by LJ Ross
Northumberland was an overcast grey when they arrived back at CID Headquarters, and the dreary light seemed to accentuate its ugly, rendered walls. Their subdued mood was improved slightly by the news that they had arrived in time to enjoy the police canteen’s legendary Full English breakfast or, as they preferred to call it, the ‘Full Geordie’. Food had a wonderful way of lifting the spirits and, with their stomachs suitably lined with an excess of caffeine and tomato ketchup, Phillips took Anna under his wing while Ryan accompanied Lowerson to the interview suite on the lower ground floor, ahead of his interview with The Hacker’s former solicitor.
Elaine Hoffman-Smith was on a period of suspension from work pending criminal and disciplinary action. She looked distinctly uneasy, crossing and then re-crossing her legs underneath the wooden table inside Interview Room A. Her mousy brown hair was dishevelled and she wore no make-up; a far cry from the glossy picture on her firm’s website. It must be embarrassing for a solicitor to find herself on the wrong side of the law and requiring a solicitor herself, Ryan thought, as he watched her from the observation room next door. Then again, if you decided to make a deal with the devil, a little workplace awkwardness was to be expected if everything went tits up afterward.
“I’m sorry about Anna’s cottage,” Lowerson offered, coming to stand beside him.
Ryan continued to assess the solicitor with unmoving, icy grey eyes.
“Nobody was hurt, that’s the important thing.”
“Yeah, but Edwards probably rifled through your things, sniffed your undies and all that.” Lowerson gave a shudder. “It gives me the creeps.”
“I don’t care whether he had a full-blown orgy on my bed, Jack. He’s shown himself and that’s the mistake we’ve all been waiting for.”
“Why?”
“He’s not superhuman,” Ryan said, watching the solicitor squirm on the other side of the glass. “We all leave a trace of ourselves behind, a trail that can be followed. That’s how we’ll find him—and MacKenzie, too.”
Lowerson looked away, thinking of his mentor. Throughout his time as a murder detective, MacKenzie had taught him how to look at the worst of humanity and come away with his own still intact. It was a rare skill to bestow on another person.
“I owe so much to Denise,” he said.
Ryan heard the catch in the younger man’s voice and gave him a bolstering slap on the back, then nodded towards the woman chewing her fingernails.
“Get in there, Jack. I think we’ve kept her sweating long enough. Show me what you’ve learned and remember who you’re doing it for.”
Lowerson’s straightened the lapels of his slim-fitting suit before giving Ryan a calm nod.
“Rely on it, guv.”
As the door clicked softly shut behind him, Ryan smiled.
“ ’Atta boy.”
* * *
Despite the attack on Anna and Ryan’s home—or perhaps because of it—the Incident Room buzzed with renewed energy. People spoke in urgent tones, exchanged notes and added details to the burgeoning stack of intelligence that was being filtered and assessed by two reader-receivers tasked with logging each and every piece of data as it came in. That, in turn, was checked against information already in their possession and eventually passed on to more senior officers for evaluation. In the case of Denise MacKenzie, every officer worth their badge was giving it their undivided attention.
There was no unused space anywhere to be found, so Phillips requisitioned an overstuffed chair from the broom cupboard and positioned it at the end of his own cluttered desk for Anna to use while she was with them.
“Thanks, Frank.”
She settled herself down to try to work on the Viking raids.
“No bother, pet. There’s a kettle full of limescale over there, probably a box of soft hobnobs—and you can get coffee that tastes like watered-down mud if you travel to the vending machine on the second floor.”
Anna grinned.
“I’m spoilt for choice.”
“Never let it be said that Northumbria CID doesn’t know how to push the boat out.”
She chuckled, then laid a gentle hand on his arm.
“How are you holding up?”
Phillips’ desk chair wheezed as he sat down heavily and thought about how to answer. She wasn’t a woman to accept empty platitudes and, besides, he didn’t have any to give.
