‘Maybe just a random punter?’
‘That’s what I thought,’ Sam said. ‘But watch.’
She hit a key on her keyboard and the footage began to play.
The woman backed away from the man, shaking her head and raising her hands as though warding him off, even though he remained where he was. She turned to walk away but then stopped and turned back. More conversation and then the man reached into his inside jacket pocket and took out what looked like an envelope.
‘See. Punter,’ Barratt said.
‘No. Keep watching.’
The woman took the envelope, seemed to peer inside checking the contents and then stuffed it into her handbag. The man seemed to be talking to her again but she shook her head, turned and walked out of the view of the camera.
The man watched her for a few seconds then crossed the car park and got into a dark-coloured hatchback. Another few seconds passed and then the car moved out of shot.
‘So, he’s meeting her somewhere else. She didn’t want to get in the car with him.’
‘That doesn’t make sense,’ Sam said. She’d watched the transaction a few times and hadn’t been able to make it fit any reasonable scenario connected with Suzanne’s profession. ‘How much does a prostitute charge?’
Barratt’s face flushed. ‘How should I—’
‘Oh, come on, Matt. I’m not asking if you’ve ever paid. What’s a hand job or a blow job go for these days. A tenner? Twenty?’
‘Maybe twenty,’ Barratt mumbled reluctantly. ‘Probably about fifty for sex. You’d probably pay more at a brothel but a quickie in the car would be cheaper.’
‘That envelope looked like it contained more than fifty quid. She flicks through it like there’s a substantial wodge of cash in there. So why would this man be giving her a lot of money? And why wasn’t it recorded among her possessions? She only had thirty quid in her purse.’
Barratt looked back at the screen as though the answer might be hiding somewhere in the pixels. ‘He arranged for her to go somewhere with him for something a bit more dodgy than vanilla sex and took the cash back when he’d finished?’
‘That’s what I thought,’ Sam said. ‘But she doesn’t get in the car.’
‘So she meets him somewhere? Maybe he has a fantasy about picking up a hitchhiker or he wants her to pretend that she’s missed the last bus or something.’
Sam sat back, shocked. ‘That’s oddly specific, Matt,’ she said with a grin. ‘Something you’d like to share?’
Barratt just laughed and shook his head.
‘So then what?’ Sam persisted. ‘He meets her somewhere else. She gets in his car and he does his thing – whatever it is.’ She could see than Barratt hadn’t found any flaws in her theory so far. ‘And then he strangles her and cuts her, dumps the body and drives off.’
‘She wasn’t raped,’ Barratt said.
Sam had been expecting this. It was the one sticking point in the timeline she’d been forming. ‘I know. Maybe his thing isn’t sex. Maybe his thing is murder.’
She could see that Barratt was mulling this over.
‘And he tries to make it look like a murder he read about in his local paper? Maybe he thinks it’s the only way he’s likely to get away with it.’
‘Hence the difference in the wounds,’ Sam said.
‘Can you see the car reg in the footage?’ Barratt pulled up a chair and squeezed next to Sam so that he could see her monitor without having to lean. She resisted the urge to move her own seat a few inches away, allowing him the proximity despite her discomfort.
‘It’s blurry. I’m running it through some image-enhancing software. So far all I’ve got is this.’ She tapped an icon in the toolbar and the programme displayed a close-up of the number plate. The first two letters were clearly YM and the numbers looked like sixty-two but the rest of the front of the car had been in shadow and, even with enhancement the letters were still vague.
‘Is that an F?’ Barratt suggested. ‘Or maybe a P?’
It could have been either. Sam grabbed a pad of paper and scrawled the first two letters and the numbers on it. She then added the possible P or F.
‘Hang on,’ Barratt said, standing up. He took two paces back from Sam’s desk, tilted his head and squinted at the screen. ‘I get YM62 PPT or FPT.’ He paused and tilted his head the other way. ‘Or PFT. The last letter must be a T because it can’t be an I.’
