by Jo Allen
‘Will do. Cheers then.’ For once, Mikey managed to end the conversation without a sarcastic comment, but whether that was a sign of maturity or of something more interesting going on at his side of the country, Jude didn’t know.
It didn’t matter. The end result was still silence. He stood for a moment, weighing the phone in his hand and dithering over the eternal, knife-edge judgement of how far he should interfere, whom he risked alienating, whether it was worth the gamble to try yet once more to heal a gaping emotional wound.
Mikey would always forgive him. That they were still speaking four years on from the younger brother’s experiment with soft drugs and the older’s dramatic intervention testified to that. And there was something else Jude had learned throughout his career, and that was that too many people went out one day with rage buzzing in their hearts and a critical word on their lips and never came back, or came back to find that death, natural or unnatural, had taken their loved ones. One day Mikey would grasp that. With that in mind, Jude steeled himself to call his father.
The moment David Satterthwaite answered the phone, the buzz in the background told Jude he’d timed it wrong and the conversation would be short. ‘Dad. Hi. How’s it going?’
‘Fine, Jude. Fine.’ He must have covered the phone with his hand, but only partially. ‘No, it’s only Jude. My round, but give me a minute.’
‘Sorry. I didn’t know you were busy.’
‘I’m in the pub with local history society.’
His mother had been an English teacher and his father taught history, but Jude had never been remotely tempted to hide for the rest of his life in either books or the classroom. Since the divorce, his father seemed to have developed the knack of finding companionship in the pub. ‘I won’t chat, then.’
‘Are you calling to cancel Saturday?’
Jude winced. All too often that was the reason he called, and because a trip to the football on a Saturday or (occasionally) a midweek evening was the only real situation in which father and son were completely comfortable, he never cancelled easily, but David could be as touchy as Mikey, as easily offended. ‘No.’ But when he reviewed his workload, and the glaringly open case of the murders of Len Pierce and Gracie Pepper, he backtracked to honesty. ‘Not yet, and hopefully not at all.’
His father declined to comment and chose, instead, to condemn him with a very obvious sigh.
‘Anyway.’ You could love someone and have no patience with them. Even when David hadn’t been drinking he was prone to theatricality ,and since he’d ditched the needs of his family he’d become increasingly self-centred. Jude sighed, ran his free hand through his hair and looked out of the window. A dog walker paused on the glistening pavement for a greyhound to lift its leg to a lamppost and on the edge of his vision a light went on in Adam’s living room. He turned to look the other way. ‘I was calling about Mikey.’
‘Is that right?’
‘About his birthday.’
David made him wait. ‘What about it?’ he asked, after a moment.
‘His party. I wondered if you might come.’
‘I haven’t been invited.’
‘No. He hasn’t invited you because he’s afraid you won’t come.’
David sighed, so obviously it could only be deliberate. ‘I’m not going to come if he doesn’t invite me.’
Jude shook his head in frustration. ‘Can’t we break this cycle, Dad? Can’t we try? Just once more?’
‘If he invites me, I’ll come.’
‘Mikey’s still a kid.’
‘Mikey’s nearly twenty-one.’
‘But you’re the real adult here. You're his dad. You’re the one who has to—’
‘To make the first move? I’ve done that before. Time and time again.’
‘Yes, and you have to keep trying.’
‘When I get the invitation, I’ll come. You’re a good man, Jude. Thanks for trying. But it has to come from Mikey not from you. Got to go.’ And silence.
Chapter 15
‘All right. Fill me in. What have we all got from our collective labours?’
Jude was in a flippant mood, Doddsy thought, though God knew why. He contemplated his boss and friend. It had been too long since they’d met up for a quiet pint and a heart-to-heart and the thread of close knowledge — how Jude felt about Mikey, how Doddsy himself felt, in love for the first time in middle age — had stretched so that he couldn’t divine the source of Jude’s light-heartedness. Maybe it was the first signs of spring. Maybe against the odds he’d managed a good night’s sleep. Maybe it was the prospect of taking Ashleigh to meet his family and, by so doing, draw a line under the relationship with Becca that Doddsy knew he’d struggled so long to shake off. He smiled at Ashleigh across the table, but she didn’t smile back.
