by Joel Hames
I laughed out loud, entirely involuntarily, hard and hoarse at the same time, and Brooks-Powell joined me. I didn’t know what to believe any more. Brooks-Powell seemed so sure of himself, but I still didn’t know what these rumours about Blennard actually were. I was starting to worry that Brooks-Powell didn’t, either. I’d said we’d both do the talking, but I hadn’t done my bit yet. It was time.
“I’m sorry, Lord Blennard,” I began, “but do you really think we’re going to sit here quietly and wait while you forage around for an antique gun and some ammunition and then wait for you to load it and shoot us? Come on, now. David, come back to the table. Lord Blennard, sit down. This has gone far enough. Tell us what we want to know and we’ll be out of here.”
Brooks-Powell returned, scowling. He had, I realised, been rather enjoying his little frenzy. Blennard sat, still red in the face, the hand back on his forehead. I worried, for a moment, that he was about to have a stroke, but then he took the hand away and shook his head.
“I have nothing to say to you,” he said.
This was too much for Brooks-Powell. He walked around the table, right up to Blennard, who stared resolutely down, avoiding his gaze. And then, to my amazement, David Brooks-Powell drew back one arm and delivered a hard straight right into Blennard’s jaw. Blennard jerked back, his hands already covering his face, and then a moment later one of those hands moving out, palm facing us, a gesture of surrender. And from behind the other hand a voice, quiet in its desperation.
“Alright. Alright. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything.”
My phone chose that moment to ring. I glanced down, hoping it was Claire, but it wasn’t. Colman. Colman could wait. Brooks-Powell had walked back round the table and sat down, silent. We both watched as Blennard’s other hand came away. There was a bruise forming already. The punch had looked good. I wouldn’t have wanted to be the wrong side of it.
“It’s true,” said Blennard, slowly, quietly. “What you think you know. About Edward Trawden. Well, some of it, anyway. There was another man. In the cell with them, Akadi and Evans. Name of Connor.”
“You’re not telling us anything we don’t already know,” said Brooks-Powell, already getting to his feet.
“Well I’m telling you everything I bloody know so that’ll have to do, won’t it?” replied Blennard, suddenly and briefly himself again. The bruise was darkening even as I looked at him, even as Brooks-Powell made his way back round the table and Blennard shrank into himself. But there wasn’t far enough to shrink. Things were catching up.
“Sit down,” he mumbled, as Brooks-Powell came within striking distance. “Sit back down and I’ll tell you the rest. I’m an old man. I don’t want to fight.”
Brooks-Powell sat, beside him this time, opposite me. Poised. Blennard didn’t look comfortable, but then, none of us were comfortable.
“He came to me,” he said. “That Connor fellow. I didn’t believe him. I always thought he was lying. I still do. He claimed they knew each other. Akadi and Edward. Akadi was a drug dealer. West End. Luvvies. Edward knew that scene. They worked together, Connor said. He came to me and he told me this cock-and-bull story and I didn’t buy it for a second. Said they’d stayed in touch, Edward and Akadi, when they both went to prison. Stood there in front of me, this Connor, stinking of cheap whisky, and told me he’d shared a cell with Evans. Said Evans used to talk. Used to say he’d been there, that day, in Warrington. Hadn’t killed the girl. He’d been fitting a window. He’d been excited by it, the murder, so close by. Thought he’d like to do something similar. Evans had been inspired by the Grimshaw murder, that was Connor’s line. But he hadn’t committed it. Akadi wasn’t even in the cell at the time Evans started blabbing about this, it was just Connor and Evans, but Akadi heard about Warrington and added two and two and thought maybe he could help out his old friend. Connor expected me to believe this nonsense, to believe that somehow without the authorities getting wind of it Akadi had written to Edward and between the two of them, working from two different prisons, they’d fixed the whole thing up. According to Connor, Akadi works his way into the cell, gets Connor kicked out of it, makes up some story about Connor trying to stab him, Connor denies it, realises what’s going on, but can’t do anything about it. The whole story was preposterous. And meanwhile, conveniently enough, Connor’s just weeks away from the end of his term and doesn’t want trouble. He gets out and doesn’t think any more about it, keeps his head down, only then he hears Evans has died. Stabbed in the showers. The man who did it – according to Connor, anyway – this chap was an idiot. You could get him to do anything. Connor told me Akadi was behind it, he was sure of it. And then a while later Trawden got released, and when Connor heard that, well, he said he couldn’t keep his head down any longer. He came and found me – I’d been involved, you know, commenting on the case, making the odd statement here and there, so he knew about me – anyway, he managed to find me, and he told me all this, and said that was his job done, and it was up to me to do the rest.”
