Perfect Crime

by Helen Fields

  When the back end of the car caught up with the front, there was a tipping movement normally reserved for roller coasters, and from Western’s left came the sound of ripping metal and exploding glass. He’d hit a building. He saw, from his vantage point of the airbag, that had his neck turned ninety degrees. The rest of the car concertinaed, attempting to bend his back in half, the wrong way.

  The driver’s door was nowhere to be seen as arrows of glass aimed their fury at him. As they struck his vulnerable face, neck, arm and leg, the surprise was how hot they felt entering his flesh. For some reason he’d expected them to be cold. Then came the stench – overwhelming, pungent, sickly. Cheese. Why on earth would his car smell of cheese?

  The windscreen glowed red and there was something sticky in his eyes. He had time to register the fact that his daughter was going to be inheriting the stunning Moray Place property much sooner than he’d anticipated. His wife would become a rich woman, and waste all that hard-earned cash on golf clubs, cocktails and shoes she’d wear only once. Perhaps Bruce Jenson was going to be waiting for him on the other side.

  He couldn’t breathe. Gilroy Western saw his mother’s face, smiling, then felt the slap of his father’s belt. He heard his daughter’s first cry as she was handed to him outside the delivery room. He remembered the first time he’d had sex with an American girl at university who’d liked his Scot’s accent and who’d giggled when he’d whispered endless rubbish in her ear. And that brought back something dimmer – a distant memory he’d squashed and changed and added unfair blame to. Another woman, another night.

  There had been a party. Too much booze. Had it been Bruce Jenson’s idea or his? He wanted to blame Jenson but knew it wasn’t the truth.

  His brain processed the relevance of the odour and he realised his car had crashed into the cheesemongers across the Kerr Street junction.

  The woman Jenson had held down for him had screamed and begged them to stop.

  Brie, he thought, trying to distract himself. He’d always loved cheese. Camembert, Stilton, Gouda. But the memory overpowered even the most aromatic of the dairy produce.

  A larger shard hit his jugular.

  He saw Bruce Jenson pinning the woman to the floor and wondered why he couldn’t understand what she was saying. She’d been French, that was it. Beautiful, too, truly breath-taking. He’d wanted her from the second she’d walked into the party.

  Everything was black now and there was a droning in his ears. Even the smell of the cheese had faded.

  The woman had sobbed as he’d entered her. He’d felt so powerful, king of the world, taking another man’s prize, stealing, violating, knowing she wouldn’t – couldn’t – say anything.

  Western tasted blood in his mouth, felt it trickle from his ears.

  He saw her face as they’d taken the bag from her head and thrown her back out into the corridor. But she wasn’t crying now. And although she seemed to be speaking French, a language he had no grasp of at all, he could understand perfectly well what she was saying now.

  Chapter Seventeen

  10 March

  DI Graham sat at the desk of the interview room, looking entirely at ease compared to the man opposite him, who was openly attempting murder by glaring, and the female solicitor sat at his side, who was tapping her nails on the desk and intermittently patting the glaring man’s arm. DC Janet Monroe perched on the edge of her chair next to Graham, pen poised to take notes. DCI Ava Turner, invited late to the party that morning after Andrew Jenson had been brought in for questioning, opted to stand in the corner, leaning against the wall.

  ‘At the present time, you are being interviewed voluntarily, as a witness. You are free to leave at any time, but I should warn you that we are pursuing an active line in this investigation and if you’re unwilling to answer our questions, it’s possible at a later date that you could be arrested and brought in for formal questioning. Do you understand?’

  ‘It’s not rocket science,’ Andrew Jenson retorted.

  ‘Do you consent to us recording this interview?’ Graham asked.

  ‘Yes, we know the form. Let’s make it quick, shall we?’ Jenson’s solicitor sniped.

  ‘As you wish,’ Graham said. ‘Mr Jenson, where were you during the evening of March the third when your father was murdered?’

  ‘At home, with my wife, watching TV,’ Andrew said.

