by JD Kirk
“Well spotted,” Logan said, placing another photograph down. “And that’s the cistern for said toilet. Correct?”
“Aye,” Clyde confirmed, a little more wary now.
“I loved those old wall-mounted numbers,” Ben said. “Held a lot of water. Gave you a proper flush. Everything in the pan, gone in one. None of this three or four flushes you have to do these days. Big cisterns. Plenty of space in them.”
“You can say that again, Detective Inspector,” Logan agreed.
“What the fuck are you pair talking about?” Clyde asked. “Toilets, cisterns… What?”
Clyde Lennon was a bad liar. Truly awful. One of the worst Logan had ever seen.
Which is why the DCI knew he was telling the truth now. He had no idea what was coming next, and Logan almost felt sorry for him as he placed the final photo down on the table.
“We found this in your workshop toilet cistern, Clyde,” he said.
Across the table, the other man tilted his head, trying to figure out what he was looking at. Then, the colour dropped out of his face—just drained away, all in one go.
“Is that…? Fuck. Is that…?”
“It is,” Logan confirmed.
“Fuck. Fuck!”
“Maybe you wouldn’t mind explaining how Fergus Forsyth’s head ended up in your workshop toilet, Mr Lennon?” Ben asked. “Because me and him? We’re dying to find out.”
Clyde was still staring at the photograph like he couldn’t tear his eyes away. His tongue did laps of the inside of his mouth again, back to chasing that boiled sweet. “I think…” he began, then he swallowed hard. “I think I want that solicitor, after all.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
Tyler sat in the passenger seat of Sinead’s car, staring ahead at the windscreen wipers, which swished back and forth, fending off the rain shower that had started on the drive over from the hospital.
Night had drawn in, and the flecks of rain outside the wipers’ reach blurred the lights from the police station, giving them a magical, Christmas-like aura.
Neither of them noticed.
“We should push it back,” Sinead said. “The wedding.”
“We’re not pushing it back,” Tyler said.
“Just for a month or two. Until we get the results. Until we know.”
“We’re not pushing it back,” Tyler insisted. “Unless… Unless you want to?”
“No! No, of course not. Of course, I don’t.”
Tyler gave a nod, the decision made. “Right. That’s settled, then. We don’t push it back.”
“OK. Good. But… we can. If you want to.”
“I don’t want to. I want us to get married like we planned. And then…”
“We’ll go from there,” Sinead said, finding an end to the sentence that had eluded him.
“Exactly. Aye. Then, we’ll go from there,” he said.
She took his hand. Held it. Kissed it. Rubbed it against her cheek.
“You OK?” he asked.
“Fine. You know. Ish. You?”
“Ish,” Tyler said. He blew out his cheeks, then nodded at the building ahead of them. “We should go in.”
“You sure you’re going to be OK?”
Tyler nodded. “But we don’t say anything. Not until we know. And even then, not until after the wedding. Alright? Like we agreed.”
“If that’s what you want.”
“It is. It could still be clear. The biopsy. It could…” Tyler sighed. “They’ll have to know, obviously, but just… Just not yet, eh? And… shite. I’ll have to tell my mum, too. Won’t I?”
“You will. We will.”
She gave him a smile. They kissed, and they held each other in the dark.
“Ceiling,” she told him.
Tyler blinked. “Eh?”
“I-Spy. It was ‘ceiling,’” she said, then she unclipped her belt and opened her door. “Now, come on,” she told him, giving his hand one final squeeze. “Let’s go inside.”
“Where the hell have you been, you malingering bastard?” Logan asked, when Tyler and Sinead came striding, side by side, through the double doors of the Incident Room.
“They had me in a neck brace, boss. One of them spinal board things,” Tyler said, not missing a beat. “Had to wait for the all-clear from Inverness, then I spent about forty-five minutes pissing like a racehorse when they eventually took it off.”
“Everything alright, son?” Ben asked.
“Aye. Aye. Everything’s fine. No harm done,” Tyler said, all teeth and smiles.
