Wrong Way Home: Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month

by Isabelle Grey

  ‘Perhaps someone who knew enough about Jupp to blackmail him?’ she asked.

  ‘That would do the trick.’

  ‘I don’t know how long the star of the show in Southminster will be able to keep it to herself,’ said Grace, ‘but if at all possible I don’t want anyone else finding out that the letters were never real.’

  ‘You have my word.’

  ‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘Do you want police protection?’

  ‘Me?’ The thought hadn’t occurred to him.

  ‘This man might know that DI Jupp suborned your silence.’ She stated it matter-of-factly, and he was grateful that she hadn’t attempted to whitewash it.

  ‘If I’d had the balls to tell the truth in the first place, Freddie would still be alive,’ he said. ‘I never warned him, never told him the full story, just sent him out into no man’s land without so much as a white flag.’ The enormity of the kid’s death hit him with full force and he rubbed a hand over his face. ‘You’ve spoken to his parents?’

  ‘His father came this afternoon to identify the body.’

  Ivo tried to picture the daughter he hadn’t seen since she was a little girl. Emily would be about the same age as Freddie. What was wrong with him? What kind of piss-poor excuse for a human being was he?

  ‘You should arrest me,’ he said. He longed for her to agree, for an external agency of justice to offer him a means to atone. ‘I knew Damon Smith was innocent and I said nothing.’

  ‘Did you lie under oath?’

  ‘No. I never said anything. JJ told me to keep my mouth shut and I did.’

  ‘Then it’s not perjury.’

  ‘But I had a pretty good idea of the consequences of what I was doing.’

  She gave him a look that almost broke his heart. ‘Unfortunately, inaction in such circumstances does not qualify as an offence,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to deal with your conscience in your own way.’

  He got to his feet. ‘Then you’ll excuse me while I go and find the nearest AA meeting.’ Finding the nerve to look Grace Fisher in the eye as she held the door open for him was one of the hardest things he’d ever done.

  58

  After a long talk with Wendy, Grace called her team together and asked for everything they had so far on the murder of Freddie Craig. Dr Tripathi had confirmed that he died from two upward stab wounds to the back, one of which had perforated his heart. In Samit’s opinion they were likely to have been administered at close range, with the attacker securing his victim around the neck with his free arm. Freddie might well have been taken by surprise and would have had little opportunity to struggle or fight back.

  Duncan had tracked Freddie’s journey from his grandmother’s house in Southminster by train to Southend, and was coordinating a search of all available CCTV footage between Southend Victoria station and the seafront. So far it had not been possible with any accuracy to pinpoint when or where Freddie’s body had entered the water.

  There was nothing among the comments on the podcast website to explain why Freddie had travelled to Southend that evening. The only clue Blake had found was a three-minute call received little more than an hour before Freddie purchased his train ticket at Southminster station. Given that there had been no previous contact between Freddie and this number – which Blake had traced to a pay-as-you-go SIM card that was now unobtainable – he was curious as to how the mysterious caller had obtained Freddie’s mobile number.

  Blake had also spoken to his grandmother – a seventy-two-year-old who made it clear she wasn’t going to give in to shock or grief in front of strangers – who said that Freddie had originally intended to stay at home with her that evening but, after receiving a phone call, had changed his plans and seemed quite excited about whatever it was he was rushing off to do. She felt responsible for not knowing his plans or who had called, and for not reporting him missing when he didn’t come back that night, but insisted he was a perfectly capable young man who needed his freedom and she’d tried not to fuss over him.

  Grace now added in Ivo Sweatman’s belief that Freddie might have been killed because someone believed his invention about the existence of letters naming the father of April Irwin’s unborn child. She had been shaken by Ivo’s explanation as to why he was so certain it was not Damon Smith who had killed April and why he believed that her actual killer was still at large. Grace had grown fond of the old rogue and knew she owed him a debt for past assistance and support, but, all the same, she had not expected to feel quite so shocked by his revelations. Past loyalty made her reluctant to spell out the details of his collusion to the whole team, but there was no skirting around the fact that he had helped a corrupt detective frame an innocent man.

