Seven Bridges

by LJ Ross

  She took her time wiping her feet and chose not to answer.

  “Is your wife at home, too? It would be easier to discuss these things together.”

  “Yes, I’ll just go and get her—she’s having a lie down upstairs. If you just have a seat in the living room, I’ll not be a minute.”

  She wandered through to the lounge and took an idle glance around the room, noting the numerous framed photographs of children and grandchildren before coming to stand in front of one in particular which showed Jack and his older brother, Paul, dressed in their school uniform and posing for a photograph sometime in the early nineties. The room itself was like any other of its type; the chimney breast had been painted in a bold shade of green while the rest of the room was papered in a floral mix that seemed to be all the rage. A large, flat-screen television was fixed to the chimney breast and there was a vague smell of furniture polish. Somewhere, the radio was playing ‘Sounds of the Seventies’ and the strains of The Eagles singing about a hotel in California drifted through the house.

  A moment later, she heard their footsteps coming downstairs.

  “DCI Tebbutt? Sorry to keep you waiting. I was feeling a bit under the weather, so I was lying down.”

  “Sorry to disturb you, Mrs Lowerson,” she said, politely. “Shall we sit down, here?”

  “Oh, yes, of course. Would you like some tea?”

  “It’s very kind of you but, no, I had some before I came.”

  They each took a seat and Tebbutt watched Wendy reach across to take her husband’s hand, preparing herself for whatever news would come.

  She cleared her throat.

  “I have some bad news,” she said. “It concerns your son.”

  They looked at each other and she watched their eyes fill with tears, no doubt imagining the worst.

  “What do you mean?” Wendy whispered, clutching her other hand to her chest. “What’s happened to Jack?”

  Tebbutt paused for effect.

  “Well, it’s looking very much like he made false statements to the police and that, in doing so, he has perverted the course of justice.”

  There was only a momentary relief for the woman who had borne him.

  “He’s—nothing’s happened to him, though? He’s alright?”

  “That rather depends what you mean by, ‘alright’, doesn’t it, Wendy?” Tebbutt replied. “His professional standing is badly damaged, and he may never work for the police again.”

  “But wait a minute—he made a confession,” Dave spoke up. “Are you saying that confession was false? That you think he didn’t kill that woman, after all?”

  There had been doubt in his mind, Tebbutt realised. His own father had begun to doubt him, and she suddenly felt a deep sympathy for the young man who was on a twenty-four-hour suicide watch back at Police Headquarters.

  “I don’t just think it, Mr Lowerson, I know he didn’t kill Jennifer Lucas,” Tebbutt said, and watched the changing expressions on both of their faces.

  If there had been any doubt, now she knew for sure.

  “How? Have you found the person who really did it?” Wendy asked.

  “Oh, yes, most definitely.”

  “Then, who?” Dave asked.

  Tebbutt only smiled.

  “Let me start by explaining a little bit about DNA, in very simple terms. Now, I don’t know how much you both know about the way we do things but, once we’ve taken samples at a crime scene, we test it to isolate the unique DNA. In this case, we found a lot of hair and tiny, tiny trace samples from a person’s fingers and skin particles. A person who, by rights, shouldn’t have touched Lucas’s body in the way they did.”

  They were both silent, listening intently as the postman pushed some letters through the letterbox in the front door with a loud clatter. Nobody noticed.

  “Jack gave us a sample of his blood as well as a buccal swab for DNA when he first came in; you remember, when he was protesting his innocence. When he had no reason not to give a sample.”

  They both nodded.

  “We compared his sample with the DNA we were able to recover from Jennifer Lucas’s body and those results came back this morning. There was a match.”

  “A match to Jack’s?” his father said. “Well, there’s bound to be, he lived there a lot of the time. His hair will be all over the place—”

  As he rushed to defend his son, Tebbutt thought that, when all was said and done, it would be something for Jack to hold on to.

