by Lisa Cutts
With no other calls to attend, Karl thought he would drive along behind it for a while, carrying out the necessary checks as he drove, waiting to see what the driver would do.
The Clio stuck to the speed limit. The driver would have been a fool not to, although Karl had watched drivers go straight through red lights, scatter pedestrians out of the way on a pelican crossing, pull out at roundabouts, and all with him behind them in a marked car. A car marked with the purpose of making it easy to see. It amused and amazed him.
He drove at a speed to keep up, although he kept his distance. Twice he saw the driver in front look in his rearview mirror. Karl could only see a face glance back at him, white and male. That much he could be certain of in the gloom of the car’s interior and the darkness outside.
He would never be able to say what it was that initially drew his attention to the Clio; possibly it was enough that it was driving around at four o’clock in the morning and wasn’t a milk float. Whatever it was, he felt his heart beat a little faster and the beginning of what he sensed was going to be a very good stop-check.
Karl waited for the result of the checks via the control room, all the while following the car, its driver now repeatedly turning his head up towards the rearview mirror.
A lack of other early-morning checks going on meant that it wasn’t long at all before Karl had the information he needed to speak to the driver.
Being single-crewed was not something that ever concerned Karl. He had been a uniform officer for eight years and had always got the measure of people in any situation. He was a Taser-trained officer but had only had cause to use it occasionally. Not something he had ever carried out lightly and not something he would choose to do again unless his or another’s life was at risk. In some situations he wouldn’t have time to draw his weapon, in which case it was better to prevent any trouble than try to solve it with violence.
He knew that. The person he stopped might not.
With his lights throwing patches of blue across the town’s ring road, Karl got out of his car and walked up to the driver’s side of the Clio. He did so with one eye on the occupant and the other watching for movement from any other quarter. It might have seemed as if the car was only one up; it didn’t mean that it was.
‘Turn the engine off and step out of the car,’ said Karl. From where he was standing, all the officer could see inside the vehicle was the driver and a black bag on the front seat.
The door opened suddenly in one swift movement, causing Karl to step back, mindful that he was in the road. He directed the driver, a man he estimated to be about twenty-five years old, skinny build, messy short black hair, dressed in a pair of navy jogging bottoms and a black zip-up hoodie, over to the pavement.
Karl heard the unmistakable sound of a diesel police car as it came round the ring road to join him. Despite the seriousness of this stop-check, any stop-check, he found that he was smiling at his colleagues’ inability to keep away and stop themselves muscling in on what might be an interesting arrest. Although performance indicators officially no longer existed, the rest of his team were well aware that he made the most arrests in any given week. He had a reputation for finding those who were up to no good, especially in the small hours.
He watched the driver as he stood on the pavement. There was no doubt about it, there was definitely something on his mind – it was in the nervous jerk of his head, the unsteady placing of his feet, the shaking of his weedy legs inside their jogging bottoms.
Despite his size, Karl knew that a knife stuck in his side wasn’t going to care that he went to the gym five times a week. The blade would cut through muscle, bone or sinew as easily as it would fat. Stab vests only covered so much and he didn’t fancy another injury after only recently recovering from having a brick thrown at his shoulder.
The wimpy boy standing in front of him shaking didn’t seem to be a threat, though he would rather not take the chance.
‘Take your hands out of your pockets,’ Karl said. ‘Now stand over here under the street light.’
He could see that the driver was still uncomfortable in his presence, but by now it could as easily have been the cold causing him to hop from foot to foot.
‘Whose car is this?’ said Karl, poised to watch the answer as much as listen to it.
‘S’mine,’ came the reply. ‘Had it about six months. Why did you stop me?’
‘Your nearside brake light’s out,’ said Karl, pointing at the left-hand side of the car, eyes still on his jumpy detainee. ‘My colleague’s here now.’
He thumbed in the direction of the other police car which had pulled up behind his, aware that his inspector, Josh Walker, had sauntered up alongside him, and had simply uttered, ‘Morning.’
As he kept an eye on the driver who gave his name as Simon Terry, Karl made to move towards the Clio.
‘I’ve got insurance and everything,’ said Simon, seemingly finding his voice.
‘I know,’ said Karl. ‘I’ve already checked. If you hadn’t, I’d be getting your car recovered and you’d be walking home. In the meantime, I’m having a look through your car.’
Simon opened his mouth to protest, his brain catching up with what he had been told about why he had been stopped and Karl’s reasons for looking in his car.
‘All right?’ said Karl, rewarded with a nod from Josh.
As he turned to the Clio he could hear Josh start to make small talk with Simon Terry, a man he had nothing in common with, apart from originating from the same species.
Confident that he would find a substance, an article, an object that should not be in the car because it broke the law, Karl began methodically to search every part of the interior, starting with the black holdall.
He unzipped the bag and peered inside, disappointed when he found nothing of interest. Unperturbed, he continued in his systematic way, moving on to the glove compartment, the foot wells, between the seats and the backs. Not one thing jumped out at him or gave him the adrenalin rush he was craving, deserving, expecting.