  She glanced over at Blake sitting with his arms folded beside Carolyn, who leaned on the table twiddling a pen, her straight blonde hair falling forward and half-hiding her face. Grace’s recollection of how her own protective silence over Ivo had forfeited Blake’s trust made her all the more bitter about the reporter’s betrayal of her faith in him.

  As if reading her thoughts, Blake voiced his own doubts. ‘How far should we trust this Sweatman character?’

  ‘On this we can,’ she answered briskly.

  Carolyn kept her head down, prompting Grace to wonder if she had confided in Blake her doubts about the wisdom of their boss sharing confidential information with a tabloid reporter. Grace had to accept that Carolyn’s doubts had been justified, yet the fact remained that Ivo had chosen to come to her today to offer his confession, regardless of the cost to himself.

  ‘I think we should also trust his opinion on why DI Jupp might have risked covering up the truth of such a brutal and vicious crime,’ she continued. ‘That it was to protect an informant.’

  ‘That’s what I don’t get, boss,’ said Duncan. ‘Why would an informant be worth the risk of losing his career, his pension and even his freedom?’

  ‘Ivo Sweatman thinks it was because Jupp’s previous corruption had left him open to blackmail,’ she responded. ‘It may be that he had very little choice. Jupp apparently boasted about trousering around half a million in cash thanks to a tip-off from an informant about a factory in Southend churning out ecstasy pills. Jupp claimed to have shared the booty with a couple of fellow officers, so they’d all have good reason to keep their informant happy. It was the supergrass era, remember. If the informant found himself arrested he was likely to turn Queen’s evidence and spill the beans on internal corruption in Southend.’

  Grace paused to look at each of her assembled team. ‘According to Melanie Riggs, a former police constable,’ she continued, ‘one of Jupp’s main informants at that time was Owen Nixon.’

  She waited for the quiver of reaction to pass around the room. ‘So the important question is whether the background to the murder of April Irwin was a credible enough motive to have killed Freddie Craig twenty-five years later. If so, then we have to take a very close look at Owen Nixon.’

  ‘The working girls I spoke to in Southend said he sometimes offers girls free lifts or a bed for the night,’ said Carolyn. ‘He might have met April that way.’

  ‘And Larry Nixon said in interview that his father had girls staying who helped with the housework,’ said Grace.

  Blake frowned. ‘How old would Owen have been at the time?’

  ‘Fifty-two.’

  ‘And April was barely sixteen.’

  ‘Yes, but so was Terri Nixon when she became pregnant with Owen’s first child.’

  ‘Terri Nixon who is missing, presumed dead,’ said Blake.

  ‘Precisely,’ she said.

  ‘Or it could have been one of his sons who was the father of April’s unborn child,’ Carolyn pointed out. ‘And, therefore, also her killer.’

  Grace nodded. ‘We know from Melanie Riggs that Owen had already used his clout with DI Jupp to steer the rape investigation away from Larry.’

  ‘So we’d need to place April in Owen’s house in the months before her dea
th,’ said Blake dubiously. ‘I’m concerned that we’re putting an awful lot of faith on the say-so of a tabloid reporter. I mean, who gave Freddie Craig the story about April Irwin in the first place?’

  ‘Ivo did,’ said Grace.

  ‘So it could all be some kind of wind-up or distraction.’

  Grace had to accept that Blake’s caution was right and sensible. ‘Except that now Freddie is dead,’ she said. ‘And besides, there should be a relatively quick and easy way to establish whether there’s any link between April and the Nixon family. Wendy says that a DNA profile will almost certainly still be available in the archived case file from blood samples taken from the child that April was carrying when she was killed. Once we have that, we can establish whether or not the father was a Nixon.’

  ‘Larry was in custody last night,’ said Duncan. ‘Would Owen bother killing Freddie unless it was to protect himself?’

  ‘It’s Owen who brings young girls home,’ said Grace.

