A Carriage of Misjustice

by Charlie Cochrane

  “Melanie might have been inclined to cover for Dave, as well. This interrelationship between the Osment household and Hartwood Rugby Club—it’s getting too complicated. And don’t get me started on all these people with their watertight alibis. Is it me being oversuspicious, sir, or are you feeling twitchy about that too?”

  “Twitchy as hell. I’m inclined to believe the people who don’t have anybody to stand up and vouch for their whereabouts, but maybe I’m getting a twisted view of life. This job can mess with your mind.”

  “You can say that again.” Pru sounded tired, despite the evening at home. Perhaps everyone was at risk of getting too tired to think clearly. “Like when I hear some bloke mouthing off that LGBT people are a threat to family life and the future of society. First thing I wonder is whether he’s got a boyfriend of his own lurking somewhere.”

  Robin chuckled. “Adam always says that. Perhaps we should apply those words of wisdom to this case.”

  “I’m not sure I understand, sir. Not with you.”

  “I don’t think I’m with myself, on second thoughts. I was trying to think if anybody had been trying to shove the blame for Osment’s death onto someone else. Trying to hide their own guilt. But I can’t recall anyone doing that.”

  “You’re right. Not a sniff of some barbed remark supposed to deflect our attention. Plenty of that around the hit-and-run, though.”

  “Yes. Who’s been so keen to point at Osment? Your mate Preese, for one.”

  “The silver fox?” Pru managed a giggle. “People would certainly believe it if he told them something was true. Thing is, if he’s the sort of bloke who’d run over one of his players and not stop, he’d have to be a damn fine actor to get away with hiding it for all these years. Your character always shows in the end.”

  “But does it, though? Think of all those cases where somebody’s been accused of an awful crime—child molestation through to murder. There’s always a queue of people willing to stand up and say that whoever it was couldn’t possibly be guilty, because they’re such a great bloke or such a nice woman.” Robin needed to calm down, this being a real trigger point for him and a huge one for Adam, who swore that the worst child molesters in education were often the most popular teacher in the school. Grooming the adults around them as well as the children.

  “That could apply here too. Preese might have heard Osment was linking Dave to the hit-and-run and refused to believe it. ‘Not one of my boys,’” she added, in a much broader Welsh accent than her own lilt. “So, he spreads counter-rumours. Joe would believe him, I bet, despite what he said.”

  “I agree, but unless we can break the Twitter alibi and pin Sam down as being in the area, then he joins the list of those we can’t verifiably link to the crime scene at the right time.”

  As applied to everybody bar Cooper. Robin wasn’t hopeful on that front, either.

  Halfway through Monday afternoon, they bowled into Hartwood station incident room, ready to share their new ideas, although before that Robin wanted to find out whether Sam’s car had been in Hartwood the night Osment was killed. This wasn’t the time to be chasing the wrong hare. Sally was back in at her desk, seeming pretty pleased with herself.

  Robin couldn’t resist a barb. “Hello, stranger. Where did you get yourself off to yesterday while we were working our arses off?”

  “I was working too, sir. I’d have rung in, but I dropped the bloody thing in the loo and it’s been sitting in pieces in a bowl of rice.” She waggled what Robin thought of as a Nokia brick. “Having to use an old pay-as-you-go until the iPhone dries out.”

  If that was a lie, it was an elaborate one, with all the right props. “I may have got a lead,” she added.

  “She wouldn’t tell us what it was until you two got back, sir,” Callum said. “She just sits there all smug.”

  “We might have got some leads too. Time to share them.” Robin parked his backside on the edge of a desk. “First off, Sam Woakes seems to have got a guilty secret that’s to do with how much he resembles his brother, although his Twitter story hangs together. And they really are identical, down to their haircuts. Laurence—his car?”

  The constable shook his head. “No sight of it on the traffic camera footage yet, sir. Although as Superintendent Betteridge keeps telling us, absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. He might have got a lift.”

