He took another drag of his cigarette and stared out over the garden. “Yeah. I didn’t like it, I can tell you that. You know what I mean? Sian was under my roof.”
“Of course, she was yours.”
Nigel nodded. “Yeah. I didn’t want other blokes thinking they could just come sniffing around her like that. She was so much better than that; Sian was special.”
“And did you tell her that?”
“Course I did. Told her all the time that she was my special angel.”
Harriet’s blood ran cold in her veins but she kept her expression deliberately neutral.
“Did she like being your special angel?”
Nigel nodded and chucked his cigarette butt onto the ground before he ground it out with his boot. Before the sparks of his first cigarette were extinguished, he’d pulled another one from the packet and jammed it in his mouth.
“Sian liked knowing she was important. She liked the compliments, lapped them up, and I liked seeing her happy.”
“When Aidan came on the scene, did she still like being your little angel then?”
Nigel’s face screwed up into a sneer. “He was filling her head with all sorts of rubbish. Told her they were going to be together forever but it was just so he could get in her pants. But Sian knew it had to be special and she knew it wasn’t special with him.”
“What about you?”
“What do you mean, what about me?”
“Was it special with you?”
Nigel spluttered indignantly but there was a sly glint in his eyes that left Harriet cold.
“Well, you said it yourself that Sian shared a striking resemblance to her mother when she was the same age. It wouldn’t be unusual for you being in a relationship with her mother to find Sian attractive too.”
Nigel Thompson’s eyes bulged in his head and he started to choke and hack on the cigarette smoke he’d inhaled, part of Harriet hoped it choked him to death.
“What the fuck are you accusing me of?” He moved toward her, his face crimson with rage.
“You said it yourself she was beautiful. She was your special angel.”
“She was but not like you’re thinking. It wasn’t like that.”
“You made her feel special, isolated her from the others.”
“I made her feel safe,” he said.
“And then Aidan ruined it all. What did you threaten her with, Nigel? What did you do to keep her quiet?”
“You bitch,” he said, and he lunged.
Harriet took a step backwards but her foot twisted over the edge of the stone flags and her ankle collapsed beneath her weight.
Nigel’s hand caught her jacket, jerking her toward his thick bulk with enough force to cause her head to snap backwards painfully.
“You fucking bitch,” he said his breath hot against her cheek.
“Did she beg you to leave her alone?”
“She was my daughter. I didn’t lay a hand on her.”
“When did it start?”
“Shut up!”
Nigel shook her violently and Harriet felt her teeth rattle in her head, reminding her of the night that had ended her career in clinical practice.
“She trusted you and you abused that trust.”
His hand closed over her throat and Harriet’s brain went into overdrive.
“Oi!” Drew’s voice cut through the panic blaring in her head. Nigel released her abruptly and she stumbled backwards but her ankle refused to support her.
Harriet went down into the soft mud that made up the edges of the stone flag terrace.
“Nigel!” Janet Thompson’s voice rose in hysteria and Harriet lifted her gaze in time to see Drew subdue the other larger man.
“I’m arresting you on suspicion of assault,” Drew said, his voice quietly confident as he reeled off his speech.
“She needs to shut her fucking slag-mouth,” Nigel said. “I would never touch a hair on Sian’s head. I loved her. I wouldn’t hurt her.”
“That’s a fine line,” Harriet said as she pushed up onto her feet. “To you it was nothing more than love but for her it was a devastating betrayal.”
Drew shot her a shocked glance but Harriet shook her head. There would be time to explain later, right now they needed to salvage a terrible situation but for once Harriet found herself unable to come up with a plan.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“What do you mean you’ve arrested the father of one of the dead teens?” Gregson kept his voice low but there was no denying the apoplectic rage that filled his eyes and caused the veins in his neck to stand out.
“I caught him in the garden trying to throttle Dr Quinn and—"
“Wait, why was she there?” Gregson asked, the unfriendly gleam in his eye made Drew uncomfortable.
“She’s been assisting me with re-interviewing the families. It’s with her guidance that we’re finally starting to get somewhere on this.”
“I had Dr Jackson on the phone to me this morning,” Gregson said. “He’s not happy about this either. Said you’d been over there digging into things you should keep your nose out of.”
“I merely asked him to take another look at Sian’s body, which he agreed to do.”
“You’re on thin ice here, Haskell,” Gregson warned. “And I don’t want that quack anywhere near the interview with the father. For all we know she hypnotised him into attacking her.”
As Gregson turned away, Drew rolled his eyes. What was it about this case that was turning normally excellent officers into train-wrecks?
“Sir, I don’t think that’s what—"
“You heard me,” Gregson said. “I don’t want her in there.”
“Well, I wasn’t going to let her in there anyway, Sir. I was planning on taking Maz into the interview with me.”
Gregson nodded. “That’s good, let cooler heads prevail for once.” Gregson paced in the small office space. “What have you got on him anyway?”
“Dr Quinn believes Nigel Thompson was abusing Sian.”