Sam scribbled down Barratt’s suggestions and logged on to the PNC database.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘PPT comes up as a white Astra.’ She typed in the next suggestion. FPT is a red Skoda Fabia. PFT doesn’t exist.’
She crossed out each possible registration number as she checked the database. None of them could be the car in the CCTV footage unless the number plates were stolen – a possibility that she didn’t want to contemplate.
‘FFT?’ Barratt suggested.
Sam typed in the three letters and got a hit.
‘Navy Golf. Could be.’ She scrolled down to the details of the registered keeper of the vehicle and suddenly felt nauseous when she saw the name. ‘Matt, look.’ She ran her finger underneath the relevant line of information.
‘Shit in a bucket,’ Barratt hissed. ‘It can’t be…’
Sam looked back at the screen, willing the name to change to something else. Anything else.
Chapter 38
They pulled up outside a three-storey town house on a side road just off the main high street through Bentley. Bright white doors and window frames stood out starkly against red brick that glowed faintly in the mid-morning sun. The curtains to the windows on the first and second floors were drawn and there was no sign of life, but Hollis’s Sportage was parked in a bay in the designated parking set back from the street and marked ‘PRIVATE’.
‘Not quite what I imagined when you said Hollis had a flat. I’d got something a lot more pokey in mind,’ Raymond said, gazing up at the herringbone pattern in the Edwardian brickwork.
‘You’ve seen Dan,’ Kate responded. ‘How could you have thought he’d live in a shithole? He probably owns this place.’
‘I’ve not really had much to do with the lad, to be honest,’ Raymond admitted. ‘He seems a decent enough detective but he’s always struck me as overly concerned about his looks.’
Kate smiled and looked the DCI up and down. ‘A few months ago I’d have taken that at face value,’ she said. ‘But look at the state of you. Slimmer, good haircut, nice suit.’
Raymond scowled and Kate worried that she might have overstepped. ‘Fair point,’ the DCI conceded. ‘I was a bit of a scruff. If I hear you repeating that, though, you’re fired.’
Kate was once again struck by the mixed emotions that accompanied her interaction with Raymond. She’d always found him a bit intimidating and a bit old-fashioned but he’d been a fair and decent boss. She’d have been loath to admit it to her colleagues but she knew that she was going to miss him despite his curmudgeonly ways and his tendency towards negativity. She was already starting to dread what would happen when he was gone. She’d had enough adjustment settling back into life in Doncaster; she didn’t feel ready for the challenges of breaking in a new boss as well.
Raymond strode up the short concrete path to the door and pressed the top doorbell. He stepped back and looked up again at the windows and Kate half expected him to shout, ‘Come on, we know you’re in there’, but he just stared seemingly lost in his thoughts.
A minute passed with no answer so Raymond tried again. Kate took her phone out of her pocket and sent Hollis a quick text: Better answer the door. It’s me and Raymond. Need to talk to you.
A few seconds after sending the text Kate heard footsteps and the door opened.
If Hollis had looked bad at work he looked terrible now. His blond hair was sticking up at odd angles as though it had been gelled and styled in the dark and his eyes were shadowed, the whites bloodshot. The smell of stale alcohol seemed to be seeping from his pores.
> ‘Come to arrest me for murdering my mother?’ he asked with a sardonic smirk. ‘Come on then.’ He held out his arms, wrists together.
‘Don’t be daft, lad,’ Raymond said. ‘Let us in.’
Hollis slumped against the wall of the hallway, allowing Kate and Raymond to push past him. ‘Upstairs,’ he said. ‘The door on the left.’
Kate led the way, following his directions into a spacious sitting room splashed with bars of light from large windows in two walls. A beige sofa dominated the room as it angled across the dark brown carpet, the perfect position to lie down and watch the huge flat-screen television which hung on the chimneybreast. Shelving lined a deep alcove in one corner and Kate saw that one shelf held a mini stereo system and speakers, the others were lined with books – mostly fantasy and horror.
The only things that seemed out of place were an empty wine bottle on the coffee table and two crushed lager cans that lay abandoned in the deep pile carpet next to the sofa. Hollis had obviously had a heavy night.
