Killer Lies (Reissue)

by Chris Collett

  ‘Sounds right up my street. We could put in a link to the nearest police station.’

  ‘That’s what I was thinking.’

  ‘If you want to let me have her address I could go and talk to her.’ Dyson suggested.

  ‘I might need to soften her up first,’ said Mariner.

  Dyson laughed. ‘I get the picture. Well, just give me the nod when you’re ready.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘By the way, not that there’s any hurry, but I think there’s a problem with one of the taps in the en-suite bathroom upstairs. I can’t turn it off fully and it seems a shame to waste the water.’

  ‘I’ll have a look at it sometime.’

  ‘Sure. No rush.’

  Dyson signalled and turned off the main road, into the training centre without prompting from Mariner and took him all the way to the empty car park where the lone vehicle stood. A man in navy overalls was gathering litter from around it, the detritus from the previous night.

  ‘Must’ve been a good night,’ remarked Dyson.

  ‘Well, thanks again for the lift,’ Mariner said. ‘We should go for that pint sometime.’

  ‘That’d be good, though I may not be around for the next few days. I’ve some work around Carlisle.’

  ‘Good luck with it.’

  ‘Cheers.’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  As Mariner approached his car the road sweeper was passing it too. ‘Looks like you’ve got a problem there, mate,’ he said. Behind the wheel arch on the driver’s side, there was a wet patch on the ground, probably an oil leak. Mariner dipped in a finger and sniffed. It wasn’t oil, it was brake fluid. The puddle was about eight inches in diameter, he’d lost a lot. This would strengthen Anna’s argument that it might be time to change the nine-year-old Volvo. She’d been saying for ages that it was on borrowed time. Mariner thought back to his conversation with the Harlesden men. Two of them had been loitering in the car park when he came out to collect his car and had watched him unlock it before changing his mind. He dismissed such scepticism. They were coppers for God’s sake. As Dave Flynn would say, he was getting carried away.

  That Mariner was on first-name terms with the mechanic from his local garage was an indication of the state of his car.

  ‘I can be there in about thirty-five minutes,’ Carl said.

  It was freezing outside and Mariner was still missing his overcoat, so tucking a note under the windscreen wiper he went and tried the door of the social club. It was open. He went in as a woman with her mop and bucket emerged from the gents.

  ‘My car’s broken down. Any chance that I can wait in here, where it’s warmer?’

  ‘Suit yourself, love.’

  In daylight the bar presented a forlorn contrast to the night before, cold and drab, the air stinking of stale beer and smoke. Mariner took a seat by the window where bright sunshine streamed in and he had a full view of the car park. It was a beautiful morning, the sun casting long shadows on the frosted sports field, completely still and lacking activity.

  Not relaxed enough to remain inert, Mariner hunted through his pockets for something to occupy him and came across the list of past cases Trudy had come up with. Each record on the database gave just the few details Mariner had requested — the name, date of referral, the advocate’s name and the petitioner’s due release date. He started off by scanning the names of the appellants that Ryland personally had turned down and crossing out the others. That still left dozens of them so he narrowed it down further by deleting all except those whose convictions had been for drugs and/or gun related crimes. It was an arbitrary process and didn’t necessarily exclude the others, but he had to do something to reduce the task to something manageable.

  Next he looked at the release dates to see who would have been out in the last year or so, and finally the numbers began to look workable. A glance outside confirmed the car park as deserted, so on the back of an old invoice folded in his wallet he began half-heartedly logging the details of the remaining cases, semi-convinced that this was a waste of time. He made a note of each person, the case reference number and the name of the advocate who had made the application.

  A name leapt off the page at him for its familiarity; Rupert Foster-Young. It took several seconds, but eventually Mariner recalled Carrie Foster-Young, the glamorous blonde photographed on Ryland’s arm during his student protest days. It wasn’t exactly a common name so it had to be more than mere coincidence. Foster-Young had applied for leave to appeal four years ago. His offence, aggravated burglary, had carried a sentence of eight years. His case had been referred to Ryland who had rejected it.