“And you did nothing,” said Brooks-Powell, and Blennard shrugged.
“Of course I did nothing. Connor was a useless street thief who had no interest in anything except my money. That was obvious. He’d come up with all this nonsense just to try and wring a penny or two out of me. He was broke, and I was rich. It was nonsense, all of it. The only sensible thing to do was ignore him.”
Brooks-Powell nodded, and smiled, and said “In that case, why did you ask Gareth Brady Jones to fiddle the forensic results?”
“I –” said Blennard, and stopped. And again. “I –”, followed by a pause, and the face reddening again, a deep, dark shade that blended nicely with the bruise. “I don’t know,” he said, finally. “It was all lies. I was sure of it. And the forensics were useless, anyway. Decades old, poorly stored, not enough to convict a man in this day and age. But there was nobody left to convict, nobody alive, at least. And I had to make sure everything went smoothly for Edward.”
“Because he knew things about you,” said Brooks-Powell.
“Because he was my friend!” shouted Blennard. Every time he closed his mouth, he closed it hard, tight, a show of defiance that must have been painful after that punch. “He was my friend! I told Jones to take a light touch, that was all. I mean, it didn’t mean anything. Connor was a thief and a liar. Edward Trawden was my friend. I wanted justice for my friend.”
He was convincing, I had to hand it to him. Even Brooks-Powell had sat back down, nodding again, but calmly, now. Justice and friendship and all those nice convenient abstracts seemed to have done the trick. But I wasn’t buying it. The man Shapiro had described hadn’t had friends. He’d had idiots and enablers. And blackmail victims. Blennard wasn’t a friend, and he certainly wasn’t an idiot.
“You’re lying,” I said. I found myself speaking slowly and calmly, testing each word before it came, making sure it made sense and was leading me in the right direction. “You’re lying,” I repeated, “and my girlfriend is a journalist, and you might not care about all your antiques but you care a great deal about your reputation, and if you don’t tell us the truth, if you don’t tell us what Trawden knows about you, then you’ll have a very black name to go with that bruise.”
I could see the defiance drain from his face. Brooks-Powell saw it, too, and took up the thread.
“That’s why you’ve protected him, then. The rumours were true. I don’t know what you did, something to do with kids, they say, but whatever it was, it’s enough to get you stabbed in the prison showers like Robbie Evans. Right?”
Blennard shook his head, but it was a sad, slow shake, and when he spoke, the voice matched it.
“It’s not fair,” he said. “You don’t understand, what it was like, then. You,” he turned, now, to face Brooks-Powell. “You think it’s so difficult now? Imagine what it was like back then. When it was a crime. And yes, you’ve kept things quiet, I never suspected a thing about you, but then, what have you got
to lose? A few cheap sniggers from people not worth knowing? Can you even imagine if you faced losing not just your name but your liberty, maybe even your life, the way things were?”
I didn’t understand where this was going, but Brooks-Powell, by the look of him, did. His hands were over his mouth, the realisation of something dawning. Something he hadn’t been expecting. Blennard went on, looking down, at the table.
“It was so long ago. I mean, yes, the boy was young, but so was I. And for heaven’s sake. It wouldn’t even be illegal, now. It wouldn’t raise an eyebrow.”
I couldn’t take this any longer. I hated it, being the one person in the room who didn’t understand.