“Most days, I try not to think about what’s happening to Denise. I just try to keep busy because I know that’s the best way. Crying isn’t going to bring her home,” he said, gruffly. “It’s just…everywhere I look, there’s something to remind me. I keep thinking she’s going to walk through the door.”
He took a deep breath and said something he hadn’t had the courage to say before.
“It feels like she’s dead already.”
Anna had lost her entire family and was no stranger to grief, but this was different.
“I can’t imagine how you’re feeling, Frank. It’s a terrible purgatory you’re in—but you’re never alone. We’re walking beside you, every step of the way, and we all miss her so much. In my heart, I believe she’s still alive.”
Phillips rubbed a calloused hand against hers and gave her fingers a quick squeeze.
“It means a lot to hear that,” he managed. “In this business, there isn’t a lot in the way of hope going spare.”
Anna nodded and kept her hand on his arm.
“Come and stay with us,” she said, impulsively. “We’re moving into a new place tonight, just as soon as I’ve found one.”
“Eh? No, lass. I wouldn’t want to impose…”
But the thought of returning home to an empty house was terrifying.
“It makes sense,” she argued. “That way, you and Ryan can work after hours, as well as getting some sleep when you can. If you play your cards right, I’ll even throw a roast dinner in the oven.”
Phillips was embarrassed to find sentimental tears pricking his eyes and he cleared his throat loudly.
“Aye, all right. Never could say ‘no’ to a Yorkshire pudding.”
“That’s settled, then.”
Phillips turned to fire up his computer, which had been resting with a screensaver whizzing around its black screen.
Anna watched his stubby fingers fly across the keyboard with surprising dexterity, then a series of grainy, black and white video images of street scenes popped up. All thoughts of Viking raids and roast dinners forgotten, she leaned closer to peer over his shoulder.
“Is that Durham?”
“Aye,” Phillips pursed his lips, took a swift look around the office, then motioned her closer. “I don’t s’pose it’ll hurt to let you come and take a look. Just don’t tell the boss.”
Anna made a sound like a raspberry and wheeled her chair around beside him.
The screen was split into a series of separate images, each representing the footage from a different CCTV camera within a half-mile radius of her cottage. Phillips selected the top left, which showed traffic moving down one of the main shopping streets in a southerly direction. With a quick click, the image zoomed to full size.
“This one’s a good bet,” Phillips explained. “Whether Edwards drove into Durham from the north or the south, he would have to pass along this road at some point to get to your house.”
Anna nodded, watching the flashing images.
“What timescale are you looking at?”
“The Fire Investigator reckons that the blaze started sometime around nine-thirty, or thereabouts. If we say that he arrived up to an hour before then and left just before it started, that gives us a window of between eight-thirty and ten o’clock.”
Anna shifted in her seat as the images start to roll.
They stayed like that for a while, scanning slow motion traffic for a face they recognised until Phillips let out an irritated sigh.
“The footage is so dark, it’s hard to make out any faces, and that takes us well past ten o’clock,” he said, dejec
tedly.
“Let’s go over it again,” Anna suggested.
Another forty minutes passed while they re-watched the same footage. A few times, Phillips paused the screen but once again the reel came to an end.
“I’ve made a note here of a few vehicles where the driver looked tall and male,” Phillips said. “I’ll send it on to the techies, who can clean up these images a bit. It’s also worth checking out the registration plates to make sure we haven’t missed anything.”
“Hmm. You’re sure it was Edwards who started the fire?”
Phillips rubbed at the stubble on his chin reflectively.
“No, can’t say that I’m sure. Could be whoever set him up with money and transport also went out on a limb for him again, last night. The question is, who? Lowerson’s interviewing The Hacker’s old solicitor right now but she’s on bail at the moment, so she’d have to be bloody stupid to risk it.”
“D’you think anybody else would have helped him?”
Phillips let out a long breath which hissed between his teeth.
