by Gytha Lodge
The DCI was on a call when Hanson returned to the office, so she parked her tray of Costa coffee and settled herself at her desk. She began looking through the spreadsheet once again. She identified another address that might be of interest a few moments later. A knife identical to their murder weapon had been sent to a firm of mortgage advisers based in Winchester. The addressee was a Mr Marc Ruskin. She started looking to see if any of their suspects had anything to do with this firm, and the careful, methodical work was the perfect antidote to everything else she was feeling.
She’d only meant to fill a little time, but ended up so absorbed in it that she didn’t notice the DCI coming to find her until he said her name from a few feet away.
‘Sorry,’ he said, as she started. ‘Didn’t mean to break your concentration. How’s it going?’
‘It’s going OK, I think,’ she said. ‘There are a couple of addresses on the list from Steel and Silver that look promising. I’m just wading through any connections to the first one. And I got you coffee.’ She gestured to a cardboard tray from Costa. ‘I hope it’s still warm. Flat white. Is that all right?’
‘Oh, thanks. That’s actually perfect.’ Sheens manoeuvred the cup out of the cardboard holder. ‘So. If it’s not a bad time, I wanted to bounce a few thoughts off you.’
Hanson sat back from her computer. ‘Fire away.’
‘There’s no way I buy Niall Reakes and Dina Weyman meeting about a job,’ he said. ‘But equally, if it was simply an affair, it seems bizarre that he wouldn’t just admit it to us, as it provides a perfect alibi.’
‘Particularly since his fake alibi relies on his ex-wife anyway,’ Hanson added.
‘Exactly. I doubt his wife would believe him about the job idea in any case, so there’s no benefit to it. Unless both he and Dina are covering up for something else that’s been going on.’
Hanson looked away, towards her screen. Her mind was grinding through this, slowly. ‘He seemed quite sure that Dina would cover for him. But then she clearly decided it was better to scapegoat him instead.’
‘Which suggests something criminal,’ the DCI agreed.
‘Niall Reakes drove to Zurich before he flew home. He booked the ticket at the last minute. As if he’d suddenly been summoned …’
The DCI gave her an odd look. ‘And he’s a drug rep.’
‘His ex-wife,’ Hanson said quickly, ‘manages a whole team of reps at another big pharma.’ The DCI met her gaze. ‘Could it be that simple?’
The chief stood, his face in a half-smile. ‘If it is, it may have nothing to do with Alex Plaskitt. Let’s bring Mr Reakes back in.’
O’Malley had finished most of his food and was feeling over-sugared, in need of a comfort break, and a little nauseous. Neither Issa nor Louise Reakes had gone anywhere, and the inside of the car was now bitterly cold. Which made it about standard for a stake-out, in O’Malley’s experience.
On the better side of things, he was now three and a half hours through his five-hour stint, and he had identified a petrol station round the corner that had a customer toilet. Naturally, he was within moments of taking a brief break when a Lotus came noisily down the road and hesitated outside number eleven. O’Malley had his camera phone out and ready, and had a clear view of April Dumont as she looked around for a space.
He took three photos and then waited as she found a spot further up the already-crowded close. She left the car half on the pavement and half hanging out diagonally into the road as she strode towards Louise Reakes’s house. But instead of going towards the door, she moved across the road. For a moment her gaze swept over his car, and he thought he’d been seen. But she walked on past him, heading for the Corsa.
O’Malley hastily switched on the ignition and put the window down far enough to be able to hear any conversation, though the first sound was just a sharp rapping as April knocked on Issa’s window. O’Malley couldn’t see Issa himself, just April, her hair swinging down over her face as she leaned towards him.
‘Hey,’ she said, her drawl loud and piercing. It seemed that Issa had not opened the window to listen to her. ‘So I know that you’re grieving and all, but you need to leave. Louise has been through enough shit, and this is not reasonable behaviour, OK?’
O’Malley found himself holding his breath slightly. He wasn’t too clear on how Issa was going to respond. He imagined him erupting out of the car and trying to injure her. But there was silence until April said, ‘Hey! You getting this?’
