by Jane Casey
A movement in the hall caught my eye: Godley. He came forward, taking charge.
‘This is a matter that can be resolved later. We won’t be speaking to anyone in the family until tomorrow at the earliest.’
Vanessa looked around at him. ‘Who are you?’
‘Superintendent Charles Godley. I’m leading the investigation into your father’s death.’
‘Why does there have to be an investigation?’ She turned back to her mother. ‘What happened to him, Mum?’
‘He was murdered.’
‘Murdered?’ Even in the badly lit kitchen I could see the blood draining from Vanessa’s face.
‘Yes, murdered. Someone shot him on his way home from work.’
Vanessa’s lips moved as if she was trying to say something, but all that emerged was a sigh. I leapt forward to catch her as she slid to the ground but Godley was there before me, lifting her up and carrying her into the sitting room. He laid her on one of the sofas and put a hand to her neck to check her pulse. Almost as an afterthought he brushed her hair back off her face, so for the first time we could see her properly.
There were four police officers in the room and all of us went completely still. I don’t think I was even breathing.
High on Vanessa’s right temple was a bruise with a raised welt in the middle of it. The injury was a day or two old, so we were probably seeing it at its worst. It stood out on her pale skin like wine spilled on silk.
Godley stepped back and looked at Julie Hammond. ‘Did you know about this?’
‘No.’
‘Do you know how she got hurt?
‘I don’t. You’ll have to ask her.’
‘I will,’ Godley said, and I knew from his tone that he thought Julie Hammond was lying.
I was fairly sure he was right.
Chapter 5
‘Where the hell have you been?’
Derwent was standing at the top of the hill, watching me as I climbed towards him. He had his hands shoved in his pockets and his feet braced a mile apart. He looked at ease with himself for once, and also dishevelled.
‘You know where. Breaking the news to Hammond’s family,’ I said.
‘Is that all? What took you so long?’
‘Talking to the wife. Meeting the daughter.’ I checked the time. ‘We were only gone for a couple of hours.’
‘It felt like longer.’ Derwent was looking past me. ‘What’s wrong with him?’
I knew who he meant without looking. Godley, who had hung back when I got out of the car because he wanted to make a phone call. ‘I don’t know.’
I did know. I could have told him the precise moment the superintendent had checked his phone and saw the abusive message. It was right before Godley began to extricate himself – and me – from the Hammonds’ house. I’d taken a dazed Vanessa upstairs with her mother’s help and watched as Julie put her to bed, and when I came down Godley was making a move to leave, in a hurry. He had promised that one or both of us would return to talk to the family, that day or the next. He had made arrangements for a family liaison officer to stay in the house, and for two community support officers to stand outside. The press were beginning to sniff out the details of the story; it was only a matter of time before tabloid journalists and news crews found the house. He had assured Mrs Hammond that he would keep her informed, shaken hands with West and Lowry, and strode out of the house, leaving me to follow as quickly as I could. The car journey back to Richmond Park had been silent, for the most part. Godley was brooding and I was terrified he’d guess I had seen the message. I made meaningless notes on what I had seen and done at the Hammonds’ house, pretending to concentrate on what I was writing.
I’d been hoping our return to the crime scene would distract Godley from his woes, but the phone call didn’t seem to have improved his mood. If anything the gloom was back with reinforcements. Derwent knew Godley all too well, unluckily for me.
‘He’s got a face like a wet weekend.’
‘I know.’
‘Did you two have a fight or something?’
‘No. Of course not.’ I felt myself blush and knew it made me look as if I was lying. ‘It’s nothing to do with me.’
‘What isn’t?’
That thing I’m not supposed to know about. ‘Whatever’s making the boss look grumpy.’
Derwent was staring at me. I studiously refused to look back. He would lose interest. Or Godley would reach us and Derwent would have to talk to him instead of waiting for me to crack.