  “But it wasn’t his hair, Mr Lowerson. The match was only a partial match. The only circumstances in which we find that kind of match is when there’s a familial link. Then, it’s just a case of isolating which one.”

  Wendy and David looked at each other with dazed, uncomprehending eyes.

  “You’re—you’re saying it’s one of Jack’s family?”

  Tebbutt nodded.

  “It’s amazing how things have progressed in recent years,” she said, conversationally, then looked Wendy Lowerson directly in the eye. “We knew it was you, Wendy, because the DNA we found is female. To be a positive, fifty percent match to Jack’s own DNA, it could only belong to his mother.”

  There was a heavy silence in the room as they struggled to accept what she had told them.

  “This is a bloody outrage,” David ground out. “First, you try and pin this on my boy and now you’ve got the nerve to come into my house and try to blame my wife?”

  He looked over at Wendy, wondering why she didn’t defend herself, why she continued to say nothing.

  Say something, Wendy, he thought. Please, God, say something.

  “I wanted to come here, to your home, to give you the opportunity to do the right thing,” Tebbutt said quietly. “I’m going to ask you once, informally, and it will be the last courtesy I give you. Did either your husband or your son know that you were responsible?”

  David began to shake with emotion as he looked at his wife, at the woman he’d loved for over thirty years. The mother to his children.

  She turned to him and tears began to spill over.

  “Wendy?”

  “I-I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

  Tebbutt watched his face crumble, watched a grown man of sixty-five break down as his life shattered into pieces around him. She had her answer: David Lowerson had not known what his wife had done, nor what she was capable of.

  Wendy watched the light die in her husband’s eyes, that light she loved so much, and knew then that nothing mattered any more. She had ruined everything, through one single act of madness.

  “Jack rang me,” she whispered, and they strained to hear her. “He told me about the cat. That silly cat he loved so much. For the first time, he poured it all out, everything. He didn’t know where to turn, Dave,” she said. “So, he came to his mother.”

  They remained silent, letting her purge herself of the awful truth.

  “He said he was going for a walk, to clear his head,” she said, in a colourless voice. “So, I took my chance. He said she would be at home later in the afternoon and that he planned to speak to her that evening. I decided to get there first.”

  “You didn’t go shopping.”

  Wendy raised her hand as if to touch her husband’s face, but he flinched away from her and she let out a sob.

  “No, love,” she said. “I didn’t go shopping.”

  “What happened when you got there?”

  “I only wanted to talk to her,” she said. “She answered the door and, do you know what? She acted so nice, at first. ‘Hello, Mrs Lowerson,’ she said. ‘What a lovely surprise.’ ”

  Wendy let out an ugly laugh.

  “It was the first and only time I’d ever been invited inside. I think she was curious; she wanted to know how much he’d told me and, who knows? Maybe she wanted to torture me a little, too.”

  “You talked?” Tebbutt prompted her, when Wendy fell silent.

  She looked up.

  “Yes, yes we talked. She had a cup of coffee
in her hand and offered me some. I told her I wasn’t planning on staying long, I only wanted to tell her she should leave my son alone. ‘He’s too good for you,’ I told her. ‘He deserves better.’ She said…she called me terrible names, said I was just like every other molly-coddling mother on the face of the Earth and that I should try letting Jack make his own decisions. I-I don’t know, I just lost my temper,” she said, and dashed tears from her eyes. “She was standing very close to me, as close as you are now,” she told her husband, who was still seated beside her. “She was taunting me, telling me all the things…well, all the things they’d done together. She was doing it to upset me, I know she was. I shoved her away from me. ‘Get away,’ I think I said. ‘Get away from me.’ ”

  Wendy closed her eyes as she thought back to the awful sound of Lucas’s head cracking against the side of the radiator.

  “I didn’t think I’d pushed her hard—just enough to give us some space,” Wendy said. “But—but then, she was falling. She dropped her cup on the floor and I think something else shattered, and then there was this awful sound, a terrible sound…”

  “Wendy,” her husband whispered, and held his head in his hands.