“I can’t figure it out,” Ben remarked. “With everything that’s happened to you over the last couple of years, and given there’s been no permanent damage done, either you’re cursed, or you’re blessed. I’m just no’ sure what one.”
“Bit of both, maybe, boss,” Tyler said. He clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Who’s on for tea?”
There was a moment of suspicious silence.
“Tea? You’re actually offering to make tea?” Hamza asked.
“Aye. I always make tea.”
“You never bloody offer, though,” Logan pointed out. He glanced from Tyler to Sinead. “What is it? What happened?”
“Nothing happened, boss!” Tyler laughed. “I just… After being strapped down like that, it’s good to be up and about.” He looked around at the other men, who all looked back with narrowed eyes. “Look, if you don’t want tea…”
“Well, now, we never said that,” Ben pointed out. “Since you’re offering, I’ll have a coffee.”
“Coffee? At this time of night, boss?” Tyler asked.
“Aye, but I reckon we’re going to need it,” Ben replied. “Hurry up and get the kettle on, and we’ll go over everything. But, needless to say, I think we’ve got a long bloody night ahead of us.”
It felt oddly comforting to be sat together around the Big Board. Even here, seventy miles from home, there was a real sense of familiarity to it. Of camaraderie. Tyler had even enjoyed the ribbing he’d got about the quality of his tea, and the poor selection of biscuits he’d been able to snaffle from CID’s not-so-secret stash.
He and Sinead sat close together, their chairs rolled over from their desks so that Hamza sat on one side, and Ben on the other. Logan stood at the board, recapping a quite impressive list of developments that had occurred that day.
“So… to be clear, sir,” Sinead said, once Logan had finished giving his thoughts. “We’ve got the texts from Clyde Lennon, he came running out of the house after Lana had been battered, and we found the victim’s severed head in his toilet cistern…”
“That’s all correct, aye.”
“But you don’t think he did it?” Sinead concluded. “Like… any of it?”
“That’s right.”
“Like… any of it? At all?”
“He’s a bloody awful liar,” Logan explained. “He’s no’ got the self-control. Whatever he’s thinking or feeling, you can see it all over his face. When we told him about Lana, and when he saw the head, that was real shock. He had no knowledge of either one.”
“He could’ve been faking it,” Hamza suggested.
“He’s no’ that smart. Trust me,” Logan said. “You get to know the difference, even with the clever ones. There’s always some wee giveaway somewhere. But that clown? He’s as transparent as a fucking window pane. If he was lying, we’d know. Which means, he isn’t. Which means—”
“He didn’t do it,” Sinead said.
“The son, then?” Tyler suggested. He looked around at the others. “I mean, it’s got to be, hasn’t it? He confessed to his mate, there’s all the video stuff. He could’ve sent the texts from his dad’s phone, then deleted them. He’d have had access.”
“Battering his own mum, though?” Hamza said. “That’s pretty extreme.”
“Jealousy?” Sinead reasoned. “If he found out about the relationship. Lana and Fergus, I mean.”
“Still, a claw hammer to your own mum,” Hamza sa
id, wincing. “I mean, aye, mother-in-law, maybe…”
“He could’ve been in the house when I got there,” Sinead said. “I didn’t hear him come in.”
“There we go, then!” Tyler announced. “Fergus is blackmailing him with the videos, so Bennet kills him. He hates his dad, so he tries to frame him for it, then when he finds out his mum has been shagging Fergus, too, he goes mental and caves her head in with a hammer.” He held his hands out as if to welcome some inevitable praise. “Case closed.”
“No,” Logan intoned.
Tyler’s arms flopped back down at his sides. “No? How no’?”
“Because none of that feels right,” Logan said. He had his back to the team now and was studying the Big Board. “You get blackmail in these teacher-student relationships, but it’s generally the other way around. If it came out, Fergus Forsyth stood to lose a hell of a lot more than Bennet Lennon ever would. Career would be ruined. He might end up charged. Bennet’s a smart enough kid, he’d have known that. And then there’s the key.”
