‘You two are close.’
Surprised to find that it was true, Fennimore nodded, unable to speak.
‘We’ve got Tremain’s blood type spattered on Josh’s clothing – we’re waiting on DNA analysis to confirm it’s his,’ the cop said. ‘There was mud on Josh’s shoes and soil particles in the weave of his jacket, as though he had fallen during a struggle. We’ll gather every shred of evidence we can to link the brothers to both scenes.’
Josh’s doctor hung up the phone. ‘We’ve got the okay,’ he said. ‘You gentlemen need to step back.’ The staff swiftly moved the trolley out of the treatment bay.
Fennimore watched as it passed. ‘His hands do look remarkably clean,’ he said, cold scientific clarity elbowing his emotions to the sidelines.
DCI Gordon looked shocked – even offended.
‘It could be significant,’ Fennimore insisted, keeping pace with the trolley. ‘Did you clean him up?’ he said, addressing the doctor.
The medic refused to acknowledge the question.
‘Doctor,’ Gordon said.
The medic glared at Fennimore across the trolley. ‘No, we didn’t. It’s taken us all this time to get him stable.’
One of the nurses had hurried on ahead to call the bed-lift, and the doors opened as they arrived. They wheeled the trolley inside and Fennimore squeezed in with them. One of the nurses exclaimed in alarm and the doctor pressed the button to hold the doors.
‘Sir, you shouldn’t be in here,’ he said.
Fennimore lifted one of Josh’s hands. It was really clean – even though his nails were black with – something. Grime? He sniffed the hand and the doctor reached across, seizing his wrist.
‘Let go of him.’
Fennimore complied.
‘Now get out.’
Fennimore didn’t budge and the doctor spread his hands, appealing to the chief inspector.
‘The evidence puts Josh’s brothers at the scene – but it doesn’t make them guilty,’ Fennimore said, talking fast. ‘They could argue they were trying to rescue Josh – hence the scrapes on the car. They lost the Toyota for a bit on the country lanes. Found Josh shot at the roadside, hunted Tremain down, shot him. They’re heroes. The media will love them – they avenged their brother and wiped a murdering child-abductor off the face of the earth in one stroke.’
Gordon stepped inside the lift alongside Fennimore.
‘Your patient should have a police escort,’ he told the doctor. ‘For your own safety, as well as his.’
The medic gave a grunt of disgust and pressed the button to take them up to the ICU.
‘What are you thinking?’ Gordon asked Fennimore.
‘Tea tree oil,’ Fennimore said, recalling the last time he had seen Josh practising lab techniques in the old university building in St Andrew Street, cleaning down the lab bench with wipes before taping his own jacket to practise taking fibre-lifts.
‘Hand-wipes,’ he said, remembering that fresh, slightly astringent smell. ‘Josh’s hands have been wiped clean.’ He leaned closer and sniffed the skin of Josh’s forehead. ‘His face, too.’
‘A mark of respect?’ the DCI suggested. ‘Or regret?’
Fennimore leaned against the metal side of the lift as he considered. ‘Forensic awareness,’ he said, feeling a powerful hatred for Josh’s brothers.
The lift doors opened and the trolley was manoeuvred on to the polished vinyl flooring of the ICU foyer.
Then they were moving fast towards the double doors of the unit. Fennimore continued by the side of the trolley, but at the doors the doctor held up his hand and spoke directly to the chief inspector. ‘This is a sterile area,’ he said. ‘You both need to wait outside.’
‘Okay,’ Fennimore said. ‘But don’t clean his hands.’
The doctor threw him a hostile look.
‘Bag them or glove them – I don’t care which – but you need to preserve the evidence,’ Fennimore said, holding his gaze.
‘He’s a patient, not a damned crime scene,’ the doctor said, his voice roughened by anger.
‘That’s exactly what he is,’ Fennimore flared back. He turned to face the chief inspector. ‘I think Josh made sure of that. He would do everything in his power to provide forensic evidence against the men who did this to him.’
Gordon nodded. ‘He’s right. I’ll do all I can to accommodate your health and safety protocols, Doctor, but I need you to protect Josh’s hands. I’ll send someone here to collect samples.’
