by GS Rhodes
“Would you like to take a seat, Mrs Grant?” Zoe asked. “It might be easier to talk about this sitting down.”
She seemed hesitant, her husband almost having to force her over to the table and into a chair. Even when she was seated she didn’t seem like she wanted to talk about it.
“The reason we’re here is because of a recent incident on the borough,” Kidd started. “It has some similarities to what happened with Holly and we are retracing our steps a little, trying to talk to the people who were involved, or who might have been involved back then.”
“You think it could be someone in connection with Holly?” Harry asked, his eyes wide. “Why would you think that?”
“There are a few reasons,” Kidd said. “We’re keeping all of our options open but there were a few similarities that we couldn’t ignore.”
“What similarities?” Suzanne asked. It was the first time she hadn’t sounded like she wanted to lean across the table and throttle Kidd. It was a start at least, maybe she would prove helpful after all.
“The lawyer that represented Michael Earle in the court case—”
“Oscar Harkey?!” Suzanne spat. “Not in trouble, is he? Couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke.”
“Suzanne, please,” Harry said. “Please, carry on, Detective.”
“He received a severed body part in the post, it had a carving on it that he recognised from the case,” Kidd said. “While it’s not an awful lot to go on, or even to connect it to this case, Oscar was the one who brought it up. Severed body parts don’t come up all that often. We’re just trying to make sure everything is covered.”
“I don’t really know what else we can tell you apart from confirming what you would already have on file,” Harry said. “It was such a long time ago, of course, and while we remember a lot of what happened there…there will always be details that slip through the net.” He tapped the side of his head. “My memory isn’t what it once was.”
Kidd gave him an understanding sort of smile before turning his attention back to Suzanne. She looked a little shifty sitting in the chair, averting her gaze from the two officers, wringing her hands in her lap.
“Anything to add, Suzanne?” Kidd asked. She wasn’t under oath, she didn’t have to answer any of their questions, but there was something about the way she was acting that made Kidd pay closer attention to her.
She looked up at him sharply. “There was one other thing,” Suzanne said. “It’s a theory, and I always thought it was…odd. Caleb did too.”
“Caleb?” Zoe asked. “Who is Caleb?”
“Our son,” Suzanne replied. “He’s not here at the moment, he’s been off staying with his friends for the past couple of days. He’s out at all hours that boy, never know whether he’s coming or going. He was young when it happened,” she added. “He…he might not remember Holly all that well, now that I think about it. They have all sorts of pictures together, very good friends, but he was only four when she died.”
Kidd let it hang in the air for a moment. There was no way that Caleb would know anything about this case, nothing at all. But if he had been missing for the past few days...
The cogs started to tick over in Kidd’s head. It would surely be too easy for this to be pinned on someone related to Holly, but if he’d seen his Mum talking about Oscar like this, if he had a vendetta against him for what he had done, could he really do something like that? Kidd supposed he wouldn’t know unless they had a chance to speak with him.
“Anyway, there was a friend,” Suzanne continued.
“Suzanne, don’t do this,” Harry said.
“No, Harry, I have to, okay?” she snapped. “I…I meant what I said earlier on. I think you took your sweet bloody time to do anything about it, and when you finally did, you missed someone.”
“Who?” Kidd asked.
“Phil Jackson,” she said. “No one ever spoke to Phil Jackson.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“I can’t have you staying all that long,” Mrs Earle said as she ushered the two of them inside. “I know you’re plain clothes but my neighbours are… Well, they like to talk and I don’t want them thinking I’m snitching on them or something, you know?”
“It’s just a few questions in connection with a new investigation,” Owen chimed in as he stepped into the house. “Nothing to worry about.”
“Nothing to worry about?” Mrs Earle repeated, slamming the door behind her. Both the detectives jumped, Janya was sure she even heard Owen let out a little yelp. “That’s what happened last time. And last time you… last time you put my boy away for something he didn’t even do. You should be ashamed. Ashamed!”
They stood in the tiny hallway for a little while longer. It was dark, the sun not managing to penetrate through the tiny glass window in the doorframe and offer them any sort of sunlight. There was a coolness in the air, one that made both the detectives more than a little bit uncomfortable. Mrs Earle seemed unpredictable, and Janya didn’t like that.
“Is there somewhere we could sit down to talk?” Janya asked. “We don’t want to take up too much of your time, but it might be—”
“Yes,” Mrs Earle replied. “The living room will be fine. Follow me.” She walked into the room straight off to the right, where a big bay window looked out over the street.
That must have been what she was looking through, Janya thought. She talked about the neighbours and their curtain-twitching, she was hardly one to talk. She had definitely seen them coming.
Mrs Earle sat on an armchair set by the window. She took a quick glance out of it, lifting up the off-white netting to get a better look before turning her attention back to Janya and Owen. They took a seat opposite her on the couch, both of them instinctively taking out their notebooks.
“So, what is it that you want?” Mrs Earle asked.
“You are Michael’s mother, is that right?”