The very last place to be searched was the boot. This, he knew, had to be it. Karl glanced over at Simon chatting away to Josh. He had his arms wrapped tightly around himself and he could see his breath as he jabbered away, making comment after comment about nothing in particular. Perhaps he had been wrong about him, perhaps he was losing his touch. If the boot failed to give him what he was looking for, he had either misjudged the entire thing or the lad was better at concealing drugs than Karl had thought.
With one hand on the boot catch and the other holding his torch, Karl popped it open.
He shone the torch into the space and initially he saw nothing whatsoever. If anything, what stuck in his mind was that it was an incredibly empty boot. There wasn’t even the usual junk, empty carrier bags, tools, cans, wrappers. He spent a few seconds waving his torch over the marked carpet and then several more working in a slow arc, left to right.
A glimmer caught his eye, a bounce from the torchlight which hit the object at about the same time as a sliver of information hit his brain.
If he wasn’t very much mistaken, what he was looking at was a plastic cable-tie. The very type put around Albert Woodville’s neck and tightened until he took his last breath.
Chapter 76
Morning of Wednesday 24 November
‘You look like absolute crap,’ said Harry as he handed Josh Walker a cup of coffee.
Harry had insisted that he get Josh a drink, even though he protested that all he wanted to do was go home to bed.
‘I did fast turn-around from lates to nights with only one day off, and most of that I spent with you in the pub, listening to you moaning about your marriage. I’m bollocksed and you give me coffee. That’ll help me sleep, if I ever get home.’
‘It’s only eight a.m. The traffic’ll be terrible now anyway so you may as well wait for nine. You could come to my briefing.’
‘Or I could not,’ said Josh, and took a sip of his coffee. ‘And this i
s rank.’
‘All right, Teddy Tired Eyes. It may not be Starbucks, but tell me again what happened.’
Josh had known Harry for far too long to think that for one moment he wasn’t going to act like a big child about to open the best early Christmas present he had ever had. He grimaced as he took another taste of the vile beverage and settled down to tell the tale all over again.
‘Like I told you when I called you at five o’clock this morning, and don’t pull that face, at least you’ve had some sleep, Karl Roundtree carried out a check on a silver Clio. I don’t think that he knew the relevance of that particular make and model but he certainly knew how Albert Woodville died. It’s not something that’s public knowledge but he’s pretty sharp when it comes to stuff like that.
‘Anyway, the driver, Simon Terry, who you’ve now seen down in custody, seemed a bit nervy and on edge. I thought, as did Karl, that he had some drugs or something on him but it turned out that he’d done a couple of drive-outs in the car from petrol-station forecourts with false and stolen plates on, that kind of thing. He also used to lend the car out to people. That’s where it got interesting.’
Harry swallowed a mouthful of his coffee and screwed his face up at the taste.
‘Told you,’ said Josh. ‘Simon Terry was waffling on to me about people borrowing his car as Karl was searching it. There were no actual names forthcoming. At the time, it was something that he declined to tell me.’
‘He’ll probably change his mind now though,’ said Harry. ‘What with him being in custody for murder. That usually does the trick refreshing people’s memories.’
It was several seconds before Josh spoke again. He scrunched up one side of his mouth and put his head on one side. ‘Perhaps it’s the lack of sleep but I think that his reaction to the plastic cable-tie in the boot was genuine. I mean, it’s not illegal to carry or have them, is it? He gave a kind of “so what” shrug when Karl asked him if it was his and if he’d seen it before.’
Now it was Harry’s turn to sit and think about his answer as he rubbed at the stubble on the side of his face. ‘We’ve got the CSI looking over the car now for any traces of Albert Woodville’s blood or DNA, and of course for traces of blood or DNA from whoever did him in. We’ve had four people in custody so far, who all know more than they’re letting on, but not one of them was actually responsible for killing Woodville.
‘After nearly three weeks, this is most definitely the break we’ve been looking for. Oh and Josh, before you start on about how the foundation of all good police work is the uniform stop-check, can I remind you that sooner or later we would have got a name.’
‘Whatever you say,’ said Josh. ‘I’ll talk to you another time about how a uniform patrol was responsible for stopping the Yorkshire Ripper and catching him. Not a load of suits in an office staring at paperwork.’
Harry was relieved to have grabbed back most of his staff as soon as Simon Terry was arrested. His choice of interview team was quite deliberate. He had an urge to do the interview himself but other than not wanting to hear his team’s hysterical laughter at the idea of the DI leading a murder interview, it had been years since he had done one, so there was a strong chance he would make a mess of it.
Instead, he made his decision based upon his observations of how Gabrielle and Sophia had interacted with one another in the incident room over the last couple of weeks, sometimes finding himself spying out of the gap in the blinds at his window towards their desks. It was important to him to know that the team were working together well, and even if they weren’t exactly friends, they needed to be able to communicate and rely on one another. They were professional people at the end of the day, and they had to behave as such.
