by Joel Hames
While we were watching three men walked by, officers in uniform. They fell silent as they approached and kept their eyes straight ahead, down at their feet, on each other’s faces. Anywhere but us. As they turned the corner I heard laughter and a muted curse. Roarkes wasn’t wrong. They didn’t like him here.
“What have you done to piss them off?” I asked him. Roarkes was good at pissing people off, it was his specialty. It looked like he’d outdone himself.
He shook his head, as if he didn’t know and it was just some strange peculiarity of Manchester cops, and then he started explaining anyway.
“Look, they don’t like me being here. I get that. It’s their patch, and whenever I get called in it’s like the Chief Constable’s turned to his own men and told them they’re not even smart enough to catch Jack the Ripper.”
I thought about that, for a moment.
“Jack the Ripper never got caught.”
“They didn’t have me on the case,” he returned, quick as lightning. “But it’s not just that. It’s two of their own. Two officers dead, and they might not have been Folgate police, but they were police, and it hurts. They were all set to beat the living shit out of Carson when I turned up and stopped it, and they took it like I was on his side.”
“Are you?”
“I’m not on anyone’s side. I just want to find out what the fuck’s happened here and get home. So the whispers started right away, and when they found out I’d been talking to the suspect’s lawyer, those whispers just got louder.”
I turned towards Serena, who responded with a tight little smile as Roarkes continued. “I had a nice little chat this morning with the superintendent upstairs. As far as he’s concerned, the sooner I’m out of Manchester, the better.”
I could see their point. Roarkes had a habit of making himself unpopular, but he couldn’t have done any more here if he’d tried. A thought struck me.
“You haven’t made any effort at all to turn it around with them, have you?”
He grinned at me. “Why the hell should I? I don’t like cops who beat up suspects. They make everyone’s life harder. Juries don’t like it when a suspect gets wheeled into court covered in police-administered bruises. Defence lawyers love it, though. Right?”
I nodded.
“So no,” he continued. “I haven’t made nice with the lovely policemen. I don’t like them and I don’t give a toss if they don’t like me. Now take a look at Carson.”
Looking at Carson took a couple of minutes. I might be allowed to talk to him in due course, apparently, once the formalities had been dealt with and I’d been processed as a psychologist or whatever the hell Roarkes had decided to call me. Roarkes wasn’t guaranteeing anything, given how popular he was in Folgate, but talent or no, I wasn’t getting Carson to talk if I couldn’t get the other side of that glass window. I shrugged and reminded Roarkes and Serena that they were paying, and Serena started to say something, but Roarkes got in first with a “Don’t worry. It’ll be sorted soon enough.”
Carson hadn’t had much on him when he was found. No murder weapon of course, because that had been recovered at the scene. Wallet, cash, cards. Three photos. A young boy, four or five years old, his son, Roarkes told me. An older family shot, a husband and wife, smiling, two sullen-looking kids, and no one knew who they were or what they were doing in his wallet. Some people on horses halfway up a mountain that sure as hell wasn’t in Manchester.
“What’s this?” I asked, holding up the last one, and Serena finally piped up with something useful.
“Argentina,” she said. “He lived there for a while. Ran a business out there.”
I turned to Roarkes.
“And you didn’t think it was worth telling me this?”
He glanced briefly at his feet, which was as close to an apology as I was likely to get. Argentina. There might be something in that. South America. Cartels, maybe, or was that further north? Argentina was Nazis and the Falklands and angry people setting fire to tyres. Nothing obvious to connect it with a shooting in the north of England, but it was off the beaten track, and that meant it was worth looking into.
Roarkes handed over some copies of the photos and I shoved them in my back pocket. I didn’t think the photos we had would tell me very much. The photos we didn’t have were a different story. Carson was a married man, and there was nothing anyone had found to suggest the marriage was anything other than happy. There was a photo of his son, a photo of a family of strangers, and a photo of a bunch of middle-aged tourists, by the look of it, halfway up a mountain in Argentina. But not a single photo of Carson’s wife.
Which, I thought, was something else worth looking into.
3: Little Dead People
WE WERE BACK in Roarkes’ temporary office, the three of us. Serena Hawkes was sitting down looking bored. She’d been through all this already. It wasn’t like she was learning anything new. Roarkes was fiddling with some bits of plastic on the little side table.
“We reckon it played out like this,” he said, and picked up one of the bits of plastic. Lego. He was holding three red Lego bricks stuck together in one hand and he was talking to me like this was a totally normal thing.
“So this is his car, right.”
“What?”
“This is the Fiesta. Carson’s car.”
As a reconstruction, it left a bit to be desired, but I thought I might as well play along until I figured out where he was going.
“And he’s driving along here.”
He put the bricks down on the table and slid them forward. It struck me that Carson’s Fiesta was blue, not red, but I didn’t think that really mattered.
“It’s about ten minutes from his house, little country road, usual bends and hills but nothing special about it. Milton and Ahmet are in their car here.”
He set down another clump of bricks. These ones were white. Sergeant Fiona Milton and Constable Naz Ahmet were the officers who’d been killed. They’d been driving a standard police Volvo. At least Roarkes had the colour of the car right this time.