“What about it, boss?”
Logan kept his feet planted, but turned and looked back over his shoulder. “Well, he ate it, didn’t he? That doesn’t strike me as a man threatening to use it.”
“You think he swallowed it because he didn’t want word of the relationship to get out?” Hamza. asked. “Hiding it from who, though? Bennet?”
“More likely hiding it from whoever did Fergus’s and Ross Lyndsay’s house over. I think they were looking for the key, or maybe the USB drive itself.”
Ben’s phone gave a bleep. He picked it up, glanced at the screen, then set it down again.
“Swallowing something’s a bit of a desperate hiding place, is it not?” he asked.
“It is,” Logan agreed. “So, what does that tell us?”
There was a moment of silence, before Tyler chipped in.
“He was in a rush?”
“Panicking, maybe,” Hamza offered. “Like, he knew someone was coming for it, and it was the only place he thought he could keep it safe.”
“Thoughts, Sinead?” Logan prompted.
Sinead blinked and sat up straighter in her chair. “Sorry, sir. Eh… Yeah. What they said.”
“You seem distracted, Detective Constable. Am I boring you?” the DCI intoned.
“No, sir. Sorry, sir. Just…” She very deliberately did not look at Tyler. “…a bit tired, sir.”
“Told you, you should’ve had the coffee,” Ben said.
“Stay focused,” Logan told her, then he turned his attention back to the board. “So, our theory is, Fergus Forsyth made recordings of his sexual encounters with Bennet Lennon for the duration of their relationship, and kept them hidden. Either he made these for his own gratification, or some other purpose we’re not aware of. Someone got wind of them, wanted to get hold of them, and so Fergus was forced to hide the key in the most readily available hiding place—his own stomach.”
“Who would want to get hold of the footage?” Sinead asked, making an extra effort to get involved.
“You tell me,” Logan prompted.
“Well… Either someone who wanted to ruin Fergus’s reputation, or protect Bennet’s?”
“Or someone who wanted to do both, maybe?” Tyler said. “That could take us back to Clyde again.”
“Or even Lana,” Hamza suggested. “If she found out that the man she was in love with was having it away with her teenage son, I can’t imagine she’d be overly impressed.”
“True, but there’s nothing to suggest she knew anything about what was going on between Fergus and Bennet,” Logan said. “She was still talking about them all running away together, and getting away from her arsehole of a husband. Besides, there’s no way she could have lifted the body by herself.”
Ben’s phone gave another bleep. He held it at arm’s length, and started patting himself down, searching for his glasses.
“So, we’re ruling Lana out?” Hamza asked.
“For now,” Logan said.
“Which leaves Clyde, Bennet, or some other bugger entirely,” Ben remarked, still searching for his specs.
“Or both!” said Tyler. “They could’ve been working together.” The initial burst of enthusiasm that had come with the idea quickly began to wane when he realised quite how unlikely that was. “Or, you know, they might not have been. And probably weren’t.”
“Don’t worry. There’s no such thing as a bad idea, son,” Logan said.
“Except that,” Ben added.
“Aye,” the DCI agreed. “Except that one you just had. Otherwise, there’s no such thing as a bad idea.”
“Haha. Aye,” said Tyler, making a passable attempt at laughter. “Sure thing, boss.”
Logan regarded him in silence for a few seconds, then did the same to Sinead. His eyes narrowed, then he shook his head and turned back to the board. “In all seriousness, son, it wasn’t a terrible idea. I just don’t see it. It doesn’t fit what we’ve got.”
He rocked on his heels, considering the information pinned up on the Big Board. The texts that Clyde Lennon denied all knowledge of. The body’s location, with all its implications of revenge and retribution, not to mention its connection to Lana and Fergus’s secret rendezvous. The head shoved unceremoniously in a toilet cistern in Clyde’s workshop.
Based on those things alone, they had a case against Lana’s husband. If he’d found out about what was happening between Fergus and Bennet, he’d have even more of a reason to get violent.