He still found Gabrielle a little odd, and got the impression that most people did. Word had spread of the sad death of her young nephew and even if it wasn’t the reason for her aloofness, it meant that the others now accepted her, where once they might have avoided her. They worked with her and tolerated her, and even knew her for what she was: a good officer with some strange views and ideas about the world. Sophia’s snooping around after Gabrielle had seemed to stop as soon as he started sending them out on enquiries together, often fabricating reasons that relied on their various skills to put them in a car together. He wasn’t sure they fell for it each and every time, but it at least meant that there was a bit more harmony in the office. Word had even got to him that they had spent time together outside work, although he doubted this was true.
As soon as Sophia and Gabrielle went into the interview room with Simon Terry, Harry took himself to the remote viewing room to see for himself how the interview progressed. He wanted to observe his two detective constables, but above all he was desperate to find out who had been driving the Renault Clio on Friday the 5th of November.
He took his seat at the point where Gabrielle had finished cautioning Terry and explaining everything he legally needed to know. She was about to ask her first question when the door beside Harry opened and Barbara Venice came in and sat beside him.
‘Just starting, Babs,’ he said. ‘And Gabrielle is lead interview. That’s good.’
He had never bothered to explain the trivia and inner workings of his investigation team to the DCI so she merely looked over at him, gave him a nod, and, like Harry, waited to see what the suspect was going to say.
If anything, Gabrielle was going to have trouble shutting him up. Terry spent the first couple of minutes explaining that he was a small-time crook, and there was no way he was involved in murder.
‘Thing is,’ he garbled, solicitor silent beside him, ‘thing is, I let all sorts of people borrow my car. Yeah, I’ve done some drive-outs from petrol stations with nicked and false plates on the motor. Who hasn’t?’
He gave a small laugh and then saw the look on Gabrielle’s face.
‘Well, you probably haven’t. Your job’s to nick people like me, ain’t it? What I’ve done, right, is I’ve changed the plates. I’ll put my hands up to that.’
And he did put his hands up in the air to demonstrate to the two detectives how committed he was to that train of thought.
‘Now, the stolen EA52 plate I’ve since taken off,’ he continued, ‘I nicked that off some old dear who parked in the next street from me. I saw her get out and go indoors, shut the curtains and I thought: I’ll be back later to have them away. It was similar to mine, see. They’re the sort I go for. The newer plates, they’re sometimes harder to get off.’
He shook his head at this travesty that the vehicle trade was inflicting upon his livelihood.
‘You were still using another set of stolen plates when you got stopped this morning,’ said Gabrielle. It was in a matter-of-fact style, no accusations, not even a question. Harry liked it. He nodded his approval. He saw Barbara look over at him. He winked back at her.
‘Well, I might have pushed my luck there,’ Terry said, face clouding over. ‘It was risky, I’ll give you that. I take a chance with the old dears that they can’t be bothered to go to the police station to report it as it’s too far away and never open. If you’ve ever tried to report a crime and rung the public enquiries number, it’s always busy, and old people are a lot less likely to have a computer and report it online. Thinking, see?’
He tapped the side of his head at his criminal genius. When he could see that the two young women weren’t particularly stunned by this piece of information, he continued.
‘I’ve got a couple of different but similar sets of plates that I change over from time to time, until I think they’re past their use, and then I throw them. When the officer started to follow me this morning, I was shitting it. When he stopped me and didn’t arrest me straight away, I thought that I’d got away with it. Then he nicked me for murder. Fucking murder. I’ve never killed anyone and I don’t even know who this Woodville bloke is.’
Gabrielle moved forward in her seat and pushed an A4 piece of paper with a black-and-white image on it towards him.
‘That, Terry,’ she said, ‘was taken from the camera outside the shop where Albert Woodville was last seen alive on the evening of Friday the fifth of November. I would say this is your Renault Clio with the EA52 plate. Who was driving it?’
He bit his lip, moved in his seat and sat on his hands. At last he glanced across to his solicitor.
‘My client,’ she said, ‘understands the seriousness of the investigation. His reluctance is due to not wanting to simply hand you a name.’
‘I get that,’ said Gabrielle, ‘but we have your car following Albert Woodville minutes before he was murdered. Up until now, I haven’t told you how he died.’
Simon Terry met her stare.
‘Someone forced their way into his flat and put a plastic cable-tie around his neck.’
Terry put a hand to his own throat and lost some of the colour in his face.
Gabrielle continued. ‘The exact same type, length, thickness and colour as the one PC Roundtree found in your boot this morning. If you can’t give us the name of who was driving—’
‘Ian,’ he said in little more than a whisper. Then louder. ‘Ian Hocking. He said that he and his mate, Dave, wanted to take his niece and nephew to a firework display. Give his sister a night off.’
Harry had no idea how much longer the interview continued as he and Barbara were already making their way to the incident room, making calls on their mobiles, trying to scramble an arrest team together. All the while, he was flying down the stairs, away from Simon Terry’s voice, closer to the arrest he had hankered after for nineteen days, he couldn’t help but wonder why he hadn’t thought to examine Millie Hanson’s family more closely.
He recognized the name within a second of it passing Terry’s lips. It was that something that he knew he had overlooked after all.