‘Coffee?’ he asked, hovering in the doorway like a nervous parent meeting his child’s fiancée for the first time.
‘Black,’ Raymond said at the same time as Kate shook her head. The DCI flopped down on the sofa but Kate couldn’t settle; this felt like such an invasion of Dan’s privacy but there was no other way for them to have this conversation. Kate wanted him to be somewhere that he felt safe because what they had to say was likely to unsettle him even further.
Leaving Raymond in the sitting room, Kate followed Hollis down a short hallway to the kitchen where she wasn’t at all surprised to see him fussing over a high-end bean-to-cup coffee machine.
‘Can I change my mind?’ she asked as the bitter smooth aroma of espresso assaulted her senses. ‘Does that thing do cappuccino?’
‘It should do the ironing and vacuuming the amount I paid for it,’ Hollis joked. He turned to her with a ghost of his usual grin and Kate’s feeling of self-loathing deepened. This was her colleague, her friend, a man who’d risked his own life to help save her son. How could she have ever thought him capable of murder? But she had to consider the possibility that it might have been an accident, a moment of panic and poor judgement.
She watched as Hollis reached up effortlessly to a high cupboard and removed a stainless steel jug. Like everything else in his flat, Kate could see, the coffee was going to be made to perfection.
‘What’s he doing here?’ Hollis asked, lowering his voice. ‘Come to turn my leave into an official suspension?’
‘No. It’s not official,’ she said, trying to reassure him. ‘You need to stay away from work until this is sorted out but the official line is that you’ve been given some personal leave. You can’t be anywhere near this investigation.’
Hollis nodded bleakly. ‘I know. I thought I’d probably be a suspect. Have you established time of death yet? Hopefully I’ll have an alibi.’ His words, so similar to Raymond’s made Kate feel even more disloyal. How could she be discussing the need for alibis with her DC and DCI?
‘And what about him?’ Hollis pointed his thumb in the direction of the sitting room. ‘Is he on leave as well? He’s got as much of a motive as me.’
‘I’m not sure that’s true,’ Kate said. ‘You need to listen to what he has to say. I’m not sure you’re going to like it, but the two of you need to have this conversation.’
Hollis turned back to the coffee machine and fussed with the milk steamer, his silence saying more than if he’d spoken. Kate could tell that he didn’t want to hear what Raymond had to say and she couldn’t blame him. Suzanne had really got inside his head with the notion that the DCI might be his father and Kate felt that Dan needed to hear the truth from Raymond.
‘Here,’ Hollis said, passing her a mug of coffee piled high with milk froth. ‘I’ve not drawn a pattern in the foam – thought that might be a bit much. Better start practising my barista skills in case I’m going to be out of the job.’
If he was joking it wasn’t very funny but Kate tried to give him a smile as he grabbed a mug of coffee in each hand and pushed past her into the hallway.
The two men sat at opposite ends of the sofa, empty coffee mugs on the table, silence heavy in the room. Raymond had explained his relationship with Suzanne Doherty carefully and concisely. He’d been honest about how and where he met her but, to Kate, it was obvious that nothing about his mother’s past came as much of a surprise to Hollis. She’d thought that Dan might ask questions, try to clarify details but he’d accepted the story and then told one of his own. It was painful for Kate to imagine him at seven years old, dragged from his mother by a police officer and driven away in a police car. It was only when talking about his adoption that he seemed more grounded, settled, and Kate could see that it had been the defining experience of his life. As Dan himself admitted, he could have ended up anywhere, doing anything, none of it good, if he’d been left with his birth mother.
‘So I’m not suspended?’ Dan eventually asked.
‘No. But you’re on extended leave until we find out who killed Suzanne. You couldn’t be involved anyway. She’s family.’
‘But I’m under suspicion?’
‘By your own admission she’d been trying to blackmail you. She’d disrupted your life and had placed a lot of stress on your mental health,’ Raymond said.
‘All good reasons to want her dead,’ Hollis admitted. ‘But I didn’t do it.’