Gregson’s eyes widened and he pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “Fuck. Is there anyone around here not screwed up? What evidence has she got?”
“Well so far it’s just her suspicion but, Sir, you should have seen how he was behaving. It wasn’t right. During the first interview I did with the family I had Officer Crandell in with me, ask her how he was.”
“So the man was upset, what has that got to do with anything?”
Drew shook his head. How was he supposed to explain a feeling to his boss when he couldn’t even put it into words?
“There’s the diary as well.” Gregson shot him a dirty look. He was definitely grasping at straws with that one because unless Sian had explicitly written in her diary just why she hated her stepfather then it wasn’t proof of anything other than a typical teen and a rocky parental relationship.
“We’re going to take a run at the mother too,” Drew said, drawing an incredulous look from his boss. “We need to know what she knows or if she was even aware of anything untoward.”
Gregson nodded. “Fine. But this stays in here.” He waved Drew out the door.
Before he could make it out of the office, Gregson called him back.
“Haskell, you better hope and pray that this doesn’t all blow back on us like the shit-storm it’s brewing up to be. It’s all well and good for Dr Goody-Goody out there to poke her nose into other people’s business and heads but we need more than just conjecture. I would hope you understood that.”
“I do, sir.”
“Then I expect you to bring her into line. In future if she has a suspicion, she should go to you first before she goes shooting off her mouth and bringing the wrath of God down on her head.”
Drew nodded and pulled the door shut. He didn’t entirely disagree with Gregson on this matter. If Harriet had just come to him before she’d gone wading into murky waters, then things might have been different. They could have treated the situation with
kid-gloves instead of the ham-fisted way it had ended up.
Harriet caught his eye from the conference room. With a sigh, Drew crossed the office and tapped Maz as he passed his desk. “Can you come in here a minute? I need you to sit in with me on an interview.”
“Sure.” Maz began gathering up his stuff as Drew headed for the conference room.
He pushed open the door. “How’s the foot?”
“It’ll be fine,” she said, waving his concern away. She had it propped on a chair opposite her, the ankle elevated with an ice pack draped over the bruised and rapidly swelling joint.
“Maybe you should get it looked at. For all you know it’s fractured.”
“It’s not,” she said dismissively.
“And you know this because you have X-ray eyes?”
“I know because I’m a doctor.”
Drew sighed. “Not the same thing.”
She shrugged and grinned at him. “What did the DCI have to say?”
“Well he’s not happy, that much is certain,” Drew said, closing the door behind him before he tugged a chair out from under the large table and dropped down into it.
“I didn’t think he would be,” Harriet said. “Cases like these rarely make anyone happy.”
“How sure are you that he was abusing Sian?”
“As sure as I can be,” she said. “At least as sure as anyone can be without Sian to confirm it.”
“What makes you so certain?”
“You don’t believe me?”
Drew shook his head and planted his elbows on his knees as he leaned forward in the chair and let his hands dangle down between his legs. “That’s not what I’m saying.”
“Then Gregson doesn’t believe me.”
“He raises a good point, Harriet,” Drew said. “What proof do we have? As it is right now it’s a ‘he said, she said,’ case and those never work out.”
“Look, I’m not saying I can definitively put my finger on it and say yes, here on these dates Nigel Thompson was interfering with his step-daughter. But I can say that after speaking to him today and the short pieces I read in Sian’s diary, not to mention her grades slipping, her isolation from the family—" she ticked the items off on her fingers. “If he hadn’t started to molest her then he was on the verge of it. He was grooming her, turning her into his perfect victim.”
Drew closed his eyes. Things were definitely getting more complicated by the minute.
“Room for a little ‘un?” Maz poked his head around the door with a wide smile on his face.
“Yeah, come on in,” Drew said. “DS Mazer Arya, this is Dr Harriet Quinn.”
Maz moved into the room and held his hand out toward Harriet. “Hey, Doc, you can call me, Maz, everyone around here does.”
Harriet took his hand and returned his smile with a warm one of her own.
“Harriet,” she said. “We don’t need to stand on ceremony.”
Maz’s smile widened a little more and he sat in the chair next to her.
“What happened to your leg?”
“I had a run in with a garden terrace,” she said wryly.
Seeing the two of them together, all jovial got under Drew’s skin in a way he couldn’t have imagined.
“If you two are finished getting all cosy, maybe we could get back to the situation at hand?”
Maz flushed up to his dark roots and Harriet cocked an eyebrow in Drew’s direction.
“The DI here thinks I’ve messed up his case because I’ve uncovered a history of abuse in the Sian Jones case.”
“That’s not what this is,” Drew said. He cut himself off with a sigh and raked his hand back through his hair.
“I just think if you’d come to me before you started digging around with Nigel Thompson, we wouldn’t be in this mess now.”
“And if I hadn’t started digging then we wouldn’t be any the wiser about it. Not to mention the fact that if I’d tiptoed around it and just left it at that, he would have had a chance to talk his way out of it all.”
“He didn’t talk his way into it,” Drew said in exasperation.
