The Suspect

by Fiona Barton

  “I don’t know what Alex said in her e-mails. How could I?” His voice remained steady and reasonable, and Sparkes reminded himself that Jake had been a law student.

  “But you do remember going to Rosie Shaw’s bedroom on the evening of August the thirteenth?” he asked, matching Jake’s tone.

  “Er, I’m not sure. I don’t think so.”

  He was beginning to hesitate, to trip over his words. Sparkes pressed on.

  “We have two witnesses who say you did. That you went to her room and had sex with her.”

  “They’re wrong. It sounds like supposition to me. Did they say they actually saw us having sex?” Jake shifted back in his chair and Sparkes wondered for a second if he was actually enjoying himself. He’d soon stop that.

  “It’s not supposition, Jake. Your DNA was detected in traces of semen found on Rosie’s body.”

  Jake’s head went down. His solicitor put his hand up. “I’d like a minute with my client, please.”

  The detectives filed out and leaned against the wall in the corridor.

  “He’ll tell us the truth when we go back, boss,” Salmond said.

  “Nearly there,” he agreed.

  Jake’s face was blank when they went back in.

  “My client has a statement he would like to make regarding his relations with Rosie Shaw,” the lawyer said and sat back to give the floor to Jake.

  “I had sex with Rosie Shaw—that’s all,” he said, his voice flat. “I didn’t hurt her. She wanted me to have sex with her, to get back at Alex. But she died after I left her. The owner of the guesthouse told me later that she found her dead. “

  “So you had sex against your will?” Sparkes said deadpan.

  “I was drunk and she egged me on.”

  “I see. The witnesses say there was a row. You were heard shouting.”

  “I was angry because I felt so guilty—I liked Alex and I had done something incredibly stupid. Slept with her friend. What a fuckwit!” He banged his hand against the side of his head.

  “Was Rosie Shaw alive when you left her room?”

  “Yes, I swear she was,” he said, his voice higher and louder. “She was saying she was going to tell Alex about us.”

  “So why didn’t she? Go and tell Alex straightaway?”

  “Alex had been drugged by Jamie.”

  So he knew. Sparkes nodded to himself.

  “He’s a complete psycho—he put something in Alex’s beer to make sure she didn’t go out with me. Rosie told me. It was such a sick place.”

  “So she never got to tell Alex . . .”

  Jake shook his head wearily. “No. She died in the night.”

  “Well, that was lucky for you, wasn’t it? Your little secret could stay that way,” Sparkes said, writing a note on his pad.

  Jake pushed his chair back and stood, shaking. “You are joking! I didn’t hurt her. It was horrible when she died. Mama came and woke me up and told me. I was so shocked, I was like a zombie. I didn’t know what to say or do.”

  “Sit down, Jake. So what did you do?”

  The younger man hesitated and retook his seat but clung onto the chair as if it were bucking underneath him. “It felt like a dream, like nothing was real for a while. I lay there in my bed and tried to get a grip on what was going on. I must have fallen asleep again. When I woke up, Mama was acting as though nothing had happened.”

  “You went back to sleep after being told that a young woman you had had sex with hours before had been found dead in her bed?” Sparkes said incredulously.

  “I’d had a lot to drink, Inspector. I told you. I know it sounds like I didn’t care. But I did. I was in shock and didn’t know what to do so I went along with Mama’s story that Rosie had gone off with the two Dutch boys.”

  “But you knew she hadn’t, didn’t you, Jake?”

  He nodded miserably.

  “I was going to tell Alex but I was arrested before I could.”

  “That was nearly two days later. You had plenty of opportunities.”

  “Don’t you think I beat myself up every day that I didn’t? But I couldn’t. You don’t understand. I was so scared, I didn’t know what to do. Scared of what would happen if I did tell. Look, I’d slept with her. People might have blamed me for her death.”

  “So you didn’t tell the police when they arrested you?”

