Jack-Knifed

by Wonny Lea

  Coffee was now absolutely essential, and Martin grabbed one of the strong black variety and took it straight to his office. Was the woman really expecting him to come up with the whys and wherefores of this murder by lunchtime? Not a hope in hell, unless some psychopath walked through the front door with a set of five knives all fitting the crime and the desire to make a full confession!

  No, it wasn’t going to be that easy, and Martin sat at his desk and faced several piles of papers, which included the full details of the post mortem and several toxicology reports. He was about to plough his way through the reports when the door opened and DS Pryor came in with yet another pile.

  ‘Did you know the Chief Constable is here?’ enquired Matt. ‘Everyone is walking on eggshells, it’s quite funny really.’

  ‘Not funny at all,’ responded Martin. ‘The woman is expecting an “update” on the case by the time she leaves at lunchtime. More like she expects to hear that we’ve solved it, made an arrest, and given her the chance to tick off one of her monthly statistics. Any chance?’

  Matt shrugged his shoulders. ‘The Turkish neighbour was our only potential suspect, and even to start with that was unlikely, but now we know that all his movements at the time of the murder can be accounted for we’ve have crossed him off the list. Having said that, there’s not much of a list, and top of the column of people we most want to question is Mark’s sister Amy – but so far we’ve not located an address for her.’

  Martin shook his head. ‘Nothing’s really adding up, and I keep going back to the issue of a motive but not coming up with anything that makes any sense – talk me through the usual things.’

  Matt drew up a chair opposite his boss and stared past him towards the window. ‘Top of my list would have to be that someone really hated the victim, and that means we’re looking for someone who knew him well. So we need to systematically trawl through his family, friends, and work colleagues. He was employed by a design company and I’ll be going there at about 9.30, to speak to absolutely everyone who works there and getting details of their whereabouts on Saturday afternoon and evening. Anyone who is unable to provide a water-tight alibi will be brought here for further questioning and fingerprinting.’

  ‘As for friends, we have already interviewed the three women he seems to have known for years. Suzanne is the only one with a definite alibi, as she was with her daughter and they were shopping. It was easy enough to check that out and put her in the clear.’

  ‘Paula and Anne claim they were at their respective homes all of Saturday afternoon and Anne has given her boyfriend as her witness but we have yet to catch up with him as the mobile number she gave us just keeps going to answerphone.’

  ‘Paula has no one who can confirm her whereabouts, as she claims to have spent all day Saturday just pottering around her flat. We were there last evening checking with her neighbours – that was an experience in itself.’ Matt continued. ‘There are three other flats in the house, but all the residents were in the one on the top floor and not one of them was capable of stringing a few sentences together, so it’s unlikely that they even knew where they were themselves on Saturday. They should have been rudely awakened this morning, as DC Lewis and DC Challinger were there at eight o’clock to interview all of them.’

  Matt hesitated and looked at Martin. ‘Guv, when I think back at that kitchen, I find it impossible to come to terms with the thought that such a vicious killing could have been done by a woman.’

  Martin nodded seemingly in agreement. ‘We are trying to focus on motive and so far we have considered hatred. We’ve got as far as needing to rule out the people he worked with, and his friends, but on the finding his friends front we don’t seem to have got very far. There must have been other groups of friends – did he belong to a fitness club, or any other sort of club? We need to go through his house from top to bottom.’

  Matt nodded. ‘I agree, and that has been done, but there are no signs of any membership cards, and in fact very little paperwork at all, which leads us to believe that Mark made most of his transactions online. The good news is that Charlie is back from her weekend, and even if she had an excess of Guinness she’s showing no signs of it now.’

  ‘I got here at about half seven and she was already set up with Mark’s computer and other bits and pieces and was well in to unveiling its secrets, with Alex filling her in on the details of the crime. I suspect that by lunchtime Charlie will be able to tell us everything we need to know about our victim’s activities.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Martin. ‘If anyone will uncover everything we need to know it’ll be Charlie, I hope we can hang on to her but she’s being seriously headhunted.’

  ‘Hang onto Alex, then,’ winked Matt. ‘Sometimes an incentive is, surprisingly, above and beyond the monthly pay cheque.’

  Martin didn’t respond to this piece of office gossip from his DS and rose from his chair, suggesting that they both go to Incident Room One to continue their deliberations.

  When they got there, Martin recapped. ‘The next thing for you and the team to do is to come up with a list of everyone that Mark knew, and that must include everyone he knew as a result of normal face-to-face contact, as well as anyone he knew through social networking. I know you’re already working on that, but we need some deadlines, so let’s say that by lunchtime we have all the relevant names displayed on that wall there.

  ‘Keeping with the hate motive, let’s think about why it is possible to hate someone you don’t even know. People have been murdered because they have red hair, or because they support a particular football team, and certainly because they are of a different religion – or because they’re known to be gay.

