‘But, they weren’t anonymised on the witness statement straight away were they? Is it possible someone could have known who both witnesses were before it happened?’ I knew I had known one of them.
He paused. ‘It’s possible, but that means you’re talking about someone within the service having leaked the details.’
‘Yes. It’s an answer that has to be considered.’
‘Do you know what you’re saying?’ He was incredulous. ‘That a police officer gave Simon Talbot witness details? My God. This goes beyond my comprehension. That an officer would put someone’s life at risk that way. We need to sort this out before anyone else’s life is put at risk.’
We didn’t know what we would find at the address of the second witness so I made the decision that Martin and Ross should go out and see if he was at home and fetch him in to the police station so we could talk to him. See if we could figure out what was going on. If the worst had happened then it had already happened and we could get there quickly enough. Martin and Ross were more than capable of containing the scene. But I was hopeful that we weren’t on such a run of bad luck though I wasn’t sure where that hope stemmed from. So far the case had created questions at every turn.
Within half an hour my phone rang. The second witness, Davis, wasn’t at his address. There was no sign of a forced entry. Having looked through windows and the letter box, nothing appeared out of place – that they could tell – and his neighbours offered nothing that would cause concern either.
‘One said they saw him yesterday and the other doesn’t care when he saw him and doesn’t pay attention. He wasn’t interested,’ said Martin.
I had to make a decision whether I wanted them to force entry under Section 17 of PACE which gave provision to enter the property without permission to protect life and limb. The thing was, Davis could be in there, maybe upstairs, with his tongue cut out and bleeding to death. We wouldn’t know about it because he wouldn’t be able to speak. Or, he could simply be out or have run, left of his own volition because he’d heard about what had happened to Miller. And to have walked away from a situation was his choice and didn’t warrant police forcing his door open and to parade through his home. ‘But,’ I said to Martin, ‘if we don’t go in and he is lying bleeding upstairs and we could have saved him, then it’s the wrong choice. I’d rather make the wrong choice and go in and cause some undue damage to his front door and be wrong, than the other way around.’
‘So, we’re to go in?’ he clarified.
‘You’re going in.’
I listened to the crack and splinter as the door was forced off its hinges and the shouts of “Police” as Martin and Ross walked about the downstairs of the house.
‘It’s as it looked from the window, all quiet downstairs,’ said Martin. Heavy footsteps as two sets of boots climbed the stairs. My heart in my mouth as I waited for the moment Martin would tell me we had another body on our hands. Hearing Ross shout the rooms he entered were clear. Then Martin came back on the line. ‘He’s not here, Boss. No sign of him.’
‘Signs of a struggle? Or signs of bags packed in a rush?’
‘No to both. There’s cash and drugs on the drawers in his bedroom. If he’d done a runner I doubt he would leave either of those.’
True. ‘Secure the house and leave a note for him that he needs to contact us straight away if he returns, will you please, Martin?’
And with that, I was left with another unanswered question. Where was Brent Davis? Had he left of his own accord, or was there a more sinister alternative scenario?
I needed to dig deeper into the previous case to find all the strands of this mess in an attempt to understand it. Without it I didn’t think there was any way I would know who had done what or why.
Finding Davis was a priority. With Miller dead, his name in Talbot’s pocket, I didn’t like the fact that we didn’t know where Davis was. No matter what he was involved in, we needed to know he was alive and well. It was our responsibility to make sure he stayed that way.
On top of the hill on Windmill Lane, in front of Burrows Court, the decaying twenty-one-storey building, with a cool breeze blowing through me, I met with Ryan Buckhurst.
He was a skinny man. He had that skeletal look where there was not one spare ounce of flesh or fat on show. His face was all hard angles and gritted determination. A face few people said no to. The tiny dagger tattooed on the ridge of his left cheekbone underneath his eye stood for the group he ran. He looked like a tough man, and I heard what Lee had said and knew not to under-estimate him. He wasn’t just muscle and fist. He harboured a brain that he could use.
I’d reached out to him, after I found his mobile phone number in our intelligence system.
I was surprised he’d agreed to meet me, but I wasn’t one to turn down the opportunity now it was on offer. His stipulation was that I turn up alone. Aaron had been none too pleased. But I couldn’t say what information he was able to provide. It may just be that he was another witness, to be treated as any other witness, or he’d listen to me, tell me to do one and walk away after sticking two fingers up to the cops.
‘So, what do you want, DI Robbins?’ he asked. His pale eyes like iced ponds.
‘You know Brent Miller is dead?’ I didn’t mean to be quite so blunt, but the touchy feely approach didn’t quite feel appropriate in these circumstances. Who knew how Buckhurst felt about it. Maybe I was about to find out as my blunt approach landed me in the shit.
‘Nothing gets past me. Of course I know. What I want to know is what you’re doing about it?’ His eyes locked on to mine. ‘You are doing something?’
‘This is now a double murder inquiry and Miller is a part of that. I get on with my job regardless of who the victim is.’
