by Joel Hames
I was surprised how smoothly I’d lied, how easily I’d fallen into Willoughby’s own patterns of speech. He seemed somewhat taken aback himself, if the haste with which he extricated himself was anything to go by, winding up the call with an Excellent, don’t hesitate to call if you need anything and a couple of Jolly good’s that felt a little like a verbal security blanket.
The next hit on Akadi was a strange one, stranger even than the conspiracy theorist that had preceded it. Some kind of blog, I thought, although when I tried to reach what I assumed would be the home page there was nothing there at all. I navigated back to the initial page, which seemed to be a broadly accurate but oddly stilted description of the proceedings right up to Trawden’s acquittal. No opinions were given, no views as to guilt or innocence or sympathy for the family or railing at the police. Instead, just a set of dates and events. Edward Trawden convicted of murder. Robbie Evans convicted of murder. Robbie Evans confesses to Grimshaw killing. Robbie Evans killed in Pentonville Prison. Hussein Akadi informs authorities of Grimshaw confession. And more of the same, with some smaller details in between, but not many of them, right up to the release. White text on a black background. Everything about the site was primitive, earlier-than-2005 primitive, although, of course, it couldn’t have been. Another lunatic, I thought. A fan, perhaps, although of what or of who I couldn’t say.
I was halfway through the next hit, another article, this time by a criminologist attempting to fit Evans into a profile she was certain would match every paedophile murderer in the western world, when the phone rang again. Again, I looked at the number; again, I didn’t recognise it, but I knew who it would be and I toyed with the idea of ignoring it, of letting it ring, and letting the caller dial again, and again, time after time, fruitless and unanswered. And then I realised that wouldn’t put her off, she’d just send someone round to “bring me in”, and the wisest move here was the same one I’d played on Willoughby. Give her what she wanted.
“Sam Williams,” I said, again.
“Mr Williams, it’s Detective Inspector Martins here. I’m just calling to ask if you’ve remembered any useful information since our last conversation.”
I didn’t recall her asking me for any useful information. I didn’t recall her asking me for anything much at all, once she’d decided I wasn’t the murderer, and couldn’t possible have been the murderer, because when the murder had taken place I’d been at the funeral of a lawyer two hundred miles away and there had been half a dozen police officers there to vouch for me. I bit back an instinctive response, a you must be getting desperate if you’ve come back to me sort of response, and answered her politely instead.
“I’m sorry, DI Martins. I haven’t got anything else. I’ll let you know immediately if anything does come to mind, of course.”
“Thank you, Mr Williams.”
She paused, and I wondered why we were being so polite, why we were pretending to have a normal, professional relationship when the last time I’d seen her she’d thrown me out of her police station. Colman had warned me about her less than an hour ago. Larkin had warned Colman that Martins would have me arrested if I interfered. I wondered when she was going to get to the point, because fishing for clues I didn’t have and wouldn’t have given her if I did wasn’t reason enough for her to call me.
The pause went on, and I found myself desperate to fill it. Maybe this was her method, her interview technique. Just shut up and let the suspect hang himself. If so, it was working.
“I’ve just been working on her memoirs,” I said. “Nothing particularly earth-shattering there, I’m afraid. Everything there was to know about Elizabeth Maurier already seems to be in the public domain.”
I’d thrown her a rope instead of a noose. I hoped she wouldn’t pull it too hard. There was nothing in what she’d actually said – there couldn’t be, really, not in the words or even in the tone of voice. But it was all so transparent. She wanted to know if I was going to interfere. I’d just told her I wasn’t.
“Good,” she replied. “I mean, it’s a shame you haven’t found anything. You just keep working on those memoirs, Mr Williams.”
And stay out of my investigation. Those were the words she wasn’t saying. She didn’t need to. And I didn’t need to endure any more of this. She’d made her point.
“Thank you, Detective Inspector. I’ll do that. Good bye.”
“Good bye, Mr Williams.”
