by Neil White
Gina was flooded by pity. For some reason, Proctor dominated this woman, kept her imprisoned by her own insecurities as he lived out his own sick fantasies.
The box was important though. Photographs, trinkets. It fitted with what Joe had said.
‘Thank you,’ Gina said, wanting to get away, to update Joe. ‘You’ve been helpful.’
‘Have I?’
‘You have. I understand my client a bit more. That’s very useful.’
‘If you need any more information, I don’t mind helping,’ Helena said. ‘Perhaps I ought to clear it with Mark first. I don’t want to betray him. Not for all he’s done for me.’
Gina wanted to grab Helena’s arm and drag her out of the house, to urge her to get away, as far as she could. No more control. Be yourself. But she didn’t. Instead, she said, ‘Thank you for your time.’
‘Are you going already?’
‘Yes, I’m sorry. We’re just so busy, but you’ve been a great help.’
She stopped, startled, when the door opened. It was Mark Proctor, smiling, confident and brash, walking into the living room and making Gina sit down again. She hadn’t heard his car.
‘This is a nice surprise,’ he said.
‘I just wanted to get some updates on your instructions,’ Gina said, a flutter in her voice.
‘So why are you leaving?’ he said. ‘After all, it’s me you want, isn’t it?’
Gina was uncertain but she realised quickly she had no choice. It would look strange if she didn’t speak to him.
‘Okay, thank you,’ she said.
Proctor sat in the large comfortable chair. Gina got the message: it was his throne. She took her notebook out of her bag and a pen out of her pocket, to look the part.
‘So what do you want to know?’ he said, his hands held outwards.
‘Just more about what you were doing at the time of the burglary,’ Gina said.
Helena gave a small cough and said, ‘I’ll just make my husband a drink, if you’re all right with that.’
So he had a title, husband, not Mark?
‘What have you told Helena?’ he said, once Helena had left the room, his gaze less genial, his tone sharp.
‘Nothing. You’re a client of the firm. Everything is confidential.’
‘You just blurted out the word “burglary”.’
‘It was in direct response to your question?’
He pursed his lips as he thought about that, before saying, ‘So what do you want to know?’
‘About where you’d been on the night your car was stolen from the compound.’ It was the only logical response.
‘Why?’
Gina met his gaze. She’d dealt with people like him all through her career. She shouldn’t be intimidated by him.
‘Juries convict for the strangest of reasons, and just the whiff of suspicion can be enough. The allegation against you makes it sound like you were up to something. If you want to be believed in court, you have to show that you weren’t.’
‘Do I?’ he said, his eyebrows raised. ‘I thought the prosecution had to prove it against me, not the other way around? When did it change?’
‘That’s bullshit, and always has been,’ Gina said. ‘Once you get a judge to let it go to a jury, they can convict because they don’t like the way you stand or smile.’
‘And acquit because they just don’t want to find someone guilty, even when they are?’
‘Sometimes. Not here. The prosecution case will look complete and somehow you have to fight it off. So tell me.’
‘Not yet.’
Anger started to bubble inside her. She wanted to rush him right then. He’d evaded her all those years ago and now he was enjoying her frustration too much. It was time to make him uncomfortable.
‘I didn’t think you’d help me,’ she said. ‘So I’ve been making enquiries on your behalf.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Have you heard of ANPR cameras? The police have them in locations they won’t disclose, but they clock and record every car that goes past. Really helps to narrow a suspect list down. I’ve still got friends in the police. It’s easy for them to track down where you were with the ANPR cameras. I’ve already asked a friend to have a look, to see if we can build up a picture of your movements. If we can do that, we can show your night was an innocent one, and you are guilty of nothing more than being uninsured.’
Proctor breathed heavily through his nose and his eyes shone a little darker. ‘There’s no need for that.’
Gina leaned forward. ‘Do you think you’ll get away with saying nothing in court? Whatever I say to you, it will be nothing like the grilling you’ll get in the witness box.’ Her voice had taken on a keener edge. ‘So enlighten me. Why would someone else steal your car when it’s locked in a police compound?’
‘Because people do stupid things. They make errors of judgement and forget about the fine detail.’
‘Do you think that will be enough?’ she said. ‘Why would someone want your car so much that they’d take that risk, and then go on to torch it?’
‘Perhaps some people have just got it in for me,’ he said, glaring now. ‘People develop irrational hatreds.’
‘What were you hiding?’
‘Who said I was hiding anything?’
‘It’ll be the first question on the lips of the jurors: why would he do it if he wasn’t hiding something? What were you trying to destroy?’
Proctor sat back and jabbed jis finger towards Gina. ‘Your job is to check that the prosecution have done their job correctly. No one can make me talk. You know that, I know that. You want to hear the answers, I can see the desperation in your eyes, but I won’t satisfy that. What will it cost me? A fine? A few hours of unpaid work for the community? That means nothing. Tiny ripples, that’s all.’