“Thing is, the bastard’s so bloody charming, he’s always had a way of manipulating people. Keir Edwards could have wrapped anybody around his finger and we wouldn’t know about it until it was too late.”
“What about his communications while he was in prison? Have they checked his letters and phone calls?”
“Aye, lass. It’s one of the first things they did. Durham CID went over his old cell with a microscope looking for contraband or anything that might give us a lead on how Edwards managed to break out. There are a bunch of letters from pen pals—mostly lonely people with a bit of a fascination about serial killers—and they’ve been eliminated already. As for phone calls,” Phillips shook his head. “They record incoming and outgoing phone calls from the prison telephones, but they can’t keep track of mobiles which are smuggled in all the time. That’s probably how he arranged everything.”
Anna nodded thoughtfully.
“I didn’t realise things were so accessible, especially in a maximum-security prison.”
“The staff do their best,” Phillips said. “They’re having to contain a bunch of hardened, violent criminals. If they manage to get through a week without riots or GBH, they’re doing well. It’d be easy for me to blame them for what happened and, God knows, I want to. But the fact is, there’s a handful of them against a bloody truckload of dangerous men. The odds don’t stack up, especially when the prisons are overrun.”
“I still can’t believe a helicopter managed to land inside the yard.”
“It’s been done before,” Phillips told her. “It was quite popular in the eighties and the prisons started erecting a sort of wire barrier to prevent anything landing, but that sort of thing takes money. It comes down to brass tacks again, love. The prisons just don’t have the cash to fit fancy wire netting when they’re having enough of a job trying to retain staff and pay to house all of them.”
Anna nodded thoughtfully, then leaned back while she thought of the road network in Durham city centre.
“How about checking the footage across Prebends Bridge, as you drive across it from the direction of the cathedral? The side road leading to my cottage is almost directly after that.”
Phillips was unconvinced.
“I thought Prebends was a footbridge?”
Anna nodded.
“It is, usually, but sometimes they use it for vehicle traffic if another bridge is closed, or if they need an alternative route. It’s wide enough to allow cars to cross and I was just thinking it’s been open for the past week during the Easter holidays.”
Phillips made a low, rumbling sound in his throat.
“It wouldn’t make much sense for Edwards to have driven into Durham via the motorway, then to have gone across one bridge and through the tourist centre, just to cross back over another bridge to get to your cottage. He’d want to get in and out again, as quickly as possible.”
“You’re assuming he drove into Durham via the A690,” Anna argued. “What if he took a coastal route? Or, what if he came off the motorway earlier, then took the quieter ring-road and circled into Durham from the east? If he came in that way, he would have to drive through the tourist centre to get back to the right side of the city to visit my old cottage.”
With a new light in his eyes, Phillips turned back to the footage and began to search.
“I don’t know what visibility will be like,” he mumbled to himself. “Aha! Here we go, this is the view overlooking Prebends Bridge. I only have it in one direction, but hopefully we’ll catch something.”
They put their heads together again and watched the cars move with comically slow speed across the screen.
“Wait,” Anna murmured, and pushed her nose to the screen. “What’s that?”
Phillips shook his head.
“I don’t see—”
“Why would anybody be driving with a sunshade down, at night?”
Anna tapped her index finger against the shape of a small SUV with both sunshades lowered as it passed across the eighteenth-century, stone-arch bridge.
“I always said you were a goodun’,” Phillips declared happily, and turned to bestow a smacking kiss on her cheek.
“Do you think it’s him?”
“I think you’ve got a bloody good nose for this business,” he said. “Because I’m damned if I know why anybody would keep a sunshade down at night unless they didn’t want the cameras to pick up their face.”
Phillips zoomed into the image even further and could make out a pair of strong male hands on the steering wheel and some kind of dark jumper. He might not be able to see a face, but he could see a registration plate.
“Bingo.”
