by Mark Roberts
As Riley formally closed the interview, she looked at Daniel Campbell and saw a man aware that life as he knew it was as good as over.
95
10.00 pm
In the interview suite, Clay waited with grim anticipation for the door to open, and a huge part of her wished that it never would. When her iPhone vibrated on the surface of the table it was as if a roll of thunder had shaken the room.
‘Bill, what’s happening?’ she asked.
‘Campbell’s in with Lesley Reid and her colleagues. I watched from the observation room. There’s going to be a lot of retired officers getting a knock on the door.’
An idea possessed her about cause and effect and, briefly, Clay was at the dead centre of a huge lake watching ripples roll out to a shore beyond the horizon. A man is murdered, and in the questioning that follows, dozens of lives are changed beyond recognition. And, in turn, the shape of hundreds of lives bend to an altered reality.
‘That’s not the main reason why you called me, Bill, to tell me about Campbell.’
‘I’ve received an electronic copy of Lucien Burns’s medical notes.’
‘Did Alder Hey in the Park find them?’
‘No. When the trail went cold there, I contacted his GP. The GP opened up the surgery after hours and has sent them over.’
‘Great work, Bill. Anything leap up at you?’
‘Eve, you know when you say to people, Don’t tell me half a story, tell me the whole thing and stick to the facts?’
She smiled at her friend’s gentle mockery. He had caught the tone of her speech exactly.
‘I’ve gone through the notes once and I’m trying to get my head round them. I don’t completely understand what I’ve read and I don’t want give you garbled info or confuse you. I need to read more – to understand something I’m aware of but am largely in the dark about.’
‘Is there anything concrete and simple you can tell me?’
‘Lucien’s not sixteen. He’s older.’
‘What’s going on with that lie?’
There was a knock on the door and Clay’s heart flooded with liquid lead. ‘Hang on, Bill. Come in!’
Carol White stepped into the interview suite and frowned at Clay.
‘I’ve got to go.’ As she disconnected the call, Clay indicated the seat next to herself.
‘Is everything all right?’ asked White from the doorway.
‘Come and sit down, Carol.’
As White sat down, it was clear that she’d had a lot more to drink than a couple of glasses of wine and Clay wished she had some red wine swimming through her veins rather than the cold poison of suspicion.
‘Who’s watching your little boy, Carol?’
Her shoulders slumped. ‘He’s with his father. I’m not coping well at the moment so I asked him to take the little fella off my hands until I can get my head straight.’ She looked around the room with perplexed tipsiness. ‘What have you called me in for?’
‘I’m sorry to hear you say you’re not coping well,’ said Clay. ‘Is there anything on your mind? Anything you’d like to talk about?’
Carol looked like a woman who could see a shadow of squares falling on her but not the net itself. ‘I don’t know what you mean, Eve. One minute I’m watching Annie Hall on TCM and trying to drown my sorrows, the next you call and tell me you want to show me something.’
‘I don’t want to show you something. I have to show you something.’
Clay handed her the sheet of retrieved texts from Lucien Burns’s phone.
‘But that’s my number.’
‘Yes.’
She looked closely at the sheet and asked, ‘So where does this come from?’
‘Same place as this.’ Riley handed her the other sheet.
‘Vindici?’ She sounded deeply surprised. ‘When you say the same place as this, where do you mean?’
‘We’ve seen the texts you’ve been sending to and receiving from Lucien Burns. You’ve been supplying him with contact details for paedophiles in Liverpool. Do you wish to confirm or deny this?’ said Clay, her scalp tingling with unpleasant heat as a coldness spread through her being.
Carol White sat back in the seat. ‘I’d like to say deny but, looking at this, I have to say confirm.’
‘What were you thinking of, Carol?’
‘I wasn’t thinking of anything. I didn’t send or receive texts from Lucien Burns.’
‘Carol, this is going to be much easier for you if you tell the truth from the word go.’