‘Chris?’ Jude prompted. ‘Do you want to start?’
‘I think we’d better let Ashleigh start.’
The two of them had been comparing notes in a corner before the meeting, while Doddsy had been standing in serene contemplation of the additional information on the incident room board as if they were an aid to meditation. He’d noticed that Chris was looking unusually severe.
Jude must have noticed it, too, because his good mood visibly dissipated. ‘Okay. Go on.’
Doddsy abandoned the board and slid into his seat.
‘This is a bit of a bugger Jude, if I’m honest with you.’ This time she did look at Doddsy and her expression was almost apologetic. ‘It’s getting a bit close to home.’
‘Oh?’
Ashleigh allowed herself a fractional pause. ‘You know I had people doing the door-to-doors and talking to people in the town. I also had a couple of PCs down at the hospital, talking to Gracie’s colleagues to see if we could pick up any leads.’
‘Obviously you got something.’
‘Yes. You know Tammy’s husband works up at the hospital.’
Jude nodded.
‘You might say he’s quite outspoken. Hates political correctness. Is a bit right wing. There have never been any serious allegations against him, but one thing I did pick up, from a number of his colleagues, is that he has a reputation for homophobia.’
Doddsy rubbed his chin. Bloody Phil. No-one in their right mind would suspect him of murder but it wouldn’t be the first time narrow-minded intolerance had made an innocent man a suspect. He caught himself up for making assumptions. You shouldn’t presume innocence any more than you should presume guilt but he couldn’t pretend to himself and if asked he wouldn’t be able to pretend to Jude. He desperately wanted Tyrone’s father to be innocent.
‘Okay.’ Jude digested that. ‘I take it when you say there were no allegations you mean there’s nothing serious, if I dare put it that way. By which I don’t mean any derogatory comments are acceptable. I mean he said nothing indictable and nothing justifying disciplinary action.’
‘Nothing like that. It was more of a historic thing, an attitude. He’s been there a long time — twenty years or so. They came to Penrith just after Tyrone was born, I think. But there are certainly a few people who raised the comment that Phil has made some unfortunate remarks in the past.’
‘I hope you weren’t allowing your boys and girls to ask any leading questions.’
Ashleigh looked momentarily outraged. ‘They asked if they knew of anyone who had anything against Gracie, for any reason whatever.’
‘Okay.’ Jude must have sounded sharper than he intended, because he lifted his hand in a general apology. ‘It just seems very…unusual that they mentioned it.’
‘I don’t think so.’ She turned her watch around on her wrist, unclipped it, clipped it back on. ‘I think we all have rather heightened sensitivities to these things these days. Rightly so.’
‘Claud took his diversity roadshow down into Tynefield, too, didn’t he?’ said Chris.
Doddsy spared a thought for Faye’s pet project. Good or bad? In the long run it was probably a good thing to talk about your sexuality
and he’d been pleasantly surprised by the positive response, but he was a private individual and never welcomed the encouragement to bare his soul. It wasn’t as if no-one knew. Tyrone, openly and proudly gay, was one side of that coin. He was the other. Opposites attracted. He smiled.
‘Yes, but no-one seemed to think that’s what changed it.’ Ashleigh pointed out. ‘There’s nothing recent and nothing specific. It was just that several people mentioned that Phil had always been a bit intolerant of people who didn’t fit the mould. Mostly it was in the context that his kind of attitude is the exception these days rather than the rule.’
‘I imagine Tammy will have knocked a lot of that sort of nonsense out of him over the years.’ Doddsy was losing his objectivity. He knew Tammy well, knew that she was single-minded and determined in her pursuit of what was right and there was no way she would let anyone, even her husband, cause trouble for her child. In his heart he could understand and forgive her hostility towards him.
‘Maybe. But Phil lied to me.’ Jude looked as if a bad smell had wafted under his nose — not something as nauseous as the stench of death and decay, but an unexpected whiff of the sewer. ‘On the night of Gracie’s killing he first told me he didn’t know who she was, then he said he hadn’t recognised her at first but that he knew her by sight only. But according to Becca he did know her, reasonably well.’
