MURDER AMONG FRIENDS a totally gripping crime thriller full of twists

by JANICE FROST

  “We didn’t harass anyone,” Adam said. “Where have you got that from? Some feminist types got the wrong idea and accused us of having an agenda that we really didn’t have.”

  “Right. Feminists. Annoying lot, aren’t they?” Steph said.

  Adam didn’t answer. His top lip curled. The notion of women having agency over their own lives was evidently distasteful to him. Steph scrutinised him and was startled to see his face transform, suddenly, into Cal’s. She blinked and the illusion disappeared. But it left her with a sense of deep disquiet. Cal seldom showed his face in the daytime.

  Elias must have noticed her momentary lapse. He took over. “The women you and your clients approach. Do they have any say in the matter? I mean, it’s not like they get to decide who has the right to stop them from just going about their everyday business in the street without being pestered by people like you, do they?”

  “They don’t seem to mind. If I stop a woman in the street and pay her a compliment, nine times out of ten I’ll end up with her phone number. They wouldn’t do that if they didn’t like being approached, would they?”

  “What was your success rate with the men you coached in the ‘art of seduction?’” Steph asked

  “Well, admittedly, not all of them went on to get the girl of their dreams. To be honest with you, a lot of them needed a lot more help than we could offer.” His unsympathetic tone spoke loudly about his real attitude towards these individuals. He didn’t care about the outcomes for them, only about how he could exploit their insecurities for his own gain. In other company, Steph was sure, he would have referred to them as losers.

  “Did any of them ever complain? Ask for their money back? We know you charged. Any of them get aggressive if they didn’t seem to be getting any benefit out of your course? Or did any of them display unusual or disturbing behaviour towards the women?” Elias asked.

  “There was that one bloke,” Phil said, before Adam had a chance to reply. “Remember, Adam?”

  Adam looked displeased. “Him?”

  “Tell us about ‘him,’” Steph said.

  “There’s nothing much to tell,” Phil said. “He attended the initial presentation and went on a bootcamp with us. Unfortunately, he didn’t have much success. He got a bit mouthy with one of the girls he’d approached, then he had a row with Mark. Adam had to step in.”

  “What did he row with Mark about?” she asked.

  “Mark approached a couple of girls first,” Adam said, “just to demonstrate how easy it was. Then this guy had a go and it was like three girls in a row just ignored him. He got a bit nasty with the final one, called her names, you know? Then, he turned on Mark, saying he wasn’t teaching him properly.”

  “Do you remember the man’s name?”

  “Ronan Cox.”

  “Contact details?”

  “No idea. We only asked for names. We got them all to pay up front, so we didn’t have the hassle of chasing them for the money. Anyway, like Phil said, we only ran a couple of sessions before we packed it in through lack of interest.” Adam looked at Steph. “Hey, you don’t think this Ronan Cox killed Mark because he was pissed off about his lack of success after doing the course, do you?”

  It was possible. The man might have harboured a grudge against Mark Ripley, especially after seeing how easily Mark was able to attract the attention of women and how, even when he copied Mark’s technique, he was unable to achieve the same rate of success.

  “So, Adam and I could be next on this psycho’s target list? We always emphasised our own success rate to reassure our clients that we could help them. What if he harbours a grudge against us too?”

  Adam glared at him. “Don’t be stupid, Phil. Mark’s murder has nothing to do with Ronan Cox, or any of our other clients. He was probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time. You ask me, Cox would be more likely to go after the women.”

  Steph changed direction. “One of you, I think it was you, Adam, said earlier that one of the reasons you packed the group in after a couple of sessions was through lack of clients. Was there another reason?”

  Phil and Adam exchanged a glance. Phil looked uneasy.

  “Well?”

  “No,” Adam said.

  Then, “Yes,” Adam and Phil said simultaneously.

  “Which?” Steph looked at Phil.

  “I . . . We found out something about Mark.”

  “Come on! Do we have to drag it out of you?” Steph’s patience was wearing out.