Buckhurst snarled. A rumble in his throat with a turn of his lip. A lip that held little flesh and just lifted, the ice ponds above turned to stone. ‘Talbot is no loss.’ I was finding that this wasn’t an uncommon reaction. ‘I care about Miller and what you’re going to do about him. You know it’s retribution from the Talbots.’
It wasn’t a question.
‘And Talbot?’
He shifted on his feet. Squared his shoulders. I held my own stance. Kept a relaxed pose. Hands resting on my waistband. Not tucked in pockets, in case I needed to act fast. But I wanted to look relaxed. Like I wasn’t worried.
‘That why you’re here? For that bastard?’
‘I’m here for both of them. I want to know who killed Miller as much as I want to know who killed Talbot.’
‘I don’t give a bastard shit about Talbot. He had it coming to him. What I care about is who did that to Miller. You don’t do that to one of us and get away with it.’
‘That’s not why I’m here.’
‘What’d’y’ mean?’
‘I’m not here to find out who killed Miller so that you can take revenge. I want to know what you know and I want you to leave it to us.’
He laughed. A harsh, dry brittle sound. ‘Did you really think it would work like that?’
‘And you think I’ll find out who it is and give you the name without making an arrest?’ I’d have laughed in his face myself, just to match him, but I couldn’t force a laugh and the circumstances didn’t warrant humour.
Another growl.
‘You think you have the resources to figure this out?’ I asked him.
‘My meets are usually give and take, DI Robbins, yet I see no give from your direction. Tell me why I should provide you with anything?’
‘Because Miller is dead. He was killed in the most gruesome way and we need to work out who did it. Davis is missing. He’s a priority. Don’t you want to know where he is? We have the time, the staff and the resources.’ Now I could have laughed. What with the government cuts, we were always understaffed, though to be fair, homicides always took priority. ‘I’d have thought, because you wanted to catch who did this, you wouldn’t be fussy on how that was done.’
His cold g
lare went through me. ‘You offer me nothing. I don’t work in that situation.’
I was about to protest when he spoke again.
‘I’ll say one thing though. There were more people in Talbot’s house the day of the cop’s murder than you think there were.’
And with that he turned and walked away.
Hannah
‘And you never stopped him?’ asked Aaron. We were now back in the incident room. There was work to do and I was frustrated with the way the investigation was progressing.
‘He may have told me to turn up alone but that didn’t stop him coming to the meet with several goons in tow. I could see at least three. They hung back, he wanted to give the impression that he was alone, but I could see they were with him. If he wanted to leave, he would leave. I had no grounds to detain him. His information could easily be hearsay, third-hand. But useful all the same.’
‘You should have taken me, Ma’am, I’d have stood up to those goons,’ said Ross.
I gave him a look. ‘You think it’s because I’m female I didn’t stop him, Ross?’
He dropped his head. I felt a little bad, but not too much. It was easy for the guys to believe the job was easier for them when trouble or risk was a factor. They opened their mouths, however well meant, without real thought.
‘No, Boss. It wasn’t that…’
‘As I said, Ross, there were at least four of them in total. If they didn’t want to talk, we had no grounds to make them and even if I had taken an extra set of hands, be they yours or Pasha’s, we would still have been out-manned.’
Martin flicked a paper ball he’d rolled up across at Ross. It hit him square on the head. Martin barked as he attempted to stifle a laugh and Ross lifted his eyebrows at him in response.
‘So,’ I continued. ‘We need to find out who else was in the house the evening Ken and Lee walked in. We need to know who is lying to us. The problem is, our two witnesses. One is dead, we can’t find the other. Our number one priority is to find Davis. We read through the file, read all witness statements and go back and re-interview them, see if they can remember any more details. Though the problem with that is the trial has played out across the media and they’re contaminated so details they may provide now, that is different to what they said in their original statement, will be challenged if we need it to go to court. We also need to continue to work the house-to-house for Talbot’s and Miller’s murders.’
I rubbed my hands through my hair. I needed to try to keep both jobs separated out somehow. I looked at Diane, the HOLMES indexer. ‘HOLMES will continue to keep track of the jobs on an individual basis, as well as linking them and their parts won’t it?’
‘Absolutely, Ma’am. It’s perfect for a case like this. I’ll keep you appraised of anything that crops up that links both.’
I thanked her. Then I looked at Lee. He dropped his head. Looked at the floor. He knew what was I was about to say.
‘Lee, I need you to go through it again. What you remember when you got to the house. Something is missing and you could be the key.’
Lee
He didn’t want to keep going back to that day. It was a day, a time he attempted to forget, to push away into the deepest darkest recesses of his mind. A place he hoped never to be able to retrieve records from again. And now he’d been asked to not only remember the day but to talk about it.
This was the sole reason he was here. He’d asked to be seconded to the Major Crime team and he had told them he might be able to help. Why should he be surprised when they called on him to do what he was here for.
He stared at the brown lace-up shoes on his feet. Clean and polished to make a good impression. But no one was interested in what was on his feet or the clothes he wore, they were interested in what was inside his head. The darkness, the horror. The stuff he wanted to hide.