The medic remained by the door while the rest of the staff moved the trolley into a newly cleared bay.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘But I want him out of here.’ He nodded towards Fennimore.
Fennimore held up his hands, backing away. The door swung to and Gordon let out a whoosh of breath. ‘Professor, you’ve got to ease up,’ he said.
‘I’ll ease up when his brothers are behind bars,’ Fennimore said. ‘You need to have CSIs vacuum out and tape-lift every inch of the car.’
‘I know my job,’ Gordon said, but his tone was forgiving, compassionate.
‘You’ll need soil experts – talk to the Hutton Institute – they can type a sample to a patch two metres square.’
‘Professor—’
‘A palynologist, too. I’ll pay for the tests myself if there’s any quibble over the budget.’
‘Professor Fennimore!’
‘What?’
‘You have to let us get on with this, now.’
‘You can’t let them get away with it. You don’t know what Josh—’ Fennimore’s throat closed and he swallowed hard. ‘What he had to do to …’
‘I’ve spoken to Josh’s Witness Protection handler,’ Gordon said. ‘I’ve been briefed – I know what he sacrificed.’
Fennimore began to speak, but Gordon talked over him.
‘The night Josh witnessed the murder of Hafiz, his mother had sent him to the warehouse where his brothers Liam and Steve were torturing the poor bastard,’ Gordon said. ‘They’d been working on Hafiz for five hours. Liam Collins tried to make Josh finish the job; it was to be his initiation. But he refused.’
Fennimore stared at Gordon, shocked. These details were not in the press reports Lazko had given him.
‘Josh was in disgrace with the family, but he kept quiet; family’s family, after all,’ Gordon went on. ‘Then Ahmed Azan’s murder trial started. Azan’s wife saw Josh in court – asked him if the brothers could do anything to help – she trusted the family implicitly. Before he even took it to the police, Josh recorded his brothers talking about the details of torture and the shooting. Barely eighteen years old and he gathered the evidence we needed to convict them. He gave up everything – family, wealth, status – for a life as a hunted man, because it was the right thing to do.’ He paused. ‘I know you care about Josh,’ he said. ‘So do I.’
Fennimore looked into Gordon’s face and saw that he was in earnest.
‘I won’t let him down,’ the chief inspector said. ‘And I won’t allow the system to either.’
Fennimore nodded, feeling a little punch-drunk. ‘I believe you,’ he said.
He turned on his heel and went to the fire escape stairs. Halfway down the fire door boomed shut behind him. For some reason this started a shaking he couldn’t control. His legs gave way under him and he collapsed on the floor. Leaning backwards, he spread his arms wide against the wall’s brickwork for support; it felt like the ground could drop away at any moment and send him plummeting downward.
46
Manchester, Thursday Night
The house was quiet when Kate Simms got home. She hung her jacket on the stair newel and peeped in through the sitting room door. It was empty. From upstairs she heard her mother’s voice, soft and rhythmic. Was she talking on the phone? She kicked off her shoes and headed up, following the sound to Timmy’s bedroom. He was sitting up in bed, Nanna beside him, reading from a Despicable Me book.
‘Had a nightmare,’ her mother said.
She perched on the other side of the bed and put her arm around his shoulder. Timmy turned to look up at her and a moment later, he clambered into her lap for a rare cuddle; he didn’t even flinch when she kissed the top of his head.
Simms’s mother slid her a sly look. ‘See what you’ve been missing?’
Simms laughed, too tired to argue.
‘How is Lauren?’ her mother asked.
‘She’s …’ Simms ruffled her son’s hair and smiled. ‘She’ll be okay – her dad’s with her now.’
‘Who’s Lauren?’ Timmy said, turning to a page in the book in which a bald man with an improbably pointed nose was addressing an assortment of small pill-shaped creatures, some with two eyes and some, like mini-Cyclopses, with only one.
‘What are those jelly-bean creatures?’ she asked, as a distraction.
‘They’re not jelly beans, they’re Minions,’ he said. ‘Who’s Lauren?’