  Phil gave Adam an apologetic look. “He was secretly filming the girls he and our clients approached.”

  Now we’re getting somewhere. “Right. For what purpose?” she said.

  “He said we could use the footage for training purposes. In the follow-up sessions, like, to show clients what they were doing well and badly. Adam and I didn’t agree. We told him to stop.”

  “Did he? What else did he film, Phil?” Phil stared at the carpet. It was left to Adam to answer Steph’s question.

  “He filmed himself having sex with girls. Including some of the ones he approached on the bootcamps. He got a lot of phone numbers.”

  “Right. I take it he did this without their knowledge or consent,” Steph said.

  “Yes.”

  “How did you find out what he was doing?”

  “He’d been boasting about how many women he’d had sex with. He must have thought we didn’t believe him, so he showed us. He actually thought we’d approve. We rowed. I grabbed his phone off him and stamped on it,” Adam said.

  “Did you report what he was doing to anyone?” Steph asked.

  “Phil wanted to. I talked him out of it. Mark said he wouldn’t do it again. We ended up giving him the benefit of the doubt.”

  “Were either of you involved in filming women during sex?” she asked.

  Phil appeared shocked at the suggestion. Adam was angry. “Come on, I just said, didn’t I? Phil and I didn’t want anything to do with that.”

  “You should have reported him.” Elias’s voice was raised. He was looking at Phil. Then, he turned to Adam. “You shouldn’t have talked him out of it.”

  “Was that what got him killed?” Phil sounded feeble and afraid. “Maybe one of the girls found out and . . . and told her boyfriend or her dad, or her brother . . .” His eyes widened. “Or maybe one of them found out somehow and killed him herself.”

  Steph shook her head. “I suggest you leave the theorising to us.”

  “What happened to the phone, Adam? The one you stamped on,” Elias said.

  “I threw it in the river. I can show you where.”

  Great. “Did he have the footage stored elsewhere?” Steph asked.

  “He told us he didn’t, said it was too risky. He didn’t use his regular phone either. He had another one that he kept exclusively for filming.”

  Which would explain why they had found nothing on his laptop.

  “What can you tell us about Mark Ripley’s relationship with a woman named Kylie Bright?” she asked.

  Adam scowled. “There was no relationship between them. Who’ve you been talking to? Lottie Purdey and her mates? I bet that’s who’s told you this crap. There’s not a chance Mark assaulted that girl. Filmed her maybe, but he wouldn’t have forced himself on her. He didn’t have to. Women lined up begging him for it and Kylie was no different. I should also point out that when we ran the group, we were really big on consent. And respect. We drummed that into our clients from day one.”

  Steph was speechless. Elias asked, “Which mates of Lottie’s were you referring to just then?”

  “Ivy Cross and her loser boyfriend, Tristan Morley.”

  “Tristan was one of your clients. He disapproved of your methods. He told us Mark encouraged him to approach underage girls. And he suspected Mark was filming the girls, though he didn’t have any proof.”

  Steph noticed the muscles in Adam’s jaw tauten. “Yeah, and look who he ended up with. That little . . .”

  �
��You were saying? Do I take it you don’t approve of Ivy?” Steph said.

  “All three of them are morons. They tried to sabotage one of our bootcamps by turning up and protesting, and Lottie Purdey posted stuff online about us. Fake information, I might add.”

  “Like what?” Steph asked.

  “She writes a feminist blog. She did a post about staying safe on campus and all but called me, Mark and Phil out as sexual predators and perverts. She didn’t exactly name us but she dropped plenty of hints.”

  Steph thought it interesting that Lottie, Ivy and Tristan hadn’t mentioned the blog. Then again, they had just heard the news of their friend’s murder.

  “Talking of perverts,” she said, “what’s your response to what DS Harper just said? That, according to Tristan, Mark encouraged him to approach a young woman who was obviously underage?”

  “No way that’s true,” Adam said. “Tell them, Phil.” Phil dutifully shook his head. “He’s talking out of his arse.”

  “Right.” There was no point in pushing the matter with Phil acting as Adam’s puppet.