  ‘I don’t see someone of Owen’s age listening to a true-crime podcast, though,’ said Carolyn. ‘And how would he get hold of Freddie Craig’s mobile number?’

  Blake tapped a pen against his teeth. ‘Freddie interviewed Larry Nixon for one of the podcast episodes. So he’d probably have Freddie’s phone number, right?’

  ‘Yes, but Larry was in already custody when Freddie’s final episode about the letters went online,’ said Grace. ‘Too late for him to pass Freddie’s number on to his father.’

  ‘But Larry wasn’t in custody when the first podcast about Damon Smith and a miscarriage of justice went live,’ said Blake.

  ‘But why would that have set alarm bells ringing for Larry unless he already knew about April Irwin?’ asked Carolyn.

  ‘Larry would still have been living at home with his father when April became pregnant,’ said Blake. ‘So if she was one of the girls who helped out with the cooking and cleaning, then Larry was highly likely to have heard about what happened to her, even if none of the Nixon family had anything to do with her death.’

  ‘Maybe enough to know what had made her desperate enough to sleep on Damon Smith’s floor,’ said Grace. ‘Enough to warn his father that Freddie was digging up trouble. I know it’s all fairly tenuous and circumstantial until we get the DNA, but it does all fit together pretty neatly. It has to be worth looking at.’

  The only question that remained was whether a pensioner could really have overpowered a young man. Grace recalled her first encounter with Owen Nixon in the hospital and the unyielding way he had looked at her. Whatever his age, he certainly didn’t lack unflinching determination or strength of will.

  59

  Although on the phone Deborah Shillingford had seemed resigned to Grace’s request to visit her in Thorpe Bay, she opened her front door with tightly crossed arms, her gaze averted. Grace sympathised with her antagonism. They all knew the presence of the detectives could only result in further trouble being heaped upon her shoulders.

  Deborah led Grace and Blake into the kitchen, where, as before, a burning cigarette and a half-drunk mug of instant coffee awaited her. As Grace sat down she had the impression that the number of gift-shop angels dotted around the tiny room had multiplied since their first visit.

  ‘How are you feeling, Mrs Shillingford?’ she asked. ‘This has been a pretty difficult time for you.’

  Deborah nodded. ‘I don’t understand what more you can want from me,’ she said. ‘It’s all over now, surely?’

  ‘Your brother Larry has been sent for trial, yes.’

  ‘That’ll be months away, won’t it?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘So, what do you want?’

  Grace glanced at Blake, who stood leaning against the worktop, clearly feeling as uncomfortable as she did. ‘Some other matters have arisen as a result of our investigation,’ she said. ‘You might be able to help us clear them up.’

  Deborah turned her head to stare out of the window. Grace followed her gaze: an unkempt patch of grass, a dilapidated fence and a grey sky didn’t offer much comfort. Grace waited until Deborah looked back into the room and nodded. ‘Go on then,’ she said.

  ‘It’s about your mother, Theresa Nixon.’

  ‘She died of cancer.’

  ‘Did you visit her in hospital?’

  ‘No,’ said Deborah. ‘I wasn’t living at home much then.’

  ‘Did you go to her funeral?’ Grace asked.

  Deborah shook her head. ‘Dad thought we’d be too upset.’

  ‘What about your mother’s family?’ Grace continued doggedly, hating every word. ‘Did they attend her funeral?’

  ‘I never met them. They never came near us.’

  ‘But you’ve visited her grave?’

  ‘No. Thing is, Dad never told us much, just that she’d got ill but it was too late to do anything and she passed away. We didn’t want to upset him, so we let him deal with it in his own way.’

  ‘The problem is that there’s no evidence your mother was ever treated for cancer,’ said Grace, ‘and there’s no record of her death.’

  Deborah lit a fresh cigarette with a shaky hand. ‘So what are you saying?’

  ‘You have no memories of her going to hospital?’

  ‘She always was stick-thin.’

  ‘Or of her funeral?’

