by Joel Hames
Roarkes had crossed the road and put an arm on my shoulder. He was still laughing.
“It’s not funny,” I said. He stopped laughing and folded his arms.
“Yes it is,” he replied.
“That bastard tried to kill me!”
Roarkes started laughing again. Gaddesdon joined him, the two of them laughing and shaking their heads and looking at me like I was about to see their side of it and laugh along with them.
I wasn’t.
PART 2
THE WHITE HILL
12: Get a Grip
WE AGREED NOT to discuss the incident outside the hospital any further, which meant that I very much wanted to discuss it, I wanted it looked into and properly investigated and I wanted serious consideration given to whether I should be granted police protection, and Roarkes didn’t want to discuss it at all. It was an accident, he said, walking away as I unlocked the Fiat and slid into the driver’s seat, and then he corrected himself, because it wasn’t like I’d been hit.
“It wasn’t even an accident. It was a bit of careless driving.”
I started to argue, and he turned and glared at me. Maybe he was right, I thought. And even if he wasn’t, it didn’t look like there was much I could do about it. I decided to chalk it down to bad luck and look after things I did have some control over instead, and before I could talk myself out of it, I’d punched out a short and humble apology to Claire and hit send.
Serena Hawkes was waiting for us in the office Roarkes had taken over and made his own. She had her back to us as we entered, but I could tell what kind of mood she was in from the way she sat, straight up, rigid, elbows out. She spun to face us, eyes blazing, and I knew I was right. I braced myself for the onslaught.
“What the hell gives you the right to keep me from my client?” she asked, and I took a step back before I realised she wasn’t talking to me. I glanced to my left. Roarkes was wearing a frown which told me he was as confused as I was.
“I’m sorry?” he said.
“You will be,” she replied, just three words in a low, steady monotone, but somehow as intense and unpleasant as the verbal assault Roarkes had inflicted on Tarney.
Gaddesdon was despatched for hot drinks and crisps while Roarkes tried to explain why Serena had been held at bay, and she started to calm down. Seguing seamlessly into a description of the near-miss outside the hospital and my “ridiculous” reaction to it helped improve her mood, too. It didn’t do much to lift mine, but Roarkes was never one to let someone else’s feelings get in the way of an opportunity to steer the conversation his way. I opened my mouth to argue and he silenced me with three words of his own.
“Get a grip,” he said, shaking his head, and suddenly I felt like a child trying to argue with the grown-ups.
Serena was smiling, again, that slightly sympathetic, slightly knowing smile. Roarkes, it seemed, was at least partially forgiven. A shame, I thought, because I’d been rather enjoying the venom. It was a novelty. Someone was furious and it wasn’t with me.
Serena's frustration had all been down to one poorly-briefed constable. There had been someone keeping a watch over Thomas Carson, and that someone had been told to keep everyone away, no exceptions, which, Roarkes insisted, wasn’t his doing. Serena Hawkes had tried to face the watchdog down, but it had been like trying to face down a brick wall. And to add insult to injury, he’d got bored and disappeared for a coffee an hour later, allowing a barely-connected lowlife like me – an entirely inappropriate adult – to stroll in and have his own somewhat one-sided conversation with the purportedly-comatose murder suspect.
Serena was looking at me strangely. I didn’t like it. After a couple of minutes I asked her if something was wrong and she pointed to my face.
“Tarney,” I said, and she looked blank. No one had told her. There had been other things happening, things more important than some B-list lawyer getting his face smashed in. So I told her, and she tutted and shook her head, but once the brief look of shock had had its moment I couldn’t fail to spot the hint of a smile flitting across her lips. Yes, it was funny, I supposed, in a sick kind of a way. And no doubt she was thinking this was why I’d blown her off the night before, that it wasn’t down to finding her unattractive or dull or anything like that, and of course she was right. I thought I’d better wipe that smile off her face, so I filled her in on what I’d found out from Maloney – omitting any background on the source. She seemed sceptical, which was fair enough, if slightly less sceptical than Roarkes.