  Did Carrie have a brother, or even a husband? Despite their relationship Ryland had gone on to marry another woman soon after it ended. Was it because Carrie Foster-Young was already married, or had been married before? Maggie had said nothing about the circumstances, only that the switch from one woman to the other had been sudden. So the likelihood was that it was a brother. The other alternative gave Mariner palpitations, but there was one vital piece of information missing from the datasheet. His mobile battery was low but he risked the call anyway.

  ‘Could I speak to Trudy please?’ he said. She hadn’t been at the Commission long, but Mariner was hoping against the odds that Foster-Young’s might be one of the files that had been retained.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the voice at the other end. ‘She’s on annual leave today. Can anyone else help?’

  Shit. Taking a chance Mariner asked to be put through to Helena James. This time luck was running for him. She remembered the case. ‘We all do,’ she said. ‘He was a persistent character. And it was unusual from the start because he kept phoning up from prison in person instead of leaving it to his brief. But then he was relatively articulate. He was on a burglary conviction that looked sound, but he kept insisting that Mr Ryland would want to help.’

  ‘Did he give a reason?’

  ‘He claimed that Mr Ryland was a personal friend of his mother.’

  Mariner’s heart thudded. ‘His mother? You’re sure about that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And did you refer him to Mr Ryland?’

  ‘I had to in the end because the chap was making such a fuss,’ she said.

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘Mr Ryland threw the case out, as I knew he would. He said there was nothing to suggest that the conviction was unsafe, whoever he might be.’

  ‘Did he acknowledge knowing Foster-Young?’ asked Mariner.

  ‘He certainly had no interest in speaking to him. Mr Ryland said if he ever had known the man’s mother it must have been a long time ago. I wasn’t surprised. I know one shouldn’t make judgements, but I couldn’t imagine Mr Ryland associating with anyone like him.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘There was an incident. Much later, after his eventual release, Foster-Young came to the Commission demanding to see Mr Ryland. As it happened Mr Ryland was out that afternoon. Just as well really. He was a mess, like a street person. I mean physically he was pale and skinny, his eyes sort of sunk back. But I’m sure he was high too. It was as if he couldn’t focus properly. It was quite a warm day and he was filthy dirty and rather pungent. The smell lingered for ages after he’d gone. It was hard to imagine how anyone related to this man could be a friend of Mr Ryland.’

  ‘When was this?’ Mariner asked.

  ‘I don’t know exactly. About a year ago last spring, I think.’

  ‘But if he’d already been released what did he want?’

  ‘He was angry. Justice, I suppose.’

  ‘How old would you say he was?’

  ‘It was hard to tell, given the state of him, though he was quite old. About forty or fifty, I’d say.’

  Thanks, thought Mariner, himself moving from mid- to late forties. But her estimate may not have been entirely accurate. If Foster-Young was a junkie it wouldn’t do much to preserve his youthful appearance. Mariner had seen twenty-year-old users w
ho looked as if they were pushing retirement age.

  ‘How did Foster-Young react when you told him Mr Ryland wasn’t there?’ he asked.

  ‘He was verbally abusive,’ said Helena. ‘Nothing original about that, but he didn’t give up. For some time after that he used to phone every couple of weeks asking to speak to Mr Ryland. Then suddenly, nothing.’

  ‘He never came back again?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So Mr Ryland never spoke to him?’ Mariner confirmed.

  ‘Not to my knowledge, though of course I can’t be certain,’ she said. ‘In the end we just wrote him off as a harmless, but troubled man.’

  ‘Do you still have his details? Is there any chance you could get me his date of birth?’

  She hesitated. ‘I’m not really sure if I should—’

  ‘Helena, were you aware of Mr Ryland’s betting habit?’

  A beat of silence. ‘I knew that something was going on. I heard Sandie refer to it as betting but it seemed rather an unconventional way of doing it.’

  ‘I’m not convinced that it had much to do with horse racing.’

  ‘You think it’s to do with Foster-Young?’

