Silent as the Grave

by Paul Gitsham

  Sheehy shook his head. “No. What I have is for your ears only.”

  “If that’s your attitude, how about I run you down the station and charge you with obstruction and help myself to the information?”

  Sheehy snorted derisively. “Investigation going well, is it? Lots of suspects all lined up?”

  The man was right. They had drawn a complete blank; whatever information Sheehy possessed about the old man’s murder, Warren needed to know it.

  Warren looked at him long and hard.

  “How do I know you didn’t kill Reggie Williamson? That you’re not some deranged killer who’s going to stab me as soon as we move on?”

  “If you thought that, you wouldn’t be sitting here with me, even with a van full of rugby players three spaces along and Gary staring all gooey-eyed at that new detective constable over in the beer garden.”

  Warren’s mind raced through the possibilities, but he’d already made his mind up. He slipped the car into gear.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I’ll point; you drive.” Sheehy wasn’t silly enough to announce their destination to whoever may be listening. He raised his voice.

  “And if that’s you on the other end of DCI Jones’s open radio link, Grayson, tell the officers parked at either end of the road to stay where they are. And it’s a clear day with good visibility. I’ll see the chopper a mile off and you can kiss goodbye any information that I’m going to give him.”

  Sheehy put a hand out. “Remove the earpiece. Save yourself an earbashing.”

  “Do as he says,” instructed Warren to the surveillance team, a small part of him enjoying the sudden silencing of DSI Grayson’s squawking as he pulled his hidden earpiece out and Sheehy tossed it out the window. He’d get it in the neck when he returned to the station, but he’d deal with that then. Hopefully the information Sheehy claimed to have would be worth it.

  * * *

  Sheehy’s directions had been by hand gesture only; he was too experienced to think that Warren’s earpiece was the only open communication channel from the vehicle. After passing the unmarked cars at the top end of the street—the officers glared openly, but made no immediate move to follow them—they were soon heading towards the north end of town. It didn’t take Warren long to work out where they were headed.

  “It’s a lovely evening, Warren. You won’t need your coat.”

  Warren sighed, tossing the heavy jacket with its hidden microphone onto the rear seat. He pointedly didn’t remove the blue stab vest, but as they left the Mondeo in the small car park on the edge of Middlesbury Common he was uncomfortably aware that he was leaving behind his last means of communication with the surveillance team. He was going to have a lot of explaining to do when he got back.

  “Is that where Reggie Williamson was killed?”

  It was a rhetorical question—blue-and-white police tape still fluttered in the breeze.

  Aside from a few young boys kicking a football at a makeshift goal made from rolled-up jumpers at the other end of the open field, the two men were now alone in the middle of the common. Nobody could possibly overhear them and Sheehy would have plenty of warning if anyone tried to approach.

  “Well I’m here. What have you got?”

  Warren’s tone was testy. So far Sheehy had been in charge and Warren was determined to regain the initiative.

  “I can point you towards the killer, but first I need a promise from you. I need your word.”

  Warren stared at him for several seconds, searching the man’s face.

  “What sort of promise?”

  “I need your help.”

  Warren thought for a long moment. It didn’t take a detective to work out what the man was after. But what did he think Warren could do?

  “What’s in it for me? How do I know that you even have the information you claim?”

  “A show of good faith. I can identify the person who ordered Reggie Williamson’s death and another killing you aren’t even aware of. Then, after you help me I have other information. Information that you don’t even know that you want yet.”

  “What sort of information?”

  Sheehy shook his head. “First you have to help me clear my name.”

  It was exactly what Warren had been expecting but he was confused. “I don’t see what I can do to help. I have no influence on the outcome of the investigation. It’s in the hands of Professional Standards; in fact I’d even question whether it is appropriate for us to be having this conversation.”

  “You’re the only one I can turn to, Warren. This whole thing is not about whether or not I took a bribe. It goes much, much deeper than that. It’s not even about clearing my name. It’s about righting an injustice and making sure that evil men are put away for a long time.”