“They come up behind Carson and flag him to stop. He stops—”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did they flag him down? Was he on his phone or something?”
“No. Someone called in, described the car, colour, plates, driver, said he was carrying a weapon.”
Another minor detail no one had bothered filling me in on.
“Who made the call?”
“We’re still looking into it. One of those pay-as-you-go phones. It’s taking a while.”
Maybe. Maybe Roarkes had another “psychologist” sorting that out for him. I doubted it. And if someone had called it in, why hadn’t they come forward by now?
“And why the hell did a pair of unarmed cops stop someone who they thought might have a weapon?”
“I asked the same thing. Apparently it was all a bit vague. They thought maybe it was a knife or something. And it’s not like they’re swimming in armed police out there in the sticks.”
I nodded. They probably needed all the armed police they had just to handle the kids outside the police station. Meanwhile, the whole thing had been triggered by a call and no one knew who had made it.
“Carson stops on the left here, the road’s a bit wider, room to pass by, not so bendy. Milton’s driving, she stops about twenty yards back on the other side of the road. So here they are.”
Roarkes was certainly well-equipped. He had two Lego figures, now, the old-fashioned ones with the yellow heads you could twist round and pull off and shove a helmet on if you wanted to assemble your very own Village People. Except one of the heads wasn’t yellow. It was brown. Roarkes was using a brown Lego figure to represent a dead Asian police officer. I looked up, briefly, at Serena Hawkes, and wondered what she made of it all. She saw me looking and grinned, not a tight smile this time, but a wide, on-the-verge-of-laughter smile, softening her face, smoothing away the corners. I grinned back. Ro
arkes was too old to know any better.
“The way we figure it, Milton approaches, Carson gets out of the car, walks round the back of it and comes at her from behind.”
“Why did she let him get out of the car?”
“How’s she going to stop him?”
I nodded. Roarkes continued.
“So she turns around to face him and he fires at her, hits her right in the forehead, she’s dead.”
He pushed the yellow-faced Lego figure down so it was lying on its back next to the red bricks.
“Ahmet doesn’t have time to react. Carson’s already there with him, makes him turn around, shoots him in the back of the head.”
“Christ!”
I couldn’t help it. The press had been calling it a cold-blooded execution from the start, but I’d assumed that was just their way of drumming up some excitement. I’d have put money on a difference of opinion that had got out of hand. The brown-headed Lego figure was face down next to the white bricks. This was about as cold-blooded as it got.
“Witnesses?”
“The actual event?” Roarkes shaped his hand into a gun, made a popping noise and shook his head. “No one saw a thing, no one heard a thing. But a minute or two earlier, yeah, we’ve got something.”
“What?”
“Not much. Couple of cars on the same road. Wanted to get past. Got waved back by Ahmet, had to drive back the way they’d come. Both of them remembered Carson’s blue Fiesta, one of them even had the plates, and of course that matched the vehicle that had been called in about the weapon.”
“Who were they?”
“One local. Farmer, driving a trailer-load of sheep around. He’s the one who remembered the plates. Other one’s a woman from Bolton, she’s got a friend with her in the car, just been to one of those posh country pubs for an overpriced meat pie and they’ve both overdone it on the mulled wine, so I was surprised she could remember anything at all.”
“Anything else?”
“Not really. Farmer thinks he passed another car after he got turned around. Land Rover. Dark blue. Remembered a bit of the plate on that one as well, but not enough to get a match. Whoever was driving it, they’d have been turned around, too. They’d have been the last ones there, before Carson started shooting. But no one’s come forward.”
“And the woman?”
“No use. Even when she was sober she didn’t have much to say for herself. Saw the Fiesta, that would have stuck in her mind because of the police. But she didn’t even spot the farmer.”
I looked back at Serena and she shrugged. Hardly the strongest foundation for a case, but that was all good news as far as she was concerned. She didn’t have to make a case. She just had to pick holes in one.
I looked down at the table. Why had Carson walked round the back of the car in the first place? Maybe Milton had asked him to open the boot, check there was nothing in there. Maybe there had been something in there, something Carson had dumped before the police caught up with him two days later. So he’d shot her, and that hadn’t been planned, it had just been necessary, and because he’d shot her he had to shoot Ahmet, who would have seen the whole thing. All very quick, though. Ahmet hadn’t had a chance to call for assistance. The last communication from either of them was Milton saying they’d stopped the Fiesta and were going to investigate.
So it was possible, the way Roarkes was setting it out with his little Lego men. It was awkward, it had to be squeezed and twisted round a bit to fit it in, but it was certainly possible, and if the bodies had been found the way Roarkes had described them, it was probably the only way it could have happened. I ran through everything we had, everything Roarkes had, or Serena, it was difficult to tell who was on what side at the moment, or whether there were any sides at all. There wasn’t much. Maybe getting a real gun-and-gangs expert in wouldn’t be such a bad idea.
“Too much to hope for CCTV around there, I guess?”