  ‘And you didn’t leave your home all evening?’

  ‘Nope. My wife will back me up.’

  ‘Are there any other witnesses who might be able to confirm that?’ Graham asked.

  ‘In my house? It was just the two of us,’ Andrew said.

  His face was an unattractive shade of purple and there was a single bead of sweat forming between his eyebrows.

  ‘What time did you get home?’

  ‘Nine thirty. After work I went to get a takeaway. My wife avoids cooking whenever possible.’

  ‘So what time did you leave work then?’ Graham clarified.

  ‘I’m not exactly sure. It was a frustrating evening. There was a long queue at the curry house and the staff were taking bloody ages to get the orders right.’

  ‘Roughly what time do you think you left?’ Graham persisted.

  ‘I’d have to check.’

  Graham looked over to Janet Monroe, who flicked through a couple of pages in the file and scanned a page, pointing out a line of text.

  ‘You work for Borderline Airways, right?’ Andrew nodded. ‘CCTV there shows your car exiting the car park at 7 p.m. Does that sound about right?’

  The solicitor leaned across and whispered in Andrew Jenson’s ear.

  ‘Yes,’ Andrew agreed.

  ‘So getting a takeaway and making it home took two and a half hours, then?’

  No reply.

  ‘Which restaurant was it that you got the takeaway from?’

  ‘Prashant’s on Main Street.’

  ‘You know it?’ Graham asked Monroe.

  ‘I do. Spent many an unpleasant Friday night after chucking-out time getting a load of verbal from customers who didn’t like their korma and thought the situation could be resolved by throwing it at the owner. That’s why they have 24-hour camera surveillance now, both inside and out,’ Monroe noted, keeping her eyes on her notepad.

  ‘What did you order?’ Graham asked Andrew.

  ‘Do you want to keep this relevant? If not, we can leave,’ the solicitor said.

  ‘I’m just wondering if the details will help Mr Jenson remember how long it took to place his order and for it to be cooked, only your client’s recollection was that there was some delay.’

  ‘I had a jalfrezi, and the wife had cod and chips.’

  ‘So your memory’s pretty good, then,’ Graham noted. ‘That’s great. How long do you think you were in Prashant’s from entering to leaving?’

  Andrew Jenson cast a sideways look at his lawyer. ‘Twenty minutes, maybe more,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s see,’ Graham said, waiting for Monroe to flick through the file again and locate a different page. ‘Yes, here we go. You arrived there at 8.55 p.m. and left at nine ten. You parked right outside, got back in your vehicle and presumably went straight home.’

  ‘If you knew which takeaway I went to, why did you ask?’ Andrew asked though gritted teeth.

  ‘Let me handle this,’ his solicitor cut in. ‘Are you trying to back my client into a corner, Detective Inspector? You know the rules. You’re supposed to summarise what evidence you’ve got in advance of an interview.’

  ‘I’m not interviewing a suspect though, am I? This is a voluntary witness account we’re taking here.’

  The solicitor swallowed, looked across the room to Ava, who returned her gaze steadily, then the lawyer appeared to smile. It wasn’t friendly.

  ‘All right. Carry on,’ the solicitor said.

  ‘The thing is, Mr Jenson, you gave a statement the day after your father was found dead. In it you claimed to have arrived home rather earlier from
work and there was no mention of the takeaway. Those details came later from your wife’s statement.’

  ‘So what? I’d just been told that my father was dead, murdered. You think I was worried about a bloody curry under those circumstances?’

  ‘Which is why we’re asking you again today, now that you’ve had a chance to think more clearly about the sequence of events. In your written statement given to uniformed officers you claimed you’d left work late, at about 8 p.m., and had arrived home at about eight thirty. The problem is that we now have a period of almost two hours that are unaccounted for, give or take some driving time.’

  ‘I’m not having this. I’ve done nothing wrong. He was my dad, for Christ’s sake. Why the hell would I kill him?’

