Everyone Lies

by D. , Garrett, A.

  ‘Give me ten minutes.’ Josh eyed him critically. ‘You could, I dunno, shower?’

  Fennimore became aware that he reeked. His shirt was still damp with sweat from the chase across town and the slow painful walk from Kate’s house, and his trousers were caked in mud and rock salt from the road. He hauled himself out of the chair and limped towards the bathroom.

  When he came through to the sitting room ten minutes later, Josh was texting on his phone. Fennimore had dressed in a freshly laundered shirt and trousers, but he still felt dirty, as if Tanford’s corruption had drawn him in, made him part of the lies he’d woven about him.

  ‘So,’ Josh said, without looking up, ‘I texted one of the girls I was chatting up earlier.’ He was leaning forward in his chair and, when he did glance up, Fennimore saw another kingfisher flash of excitement in his eyes. ‘I told her Marta still isn’t answering her phone, and when I called to her flat, it’d been broken into. I say I think Marta should know – has she got an email address for her? She texts that she’s already tried that – everyone has.

  ‘I say, well, I don’t know about her, but I keep a few personal email accounts.’

  Fennimore nodded; a lot of students preferred to use private email accounts – they were often faster, and less prone to outages than university networks. This had possibilities.

  ‘She’s just texted – she remembered there was this one time Marta sent her an email registered to a Gmail account.’ He grinned. ‘She’s found the address.’

  Fennimore used his professional credentials shamelessly to gain access to Enderby’s secretary. The Chief Constable was in a meeting, she told him. Fennimore told her that he had information that was highly relevant to his meeting and persuaded her to tell Enderby that he was on the line. Enderby took the call in his secretary’s office. He listened sympathetically and gave instructions that Fennimore and Brown should be escorted to his office as soon as they arrived.

  ACC Gifford rose from his chair as Fennimore came in. ‘Who let you in?’ he demanded.

  ‘I did, Stuart.’ The Chief Constable stepped around his desk and shook Fennimore’s hand.

  Josh hung back a little; he seemed uneasy around so many uniforms – the Chief, Assistant Chief and Detective Superintendent were all in full regalia.

  Kate turned to face them. The bruise on her forehead looked red and angry, a white lump at the centre of it seemed almost to throb visibly.

  ‘Nick,’ she said. ‘This isn’t helping.’

  ‘I’m prepared to hear him out,’ Mr Enderby said. ‘Chief Inspector?’

  Simms gazed at Fennimore, despair and exhaustion on her face, but after a moment she gave a tired nod.

  Spry, who hadn’t spoken, hunched lower in his chair, anticipating Gifford’s response, but Gifford was a man to respect the hierarchy, and he deferred to Enderby with a grudging ‘Very well.’

  Simms closed her eyes briefly and turned to face Gifford again.

  Fennimore should have felt guilty, using the Chief Constable to pull rank on her, but he didn’t. He told them what Kate couldn’t: that her daughter had been threatened with a gun and had narrowly escaped abduction, that she herself had been stalked and attacked and threatened. Throughout this, she bowed her head and stared at a spot on Gifford’s desk.

  When Gifford began to splutter at the destruction of evidence, Enderby raised a single finger, and he subsided. Fennimore told them about Marta’s double life – as a sex worker and a brilliant student. He described her notebook, filled with details of drugs drops and contacts, registration numbers, sketches, the tip-offs to Crimestoppers, the man named ‘Rob’, who seemed to have such powerful connections, the photograph he and Kate Simms had found in the notebook which identified ‘Rob’ as Detective Superintendent Tanford. He finished with Marta’s call to Gary Parrish on the night she died.

  Spry murmured a few muddled words.

  Gifford seemed unmoved. ‘As I have explained to Chief Inspector Simms,’ he said, addressing the Chief Constable, ‘sadly, without firm evidence, I’ve really no reason to believe this isn’t all the product of a disturbed mind.’

  ‘Is that Chief Inspector Simms’s disturbed mind, or mine?’ Fennimore said.

  Gifford raised his eyebrows and looked from Fennimore to Simms as if they were one and the same.