  “No. I hadn’t told them who I really was. I was already in a world of trouble,” he said and closed his eyes.

  “Jamie says you were there when Rosie died.”

  Jake looked up and almost smiled. “Well, he would, wouldn’t he? He hates me because Alex wanted to be with me, not him. He killed her rather than let her choose anyone but him. And he’d say anything to get his revenge. I bet he slipped something in Rosie’s drink, too. She was going to tell Alex about him and his little roofie habit. Maybe he decided to stop her. He is capable of anything.”

  * * *

  • • •

  When they got Jamie Lawrence back in, he’d stopped the flirting. He sat down and put his bandaged hands on the table.

  “I was having a sleep,” he said. “I’ve answered your questions.”

  “There are a couple more we need to ask,” Sparkes said, leaning forward to get the younger man’s full attention.

  “Did you drug Rosie Shaw?” he said.

  Jamie sat up straighter. “She was doing that herself.”

  “But did you give Rosie anything? To stop her telling Alex about the Rohypnol? Mama has told us she knew about it. Was Rosie going to reveal the sort of man you really were?”

  Jamie pressed his lips together tightly and shook his head as if he didn’t trust himself to speak.

  “We’re doing tests on Rosie’s blood, Jamie. So we’ll know if you did,” Sparkes said. He was pretty sure the toxicology tests couldn’t produce evidence of Rohypnol at this late stage, but the suspect was at the tipping point in his confession and needed just a nudge to reveal the truth.

  The silence grew, filling the room, but Sparkes waited it out. He sat completely still, offering no distraction to the boy opposite. Jamie’s fingers twitched on the table and his eyes closed in apparent concentration.

  “I only gave her a little bit,” he muttered finally, almost under his breath, and Sparkes had to lean forward to hear. “Just to shut her up until I could figure out what to do next. I put it in her tequila and she went to sleep.”

  “Except she didn’t go to sleep,” Sparkes snapped back. “She was unconscious and full of drink, and you left her there to choke. That poor girl.”

  “She should have shut up,” Jamie said quietly. “Anyway, it was her own fault. Nobody forced her to drink herself stupid.”

  Sparkes looked at him without speaking for a long minute. Letting the poisonous words drip down the walls.

  “Did you put her body in the cold store, Jamie?”

  “No. I woke up the next day and she’d gone.”

  “But you are the one who heard and saw everything going on in that guesthouse,” Sparkes went on. “The lad no one noticed.”

  Jamie shrugged. “I had nothing to do with it.”

  “You told us this morning, ‘All that stuff I’d done to make her take me.’ Was this the stuff you meant? Disposing of a dead body? Hiding it from the police?”

  Jamie banged one of his hands on the table, making his solicitor jump. “No!”

  “But you knew she was dead, didn’t you? And you helped to cover up Rosie’s death. Mama told us that it was you who suggested making up messages from her,” Salmond pressed on. “To keep everyone quiet about her disappearance. You seem to have been controlling that situation, too.”

  “I didn’t care about Rosie, but Alex was upset about her going without a word. I thought it would help her make up her mind to come with me.”

>   “But she didn’t, did she?”

  He shook his head wearily. “No, it all went wrong, like I told you.”

  SEVENTY-TWO

  The Reporter

  FRIDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2014

  I’ve had a card from one of my ghosts of Christmas past—Glen Taylor’s widow, Jean. The office forwarded it in a big brown envelope with my expenses statements and some union stuff.

  In it she writes about our shared trauma of having the press on our doorsteps. As if I’m interested. I suppose I was so much a part of that time in her life, my presence interlocked in her memories of when her husband was accused of taking little Bella Elliott, that she thinks she knows me. I was there with her as the story unfolded, in her kitchen, her sitting room, in the hotel where we took her for the interview. And in her head, where, I suppose, I still am.

  But I hadn’t heard a peep from her since the last appeal in the Bella Elliott case, although she still appears in an occasional story, when she’s written to the parents of missing children or befriended notorious criminals in prison.

