A Carriage of Misjustice

by Charlie Cochrane

  “Could be. Or he’d truly given up on trying to find out who had been the driver—as Joe suggested—and the Osment thing came as a shock.” Why did that last point resound around Robin’s brain as though he’d missed something? Better to let the subconscious work on that for a while. “Anyway, the Weatherell angle’s the one I’m going to pursue. I’ll let you know where we get.”

  “Okay. Good work. Enjoy your hotel breakfast. I’m not envious in the slightest.”

  Once Robin was settled with a bowl of cereal and a glass of orange juice—eyeing with envy the usual plate of fried delights that Pru was about to tuck into and which never appeared to add half an ounce to her frame—he outlined what he’d discussed with Betteridge.

  “Oh, I like that, sir.” Pru gestured with her knife. “You reckon his mate Archie’s given him a false alibi?”

  “Not necessarily. Just because a call comes to your landline, it doesn’t mean it has to be answered from there. It’s easy enough to set calls to rollover to a mobile—lots of businesses do that so they won’t miss contacts from customers. Weatherell might have found it necessary to do that in his line of work too, especially if he’s the emergency contact for trouble at the ground. The timing of that call is pretty vague on Archie’s part, so around half seven could have meant later. Weatherell would have had enough time to scuffle with Osment, finish him off, leave the body, and be starting on his way home.” Robin rapped the table with his spoon, sending a spray of milky droplets across the cloth. “Sorry, I’ve remembered something.”

  “It must be good, then.”

  “Not so much good as weird. I had this dream in the wee small hours. Totally fit for sharing in polite company.” He grinned, then finished off his orange juice. “I had arranged to meet Osment in one of our interview rooms, even though he was dead. Told you it was weird. Don’t you dare tell the rest of the team about it.”

  “You have my word.” Pru scooped up some sausage and bacon, then munched on it while awaiting the rest of the tale.

  “It was nighttime, with no lights on, so the room was dark. He mistook me for someone else—his wife, I think, which is somewhat odder and possibly Freudian so let’s not go there—and he got his phone out and started scrolling through the picture roll.”

  “As he must have been intending to do with Dave. The setting’s odd but the actions make sense.”

  “Exactly. Therefore, thinking about that in the cold light of morning, here’s another take on things. Could Weatherell have come into the bar, initially innocently? You know, he’s there to see the training, spots the bar door’s open or whatever, goes to investigate and Osment, who’s expecting either Dave or Cooper to turn up, assumes it’s one of them coming in? Not knowing what he’s actually doing, he shows Weatherell the pictures. ‘Here. Look at these, from the night Jamie was killed. I was there, I know what happened.’ If I’d been in the same position as Weatherell at that point, I’d have gone mental, thinking that somebody might have been there, maybe even witnessed the crash and done nothing to help.”

  “Okay.” Pru laid down her cutlery: this was clearly time for a serious discussion. “I’ll be devil’s advocate. If that happened, why didn’t Osment ask who was there? Was he that stupid that he wouldn’t check beforehand he was talking to the right bloke?”

  “Maybe he did. Maybe Weatherell simply said a mumbled yes. Playing at detectives. Perhaps he interrupted Osment showing the pictures to Cooper and overheard their conversation.” Robin felt less and less convinced by the moment. The dream was turning out to have been a nightmare.

  “It might have started with him seeing Osment breaking the glass in that picture.”

  “He couldn’t have done if it was dark. He could have heard it, though, and thought he was up to his vandalism again. Scuffle first and ask questions afterwards, only there wasn’t an afterwards, because he’d seen a red mist. Or the team picture is simply a red herring. Osment broke it in frustration at being stood up or out of spite and it signifies nothing.” Robin buttered a piece of toast, then slathered it with Marmite.

  “Do we have to squeeze the murder into the time between Joe leaving the loos and Cooper entering the bar?” Pru asked. “Could it have been done afterwards?”