  ‘And DC Parrish – is he deluded and disturbed, too?’

  Gifford spread his hands. ‘DC Parrish isn’t here to speak for himself,’ he said.

  Fennimore held his gaze. ‘Only because he was killed in a hit and run a few hours ago.’

  Gifford blinked. He must have been told of the young detective’s death, so perhaps he was offended by Fennimore’s bluntness. ‘Are you suggesting that his death was not an accident?’ he said.

  ‘Marta had documented evidence that a senior police officer has been associating with two major drugs suppliers, protecting them, taking bribes,’ Fennimore said. ‘She was a registered informant. And both she and her handler are now dead. What do you think, Stuart?’

  ‘Well,’ Spry said, nodding and shaking his head as if he didn’t know what to think. ‘That’s …’

  But Gifford folded his arms and sat back in his chair. ‘I believe you’ve just told us that Chief Inspector Simms destroyed the evidence,’ he said.

  Fennimore nodded towards Enderby’s desktop computer arranged neatly to one side of his desk.

  ‘May I?’

  Gifford looked like he might leap up and shield the equipment from Fennimore’s impertinent attention, but Enderby said, ‘Of course,’ and, with a frustrated sigh, Gifford subsided.

  Fennimore explained the combination of numbers and letters Marta had written on the back of the photograph in her journal. He typed it in to the word processor. ‘A coded password,’ he said. ‘Presented in the right font, it spells a name.’

  ‘Rika-19,’ Enderby read.

  ‘Marta’s sister – aged nineteen when she died.’ He explained the purpose of the students’ F: Drive – emphasizing its privacy and security. ‘We think the password will allow access to Marta’s university F: Drive,’ he said as he typed in commands. ‘I won’t risk compromising the evidence at that location, but a lot of students have multiple email addresses, and one of Marta’s student friends gave us a webmail address for her.’

  Simms sat up, her expression changing from defeat to wonder, and then impatient anticipation.

  He turned the monitor so they could all see.

  There were dozens of files on Marta’s Gmail account. All sent from a Hotmail account. Every email had multiple attachments.

  The file names were self-explanatory: Notebk1, 2 and so on through to Notebk33. ‘I think she scanned pages from her notebook and emailed the images to herself,’ Fennimore told them. ‘Rob1, Rob2 and Rob3 are, I believe, photographs of Detective Superintendent Tanford, or evidence implicating him.’

  Simms was staring at him.

  ‘Now, anyone with the account details can upload or access material from Gmail and Hotmail, but both service providers keep a full audit trail because of their susceptibility to attack by email viruses and bots, so I didn’t see any harm in taking a peek at “Rob 1”.’

  He clicked on the email attachment and angled the monitor so they could all see.

  They were looking at a photograph of Tanford, caught unawares. ‘Clearly that’s DCS Tanford,’ Fennimore said. ‘It would be a simple matter to match this image to the interior of Francine’s massage parlour.’

  Gifford sat frozen, gripping the arms of his leather office chair.

  Fennimore grinned. ‘Bet you can’t wait to get a look at the rest of those files, can you, Stuart?’

  48

  ‘Give a man enough rope and he’ll hang himself.’

  ORIGIN UNKNOWN

  Chief Constable Enderby granted Kate Simms the privilege of arresting Detective Superintendent Tanford; she was supported by a nervous Detective Superintendent Spry. Tanford was carrying the throwdown Marta had ca
lled on the night she was murdered. Mobile phone records also linked it to the Henrys.

  Four years before, Tanford was a DI in Newcastle, working Vice. He moved to Humberside Police, got promoted to DCI; he had even headed up one of the teams investigating the abduction rapes in Hull. Humberside police would want to talk to him about that, but for now he was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit misconduct in a public office and conspiracy to supply Class A drugs.

  The drugs seized in Operation Snowstorm were supposed to have been destroyed three weeks before Kate was assigned to the ‘overdose’ case review. The Customs and Excise Incineration Log, which DS Renwick claimed he and Tanford both countersigned, showed only one signature – Renwick’s. They had only Renwick’s word that he acted under Tanford’s instruction. As Tanford predicted, there was no trace of him at Marta’s flat; in fact the only trace evidence was a hair and a footwear impression, both matched to Renwick. He was wearing the incriminating shoes when he was arrested.