  She was filling in the blanks herself, and Mariner wasn’t about to stop her. ‘I’ve come across the name before,’ he said. ‘This is important, Helena, otherwise I wouldn’t be asking.’

  ‘I’d have to go and look out the file, but I might have time to fax it to you later today.’

  Mariner didn’t want the information coming through to the station while he wasn’t there, so he gave her Anna’s fax number.

  Ending the call, Mariner saw the flashing bar of Carl’s breakdown truck coming along the driveway. He picked up the database and went out to meet the mechanic. It only took a couple of minutes to confirm the problem; a split brake cable. ‘But I can’t fix it here,’ Carl said. ‘I’ll have to have it in the garage.’

  Mariner climbed up into the cab to wait while Carl hooked his car to the tow-bar. Jumping in beside him minutes later the mechanic passed him something. ‘You may want to hang on to this.’

  Mariner took from him a black plastic box the size of a personal stereo. It had a heavy-duty magnetic strip down one side and looked vaguely like something Mariner had seen before. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a GPS tracking device.’

  ‘A tracking device?’

  ‘Yeah, people stick them on in case of theft, so that—’

  ‘Yes, I know what it’s for,’ said Mariner. They used them all the time in the job. He’d seen the techies fitting them. ‘I’m just wondering what it’s doing on my car.’

  ‘You didn’t put it there?’ Carl grinned. ‘Maybe your missus is keeping tabs on you.’

  Preoccupied, Mariner barely cracked a smile. ‘Could it have been the previous owner?’ he asked.

  ‘Nah. Too new for that,’ said Carl. He started up the truck and they moved off. Mariner pocketed the device, wondering again about the Harlesden officers who’d watched him go and not liking the implications a bit. Carl dropped Mariner off at Granville Lane where he booked out a pool car. Strictly speaking it should only have been used for official business, but the delay meant that he’d already be pushing it to get to the motorway services as planned, so there wasn’t time to wrestle with that particular dilemma. Besides he was on police business, Mariner told himself, just not a case that had been assigned to him. Fortunately the motorway was moving freely and he drove south into low cloud, the first sleety rain starting to fall as he pulled into the services ahead of his appointment. A quick scan around the car park told him that Baxter hadn’t yet arrived.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Through a sheet of icy rain Mariner watched the green Discovery pull in and park. He allowed Baxter a couple of minutes, then turning up his collar against the downpour, went and knocked on the passenger window. The door clunked open and Mariner’s first impression was that Baxter didn’t much look as if he’d been in an accident. Short and bulky, his grey hair cut close to his skull, he filled up most of the driver’s side of the car.

  ‘Thanks for agreeing to meet me,’ said Mariner, ducking in out of the sleet and slamming the door. ‘I didn’t expect it to be so soon. Jayce seemed to think you were going to be off for a while.’

  Baxter chuckled. ‘Wishful thinking on his part. Leave him on his own for too long and chances are I wouldn’t have a business to go back to. Also I checked you out with Helena James. She seemed to think it was ok that I speak to you.’

  Funny Helena hadn’t mentioned that. ‘Did Jayce tell you what I wanted to know?’

  ‘George Hollis and Steve Jaeger, right?’ said Baxter. ‘A charming pair.’

  ‘What more can you tell me about them?’

  ‘Plenty. Hollis has quite a pedigree. You know that he worked out of Harlesden nick during the early eighties?’

  ‘Special Incident Squad, Jayce told me.’

  ‘You know the score on those units. They were completely results driven,’ Baxter went on. ‘Always a dangerous objective, in my book. Minor considerations like truth and justice tend to get side-lined. Hollis was young and hungry when he joined the squad and presumably impressionable. He would have learned a lot from the more experienced officers on the squad and not all of it good. We know that a number of dubious practices were rife among those elite squads at the time.’

  Mariner had grown up with the folklore; unrecorded evidence taken in cars en route to the police station, the ‘correction’ and fabrication of information recorded in pocketbooks, the use of intimidation and physical violence during interviews. The bad old days. ‘I understand Ryland had linked Hollis to a number of miscarriages, including Joseph O’Connor’s,’ he said.