I needed a coffee. I needed a whisky, really, but I was out of whisky, it was half past two in the afternoon and I’d skipped lunch, so a coffee would have to do. I took five minutes out to close my eyes and take in the hot bitterness, and returned to the computer.
After a dozen stories with nothing new in them, and a couple with plenty that was new but had little basis in fact, the next one came as a shock. The headline was stark enough – “Body Identified as Local Drug Dealer”. The article was less than a fortnight old, and the source was the Walsall Guardian, a good-sized local with a decent reputation and some major national stablemates. Nothing, in short, to suggest the story that followed would be anything but genuine.
Akadi was dead. That was the gist of it. A body had been found in a park a week earlier, nobody had known whose body it was, and now they did. “Sources” – the paper was tight-lipped on who these sources were, but that was their right – had identified the man as Hussein Akadi, a small-time drug dealer of unknown origin, who had drifted into the Midlands following a number of prison sentences for a number of different crimes. The police were happy to concur with the identification and confirm that Akadi had been dealing locally for more than three years. The date for the inquest had been set for early in January, not that there would be much interest in the verdict, from the sound of it – Akadi’s friends hadn’t exactly flooded forth to claim him. The journalist cited other sources – police sources, no doubt – who were all but certain the cause of death was an accidental overdose, an occupational hazard for a dealer who mixed business with pleasure. A local politician named Kevin McManus harped on about the sadness of a lonely death, about what a shame it was that society could not do more to redeem the man, for his own sake and for the sake of those who lived and worked around him. I opened another tab and looked up Kevin McManus. He was a parish councillor with big ambitions, standing for the vacant Police and Crime Commissioner post on an independent platform and a lot of cash from his construction business behind him. The money wouldn’t help; the big parties had it all sewn up, the same way they always did, and anyway, Kevin McManus’ business dealings had left him less than popular with certain elements of his potential constituency.
But he was right. It was a shame. I thought back to the Akadi I’d known, and I shivered. The word that came to mind was slimy. Always after the next thing. He’d implied – not actually asked, but implied – that he hoped to get something out of his testimony. What he’d wanted was money, but Elizabeth Maurier had pretended not to notice his veiled bargaining stance and handed him over to me, not wishing to soil her hands with the Akadis of the justice system. I could hardly blame her: if there had been anyone below me in the food chain I’d have passed the bastard right on again. But there hadn’t been, so it was Sam Williams and Hussein Akadi, half a dozen meetings in the visitor’s wing at Pentonville, teasing out his testimony, picking out the holes the other side might spot, steering my witness round those holes as subtly as I could. Akadi was a shark, a murderer and a drug dealer of the worst sort, but that didn’t make a blind bit of difference in the end, because he was telling the truth about Evans, and we proved it. Still. It would have taken a lot more than a sensitive and benevolent society to redeem Hussein Akadi. No wonder he wasn’t overwhelmed with mourners.
It was three o’clock. Not fourteen hours since we’d staggered out of Brooks-Powell’s palace. I’d learned a lot since then, but I wasn’t sure any of it was useful, either for the memoirs or the murder investigation. I picked up the phone to call Brooks-Powell, to tell him about Shapiro and his vi
ews on Trawden, about Akadi’s death, about my own sudden revelation, as sleep had swept over me, that Elizabeth Maurier had died with something unsaid. And then I remembered who it was I was calling. Sure, we’d ended on good terms, we’d mended some bridges, we’d each taken a leap of faith. But still. He was David Brooks-Powell and I was Sam Williams and nature dictated that we be in opposing corners.
Instead I called Lizzy Maurier.
16: Forgiven
SHE ANSWERED ALMOST immediately, as if she’d been sitting by the phone waiting for it to ring.
“Hello? Who’s that?”
She sounded groggy, and a little confused. Maybe she’d opted for that whisky I’d been forced to do without half an hour earlier.
“Lizzy? It’s Sam. Sam Williams.”
“Oh. You.”