‘What are you talking about?’
Proctor leaned forward and his hands clasped together. He stared into her eyes. She met his gaze.
‘Sometimes the ripples are more enjoyable than the splash,’ he said. He cocked his head. ‘Making no sense?’ He smiled. ‘I ought to think about getting a new lawyer. Perhaps you’re not as good at your job as you think you are.’
Gina clenched her jaw in frustration.
Proctor gestured towards the door. ‘If you’ve nothing left to add, it looks like our meeting has ended.’
Gina put away her notebook and pen. As she stood to leave, Proctor said, ‘Don’t feel bad. You can’t expect everything to always go your way.’
She rushed out, almost knocking the cup out of Helena’s hand, who was bringing in the drink.
‘Goodbye, Helena,’ Gina said, before rushing through the door.
As she stood on his drive, she took a few deep breaths to calm herself. She was angry. He’d been taunting her, her hands were shaking. She rushed to her car. Once inside, she called Joe.
He answered straight away. ‘So what did you find?’
‘A woman with no voice or authority, happy just to do whatever pleases him. I wouldn’t be surprised if she knew something but chose to ignore it. The house has no character or warmth. But there was a funny thing.’
‘Go on.’
‘As soon as I arrived, she asked me if I was there about the money?’
‘Did she say what she meant?’
‘Kind of,’ she said. ‘Proctor’s a financial investor, but he runs into problems with his clients sometimes. Helena said that he had a different set of accounts, hidden away in a metal box in his workshop at the end of the garden. I’m not surprised. Psychopaths are risk-takers but overestimate their own intelligence. He isn’t going to be doing normal investments. He’ll be running scams of some type. She said there were other things in there too. Photographs and odd things.’
‘His memento stash,’ Joe said. ‘Gerald was sent copies of his daughter’s notebook. But it won’t be there any more. He was burgled.’
‘There might be other things.’
‘Stick to
our plan,’ Joe said. ‘You’re looking into any old cases. Speak to Sam.’
‘Do I mention this?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘And what are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to have a snoop around Proctor’s workshop.’
Fifty-one
Sam rushed into the Incident Room, not wanting to waste any time. There was the packed silence of hard concentration. The latest murder hadn’t been linked officially, but the possibility made everything more serious. The case could become huge – something momentous they would talk about when they got older. To their children and grandchildren, perhaps even to the television cameras: one of those true-crime programmes where just about any murderer gets a profile. Everyone looked up as if they were expecting Sam to give them an update from the new murder. When he went straight to his monitor, they went back to what they were doing.
Sam didn’t meet anyone’s eye. As much as their interest in him could be about updates, it could also be because his brother’s involvement was getting deeper. Were his colleagues looking at him and wondering what he knew, whether he would share it? Sam didn’t have many friends on the team. He was the quiet one by the window, the one who preferred to look for changes in behaviour patterns over knocking on doors.
He retrieved the list of registration numbers picked up on the cameras close to Henry Mason’s murder site. He’d printed them out and folded them under his monitor the day before, waiting for some quiet time to start building a grid, working out the owners and separating them geographically, so that if nothing came up forensically they could quickly work out teams to visit each house.
He was looking for something different now; he was looking for Mark Proctor.
He logged onto the computer and went to the entries for Mark Proctor from a few nights earlier. The statements were on the system, everything done electronically, and he went to the arresting officer’s statement. As he expected, Proctor’s registration number was on there, the car seized and taken to the compound. He scribbled it down on the back of the papers and logged off. He grabbed his papers and headed for the door. He didn’t want Brabham to come back to tell him he was off the team.
As he reached the doorway, someone shouted, ‘Everything all right, Sam?’
‘Just a line of inquiry,’ he shouted back,as he darted along the corridor.
He got in his car and called Gina. ‘On my way,’ he said, and hung up.
It didn’t take long to get to the park where Henry Mason was killed.
There was some twine wrapped around one of the gates. Flowers, Sam guessed, long since stolen. Gina was waiting on a bench just inside the park. Sam held up the sheets of paper as he got closer. ‘Here’s the list.’
‘How close are the cameras?’ Gina said. She didn’t want to tell Sam about the visit to Proctor’s house just yet. She wanted more certainty.
‘There’s one just as you come off the motorway,’ he said. ‘It gets them going off and on. It makes the ring road like a ring of steel. You can’t get in or out without someone knowing about it. There’s another on the way out of town. I got one from the road into Manchester from the next junction along. If we know which junction he used, it will give us a better idea of his movements.’
‘Have you gone through them?’
‘No, not yet,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d wait to see how you were getting on.’