  “It could. Although that doesn’t explain why Weatherell wasn’t simply watching the players practicing before then. He’d have been seen, surely—unless he felt the need to hide, and what motive would he have had to do so at that point?”

  “True. I suppose it also begs the question of where the victim was up until that point, assuming Cooper has told us the truth and Osment wasn’t in the bar at seven twenty.”

  “It does, but I like it as a theory. Neater. Gives the murderer a bigger window of time to get in, kill the victim, and get out again.” Robin jabbed with the remaining crust of his toast. “The crime scene investigator had a feeling the body had been dragged off and discarded in a hurry. What if that was because the killer heard the ambulance approaching and knew he had to get out quicker than anticipated?”

  That would have the added advantage of partly explaining the coincidence of Greg’s injury and the murder. If the killer had heard the sirens, that could have precipitated a panic.

  “Okay, so where does Cooper come into all this? Wouldn’t Weatherell have seen his car and become suspicious?” Pru paused, cutlery back in her hands but now suspended above her plate. “Or do we think that’s exactly what happened? Weatherell goes to check that everything’s all right, tries the bar door, finds it’s open, then goes in and stumbles across Osment up to no good.”

  “I think that’s possible, although there’s another line I’d like to explore. A hunch.”

  “A hunch? Is that what some of our less enlightened colleagues would call women’s intuition if I’d come up with the idea?” Pru grinned.

  “Something like that.” Robin returned the smile. “Based on something Joe said about Weatherell. ‘Gift of the gab because he’d been in sales.’”

  “Ah. I’m with you. Sounds like we need to get the team back onto those traffic cameras again, as a matter of priority. See if Weatherell’s car was in the area that evening and exactly when.” Pru speared the last bit of sausage with her fork. “They’ll be overjoyed.”

  The inadequately suppressed groans when Robin told the team it was time to scour the traffic camera footage yet again were understandable. It was such a thankless task, a mixture of intense boredom and repetition combined with the need to remain alert at all times so that a vital number plate wasn’t missed. Callum tackled the first camera Weatherell would have encountered if he’d taken the logical route to the training ground, while Laurence trawled through the recordings from the one nearest the ground. Sally and Pru concentrated on finding out everything they could about the man himself.

  That turned out to be very little, as he wasn’t on social media, didn’t have a criminal record—not even points on his driving licence—and only appeared on their records in connection with his son’s death. About which one of the long-serving uniformed officers had said he’d acted with a lot more dignity and restraint than most people would have done in such a shitty situation. Acting on one of Robin’s hunches, Sally had been despatched with a set of questions to ask the personnel department at the company Cooper worked for.

  It didn’t take long to get an answer about Weatherell’s location on the Wednesday night, though. His car had been clocked five minutes from his home at six forty. So, assuming it was him driving, he could have left home at just gone half past. If his intention had been to watch training, he’d clearly been going to miss the start of it, especially so given that he appeared to have been snarled up in the same traffic jam that had affected Cooper. He’d been caught by another camera, quarter of a mile from the ground, at seven twenty-one, so would have arrived a few minutes later and possibly taken Archie’s call while still in his car.

  Callum piped up. “Wouldn’t this Archie bloke have noticed his call had rolled over and was bei
ng taken outside on a mobile and not on the landline at home? It always sounds different.”

  “Depends what his hearing’s like,” Laurence pointed out. “Even if he did notice something, Weatherell could have said it was a problem with the line.”

  “You can go and ask him. He doesn’t like being rung at work, so let’s see what he thinks about us turning up at the place. Might jolt him into telling the truth. Ah, Sally.” Robin glanced expectantly at the constable as she re-entered the incident room. “Any luck?”

  “In spades. Tom Weatherell was a salesman for Hepius Pharmaceuticals, on the same regional team as Colin Cooper before he moved into marketing. They could have known each other.”

  “You’re thinking the pair of them are linked, sir?” Callum asked, nodding appreciatively.

  “Possibly.” Robin still needed to exercise caution about this theory. “Several times we’ve asked ourselves if this has been a case of two or more people working together. Sometimes those gut instincts are right.”