‘A little girl,’ Simms said. ‘Why are the Minions wearing goggles?’
He turned to look at her, his eyes large and solemn. ‘No one knows.’ Then: ‘Is the little girl sick?’
‘Yes, but she’s going to get better.’
‘Why wasn’t her daddy with her before?’ Timmy asked. ‘Is that why she got sick? Did he go far away?’
Simms winced.
Her mother murmured, ‘Out of the mouths of babes …’
‘Lauren got lost,’ she said, refusing to meet her mother’s eye.
‘And Mummy found her,’ her mother said.
‘My mummy?’ Timmy asked, twisting to look up at Simms again, astonishment on his face.
‘Your mummy was very clever, and she found Lauren and brought her home to her daddy.’
Simms glanced at her mother, surprised.
‘Well,’ her mother said, ‘it’s true.’
Timmy was still staring at her, a frown on his face. ‘Where is Lauren’s mummy?’ he asked.
For a second, Simms’s heart stopped. ‘In heaven,’ she said.
‘With God, and Baby Jesus, and all the angels?’
‘Yes.’
This seemed to satisfy him and he turned his attention to the book.
She and her mother exchanged a look of relief, then her mother slipped away, and for a few minutes Simms read from the story, while Timmy drowsed.
Kieran popped his head around the door. ‘He okay?’ he said.
‘Come and join us,’ Kate said, patting the bed.
‘Wish I could.’
He opened the door wider and she saw that he was duded up for a party. ‘Staff end-of-term bash,’ he said.
‘Didn’t you call in sick earlier?’
‘Migraine,’ he said, with a grin. ‘All better now. I’d have asked you to come but you were so busy with …’ He glanced at Timmy, implying that he didn’t want to say more.
Simms felt herself withdraw slightly.
‘You okay?’ he asked.
‘I’m fine,’ she said, making an effort to smile. It really wasn’t Kieran’s fault. ‘It’s been a hard day.’
‘Yeah. Congratulations, by the way.’ It sounded forced, over-formal, and he jingled the keys in his hand. ‘Well, you relax,’ he said. ‘You’ve earned a rest.’
A moment later he was gone, and as she read on, Becky’s words – He’s never home – chimed over and over in Simms’s head.
Later, with Timmy safely asleep, she decided on an early night, but she couldn’t sleep. An hour after that, still wide awake and feeling sad and dissatisfied, she picked up her laptop, tiptoed past her mother’s room and headed downstairs.
Fennimore was online. She hit the Skype call icon and he answered in seconds.
‘Hey.’ He looked genuinely pleased to see her.
‘You look terrible,’ she said.
He raised one shoulder and let it drop.
‘How is Josh?’
‘No change.’ After an uncomfortable silence, he asked about Lauren.
‘She’s dehydrated, undernourished and has a leptospirosis infection – rats contaminated the supplies Tremain left. She hurt her ankle in a fall and she’s traumatized, but the doctors think she’ll make a full recovery.’
‘Was she—’
‘He didn’t touch her,’ Simms said quickly. ‘She seems to think he was afraid of her.’
‘And the body in the car was Tremain?’
‘It’s him all right – he’s been identified by his brother.’
‘Well, let’s hope there’s a special kind of hell where people like him are tormented by baby-faced demons.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘You don’t believe in hell.’
‘I don’t believe in God,’ he said, ‘but there are a thousand kinds of hell.’
Simms didn’t doubt that her friend had lived in one of them ever since Rachel and Suzie vanished. Being honest with herself, she realized that she had lived part of it with him. Even when he disappeared from her life, the pain and guilt didn’t go away, and since they had started working together again, she had read it in the lines on his face and the sorrow and regret in his eyes.
‘Have you managed to sort out your apartment?’ she said, to change the subject.
‘The locksmith’s been in and the alarm’s repaired,’ he said. ‘As for the rest …’ He slid out of the way, allowing his laptop camera to present a panorama of the room. ‘As you see, it’s a work in progress.’
She saw kitchen cupboards emptied out; papers, some stacked, some littered on the floor; a flash of a laptop screen showing some kind of street scene; then Fennimore was front and centre again.