It took Godley a long time to walk up the hill to meet us, and Derwent didn’t look away for a second.
‘Josh, what have you got to tell me?’ The superintendent was frowning. I could see the tension in his jaw. The corners of his mouth were turned down. The giddiness I’d seen in him earlier that day was gone, apparently for good.
With great reluctance, Derwent turned away from me to face Godley. ‘The body’s gone. The post-mortem will be this afternoon, according to Hanshaw. Three o’clock, he said.’
‘I’ll have to go.’ Godley took out his phone and made a note. ‘What else?’
‘The car’s been recovered. It’s gone off for forensics to pull it apart.’ He meant that literally. The car would be stripped down to its chassis so every stray fibre, every hair, every drop of blood could be collected and analysed. That might lead us to the person who’d been in the car with Hammond, or when we found them we’d be able to prove it. Either way, it was a gift that we knew there was someone with him when he died.
‘Did you get to talk to the witnesses?’
‘Not yet. They’d gone home. I’ve got their contact details.’
‘Make it a priority,’ Godley said and started to turn away.
‘Hold on, you haven’t heard the best bit yet.’ Derwent was like a puppy waiting to be praised. ‘We found where the sniper was waiting.’
That got Godley’s attention. ‘Really?’
‘Yeah. The SOCOs have got it taped off at the moment but they should be finished soon.’
‘Anything useful at first glance?’
‘Nothing obvious. They think they’ll be able to estimate his height and weight though. They’re in there measuring broken twigs and indentations in the ground as I speak. I’ll show you later if you like but they don’t want too many people tramping around at the moment. They’ll be bringing in a dog to try and track the route the killer took. Not that it ever works. I guarantee you the dog will lead them to a rabbit hole.’
‘How did they find it?’
Derwent’s chest swelled, visibly. ‘I found it.’
‘How did you manage that?’ Godley asked.
‘It was before they moved the body. I went for a wander through the woods.’
Which explained the mud coating his trousers and his once-pristine shoes.
‘How did you know you’d found the right spot?’ I knew Derwent would be pleased to be asked to explain how clever he’d been but I genuinely wanted to know.
‘It was where I would have waited. Bit of height. Good field of vision. Plenty of growth around it so he was protected from view. They’ll get more information about the trajectory from the post-mortem, once they’ve got a line on the wound tracks so the SOCOs have the angle, but it’s the right place.’
‘When you say there was a good field of vision, did it matter where the car stopped?’ I asked.
‘Yeah. For accuracy. You don’t want to leave anything up to chance if you can avoid it. He’d have planned it out beforehand as much as possible – the distances, the angles, the wind speed.’
‘So whoever was driving knew where to stop. It was an ambush. A trap. And whoever was in the car planned it along with the shooter.’
‘Looks like it,’ Derwent said. ‘Which means that person knew she was acting as the bait. I can’t wait to meet her, if it is a her.’
‘She sounds like your type,’ I said, and got a glower for my trouble. Quickly, I went on, ‘They must have been here at
least once before last night, then, to check it out. That might help. We can talk to the parks police – see if they came across a couple driving up this road or hacking through the undergrowth recently.’
‘It’s the sort of thing that’s worth a public appeal,’ Godley said. ‘I’ll mention it at the press conference. I think we should try to get this on Crimewatch as well. Thousands of people use this park every day. We need to try to reach as many of them as possible.’
‘Look for someone who was here after sunset. That might narrow it down.’ Derwent looked around. ‘He’d want to check the conditions at the time he was planning to do the shooting, not in the middle of the day. Place like this, it’s going to be different in the dark. He’d have needed a night sight because there’s fuck all street lighting around here, and that means he’s using a modern rifle, not an old one, so that might help us. He’d have been prepared. And a bloody good shot, incidentally, because it was seventy metres from where he was lying to the target.’
‘Do you think ex-military?’ Godley asked. ‘Should we talk to the army?’