Had he gone to confront Fergus about that, and not the affair with Lana? Had things escalated from there?
But then, why would the body be at the Well of the Seven Heads? Too big a coincidence, if it wasn’t connected to Lana.
He ran through a few more possibilities. What if Lana had killed Fergus, with the help of Bennet, or Clyde? How would that play out?
Maybe she and Bennet both found out they were sleeping with the same man, took their revenge, then jealousy drove Bennet to attack his mother afterwards.
It was possible. Plausible, even.
He just wasn’t feeling it. He had a nose for bullshit, and Lana Lennon had been nothing but convincing in all their conversations. She hadn’t known Fergus was dead. She hadn’t suspected anything was going on between him and her son.
She had trusted Fergus. Implicitly. From almost the moment she’d met him, she’d said.
“She felt like she’d known him forever,” Logan muttered.
“Boss?”
Logan turned from the board, something stirring at the back of his mind. Not a thought, exactly. Not yet. But a spark of one.
“Lana Lennon. She said… When she spoke about Fergus, she said it was like she’d known him for years. Like, he was familiar.” He sucked in his cheeks, thought for a moment, then shook his head, tentatively at first, then with more conviction. “No. No, that would mean…”
He sat on the edge of a desk, eyes drawing maps on the floor as that spark became a thought that led to dozens more, all flashing up, rapid-fire.
The others said nothing. They knew better than to interrupt when Logan was like this. Derail his train of thought at a time like this, and you’d be left picking yourself up out of the wreckage.
“What if…?” he muttered. “What if we’re looking at it all wrong?”
“Wouldn’t be the first time, boss,” Tyler pointed out, then he bit his lip to stop himself saying any more.
“How do you mean, Jack?” Ben asked, then he patted the top of his head, found his glasses there, and pulled them down with a self-reprimanding tut.
“What are the chances of Fergus Forsyth just happening to get into relationships with both Lana and Bennet Lennon at the same time?” Logan asked. “I mean, he’s a young guy, good looking. Plenty of opportunities, but he jumps into bed with a woman twice his age who he has nothing whatsoever in common with, and then starts having sex with her sixteen-year-old son, and recording it all for posterity.”
“It
’s definitely odd, sir,” Hamza said.
“Unless he had another motive,” Logan reasoned. He pointed to the photograph of Clyde Lennon. “Revenge.”
There was near-silence as the other detectives considered this, the only sound coming from DI Forde muttering to himself as he tried to get into his email.
“We’ve had revenge as a motive from the start,” Logan said. “Given where the body was stuffed. But what if Fergus was the one looking for revenge on Clyde Lennon? Stealing his wife. Grooming his son.”
“Why would he want revenge on Clyde, though, sir?” Hamza asked.
Logan sucked air in through his teeth. “I think… I think I might know the answer to that,” he said. “I just wish I didn’t.”
“Jesus Christ, Jack!” Ben exclaimed, jumping to his feet more quickly than he’d likely done in years. He thrust his phone out, almost like he wanted to be rid of the thing. “Email just arrived. I think you’re going to want to see it.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
“You get something to eat, Mr Lennon?” Logan asked once the tape had been restarted. “We treating you alright?”
“Not really,” Clyde said. “Food’s shit. And cold.” He gestured to the notepad of the grey-haired solicitor who had been dragged away from his family to sit in on the interview. “Put that down, will you? Food was cold. And shit.”
“I don’t think that’s really relevant, Mr Lennon,” the solicitor said. He was more switched on than the other one, Logan thought, but shared the same desire not to be here.
“This shouldn’t take too much longer,” Logan said. “We just have a few more questions, and then you can get some rest.”
Clyde beckoned across the table, inviting the detectives to come at him. “Well, come on. Let’s have it.”
“Did you ever meet Fergus Forsyth?”
“No.”
“Ever see a picture of him?” Logan asked.
“Why the fuck would I have seen a picture of him?”
“On the school website, maybe?”
Clyde sighed. “I’m hardly pissing about looking at school websites, am I?”