“Doesn’t add up, Sam,” she said, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Roarkes grinning a rare, smug grin, “but if you think it’s worth looking at, I’m not going to stop you.”
Roarkes sighed in frustration. Sure, he didn’t want me wasting time on it, and he might even be right, but I didn’t care. All those leads he hadn’t bothered with were bothering me. There was something out there that would help me get into Carson’s head, if he ever woke up. I didn’t know where it was or what it was, and maybe I’d never find it at all, but a bit of time wasted on a dead end and a bit less of the smug grin might do Roarkes some good.
One of the leads Roarkes had bothered to follow up, or at least tried to, was the mysterious third car that might or might not have approached the murder scene but hadn’t shown up anywhere else. A dark blue Land Rover, a Defender, that was all anyone had, PK11 on the plate, which was half the bloody Defenders in Lancashire, no CCTV or ANPR or anything other than one local farmer with a trailer full of sheep who’d been turned round himself and swore blind he’d seen this guy heading the other way a minute later. Couldn’t describe the driver, thought it might have been male. And this was the witness who’d remembered Carson’s plates to the last letter, so if he didn’t have anything more than that, it was hardly surprising no one else did either. This one looked like a bona fide dead end.
But so was Carson, for now. When I got a minute away from prying eyes to call Maloney, he told me to hang tight. I knew Maloney. I could be hanging a while. Carson still wasn’t saying anything, and neither was his wife, now, and whatever it was I thought she reminded me of, Claire wasn’t going to help me find it any time soon. I asked Roarkes about Tarney, but it turned out Tarney had taken the same vow of silence as Carson. I wondered if maybe I might shake something out of Tarney myself, but Roarkes said no, and given the nature of my relationship with Tarney, he probably had a point.
“Come on,” said Gaddesdon, and grabbed me by the arm. It was my right arm, the arm Tarney had marked so elegantly with his size twelves, and I hadn’t noticed till now how sore it was. I winced, and Gaddesdon looked at me like I was some kind of soft southern bastard. Maybe I was, but this time I had an excuse.
“Tarney’s feet,” I said, and Gaddesdon gave a sympathetic, know-what-you-mean kind of nod, as if the custody sergeant had stamped on half the arms in Folgate.
“Come on, sir. Let’s get some lunch. You haven’t seen the crime scene yet, have you?”
I shook my head. It wasn’t like Gaddesdon to take the initiative like that, I hardly knew the guy but even I could see taking the initiative wasn’t really his thing. Maybe lunch was his thing.
I’d been in some bad pubs in my time, but the King’s Head was a new kind of awful. A nice enough bar, and then a huge cold conservatory with the rain beating so hard on the roof you could hardly hear the waiter apologising for what wasn’t on the menu today. He’d have been better apologising for what was: I found myself confronted with a great grey block of fish that dissolved into water and bone the moment my fork hit it, and Gaddesdon’s chicken was so badly burnt it might just as well have been a lump of coal. That didn’t stop him tucking in with gusto and grabbing a handful of soggy chips off my plate when I sat back and pushed it away in disgust.
Maybe it was just me. The place was packed, after all, elderly ladies by the bus-load, tourists with a liking for the cold and the wet, little knots of farmers gathered in sullen pockets like Victorian mourners.
As my eyes washed over the crowd I spotted a mop of bushy blond hair and went suddenly cold. I blinked and looked again, and it was a few strands of combed-over white. Roarkes was right. I had to get a grip.
One thing the King’s Head did have going for it was a decent mobile signal. I had three texts, two from insurance claims handlers fishing for a non-existent accident, and the third an extravagantly polite message from Atom Industries inviting me to get in touch to confirm a date for my interview. I hovered over the delete button for so long they could have burnt another couple of chickens for Gaddesdon to eat in the time it took me to make up my mind, and finally put my phone in my pocket and left the decision for another day.