  “Don’t cry, Dave, please don’t cry,” she crooned. “I did it for Jack. I did it to protect him.”

  He simply shook his head.

  “What happened after she fell?” Tebbutt asked.

  “She was lying there, and the blood just started pouring from her head,” Wendy whispered. “She’d done something to her leg—her ankle maybe. She was trying to say something, maybe asking for help, but then her eyes sort of rolled back and she stopped moving. I just stood there; I panicked, and I started to call for an ambulance. But then, I thought, they’ll send me to jail. I’ve spent my life trying to be a decent person, a decent friend, wife and mother. She was evil, she brought nothing but pain. Why should I be punished? It didn’t seem fair.”

  “That wasn’t for you to decide,” Dave said, and took the words right out of Tebbutt’s mouth. It had not been her decision to make.

  “Yes, it was,” Wendy argued, twisting her hands together in her lap. “It was like seeing a fallen horse, or an animal writhing in pain. I decided to put her out of her misery, to be sure.”

  “What did you do?”

  Wendy looked down at her hands and could remember the terrible power she’d felt, the intense satisfaction as she’d taken Lucas’ head and rammed it back onto the edge of the radiator.

  Once, then twice.

  “I took a fistful of her hair and hit her head against the radiator a couple of times, to make sure she was dead.”

  David had the look of a man who might faint, or vomit, and Tebbutt spoke briefly into her radio to ask her sergeant to join them.

  “All the while Jack was accused, you knew,” David said, bitterly. “All the while he sat inside a cell, lonely and confused, you knew. He guessed—I don’t know how he must have guessed—and tried to take the blame on his own shoulders because he loves you so much. And you let him, you let your own flesh and blood risk life imprisonment for what you did.”

  Wendy burst into a flood of fresh tears.

  “Please, Dave, it wasn’t like that. Please listen.”

  But he stood up and walked away from her to stand at the window with his back to the room.

  “How did he guess, Wendy? Do you know?” Tebbutt tried one final question.

  “I had some blood on the bottom of my jeans,” she explained. “I’d put them in the laundry basket and planned to wash them. Usually, I’m the one to do the washing around here. But when I came home the other day, I found he’d done a big wash-load for me. He must have seen them. It’s the only thing I can think of.”

  “What will happen to Jack now?” his father asked.

  “Well, I’ll need to speak to the Crown Prosecution Service and see about that.”

  “My son is a good man,” he said. “Please…I know we don’t have the right to ask for anything but…” his voice broke and he was unable to continue.

  Tebbutt rose to her feet.

  “Wendy Lowerson, I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Jennifer Lucas on Saturday 10th February. You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”

  David didn’t turn around, even as Wendy was led from the room.

  CHAPTER 37

  When Ryan and MacKenzie returned to the Incident Room, the sun was beginning to set. It filled the room with mellow light and, just for a moment, it lifted their spirits. The city was still locked down with no access across the bridges. Petty crime sprees continued, creating pressure within the police ranks that came to bear on those who were tasked with bringing the madness to an end. They had already been intercepted by the Chief Constable, who had heard of Nobel’s arrest and was ever-optimistic that they had turned the corner. She had been less than impressed when Ryan told her he had reservations about them having found the right culprit and had handed him a stern lecture about having been spoilt by too many high-speed, high-octane murder hunts.

  “Sometimes, Ryan, it’s just the most obvious suspect,” she’d said. “Nobel ticks all the boxes. What the hell do you want? A sign on his forehead saying, ‘I DID IT’?”

  No, he didn’t need a confession or a helpful sign from God. He just needed the facts to match up with the killer’s psychology, and it seemed he wasn’t the only one who had his doubts.

  “Heard you arrested the Cap,” Wilson said, when they re-entered the room.

  Ryan swore the walls in Police Headquarters had eyes.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Seems that bad news travels fast in this place.”

