Everyone Lies

by D. , Garrett, A.

  He groaned and rubbed the heel of one hand into his eye socket.

  ‘The Henrys are hard men – maybe you felt hurt and humiliated.’

  Behind his hands he was shaking his head.

  ‘So you decided to take it out on one of their girls.’

  ‘Please, stop!’ He dragged his hands from his face. ‘Just stop it.’

  For aching seconds nobody moved, nobody spoke.

  ‘I know what you think of me, Chief Inspector. But there are things you don’t understand.’ He heaved a sigh.

  The atmosphere in the room was one of expectation. He really was going to confess. Simms wasn’t sure how she felt about that. She’d been so sure that Howard was set up, and now he was about to admit he had murdered Marta.

  ‘I suppose,’ he said, tentatively, ‘that if a person was so drunk or traumatized by … something that he couldn’t remember, he might plead …?’

  ‘Diminished responsibility,’ his solicitor said automatically.

  ‘So if he had certain … memories.’ He pressed his thumb into his breastbone as if to quell a pain. ‘Certain … images, things he couldn’t understand, but which were truly awful. What might he—’

  He flinched at a knock at the door.

  Shit. Simms turned angrily. It was Renwick. ‘Not now,’ she said.

  He stood his ground. ‘Sorry, Boss,’ he said. ‘You need to hear this.’

  Renwick was standing with Kilfoyle, the soft-featured constable who had led the canvassing teams.

  ‘I showed the landlord the Henrys mugshots,’ Kilfoyle said. ‘It was definitely them that Howard was drinking with.’

  ‘I know,’ Simms said, ‘I have the pink slip to prove it.’ She looked from one to the other, trying hard not to tap her foot with impatience. If they had interrupted her interview for this …

  ‘I was on my way back here when he rang my mobile,’ Kilfoyle said. ‘The picture jogged his memory.’ She saw excitement in his soft blue eyes. ‘Only one of the Henrys left with Howard on the night of the murder. The other – “the tall, mad-eyed one” – left half an hour earlier after taking a call.’

  So, Frank Henry had left the pub a half-hour before midnight. She stared at Kilfoyle, with Howard’s near-confession swirling in her head. She knew one thing for certain: the Henrys hadn’t told her the whole truth, and she didn’t intend to charge Howard until she had that.

  She stepped back into the interview room, announcing her return for the tape.

  ‘I’m requesting a consultation with my client before we proceed,’ his solicitor said. It seemed she’d shaken off her outrage that Howard had lied to her and had clicked back into professional mode again.

  ‘I’d like Mr Howard to finish what he was saying before we were interrupted,’ Simms said.

  Howard turned his flat, grey stare on her. It seemed he too had made use of the break to recalibrate his feelings. ‘I don’t know what to say to you,’ he said. ‘Except I’m not a killer.’

  31

  ‘There are a lot of lies going around … and some of them are true.’

  SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL

  Fennimore stood in the arched entrance of his hotel, watching for Kate Simms’s arrival. The temperature had dropped, the air was sharp, the pavements cold and iron hard. He enjoyed the bite in the air, needing it to clear his head; in the hours since he walked back to the city he had chased lab results, lost a couple of hundred on the races, and done something that was possibly very stupid, and which he would almost certainly regret.

  Betting on the races was a distraction from the calculations he would otherwise do obsessively, compulsively, over and over in his head. But gambling was like a sugar high – peaks led to troughs – you needed to limit your intake. His two other palliatives were work and rock climbing. Work, because it required a mental immersion that excluded the helpless, despairing thoughts that otherwise crowded in; rock climbing because it required total physical commitment; the downside being there was only so much rock climbing you could do before it became a thinly masked suicide bid. So, mostly he relied on work to keep him sane.

  He caught sight of her, approaching unexpectedly from the right. Her normally long, loose stride was tightened slightly by the cold, and in the hundred-yard stretch to the hotel, she checked over her shoulder twice.

  As she reached the building, a few small flakes of snow drifted to the pavement, glittering and pink-tinged in the street lights.