“Lindsay Earle, yes,” she replied. “Will that be all?”
Janya laughed. Lindsay didn’t. Janya cleared her throat before continuing.
“We were hoping that we’d be able to speak to Michael,” she started again. “We popped round to his flat, or at least the address that we had on file for him, and he didn’t seem to be in.”
“What am I, his keeper?” she snapped. “I don’t know where he is. He does what he wants most of the time.”
“When was the last time you saw him?” Janya asked, her pen poised.
“What’s this then?” Lindsay asked, looking at them, pointing at them each in turn. “You trying to pin something else on him now? After everything you did before, you’re trying to—”
“Mrs Earle, please, we’re not trying to pin anything on your son, we would just like to speak with him,” Janya interrupted. “You keep talking about everything that we have done and that we have done enough, can I ask you what you’re talking about?”
Lindsay looked between the two of them, confusion etching deep lines on her brow. Her mouth fell open as if she were about to speak. Maybe she expected them to know absolutely everything about the case. Maybe it was hard to fathom that they dealt with hundreds of cases every single year and there was simply no way they could remember the details of each and every one of them. That, and the fact that it was almost twenty years ago, and neither one of them were even part of The Met at the time.
Lindsay turned away and closed her eyes. She seemed to whisper something to herself, something that neither Janya or Owen could catch. It was enough to steady her.
“It wasn’t Michael,” she said simply, turning her gaze out of the window. Her eyes glazed over, like she was reliving a moment from all those years ago. “I know it wasn’t my Michael, it just couldn’t have been.”
Owen looked over at Janya, and she could tell that he didn’t believe a word of what she was saying. It was understandable, almost bordering on cliché, for the parents of criminals not to believe that their child was capable of something like that. They had seen them as babies, he
lped teach them how to be when they grew up. Why would they want to believe that their child was capable of something so horrible?
“I know what you’re thinking,” Lindsay said, looking back to the two of them. “I know you must think that I’m crazy, that all the evidence was there and pointing squarely at my boy, but I just don’t buy it. There were so many stones that were left unturned.”
“Whether we believe you or not is irrelevant,” Janya said. “I want to hear what you have to say.”
Lindsay’s eyes widened in surprise. She hadn’t been expecting that. Perhaps no one had taken to the time to say that to her over the years. Maybe she had been keeping these feelings bottled up for such a long time that just to hear someone say they wanted to listen was enough to calm her down. The anger she harboured towards them seemed to dissipate. The temperature in the room seemed to go up a few clicks.
“I knew that boy so well,” she said. “He was always such a mummy’s boy, to think that he was capable of something like that didn’t make sense. He loved Holly Grant, loved her with all of his heart. He was going to marry her.”
“What happened, then?” Owen asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice choked with tears. “Everything seemed to be going perfectly as far as I could tell. They would spend their days and nights together, so much so that I told him that the two of them should just move in together, but they were too happy being a little bit more independent than all of that.” She held her hands up. “Call me old fashioned, but I think living with the person that you love sounds like it would be a lot of fun. I know that’s what it was for me and Brian.” She took a moment, feeling the need to explain even though they already knew who Brian was. “Brian is my husband, Michael’s father. He popped out just before you got here, you might catch him on the way back.”
“If we could talk to him at some point, that would be useful,” Janya said. “Just to hear his thoughts on all of this too.”
“He’s with me,” Lindsay said firmly. “We watched as the whole case was ignored, and then suddenly rushed. I was sat here thinking about how much they missed, how much they didn’t pay attention to.”
“Like what?”
“Like that Michael wasn’t even around on the night that Holly went missing,” Lindsay said. “He was away. Every statement he gave said he was away, we knew he was away.”
“Did he have an alibi for where he was?”
Lindsay shook her head. “He had a hotel receipt for somewhere in Central London, I can’t remember where. But there was no CCTV of him there so they decided it had to be a lie.”
“And what do you think?”
“I know my boy,” she said. “That CCTV would have been there, they just didn’t want to see it. It was more convenient for it not to be there.” She leant forward in her chair, lowering her voice conspiratorially. “It’s a little convenient, isn’t it? The big, burly boyfriend is the one who killed her off. Very, very easy.” She shook her head. “Not my Michael, it wouldn’t be my Michael.” Lindsay went back to staring out of the window, muttering to herself.
Janya hadn’t had a chance to look at the case file completely herself, but everything she had seen of it in the news reports and old videos pointed to Michael. His alibi wasn’t watertight. There were fibres of his clothing found beneath Holly’s fingernails where there had been a fight. The neighbours had heard the fighting inside the flat. No one had called the police. No one wanted to be that person. And it had resulted in Holly’s murder, and her mutilation as Michael tried to hide it.
Janya didn’t want to say all of these things to Lindsay. They were likely to fall on deaf ears anyway. Lindsay didn’t want to believe that it was Michael, so no matter how much evidence they presented her with, there wasn’t much of a chance that she would see it.