  Warren ignored the man’s familiar use of his first name and his attempt at stirring rhetoric; he wasn’t naïve enough to be persuaded by that old trick.

  “Again, I don’t see what I can do to help you—Standards are investigating the case and I have no access to their files or even their officers—by definition they have to be free from outside influence. I doubt they’d even grant me an audience. I didn’t arrive until months after your arrest—this is the first time I’ve met you. Why the hell would they listen to me?”

  He was starting to lose patience with the man. He was clearly a drinker and obviously clutching at straws. This afternoon’s operation had cost the force a considerable amount of manpower and resources; if Sheehy had nothing to contribute to the Williamson case, then Warren was strongly contemplating arresting him for wasting police time. He said as much.

  “Warren, I can help with the Williamson case and others, but it has to benefit both of us. I need you to help me fight these charges.”

  Warren shook his head in exasperation. “Haven’t you listened to anything I’ve said? I can’t intervene on your behalf. I have no influence here. You must know this. I don’t understand why you want me to become involved.”

  Sheehy looked at him for several long, hard seconds. When he spoke again, his voice was low, almost gentle. “Warren, you are already involved. You’ve been a part of this since the moment you walked into that garage and found your dad dead in his car.”

  * * *

  It was as if Warren had been punched in the stomach. All of the air left his lungs and he felt a wave of nausea pass over him. Immediately, the memories flooded back. He could taste the coppery tang of fear, feel the painful pounding of his heart, smell the choking exhaust fumes as they filled his nose and mouth. It was a smell that to this day Warren hated. As a teenager out clubbing in Coventry he’d always make sure he was upwind of the taxi rank, the smell of their idling engines making him feel sick. He’d loathed the old Pool Meadow bus station, with its lines of chugging buses filling the air with smoky pollution.

  Somehow, he found a voice, forcing it past the tightness of his throat. “You have ten seconds to explain yourself before I arrest you for wasting police time.”

  Sheehy ignored him. “What do you know about your father and his death?”

  The voice that answered sounded like Warren’s but it seemed to come from a long way away. “He killed himself after stealing money from a drugs bust.” The voice dripped with bitterness and resentment.

  “What if I told you that he didn’t kill himself? That he never stole that money.”

  If Warren hadn’t felt so weak and disoriented he’d have punched the man in the face as hard as he could. Could the man stoop any lower, invoking the name of Warren’s father in a crude attempt to manipulate Warren into helping him? It was nearly a quarter of a century ago and Warren had suppressed his feelings for much of that time, but they never went away. And they hadn’t softened. The hurt, the betrayal then finally the anger and, yes, even hatred towards his father. The man he’d admired and looked up to, even wanted to be when he was older—that man had torn Warren’s world apart. To know that his father had chosen to leave them had hurt so ha
rd—that he had been unable to save him had hurt even more.

  And then came the revelations. Thousands of pounds seized in a drugs bust, half of it going missing between the crime scene and the evidence room at the police station. His father’s gym bag, housing sweaty towels, stained T-shirts—and wads of fifty-pound notes wrapped in elastic bands.

  Quite why his father had decided not to collect the bag from his locker—he would probably have gotten away with it—instead choosing to kill himself, was never satisfactorily answered. Perhaps he had stolen the money on a whim, then felt guilt at what he had done? Unable to face the shame, he’d taken his life that early summer evening.

  That was what his mother had clung onto, even as she saw her husband’s memory destroyed, as friends from the force stopped calling or avoided talking to her when they bumped into her in the street. The name Niall MacNamara was toxic and Warren wanted nothing to do with it.

  “Leave now, before I make you.” It was all Warren could do to force the words past his clenched teeth. He no longer cared about Reggie Williamson, he just wanted this man out of his life; he could feel the sweat on his brow. It was as if Sheehy had slammed a wrecking ball into Warren’s carefully constructed defences, bringing down the walls. Warren needed time to rebuild them, to reconstruct the ancient structure.

