by Fiona Barton
* * *
• • •
Alex suspected Jamie was standing outside her room again. She pressed herself against the door to listen. She could hear a rustle and tried to ignore it. She needed to get dressed and buy another phone. Come on, Alex. You can’t put this off any longer.
As she was pulling on a pair of shorts, she thought she heard whispering outside. She crouched by the door and listened. She heard Jake mutter: “Everything okay?”
“No.”
“Is she still asking about Rosie?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll talk to her,” Jake said and tapped on the door just above Alex’s ear. She lurched backward and sat down hard on the concrete floor.
“Come in,” she called, struggling to her feet.
“How are you feeling, Alex? Oh, sorry—you’re getting dressed,” he said when he caught sight of her. “Is that a good idea?”
Her face burned at the sight of him, but her anger made her feel stronger.
“What do you care what I do?” she snapped.
“Er . . . Look, I can see you’re upset, not thinking straight.”
“Wrong. I know exactly what I’m doing. I’m going to buy a phone and ring home. I have to tell my parents what’s happened.”
“Look, Rosie is an adult. You can’t dictate what she does,” he offered.
“No, so I hear.”
Jake looked at her carefully. “What do you mean? What have you heard?”
“Forget it.” Now that he was there in front of her, she couldn’t bring herself to ask him if he had slept with Rosie. She couldn’t face the humiliation.
Jake took a deep breath. “Alex, you should make your own decisions about your trip. You could carry on on your own. Let Rosie do what she likes. That’s not your responsibility.”
“Of course it is,” Alex shouted. “I can’t just abandon her. What am I going to do?”
“You could go home,” he said.
“You didn’t when things went wrong for you.”
“No, and I wish I had. I’ve made bad decisions, Alex. Don’t make the same mistakes I did.”
Jake put his arm round her to comfort her and she tried to pull back, but she felt safe for the first time in days. She rested there, breathing him in, listening to his heartbeat, telling herself Jamie was lying. She could have stayed there forever, but Jake let go suddenly when Jamie barged in, uninvited, pretending he hadn’t been eavesdropping outside.
“Sorry, didn’t realize I was interrupting,” he said sullenly.
“You are,” Alex snapped. “Would you mind closing the door behind you?”
He slammed it instead.
FIFTY-THREE
The Detective
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2014
Jamie Lawrence rang all sorts of bells. Social Services, police records, Youth Courts, the Probation Service—all spewed him out. They all used different terms and weasel words—“challenging” was his personal favorite—but the consensus was clear: a troubled boy. He’d been put into care by his mother at the age of four. Poor kid. He must have known all about it at that age. All about his mum not being able to cope, Sparkes told himself.
Foster carers followed—Sparkes counted three moves in less than a year—then adoption by the Lawrences, a couple in their forties who’d never had children. Jamie’s records went quiet then for about ten years before he exploded back onto the scene as a teenage thug. He was eventually put back into care by the Lawrences “for his own protection.” They, too, were unable to cope with the troubled boy.
Local authority homes; petty crime; fights; court appearances; second, third, and final chances peppered the documents in front of Sparkes. On his seventeenth birthday, Jamie left the state system with his Pathway Plan for getting a job, according to the social worker’s last word.
But the odd thing was that he seemed to stop getting into trouble. He just disappeared off the radar and stayed there.
Until now, Sparkes reminded himself. He had a bad feeling about Jamie. The building-site boss had said he lost his temper—“went a bit mental”—when things went wrong. If people said the wrong things. And there was an awful lot going wrong in that guesthouse, according to Alex’s e-mails. And you wanted to replace Rosie as Alex’s traveling companion. Did you make sure you could? Did you do something to make it happen? Did Alex find out?
All this was whirling round his head as he looked at the party photo, trying to read the expressions on their faces and map the dynamics of the group.
He stopped only when answers to his inquiries started to trickle into his inbox at mid-morning. More red flags unfurling.
It turned out that Jamie Lawrence had traveled from London to Bangkok on the same flight as the girls, on a newly issued passport.
Did he see them on the plane? Or follow them from the airport? he thought. I wonder if there’s CCTV of him at Suvarnabhumi arrivals. Or Heathrow departures. He called Salmond in.
“Get on this, Zara. Let’s see if airport security can find the girls on CCTV and see who is milling around them, shall we? I think we’re on the right track at last. What else is on your list?”
“I’ve interviewed the building-site boss, the barmaid, the other tenants in his rented flat.”
“What did they have to say?”
“Kept himself to himself. As per . . . Liked power ballads, apparently.”
“Really?”
“Whitney Houston on repeat. The others complained.”
“So a romantic, then . . .”
“Hmmm. His ex-girlfriend said he was moody. Got jealous about nothing and then went quiet. She got fed up and ended it last year. She said . . .” Salmond pulled out her notebook. “She said he had a problem with trust. She’s been reading too many advice columns, if you ask me.”