  Now it is my turn to be pitied.

  She’s heard about “my trouble” and obviously wants to rub my nose in it. She doesn’t say that. Not her style, really. Little Jeanie Taylor wants to tell me how sorry she is to hear about Jake. I don’t want her to use my son’s name. I don’t want her to touch anything of mine.

  I won’t reply. I tear the smiling snowman in half and put it in the bin.

  * * *

  • • •

  Jake won’t know. He’s gone skiing with Steve and Freddie. A boys-only trip to take his mind off things. Steve said he needed it. Jamie Lawrence’s trial is coming up in the New Year and we’ve all been on edge, waiting for the whole thing to be churned over in the press. For a while I thought Jamie might be sent back to Thailand and face the death penalty for murder. “By lethal injection,” Joe, my new best contact, reported to me. “They haven’t executed a foreigner or anyone else since 2009. But we won’t want to send a Brit to death row. It’ll be dealt with here—you can be tried in the British courts for killing a Brit anywhere in the world.”

  That won’t please the families. Lesley rang me after Jamie Lawrence was charged with Alex’s murder and told me they were writing to the home secretary demanding he be sent back to Bangkok for trial. “He killed her in Thailand; he should face their penalty.

  “We’re having a bake sale at school to kick-start fund-raising for our legal costs—we want our voices heard,” she’d added, and I pictured rosy-cheeked juniors munching on Hang Jamie Lawrence cupcakes.

  The venom in her voice had shocked me. She wasn’t the same woman I’d last seen at the girls’ memorial service. I’d stood near the back, unsure of my welcome, and watched Lesley, a quietly dignified presence at the heart of the service, Jenny a pale shadow beside her. The church was full of young people, the girls weeping freely and hugging one another while the boys stood awkwardly in groups, not knowing where to look or put their hands. Jake had talked about going but I’d persuaded him to stay at home. He’d have been a photo opportunity for the waiting press, a jarring distraction on the girls’ day. I’d gone alone and mouthed the words of “Amazing Grace” as the kids around sang their grief and held hands. I left before the final notes ended.

  I would never have thought of Lesley as an advocate for capital punishment. More of a campaigner for road safety. But I know now that protecting our children changes who we are. Who we seem to be.

  Their battle for justice—and the death sentence—has had Louise Butler heaving and pushing from the rear. My editor didn’t want to take it on, according to Joe—“Bit down-market for our readers,” he’d told the news desk. “And it won’t happen, so it will look like our failure . . .”

  The O’Connors had always presented a united front, but I wondered how the Shaws would cope in their opposite corners. It was Joe who told me that Mike had moved back in with Jenny. “Wife number two kicked him into touch over his fumble-at-work habit,” he’d said. “Jenny took him back. They’re like newlyweds, apparently. I give it six months . . .”

  That will be long enough for the crusade to die its own death and be forgotten.

  * * *

  • • •

  Joe says Jamie’s still claiming Alex’s death was an accident—a loving embrace that went wrong because of his history of rejection. My office son has tracked down all the mothers, including the sad woman who gave birth to Jamie. It won’t make for happy reading when the case finishes and the full background can be revealed. I feel my fingers itching to write the story, but I can’t this time. I am part of the story. And I am back with Jake and his “loving” embrace with Rosie.

  I wonder how my boy will fare if he comes under cross-examination. It would be only as a witness to Rosie’s claim that Jamie drugged Alex. Not as a defendant. He wasn’t charged with anything in the end.

  “There is no evidence or reliable witness to report that anything untoward happened while Jake was with Rosie,” our lawyer told us confidently. “He’s admitted not telling anyone about Rosie’s death but he was not a witness to it and he didn’t see her body. It really astonishes me that the CPS is even considering a case of perverting the course of justice,” he’d said each time we met to spend another five hundred pounds of our money. But we had to wait another nail-biting month before the decision was relayed to us by phone.