The groggy and confused were gone, and in their place was a cold hostility that couldn’t have been clearer if it had been brandishing a knife and baring its teeth. I spent about half a second trying to figure out what she might be angry about, and then it hit me. That’s the trouble with a photographic memory, or at least my sort of photographic memory. No problem recalling her phone number. More of an issue remembering in time that I’d left her comatose and alone in her flat and taken with me a bunch of files she’d expressly told me not to look at it until she’d had her turn with them.
“Listen, Lizzy. I’m sorry.”
“What are you sorry about?”
She was testing me. I was going to have to tread carefully.
“About the other night.”
“Which bit of the other night? Leading me on and letting me make a fool of myself, or stealing my dead mother’s papers?”
Don’t rise to it. Don’t rise to it.
“Look, I’m just sorry, OK? We’d both had too much to drink. I wasn’t thinking. I saw the files and I just really wanted to get the work started. It’s important work, right? You said so yourself. You were right. It needs to be done.”
“Of course. It needed to be done when it suited you to get it done.”
I started to protest, but she spoke over me.
“Listen, Sam, I get it. None of this was what you wanted. You’re doing your best, but don’t pretend your heart is in it.”
“No – no. I’m sorry, Lizzy, but that’s not it. It’s really not.” I knew I was lying even as I spoke. There was something driving me on here, but it wasn’t Willoughby and the damn legacy. But that didn’t matter. “I’ve found something. In the papers I – in the papers I took home with me. There was something about a Doctor Shapiro. Does that ring any bells?”
There was a pause, a long silence, and I wondered whether Lizzy was thinking about my question or had just given up on the call altogether. I got my answer a few seconds later.
“No. Sorry, Sam. What’s this all about?”
Her voice was different now. Not the barely-conscious wreck of earlier, and not the terrier spoiling for a fight, either. I’d piqued her interest. I pushed on.
“It’s pretty obscure in her notes, but I went to see him. He’d been a shrink of some sort. Did a lot of work with Trawden.”
Another pause. Even through the silence I could sense that interest waning. Time for some more bait.
“And – well, I know it’s not got anything to do with your mother, not really, but Akadi – remember Akadi?”
“I remember the name,” she said, matter-of-fact, noncommittal. “Something to do with Trawden, and Evans, right?”
“He was Evans’ cellmate. He was the one who told the police Evans had claimed Maxine Grimshaw. Anyway, he’s turned up dead in Walsall.”
There was a gasp from the other end of the phone, and then “Murdered? Like my mother?” when she’d got her breath back.
“No. No, looks like an OD. It was always on the cards with Akadi.”
“Hmm,” she said. “I think I can see what you’re driving at here,” and for a moment I thought I’d reeled her in. But instead she wriggled free. “You’ve been landed with these memoirs and now you’re doing your best to make it all interesting. I get it. I do. But be honest, please. Don’t play games with me.”
I took a moment to figure out what to say. She might have missed the mark with the line about leading her on – that had been the last thing I intended, and as far as I recalled the last thing I’d done. But she’d hit closer to home with the rest of it. Was that all this was, the secret calls with Vicky Colman, the arguments with Claire, the half-day I’d spent driving to Norfolk and back? Was I just inventing an angle to liven up a dull job?
No, I decided. I wasn’t. I wouldn’t exploit Elizabeth Maurier’s death just to indulge some strange, mysterious fantasy. But if I wanted to convince Lizzy, I needed something else. I considered, briefly, telling her about the board, the other victims, the body parts, but that would be wrong in almost every way – whatever state Lizzy Maurier might be in now, she wasn’t ready to hear about more severed organs. And given that state, I couldn’t trust her not to go running to Martins and set loose a firestorm of the Detective Inspector’s fury on my head. Instead I gave her a hunch.
“Listen, I think there’s something else. It’s just occurred to me.” I wondered if it would work, in isolation, without the eyes and the nose and the fingers, without no one will see and no one will smell and no one will touch. I had to take the chance. “I think your mother had something to say. I think that’s the point, the words on the wall, I think she had something to say, and whoever killed her wanted to make it clear that no one would ever hear it.”