* * *
An hour into the interview, DC Lowerson could feel a light sweat breaking out beneath his impeccably pressed shirt and wondered why he had never noticed the lack of air conditioning before. Probably because no interview had ever seemed so vital, and the weight of expectation weighed heavily on his padded shoulders.
A fraud inspector from Durham Area Command was seated to his left, wearing the slightly dull expression of one who would rather be back on his own home turf and had a habit of checking his watch with annoying frequency. Opposite him, a lanky man with a pinched expression and a gold pinkie ring was scribbling notes in a pale blue legal notepad, while his client fidgeted in her seat beside him.
Despite her obvious anxiety, Elaine Hoffman-Smith was a stubborn woman. After nearly an hour of determined questioning, she remained adamant in her refusal to discuss any details of her relationship with Keir Edwards.
“That’s privileged,” she said, mulishly, for the fiftieth time. “As I’ve told you, discussions between a legal professional and their client are subject to legal professional privilege.”
Lowerson could feel himself beginning to lose patience. The woman’s career as a legal professional was already in tatters and she was being prosecuted separately for aiding and abetting criminal harassment alongside a string of unrelated fraud charges.
Why didn’t she make a clean breast of it and disclose what she knew?
“In the first place, professional privilege does not apply to communications which you knew constituted, or intended to constitute, a criminal offence,” he said coldly and, behind the glass partition, Ryan smiled in approval. “In the second place, privilege only applies to communications pursuant to litigation or where you have been asked to give advice.”
Lowerson tapped the top of a stack of papers.
“These e-mail exchanges with Edwards, dated as recently as two weeks ago, don’t have any connection with ongoing litigation and they were not responding to a request for advice. Were they, Elaine?”
Her solicitor looked up from his notepad and fixed Lowerson with a patronising stare.
“Detective, as you are well aware, my client has not been found guilty of any criminal offence relating to her former client, Keir Edwards. In this country, we prefer to
allow the courts to determine guilt and persons are presumed innocent until proven otherwise. It is quite clear from Ms Hoffman-Smith’s statement that she formed a genuine, if mistaken, belief that certain e-mail communications were subject to legal privilege—”
Lowerson cut through the spiel.
“I’m not interested in her ‘mistaken beliefs’. I want to know why she thought it was acceptable to hand-deliver threatening notes from a known serial killer to Detective Inspector MacKenzie’s home address in the days leading up to her kidnap by the same man.”
There was an uncomfortable silence around the table.
“My client reiterates that she genuinely believed those messages to contain pertinent information relating to an offence—”
“And she failed to pass it on to the police through the proper channels?” Lowerson scoffed. “Give me a break.”
The woman’s face fell into worried lines and she darted a glance towards her solicitor, who took his cue and tried again.
“At worst, my client acted rashly, detective,” he spread his hands. “Hardly worth all of this fuss.”
Lowerson felt something snap and he leaned forward, every inch the man in charge.
“Fuss?” He laughed shortly. “Is that what you call a nationwide manhunt? Or the kidnap of a police officer? The attack on a man and his family? Fuss?” He turned back to Elaine and pinned her with a hard stare. “What did he tell you, Elaine?”
His voice lowered to almost a whisper, inviting her confidence.
“Did he tell you he’d changed, Elaine? That you were the woman who changed him?”
He caught a flicker in her eyes and knew that he’d stumbled onto the right track.
“Maybe he told you he loved you,” Lowerson said, with a trace of sympathy he didn’t feel whatsoever. “Is that it, Elaine? When you visited him in prison, he told you all about his remorse…or, better yet, did he tell you he was a wronged man? That it was all a terrible mistake?”
The woman flushed a dark shade of red and her lips trembled.
“That’s right,” Lowerson murmured, holding eye contact. “Edwards told you he could never have harmed those women. That he was a doctor, a man who had devoted his life to saving others. One day, he vowed to clear his name, he just needed someone to believe him, to help him—am I right?”