  DCI Simms and DC Moran were to conduct the initial interview, with Fennimore watching via video link and advising Simms via audio. They discussed interview strategy, sitting in her office.

  ‘I think we should lead with the drugs charges.’

  Fennimore agreed. ‘The strongest evidence is in the association with the Henrys and the recycling of seized drugs.’

  ‘If I can get him on the back foot with that, maybe he’ll slip up on the murder.’

  She looked pale as she guided him to the room where the video link had been set up for him. He turned on the monitor. Tanford was already installed in the interview room with his solicitor. Moran sat opposite. Tanford looked relaxed, and even seemed to be sharing a joke with the solicitor.

  Fennimore slipped on a set of headphones with integral mic and Kate said, ‘I’m just next door.’

  ‘Nervous?’ Fennimore asked.

  ‘No,’ she said, and a shiver of emotion rippled across her face. ‘Terrified,’ she admitted with a wan smile.

  ‘He’ll be confident. He’s police – he knows how to clean up a scene, and let’s face it, he’s managed to remain undetected for a long time. But he isn’t infallible, Kate; he kept the throwdown, which was incredibly stupid – Professor Varley might call it arrogant, from a psychological viewpoint – and he will have made other mistakes.’

  Kate nodded. They had already discussed some of those potential errors, and she would confront Tanford with them during the interview.

  ‘He despises forensic psychologists,’ Simms said. ‘I’ll see if I can needle him with Varley’s profile of him.’

  Tanford’s legal representative was Sam Carr. Known as ‘Slippery Sam’, he mostly represented celebrities who could afford to pay his exorbitant fees.

  After running through the formalities, Simms said, ‘You claim you weren’t present at the faked disposal of heroin which had been seized during Operation Snowstorm?’

  ‘I’m not “claiming” anything,’ Tanford said. ‘I’m stating a fact: I wasn’t there, as you will have seen from the Incinerator Log.’

  ‘You’re expecting me to believe that you let a sergeant dispose of a large quantity of Class A drugs on his own?’

  ‘My client exercises his right to silence,’ Carr said firmly.

  ‘Your client is insulted by the suggestion,’ Tanford said.

  ‘Detective Superintendent …’ Carr began, but Tanford waved him away.

  ‘Obviously I did not allow DS Renwick to dispose of the drugs unsupervised. I buddied him up with a senior officer.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I can’t recall.’

  ‘Isn’t that odd? It was only three weeks ago.’

  ‘It’s been a tough three weeks.’

  His solicitor sighed loudly.

  ‘Care to elaborate?’ Kate asked.

  Tanford smiled, for once taking his solicitor’s advice.

  ‘We’ve made extensive inquiries,’ Simms said, ‘but we haven’t been able to identify your elusive “senior officer”.’

  ‘Are you surprised?’ he said. ‘If they admitted that, they’d be admitting liability.’

  Carr tried again, resting his hand on Tanford’s arm, but the superintendent shook him off.

  ‘Look, I led Operation Snowstorm, why would I compromise it?’

  ‘Self-aggrandizement,’ Simms said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The forensic psych said to look out for that as a character trait,’ she said.

  Fennimore saw a flicker of reaction – Tanford would not like to be reduced to a set of character traits.

  ‘Operation Snowstorm was a joint operation set up last minute following intel from HM Customs and London Met,’ Simms said. ‘You didn’t lead it, you just handled the Manchester end. And, as for compromising it, the Customs people were very disappointed that the big boys – the suppliers and moneymen – somehow got clean away.’

  ‘And you’re suggesting I facilitated this bit of escapology?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Well, clever me. But you’ve searched my office, my house, my police and home computers. Have you turned up one shred of evidence against me?’

  Carr was red in the face, but Tanford ignored him – fascinated, it seemed, by Simms, watching her every gesture, devouring her with his gaze.

