‘So how did you get on?’ asked Grace, trying to subdue the acid rising in her throat.
‘No one admitted knowing Larry,’ said Carolyn. ‘And the only one who described a client having anything like a shoe fetish said her client was Asian. Several of them, however, talked about Owen Nixon.’
‘He’s a client?’ Grace asked eagerly.
‘Not sure, boss. They were a bit cagey about that. But a couple of them described him as a friend. He offers lifts, sometimes for free if the weather’s bad. Sometimes he lets girls stay with him in return for cooking and housework.’
‘Housework?’ asked Blake. ‘That all?’
‘So they say. And not just working girls, either. One said she’d heard stories of him offering women a bed for the night if he saw them wandering the streets late at night with no way to get home.’
‘No strings attached? Really?’
Carolyn shrugged. ‘They have a nickname for him. The “Guardian Angel”.’
Nothing like the yellow glow of a taxi light on a cold wet night, thought Grace. She wondered if it had been one of the girls who had given him the cardboard air freshener that hung from the rear-view mirror in his taxi.
‘I only met him briefly at the hospital,’ said Carolyn, ‘but if I ended up in his house, I’d make bloody sure my door was locked.’
‘What sort of age were the women you spoke to?’ Grace asked. ‘I don’t suppose they were old enough to remember the fire twenty-five years ago?’
‘Some looked it,’ said Carolyn, ‘though it’s hard to tell. No one showed any interest when I asked about it.’
‘Owen’s wife died when his sons were teenagers,’ said Blake. ‘If he was in the habit of picking up random women and bringing them home for sex, maybe that’s where one of the boys learned his warped ideas.’
‘Larry did make some comment about Owen finding girls to help out in the house, didn’t he?’ said Grace. ‘He didn’t seem to say it with any heat behind it and he didn’t have to mention it at all if it risked revealing private stuff.’
‘Perhaps Owen is on the side of the angels after all,’ said Blake, ‘and that’s why he was also a police informant.’
‘Not if his handler was bent,’ said Grace. ‘Ivo Sweatman, the reporter I was talking to at the cemetery this morning, he told me how DI Jupp walked off with carrier bags full of cash from a raid on an ecstasy factory. Over half a million quid.’
Blake whistled through his teeth.
‘Let’s just say it was Owen who tipped Jupp off – that would explain why Jupp ordered a young WPC not to approach Owen, even as a potential witness,’ she continued.
‘It’s also a possible reason for the DI to stifle any investigation of Owen’s sons,’ said Carolyn.
‘It doesn’t even need to be about outright corruption,’ said Grace. ‘Ivo also mentioned that Jupp was a Freemason, like Owen.’
‘And a journalist simply volunteered all this?’ Blake didn’t hide his scepticism.
‘Ivo and I have some history,’ she said shortly. She couldn’t begin to explain herself in front of Carolyn. And perhaps, with Carolyn beside him, Blake wouldn’t care now anyway.
‘If that stacks up,’ said Blake, his thoughts on the case, ‘then how far did the cover-up go? Is that why there was so little forensic evidence, for instance?’
‘There’s no way to unravel any conspiracies now,’ said Grace. ‘We just have to keep going with what we’ve got.’
The young waitress came and laid a saucer on the table with the bill on it. Grace looked around. While they’d been talking it had grown dark outside and they were the last ones there.
42
Grace was glad to close her own front door behind her in Wivenhoe. It had been a long day. She kicked off her shoes and went to put on some music and root out the opened bottle of white wine she’d left in the fridge. She felt an unaccustomed pang of loneliness and realised it wasn’t only her passing impression of reconnection with Blake, it was also to do with Ivo Sweatman. He had once again proved himself loyal and yet the ambivalence she’d felt about seeing him again hadn’t dissipated. She knew it was unfair. Unworthy, even. Ivo had freely offered his help and she had been glad to take it. It wasn’t his fault that she had lost Blake.