“A troubled boy. Maybe Alex gave him reason to be jealous. Her pursuit of Jake was pretty full-on according to her e-mails. Maybe she didn’t hide it.”
The detectives sat and nodded at their own thoughts.
“Let’s get on with it,” said Sparkes. “It looks like a case is finally building. I can feel it in my gut.”
* * *
• • •
It was all going so well. Until he got a message to call his Interpol contact.
“Bob, sorry it’s taken a while. Mad busy here. Anyway, your Jamie Lawrence has turned up on our system. He’s on remand in Bangkok as part of a drugs investigation.”
“Christ, you’ve got him. That’s brilliant. When was he arrested?”
“Last month. The Thai police lifted him on August the fourteenth.”
“But that’s the day before the fire. Can you check the date?”
Sparkes drummed his fingers on the desk while he waited, his brain racing. The Thais have got everything else wrong; they must have cocked this up as well.
“Hi. No, that’s right. Probably not what you want to hear. Sorry, but I’ve seen the arrest report online. Arrested on Thursday, August fourteenth, at fourteen oh five. With a two-gram bag of cannabis.”
“Shit! Can you send it over? What a pisser.
“Salmond, get in here!” he shouted into the empty room and drew a line through the name at the top of his pad.
FIFTY-FOUR
The Detective
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2014
He’d been waiting all morning for a call from the techies. Sometimes he thought they were winding him up when he phoned to see if there was any news, pretending they didn’t know who he was, calling him DI Sparkle behind his back. They liked a joke down in the labs.
“Inspector, I’m pushing the button on your sex-swab reports now,” a voice said down the phone. “Come back to us if there’s anything you don’t understand.”
Bloody cheek.
“Thanks. Will do.”
* * *
• • •
“Exhibit RMS3 (low vaginal swab) tested positive for semen. Full DNA profile was obtained.”
The minute traces of bodily fluid taken from Rosie Mary Shaw’s body showed traces of semen.
The lab had run the DNA extracted from the traces through the database and come up with nothing. But with Jamie Lawrence out of the picture, Sparkes was laying bets that there would be a match with Jake Waters.
Christ, poor Kate, he caught himself thinking. Never mind Kate. Poor Alex and her parents. They’re the victims here.
He read through the results again, ticking them off against his inbuilt checklist.
Salmond knocked.
“I heard the labs had sent some results, sir.”
“Did they tell you they found semen on Rosie Shaw?”
“No. Christ. I bet it’s Jake Waters. We’ve got him.”
“Except we haven’t. Unless he’s turned up overnight and no one’s told me. Where the hell is he? Why are we not getting any sightings or credit card use apart from hiring the two cars? He must be using cash and sleeping rough. It’s been two—no, three—weeks since immigration confirms he flew in. How has he been invisible for that long? His photo has been everywhere.”
Kate Waters had complained loudly about the picture—Jake’s driving license photo—claiming it made him look like a criminal.
“Everyone looks like an ax murderer in those photo-booth pictures, Bob. Please use another one. I’ll send you one of ours.”
But the new picture hadn’t shaken loose any witnesses. There’d been no calls into the police station beyond those from the usual loons and attention-seekers.
“Anyway, Zara, what we might have is that he had sex with Rosie. Not that he killed her. Let’s confine ourselves to the facts for a moment, shall we? We don’t even know if it’s his DNA. This afternoon we should get the results from the hair we found in his baseball cap. Can you chase it up? I want to talk to the grown-ups about next steps. I think someone has to go to Bangkok. Speak to Jamie Lawrence, see the crime scene, and try to get at least some of the original reports. We are getting nowhere doing it on the phone.”
Salmond’s face lit up. “Who? Am I going?”
“Stop grinning like a monkey. It’s not a jolly,” he said.
“’Course not. But I’ve never been to Bangkok.”
“Well, don’t pack your bags yet. They may say no.”
* * *
• • •
DCI Chloe Wellington nodded her way through the points in his special pleading. She had a meeting at eleven—“It’s mandatory, so make it brief and to the point, Bob”—and it focused him on what they had so far.
Two dead girls.
Both died before a fire, perhaps set to destroy evidence of murder.
One strangled and the other possibly raped.
British suspect/witness now in hiding in the UK.
British witness, Jamie Lawrence, in custody in Bangkok.
Dodgy investigation in Bangkok that missed almost all of the above.
* * *
• • •
“And what will it cost?” DCI Wellington demanded.
“We’re pricing it out now, but we’ll need a team of four including a scenes-of-crime officer and a photographer.”
“And an interpreter,” she added, glancing at the clock above the door. “Get me the ballpark figure asap so I can put it in front of the commander. But in principle, yes. You should go.”
“Not sure I can,” Sparkes said quietly.
“Well, that would be your call, Bob. But I can’t see it working without you.”
* * *
• • •
Salmond practically burst into song when he told her.
“Team meeting in thirty minutes. Can you get someone to look at airfares and hotel prices? We need to do a budget this afternoon.”