‘Maybe.’ Derwent rubbed a hand over his head, considering it. Being ex-army himself, he was in a better position to know than most. ‘The thing is, ex-military doesn’t mean someone who was in the British army. We could be looking for someone who got experience as a sniper in the former Yugoslavia, or Syria, or in Africa. And you can’t rule out terrorism at the moment.’ Terrorism was Derwent’s pet subject. It was one of the few areas of policing that held his interest outside of homicide investigation.
‘Terrorism.’ Godley didn’t look convinced.
‘We’ve imported plenty of them and we’ve grown our own. I’m surprised we haven’t had a sniper attack before, to be honest. It’s one of the skills they’re teaching in the training camps in the Hindu Kush. They estimate hundreds of British Muslims have been through those camps in the last ten years. There’s no shortage of potential shooters.’
And if it was terrorism, the press were going to go insane. A police officer made a new kind of target, at least in Britain. The police in Northern Ireland and Afghanistan had known all about it for decades.
‘They’d still need to practise, wouldn’t they?’ I said. ‘I don’t imagine you can shoot a high-powered rifle in a suburban garden without the neighbours noticing. We could talk to the gun clubs around London.’
‘Not a bad idea.’ Derwent was nodding. I braced myself for a follow-up remark. He was never one to give a compliment without qualifying it. On this occasion, however, he let it stand. I found it more unsettling than being criticised, as I thought he probably knew.
‘All right. This is what I want you to do next.’ Godley was fiddling with his phone again. He sounded distracted. It wasn’t like him not to make eye contact with the people he was talking to, and Derwent’s eyebrows twitched together as he looked from the boss to me and back again. ‘Maeve, stay with Josh. I’ve got somewhere else to be so I’m not going to wait until the SOCOs release the crime scene.’
I was willing to bet Godley’s ‘somewhere else to be’ had something to do with the message he’d received. I hoped my face was safely neutral when he finally looked up.
‘I’ll do a press conference for the lunchtime news,’ Godley said. ‘I’ll start off by giving some general information on the shooting and appeal for witnesses. We don’t want to say too much at the moment about a possible terrorist connection, or anything else, so I’ll keep it brief.’
‘Makes sense,’ Derwent said. ‘No point in causing a panic.’
‘Don’t mention it to anyone else, either – not the SOCOs, not the local police, not the press.’
‘I wouldn’t.’ Derwent sounded hurt at the very suggestion.
‘I’m going to want to speak to everyone at six this evening in the office,’ Godley went on. ‘I’ll let Chris and the others know about that. In the meantime find out what you can about the shooter, the gun, the ammunition – anything that might help us to come up with some suspects. At the moment, we’ve got nothing apart from a dead policeman and some broken twigs. We’re not going to catch anyone with that.’
‘We’re just getting started,’ Derwent pointed out, not unreasonably.
‘I’m going to have the commissioner on the phone any minute to find out where we are with the investigation. I am not looking forward to telling him how little we know.’ The edge of irritation in Godley’s voice was sharp enough to draw blood. ‘If you can spare the time, please talk to the witnesses before our conference this evening.’
‘I was going to.’
‘Well, make sure it happens.’
‘All right, calm down.’ Derwent rocked back on his heels. ‘It’s not like you to let the pressure get to you, boss.’
‘The pressure is not getting to me. I’m asking you to do your job properly. That’s all.’
‘And you know I always do.’
Godley held Derwent’s gaze for a couple of seconds before he nodded and turned and strode away. He didn’t even say goodbye.
‘That went well,’ I observed.
‘Thanks for jumping in.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Oh, come on. Like you need me to stand up for you.’
‘Obviously not. I can look after myself.’
‘Then you didn’t need me to defend you,’ I said patiently.
Logic: not Derwent’s strong point. He ignored me, though. He was brooding over Godley.
‘What was his problem? He basically accused me of time-wasting. If anything, he’s been wasting my time. I’ve been hanging around here for hours waiting to do something useful. I haven’t even had a coffee.’