‘Lee?’ her voice was gentle. He had wandered off. Into a world of his own. Was it such a great idea to have requested the attachment here? Could he really do this? Not that he’d had a choice.
He took a deep breath in, held it, pulled up his head and let the breath out.
‘You good?’ DI Robbins asked.
‘Yes, Ma’am.’
Every face in the room was turned towards him.
He looked again. Other than Martin. Martin had turned away. Given him space. He was flicking through some papers on his desk. He liked Martin. He had been supportive and friendly since he’d arrived on the unit.
It was a Monday, he told them, not much ever happened on a Monday, though they knew from experience, even in Lee’s limited experience, that you couldn’t count on the day of the week or the hour of the day to dictate what kind of job you would be called out to but it was a day shift on a Monday and these were notoriously one of the more steady shifts of the week. They had been parked, with a bacon sandwich, a coffee and writing up their pocket books from the job they had just attended, all while keeping their eyes on the streets around them.
Ken talked more than he ate or wrote. His daughter had a new boyfriend and they had argued over her choice of outfit the night before. Ken was mortified at the lack of material she considered passed for clothes and there had been a standoff. His wife had intervened and both Blakes had been calmed down.
Lee thought this hysterical, as Ken’s moans and groans about his daughter’s dress sense sounded funny, which resulted in Lee being told all about how he would feel when he became a dad and how Ken was sure Lee would lock any girl he had, up in her bedroom after he had done this job and seen the world through less than rose-tinted glasses.
Then the radio sparked into life as the control room called them up and asked if they were free for an urgent job that had been called in.
Ken acknowledged that they were. He was like that. He didn’t wait to see if anyone else responded, or finished what he was doing. If there was an urgent call, then that’s what he was there to do. The food went in the bin and they were on the way.
The control room informed them of the location and let them know it was a disturbance reported by the neighbour. They checked the voters’ register and it came back with Simon Talbot at that address, but Ken and Lee were already aware of that.
Lee tightened the Velcro on his stab vest.
Ken was driving that day. He always drove. He didn’t trust the youngster, as he liked to call Lee, to drive if he was in the car. Ken had twenty-six years’ service in the job and only had four years left to do before he retired. He had never taken his exams for promotion. He had never wanted to. He loved working the streets in uniform. You could never get this thrill anywhere else, he would say. You would never meet this variety of people and be able to access their lives and help them the way you can when you’re in uniform, because in uniform you are always the first port of call, no matter what the job, before any other department comes out, uniform go out first. He even loved the rough and tumble still. Only ever seriously injured once with a busted nose, rib and broken arm where he needed to take a week off before he returned on light office duties.
‘What else did you know at this point?’ the DI asked.
Information was thin. The neighbour hadn’t wanted to say very much but had informed the call-taker that this disturbance was on a level that she had never heard before and she was worried that it would spill outside, get worse and involve more people and she had her child in the house with her. There were people there she didn’t know and there had been a flurry of activity, with cars arriving before the disturbance. There were shouts heard through the wall, threats of violence and threats to kill.
Lee had heard of the Talbot family. Every cop that policed the city area had heard of the Talbot family, but he had never dealt with them as yet so he was, to his shame, excited, as well as a little nervous about the situation they were headed into.
The control room informed them that they had another car travelling to the address with them.
Lee knew Talbot was a violent male. He repeated to himself that h
e had to get them out the kitchen, to keep them out of the kitchen. Stay out the kitchen.
The knives were in the kitchen.
When they arrived at the call they found several cars parked haphazardly in front of Talbot’s address.
How many looked out of place, the DI asked him. He shook his head as if attempting to shake loose the memory that was stuck.
Obstructed.
There were at least three cars. He replied. They weren’t parallel to the pavement, they were at angles, into the road. Like they’d been thrown in anger. It was what set Ken’s hackles up in the first place he said.
Hannah wanted to know the makes and models. The colours of the cars.
He shook his head. Not to dislodge a memory this time. To tell her he couldn’t remember that much detail.
He was sure he saw a flutter of disappointment cross her face, but it was soon gone. Her usual impassive, give nothing away expression was in place.
What happened then, she asked him, prodded him to step forward from the vehicles, to move away from the kerb and into the house. The place he avoided.
Another deep breath.
So, because of the cars, Ken had parked a few houses away and they updated control room they were State 6 at the address.
‘Watch out for yourself in there, youngster,’ said Ken as they walked towards the open door.
‘Yeah, okay, old man. You too, I’ve a retirement party to go to don’t forget.’
Ken stopped moving and turned to face Lee. ‘I’m serious, Lee. You know the Talbots are a crazy bunch and if they’re arguing amongst themselves then it’s not a good day and they won’t think twice about taking it out on an outsider who walks through that door. Even an outsider who wears this uniform.’ He put his hand on Lee’s. ‘Especially an outsider in this uniform. Keep your wits about you. You’ve got your CS and asp?’
Something else crossed the DI’s face at that comment.
The DI Hannah Robbins Series: Books 1 - 3 (Boxset) (Detective Hannah Robbins Crime Series) Page 56