  Kevin took a slurp of coke and scratched the heel of his hand against his forehead, looking as though he had the weight of the world on his shoulders.

  “Look, I’ve gotta be straight with you,” he said. “When I found out Gaz knew that girl, Kayleigh, I thought he was an idiot not to mention it. I mean, I get that he didn’t want his wife to know because that’d break up his family, but not telling you about it crossed the line.”

  “I’m glad we agree on that,” Ryan said, with an edge to his voice. “I hope you’re not building up to telling us you know one of the other victims?”

  Kevin gave a short laugh.

  “No, don’t worry. I was just going to say that, if you’d asked me, ‘Hey, Kev, is Gary the type of bloke to cheat on his wife?’ then, yeah, I’ll be honest and say he probably was. He was always a Ladies Man.” He gave another short laugh and toasted his can of coke. “Just ask Sue.”

  MacKenzie frowned.

  “Not Sue Bannerman?”

  “The very same,” he said. “They were on tour together in Afghanistan eight years ago and they kept each other warm at night, or so he says. After they both got posted into EOD up here, they had a casual thing going on during the week. Like I said, Gary’s got a way with the ladies.”

  “With some ladies,” MacKenzie corrected him.

  “Right. But, I mean, to kill like that? I’ll be honest with you guys, I don’t think he has it in him.”

  “He killed as part of his service in the army, didn’t he?” Ryan said.

  Wilson merely shook his head.

  “It’s different, man. Over there, you’re fighting for Queen and Country. You’re defending people, you’re following orders. It’s all in the line of duty. It’s not the same as planning something as cold-blooded as that.”

  “People can surprise you,” MacKenzie said.

  Wilson gave a small shrug.

  “I guess you’re right. Look, I just wanted to get that off my chest, anyhow.”

  “We’ll bear it in mind,” Ryan assured him, and when Wilson moved off again he turned back to MacKenzie with a frown.

  “What’s your take on it, Mac? I have to say, I agree with him. Gary Nobel is a smarmy, opinionated git with a chauvinist view
of women and he probably wouldn’t make my Christmas card list. He’s also got a short fuse, which is precisely why I can’t see him planning the kind of execution-style murder that happened this morning. I also can’t see him delaying gratification and plotting two other bombings, purely to set up the third.”

  MacKenzie thought of the psychology of the killer they hunted and nodded slowly.

  “You’re right,” she said. “And most damningly, he’s just not smart enough to plan and successfully execute the kind of large-scale chaos we’ve seen over the past few days. It doesn’t feel right. But, if not Nobel, then it’s back to the drawing board, isn’t it? We need to look again at those victims and see which one was the link. It could take months.”

  Ryan ran a tired hand over the back of his neck.

  “For now, let’s look out the CCTV footage of Kayleigh-Ann Dobson’s apartment building. If Nobel was where he said he was…” He sighed heavily. “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. No pun intended,” he added, with the flash of a smile.

  “Speaking of CCTV, Frank’s been supervising the review of all the fresh footage that’s been coming in,” MacKenzie said. “Something may turn up.”

  “That’s about as likely as Frank giving up bacon butties,” he said, to make her laugh, before strolling across the room to see his sergeant.

  * * *

  Phillips was staring fixedly at the screen of his laptop computer and his desk space bore the evidence of several hours’ worth of drinking fizzy pop and chewing nicotine gum, judging by the small mountain of foil wrappers lying discarded beside him. It was getting easier now to handle the old pangs but, every so often, the cravings came back in times of stress.

  And it had been a particularly stressful few days.

  He ticked off another piece of footage and moved on to the next, which happened to be a batch of recordings from the bus company which operated all the major routes through the city centre of Newcastle and across the bridges into Gateshead.

  “Any luck, Frank?”

  He looked up when Ryan approached.

  “Nothing yet, lad. I keep hoping to see some bloke tiptoeing onto the bridges with a black bag saying ‘TNT’ on the side, like in the old Bugs Bunny cartoons, but no such luck.”