‘But what I don’t understand is how he was admitted to the roll of solicitors?’ said the Super. ‘He must have set up an elaborate false identity.’
‘I wonder how much Joe Capaldi knows?’ said DI Moore.
‘I should think he knows everything,’ said Byers. ‘I’ll order up the various warrants then we’d better bring them in. For once, this is an arrest I’m not going to relish. Bastard had it coming,’ he muttered under his breath, turning away.
‘What was that, DS Byers?’ asked the Super.
‘Nothing, sir,’ said Byers. He’d only said what they were all thinking.
Chapter 77
Farrell sat beside the bed as the monitors beeped, his eyes fixed on Mhairi’s white face and trying to ignore the terrible sense of déjà vu sweeping over him. Although he’d been told the procedure had gone well, he was almost demented with anxiety.
What if she didn’t wake up? He tried and failed to imagine a world without her in it and could feel emotion swell in his chest. She looked so small and vulnerable asleep. When she was awake she was loud, opinionated and could drive him to distraction with her mess and chaos. He’d give anything for her to be nipping his ear about something right now.
‘It’s rude to stare,’ she mumbled.
He squeezed her hand in relief.
‘Ow.’
Her eyes fluttered open and she managed a small smile. Then the tension returned to her face as she remembered.
‘Mia?’
‘Safe at home with her parents. Peter Swift and Beth Roberts are both in custody.’
‘What happened?’
‘The impact of the bullet on your vest fractured a rib, causing a tension pneumothorax. It’s been fixed but you’ll need to stay put until tomorrow at least.’
He decided not to let on about the cardiac arrest for now.
She rolled her eyes and he laughed.
‘I see that normal service has been resumed.’
‘You’re blethering, Frank Farrell.’ She glared but she gave his hand a quick squeeze, looking away from him as her eyes teared up.
‘Is there anyone you want me to call? Sandy, maybe?’ he asked, realizing he was holding his breath.
‘I’m not bloody dead yet, thank you,’ she said.
‘You and him aren’t …?’
‘No,’ she said, avoiding his gaze. ‘I ended it. Nice bloke but not for me.’
Farrell felt unaccountably relieved.
‘Now that I know you’re all right, I’ll have to go. There’s stuff to sort out.’
‘Sure, bugger off,’ she said, snippy as ever.
He hesitated then leaned down and gently kissed her on the cheek.
‘Keep yourself out of trouble till I’m back, DS McLeod.’
He looked back as he left, but she’d already closed her eyes.
Arriving at the station, he felt a wave of fatigue wash over him as the adrenalin finally left his system. Entering the MCA room he found everyone gathered with the exception of the Super. Pouring himself a mug of coffee, he joined them.
‘Mhairi’s op went well,’ he said. ‘She’ll be transferred to Dumfries tomorrow and out a couple of days after that, hopefully.’
‘Thank God,’ said Stirling. ‘It’s a lot quieter round here without her.’
‘You can say that again,’ said Byers.
‘I phoned DCI Buchanan on the way down. She brought me up to speed on the Gabriel Ferrante situation. Have we managed to apprehend him and Joe Capaldi yet?’
‘They’re both downstairs waiting to be interviewed,’ said Byers. ‘I thought you’d want to take a crack at Ferrante yourself?’
‘No time like the present,’ said Farrell. ‘Care to join me?’
It was an olive branch and Byers took it.
‘Sure.’
They headed to Interview Room 4.
Farrell and Byers sat down opposite Ferrante.
Farrell switched on the recording device.
‘I’d like to remind you that you’re still under caution,’ he said.
‘Those present are DI Frank Farrell.’
‘DS Mike Byers.’
‘Gabriel Ferrante.’
‘Also known as …’ said Farrell. He eyeballed Ferrante. The game was up and he knew it.
‘Tony Marino,’ Ferrante sighed.
‘We know who you are,’ said Farrell. ‘We’re also aware that you served a life sentence for the rape and murder of Emily Drummond.’
Ferrante’s eyes hardened.