  Sheehy ignored him. “Warren, your father was a good man; he was an honest man. He wasn’t a thief…and he didn’t kill himself. I know this. I’ve known it for twenty years. And everything that’s happened recently—it all stems back to what happened that night.”

  Warren closed his eyes, concentrating on breathing. He wanted nothing more than to race back to his car, to leave in a cloud of burning rubber and run and hide. But he couldn’t. The memories from that horrific evening had left their mark, but now another scar was itching. One he’d ignored but which was now shouting for attention. Why? Why had it happened? He had to know. He was trapped. If he left now, refusing to let Sheehy talk, he could never have peace. A long-dormant seed had started to germinate and he had to know the truth.

  “I knew your father back in the late eighties. We met about two years before…you know. I was a young DC, with only a couple of years’ experience.”

  Sheehy stared at his feet. “I was working in North Herts, but I was seconded to West Midlands as part of a small team working as liaisons on the investigation into a huge, cross-county crime ring. Your father was a senior detective sergeant on that team and we worked closely together.” Sheehy raised his head, looking Warren directly in the eye. “He was a good man. And I liked him a lot.”

  Warren didn’t trust himself to speak.

  “It was a massive enterprise. Basically, it was modelled on the Italian Mafia: drugs, prostitution, stolen goods—you name it; these guys did it. And they were ruthless, anyone who crossed them ended up dead.

  “But they were also clever. All of the action was taking place in the West Midlands—Birmingham, Coventry, Nuneaton. But the guy who headed it lived in North Herts and was ostensibly a legitimate businessman. He owned a string of restaurants, fast-food places, leisure centres, B&Bs, minicab firms—you name it. He partnered local tradesmen. All cash businesses. All built from scratch or bought legitimately, with no links to the Midlands and no evidence of any wrongdoing. They even had a charitable foundation, helping unemployed kids learn skills and trades. Local politicians loved him and he was on the front page of the local newspaper at least once a week.

  “But, we knew the bastard was a crook. The Hertfordshire businesses were just a front and a way of laundering money. Back in those days you could move money around a hell of a lot more easily than now and a secret Swiss bank account really was a secret. He was worth millions. And he was a murderer. We knew of cases going back to the nineteen seventies—drug dealers mostly but the odd prostitute as well.

  “The problem was we couldn’t prove it. He covered his tracks too well. And he rarely got his own hands dirty. We busted a few dealers here and there, but there was never any direct link to him. Witnesses had a tendency to suddenly develop amnesia or even to disappear. We were going nowhere fast. We needed a break.”

  Sheehy paused. “You have to realise, Warren, that we knew this guy was filthy. In fact we had tons of evidence that placed him right in the centre of his little ring. Most of the grunt work was carried out by his right-hand man, but it was him that we wanted. What we didn’t have though was the one remaining piece that would open up everything else. He was too high profile for us just to go on a fishing expedition—we’d never get a warrant to search his house or business premises. And that was what we needed. With a warrant we would be able to raid him and that would be enough to open a bridge between the evidence we had and him. But without that information, we didn’t have enough to get a warrant. Catch-22.”

  Warren didn’t like the sound of this. Where was it leading? He also had a suspicion about who Sheehy was talking about—and the implications were massive.

  “What did you do?” His voice was slow, steady.

  Sheehy licked his lips nervously. “Although he kept his hands clean most of the time, it wasn’t always that way. Back in the early eighties, he was dabbling in the club scene—supplying drugs to clubbers. The problem was that if you really wanted to make money, you needed the clubs—or at least the door staff—on your side. And most of the clubs that were willing to take part were already under the control of a guy named Frankie Cruise.

  “He approached him about a partnership, but Cruise was an arrogant bastard and wouldn’t play ball. In the end, he shot Cruise dead. The mess was all cleaned up of course, but everyone knew what had happened. In fact he encouraged the rumours to enhance his own reputation. But obviously, that wasn’t good enough for court and no judge was going to grant us a warrant based on that. Especially not for someone so high profile and well connected; he knew where all the skeletons were buried.