‘Poor you.’ I checked over my shoulder, seeing SOCOs in overalls bustling in and out of the woods like honeybees, every movement suggesting a strong sense of purpose. ‘They’re still working. Let’s go down the hill and see if we can find somewhere to have breakfast. I don’t know if there’s a cafe near here but there’ll be a fast-food van in the car park at the very least.’
‘Where’s the car park?’
I pointed. ‘Five minutes that way.’
‘You do have your uses.’ Derwent grinned at the expression on my face. ‘Too patronising?’
‘No more than usual.’
‘Over coffee,’ Derwent said, sliding off his jacket and hooking it over his shoulder, ‘you can explain to me what you did to piss the boss off.’
‘I told you, it was nothing to do with me.’
‘Yeah, and I don’t believe you.’
‘I can’t help that. It’s the truth.’
We walked down the hill in something approaching a companionable silence. The air was still and warming up nicely. It was a day for picnics in the park, not murder investigations. I should have been glad, I thought. More often than not outdoor crime scenes involved rain, or snow, or freezing winds. It was positively pleasant to be wandering through Richmond Park in the sunshine. If I could have forgotten that I was there because two teenagers had just lost their father, I’d have been happy.
We were getting close to the temporary barrier that blocked the road. One of the uniformed officers turned at the sound of our voices and leaned over it.
‘Are you with the MIT team?’
‘Yeah,’ Derwent said. ‘Why?’
‘There’s a young lady here who says she was here last night. She’s been waiting to talk to you.’ He pointed and I saw a slender dark-haired girl sitting on the grass verge, her arms hugging her knees. She was watching us and as we came towards her she jumped up.
‘Are you investigating that man’s death?’
‘Yeah. And you are?’ Derwent sounded even more hostile than usual. I knew why. We were always on our guard for tabloid journalists pretending to be involved in a case so they could get the inside story on an investigation. There were plenty of young and pretty reporters angling for a big break who could convince you that black was white if you gave them the chance.
> ‘I’m Megan O’Kane.’ She was pale, her expression worried. It was impossible to tell what she would look like when she was animated and happy.
‘What’s your address?’ Derwent demanded, flicking through his notebook.
‘Fifteen Sopworth Road, Richmond.’
Derwent paused to read something, then looked up. ‘You’re the one who found him.’
‘Yes. Well, I found the car. I didn’t really look inside once I saw he was …’
‘Dead.’
‘Yes.’
‘What are you doing here? We were going to come and see you later.’
‘I couldn’t stay at home.’ She shivered. ‘My flatmate is there and she keeps telling me we should go for brunch and have a few drinks and forget about what happened last night. I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t mean to come back here but I couldn’t think of anywhere better to be. I just wanted to know if you’d found out anything.’
‘We’re making enquiries,’ I said, which was the standard line but true. ‘Why were you here last night, Megan?’
‘Badger-watching. Well, it was supposed to be badger-watching. I didn’t actually see anything.’
‘Why were you doing that?’ Derwent sounded totally nonplussed.
‘Do you know Hugh Johnson? He’s on the television?’ She looked from me to Derwent, not seeing any dawning recognition. ‘Animal Neighbourhood?’
‘Oh, I know,’ I said. I half-recalled the presenter, who was too old to be as boyish as he tried to be. ‘“Look who you might meet at the bottom of your garden.” That kind of thing.’
‘Exactly. I met him in my local pub last week. He was asking the questions in a bonus round in the table quiz and my team won it. He sat with us afterwards and we got talking about our favourite animals. I said I loved badgers and he asked if I’d ever seen a real one. I hadn’t. He told me he knew where I would definitely see one and he said he’d show me and I was kind of flattered he was offering, so I said yes.’
Derwent was shaking his head. ‘It’s so easy if you’re on the telly, isn’t it?’