She had, however, sensed that Ivo could have told her more about DI Jupp if she’d pressed him. She should have done. Why hadn’t she? Had it been her awareness of Blake waiting nearby and her unwillingness to open a dialogue with Ivo that would distance her even more from him? And, if so, did that mean she was prepared to put her own private life ahead of the possibility, however faint, of a much-needed break in this case?
She curled up on her sofa with her glass of wine and considered her conversations with Alison. Her sister’s concern was genuine, and Grace accepted she was probably right. She mustn’t leave it too late to establish a life outside of work. But did that have to mean compromising on winning justice for victims of crime, whether living or dead?
There had to be another way to solve this case. The yellow legal pad on which she scribbled notes and ideas lay on the coffee table where she’d left it. She picked it up and turned to a fresh sheet. What had they learnt so far?
The Southend rapist drove a taxi and perhaps liked the Eurythmics. One of the victims recognised Larry Nixon’s voice when he was interviewed not long afterwards. Larry appeared to be aroused by high heels. His DNA was an exact match to the trace DNA found on the murder weapon. He had opportunity and motive to murder his brother and sister-in-law, and it could be significant that physical evidence which might have shown him to be an arsonist had been destroyed or effectively masked.
It was all circumstantial, yet it might be enough to put before a jury – except for one thing. Reece could not be ruled out as a suspect – and that would be Larry’s defence. A judge would have to advise that that fact constituted reasonable doubt.
Was that why Larry had volunteered to be interviewed by Freddie Craig, to make sure that his version of events was out there? If he’d delayed until he’d been charged with the crimes, the entire matter would be sub judice until the trial was over and he’d no longer be able to peddle his alternative narrative. Grace wondered if it had been Larry who’d tipped off the media about Reece’s funeral that morning, hoping they’d run with pictures of the grieving hero of the Marineland fire. Maybe Ivo would know.
She’d have to convince a jury that Reece wasn’t the Southend rapist and the killer of Heather Bowyer. But how? She couldn’t. The person most likely to alibi Reece was Kirsty, and she was dead. Other family members with whom he’d been living – Larry and his father – had little reason to tell the truth now. And after twenty-five years, it simply wasn’t going to be possible to prove a negative – that Reece hadn’t done it.
Grace wondered what part Owen Nixon was really playing. She could understand that, with Reece dead, he would strive to save his surviving son from imprisonment for crimes committed so long ago, but would he seriously protect Larry if he believed Larry had so callously murdered Reece and Kirsty?
Could Owen really have known what he was doing when he destroyed Larry’s fire-damaged clothes? It was more likely, surely, that he simply hadn’t questioned Larry’s request either to dispose of them for him or to fib to the police about the fact that Larry had done so himself.
But then maybe Owen had known from the beginning what Larry had done, and, all those years ago, had leveraged his knowledge of DI Jupp’s corruption to shield his son from investigation.
Or was that all just too far-fetched?
Carolyn believed she’d been shadowed by a man as she’d talked to the working girls along York Road and Riviera Drive. Grace couldn’t silence an apprehension that Blake’s concern might prove to be justified. In retrospect, perhaps the stunt with the high-heeled shoe had been foolish but not, she hoped, dangerous. Nonetheless the risk that she had baited Larry too far underlined her sense that she was dealing with more than she fully understood
.
She looked at the time. Not too late to call Wendy and once more run through the possibility that some potential evidence retrieved from the fire at Reece Nixon’s house had been overlooked.
The crime scene manager didn’t seem too put out by being disturbed at home and admitted that she, too, had remained sufficiently uneasy about the case to keep picking away at it in her mind. She was happy to spare the time to talk it all through again.
‘There may possibly be one further test we can do,’ Wendy told Grace eventually. ‘It’s not cheap and may not yield any results at all.’
‘We’re desperate for something,’ said Grace. ‘Tell me more.’
‘Well, there’s a technique that should be able to retrieve any fingerprints from the cap of the petrol container – if there are any.’
‘I thought the canister was completely melted?’
‘The can was, yes, but not the cap, which was found separately and is made of a more robust type of plastic. It’ll be an extremely slow, arduous process, chemically lifting away layer after layer of the sooty deposits until we get back to the original surface, but I’ve seen it done.’