  “But we’ve picked the right pairing?” It was less of a question from Pru than a statement.

  Robin nodded. “If Weatherell knew his old colleague had been in the vicinity when Jamie was killed, he might have been in contact to see what he knew. Cooper can’t help him, until the day Osment gets back in touch, saying he has evidence about who the driver was. Cooper contacts Weatherell to tell him and suggests he comes along to the ground as well. Maybe not for the initial part of the meeting, because Osment would be likely to clam up.”

  “That would explain why Cooper wasn’t that worried about putting himself in potential danger,” Sally pointed out. “He knew he’d have backup.”

  “It would also give him a legitimate reason to be there, if challenged,” Callum agreed. “He was there to meet Weatherell, who often came to watch training himself, so it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for him to be seen. Maybe there was something around covering up why he had that pitching wedge too, in case he was seen with it. ‘I was bringing it because my old mate said he’d redo the grip for me.’”

  As earlier, Pru slipped into the devil’s advocate role again. “I’ll buy this as a theory so far, sir, although Cooper would have had to be absolutely certain he didn’t actually hit Jamie when he thought he hit the deer.”

  “If I’d have been him, I’d have checked my car the next morning,” Callum said. “And double-checked all the details from the news reports. I’d have had to satisfy myself. But then, I’m not him.”

  “Indeed.” Nobody could put themselves into another person’s mind and take the measure of their conscience. Still, this had the advantage of explaining why Cooper had so readily depicted himself to the police as the potential victim. “Let’s focus on the night in question. Both Cooper and Weatherell are running late because of the prang on the local road and because of the phone call from Archie, that has to be answered so it doesn’t appear suspicious what our friend the groundsman might be up to. Osment, who’s been sitting in the bar since six thirty, gets cross because he’s been stood up twice, so he lashes out at the photo. That’s probably a few minutes after seven, because none of the players heard it.”

  “Assuming it happened that night, sir.” Pru jabbed a finger towards the picture of Osment. “If he was in possession of the keys, I’d reckon he’d have used them before then. Trial run, maybe. And what happened to the keys, anyway? They weren’t found on the body.”

  “They didn’t turn up in the search of the premises, either,” Laurence confirmed, “although nobody was particularly keeping an eye out for them. Mind you, would he have needed to do a trial run? If he used to train at the club, he’d have known his way around.”

  “Not behind the bar, I hope.” Pru rolled her eyes. “Add the whereabouts of the keys to the list of unknowns. Like what Osment was doing between six thirty and when he died.”

  “When he was in the bar, I bet he would have had a poke around hunting for anything valuable. Was there a till?” Sally asked.

  “We saw one when we looked around the clubhouse,” Robin replied, “but it appeared to have had the cash drawer taken out for security. He could have nicked bottles off the optics, although they’re not so easy to transport home. He’d have checked his phone, surely, for messages from Dave or Cooper.”

  “Maybe he fell down the internet rabbit hole,” Callum suggested. “Like I said before, you decide to give your phone one last check for notifications when you go to bed and suddenly it’s half an hour later and you’re on some website reading about how they’re trying to reconstruct mammoths from DNA.”

  “That’s a good point. It could be used to account for any of the time gaps we’re trying to fill up.” The joys of modern life that the police of twenty years previously wouldn’t have had to contend with. Robin turned back to the incident board, staring at the picture of the victim. “Whatever he was doing in that bar, he’s out of it by twenty past seven. If you bet he’d rummaged round the bar, Sally, I bet he’d have done the same in the changing rooms, once he was sure they were empty again. Out for what he could nick, if he was so in need of money, or what havoc he could wreak, especially in Dave’s direction. That’s what he’s doing while Cooper’s in the bar. Maybe Osment has a good nose around in all the nooks and crannies farthest from the door so can’t hear that Cooper’s turned up at last.”

  “And then what?” Pru asked. “Osment simply sits around, maybe down the internet worm hole again?”