  ‘Because we now know that you’ve instructed your solicitors to contest his will. Your father, for reasons that are not yet clear, left his whole estate to a rape crisis charity. That’s the proceeds of sale from his home, some stocks and shares, one classic car that’s in storage and any cash left in his accounts. We don’t have a figure on the cash yet, but our best estimate for the estate is that it’s worth £800,000. Without the bequest to the rape crisis charity, you’d have been the sole heir. It seems reasonable to think you might have been more than just a little angry about that.’

  In the corner, grateful that neither Graham nor Monroe could see her face, Ava tried to keep her breathing steady. The investigation had stumbled across a perfectly legitimate issue that could provide a motive for Bruce Jenson’s murder, yet she was unable to pass on the information she had about why Jenson had an interest in a rape charity without immediately implicating Callanach as a suspect. If she did that, and she knew she should, it would become clear that crucial information about Callanach’s reasons for visiting the nursing home had been withheld from the start. It didn’t matter that she was convinced Callanach had nothing to do with Bruce Jenson’s death. This was about something more fundamental. Honesty, openness and legal procedures.

  ‘That’s my money. I’m entitled to it and I’m allowed to have my lawyers challenge the will. It doesn’t mean I’ve done anything wrong,’ Andrew snarled.

  ‘You’re right, it doesn’t, but when we found out about it, we had cause to re-examine the timeline you’d given. So now we need to know where you were between leaving work and arriving at Prashant’s,’ Graham explained calmly.

  ‘None of your fucking business,’ Andrew shouted.

  Ava studied Andrew’s body language. His arms were tightly crossed, high over his chest, almost a self-hug. His shoulders were hunched inwards. He was as far back in the chair as he could get, away from Graham, but bolt upright. Ready to flee if the fight got too much for him in evolutionary terms. His jaw was switching from left to right, like a swing boat beneath his face.

  ‘Okay, you can pass on any question you like while you’re not under arrest. Let me move to a different subject. Do you have any idea why your father was prepared to be so supportive of a rape charity?’

  ‘Of course I don’t. It makes no sense at all. He had dementia, imagined all sorts of things. He never gave to charity his whole life, not a penny that I saw. Then, when he got really ill, when he knew he didn’t have much time left, he decided to change his will. He’d get upset, rant, would bang his head against the table or the wall, anything he could find. That’s why I’m challenging the will. He had no idea what he was doing when he cut me out of it.’

  ‘Did you discuss it with him?’

  ‘I tried. He just got really upset, said I had a good job and more than I already needed. Told me if I wanted extra I could work for it like he had. Said there were other people who needed it more. Then he got so upset, I had to let the subject go. I didn’t try again after that. He went downhill really fast and I knew that I could take the matter to the courts once he was gone.’

  ‘So you were just waiting for him to die?’ DC Monroe interjected.

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ Andrew said quietly.

  ‘But you were angry with him,’ Graham said.

  ‘He was demented!’ Andrew Jenson stood up, leaning over the table, furious.

  ‘Except that he wasn’t. He had his solicitor and two independent witnesses for the amendments to his will, and they’d taken the precautions of getting a consultant psychiatrist to certify that at the time of making the changes he was of sound mind,’ Graham read from a statement in the file.

  ‘That’s ridiculous. Why would my father suddenly decide to leave that much money to a rape crisis centre?’

  ‘Perhaps something had happened to someone he loved?’ Monroe offered.

  ‘Yeah, and perhaps he’d watched five minutes of a documentary, got upset and managed to persuade the lawyer he was paying by the hour, and the psychiatrist he was also paying, to say what he wanted them to say. The symptoms of dementia aren’t always obvious. My father could seem lucid and then have no memory of the conversation he’d had five minutes later.’

  ‘All right,’ Graham said. ‘We can leave it there, but I’m urging you to tell us where you were during the period when your father was killed.’

  ‘Do you have evidence that my client was involved?’ the solicitor asked.