  Robin grinned at the intonation, which was identical to the way he’d heard the phrase as a young constable. “You and I know that, but try standing up in court spouting that line.”

  “One other thing, though. We’ve got Cooper’s car on the homeward journey. Given the timing and where he was, he must have left the ground no later than twenty to eight.”

  “Okay. That might still have given him time, if he was quick and lucky. Anything from forensics yet?”

  Callum shook his head, then scribbled a note. “I’ll chase them.”

  “Thanks. And while we’re at it with theories and no evidence, here’s something to mull over.” Robin—with interventions from Pru—outlined the new theory. “If this is true, it could mean that Osment was killed by the person he was going to confront, and the reason he couldn’t meet Cooper was that he was already lying dead. I wish we knew about the forensics on those golf clubs. I worry we’re getting so convoluted we’re missing the bleeding obvious.”

  “I’ll chase them now, if that would help, sir,” Callum offered.

  “Yep, you do that while Pru and I update the team on what Sam Woakes had to say for himself.” That update included the third-hand report of his apparently hiding something to do with their close resemblance. By the time they’d finished, Callum had completed his task, re-emerging from behind the small partition that did such a meagre job of making a cubicle. “The forensics people say they were about to ring us, sir. That may or may not be true, given that they say there’s no sign of anything incriminating on Cooper’s golf clubs. Although I guess we weren’t expecting there to be.”

  “No, but it would be good to have some real, hard evidence for once. The only audit trail is from the victim.” Robin had to keep believing that they’d end up in a position where they had solid stuff to base a case on rather than speculation. The murder of Nick Osment couldn’t become that thing he dreaded—the great unsolved mystery. “Sally, give me some good news. What were you up to yesterday?”

  “Getting pally with Melanie Osment’s best friend, Dawn. A few days back, I realised that she and I go to the same gym and a couple of times we’ve chatted while we’ve been on adjacent equipment. She seems happier gassing than listening to music like everyone else seems to prefer. I keep thinking that she must know more about this—from both sides—than she lets on, so I thought I’d keep an eye out for her and see what I could find out away from a formal interview.” She paused, eyes pleading for encouragement.

  “I’m listening,” Robin said, trying not to get his hopes up.

  “Early Saturday I went in for a workout. She was there and I overheard her saying she’d be back late Sunday morning. So I decided to return yesterday, hanging around on the off chance and praying she hadn’t changed her mind. When she turned up, I went on the cross-trainer next to hers, then started up a conversation. Said I’d heard through work that her fiancé had been injured and hoped he’d be alright.” She paused, clearly aware that Callum and Laurence were sharing glances.

  “Go on, Sally.” Robin glared at the other two constables. “I’m still interested in what you have to say.”

  “Sorry, sir. Sorry, Sal.” Callum seemed appropriately sheepish. “I’m dog-tired and I get silly with it. No excuse for being sarcy.”

  “You’ll have to get used to being tired, in this job. You need to remember we work as a team, as well. Which means we don’t do each other down. And we don’t take off without informing other people what we’re up to, after the event if we can’t do it before,” Robin added, with a sideways squint at Sally. “Right, sermon over. Your conversation with Daw
n. Did it get further than chatting about Greg?”

  “Yes. I was totally upfront about being a police officer, which I know risked putting her off but I’d rather everything was above board. Anyway, rather than her blanking me, she asked to talk. Had stuff to get off her chest and she reckoned pouring it into an independent ear—independent of her circle—would be cathartic. We finished in the gym, went for coffee, and the floodgates opened. She said she’d been so busy taking care of Greg and trying to make new plans for their life ahead that she hadn’t really had time to get involved in other stuff. She felt guilty about not supporting Melanie, although less so than she had.”

  “Interesting,” Pru said. “What changed?”