  “Rabbit hole. Get your animals right. Maybe he did just sit around. He had time to kill before his darts match, he couldn’t go home and it would have been warmer—slightly, anyway—than wandering the streets and less depressing than sitting in a pub being Billy no mates. He might have gone back into the bar to avoid being seen. You could even lie down on one of the banquettes there and have a crafty kip. Cooper, meanwhile, has gone home, thinking that he’s been stood up twice over. Weatherell’s either too late arriving to cross paths with him or for some reason doesn’t notice the car.”

  Pru rapped a happy tattoo on the desk where she was perched. “Then Cooper hears the news the next morning and suspects that his old colleague might have had something to do with the murder. No wonder he kept it all quiet if he thinks there’s a risk what he knows makes him a potential target. He certainly seemed worried about it when we interviewed him.”

  “Yep. I know we’re indulging in speculation, but it’s not all that wild. Weatherell goes to see if anyone’s still hanging around—maybe he’s angry, too, because he thinks he’s been called out on a wild-goose chase. He discovers the clubhouse door open and Osment lurking in there. Confronts him, wanting to know what evidence he has about the hit-and-run. Things get out of hand.” Robin puffed out his cheeks. “I have no idea what weapon he could have used, though.”

  “Maybe he went and got something after he found the door unlocked and before going through it,” Laurence said. “One of his tools?”

  “Could be.” Robin shrugged. “Okay, I want both Weatherell and Cooper called in here today for further questioning. Pru, can you get onto that because I want them at the same time.”

  Pru grinned. “And you want them both to know the other is being questioned?”

  “You’ve read my mind. Then lean on the forensics people to see if there’s anything else they can tell us about the weapon used other than it not being that golf club. Laurence, you’re going to see Archie to find out if he’s deaf as a post and whether he can tell a call taken at home from a call taken outside. Add to your list finding out whether he rang Weatherell out of the blue or if it was somehow agreed in advance.”

  “In order to get himself an alibi? Will do, sir.” The constable jotted that down.

  “Sally and Callum, I think we’ve still got those keys to the sports ground in the evidence room. Take them, get down there, and have a poke around. Fresh eyes, focussing on this new theory.”

  “Do you want us to look for the weapon, sir?” Callum asked.

  “K
eep your eyes open for anything that strikes you, although if there had been something screamingly obvious in plain view all along, then we should all get the sack for missing it.” Robin first out of the door, because he’d been to the ground twice. “Unless, of course, it’s a totally commonplace object that Weatherell took away, cleaned up, and slipped back into where it belonged once we’d done our search. Hiding it in plain sight. Apart from the weapon, there’s another thing I had in mind. If Osment had the spare bunch of keys, did they ever leave the premises—like the phone, to be chucked away somewhere they’ve yet to be turned up—or did he either mislay them or deliberately discard them, given that they might have outlived their usefulness?”

  “Hunt the keys it is, sir.” Sally gave Callum a wink. “What if Weatherell’s there and sees us?”

  “That’s all to the good, as far as I’m concerned. He could do with the wind put up him.”

  Pru agreed. “What with you nosing about and us wanting to see him, he might get in a panic and do the kind of stupid thing he’s avoided doing so far.”

  “I think he already has done something stupid.” Robin, was pleased to find he could still be a step ahead of his sergeant. “He should have left the body, made his way out through the bar, and left everything unlocked in his wake. We’ve been so focussed on thinking about how Osment got in that we’ve glided over how the killer got out. Must have had his own keys.”

  “Unless he used Osment’s,” Pru said. “So if we do find those on the premises, that’ll be another piece of circumstantial evidence.”

  Assuming—big assumption—that this wasn’t another red herring.

  “Why would anyone be so daft?” Callum asked. “Panic?”

  “No,” Laurence said. “Remember my teacher who picked up the bunch of keys automatically? I can imagine Weatherell automatically locking everything up. Routine. If he was in a panic to start with, autopilot might have taken over.”