  ‘No,’ Graham replied honestly. ‘But our job is to investigate all possible suspects and it makes our job a lot easier when people are forthcoming. If you weren’t involved in any way, Mr Jenson, if you have an alibi for the hours in question, then the sooner you tell us everything, the sooner we can get on with finding the person responsible.’

  Graham waited until Andrew Jenson and his solicitor had left the room before turning to Ava.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked her.

  ‘I think the man’s an idiot, but he looked angry rather than scared. Do we have any idea what he’s hiding?’

  ‘We’re checking the public CCTV for the evening, trying to follow his car route. His wife gave us more accurate, detailed information, so I’m sure she’s no part of it. There’s motive, for sure, though. Leaving his whole estate to a charity was always going to cause a problem,’ Graham said, standing up.

  ‘Yes, but Andrew Jenson already knew he could challenge the will in court and he’s got a reasonable chance of winning, even with the psychiatric report,’ Ava said, doing her best not to comment on the rape charity issue itself. ‘Find out where he was and what he was doing. That’s the fastest way to exclude him from the investigation and shift the resources to where we’ll get results. Good work, both of you.’

  Ava left, trying to keep her pace normal, knowing discussing the case with Callanach was inevitable. The real question, though, was not how Callanach was going to react to the news, but what she was going to do with the knowledge she had.

  Chapter Eighteen

  10 March

  Callanach handed Rosa Macmillan a box of tissues.

  ‘I’m not sure which is worse,’ she sniffed. ‘I know that sounds awful, but he seemed to be going through a good period, so when I was told Stephen had killed himself, I started doubting everything I thought I knew about him. Then when I was told that somebody might have killed him … why would they? He was struggling enough just to survive.’

  ‘Did Tantallon Castle have any particular meaning for Stephen?’ Callanach asked.

  ‘Not that I was aware. I’m sure he said he’d been there, probably a school trip or something like that, but not recently. And as for going there at night when it was closed, that was totally out of character.’

  ‘He waved a knife around in the taxi on the way to Queensferry,’ Callanach reminded her. ‘So would it be fair to say his behaviour was becoming more erratic and unpredictable?’

  ‘Not as far as I was concerned. He was back on his medication. I know he felt terrible about what he’d done in that taxi, and he was worried about whether or not he was going to be prosecuted, but he was ready to take responsibility for it and his doctor had agreed to write a medical report if needed.

  ‘Stephen and I were talking re
gularly, seeing each other occasionally. I wasn’t ever going to be his girlfriend again, it was all too painful for me, but he’d let me back into his life. For the first time, he was thinking about his future, maybe getting some new qualifications, booking a holiday with one of those tours that takes groups of people to South America or Australia trekking. There were real signs of improvement.’

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘The night before he died. We grabbed a coffee, talked about how he was doing, and he was able to ask me about work and my parents, which was always a good thing. When he was at his low points he couldn’t ask about anyone else, or think outside his own head. I spoke to him the day he died, too. I called his mobile and we arranged to have dinner the following week. Just pizza, nothing fancy, but I could tell he was looking forward to it. That’s why when the news came that he was … I just couldn’t believe it.’

  ‘Had he talked to you about his suicide attempt? It must have taken some time to recover from the incident on the bridge.’

  Callanach refilled Rosa’s coffee cup and handed it to her, just to give her something to hold.

  ‘A lot, but not in the way you might think. As traumatic as it was, he said he realised at the very end how badly he wanted to live. He was angry, really raging, about a man in the crowd he’d heard laughing at him. Stephen said he was determined not to die after that, not to give the crowd what they were waiting for. He said he’d felt like a sideshow freak.’

  ‘I heard about that,’ Callanach said. ‘The gathering crowd is an unfortunate side effect of public suicide attempts. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m not, or at least I wasn’t. If being angry was what it took to get him down, then the insensitive moron who thought encouraging someone to end their life was a good laugh can be there every time someone does the same.’

  ‘Were you aware of any injury to Stephen’s right hand, specifically his middle finger?’ Callanach asked.