I trailed off. I’d delivered my piece; there was nowhere left to go. I waited.
“OK,” she said, after what felt like an hour. “OK. I’ll see if there’s anything here, anything at all, that makes what you’re suggesting make any kind of sense whatsoever. Akadi, you say? And Trawden, of course. And this Shapiro. I’ll have a look.”
“Thanks, Lizzy. It’s just a hunch, but there’s too much that looks a little out of place.” I was backtracking now, but I could afford to. I’d landed her, which meant I’d landed the rest of Elizabeth Maurier’s files. I asked her about Rich Hanover, whether he’d been harassing her, too, but although she remembered the man who’d been hanging around the townhouse the day Brooks-Powell and I visited, she didn’t seem to know what had happened since, and I didn’t think it was worth drawing her attention to something that would only upset her. She agreed to call me back once she’d been through the material, and I returned to my laptop and the Akadi search results.
There wasn’t anything else there, of course. Akadi was a footnote. His impact on the world could be measured only in the lives he’d taken, the lives he’d blighted, his own lonely death. Barely a ripple.
Roarkes called. They’d found a place in a local hospice for Helen. He sounded cheerful, as if this were some kind of cure rather than a softening of the end. It was a matter of days, now, not weeks. Roarkes never sounded cheerful, even when things were going well. I thought about pushing him, seeing whether I could drive him to some kind of honesty, some kind of emotional response that made sense, but he didn’t want that any more than I did. He just wanted to tell someone, so I let myself be told and assured him I’d come and visit her as soon as I could. The usual Roarkes would have jabbed in some dig about the state of my client list and the poverty of my workload, but the one on the other end of the phone just thanked me and said goodbye. I’d only met Helen Roarkes twice; she’d seemed charming, witty and intelligent, the reverse of the picture her husband habitually painted of her, but I had the feeling this was all agreed between them, this pretend Helen Roarkes, the wife he could complain about at work and unwind with happily at home. I wondered what kind of a man he’d be without her.
There was still no sign of Claire. I tried her phone again, without success, and turned on the television. It opened on the news channel, which was too depressing, so I flicked around looking for something inane and cheerful enough to lift me. A decent action movie would have done
the trick, but there was nothing, and I sat back with the sound of a home renovation programme buzzing through my ears, and closed my eyes.
It was dark when I woke, and my phone was ringing. I glanced at the time before I answered. Five o’clock. I’d been asleep nearly two hours. It was a good thing she’d called.
“Hello?” I said, that upward cadence there even though I knew who was on the other end.
“Hello, Sam,” said Lizzy. “I’m just calling to let you know that I’ve been through the files. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing about Shapiro, nothing about Akadi, and nothing about Trawden we don’t already know. I don’t want to deflate you, Sam, but I’m really not sure there’s anything in this.”
She waited for me to argue, but I didn’t have the fight left in me. After a moment, she continued.
“I know you weren’t making this up. And when I’ve got a chance to spend some more time going through everything, I’ll have a proper look – I mean, all I’ve been able to do this afternoon is flick through. But I don’t think there are any great dark secrets, Sam. I think it’s all out there for everyone to see. All we have to do is put it in the right order and make it look pretty.”
“I suppose you’re right,” I muttered. “And thanks. I appreciate your taking the time.”
The home renovation programme was still on – same presenters, different owners. The same words, it seemed, knock through here and a lick of paint and see if we can extend out here and sort out the windows. I wondered if houses were like people, if these presenters could tell in an instant whether they were full of promise or full of bullshit, the way I could tell – the way I’d thought I could tell, before Serena Hawkes – whether someone I was talking to was lying to me. Shapiro hadn’t been lying to me. Trawden? He’d been covering something, sure, but I doubted it was anything that concerned me. Broadmoor and Belmarsh. Twenty years. There would be plenty he’d want to hide from the outside world, from Sam Williams and Elizabeth Maurier and Charlie Blennard and the Reform Club. What had Shapiro called him? A chameleon. It didn’t mean he’d done anything wrong.