  “Sensible decision. There just isn’t any evidence to go with,” the lawyer said. Bob Sparkes hadn’t delivered the news himself.

  * * *

  • • •

  “We can put it all behind us,” Steve said after the lawyer’s phone call. “Make a fresh start.”

  Jake is definitely looking to the future. When he gets back from skiing, he’s going to look into returning to his law degree—“I’ll be a mature student, Mum. I’ll do it properly this time.”

  He will, I tell myself in the small hours of sleepless nights. He’ll be a better person.

  But there are days when I find it hard to look at my eldest son without choking on the guilt I feel for hiding his. I study that face that I gave birth to and search for his remorse, but he seems to have managed to put up a shield to “what happened in Thailand,” as it is now referred to in our house.

  Steve smiles optimistically and calls it the resilience of youth. And I let him think that.

  I decided not to tell him the truth, because he would want to do the right thing—ring Bob Sparkes, have Jake own up and take the consequences. Because he sees things so simply—they’re either right or they’re wrong. I see beyond, into the gray, blurred margins where the consequences wait. Steve didn’t see our son in prison. I did. I saw the old-man face of our boy, felt his despair. I can’t be responsible for that happening to him again.

  * * *

  • • •

  I distract myself with thoughts of my own future. I’m still on gardening leave—“You can sort out your geraniums,” Joe said, trying to cheer me up. And I’m in with a chance of a payoff in the next cycle of redundancies. Steve wants me to take it, but I can’t bear the thought. I need an anchor to my existence. Especially now.

  I ring Bob Sparkes, just to hear his voice, really. He’d been in his usual pew—the one nearest the door—at the girls’ service, and we’d managed a few vanilla words. But nothing since.

  “DI Sparkes,” he answers.

  “Hello, Bob, it’s Kate.”

  “Well, how are you doing?” He sounds unsure but not hostile, so I plow on.

  “Not bad—you?”

  “Same. Back at work full-time now.”

  “Good for you. I’m ringing because guess who I’ve heard from.”

  “Go on . . .” And I can hear the smile in his voice.

  “Jean Taylor.”

  “Bloody hell! What did she have to say?”

  And we ar
e back on common ground, picking up the threads of a former life. Perhaps I ought to write and thank Jean Taylor for her intervention.

  * * *

  • • •

  Today, I feel I’ve turned a corner.

  I’ve done my stable cleansing. I’ve finally thrown the trousers away. The trousers I brought home in my overnight bag. The trousers with their telltale stain that could expose my son’s lie.

  “He came round in a bit of a state and wanted a smoke,” his friend Ross had said when he’d given them to me. “He’d got some sick or something on his trousers.”

  And I’d forgotten them in the head-spinning events that followed. But I’d known as soon as I’d found them in my bag, thrown into a cupboard after I got home the first time without Jake. I’d known that they could undo everything. He was there in that bedroom with Rosie’s body, just like bloody Jamie Lawrence said. He’d hidden her. He’d perverted the course of justice.

  I was going to confront him with the trousers a hundred times. But I always held back.

  I suppose I hoped he would tell me himself. That he’d take responsibility for his actions.

  But he didn’t, and whenever I allowed myself to think about him being sent to prison, his life permanently blighted, I told myself I owed him this second chance.

  The girls won’t get another one, but I can’t change that or make amends. Lesley and Jenny would like everyone involved to be publicly executed because they want them to suffer as they have. But pushing Jake back into the dock won’t give them closure. This is what I tell myself as I bundle the trousers up with a couple of old jumpers in a plastic bag, and walk to the recycling bins up by the Co-op. I stand there unable to move, indecision clamping my arms by my sides until Bet from next door calls to me from the pavement. “Hello, Kate. How’s that lovely boy of yours doing?” And I shove the bag in the dark maw of the bin. Gone.

  “He’s doing fine, Bet. How are you?” I call back as if our lives are unaltered.