  It was too late for a bar meal, so Simms settled for tonic water and peanuts and Fennimore ordered a double measure of Jura single malt.

  He listened to details of her exchange with Detective Superintendent Spry, her interviews at the Henry brothers’ salon, and George Howard’s near-confession.

  ‘Amy – the girl working on reception – rang me on my mobile at six this evening. Marta’s clingy punter turned up.’

  ‘By the look on your face, I’m guessing Trevor was a disappointment.’

  She shrugged. ‘Arrested, interviewed, released without charge. Trevor Hillesley was celebrating his silver wedding anniversary on Thursday night. The party finished at 12.30 and his wife reports that between 1.30 and 2 a.m., Trevor was hurling up his Indian buffet and swearing off booze for the rest of his days.’

  ‘It’s still Howard in the frame then,’ he said. ‘Although you do have that anomaly in the Henrys’ story.’

  ‘Big fat porky pie, you mean.’

  ‘Even if they are lying, half an hour isn’t enough time to do all that was done to Marta.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going to break their alibis,’ Simms said. ‘The girls who were supposedly partying with them are word perfect.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ Fennimore said. ‘D’you really think Howard was about to confess?’

  She nodded. ‘I’m just not sure to what. I think he’s remembering things. I’m damn sure he knows more than he’s telling us.’

  Fennimore worked back through what she’d told him. ‘He said that there were images in his head he couldn’t understand?’

  ‘Awful images, he said. And he used the word “traumatized”. I know, you’re thinking Rohypnol, but it’s no use to us – we could never prove it.’

  ‘Of course we can.’

  She pinched the top of her nose and closed her eyes. ‘Am I missing something here, Nick? Because I thought Rohypnol was short-lived. It only stays in the blood and body tissues for a few hours, doesn’t it?’

  ‘That’s certainly true of the soft tissues – the squishy bits that process the nasties and help us to eliminate them from our bodies – but hair is a different story. Toxins persist in the shaft of hair until it falls out.’ He stopped short. ‘Please don’t tell me Mr Howard is bald.’

  The gleam in her eye told him that George Howard had a good head of hair.

  ‘On the other hand, the concept of the Henrys framing their commercial rival for murder is a bit extreme if they just wanted him out of the way.’

  ‘So why would they drug him?’

  ‘I didn’t say they did.’

  He could see her thinking back over the last few minutes of discussion. ‘Didn’t you?’

  ‘Some people take the stuff voluntarily,’ he said. ‘They use it as a disinhibitor, to heighten the sexual experience.’

  ‘Seems a bit pointless,’ she said, ‘if you can’t remember what you did.’

  ‘A very practical objection, Chief Inspector. Voluntary use is normally at lower dosages – reduces the amnesia risk. But the potency of illegal drugs varies enormously; it could be he simply overdid it.’

  She shook her head. ‘No, that won’t wash. Doctor Cooper thought there might be two assailants.’

  ‘Might be,’ he emphasized. ‘He’s not certain – though I would be fascinated to know where Frank Henry went after receiving that call on his mobile.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Me too. But I can’t see him taking us into his confidence, can you?’

  He didn’t need to answer that question, so t
hey sat in silence for a few minutes, Kate staring at the bubbles rising in her drink. Her eyes flickered occasionally to the entrance, and she watched the few remaining customers with more than idle interest.

  ‘Worried about your stalker?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’ She’d answered too quickly, and added more casually, ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because you came here from the west this evening.’

  ‘Very cryptic.’ She took a sip of her drink and set it lightly down on the table, as if she didn’t have a care in the world.

  ‘If you had used the GMex car park, I would have expected you to appear from the east, at the corner of Lower Mosley Street.’

  ‘Did it occur to you that street parking’s free this time of night?’

  ‘And you looked over your shoulder twice, and I’ve lost count of the number of times you’ve checked the entrance in the last ten minutes.’

  ‘Leave it alone, Nick, okay?’ Her voice was steely, but he saw a lingering shadow of anxiety in her eyes. ‘There’s no sign of Candice,’ she said, firmly. ‘She’s a key witness, and I haven’t got the staff to find her. So now it’s your turn – what have you been up to in these halls of decadence?’