And then the engine started up, and April backed away as Issa drove his car down onto the road. She stood and watched the car disappear from sight, and then she turned and walked towards number eleven.
O’Malley grinned to himself, deciding it was time for that comfort break.
Niall Reakes no longer looked anxious. He looked defeated. He moved slowly and without apparent care into the interview room and sat heavily. There was none of the self-righteousness that had characterised his first interview in this room, and Jonah was caught between satisfaction at his fall from grace and genuine empathy at his situation.
Daniella Hart, here as Niall’s solicitor again, looked rather more cheerful. She threw a slightly combative smile in Jonah and Hanson’s direction as they ran the tape. Jonah smiled back, guessing that Niall hadn’t told his solicitor what he’d really been doing with Dina Weyman.
‘Thank you for coming in again, Mr Reakes,’ Jonah began. ‘I’m afraid we have yet to communicate with your ex-wife.’ He saw Niall’s expression tighten very slightly, but it was almost as though he’d expected this. As though he had come prepared for betrayal. ‘There are, however, a few more questions that need some answers in the interim.’
Niall did nothing more than nod, and Jonah glanced over at Hanson, who was primed to take the questioning from here.
‘We’ve arranged to liaise with the Swiss police in order to trace your movements during Friday afternoon,’ she said, with perfect coldness. ‘Before we pin down exactly where you went in Zurich, and prove what you were picking up, we want to give you the opportunity to cooperate fully with our investigation.’
Niall’s eyes were on the table, his jaw working. Daniella Hart’s eyes were fixed on Jonah now, her pen poised over her notebook. The silence went on for a good few seconds and felt a lot longer.
And then Niall said, ‘Shit.’
Hanson adjusted her pose, and spoke more quietly. ‘This doesn’t have to be an unmitigated disaster, Niall. You aren’t kingpin in this.’
‘I’d like to speak with my client alone,’ the solicitor said.
‘I didn’t want to get involved,’ Niall said, lifting his head and ignoring her. ‘They entrapped me.’
‘As serious an offence as drug smuggling is,’ Jonah said, ‘we’re only interested in whether it relates to Alex Plaskitt’s death.’
‘Of course it doesn’t!’ Niall said, immediately. ‘There’s a big difference between shipping stuff around and killing someone. I wasn’t even in Southampton on Friday.’
‘Mr Reakes,’ Daniella said sharply, ‘we need to have a conversation.’
And this time, Niall nodded silently. Jonah switched off the tape.
It took the solicitor and her client fifteen minutes to establish that Niall was going to cooperate fully. When Jonah and Hanson returned and ran the tape again, he told them, in great detail, about the new friends he’d met at a conference in Dallas eight years ago. Two wonderful new people who had turned out not to be who he thought they were.
‘They were a GP and his dermatologist wife, they said. They struck up a conversation in the hotel, and they were just so … cool. The kind of people you immediately want as your friends.’
Niall had met up with them again late on the second night of the conference, and they’d fed him a story about her having stage two breast cancer. ‘The one experimental drug that looked like it was going to work wasn’t on the market in the UK yet, which was why they grabbed any opportunity to come to the States. They sai
d they’d been buying it for a fortune and shipping it to the UK, and had ended up with massive debts. They had to find a solution, or they were going to have to sell their house, they said.’ He sighed. ‘Somewhere down the line, I admitted I had debt problems, too. And that I hadn’t told anyone, least of all Dina, who was my fiancée back then.’
It was clear how much Niall hated talking about this, and his shame added to Jonah’s conviction that this was the truth. He signalled for Niall to continue.
‘The wine was flowing and it seemed really … natural to talk about it all. They seemed like they were being so open …’
Jonah nodded. He could imagine it well. Successful hustlers often had a particular ability to connect with people. Or to fake it, at least.
‘The next night,’ Niall went on, ‘they told me they thought they’d found a solution to the cancer drug issue. A way of making it affordable. They looked so ecstatic that I actually felt happy for them. They went off to bed, and we agreed to see each other on the last night. We partied late after the conference and rolled to bed. I didn’t think I’d see much of them after that, but she – the wife – turned up at my room before breakfast on the last morning, freaking out, apparently.’