‘Someone is coming here shortly. Someone I trust. He might have something for me.’ She patted the bench next to her. ‘Pull up some wood and make yourself comfortable.’
Sam sat next to her and pulled out the sheets of paper. ‘This is from the camera nearest to here,’ he said, holding up one sheath. ‘If Proctor came from his house, he’d come past that way, but he’s not stupid. He’s avoided capture for a long time, and he hasn’t done that by being predictable. I’ve got the lists from all the closest junctions and the ones in the towns on the way.’ He handed over a scrap of paper with Proctor’s registration on it. ‘Let’s get to it.’
The wind blew the pages as they both looked. Sam was looking for just the last three letters, because that was enough to memorise, and then he examined each entry if he came across it.
Each report ran to nearly a hundred pages, showing registration numbers and the times the vehicles were logged. The time span covered the evening rush hour so the traffic had been busy. Fifteen pages in, with the typed figures starting to blur in front of his eyes, he said, ‘I’ve got it,’ and tapped the sheet with his pen. ‘Proctor came off the motorway and passed the camera just after seven.’
‘Mingled in with the dregs of rush hour.’
‘What time does it get dark?’ Sam said.
‘Just before eight.’
‘He was getting himself in place nice and early. The attack was brutal, and because no one heard any shouting, I reckon Mason was taken by surprise. So Proctor was waiting patiently, and once it was dark, bang, hammer on the head.’
‘I can trump that,’ Gina said, and passed over the sheets of paper she’d been looking at. ‘Just before nine thirty, his car was picked up on the camera at the next junction along. We’ve got him in the car, because he was stopped shortly afterwards, on the way home; so we’ve got him driving towards the murder scene and away from it.’
‘We need more, though,’ Sam said.
The sound of footsteps drew their attention, like the clip of leather soles. A man in a suit strode towards them.
‘Is this your man?’ Sam said.
Gina smiled. ‘Yes. Tim Smith. One of the best detectives I’ve worked with. Just don’t tell him I said that.’
As he got closer, Tim was panting. ‘I can’t stay long.’
‘Good to see you, Tim. I take it you’re not going to the gym much.’
He patted his stomach and grinned, a football of a paunch protruding over his belt. ‘Can you tell?’ He gave Gina the quick up-and-down. ‘You’re looking well.’
‘Don’t lie,’ she said, and she tapped his wedding ring. ‘I’ve got a hangover, I slept badly and my roots need doing. Did you get what I asked for?’
He looked at Sam, hesitant to answer.
‘This is Sam Parker,’ Gina said.
Tim frowned, as if he was trying to remember something, then said, ‘You made the call yesterday, about your sister.’
Sam nodded. There was no point in denying it.
‘You can trust him,’ Gina said.
Tim paused for a moment, but when Gina raised her eyebrows, he relented and pulled out an envelope from his suit jacket. ‘I did my best but I haven’t got much.’
Gina reached out her hand, but Tim pulled the envelope away.
‘What’s it for?’ he said. ‘I can’t do this if it’s to help one of your clients.’ Before Gina could protest, he added, ‘This Proctor guy? You must have known I’d check out his most recent arrest? Honeywells is the name on the custody record. Joe Parker, right?’ Tim nodded towards Sam. ‘I know of Sam because of the call, but why are you working together?’
Sam and Gina exchanged glances, nothing more than twitches of eyelids and the slightest head tilts, but each knew what the other was asking: could they trust Tim? As far as Sam was concerned, if Gina did, that was enough for him.
‘Full disclosure?’ Gina said.
‘Yes, full disclosure,’ Tim said.
‘Yes, Proctor’s a client of the firm. And before you say anything, I’m not trying to get him off with anything. My boss is Joe Parker. Sam’s brother. Ellie’s brother.’
So Gina told Tim about how Joe was convinced that Proctor was Ellie’s killer, and that he was somehow linked to other murders in the city.
‘And Sam couldn’t just find out about Ellie’s case – or Proctor – without this subterfuge? It’s all just a few clicks of the computer mouse away.’
‘Come on,’ Sam said. ‘I can’t go near anything to do with Ellie’s case, and if we get Proctor for it, they might look at the computer trail. You’re on the squad;
you’re entitled to look.’
‘What you mean is that you’ll do the same as searching the computer but in a way that won’t get you found out?’
‘It’s not what you know, it’s what you can prove,’ Sam said. ‘I’m not going to get you into trouble.’
‘So you’re trying to lock up your client, rather than keep him out?’ Tim turned to Gina.
‘Something like that,’ she said.
Tim grinned. ‘If only there were more defence firms like yours,’ he said, and passed Gina the envelope. ‘I can’t let you keep them, but if you happened to make a note of what was on them, who would know?’