  ‘Your laptop hard drive has been electronically fragmented,’ she said. ‘We haven’t found anything to prove or disprove your innocence.’

  He smiled. ‘That’s very Jesuitical of you, Katie.’

  ‘Please address me as Chief Inspector,’ she said. ‘Perhaps though, you could explain why you chose to electronically “shred” the files and data on your laptop, Chief Superintendent?’

  His smile broadened.

  ‘For the record – DCS Tanford made no response.’

  He scratched the side of his nose, and Carr relaxed in his seat, satisfied.

  ‘Renwick says that you went with him to oversee the incineration of the heroin. That it was your idea to switch the drugs for an inert powder that would pass for the real thing.’

  ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he? But the fact is, Chief Inspector, my signature isn’t on the Incinerator Log, because … I. Wasn’t. There.’ He pressed the tip of his index finger on the table three times, punctuating each word, speaking in an emphatic but entirely reasonable tone.

  ‘Okay,’ Fennimore said and Simms jumped at the sharpness of his voice in her ear. ‘Renwick swears he saw Tanford sign the log, so Tanford only faked signing it. But his DNA could still be on the relevant page.’

  Tanford was watching her, one arm hooked casually over the back of his chair.

  Simms said, ‘Low Template DNA is a miracle of science, don’t you think? Say, for example, you rested your hand on the page when you faked signing the log, you might have rubbed off a few skin cells. D’you think I should ask for DNA trace on the log?’

  He didn’t move.

  ‘I think I will – yes, it’s definitely worth a shot,’ Simms said. ‘I’ve already requested cell site analysis of your mobile phones. It’s always helpful to have the victim and the suspect locked together when a crime is committed, isn’t it, Detective Superintendent?’

  Fennimore watched as Tanford realized that the same could apply to the night of the murder – that his phones would place him with Marta when she died.

  Simms waited a second, then said, ‘No response.’

  ‘As for your dealings with the Henry brothers – we have Marta’s written testimony.’ She flipped through printouts from the JPEG files and Word documents they had already recovered from Marta’s webmail and university accounts. ‘I’m looking at dates and times you went to the Henrys’ massage parlour. Dates, times and duration of meetings you had with Sol and Frank Henry …’ She glanced up at him and smiled.

  He hadn’t been expecting this.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Marta made back-ups.’

  ‘Sadly, Marta is dead,’ Tanford said, without a trace of regret.

  His solicitor ra
ised a finger, but Tanford carried on: ‘It’s debatable whether the CPS will allow her files into evidence.’

  ‘Well, it’s good of you to show concern,’ Simms said. ‘But I can corroborate that I saw the original notebook, and I’m sure her family and friends will confirm that the electronic copies are in Marta’s handwriting. So – thanks again – but I’m hopeful.’

  He spread his hands as if to say, Your time you’re wasting, not mine.

  ‘Marta wanted us to know everything. She filled her notebook with information written in English because she wanted us to know. She listed her code and alias for Crimestoppers on her university account because she wanted us to know.’

  That shook him – he’d been relying on the anonymity of Crimestoppers.

  ‘She really messed up your supply train, didn’t she? You thought Operation Snowstorm was a temporary setback. You’d get by, cutting the deals a bit thin for a few months. You’d put the drugs back into circulation when things calmed down. But things just kept going wrong, didn’t they? Intel kept coming in via Crimestoppers – tip-offs you had to act on even though you were killing your own business. She must have driven you half mad.’

  Fennimore saw something flare in the inky black of Tanford’s eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That was all Marta. Shall I tell you why she did it? Oh, but you know all about that. Renwick got to the cemetery before I did, so you already know that she and Rika were sisters. Marta came to England to punish the men who made her sister an addict. One brave young woman, acting alone, and she got you on the run – you and the Henrys and Renwick and whoever else you’ve corrupted along the way.’

  Tanford scratched his nose again. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, feigning confusion. ‘Was there a question in all that garbled nonsense?’

  Fennimore couldn’t see Simms’s face, but she bowed her head to look at the pile of documents under her hands and then raised slowly up again to Tanford, her back straight and stiff.