Roarkes smiled wearily.
“You’d imagine, wouldn’t you? Why would anyone bother? As it happens, we thought we’d got lucky, because there’s a track up to a farmhouse right where it happened, and there’s cameras on the house and cameras on the track, but the bloody farmer doesn’t bother switching the bloody things on. Says there’s no point because he’s not got anything worth nicking, there’s no one around to nick it, and if there was the police wouldn’t care so why should he?”
I laughed, then coughed, then laughed again, my head a fog of painkillers and phlegm. Roarkes went on.
“You should hear the guy. Miserable bastard. Not that I can blame him. You think it’s cold and wet round here, just wait till you get up there. Course he didn’t see anything, and he didn’t hear the shots either, because he’s half-deaf.”
This was useless. They really had nothing at all.
“What about Carson? Anything unusual?”
“No. Runs a local business, outdoors stuff, small time. We’ve got some people looking into it, but there’s nothing particularly exciting.”
I thought about that. Local business. My experience of local business was confined to dodgy landlords and small-time drug dealers, but that was just the circles I moved in. I imagined it was a little calmer out here. Not the kind of thing you’d expect to lead to murder, really. But then, people could get upset about all manner of things. I remembered a case back at Mauriers, where I’d started my career, a guy who’d gone crazy and stabbed the woman who ran the nail bar across the road because her customers kept blocking his drive. Small-time business could make some big-time enemies. And, I reminded myself, that wasn’t confined to other people. David Brooks-Powell had started at Mauriers three weeks before I did, and never bothered hiding his disdain. Brooks-Powell was Knightsbridge, St Paul’s School, tall, good-looking, reasonably clever, very smooth and extremely arrogant. He’d gone on to get me fired, although I hadn’t exactly made it difficult for him. But Mauriers had been a good firm with high profile clients, and I’d been a young, ambitious lawyer, when I started, at least. Right time, right place, it wouldn’t have taken much for me to hurt David Brooks-Powell, physically. Could I have killed him? I couldn’t say no for sure.
Now it was probably the other way around. Not six months back I’d sued him and the firm, and Mauriers had settled, but not before David Brooks-Powell had been utterly destroyed in that courtroom. Beating Mauriers had turned out to be a temporary bounce on a long slow fall, but beating Brooks-Powell was something I wouldn’t have given up for all the Carsons in England. Mauriers had downgraded him from partner to “part-time consultant”, which meant they’d fired him but didn’t want to spell it out. Right now, he’d probably be quite happy to put a gun to my head and pull the trigger.
I smiled at the thought. Roarkes coughed, and when I looked back up at him he was glaring at my left hand. I followed his gaze and saw why. I’d picked up one of the figures, without thinking about it, without even meaning to, and I’d been sat there grinning away like a fool and rotating the head of the figurative corpse of Naz Ahmet between finger and thumb. I put it back down on the table and forced my brain back to Carson.
“Nothing else?”
“Nothing. The science boys are still looking, but if they were going to find anything they’d have found it by now.”
I nodded, and turned it all over again. Forensics. No photo of the wife. Layout of the cars. Land Rover. Argentina. Local business. Any one of those things might be the key to what had happened. But I doubted it.
The key to what had happened was sitting there in that cell staring through a blank bit of wall at people he couldn’t see, and I’d have given anything to crawl inside Thomas Carson’s head and find out what the hell had happened to Fiona Milton and Naz Ahmet.
4: Through the Window
IT WAS TEN in the morning and I was standing in the bathroom going back over an uncomfortable telephone conversation with Claire and trying to shave in a cracked, warped mirror that made one of my nostrils look twice the size of
the other. A good night’s sleep would sort me out, Roarkes had informed me, and directed me to the nearest First Quality Inn where he’d booked a room for me but not bothered suggesting we meet up for a drink or something to eat. There was no one in Manchester I particularly wanted to see, with the possible exception of Serena Hawkes, who had shaken my hand and left as soon as she politely could, so I’d ended up in my room, alone, with a slice of something that claimed to be a pie but seemed to be filled with the same sludgy pastry that held it together, two cans of warm beer, and a cold, empty bed. I’d sat on the bed and called Claire, and she’d told me breezily that everything was fine and she had some new information for me to look at.
“What, about Carson?” I’d asked, before I could stop myself, and there had been a pause during which I remembered that Carson wasn’t the only thing in the world and that Claire had absolutely nothing to do with him anyway.
“No,” came the reply, still breezy, but with that faint trace of an edge I recognised from all those times I’d ended up on the wrong side of the conversation. “No, of course not. Tanya and Xenia.”
Tanya and Xenia were two of the murdered girls. Tanya and Xenia weren’t their real names, nobody knew their real names, but there had been some suggestion in court that one was Russian and the other was Greek. The police had referred to them as “Girl A, Blonde” and “Girl B, Brunette”, and once the killers were locked up, they’d closed the files and moved on to something else. Claire had been clawing her way towards the truth for two years now, alone and with the grudging consent of her editor, writing real, printable stories every week or two to keep him happy. She’d decided the girls deserved names.