  ‘Dad told me I had to come over and keep an eye on the boys. He put on a black suit and went out, then he said it was best if we never mentioned her again.’

  Grace looked at Blake, whose set face conveyed his revulsion at such a father, even if the preposterous story had been true.

  ‘Do you have any reason to suppose she might still be alive?’ Grace asked.

  Deborah drew on her cigarette and then busied herself rounding off the ash on the edge of the ashtray. ‘No.’

  ‘If your mother had reasons to want to disappear, she wouldn’t be in any trouble,’ Grace assured her. ‘We just want to know what happened to her.’ She waited until it was clear that Deborah wasn’t going to speak. ‘Can you think of any reason why your father would have told you that she’d died when she hadn’t?’

  ‘No.’ Deborah took a sip of cold coffee, avoiding having to look at either of them.

  ‘What sort of relationship did your parents have? Was it volatile? Did they have rows? Was either of them ever violent?’

  Deborah was unable to suppress a laugh. ‘I told you before, didn’t I? Dad never needs to hit anyone. He just has a way of making you do what he wants.’

  ‘And if you refuse?’

  Deborah pressed her lips together and once again stared out of the window. Grace caught Blake’s eye and sent a silent appeal for help. He shifted slightly, attracting Deborah’s attention.

  ‘Do you have any photographs of your mother?’ he asked gently.

  ‘No,’ said Deborah, showing the first signs of regret. ‘I don’t think I ever had one. And besides, so much of my stuff has got lost along the way. I left the last place with nothing but a couple of bin bags. I don’t even have photos of my kids from when they were little.’

  Her gaze panned slowly round her display of angels in what appeared to Grace to be a familiar meditation. It seemed to strengthen her, for she shifted in her seat to face Blake directly. ‘You probably think I’m a total fuck-up,’ she said. ‘But sometimes, you know, given what my life’s been like, I think I’m doing quite well.’

  ‘I think you are, too,’ he said. ‘All the grief that our investigations have brought to your door, I’m not sure I would have coped as well.’

  She gave a wan smile. ‘Thanks.’ She fiddled with her cigarette lighter. ‘I always knew it was never Reece. It had to be Larry.’

  ‘Larry was about twelve when your mother disappeared,’ Blake said. ‘Must have been tough on a kid that age.’

  ‘Harder on Reece,’ she said. ‘It was trouble all the way between him and Dad after that.’

  ‘Do you think that was perhaps because Reece understood what really
happened to your mother?’

  ‘Nothing happened. She died, that’s all.’ It was as if an old tribal allegiance had kicked in. ‘Dad put a roof over our heads, food on the table, clean clothes, we all went to school. I may be a mess, but the boys did fine.’

  ‘What?’ The exclamation was out before Grace could stop it, but she was mystified by what kind of amnesia could make it possible for Deborah to describe Larry’s crimes as doing fine.

  ‘Yeah, well, I only meant—’ Deborah got up and took her mug to the sink, turning her back on them.

  Blake gave her a few moments to rinse out the mug and place it on the draining board before trying again. ‘So once your mother was no longer there, we’ve been told that your father used to offer board and lodging to young women in return for household chores, is that right?’

  Deborah’s back stiffened. ‘I’d left home by then.’

  ‘But you were aware that there were girls in the house who helped out?’

  ‘If that’s what you want to call it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Did you ever meet a sixteen-year-old named April Irwin?’ Blake asked.

  She shifted slowly to face them. ‘Is she the one who got killed?’

  ‘That’s right. Did she ever stay at your father’s house?’

  ‘It was someone else who killed her, though,’ Deborah stated flatly. ‘It wasn’t Dad.’

  ‘Did you think it might have been your father?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Was she ever at the house?’

  ‘I can’t answer that,’ she said.

  ‘We only want you to tell us the truth, Deborah,’ said Grace.

  ‘I can’t.’

  Grace exchanged glances with Blake. He gave her a little nod of encouragement. ‘A young man was knifed to death in Southend the night before last,’ she said. ‘We think his murder may be connected to the murder of April Irwin.’