspect this upright Church of England verger? Who would have seen her as anything other than a law-abiding pillar of the community?
One burning question remained. ‘Was it you in the library, shooting Volkov and Talin?’
She laughed. ‘I wished it was. But no. Not me.’ The weapon wavered momentarily, as she spread her arms. Gillard lunged across the desk, seizing the gun by the barrel and twisting it upwards. She was strong for her age, but no match for Gillard, who with his other hand and superior weight pulled her gradually, face down, across the desk, pinioning her arms behind her back.
‘Constable!’ he bellowed ‘I need you in here right away with the handcuffs.’
Mary Hill began to sob.
* * *
An hour later, Gillard and two members of the Met’s anti-terrorism unit were crouching in Mary Hill’s garden shed, levering up floorboards. She had not been lying. The apparatus of terrorism was there in full measure in a steel box: plastic explosives, detonators, tape, fuse wire, pliers. From the first formal interrogation of her, he was convinced that this was not a false confession.
The garden overlooked the lane and at the sound of engines they looked up. A custody van containing Mrs Hill and two accompanying female constables pulled away from Westgrave Hall, escorted by a patrol car, destination Paddington Green police station in London. She was now the Met’s responsibility, and no doubt DCS Clive Basford would be in charge of the case. Gillard’s job here was done. He surrendered control of the garden of Mary and Colin Hill’s cottage to the anti-terrorism police and headed back to the Khazi. The Met Police’s own mobile incident room, a rather grander version of the lorry-mounted Portakabin, was reportedly on its way.
A terrorist bomb outside Buckingham Palace had already stolen the headlines from the murders in the library at Westgrave Hall. When news emerged that a devout Anglican official in her seventies had confessed to the outrage, that would undoubtedly turn it into a media bombshell. Many would assume that the entire case had been solved.
It was quite the reverse.
Mary Hill’s confession complicated the case enormously. She’d killed the only witness, and one of the main suspects, without becoming a tenable one herself. CCTV on the night of the shooting showed that she hadn’t entered or left the library. She claimed she was at home with her husband, her grown-up children and grandchildren, watching Christmas TV. Colin Hill had confirmed that. In Gillard’s view, her alibi would probably prove even stronger than that of any of the partygoers.
Mary Hill could not have fired Oleg Volkov’s gun. The big question remained: who did?
* * *
The incident room meeting had been postponed until three p.m. and with only an hour to go, Gillard frantically reviewed the huge mass of evidence that they had obtained. Over a million items on HOLMES, and most of it, he had to admit, useless. Statements from every butler, gardener, security man and chambermaid at Westgrave Hall, from every casual guest at the party. More than 100,000 photographs across all the searched rooms, and another 10,000 of the crime scene, thousands of fingerprint and DNA checks. Haystack upon haystack, and no needle to sew it all together.
He sat in his chair and leaned back with his eyes closed. Going back to detective basics meant examining once again the three key elements: means, motive and opportunity. The means was clear. Ballistics had proven that Oleg Volkov’s gun was used to kill Alexander Volkov, Maxim Talin, and Bryn Howell. Testimony from the late Yelena Yalinsky, the only person to witness the shooting, said that a bearded man in dark clothing had fired the weapon. A message on Yelena’s phone indicated that she suspected her son Oleg was behind it, which made sense if she had seen the golden pistol she knew to be his. In a sense that skein of evidence tied together quite well. The trouble was it did not accord with anything recorded by the CCTV.
Oleg had been on his bedroom balcony, with a couple of girlfriends. Marcus Dolan, his bodyguard, was in Liverpool over Christmas and had been seen in a pub there. DC Shireen Corey-Williams had just tracked down the CCTV which proved it. Jason Lefsky, now dead, would have been a great candidate for the killer, having been long suspected as a Russian agent by MI5. He had apparently been blackmailing and abusing Anastasia. There was just the small matter that every witness statement – and the Russian TV footage – had Jason standing outside on the bridge when the shooting began.