‘Their scheme with the drugs had gone wrong somehow?’ Jonah asked.
‘Of course it had,’ Niall said, bitterly.
He explained, tightly, everything she’d told him. That their flight had been cancelled and their airline was rerouting them via Boston, an airport where they used sniffer dogs. They’d picked up a large batch of her cancer drugs at a much cheaper price here, not actually legally. They knew they couldn’t risk taking them through US customs in Boston.
‘She said, “We can’t afford to jettison them,” and she looked so …’ He sighed. ‘So desperate. I didn’t even stop to think about it all properly. When she asked what they should do, I just – I just said to give them to me. I was taking drug samples myself so it wasn’t a problem to take theirs home too.’
‘And these drugs …’ Jonah said.
‘They weren’t cancer drugs,’ Niall said, flatly. ‘They told me later that they were MDMA. And, no, I didn’t check before I shipped them. I went to their hotel room with my case, and I let them thank me over and over as they gave them to me. They hugged me and cried a little, both of them, and I never even stopped to wonder if the bag sitting on the bed had a concealed camera in it. I guess I just don’t think in the right way for that stuff.’
‘So what happened when you arrived home?’
‘They came to get the drugs, and they said, “Come on, Niall. You know they weren’t cancer drugs.” Then they played me the little video they’d taken of me putting the drugs in my suitcase and pointing out my fake paperwork. They’d obviously edited out the rest. And I felt just so …’ Niall’s body sagged as he sighed. ‘I thought I’d made some lifelong friends. When all they’d done was recruit me.’
‘Did they pay you?’
‘Yes,’ Niall said. ‘They paid me a lot. And they told me not to worry, because their organisation would keep on paying me. They said they really were going to be friends to me. I was going to get right out of debt, they said.’ He glanced up at Jonah, and then added, tightly, ‘I wish I could give you their real names, or some way of contacting them, but I can’t. They became just the collection people, and the numbers they gave me were never answered by them. Always by someone else.’
‘Another team here will need to ask you about all of that,’ Jonah replied, not without a little sympathy. Jonah knew that the National Crime Agency would have a lot of questions for Niall about his contacts, but Jonah’s interest was a lot narrower. ‘What we need to know about now is Friday. Is Dina involved in all this somehow?’
‘Of course she is,’ Niall said, his mouth twisting. ‘I’d stupidly let slip in those early conversations about my fiancée who worked in pharma too. They didn’t touch her while we were together, but then I turned up at a drop-off and it was Dina instead of the couple. She became … They used her to recruit reps. She’s risen up the ranks crazy fast. I guess she was in an ideal position to manage a whole group of runners. And she’s ruthless enough to help dig dirt on her employees and then force them into it. The part that got to me the most was that she was suddenly above me in this scheme. I’ve spent the last four and a half years being answerable to my ex-wife, and having to walk this constant line. Avoiding sleeping with her but keeping her sweet.’
‘But you kept doing it,’ Jonah said.
‘What choice did I have?’ Niall asked. ‘They had the video, and I had money troubles. They seemed to know exactly how to keep me tied in. There was never enough money to get me totally out of debt, and a lot of their deals meant going to expensive hotels or bars, which made it worse.’
Jonah nodded. ‘So tell us what happened on Friday.’
Niall’s mouth twisted into a slight smile. ‘That was a massive balls-up. But it wasn’t actually mine. One of Dina’s reps in Zurich was supposed to take a shipment and got himself arrested.’ He shook his head, his hand coming up to rub his face as he thought about it. ‘I don’t even know who he was, but you could probably find out. He got picked up in a bar for sniffing coke in the middle of the effing afternoon. He rang one of our group, who told me they were extracting his stuff from his hotel room, but I needed to get my ass over there, or their buyer was going to be seriously pissed off.’
‘So you changed flights and collected it?’
‘Yes,’ Niall said. ‘And it was bloody stressful. I could just see everything crumbling, which it did. Just … for a different reason.’
‘Where did you go once you were back in the UK?’ Hanson asked him.