‘Wouldn’t that also remove any fingerprints?’ asked Grace.
‘Not if you’re clever.’
‘Fair enough!’
‘But we may do all that only to find that he wore gloves,’ Wendy warned.
‘He threw the can into the fire,’ argued Grace. ‘He can’t have imagined any of it would survive. It has to be worth a go, if only to see his face when we tell him there’s a possibility we can get fingerprints from where he unscrewed the cap.’
‘OK, leave it with me. I’ll email you an accurate costing tomorrow and you can decide if you want to go ahead.’
Grace thanked her and ended the call, relieved to have identified a practical task on which to pin her hopes, however slim they might be.
43
It hurt as much as if he was probing an exquisitely painful dental abscess with the tip of his tongue, but Ivo knew it had to be done. He’d awoken from another central casting nightmare and he simply couldn’t take any more of the dreadful clichés his unconscious was employing to prod him into confronting his past.
Ivo had never shied away from his sins – apart from this one exception. In fact, as he’d come to realise once he stopped drinking, he’d almost begun to define himself by the failed relationships, the alimony, the mornings after the nights before. When he was drinking he’d told himself all the mess and chaos just made him a Jack the lad, a free spirit, what the fuck anyhow. Now he asked himself how much of the chaos he’d created had been fuelled by the urgent need not to look back or examine what he’d done.
Not that he ever really knew precisely what he had done. He’d saved himself that. JJ had merely asked him for a small favour and Ivo had agreed to it. The favour hadn’t even required him to do anything. That was the most insidious part of it. He could tell himself that he’d never carried out a wrongful action so there was no reason to repent. He’d done nothing. Which was precisely what JJ had asked of him.
But doing nothing had grown into something that occupied an awful lot of space, something that took up more and more of the air around him. Here he was, back in his kitchen again at four in the morning. It was the time – or so he’d been told – when all the signs of life are at their lowest and the breath can simply give out. As he waited for the kettle to boil and looked out over the autumnal gloom of the adjoining London gardens, he felt acutely aware of the coming and going of his own shallow breath and relived the panic that arose whenever he looked back at that defining moment in a Southend pub with JJ.
At the time it hadn’t seemed like very much at all, and JJ had certainly never required Ivo to know why he was asking this particular favour. And Ivo had been happy to take the hint and not enquire. But unwanted comprehension had eventually come anyway, arriving in dribs and drabs over the years via news reports of a trial, a lifer’s two failed attempts to appeal against conviction, and then the premature death of a man who had consistently asserted his innocence. The man whom JJ had casually asked Ivo not to mention seeing in the pub on a particular afternoon.
Damon Smith had been his name. A habitual petty criminal, but not a murderer. By the time his second appeal was turned down, JJ was dead and there’d been no reason for Ivo not to give his evidence at last. Nothing except a shame so overwhelming that any kind of utterance was inconceivable. And then it was too late. Damon Smith developed cancer and died in prison.
Ivo had seen him in the pub on the afternoon a pregnant girl was kicked to death, so knew that Damon Smith was innocent. He’d never been told why JJ had wanted him to keep quiet, nor whether JJ had any inkling of who had in fact committed the crime. Ivo had always assumed – or conveniently let himself assume – that JJ had good reason not to offer Damon Smith an alibi, and that this was one of those cases of so-called ‘noble cause corruption’ that seemed almost fashionable at the time.
He had read in a magazine that around a quarter of wrongful convictions involve false confessions. The majority involve a mistaken eyewitness, scientific fraud or junk science, or suppression of evidence by police. They were American statistics, but Ivo had done his bit to boost that final category.
He poured boiling water on top of the instant coffee granules and stirred. A light went on across the gardens and the shadow of a figure moved against a drawn blind. He had never felt more like an outcast. Affairs, unpaid bills, unaccounted absences, special occasions missed or ruined by drunken scenes – all that might be forgiven. But sending an innocent man to prison for life?