“Was there anything else that you wanted to add, Mrs Earle?” Janya asked. She had taken a few cursory notes, if only to show Lindsay that she was listening to her and not just assuming she was another parent who refused to believe that her child was a monster.
Lindsay looked at Janya. “Go through the case file again,” she pleaded. “Trust me when I say there is something not right in there. Not my Michael. It couldn’t have been my Michael.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Suzanne Grant explained the discrepancy around Phil Jackson, much to the annoyance of her husband who didn’t want to hear it. Kidd wondered how many times this particular conversation had come up. He had been Michael’s best friend since they were children. They had done everything together. They were together at Nursery, all the way to the end of University where they studied Sports Science at St Mary’s in Twickenham. Neither one of them had wanted to leave home, they were perfectly happy here.
And it was suspicious, at least to Suzanne, that Phil Jackson was never brought into the picture. He knew Michael better than anyone, they spent every waking minute together, even after Holly’s disappearance. She refused to believe that he didn’t know anything, that he couldn’t have done something about it.
As far as Suzanne Grant was concerned, it was an incomplete piece of the puzzle, one that no one had bothered to investigate or even think about looking back on. Kidd had done his best to reassure her that they would look into it, but she didn’t seem convinced. The police had let her down once before, what were the chances that they were going to let her down all over again? As far as Suzanne was concerned, the chance was pretty much a certainty.
But Phil Jackson was an interesting prospect. When going through the case file, it wasn’t a name that Kidd had come across, at least it hadn’t jumped out at him at any point. If he was such a key part of Michael’s life, an integral part of it even, why wouldn’t he have been questioned?
Kidd started to get that creeping feeling that the further he dug into the case, the more questions there were going to be.
They thanked Suzanne and Harry, saying their goodbyes and promising to keep them in the loop about everything. As soon as they had closed the front door, Zoe practically jumped on Kidd.
“Thoughts?”
“On which part?” Kidd asked as he started away from the house.
“Take your pick,” she said. “Phil Jackson, whoever that is, suddenly feels like an interesting person to be getting hold of, don’t you think?”
“You think it could be him that’s sending severed limbs to Oscar Harkey?” Kidd asked.
Zoe considered it for a moment. “It’s a possibility,” she said. “Oscar was supposed to defend Michael, get him off right? So maybe this is some kind of twisted vengeance for him not doing that?”
Kidd thought about it. It was certainly a possibility. The question was, what would Phil get out of it? At least if it was Michael, he was the one after revenge. If Phil wasn’t mentioned in the case at all, and there are people out there that feel like he should be, why would he want to draw attention to himself?
Kidd couldn’t think. They would need to track him down if they could. If there was no interview with him in the original case file, they would need his side of the story, or at the very least what he could remember of it.
The other thing that was sticking in Kidd’s head was Caleb. Caleb Grant hadn’t been seen for several days, at least according to his mum. She didn’t know where he was so there was a possibility, however remote, that he could be involved in some way.
“You thinking about Caleb Grant?” Zoe asked as they got to the car.
“I’m wondering where he is more than anything,” Kidd said. “They didn’t seem worried about him, did they?”
“No, not to me,” Zoe replied. “As far as I could tell, him being away from home was pretty much standard practice.”
“What do we think that means?”
Zoe shrugged. “It could mean anything,” she said. “It could mean that he’s responsible for what’s going on, it could mean that he has nothing to do with it whatsoever, or…” She trailed off like she had just landed on the thing that Kidd was worri
ed about the most. “You don’t think—”
“That the limb might belong to him?” Kidd interrupted, a cold creeping feeling crawling down his spine. “It feels like it could be a possibility.”
“Everything is a possibility.”
“Exactly what I’m afraid of,” he said. “The fact that—” He was cut off by the feeling of his phone vibrating in his pocket. “Hold that thought.”
He pulled out his phone, surprised to see Andrea’s name across the front of it. He hadn’t expected a call back so soon. And the people who had called him in the last little while had been John, Craig, and Liz on an almost constant rotation.
“Hey,” he said. “Thanks for calling me back, how have you been?”
“Ben,” Andrea said brightly. They’d not spoken since they were in Essex together looking for Craig. She sounded better, way better, in fact, than she had back then. Like some light had come back into her life. “I’m well,” she said. “Everything’s been a little bit nuts with work but apart from that, it’s the same old, same old.”
Kidd laughed. “I know how you feel,” he replied. “It’s all gone a little bit weird here too, if I’m honest. But if I ever have a day that is exactly the same as the one that preceded it, I think I would lose my mind.”
“How is work?”
“Um, busy,” he said. “A new day, a new case. Just back from a little bit of time off.”
“With John?” she asked.
Kidd had told her a little about John when they’d been away. It had felt strange talking to his ex-boyfriend’s sister about his new relationship but she seemed keen that he was happy, which had been nice at least.
“Yes, with John,” he said. “So we spent some time together at the house, just around the area, nothing too fancy.”