Three texts. Not one, I noted, from Claire. Maybe I hadn’t been humble enough.
As we made our way towards the exit we found the route blocked by one of the farmers, either a stout man or a slim man in a stout coat, it was difficult to tell which. Gaddesdon tapped him on the shoulder and asked politely if we could squeeze past, and he turned so slowly I wasn’t sure if I was watching a man moving or an oil tanker changing direction. “Thanks,” said Gaddesdon, and the farmer replied with one of those nods that passes for a smile in those places where a smile’s a sign of weakness.
On the way out we walked past the table he’d been sat at. His friends were grumbling, and I could just about make out what it was they were grumbling about.
I turned and stared at them, but they were back to their bitter and the weather and whatever it was the farmers usually talked about round here. I waited until we were back in Gaddesdon’s car before I mentioned anything.
“Did you hear them?”
He hadn’t. I gave him my best impression of what I’d heard. Cops and journalists. Thieves nicking anything that’s not nailed down and we’re left to it, but the moment someone kills one of them, here they all are.
Gaddesdon shrugged.
“Not really the same, is it?” he said. “Someone nicking a lawnmower and someone shooting two officers.”
Which was fair enough, but wasn’t really the point.
“The guy with the CCTV.”
Gaddesdon didn’t know what I was talking about. I wasn’t sure his memory stretched back more than twenty-four hours on a good day. I reminded him.
“The farmer. Near the scene. Said his CCTV was switched off because there was no crime round here.”
“What about him?”
“From what I’ve just heard, there’s plenty of crime round here. Enough to leave a few cameras running, at least.”
Gaddesdon turned and looked at me, which was disconcerting, because he was doing forty and the road wasn’t as straight as I’d have liked.
“Don’t listen to that lot, sir. Farmers. They’ll moan about anything.”
“Sam,” I said. “Enough of the sir. Let’s visit the scene, OK?”
Gaddesdon shrugged. I took it as a yes.
13: Chicken Jalfrezi
THE CRIME SCENE could have been anything, anywhere. The forensics officers had packed up and gone home and taken all their masks and yellow tape with them. A narrow road, a couple of lay-bys, on either side, twenty yards apart. Six-foot hedges bordering the road, fields, a wood in the distance. There was nothing to tell you two police officers had been murdered here. I walked up and down for a few minutes, taking it all in, not that there was much to take in, and trying to ignore the drizzle that was soaking its way steadily through everything I was wearing. Gaddesdon stood with his arms folded, impervious to the rain even though he had neither a coat nor an umbrella, staring fixedly at nothing.
A few yards further on there was a track, just as Roarkes had said, and it took us to a farmhouse where a tight-lipped man in his fifties told us he’d already told everyone everything he knew so we should stop bothering him or he’d make a complaint.
“Do you mind if I take a look at your CCTV system, sir?” I asked. He stared at me. I hadn’t introduced myself, so I was guessing he thought I was police, just as Daniel Cullop had. I wasn’t going to tell him otherwise. Being mistaken for police wasn’t so bad, anyway. People tend not to like the police, but in my experience, they like lawyers even less.
“Over here,” he said. I’d spotted a camera on a pole at the entrance to the track, and another one high on the wall of the farmhouse. The computer running it all was in the corner of a barn tacked onto the side of the house, with a power cable running through a glassless window to feed it. It was switched off, but it was still plugged in. I turned it on.
It whirred for a minute, and the monitor flickered to life. Blue screen. The whirring stopped, started again, died. “No disk,” read the screen. I stared at it.
The farmer was outside with Gaddesdon, both of them silent.
“Did you know there’s no hard drive in your PC?” I asked him. He looked at me like I was talking a foreign language.
“The drive. The bit of your computer that has everything on it, all your data, your programmes, your system, everything you’ve recorded. It’s not there.”
He shrugged.
“Nick anything, they will,” he said, turned and walked back inside the house, letting the door fall shut behind him. This was the farmer who’d claimed he had nothing worth stealing. Gaddesdon followed me back into the barn and bent over the computer.