Yet even if he could atone, he’d left it too late. Damon Smith was beyond help and JJ was past being held to account. Except, what if JJ’s motives linked up somehow with Grace Fisher’s investigation? She’d floated the idea that maybe JJ, in his turn, had owed favours to other people. For all Ivo knew, the malevolent presence that he had empowered by his silence all those years ago was Owen Nixon. He should tell her everything. Finally unburden himself. Let her decide whether or not an old injustice could still somehow be righted. Maybe it could even provide the clincher in the Heather Bowyer case.
He had almost made up his mind to call Grace at a civilised hour and offer up his confession when he saw in his mind’s eye her look of disappointment and contempt and knew that he could never bring himself to tell her, of all people, the truth.
44
When Grace arrived for work she found a yellow sticker on her computer to say that a Philip Langstone was waiting downstairs to see her. It took a few seconds for the name to register. Phil Langstone and Kevin Barnes had, as teenagers, accidentally started the Marineland fire.
She found him sitting in the reception area by the main entrance. A man of middle height in a sharp blue suit, white shirt and narrow tie, he sprang to his feet as soon as he saw her, bouncing lightly on his toes as he introduced himself. ‘Dave Clements told me you were asking about Larry Nixon,’ he said, ‘and I just had to come over right away and tell you what I know about him.’
Grace found his energy and sincerity endearing. She smiled and showed him into an interview room. ‘I’m glad you came,’ she told him. ‘It will be very helpful to have your account of that night.’
‘The fire?’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him. He carried Kevin out on his back. I’d totally panicked, didn’t know what to do. We’d have died if it wasn’t for Larry Nixon.’
‘Can you tell me what happened?’
Langstone shook his head more in wonder than bewilderment. ‘We couldn’t believe it. We thought we were goners, and then he appeared out of nowhere. Seemed to know his way around. Kevin couldn’t walk. We found out later he’d broken his ankle. I helped him grab hold of Larry’s shoulders and climb up in a piggy-back, and then I clung onto the tail of Kevin’s jacket so I wouldn’t get lost in the smoke.’
‘What was Larry wearing, do you remember?’
‘Dark clothes, I
think.’ His frown cleared away. ‘He took his jacket off, threw it down, before we hoisted Kevin up.’
‘So his jacket got left behind?’ she asked.
‘I guess so.’
‘Do you remember what kind of jacket?’
‘Leather, I think. You know, the kind with zip-up pockets.’ He laughed. ‘So strange what comes back if someone jogs your memory. I never realised I knew that, but I can see it quite plainly now!’
‘Why do you think he took it off?’
Langstone shook his head. ‘Must’ve freed up his movements or something. Made it easier for Kevin to take hold.’
Grace asked herself whether a balaclava and a single blood-stained leather glove had been zipped up in the jacket pockets. If Larry had assumed he’d safely destroyed them then that would explain his surprise when he’d been told that a glove had been found at the scene. ‘It didn’t seem strange to you?’ she asked.
Langstone’s expression darkened. ‘Dave Clements said you had the idea that Larry had something to do with that poor girl’s death, but you couldn’t be more wrong.’
‘We have DNA evidence that links him to the murder weapon,’ Grace said mildly. ‘We have to follow that up and see where it leads.’
Langstone shook his head firmly. ‘Then you’re talking to the wrong guy here. That night turned our lives around. Kevin, he was heading for trouble, but that second chance straightened him out, made him start working for his exams. He moved with his family to Australia soon after, but the last I heard he was in medical school there, training to be a doctor. Who knows how many lives he’s saved? I wasn’t brainy like him, but I focused on my running, got as far as the national squad. Now I’m a sports physio and I’ve been all over the world working with elite athletes. I have two kids who wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for Larry Nixon. I’m telling you, he was our saviour.’
‘I can understand why you hold him in such high esteem,’ she said, ‘but I can’t simply ignore the scientific evidence. Did he ever mention anything to you about how he came to be passing the Marineland complex or noticed that there was a fire?’
Wrong Way Home: Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month Page 19