  “However, ballistics recovered a nearly intact bullet from Cruise after his body floated back to the surface in Coventry Canal. It was no good to us without a gun though.

  “Then in mid 1987, we got word that he had been boasting at a party he was hosting at that Hertfordshire mansion of his, about how he had killed a man. He must have really wanted to impress his guests because he eventually went up to his bedroom and fetched the handgun that he claimed to have used to kill Cruise. He was brandishing it like some sort of trophy.”

  Sheehy paused. “Your father and I knew that was the weapon he had used, and that it was the final piece of evidence that could blow the whole case open. But we still couldn’t get a warrant. We were told it was just hearsay. The PACE regulations were still fairly new and nobody wanted to be seen to be harassing such a prominent local figure.

  “So we made contact with his handyman, who was unhappy with the way he was being treated. We persuaded him to steal the gun, which was kept in his bedroom.”

  Sheehy, looked away, unable to meet Warren’s eye.

  “You have to realise, we knew that he was guilty. We had so much evidence. That all came out at his trial. It just needed a catalyst to start everything working.”

  “So you planted the gun and framed him for murder.” Warren’s voice was bitter. He felt sick.

  But Sheehy was shaking his head vehemently. “No! We didn’t frame him for anything he hadn’t done. We just left the gun at the scene of a drugs raid. It was collected along with a load of other weapons. Routine ballistic testing linked the gun to the Cruise murder. There were fingerprints all over the gun. Luckily for us, he’s had a few run-ins with the police over the years. Usually all the charges were dropped when the witnesses mysteriously changed their minds, but his fingerprints were still on file.

  “All it did was give us the excuse to raise a warrant. As soon as that happened, we were able to build that link between him and the case we’d built. The case was sitting there, ready to go. It just needed that link.”

  “Vinny Delmarno.”

  It wasn’t a quest
ion. The man had been released whilst he was still with West Midlands Police and there had been anger about the things that had been said in the press. Allegations of corruption and fabricated crime scenes—allegations that Sheehy now claimed were true.

  Sheehy nodded but said nothing as if speaking the man’s name out loud was a curse.

  “So why are you telling me all of this now?” Warren’s voice was bitter, the anger now simmering just below the surface, “It can’t just be an attack of conscience. You’ve had over twenty years to come clean. Delmarno’s been out how long now?”

  Warren was confused; it made no sense. By all reports, Sheehy was in deep trouble already. What benefit was there to adding this long-forgotten miscarriage to his litany of sins? It was clear from his tone that he felt that what he and Niall MacNamara had done all those years ago was still right. Noble-cause corruption they called it.

  Sheehy looked at his hands and Warren noticed they were trembling. “Reggie Williamson was the gardener who supplied us with the gun.”

  “That’s what this is all about?” Warren couldn’t hide the scepticism in his voice. For sure it was a hell of a coincidence, but surely that was all it was?

  He said as much.

  “When Vinny Delmarno was released, he swore blind that he would find out who put him away and would get his revenge.”

  Warren still wasn’t convinced.

  “There’s more.”

  Sheehy opened the coat, revealing the concealed file folder, and removed a newspaper article, handing it over. A cutting from a local Hertfordshire paper from February, page one but not the lead. Stapled to the back was a narrow column from page four, continuing the story; a black-and-white headshot, formal-looking and probably taken from an official website, took up barely two inches.

  Retired coroner and wife killed in drink-driving smash: Verdict

  A former coroner, killed in the early hours of 31 December 2011, was driving too fast and was under the influence of alcohol, an inquest ruled today. The crash, which killed Dr Anton Liebig, 67, and his wife Rosemary, 66, instantly, happened after a sharp bend on the A5062, on the way back from an awards dinner at The Allingham Golf Club in Hertfordshire, where Dr Liebig—captain of the senior men’s team—had presented several trophies.