‘I was innocent. I served twenty years for a crime I didn’t commit.’
‘We believe you,’ said Farrell.
‘What?’ said Ferrante, unable to hide his surprise.
‘We believe that the crime was carried out by one of her then classmates, Robert Granger. After his death we ran his DNA against the sample obtained at the time. It was a match.’
Ferrante shook his head as though he couldn’t process what he was hearing.
‘I can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘After all this time …’
‘If you’d only left Sheriff Robert Granger alive, he’d have received his comeuppance and you yourself could have reclaimed your identity and lived as a free man,’ Byers said.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Ferrante.
‘You murdered Robert Granger in cold blood,’ said Byers. ‘You’ll most likely spend the rest of your life behind bars.’
‘No, no!’ Ferrante said, his voice rising in horror. ‘It’s happening again! I didn’t kill him! For God’s sake, I didn’t kill him!’
Farrell and Byers looked at each other in consternation. Either Ferrante was an even better liar than they’d thought or he was telling the truth.
‘I admit I wanted to kill him. I followed him down here from Glasgow. But the bottom line is I’m not a killer. I wasn’t a killer before and I’m not one now.’
‘What about Joe Capaldi? He’s far from squeaky clean,’ said Byers. ‘He’s stuck by you through thick and thin. Maybe he was willing to kill to protect you?’
‘Joe? No way. He’s loyal to me, yes. We went through Hell together in that place. But he’s no more a killer than I am.’
‘Someone found out about your secret, didn’t they?’ said Farrell.
Ferrante sighed and nodded.
‘Mario Lombardo started blackmailing Joe. He’s got a file on half the town. A real nasty piece of work. He’d worked out who I was and was threatening to expose us. We’d have lost everything.’
‘What did Joe do?’
‘I didn’t find out about this until after Aaron Sullivan had been murdered, but Lombardo made Joe handle some local drug distribution. He was horrified when he found out he was dealing with a kid but he was in too deep by then. It was gnawing away at him. He felt responsible after the murder and told me what had been going on. He thought that Lombardo had murdered the kid. I wasn’t so sure.’
‘Interview terminated,’ said Farrell.
‘Are you going to charge me?’ asked Ferrante.
‘Not at the moment,’ said Farrell. ‘We need to keep you in custody for the time being, though. Are you sure you don’t want a lawyer notified?’
‘The only lawyer I trust is myself,’ said Ferrante.
They left the room and walked along the corridor, leaving Ferrante with his head in his hands.
‘What do you reckon?’ asked Byers.
‘I think he’s telling the truth.’
Chapter 78
Farrell marched into the MCA room.
‘I’m as sure as I can be that Ferrante didn’t kill Sheriff Granger,’ he announced.
‘Well, who did then?’ asked DI Moore.
‘Peter Swift and Beth Roberts.’
‘But how does that fit into his revenge fantasy and the house in Jedburgh?’ she asked. ‘I know Robert Granger was responsible for Colette Currie’s death, but Peter Swift couldn’t possibly know that. We’ve only just discovered it ourselves.’
‘Think about it
,’ urged Farrell. ‘All his crazy Panopticon stuff. That image is based on the all-seeing eye. What if he was such a control freak he had set up micro cameras in the cottage to spy on Colette Currie? We’ve heard she was starting to cool off. Maybe she was finding him too controlling? Maybe he decided to spy on her? It was his late aunt’s cottage. He had access to it. He could have seen the rape by Robert Granger. That would give him motive.’
‘I remember at the dinner she was covering up bruising to her throat with a scarf. I thought Granger had done it, but maybe it was Swift? Also, if he’d got away with spying on Colette Currie and had his fears vindicated by catching her cheating on him with Jack Kerr, it might have fuelled his paranoia to the extent he monitored Beth Roberts too. He could have witnessed Granger attacking her in the agents’ room, which would explain why he came upon her so soon after,’ Moore said.
‘We need proof,’ said Farrell. ‘Peter Swift’s house was only given a cursory search this morning. Dave and I can head there now.’