  ‘That was classic Hollis,’ Baxter told him. ‘And the first hint we had that there was more going on. O’Connor’s was one of the first cases that the JRC handled. His brief referred on the grounds that his client’s statement had been coerced. When Geoff looked at the transcripts, he agreed. He’d talked to Joseph O’Connor and could see that there were words and phrases that just wouldn’t have been in his lexicon. He wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.’

  ‘So how were you involved?’

  ‘Geoff and me go way back to when he was a prosecutor, and bloody good he was too. We’d both been party to a couple of corruption cases before and he knew my views. In the end it’s what compelled me to leave the force. I’d just set up in business, mainly working with the complaints authority to support the drive against police corruption. As part of the investigation into Hollis, Geoff got us to trawl back through transcripts of other cases that he’d been assigned to, some of them going back years.

  ‘Geoff had a nose for a bent copper and he could tell that O’Connor wasn’t just a one-off. Naturally as part of the enquiry we looked deeper into the circumstances surrounding O’Connor’s arrest, and that was when we learned that Marvin Jackson had been in the van, and had been arrested along with O’Connor. It didn’t make any sense that Jackson had been released without charge, especially when he was the one with the history, so we started to explore the possible reasons for that. The one that leapt out and smacked us in the face was that at, about that time, Jackson was registered as an informant, with Steve Jaeger as his handler, and supervising officer—’

  ‘George Hollis.’ Mariner was ahead of him.

  ‘But given the length of time that Jackson was on the books there were surprisingly few results arising from information he’d supplied. In fact what intelligence there was seemed to be flowing in the opposite direction.’

  ‘That was a hell of a risk for Hollis to take.’

  ‘He’d been at Harlesden for a while by then and he was a powerful figure,’ said Baxter. ‘We put him under surveillance and found that there seemed to be something more than a professional relationship between Terry Brady and George Hollis. It wasn’t hard to figure out. Hollis was taking a cut of Brady’s dirty money in return for keeping him out of trou
ble, giving him information on raids that were going down, that kind of thing. Hollis got complacent, took to holidaying on the Costa del Sol in one particular villa, coincidentally owned by Terry Brady. He even had the barefaced cheek to meet him out there a couple of times.’

  ‘That’s when you took those photographs,’ Mariner deduced.

  ‘This job isn’t all about sneaking around in car parks in the pouring rain, you know. There is some glamour.’

  ‘It looks to me as if you had a strong case.’

  ‘It took us a while to assemble the evidence and Geoff was thorough,’ said Baxter. ‘You know what it’s like. Corruption amongst police officers, like miscarriages of justice, is a big thing. No margin of error. There was another complication too. The Home Office was breathing down our necks because they didn’t want another corruption scandal in the police.’

  ‘So what happened?’ asked Mariner.

  ‘To be honest, I don’t really know. We were all set to move on it, the middle of last year. Hollis was coming up to retirement anyway. He was just over fifty at the time and was planning to go out in a blaze of glory. I think it was that more than anything that rankled with Geoff; that this guy was about to be held up as an exemplary officer when in truth he was anything but. But just as we were due to subpoena Hollis’s bank details and suchlike he slipped out of sight. He got to take early retirement due to so-called “ill health.”’ Baxter spat out the words with contempt. ‘Bastard jumped before he was pushed.’

  ‘Do you think someone tipped him off?’

  ‘He got wind of it somehow. Hollis was popular. There would have been plenty of people watching his back.’

  ‘So that was the end of it?’

  ‘Geoff wanted to go ahead with an indictment anyway but the Home Office had been unhappy from the start and wanted it over. No point in stirring up more bad feeling against the police when they were just beginning to recover their reputation. As far as they were concerned the corruption had ended and Hollis’s retirement put a stop to Brady’s activities, or so they thought. Shortly after that it was rumoured that Brady had moved permanently to Spain. When Hollis left there was a big shake up at Harlesden, a lot of dead wood was cleaned out and Jaeger moved on to pastures new.’