  “Melanie gave Dawn a gobful. All the usual stuff like ‘Why weren’t you there for me when I needed you?’ And when Dawn pointed out that she’d had other people who’d needed her there for them, Melanie played the you don’t ditch your friends just like that card.” Sally grinned. “Dawn apparently went apeshit. I wish I’d been there to see it. I think she started at ‘Don’t try to guilt me’ and ended with the fact that if Melanie hadn’t kept hanging around with Dave, then none of this might have happened. I’ve asked her to come in later and officially give a statement detailing what she told me.”

  Robin tempered his enthusiasm at what might be a potential breakthrough: he remembered the little inconsistencies between Dawn’s account of the evening of the murder and that of Preese’s. Was one of them lying, or was it simply the usual, innocent discrepancies that turned up when two people related an event? “You can’t leave it like that, without giving us a heads-up on what she said.”

  “There’s a lot of it.”

  “We’ve got plenty of time to listen. What about her saying she was going to sober up and drive but then calling for a taxi?”

  Sally rolled her eyes. “Oh, that’s an easy one, sir. She said that because she was scared Preese would offer her a lift. She says he’s a bloody awful driver. Seems like there’s an epidemic of them.”

  “Yes.” That would account for it, though. “Right, let’s have the rest of it.”

  “Long story short, Nick had been acting smug about getting his hands on some money if his job went arse up. We knew that, of course, but Dawn reckoned it involved Dave.”

  “How did she know that?” Callum asked, in a tone a little short of sarcastic.

  “Because she and Melanie had been going out to lunch two Saturdays before Nick was killed, but had turned around a few minutes after they left because Melanie had swopped handbags and forgotten her pills. The pill. She takes them at lunchtime every day.” Sally quickly hid a smug grin. “Which means that her sex life isn’t as nonexistent as we were led to believe.”

  “Unless she takes it to regularise her cycle,” Pru pointed out. “Although if Nick discovered she was taking contraceptives and knew that it wasn’t for anything happening in their bed, he was bound to have assumed it was for Dave’s sake, even if it wasn’t.”

  Sally nodded. “Anyway, when they got back to the flat, she caught the tail end of a conversation Nick was having on the phone. He must have realised they were in the flat so he slammed the phone down, although not before she’d heard him say something like ‘Don’t ring me here again.’ He stormed into their bedroom, he and Melanie sounded off at each other, and then he flounced out of the house. Dawn took the opportunity of surreptitiously ringing 1471 and noting the number. It was Dave’s.”

  “He kept that quiet.” Robin narrowed his eyes. “Pru, arrange for him to come in here today. We’ve got enough to justify a formal interview. Sally, any else to add?”

  “Plenty. Dawn was well away once the seal burst. You know how Dave and Melanie just happened to meet for coffee in Morrisons on the Monday before Nick was killed? That was no coincidence. They meet up every Monday at that time, when she does her big grocery shop. It was one of Nick’s darts nights, so normally they’d be safe. Thing is, he got wind of these meetups a few weeks back. Around the same time he got in contact with Cooper.”

  Laurence raised a tentative hand. “Remember how all the accounts of that night talk about Dave wanting to stay out on the pitch and watch what happened with Greg? And then go with him to hospital? He practically had to be ordered into the changing rooms. What if he was avoiding Osment? Hoping the bloke would simply give up and go home?”

  “But something doesn’t add up,” Pru said. “Why arrange to meet Dave during training? Osment would have known—especially since he was aware of the coach’s rules—that no players could leave the pitch.”

  “Because he could have arranged to meet him beforehand. In the clubhouse,” Robin said. This was starting to hang together. “If that’s true, there are two possible outcomes. Dave met him there and killed him—remember how he was last to arrive that evening—then somebody else moved the body into the changing room while he was giving himself an unbreakable alibi. Or Dave deliberately arrived late so he wouldn’t have to meet Osment at all. Which might explain the damage to the photograph—frustrated at having been stood up so he took his feelings out on anything that came to hand.”

  “So, Dave’s been counting his blessings ever since that whatever Osment knew died with him.” Pru nodded, but her narrowed eyes told Robin she clearly wasn’t convinced. He’d seen that expression before. “Two questions, sir. Why put the body in the changing room loos and what about Cooper? He was expecting to meet Osment around seven o’clock, not earlier.”