  “You know what, maybe it’s those three you should be investigating for Mark’s murder. They’ve got extremist views. Maybe they went after Mark because of the lies Kylie Bright told them about him.” Adam looked supremely pleased with himself for coming up with this theory. “You could start with speaking to Kylie.”

  “Kylie’s dead.” Steph looked Adam in the eye. “She was murdered.”

  “What the fuck?” Phil exclaimed, hands to his head.

  “So, what are you doing here?” Adam’s sang-froid was slightly unnerving. “When you could be out looking for real suspects.”

  “Oh, believe me, we are looking for ‘real’ suspects,” Steph said. “Can the pair of you confirm your whereabouts last night?”

  “We were both here. Our flatmate can vouch for us. We were gaming into the early hours.”

  “Is your flatmate in?” He was. They called him down and he backed them up.

  “I think that’s all for now. Just one more thing, have either of you heard of Ryan Brown?” They shook their heads. Steph looked at Elias. He had no other questions. “Right. That’s all then. We’ll be in touch.”

  They saw themselves out and walked back to Monks Road.

  “Adam’s arrogance got me riled,” Steph admitted “They got to you, too, I think.”

  “I told you, I was brought up by women,” Elias said. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s to be able to view men from a woman’s perspective. And that there’s more than one way of being a man.”

  “That’s two things.”

  Elias smiled. “Actually, they taught me almost everything I know. Look, I just don’t want you thinking I’m like that pair back there.”

  “Okay. I haven’t known you very long, but I picked up straightaway that you weren’t like a lot of men I’ve met. You have respect for women.”

  “It’s what I’m used to,” Elias said. “The women who brought me up taught me respect, and that I didn’t need to conform to traditional male stereotypes in order to be a ‘real’ man.”

  “You’re so woke.”

  “I do my best.” They exchanged a smile.

  Fearing they might actually start bonding, Steph reverted to the case. “Sounds like Adam and co. had some pretty dissatisfied customers, doesn’t it? Doesn’t say much for their skill as trainers.”

  “Hmm. They probably watched a few videos on YouTube and fancied themselves ideally suited to the job. Hashed together a pep talk and assumed the bootcamp would be a piece of cake. Coaching pick-up skills probably seemed a more attractive proposition than getting a proper job to supplement their student finances. Mind you, I got the impression that Phil’s heart wasn’t really in it. Adam, not so much. He’s a cool customer.”

  “I agree. So, what did you think of Adam’s insinuation that Lottie and friends could have murdered Mark?”

  “Somewhat far-fetched. I think it was a feeble attempt to bounce the blame elsewhere, but I also think we need to seriously consider that these murders are linked in some way. There’s the number of connections between Lottie and her friends, and the fact that Mark Ripley was a member of Adam’s little gang. Then there’s Ryan Brown, although none of them claims to have heard of him.”

  He didn’t mention Jane Bell, Steph noted, but she was another link in the chain, it seemed. “Maybe we need to find out if there’s anything else Jane Bell knows that she’s not telling us about. If she’d told us about Kylie sooner, we’d have connected her to Mark sooner.”

  “Do you really think so?” Elias’s tone was borderline insubordinate. And he’d omitted to say ‘boss.’

  Steph didn’t comment. She wasn’t confident she could justify her claim. Whatever bonding may have taken place between them earlier had gone.

  Chapter Seventeen

  A trawl of the usual databases had failed to find a suitable match for Ronan Cox. Which led Elias to state the obvious at the team briefing. “He must have given a false name to Ripley and his friends.”

  A murmur of amusement rippled around the room, a “You don’t say?” and the predictable, “Nice work, Sherlock,” until Steph brought them to order.

  “All right, that’s enough, you lot. Get back to work.”

  They needed to interview Ronan Cox. An interview with Ryan Brown had yielded no new information. Ryan hadn’t known Mark, Adam or any of their crowd. He’d never heard of Ronan Cox, and he had a solid alibi for the time of both murders.