‘She wasn’t the kind of person to slip under the radar.’ Ashleigh looked down at her notes again. ‘Even after a short acquaintance.’
‘No. And they participated in the same workshop.’
‘That doesn’t look great, does it?’ Ashleigh appeared unconvinced of Phil’s innocence. ‘He wasn’t initially in the frame for Len’s killing, but I took the precaution of going back and checking what he was doing on the Sunday afternoon when Len died.’
‘And?’
‘Tammy was at work and so was Tyrone. He was on his own. I asked Tyrone about it, as casually as I could, and apparently Phil had said he was out on his bike. He said he left the house in Stainton, drove to Langwathby, cycled about for a bit and came back again.’
Doddsy pushed his chair back six inches, not needing to look at the map as Chris was doing in order to see the implications. That placed Phil Garner comfortably in the zone where he might, if he’d lied about his route, have been present in the lane where Len had died on the Sunday afternoon.
‘There were no bike tyre marks at the scene.’ Jude tapped his pen on the table.
‘He could have left the bike somewhere and walked.’
‘There were no footmarks.’ But even as he said it, Doddsy remembered Phil’s words to Jude on the night of Gracie Pepper’s killing. ‘But he knows all about crime scenes. He may not have had any forensic training himself, but he’ll have picked up a lot along the way from Tammy. He’ll know exactly what to do to avoid contaminating a crime scene.’
‘And exactly what to do to avoid incriminating himself, as well.’
There was a short silence. Doddsy felt his own face twisting up in displeasure, just as Jude’s was doing. Sometimes crime came a little too close to home, and sometimes they had to remind themselves that circumstantial evidence wasn’t enough.
‘Yes, that’s true,’ Jude acknowledged. ‘But we need something more than that. As far as I can see, there’s no reason at all why Phil would want to harm Len Pierce. I’m not aware of any connection. They don’t move in the same circles.’
‘Phil’s a doctor, though. Like Giles Butler. They could have met.’ Chris flipped open his iPad and flicked through document after document until he found the one he wanted. ‘Go back to the PM report. Len’s medical records indicate that he had specialist treatment for some form of dermatitis. I imagine he’ll have had that up at the hospital. What’s Phil’s area of specialism?’
‘He works up at the fracture clinic, I think. There has to be a possibility their paths crossed.’ Jude pulled his notebook towards him and wrote down: check out PG, as though by writing it, it would magically be accomplished without him having to go through the strain. ‘See if Giles Butler knew him, as well. Though I’ll be honest with you. I can see Phil punching someone in the face if he disagreed with them, but I can’t see him sneaking round the countryside at night with a knife, still less lurking in a churchyard when he knew he was about to pick up his wife from drinks with a bunch of detectives.’
‘Bluff and double bluff.’ Ashleigh, he saw, was giving Doddsy a sympathetic look. ‘Do you know Phil well, Doddsy?’
‘No better than anyone else. Bumped into him a couple of times. Nice enough guy.’ But that had been before he’d got involved with Tyrone. If he were to bump into Phil now his reception would be a lot less cordial. ‘I’m seeing Tyrone later on.’
‘Ah, I’d forgotten. You’re supposed to be off this afternoon. For God’s sake don’t hang on here too long. We all need a break.’ Jude sighed. ‘I’d better talk to Phil, then. Chris. You get someone to follow up on whether Lenny or Giles Butler had ever met Phil. Then we’ll see.’
Chris sat back and stuck his pen behind one ear, hands behind his head. ‘I think I’d also like to take another look at Giles Butler.’
‘Why’s that? Did anything come back for the forensics on the car?’