  Before Robin could summon up an answer, Laurence chipped in. “Whatever happened in the clubhouse that evening and whoever did it, there was one element they didn’t factor in, because they couldn’t have predicted it. The accident and the arrival of the ambulance. Whether Osment’s death was planned or a spur-of-the-moment thing, having the emergency services arriving would have thrown anyone into a panic. The police could have been called in as well, for all they knew, so their natural reaction would have been to get out.”

  Pru shrugged. “Okay, but that still doesn’t answer why the body was in the toilets, unless it was to buy the killer time. The loos aren’t visible from the main changing area.”

  “Osment could have been mooching around the changing room of his own accord. Looking for something else to trash.” No, there was a better explanation. “Or what if he got those abrasions when he hit the glass? He could have wanted to clean the wound at a sink and he’d have known there’d have been no players there.”

  “Apart from Joe,” Pru pointed out. “If Osment walked into the changing room from the bar when Joe had nipped in to have a slash, there could have been a scuffle. The connecting door is right next to the loos.”

  “Unless Joe was the one Osment was intending to meet all along.” Callum turned to Robin, hands spread. “This theory seems too complicated, sir. He goes to meet Dave, but even though Dave doesn’t show up, Osment gets killed by somebody else. And where’s Cooper while all this is going on?”

  “Hold on,” Sally said. “Osment might have asked Cooper to arrive later so that he could talk to Dave on his own.”

  “But why?” Pru asked.

  Robin rapped the desk hard, then jumped off it. “That’s enough speculation. Callum and Sally, can you get all the statements and work out a timeline of who was where and when at the sports ground that evening? With a note of where that information has been corroborated by other people. Laurence, can you concentrate on Osment’s movements, so far as we know them? I know you drew a blank with checking the local CCTV before we got called in, so we’re working off what Melanie told us about his leaving home and those emails where he’s asking Cooper to meet him at seven o’clock. I want you to double—or triple—check that we haven’t missed anything that can fill the picture in further. We’ll touch base again when we’ve spoken to Dave, assuming that nothing major turns up in the interim.”

  About which Robin wouldn’t hold his breath.

  The interview rooms at Hartwood station might have been modern and airy, but the
y still held that distinctive atmosphere Robin had encountered in every one of their kind. Dave was waiting for them, scowling, clearly not best pleased at having been called in to the station. He made it clear that, in his opinion, calling him in from work had been out of order, causing him considerable embarrassment. Robin took little notice: he’d heard worse bluster from people who were guilty as sin. He and Pru went through the formalities of explaining how they’d be recording what was said, clarifying that they weren’t pressing charges on anyone at the moment, and establishing whether he wanted a lawyer present.

  Dave had nodded at the first, rolled his eyes at the second and shook his head at the last. “I have nothing to hide. Ask what you want, then I can answer and get out.”

  “Are you in a rush?” Pru asked, in her most insouciant voice. “Oh yes, it’s your regular evening to meet Melanie, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Pru smiled sweetly. “I mean that we know you and Melanie meet for coffee every Monday evening. Nick’s darts night and her big shop. Very convenient.”

  “So what if we do?” Dave had flushed a hideous shade of red. “There’s nothing wrong with chatting to an old friend.”

  “Nick didn’t like it, though, did he? Especially when he found out it was still going on.”

  “Nick didn’t like anything to do with me, frankly,” Dave said, instantly appearing horrified that he’d made the admission.

  “Did he have grounds for that?” Robin asked, pleased to see that they were getting under the witness’s skin.

  “Only his insane jealousy. There was nothing in it. It is possible for a man and a woman to be nothing other than friends,” Dave added, with a sneer.

  “Thing is, Dave, we’ve been told that Nick arranged to meet up with you the evening he was killed.” That question hit home, as well, evidenced by the colour draining from Dave’s face. “Is that true?”

  “Who told you that?”