***
The sun was low in the sky as they drew up outside the modest house where Peter Swift and Beth Roberts had seemed to lead such unremarkable lives. He thought of the times he had passed the time of day with the young fiscal with no notion that he was in the presence of such evil.
He entered the house with DC Thomson, who had brought along a gadget to detect micro cameras. They started in the master bedroom. As DC Thomson opened the wardrobe door, the gadget beeped and he jumped. Thomson carefully ran it over the nearest jacket until he found the source of the signal. It was a brooch on the lapel. He moved the device around the whole room and it kept beeping as more and more cameras were identified. There were cameras on jackets, on the ceiling above the bed, on her briefcase. They found more in every room of the house. Eventually, they discovered a laptop inside a ventilation duct in the bathroom together with a separate hard drive. Beth Roberts’s every move had been recorded.
‘What’s the betting we’ll find footage from the night of the fire stored on here too?’ said Farrell. ‘We’ve got the bastard. Once we tell Beth about this, I’m betting she’s going to sing her heart out.’
Chapter 79
Peter Swift had been remanded in custody to await trial in the High Court for the murders of Gina Campbell and Aaron Sullivan. The short formal hearing in chambers was over in seconds and completely blindsided the press. Farrell had held good on his promise to Moira Sharkey, so she had scooped her rivals.
Before he was taken up the road to Barlinnie, Farrell had arranged to interview him at Dumfries in relation to the murder of Sheriff Robert Granger. Beth Roberts had been granted bail, pending psychiatric reports.
Swift entered the interview room still wearing his suit but accessorized with handcuffs. His demeanour was arrogant, almost as though he was enjoying being the centre of attention. The mask had finally slipped to reveal the heartless psychopath beneath.
Farrell nodded to DC Thomson to switch on the tape and asked all those present to identify themselves.
‘I’d like to remind you that you remain under caution in relation to the murder of Sheriff Robert Granger,’ he said. ‘Is it still the case that you wish to decline legal representation?’
‘What would be the point, DI Farrell? If I can’t have my liberty I might as well enjoy a degree of notoriety. It seems only fair. I should cast around for someone to write my memoir.’
Farrell felt his skin prickle. ‘I assume you were a member of the Omniscient Society at Morrington Academy?’
‘Not just any old member. Such was my inventiveness I rose to be the President. During my reign we took our surveillance and methods of subjugation to a whole new level.’
‘Really?’ said Farrell, pretending to stifle a yawn and glancing at his watch.
The anger was quick to flare as he’d hoped.
‘Colette betrayed me. I trusted her. She was all mine and they took her away from me in the cruellest of ways. Each of them played a part.’
Farrell laughed in his face.
‘You trusted her? The hell you did!’
‘What do you mean? She was my everything.’
‘Then why did you have cameras rigged up all over the cottage that night?’
Swift’s face went white.
‘Yes, we found the saved recordings. It shows everything that happened until the cameras themselves melted in the flames. I’m guessing you watched the live footage unfolding and it sent you nearly mad with rage.’
‘You tried to control Colette with your sick version of love, but you failed, didn’t you? She was about to leave you.’
‘No! She would never have left me. That druggie bastard Jack Kerr took advantage of her when she was drunk. She loved me not him. They were all complicit in stealing her away from me. Max Delaney filmed them together and sent it to me, but the worst treachery of all came from Fergus Campbell. That’s why I killed Gina Campbell first.’
‘What did he do that was so bad?’ asked Farrell. ‘He thought he’d accidentally locked her in the cottage, but the last to leave was Granger.’
Swift laughed. The sound was chilling.
‘Is that all he told you, Inspector? That wasn’t the half of it. He was there when Granger arrived. He could have saved her. I could see her desperation as she begged him to intervene. But all he could think about was saving himself. He fled and sealed Colette’s fate.
‘Don’t you see? I had to avenge her. I had to make them suffer. All of them. Justice had to prevail.’