‘Nothing that doesn’t tie in exactly with what he said. If he’d killed Len you’d expect there to have been blood in the car, either from Giles’ clothing or from the knife, assuming he took it with him to dispose of it. There’s no trace. But I’m not happy with that.’ He paused. ‘Not the forensic side. I’m not questioning that. I’m just not convinced that entirely clears the good doctor.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. If we leave aside Gracie Pepper for now, there was always the motive with Giles, wasn’t there? He had a reason to kill Len. It might not have been a good one, but it was always there. He was the one who was hiding the affair. He was the one who was lying to his wife. Lenny wasn’t open about it and he didn’t talk about his private business, but nor did he hide it.’
‘Oh, I see.’ Ashleigh sat forward, intently. ‘Supposing — just supposing — Len wanted to get serious and Giles didn’t.’
‘That’s what I’m thinking. I was reading back through his witness statement. All that stuff about his reputation, his standing in the community.’
‘His wife and kids.’ Doddsy was more sympathetic than the others. Coming out wasn’t always easy. People judged you for it, one way or another. Sometimes they made you into a hero when all you’d done was be yourself, an action as false in its way as making you a villain. ‘I get that. It’s hard to explain.’
‘Yep. And I accept that it’s a possibility,’ Jude agreed. ‘But if Giles is the killer, that doesn’t explain how he managed to get the knife, and any blood-stained clothing, from the murder scene down to the bin in King Street.’
‘We don’t yet know if it’s the knife. Though I’ll be astonished if it isn’t, and if it isn’t we still have to find that murder weapon, or explain how he disposed of it, and it doesn’t account for the absence of any forensic evidence on the car.’
‘Yeah. That’s the problem. Leave it with me,’ Chris said, with a shake of the head, ‘and I’ll sort it.’
The meeting broke up. Jude and Doddsy headed back along the corridor to the office they shared. ‘Jude. You don’t seriously suspect Phil, do you?’
‘I have an open mind.’ Jude always said that, even when it was clear his thinking was going in a particular direction. There had to be evidence and there had to be good evidence. There was nothing, Doddsy reminded himself, comforted, that firmly linked Phil to the scene of Len’s murder and there was no known motive for the death of Gracie Pepper. Even if Gracie turned out to be gay, and even if Phil had objections to homosexuals in general, surely if he was to target someone it would be Doddsy himself. ‘Let’s see what else comes up.’
Doddsy reached for his coat. ‘I’m off.’ He wasn’t normally precious about his time off, but it wasn’t that often that
he and both Tyrone found themselves not working on a bright afternoon. For the first time in his life he found himself with a real reason not to volunteer to be the one who stayed on. He had plenty of credit in the bank on that score, and no guilt.
He’d logged out of his computer and cleared his desk before the meeting, knowing the way life had of catching you by the heels on the way out, and someone had left an envelope on there for him. White, a third A4 size, typically bulk-bought office stationery. By post, a typed label that said, in bold capitals, PERSONAL. He picked it up. The postmark was smudged.
‘One thing you might want to do,’ Jude went on, opening a folder and flicking through it, ‘is ask Tyrone if he’s heard anything about Gracie or Giles on the grapevine. Though you’ll have other things to talk about, I imagine.’
Doddsy slit the envelope open with his forefinger and extracted a folded A4 sheet. Jude was still talking to him, but he wasn’t listening. All he could see was the sheet in front of him, four words, neatly typed.
DI DODD. You next.
*
‘Can we keep it short?’ Phil glanced at his watch. ‘I’m so busy I can barely manage a lunch break these days. You’ll know all about that.’
On the other side of the road an ambulance made its leisurely way on to the hospital campus. Aware of how bad it might look for Phil to be interviewed by the police at work, Jude had acceded to his request to come off-site, but that constituted the single table and chairs near the coffee machine in a petrol station. Phil was still wearing his pager clipped to his belt and kept a forefinger resting on it as if to remind Jude of his indispensability.
‘I’ll get to the point.’ If he hadn’t had a dozen other things to do he’d still have wanted to keep the meeting as short as possible, but he was even more keen to do so since the threat that had landed on Doddsy’s desk had thrown more fuel on the metaphorical fire. ‘I don’t think you were quite straight with me on Tuesday night.’
‘You think that?’ Phil was a big man and he put his shoulders back to make himself bigger.