  Subject changed, and not subtly, either. Do what the woman says – leave it alone.

  He thought about the two hours before her arrival, working on the aged-up picture of his daughter and what he’d done with it, and he quailed. ‘You want the useful or the stupid?’

  She gazed at him thoughtfully, her brown eyes soft and full of warmth in the dimmed lighting of the bar. ‘Better tell me the useful first, in case I get so pissed off about the other thing I forget you’re a brilliant scientist so all I can see is the idiot in you.’

  ‘That’s probably the most backhanded compliment I’ve ever had.’

  She toasted him with her tonic water.

  ‘Okay. The cross-hatch whip marks give you physical evidence linking Marta and Rika. The toxicology reinforces the link between those two and establishes a link to the penicillin deaths.’

  She took a breath – they both knew that biochemistry would be far more persuasive to a jury than a visual comparison of injuries. Chemical tests were quantifiable, hard to argue with.

  ‘Remember right at the start of this, when life was simple and you were just investigating a few drugs deaths over the odds? You sent me samples of drugs found with the bodies. Well, the university lab has been working steadily through those in my absence, and Josh emailed with the results today. One of the tests I asked for was HPLC – High Performance Liquid Chromatography. Think of the tests you did at school with a wee blob of ink on a filter paper—’

  ‘Skip to the results, Nick.’

  He flashed an apologetic grin. ‘The heroin that killed Rika had the same chemical profile as the deals found in the penicillin deaths, and they were the same as the heroin found with Marta’s body.’

  She stared at him, round-eyed. ‘The same heroin batch links to all of the deaths?’

  ‘Not quite,’ he said. ‘Rika’s deal wasn’t cut with penicillin, and the proportion of penicillin used in the later deals actually increases, so they’re definitely different batches. I’m talking about the underlying composition of the different batches.’

  She frowned and he explained, ‘You’re decorating a room – you would always buy rolls from the same batch off the production line to guarantee a perfect match, wouldn’t you?’

  She nodded. ‘Okay …’

  ‘This is the same. Over the months, several batches have been made; there are subtle differences, but they all contain methaqualone – a narcotic used to bulk heroin. The key thing is, it’s not commonly used, and that makes it distinctive, and it’s present in exactly the same ratio in the overdose samples, the penicillin deaths, right through to the bindle found with Marta.’

  ‘So it must have come from the same place,’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘The bulk supplies of heroin would probably be mixed abroad, and that’s where the methaqualone would be added. But it makes sense to do most of the cutting near to the point of final distribution – smaller volumes coming through customs have a better chance of getting the stuff through unnoticed. When it gets to the suppliers, they add in the penicillin.’

  She took a thoughtful sip of her drink. ‘Methaqualone – that’s Quaaludes, isn’t it?’

  ‘Quaaludes, quacks, quales, quas—’ He smacked himself in the forehead with the flat of his hand.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re right – I am an idiot,’ he said. ‘In the seventies, “luding out” was a popular college pastime in the States. Methaqualone – “ludes” – has several effects: it heightens sexual sensitivity, lowers inhibition and the user has no memory of the dirty deeds of the night before.’

  She stared at him. ‘Just like George Howard.’ Her eyes glowed and he felt an answering flicker of excitement; they had found another possible link to the heroin deals. ‘Would methaqualone show up in the hair analysis?’ she asked.

  ‘You just have to tell the toxicologist to look for it. But toxicology takes time. And even if you get a positive, it won’t tell you who administered the drug.’

  She thought about that. ‘Either way, I think we need to know.’

  ‘Agreed. But it won’t do you any good in the short term, Kate, and so far as this investigation goes, the short term is all you’ve got.’

  She sighed. ‘Yup. We need to identify the supplier. I mean the real supplier – not some street dealer who jumps a red light in front of a patrol car and screams “Catch me!”’