  PC Fairbairn had been in touch with the restaurant Kylie and Ryan had visited on the night of Ryan’s attack. Frustratingly, they’d deleted their CCTV footage of that evening before the recommended thirty days.

  Adam Eades had given the police a list of the pick-up group’s clients. The pair claimed only to have organised three bootcamps in all. There had been three or four clients per bootcamp. They had already interviewed Tristan Morley, but there were a number of others to track down. Steph was most interested in the ones who had been in the same group as Cox. She elected to interview these, accompanied by Elias. The rest she assigned to other members of the team.

  The first man they interviewed was another student, Scott Brocklehurst, shortish, overweight, diffident. In a roomful of people, he would be the one no one remembered. He remembered Ronan Cox.

  “He started to get agitated after he’d approached two women in a row and they basically ignored him. That was when he got sort of jittery, like he couldn’t keep still. Maybe he was on drugs or something. I thought afterwards that maybe he was just bursting with frustration and had to keep moving to contain it.” He added an unfortunate afterthought. “Couldn’t really blame him though. Those women were disrespectful.”

  “How so?” Steph asked.

  Brocklehurst shrugged. “They just thought they were too good to talk to us. I’d have thought they’d be all over Ronan, mind. He was the type women usually go for. You know, big, muscly, but I guess he did come across as a bit aggressive. Maybe they sensed that about him.”

  “How do you know what their thoughts were? Maybe they were on an errand from work and didn’t have time to stop. Maybe they just wanted to get on with their daily lives without being harassed.” Steph wondered if it had ever occurred to Scott that a woman had a right to go about her everyday business without being pestered by predatory men.

  “He only asked them for directions.”

  Oh Please. “Do you know how many times men have stopped me in the street to ask for directions and then pressed me for my phone number?”

  “That’s a compliment, isn’t it?” Scott said. He’d missed her point entirely.

  Elias said, “What happened on his third attempt?”

  “Well, he went up to this woman and politely asked if she could give him directions to the train station. It was obvious she didn’t want to stop, but at the last moment, she did. She told him how to get there, then he said something else to her and she shook her head and
just started to walk away.”

  How dare she? Steph felt a surge of anger towards these men and their sense of entitlement. What on earth was disrespectful in not wanting to hang around talking to a complete stranger who’d accosted you on the street? Only her training and her sense of professionalism prevented her from showing Scott the true meaning of disrespect.

  “What did he say to her? Was he using a script he’d rehearsed beforehand?” Elias asked.

  “Yes. He was supposed to tell her she had pretty hair, I think, but I didn’t hear what he actually said.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Ronan called after her. Again, I didn’t catch what he said, but she looked angry. She turned around, and I think she said something back. That’s when Ronan grabbed her by the arm.”

  Eades and Adam had made no mention of this. “Roughly?” Steph said.

  “Maybe a bit. Yeah, probably. I would say so, yes.”

  “Then what happened?” Elias asked.

  “That’s when it turned a bit nastier. She tried to shake him off. I think she told him he was hurting her, but he wouldn’t let go. He started calling her names.”

  “What names?”

  “You know, like ‘Stuck-up bitch.’ I don’t know, whore, maybe. Other things.” He looked uncomfortable. “I didn’t approve of that, just so’s you know.”

  “Right. Was that when Mark intervened?”

  “Yes. Ronan had gone way off script. You’re not supposed to do that, even if the woman disrespects you.”

  At least some standards had been set. Steph almost laughed. “And Ronan was aggressive to Mark?”

  “A bit. He didn’t get much chance though. Mark grappled with him. I guess he thought Ronan might go for the girl. Adam and Phil helped. They held Ronan until he got himself under control. It took a while. Then they told him they were chucking him off the course.”

  “So, Ronan didn’t return to the group for the follow-up session?”

  “No. I never saw him after that.”

  “Never? You haven’t seen him around town any time?”

  “No.” He looked suddenly appalled. “You think he was the one who killed Mark? Is that why you’re asking me all these questions?” Scott was a slow processor.