‘Oh, I met Dina at Gatwick airport, like I said.’ He looked between them. ‘I wasn’t lying about that. The stuff was supposed to go to her … She could have just bloody lied for me, and this would all have been fine.’ Niall made a slightly disgusted sound. ‘You know, I don’t even think they told her to throw me to the wolves. I’ve been thinking about it, and it’s much more dangerous to have me questioned under pressure. I think denying it was all her idea. A way of making me know that she had power over me. She probably thought she could leave me to sweat for a few hours and then admit that she saw me.’
‘So you met her at Gatwick,’ Jonah said. ‘And the handover went as planned?’
‘Yes.’
‘And then?’
Niall looked disconcerted. ‘Well, I stayed at the hotel, so Louise wouldn’t find out I was back early, and I hung around there on Saturday morning. Went to the gym, had coffee and read the papers … I was just killing time. And then … and then Louise called and told me what had happened.’ He shook his head, his expression angry. Even after everything he’d done, he still seemed aggrieved at his wife’s actions.
‘So you weren’t in Southampton on Friday night?’ Jonah asked, his voice hard. ‘You didn’t make your way home, thinking to catch Louise out for drinking?’
Niall shook his head, very definitely. ‘Why the hell would I do that? I was trying not to get caught out myself.’ He shook his head, slowly. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t have a clue what happened to that guy. It had nothing to do with me.’
‘Do you believe him?’ Hanson asked, as they returned to CID. She wasn’t quite sure why she was asking. Perhaps because she wasn’t sure what she thought about it all.
‘Not necessarily,’ the DCI said. ‘The people Niall works for are exactly the kind of people who might stab someone using a custom-made weapon. It’s possible that Alex saw something he shouldn’t have done, and Niall ended up reacting violently out of desperation. But it does seem unlikely that he’d then leave the body in his own house. Or frame his wife, for that matter. It’s too close to home.’
‘But he still could have had a knife like that and flipped out because he found Alex with his wife,’ Hanson countered. ‘I still want to try and link Niall Reakes to that weapon. Possibly his ex-wife, too.’
‘
Good,’ Sheens said. ‘I agree that we shouldn’t rule him out.’
They came to a stop next to Lightman’s desk. Ben was typing up a report, presumably of his interview with April.
‘What did April Dumont have to say?’ Hanson asked.
‘A few things,’ Lightman said, thoughtfully. ‘She agrees that she kissed Alex Plaskitt, but had no idea he was the victim. She doesn’t think Louise would have gone home with Alex, either. She says it’s not what she does. Interesting observations on Step Conti, though.’
The DCI raised an eyebrow.
‘He was apparently very upset when Alex and April kissed. April thought he might actually be jealous that Alex had kissed someone else. She saw some intense conversations going on between the two of them afterwards.’
Hanson cast her mind back to Alex’s self-contained friend. He had seemed genuinely upset at Alex’s death. Surprised, too. Or at least good at pretending to be.
‘He did seem close to Alex,’ she said, thoughtfully. ‘Might he have been secretly obsessed with him? Or even seeing him behind Issa’s back?’
‘Nothing has pointed in that direction so far,’ Sheens said. ‘But it’s worth looking at.’
‘I suppose,’ Hanson went on, ‘if he was obsessed, then if he’d seen Alex get together with yet another woman, that might have driven him to do something stupid.’
‘I wouldn’t mind getting other views on Step Conti,’ the DCI agreed. ‘Let’s try Alex’s sister.’ He turned to Ben. ‘Anything else from April?’
‘Yes. A small but potentially interesting other thing,’ Lightman said. ‘Louise lost her driving licence in the club. I wondered if Alex might have tried to return it to her.’
‘Interesting,’ the chief agreed. His expression was thoughtful. ‘I need some more coffee and some time to think. Anyone want anything from Costa?’
‘As many chocolate twists as they have,’ Hanson said. And then she added, ‘God, and I’d better do some exercise later. I’ve done nothing for days.’
She didn’t add that she’d largely stopped running because of Damian. It had lost a lot of its charm once she’d started looking over her shoulder for him. She’d ended up running in the gym instead, and she didn’t enjoy it in the same way. Getting there was also needlessly time-consuming, so she inevitably went less often.