  ‘The steady increase in penicillin as a cutting agent suggests a disruption of supply—’

  She held up her hand. ‘I know what you’re going to say – you need the lab analysis of drugs seized during Operation Snowstorm. I’m sorry – you really should have had that by now. I’ve asked Superintendent Tanford to email me a copy of his report. Speaking of Tanford …’ She picked up her phone and opened her messaging program.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Texting Superintendent Tanford.’

  ‘Kate, it’s a quarter to midnight.’

  She checked her watch, cancelled the text, opened her email and began again: ‘I’m emailing Tanford so he can pick it up in the morning. Field Intelligence said there’s no significant drugs intel on the Henry brothers, or George Howard. But like Tanford said, his squad is better placed for that kind of ear-to-the-ground rumour.’

  She sent the email and looked up at him. ‘Everyone’s lying, Nick – even the people I’m trying to help.’

  She looked about done in, and he realized she must have been working flat out for forty-eight hours. He handed her his Scotch and picked up her glass of tonic. ‘Churchill said, “There are a lot of lies going around … and some of them are true.”’

  ‘Profound,’ she said. ‘Churchillian.’

  He sipped her tonic water, trying not to shudder.

  ‘The truth will reveal itself when you have more facts. Go home, get some sleep, let the computers and analysts and information gatherers do their work.’

  She tasted his whisky, approved his choice. ‘So,’ she said. ‘What was the stupid thing you did?’

  That surprised a laugh from him. ‘And you say I have a mind like a steel trap.’

  ‘Like I’m going to forget you admitting to any kind of weakness,’ she said, smiling.

  He saw that smile and wanted to hold on to it, which is why he didn’t tell her that after working through the lab results he had in fact spent too long staring at the pictures of Rika. The photograph they had found in Marta’s purse pictured a pretty, smiling girl with a tumble of brown curls and dark, defiant eyes. Her estimated age at time of death was eighteen. In the post-mortem picture, one eye was closed, the other half open, and the cornea, desiccated in the hours after death, had a bluish cast. He had set the two images side by side – Rika full of life and hope/Rika dead. He couldn’t make them match. Suzie – his Suzie –
was only a few years younger than Rika.

  Before he could reason with himself – before he could argue himself out of it – he had created a Facebook page and launched the image which for two years he’d tinkered with offline. Suzie aged ten; Suzie aged fifteen. Her name; a bio – five years too short – a picture of him, so that if she came looking she would know that he loved her and had never given up on her.

  32

  ‘It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.’

  COLETTE

  Suzie and Becky are zooming up the street on skate-boards, whooping with glee. Suzie scoots up the Simms’s driveway, and then down at speed, her face tight with concentration. She veers off to the left, heading for the kerb, tips the leading edge of her board and lands perfectly, a grin of exultation on her face.

  Fennimore knows he is dreaming. He has arrived at Kate Simms’s house to pick up his daughter. When she sees him, Suzie flips her board into her hand and tucks it under her arm. It doesn’t belong to her – it’s Becky’s, and she knows she shouldn’t have it, but she stands tall and eyes him defiantly. She is ten years old.

  Becky tries to slide the board from under her arm, as though he’ll forget what he’s just seen if Suzie just hands over the incriminating evidence. But Suzie resists, glaring at her friend, and Becky, always the follower in their friendship, gives up and hugs her own board across her narrow chest.

  ‘Suzie,’ Fennimore says, ‘you promised your mother—’

  ‘I didn’t.’ Her eyebrows draw down into a scowl. Becky stands very still to one side, her eyes wide with shock that Suzie should speak so boldly to her father.

  It’s true, she hadn’t promised. What she’d said was, ‘Fine – but you won’t stop me. I’ll borrow one. Or steal one.’ Suzie’s relationship with her mother has never been easy.

  She has a healing scar on her left temple – a fall, practising ‘acid drops’ from the kerb on her skateboard. The cut bled profusely and Rachel had rushed from the house hearing the girls’ terrified screams. It was fear that made her confiscate the board, and stubbornness that made her refuse to relent. And true to her word, Suzie had persuaded Becky to loan her an old board.