‘Robert Granger raped Colette, but she fought back, didn’t she? She clawed off his mask and he killed her for it. And you had to sit there in front of your screen and watch.’
‘I thought he’d killed her,’ Swift said, his face twisted in remembered pain, as he relived the events of that night. ‘She was lying there not moving after he hit her. I saw him start the fire.’
‘Why didn’t you call the fire brigade?’
‘I thought she was already dead. I couldn’t face everyone finding the cameras, seeing what I’d done. I was in shock.’
‘Then what happened?’ said Farrell, gentler now, as he heard the raw emotion.
‘The flames were starting to take hold. I was just staring at the screen, numb, I felt as if I couldn’t move, could scarcely breathe.’
He raised his eyes to meet Farrell’s and he saw the ruin of a man buried within them.
‘I saw her start to move. I screamed at her to get out of there but the flames had taken hold. She went to the front door but it was locked. That bastard had locked her in. I could hear her screams. I can still hear them,’ he whispered.
‘You killed Robert Granger, didn’t you?’ said Farrell. ‘You did it for her.’
‘Yes, I killed him. And nothing would give me greater pleasure than being able to do it over and over again for all eternity.’
‘Peter Swift, I’m charging you with the murder of Robert Granger. You do not need to say anything but anything you do say will be noted down and may be used against you in a court of law. Do you understand?’ said Farrell.
Peter Swift laughed.
‘I bloody should do after all these years.’
‘The only thing I don’t understand is why wait ten years to take your revenge?’
‘Because I didn’t know who he was until he came down here a year ago. It was obvious from the tape that Colette knew her killer. If it had been one of the other men she would most likely have shouted out their name. She didn’t. All I had was a partial shot of his face but I knew I would recognize those ice blue eyes if ever I came across them again.’
‘When did you realize?’
‘The first day he came on the Bench in Dumfries, I thought he looked familiar but I couldn’t place him. It never even crossed my mind that it could be him.’
‘We know how closely you watched Beth. All those tiny hidden cameras,’ said Farrell.
‘You can hardly blame me for having trust issues.’
‘That’s how yo
u realized it was Granger who had raped Colette. You saw it happen in the agents’ room, didn’t you?’
Peter Swift’s face hardened at the memory.
‘It was a few months after he’d come down here. He’d been giving her a hard time in court, making her life Hell. Still, I didn’t guess. It’s hardly likely to be the bloke in the wig. We were at some function at the court. Beth had been getting pally with those three bastards and I didn’t like it. I thought I’d walk off and leave her to mingle, watch her on my phone with live streaming from the camera on her brooch and see if any of them were trying to move in on her.’
‘I was sitting downstairs in Court One just watching what was going on upstairs when I saw Sheriff Granger hand her a drink and walk off to the agents’ room with her. At first I was pleased, thought he’d decided to bury the hatchet, be a bit nicer to her. The camera was in her brooch on the lapel of her jacket. She sat down, slumped as though she was sleeping. I saw him unbuttoning her shirt, pushing up her skirt. Then I saw his eyes. And I knew. I knew it was happening again. I raced up the stairs but by the time I got there he’d left. Beth was groggy and seemed to have no notion of what had just happened. I knew from that moment I was going to kill him. They were all going to suffer, as they had made me suffer. Every single one of those bastards. They had it coming.’
‘Interview terminated at 12.06,’ said Farrell.
He stared at Swift who met his gaze unflinchingly across the divide that now separated them.
Farrell nodded to the guards.
‘Take him away.’
Chapter 80
Farrell placed his key in the lock and entered his cheerless flat in Glasgow. Although he’d only been away eight months it felt like a lifetime. It had taken forever to clear up the tangled web of cases in Dumfries. Gabriel Ferrante had been disbarred but was expected to have his original conviction overturned. He wouldn’t need to work again after the sizable payment for wrongful conviction headed his way. Joe Capaldi and Barry McLeish had rolled over on Mario Lombardo and were giving evidence against him in exchange for immunity. They hadn’t been able to get Lombardo for extortion, so he would probably not be inside for long.
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