“What?” I shouted. “What the hell happened that was so bad you had to cover for a murderer all these years?”
Blennard looked up, looked at me, nodded. And began.
“It was 1966. Indira Ghandi had just been elected in India. Wilson held on over here. England won the world cup. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were convicted. I was a thirty-year-old masters student and he was an eighteen-year-old undergraduate and it wasn’t like I was even teaching him. Yes, he was young. But he wasn’t that young.”
“Where did this happen?” I asked, even though I knew the answer already.
“Christ Church. He was only there for a year. Afterwards, after he’d been thrown out, he got in touch with me. Wrote me a letter. There was a photograph with the letter. I was rich. I came from a well-known family. I’d thought at the time that I was in love with him. I’d hoped he was in love with me – he’d certainly claimed to be. But I realised then that he’d planned the whole thing. He’d seduced me. He’d blackmailed me. From that moment, I was his. What have I done? What have I done?”
A silence fell over us, each of us taking it in, realising how wrong we’d been, how close to right, how the smallest lapse could lead somewhere no one could have imagined it would. I knew the law on this, I remembered it the same way I remembered every statute I’d read and most of the regulations and judgments. Sex between men had been illegal until 1967. Even then, it was illegal for men under the age of twenty-one, right up to 1994. The age hadn’t come down to sixteen until 2001. Trawden had lured Blennard into a nothing of a crime, and for fifty years he’d owned him.
The silence was broken by a sob. A great, thick mammoth of a sob. And then another, and another, until they were coming so fast and Blennard’s face was so red that for a moment I worried he wouldn’t be able to breathe. I moved towards him, a ghost of a movement, hardly a movement at all, but it was enough for him to jerk away and raise a hand. He’d had enough of us, of me, of Brooks-Powell. Between us, we’d broken him. I felt bad about it, but it was something that had needed to be done. Brooks-Powell’s hands were still over his mouth and the bit of his face I could see was as white as a blank page. He hadn’t got past the feeling bad.
My phone rang, again. Colman, again. I’d been glancing at it periodically; she’d called, earlier, and texted three times asking me to call her back. Nothing from Claire. We were, I thought, as good as done with Blennard. I answered the phone.
“I’ve found him!” shouted Colman, before I could say a word. “I’ve found Connor. I’ve been trying to get hold of you for ages!”
“Any news on Claire?” I asked, and she stopped shouting long enough to answer me.
“No, I’m sorry. But listen. I traced the company. That website. The PO Box. Traced the shareholder. Got the address. Little village called Redbourn out in Hertfordshire, right by the M1.” She reeled off the street name and house number. “I checked the electoral roll and would you believe it, the name on it is P Connor. Checked the utility companies and got the same result. I’ve been trying you all night and I couldn’t wait any longer.”
The whole time she was talking I hadn’t got past that No, I’m sorry, hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Claire and what she might have done, or what might have been done to her, all the way through everything Colman had said right up to the end. The signal wasn’t great, fading in and out, the end of one word and the beginning of the next cutting out entirely from time to time so the part of my brain that might have been digesting what she was saying was busy just trying to hear it. And the bigger part of my brain was focussed on Claire, the whole way through. Right up to that couldn’t wait any longer. Something about that, about the way she said it, jerked me back to her.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m there now,” she replied. “I’m going in.”
“Who have you got with you?”
“No one. It’s OK. I called him. Connor. He agreed to talk. He’s expecting me.”
“Don’t go in,” I said, and noticed Brooks-Powell standing beside me, crouching down as if to hear what I was hearing.
“Where is she?” he asked.
“Connor’s house,” I said. “Hertfordshire, somewhere. Apparently he’s agreed to talk to her.” And then I noticed another sound. Or the absence of it. The sobbing had stopped. I looked up and Blennard was shaking his head, frantically, mouth wide open in horror.
“No,” he said, finally. “It can’t be.”
“Hang on,” I said, to the phone, but there was so much static I wasn’t sure she could hear me, and then, to Blennard, “What do you mean?”