“On it.”
* * *
• • •
The afternoon post brought evidence of pulmonary aspiration of food in Rosie Shaw’s lungs. Microscopy had identified “multiple areas of vegetable matter in the small airways and air sacs.”
“Looks like she choked on her own vomit,” he told Salmond. “Poor girl.”
“Had she passed out drunk, do you think?”
“Probably, but she may have taken drugs, too.”
Sparkes scrolled back through Alex O’Connor’s e-mails for the message where she’d said her friend was messing about with drugs. He was pretty sure she hadn’t specified which, but he wanted to check.
Rosie’s completely out of it tonight. Can’t get any sense out of her. She’s just sitting there, panting, and her eyes are all glazed and scary. God knows what she’s taken. I asked Lars—one of the boys—but he just laughed. Said she was fine, he’d taken something, too. I’m putting her to bed and I’ll try to talk to her about it in the morning.
It sounded like ketamine—the dissociation and the labored breathing. He wondered if it was the first time Rosie had taken it. It was a club drug—small amounts snorted or shoved up your jacksie to make you high quickly. But it didn’t always last long. Maybe she’d kept taking bumps to keep the high going? You could take too much—especially if you were out of it already—but people didn’t usually die from an overdose unless they’d taken something else as well. Or had too much to drink and choked. To be sure he’d have to wait for the tox results from the fluid Aoife had managed to get out of a vein in Rosie’s groin, but he’d put money on the drug being there.
“I’ll go and tell the Shaws,” he said.
* * *
• • •
Sparkes drove to Winchester slowly. He needed thinking time, to weave in the different scenarios. Alex strangled. Rosie choking. What was the time frame? How were the deaths linked? Was one death the consequence of the other? But which?
He was still deep in his head when he pulled up. Mike Shaw was waiting outside in his car.
“I thought we’d go in together, Inspector,” he said nervously as Jenny watched from the window.
They were sitting in chairs at opposite ends of the sitting room, so Sparkes had to keep turning his head, as if he were at a tennis match.
Jenny started crying immediately and Mike had got up and sat on the arm of her chair, patting her back awkwardly as Sparkes described their child’s last moments.
“She wouldn’t have known anything about it,” he said. It was what everyone wanted to hear. That no one had suffered.
He’d left them to their grief and gone back to the office.
Salmond rang him just as he was closing down his computer. And his work brain. He needed to get home to Eileen.
“I’m out the door, Zara. Is it important? Is it the DNA result?”
“No—tomorrow, they say. But it looks like Jake Waters has surfaced.”
He flicked the computer back on. “Where is he?”
“Kingston upon Thames. Buying fuel and withdrawing cash at an ATM in a garage forecourt just off the A3. There’s a watch on his accounts and the bank alerted us immediately.”
“And?”
“He drove off before we could get there but we’ve got him on the garage CCTV. He’s still driving the second hire car, the Skoda. We’re looking for him on the ANPR cameras on the A3 to see where he’s gone. His number plate will ping up in one of the control rooms if he stays on the main roads. He won’t get far.”
“Well, what have we got at the moment? Any security camera material to identify him?”
“The usual crappy blurred images. He’s got a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes and what looks like a scarf over the lower part of his face. The bloke who served him said he made him nervous. Said he looked like he was wearing a bank robbery kit when he came in, all wrapped up on a sunny day.”
“Who’ve we got at the scene?”
“Me and a two-man team to mop up the staff and witnesses before everyone disappears. And I’m coordinating the vehicle alert to other forces.”
“Is he going home? Have you spoken to Kate Waters yet?”
“No. Next on the list.”
“I’ll do it.”
He dialed, working out what he wanted to say as he pressed the buttons. She was so sharp, she’d probably guess right away, and he didn’t want to risk Kate tipping off her son and sending him deeper underground.
He fleetingly wondered what he’d do if it were his boy. Would he turn him in? Of course he would. But what if he were being tried by the media? What if the case seemed circumstantial? Could he put his hand on his heart and say he’d do it?
“Hello,” Kate said, picking up immediately and stopping him mid-thought. “Have you got some news?”
“There’s been a possible sighting of Jake at a petrol station in Kingston.”
“Kingston? Southwest London? Why would he be there?”
“I was hoping you’d know. Is there any reason you can think of for him to be in that neck of the woods? Any friends there?”
“No, not as far as I know. It’s somewhere you drive past, isn’t it? How do you know it’s him?”
“Well, money was withdrawn using his credit card and he was driving the second car he’s hired.”
“Okay. More importantly, have you found Jamie Way, or Lawrence, or whatever he’s calling himself now?”
It was his turn to hesitate.
“What? Have you got him?”
“No, the Thai police have. He wasn’t there, Kate. He was in prison in Bangkok on the night of the fire. He’s not our man.”
He could hear the crushing disappointment in her voice as she muttered, “No . . .”
“Right, better get on.”