‘How’re you doing?’ he asked.
‘Okay.’ He’s never home – the words that had clanged in her head for the past two hours – seemed quieter, less strident, when she was talking to Fennimore. She said, ‘I’m okay’ again, to test how she felt, and realized that she meant it.
‘You did a wonderful thing today,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ she said, smiling. ‘It was pretty amazing.’
‘Keep telling yourself that, no matter what,’ he said, and she felt the intensity of his stare despite the barriers of distance and low-resolution imaging.
What had he seen in her face? It was rare for Fennimore to have any kind of empathic insight and when he did it was unsettling.
‘Well,’ she said, suddenly anxious to finish the call, ‘I’m going to try and get some sleep. Let me know if Josh’s condition improves or—’ She stopped; no need to add the other way things might go – they both knew that Josh’s prognosis wasn’t good. ‘Call me if you need me,’ she added firmly.
47
Every contact leaves a trace.
LOCARD’S EXCHANGE PRINCIPLE
Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, Friday Morning
‘Do you not sleep at all?’
Fennimore looked up from an academic paper he was reading; DCI Gordon was standing over him. It was 9 a.m., and he had been at Josh Brown’s bedside in the ICU for two hours.
‘I was going crazy at home,’ Fennimore admitted.
‘How did you even get in?’
‘The constable on duty recognized me from yesterday. I told the nursing staff I was family.’
Gordon rolled his eyes. ‘Seems I’ll have to brief them about the wisdom of allowing Josh’s family in here,’ he said. He drew up a chair. ‘How’s he doing?’
‘Stable, but still critical,’ Fennimore said. He had watched Josh’s fluctuating BP and heart rate on the monitor until he found his own pulse began to follow the wild stutters and spurts of speed; now he rationed himself to checking at five-minute intervals. ‘I notice he’s been processed.’ He glanced down at the student’s hands; each nail had been clipped and scraped clean.
‘Analysis is ongoing,’ Gordon said. ‘But we’ve matched fibres from under his fingernails to seat fabrics and carpeting in the BMW his brothers were driving. I
t’s a hire car, but we got enough transfer from their clothing to put them inside the vehicle.’
Fennimore exhaled slowly. ‘D’you hear that, Josh?’ he said. ‘You did it.’ Josh’s heart rate spiked. Fennimore remembered the clean, astringent smell on the student’s hands in the accident and emergency department the previous day. ‘What about the tea tree oil?’ he asked, and saw the ghost of a smile on Gordon’s face.
‘That’s part of the ongoing analysis, but the CSIs found wipes in Josh’s pocket that will make it so much easier to compare it with trace they found in the BMW – they’ve already matched fibres from them to trace they found in the car. They also identified a paint fleck from the damaged bodywork of the BMW on Josh’s jacket.’
‘You were listening in the lectures, then,’ Fennimore said, tapping Josh’s foot.
Another responding stutter – three quick beats in succession and a corresponding increase in Josh’s BP.
‘That isn’t all,’ Gordon said. ‘There’s blood aerosol on Josh’s jacket and T-shirt.’
‘His younger brother’s nosebleed,’ Fennimore said, his own heart rate picking up pace.
‘We’re waiting on the DNA results, but my guess is, yes.’ Fennimore looked at the young student with fierce pride.
The voices seemed far away – somewhere he could not easily reach – but Josh did recognize Fennimore’s, and that alone reassured him he was safe.
While Damon and Mikey had bundled the dead man into the boot of Josh’s car, Greg had instructed Josh to wipe ‘evidence’ off his hands and face. Of course, he’d complied – he didn’t have much choice. Big brother Greg had grinned when he found the hand-wipes in his pocket. ‘You always were a clean freak, bruv,’ he said.
Then they heard a car approach. It crested one of the hills a mile down the road and the next second Josh was in the back of the Beamer, face down on the floor.
This is it, then, he thought. He felt more bitter than afraid. The fear he’d lived with day after day since he went into hiding had dulled his emotions, he supposed. But he did feel regret, and sadness. He’d always hoped that Damon would be spared this life.
Truth Will Out Page 25