  ‘Does anything like that fit into this type of killing? I don’t think so. That sort of obsessive killer is more likely to randomly pick a target, and much less likely to go into the home of his victim. No, I keep coming back to the view that it is someone who knew Mark. Someone who had a particular reason to hate him, someone with a hatred that was not as a result of a one-off incident, but more likely one fuelled by years of jealousy or anger.

  ‘Yes, I’m more than ever convinced that this killing is a hate killing of some sort. But that’s just my gut feeling so let’s think about all the other motives for killing if only to rule them out.’

  They considered a fight that had got out of hand, but there was no evidence of a brawl; burglary, but nothing had been taken; self-defence, but who would have five different knives handy, just to ward off a possible attack from Mark? Finally, after exhausting all the possibilities that they could think of, Martin went to the whiteboard and wrote across the space he had left in the middle.

  MOTIVE – HATE OR JEALOUSY OR BOTH

  VICTIM KNEW HIS KILLER.

  It was a gamble to focus the minds of his team in one direction at this early stage of the investigation, but it would speed up the process if he was right, and all his instinct built on experience told him he was.

  ‘What have we learned about Mark’s early life and the years he spent in care? Were there any major upsets with any of the foster parents or their families?’

  ‘Nothing of note that hasn’t been checked out,’ replied Matt, as he thumbed through one of the folders full of Social Services speak. He tried to consider what could be behind reports that made such comments as ‘the family think Mark would do better in a smaller family’ or ‘Mark would benefit from being with older children’, or even ‘Mark is a lovely boy but we are not sure we are able to help him’.

  There were pages and pages of reports, not surprising for a boy who had spent most of his childhood being looked after by a succession of strangers, but only one serious incident. It was the only mention of issues concerning Mark’s sexual orientation, and found in a report where one foster-father, Peter Garfield, had accused Mark of turning his ‘normal’ sixteen-year-old son into a ‘queer’, even though Mark was just nine years old at the time.

  Matt read the details of that incid
ent aloud. It seemed to have been quietly dealt with at the time, but there was writing in the margin of the report that had been added some years later and while Mark was still in care. It gave the name and telephone number of a CID officer, who had interviewed Mark in connection with the murder of a twenty-year-old man in an area of Cardiff known to be a gay pick-up point.

  The young man’s father, who was subsequently convicted of the crime, had initially accused Mark of the killing, but the young teenager was completely innocent except perhaps in some twisted way in the mind of the victim’s father – one Peter Garfield.

  ‘Before you ask,’ Matt pre-empted his boss, ‘we considered the possibility of Garfield harbouring a grudge while he was doing his time, and then taking his revenge on Mark, but obviously the timing is all wrong, and Garfield would be over eighty by now – if he was still alive. DC Davies checked him out and discovered that he only did six weeks of his sentence, before being transferred to a mental health unit and committing suicide shortly after.’

  The doors to the room opened automatically in response to the button outside being pressed, and the familiar hum of Charlie’s wheelchair announced her arrival.

  ‘You look far too lively for someone who has just spent a weekend sampling the hospitality of our Irish cousins,’ commented Martin. ‘How did it go?’

  ‘Least said about that, the better,’ was the reply. ‘I’m quickly coming to the conclusion that I prefer wakes to weddings. Thought you would like to see what we’ve picked up from that poor man’s computer – I’ve transferred anything of interest so we can look at it all from here.’

  Years of experience allowed Charlie to manoeuvre her wheelchair around chairs and trailing wires to settle herself in front of one of the screens. In a matter of seconds, images from Mark’s computer were being flashed up for her colleagues to view.

  ‘Simple stuff first,’ suggested Charlie. ‘Here, we have Mark’s electronic address book – it’s quite a cute little programme and he has obviously spent hours configuring it to remind him of people’s birthdays and anniversaries. My interest was sparked not by the names we can see here, but by the names that have been deleted. Most people think that if you permanently delete data from your PC trash bin, it’s gone forever, but not so, and here are the details of four people deleted this year.

  ‘As you can see, they are all men, and unlike his other contacts where there is quite a good profile for each one, on these we only have a first name and a telephone number. We haven’t checked out the numbers yet, as we wanted to run it past you first.

  ‘As well as individual people he knew personally, we have the usual contacts such as builders and decorators, the doctors’ surgery, dentist, and the phone numbers for seven clubs of one sort or another.

  ‘Three of those are health and fitness type venues, and it looks as if Mark was a member of two of them, according to what we have found in the way of regular direct debit payments.’

  ‘My curiosity got the better of me when I saw the other four numbers, and, as I suspected, they are all matchmaker type agencies and claim to be able to find one’s perfect partner, either for a one-night stand or for life-long commitment. Obviously, I only made a general enquiry when I phoned the numbers, so I don’t know if Mark has used all the agencies, but there is evidence of some payments to one of them, albeit on an ad hoc basis, and nothing for the last four months.’

  ‘Any other regular payments?’ asked Martin.

  ‘Trust you to steal my thunder, DCI Phelps.’ Charlie pretended to pout. ‘I was just coming to that, and I have to admit it’s never been easier to investigate anyone’s bank transactions. Mark did everything online which is why are no paper records anywhere when it comes to the usual household bills. However, when he took out cash from the hole in the wall, just about every penny of it is accounted for. He kept receipts for everything and even made a note of the odd change he put into the tin of a street charity collector.