“But when you interview him, you’ll have a better starting point. He’s already off balance. The sooner you get in there and have a cosy little chat with him about his unnatural relationship and infatuation with his step-daughter the easier it will be for you to get the truth out of him.”
“So wait, do we think Sian killed herself because her step-dad was abusing her?”
Drew shook his head. “No.”
“It’s possible,” Harriet warned. “Until we hear back from the coroner on this, we need to approach it with an open mind.”
“So you’re changing your mind then?”
Harriet shook her head and Drew groaned into his hands.
“I haven’t changed my mind. There’s definitely something going on here but you said it yourself we need proof and right now we’ve got pretty much nothing.”
Drew hated to admit it, but she was right. However, he didn’t appreciate her turning his words against him like that.
“Right, we’re going in there with one goal in mind.” He pushed onto his feet. “We’ve got to get Nigel to confess or we’ve got nothing at all.”
“If you’d like me to talk to Janet,” she started to say but Drew cut her off with a shake of his head.
“I’m afraid we’ve got to keep it strictly above board from now on.”
“Another one of Gregson’s arbitrary rules is it?”
He nodded. “Something like that. Maz and I’ll take the interviews. You should get the leg looked at.”
Harriet opened her mouth as though she was going to object and then seemed to change her mind. Was it disappointment he saw flash in her eyes as she grabbed her bag from the floor and dropped the ice-pack back onto the desk?
“I’ll be off then,” she said. “It looks like you’ve got it all under control here.”
Drew caught up to her as she hobbled to the door. “Look, I’m not trying to cut you out here,” he said, catching her elbow.
“Of course not,” she said with false brightness. “You’re just doing your job, like the rest of us.”
“You’ve been a real asset in all of this. I couldn’t have gotten this far without you.”
Harriet smiled and patted his hand. “It’s fine, Drew. I get it, I’m an outsider and that’s all right. I’m not saying it to make you feel bad, it’s just how it is.”
If she wasn’t saying it to make him feel bad, she was doing a bloody good job of it.
“I’ve got a lot of work at the university that I’ve been neglecting,” she said. “When you need me, you know how to pick up a phone.”
Drew nodded and took a step back, noting the way she shut him out with her professionalism. If they’d been getting closer to one another over the last two days, then obviously he’d been mistaken.
“I feel like you’re taking this personally,” he said.
Harriet shook her head as she pulled open the door. “There’s nothing personal about it. You got from me what you needed. Now you need to hold up you side of the bargain and catch the person responsible.”
“How should we approach the Thompsons?”
She hesitated and cocked her head to the side. “Try and gain his confidence. You know, man to man, that kind of thing. Deep down he doesn’t see what he was doing with Sian was bad because he loved her. It’s society in his eyes that’s screwed up.”
Drew sucked in a deep breath. “And if that doesn’t work?”
Harriet gave him a grim smile. ‘It’ll work,” she said. “The man is so full of his own importance, he doesn’t want to believe that he’s sick. He wants people to empathise with him and if you can make him think that you understand why he did the things he did with Sian you’ll have him eating out of the palm of your hand.”
With that she pulled away from him and hobbled out into the main office.
“And Janet?”
Harriet didn’t even look over
her shoulder as she answered him. “Remind her that Sian was her baby—not that she’ll have forgotten—but remind her all the same. And then ask her if Nigel ever commented on how Sian looked like her when she was younger.”
“What’ll that do?”
But Harriet was already gone out through the set of double doors that connected the office to the rest of the building.
“Shit,” he swore under his breath before he turned back to face Maz. “Looks like it’s just you and me.”
Maz shrugged. “We don’t need a head doctor to help us do our jobs,” he said, flipping through the files laid out on the table. “She’d probably only just get in the way.”
Drew said nothing as he moved back to the table and scooped up a file of his own. He wouldn’t disagree with Maz aloud but he also wasn’t going to agree with him either. Ever since he’d gotten Harriet involved, she’d caused him to view things in a new light. It was her insight into people that had helped him keep the case alive in the first place and it was with her help that they now had Sian’s stepfather in holding.
None of those things would bring the dead teenager back. But at least that scumbag wouldn’t get the chance to hurt anyone else and Drew had to believe that Sian would have wanted that.
“Right,” he said, letting the file drop back onto the desk. “You ready?”
Maz rolled his shoulders, causing his neck to crack loudly. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Harriet made it as far as her car before the pain in her ankle became too intense. As she slid in behind the wheel she groaned inwardly. Using her foot to change gears was going to be interesting to say the least.
But all of that paled in comparison to the pain she felt over being dismissed so thoroughly.
Placing her palms on the wheel, she pressed her forehead onto the backs of her hands. She should have seen it coming. At the end of the day, it made perfect sense for Drew to drop her once he had what he needed from her. In fact, it was something of a miracle that he had even allowed her to go out with him and do the interviews in the first place.
And maybe it was better this way. After all, this wasn’t her real job and she’d been neglecting that in favour of doing this.
The Hanging Time Page 16