Wolf, Oleg, Sophie, Anastasia. Every member of the family, every guest, every member of the staff had the same alibi. As did Mary Hill. They’d all been seen by unimpeachable witnesses outside or away from the library at the same time as the shooting was taking place inside.
Examining motives would not help. Billionaires aren’t ever short of enemies, and not even their closest friends can really be trusted when so much money is at stake. Even the immediate family was fractured, divided by geography, divorce, jealousy and intrigue. Above it all loomed the shadow of the Kremlin, seemingly omnipotent and beyond punishment. He feared that in the end this case would join the others: Litvinenko, Peripilichny, Berezovsky, the lucky-to-be-alive Skripals, and many other lesser-known cases that could be laid at Moscow’s door.
Gillard paced among the whiteboards, marker pen in hand, connecting arrows between suspects. He could certainly accept that Oleg had both means and motive. If he had an accomplice that would make for opportunity too. But going right back to the crime scene evidence, the bearded man in the dark clothing would have needed to be invisible, to possess the climbing ability of Spiderman, and be wearing a jet pack to leave so few clues. He would have had to have lain hidden and undetected in the library for some time and, after the shooting, escaped the crime scene leaving neither a single footprint on the balcony nor on the snowy roof.
Five minutes to go. He could hear all the members of the team chatting on the wooden steps outside. Going back to basics hadn’t helped.
Now, maybe time for something wild.
He had a hare-brained hunch, which had been swirling in his head since yesterday afternoon. It seemed insane, but maybe he should bounce it off the team. There were some good detective heads there. If there was a flaw in his idea, they’d find
it.
* * *
Rob Townsend was the first in, obviously tired but his voice abuzz with excitement. ‘Sir, I’ve got something that may help. Passed across by the Met this morning. It’s a message from the answer machine on Oleg’s landline in Knightsbridge. I’ve got it recorded on my phone.’
‘Okay, we’ll have it as the first item,’ Gillard said.
The detectives filed in: Rainy Macintosh, Michelle Tsu, Shireen Corey-Williams, Carl Hoskins and Vikram Singh, all of them holding big mugs of coffee and plates loaded down with doughnuts, danish pastries and fruit tarts.
‘Where did you get that lot from?’ Gillard asked.
‘Liberated them from the anti-terrorism mobile canteen,’ Hoskins said, stuffing an iced doughnut into his mouth. ‘Just arrived half an hour ago.’
‘Seems like the Met need crime tape just to keep you lot off their supplies,’ he said.
The team looked brighter and more rested than he felt, and the buzz of conversation about Mary Hill dominated. The smell of fresh coffee was tormenting him.
‘There you are, sir,’ Michelle said, handing him a pastry on a proper china plate, and a coffee in a mug emblazoned with the SO15 logo. ‘Belated Happy Christmas, sir,’ she said.
Gillard thanked her and called the meeting to order.
‘Where’s DI Mulholland?’ Michelle asked.
‘At Sophie Cawkwell’s home in west London.’
‘Sir, why didn’t you ask me?’ Hoskins asked. ‘I’ve been interested in dinosaurs since I was a kid.’
‘We dinnae need the answer to that wee question,’ Rainy muttered, sinking her teeth into a doughnut.
Gillard held up his hands. ‘All right, let’s listen to Rob’s new bit of evidence while we eat.’
Townsend highlighted the sound file, set his phone mic on maximum and held it up so all could hear.
‘Oleg? It’s Michael. Please pick up if you are there and delete this after listening to it. Oleg, I was very concerned about what you are proposing to do. As your solicitor, my advice is that you are in a good place and cannot be convicted. The course of action you propose, however understandable, will only demonstrate that there is a way in which these murders… Oh, I just got your text. Look. I’ll be there in thirty minutes. I counsel you to keep your silence. Call me ASAP if you have the chance.’