  ‘Now me, I have difficulty in remembering what the hell I do with hundreds of pounds of my salary every month! Judging by the dates of the receipts we found, I suspect that Mark did a monthly trawl of what he had spent, and probably checked things against his bank statements before destroying them. So, we have a brilliant trail of all Mark’s financial activity, except that for the past two months on the first day of each month Mark has withdrawn one thousand pounds in cash and there is no record whatsoever for it.’

  Charlie sat back in her wheelchair and waited for the obvious reaction, and DS Pryor did not disappoint.

  ‘Blackmail!’ He could barely contain his excitement. ‘It’s got to be blackmail, and maybe he was slaughtered when he refused to pay up for the third time. Makes sense, and he certainly wouldn’t want to make a record of those transactions, would he? What do you think, boss?’

  Martin was trying to think of any other reasons for withdrawing such a large amount of money on a precise date each month, but each possibility begged the question of why Mark wouldn’t account for it in his meticulous records.

  He gave some orders. ‘Matt, I want you to get hold of the four men on Mark’s deleted contacts list, bring them in to help with our enquiries, and then pay a visit to the two gyms that he had membership of, and the agencies he might have used for meeting people. I want to come with you when you visit the one we know he used, and although it might just be a coincidence, there could be a link between the fact that he has not used them for a couple of months, and that it’s over the same period that he has needed to withdraw this level of cash with no explanation.’

  ‘OK.’ Matt looked purposeful as he walked towards the door. ‘I’ll keep you informed of our progress – where will you be?’

  ‘Speaking to Sandy and Norman Harding,’ replied Martin. ‘They should be able to fill us in with some more details about Mark, and I’m now very keen to see if they can offer us anything, like possible changes in his behaviour during the past few months. I should be back here by two o’clock, and then I think we need to get everyone together for a briefing.’

  Martin’s thoughts were already on the meeting he must now have with Sandy and Norman Harding and his experience reminded him that it was likely, in the process of grieving, that their initial shock would now be turning to anger. Well, he couldn’t argue with that – they had every reason to be angry and he would have to be prepared to be the butt of their anger unless they could help him to point them all in a different direction.

  Charlie had chosen to remain in the incident room, and was scrolling down numbers and tables across the computer screen at a rate of knots, making her beloved technology dance to her tune. She looked up as she became aware that Martin was watching her, and grinned as she said, ‘Better get a move on, or this morning’s seminar will be over and you’ll be blessed with meeting the wicked witch of the north.’

  By rights, Martin should have taken her to task for her unprofessional comment about the Chief Constable, but instead he practically ran to the back stairs to avoid a meeting that could potentially be even more demoralising than the one he was hurrying to.

  The journey to the Hardings’ home was uneventful, but as he turned the corner to approach their house his heart sank at the sight of upwards of twenty men and women of the press waiting just outside the house, and rushing towards his car as he slowed down to turn into the drive.

  Chapter Ten

  Grief plays tricks

  Matt walked through the doors of a rather imposing health club, and decided on first impressions that this was not a gym for the seriously minded fitness addict, but more a fashion statement for people who wanted to drop details of their membership into the conversation over dinner. He thought of the gym he frequented, which was nothing more than a few rowing machines, exercise bikes, and lots of weights, and not a trace of Lycra – but then he wasn’t paying the sort of money needed for membership of this setup.

  It was always interesting to watch people’s reactions, and as both he and DC Matthews were in pl
ain clothes they were greeted with the full flash of perfect white teeth from the bronzed, blond receptionist. At that point they were probably seen as a potential money stream, and two victims to sign up at the same time was something not to be missed.

  ‘How can we help you gentlemen?’ was the greeting. ‘If you are looking for a place to realise your fitness potential and meet like-minded people who are achieving that level of perfection, you have come to the right place. Personal trainers are something we highly recommend and we will ensure that for a small extra fee you are placed with a trainer who totally meets your needs – after all we can’t really put a price on that feeling of well-being that comes with being truly fit, can we?’

  Matt relished watching the smile disappear and then the well-rehearsed greeting come to a faltering halt as he held up his warrant card and introduced himself and DC Matthews in the most officious voice he could muster.

  ‘I am not allowed to speak to the police or the press and I don’t know if our manager is here.’ The receptionist’s voice had changed from the assumed English public school variety to a distinctively Cardiff accent and Matt had difficulty in concealing his amusement as he replied.

  ‘I suggest you find out if he or she is here as we need a word and now would be a good time.’

  ‘It’s Mr Wilson, and if he is here he will be working out so I will have to go and tell him you want him as we don’t have phones in the place where members do their exercises – but I’m not supposed to leave the reception desk.’

  Matt responded. ‘We promise not to frighten off any would-be members and your reception desk will be safe in our hands, but alternatively we are happy to find Mr Wilson for ourselves if you point us in the right direction.’