Raymond nodded gravely and Kate took his response as an admission of belief in his colleague. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘If there was another way—’
He was interrupted by Kate’s phone beeping to let her know that she’d got a text message. Cooper asking that Kate ring her ASAP. She stepped out into the hall without explaining. Raymond and Hollis would understand that it was work-related.
‘Sam? What have you got?’
Cooper’s voice on the other end of the phone was higher and breathier than normal as she quickly explained what they’d found on the CCTV footage.
‘So find him,’ Kate said. ‘We need to know who this mystery punter is.’
‘That’s the problem,’ Cooper responded. ‘We traced the car reg. We know who he is.’
‘And?’
‘The car’s registered to a Joseph Hollis from Chesterfield. Kate, he’s Dan’s dad.’
Chapter 39
‘What a complete and utter shitting mess!’ Raymond was shouting as Kate tried to concentrate on parking the pool car. ‘Not only do we have a prime suspect for two murders who you won’t touch but we’ve now got another suspect who’s related to your bloody DC.’
Kate pulled on the handbrake and concentrated on keeping her temper. Raymond had fumed all the way back from Bentley and somehow seemed to be blaming all this on her. The problem was that, on some level, he was right. If she’d told somebody about Hollis being blackmailed, warned them to look out for Suzanne Doherty then the situation might not have escalated. And she should have been much harder on Sarah Armstrong. The woman could be the key to the murders of Melissa and Chloe but she didn’t want to get involved. Well, tough, Kate thought. She was involved and Kate might need her help if she was going to put Matthias away.
‘Now what?’ Kate asked Raymond.
‘Now you bring Hollis’s dad in and you question him. And, if he killed this woman, you make sure that he’s charged.’
‘What about Matthias?’
‘You keep digging until you find something to pin on him. If we arrest him we can get his prints and ask for DNA and we can access his house, see what a search might turn up.’
He undid his seatbelt and left her sitting in the car, slamming the door after him. For the first time in years, Kate felt at a loss. She’d let people down who were relying on her and she didn’t know what to do to get things back on track. She thought about ringing Nick. Just pouring everything out and letting him soothe her until she was ready to face the rest of her team. But that wasn’t a possibility. She couldn’t allow herse
lf to rely on him to prop up her self-esteem – that wasn’t how their relationship worked and she didn’t want it to go down that road. She’d learned everything she ever needed to know about linking her self-image to a man when she was married to Garry and she certainly wasn’t going to allow herself to fall back into that trap.
Sighing heavily, she eased herself out of the car and trudged up the steps to the back entrance to the police station.
‘Right,’ Kate began, when the remaining members of her team were gathered in the incident room. ‘As you’ve heard we’re looking for Dan Hollis’s father in connection with the murder of Suzanne Doherty. If possible, the familial link goes no further than this room until we know what Joseph Hollis’s involvement is in this case. I’ve notified Derbyshire and they’ve sent somebody round to his house to arrest him. He’ll be brought over here for questioning later today.’
‘His involvement looks pretty obvious to me,’ Barratt muttered.
‘And that’s why it goes no further,’ Kate snapped. ‘Dan’s our friend and colleague. Of course we can’t protect a family member if they’ve killed somebody but, for now, it’s still an if. And the only way we can protect Dan is to be discreet and sensitive.’
Barratt looked up at her, obviously with more to say and Kate wondered whether she should just get rid of him. Send him out on a job until he’d calmed down. But then she noticed that Sam Cooper couldn’t meet her eyes and even O’Connor was looking a bit shifty. They needed to know the whole story.
‘Okay. I think you’ve worked out that there’s more to this than I’ve been telling you. To be honest, it’s not my story to tell and Dan won’t thank me for this but I think I owe it to you to be up front. Suzanne Doherty was Dan Hollis’s birth mother.’
‘What?’ Cooper spluttered. ‘She was Dan’s mum. How long had he known? Is that why he’s been such a mess lately?’
The Kate Fletcher Series Page 74