“He’s right, you know,” he called out a minute later.
“What? How?”
“It’s been nicked. Look. Someone’s unscrewed the back, pulled out the hard drive, left everything else there.”
“Why the hell would someone do that?”
Gaddesdon shrugged.
“Dunno. Storage. It’s what everyone wants, right?”
Right, I thought. Top marks for Gaddesdon. They want it so bad they’ll come to a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere to steal it out of a computer so old it’s never heard of Facebook.
Roarkes was looking pleased with himself when we returned, that smug grin back on his face, which usually meant someone else was wearing a frown. I hoped the someone else was Tarney.
“Got one of the bastards talking, have you?” I asked, and he shook his head.
“Nothing that good, no. But we found the phone the original call was made from.”
Nothing that good? From where I was standing the phone was a miracle. And for all he was using the plural pronoun, I didn’t see anyone in that “we” except Roarkes. I raised an eyebrow and Roarkes filled me in.
“Well, not the phone itself. But we tracked down the owner. Says it was nicked.”
“That’s convenient. Did he report it?”
“No, he didn’t report it. But he doesn’t look the type to talk to the police unless he has to.”
I nodded. Roarkes went on. The owner of the phone – Brian Betterson, the guy was called – claimed to have lost it outside a football ground the day before the killing. Turf Moor. Burnley.
“They’re used to losing things round there,” said Gaddesdon, and laughed. No one joined in.
Betterson had already been pulled in and interviewed by a detective sergeant who’d had the bad luck of a free half hour at the wrong time, with Serena Hawkes allowed to sit in as an observer. Nothing useful, said Roarkes, and showed me the transcripts. He wasn’t wrong.
“Did the guy seem convincing?”
“Serena certainly thought so. Give her a call.”
I did. She agreed with Roarkes. The phone was starting to look like yet another dead end.
“Mind if I speak to the guy?” I asked her.
“No skin off my nose.”
Brian Betterson was halfway back to Burnley when Gaddesdon got hold of him, and his response to being asked to return to Folgate was loud and fairly predictable. But he agreed to come in, and that was the important thing.
Except maybe it wasn’t. I sat there, in what Roarkes insisted, for the tape, was an “advisory role”, with Betterson muttering darkly about all the fucking observers and advisers and no wonder they can’t catch any real cri
minals, while Roarkes asked him most of the same questions the DS had asked an hour or so earlier and got the same answers, preceded each and every time by “I’ve already fuckin’ been through all this.” Brian Betterson was a tall, thin man in his late twenties with cheap, fading tattoos on his upper arms and the distracted look of someone on his way down and already thinking about his next fix.
And Brian Betterson was nervous. That was certain. He had his story straight enough, phone taken from his bag when he’d put it down to have a smoke before the Burnley game. He hadn’t reported it to the police because it was a cheap phone, a crap one, and what were the police going to do about something like that when there were people getting raped and stabbed all over the place? It struck me that Brian Betterson probably wouldn’t have gone to the police even if he’d lost something expensive, because, as Roarkes had indicated, Brian Betterson didn’t look like he enjoyed talking to the police. But that was fair enough, I thought. He was a junkie. He had, as Roarkes informed me just before we went in to see him, a short and modest record for handling stolen goods. The biter had been bitten. He wasn’t going to come moaning to the police about it.
One last try, I thought, and asked him to read out some words.
“Why the fook would I do that?” he asked, but he did it anyway.
“Hello, listen, I think I’ve seen a man with a weapon.”
“Yes, in his car.”
“Dunno. Dark hair, late thirties.”
“Blue Fiesta. Driving out of Charborough, up towards Bursington.”
He didn’t sound anything like the man who’d made the call, and I didn’t think he was acting. I didn’t think he was clever enough to act. Brian Betterson was nervous, but not because he was lying. He was a dead end. I was sure of it.