“It can’t be Connor.”
“Why not?”
“Because Connor’s dead. He died years ago.”
The last thing I heard, before the line went dead, was a tinkling noise that sounded very much like a doorbell.
23: The Centre of the Web
FOUR TIMES I tried to call her back, once that line had died. Three times I was informed, by a recording of a woman with a maddeningly calm voice, that my call could not be connected. The fourth time I didn’t even get that.
I sat and looked around the room, at the faces of Brooks-Powell and Blennard. Brooks-Powell, my enemy, my ally, married and gay and behind everything I thought I’d known, a mystery. Blennard, the titan, the thorn in the side of government after government, face red and bruised and tear-streaked, his life a lie, a story spun with guilt and fear for threads.
I picked up my phone again and dialled the number for Martins. For all I’d tried to avoid any contact with the woman, she needed to know about this. It was six in the morning, but she answered on the first ring.
“Williams,” she said. “I think it’s time you came in.”
“Came in?”
“There have been reports of a disturbance. In Mayfair. I understand you may be on the scene. I’ve been toying with the idea of sending uniform round to get you, but I think Lord Blennard can take care of himself. But whatever it is you’ve done, you’ve gone too far. Next time I see you, you’ll be under arrest and in a cell. I told you to stop. You wouldn’t listen.”
“No!” I shouted. “You need to listen! Colman’s in danger!”
“Colman?”
“Yes.”
“Police Constable Vicky Colman, my former detective, relieved today of her duties within CID?”
“Yes!” I shouted, again. “Her. I don’t care if you’ve kicked her out of CID and she won’t care either soon because she’ll be too dead to know it. She’s gone to an address in Hertfordshire and I’m convinced she’s in danger.”
“And I’m convinced you’re wrong and you’re just trying to deflect attention from your own activities, Mr Williams. So be a good boy and come down to the station, before I change my mind and send uniform after you.”
She killed the call, and I turned to look at Blennard.
“You know her,” I said. “Call her. Convince her it’s real.”
Blennard just shook his head. I wasn’t sure he’d have been able to talk much sense into her on a good day, but he’d been mute since he’d told us about Connor’s death, and the way he’d been opening and closing his mouth like a fish suggested he wasn’t fit for any kind of conversation now.
“Come on,” I said, and grabbed Brooks-Powell’s arm. “We’re going
to Hertfordshire.”
It took forty-five minutes, in the Fiat that was still parked and mercifully unscathed on the double yellow lines outside Blennard’s building. The commissionaire had given us a searching look as we’d left, and I wondered whether it had been he that had tipped off Martins, or whether Blennard had done that all by himself when he’d been alerted to our presence. It didn’t really matter now. Blennard wouldn’t be making any more complaints about the two of us.
Brooks-Powell was silent. I asked him if he was OK, twice, and both times he turned to me and nodded, still pale but less so each time. And pale was his normal state, anyway. I passed him my phone and asked him to try Colman and Claire every five minutes, and every five minutes he dialled their numbers, listened for a moment, put the phone down and shook his head. I had him try Roarkes, too, fuck the time, fuck the dying wife, I had a missing girlfriend and a detective walking into a murderer’s trap, but he didn’t answer, either. Not the first time. Not the second, either. On the third try I heard the ringing stop and a shout from the other end of the line, followed by a long beep as the connection died.
“He told me to fuck off,” said Brooks-Powell.
“I heard,” I replied.
We got there just before seven, a small terrace at the end of a row of cottages on the fringes of a village that was picture perfect, until we opened the car doors and heard the boom of the M1 traffic racing by half a mile behind us. Connor’s house – Trawden’s house, really, there was only one person I was expecting to open the door when we rang the bell, and it wasn’t Connor – was the only one in the row with any lights on, but there was life in the others, too, as the furious barking from behind several front doors informed us. I offered up a silent apology for waking the residents of Redbourn so early on a cold Sunday morning. Brooks-Powell’s arm halted my progress as I marched towards the house.