‘I’m telling you the truth. I’m not going to jeopardise my future for the sake of getting some paedophiles topped. Never mind being drummed out of the police, I would never be an accessory to murder. You know what life in jail’s like for disgraced coppers. I might be off my head with stress but I’m not that far out of my mind.’
‘It’s your number, Carol, and much as I want to believe you, I’ve spoken to you tonight on that number.’
White took her mobile phone from her bag.
‘Hand that to me!’ said Clay.
White pointed at the video camera in the left-hand corner of the ceiling. ‘Do you think I’m that stupid I’d try and tamper with or destroy evidence in an interview room, sitting next to an extremely experienced and on-the-ball detective under the watchful eye of a camera?’ She checked the camera. ‘A camera that is pointing at me and recording?’
Clay held her hand out.
‘You’re making me angry now,’ said White.
‘Just give me the phone, Carol,’ replied Clay calmly.
‘On one condition.’
‘You’re not in a position to start demanding conditions,’ said Clay.
‘I’ll outline my condition. Once you’ve followed my instructions, I’ll explain what’s happened here.’
‘Go on,’ said Clay.
‘When I give you the phone, Eve, take off the back casing. Then remove the battery and take out the SIM card. That’s not going to damage any so-called evidence on my phone, is it?’
‘No,’ said Clay, watching White sobering up on fast forward.
‘Will you do as I’ve instructed?’
‘All right,’ replied Clay.
As she slid the phone across the table to Clay, White said, ‘I’m telling you right now, I’m not going to watch another second of child pornography ever again for the rest of my life.’
Clay took off the back casing of White’s phone.
‘I want an immediate transfer to any department within the Merseyside Constabulary.’
Clay took out the battery and laid it on the table next to the casing.
‘I don’t care which nick, I don’t care which department.’
Clay slid out the SIM card.
‘Call me, Eve,’ said White.
Clay went to Recents on her phone and called White’s number. She turned her phone on to speakerphone, laid it on the table and, after two seconds of silence, the ring tone sounded.
White pointed at her dead, deconstructed phone on the table.
‘You can keep ringing it, over and over, until midnight. Whoever’s done this is never going to answer your call, Eve.’
Clay closed the unanswered call down and felt a collision of confusion and relief. ‘What’s going on, Carol?’
Clay’s iPhone rang. As she connected, she took it off speaker-phone.
‘Eve, it’s Poppy.’
‘What have you got, Poppy?’ asked Clay.
‘A direct hit from Christine Green’s phone. She received a call at one minute past nine this morning that lasted less than a minute. The caller’s number is 07704 193119.’
Clay jotted the number down and said, ‘Thank you, Poppy.’
‘That was the only call that Christine received in the window of time you gave me. What do you want me to do next?’
‘Prepare yourself. Please start working on Daniel Campbell’s phone. Thank you.’
She closed down the call and dialled the number Poppy had given he
r. After three rings, the recipient connected.
‘Yes?’
‘Are you in the Travelodge on Aigburth Road, Annabelle?’
‘Well, I can’t go home, can I? Can I claim my hotel bills back? Hmm?’
‘Yeah, sure... I’m sending an unmarked car round for you. Lucien’s given me some information about his sister dying. I need you to corroborate that information, and I’d like you to come to Trinity Road to do so.’
‘I’ll wait outside the front entrance.’
Clay disconnected.
‘Your leak’s one of two people,’ said White, back straight and sober. ‘You want me to explain what’s happened here?’
96
10.10 pm
When the heat from the crumbling incense cones first reached the tops of Hawkins’s knees, he said, ‘Please take it off me. I’m begging you, Justin.’
‘In less than a minute, the warmth you’re feeling will get much warmer, and when it turns hot, two things will happen. You will start screaming and your flesh will begin to cook. You’re lucky. I’ve only put seven burning cones on you.
Hawkins made a noise at the base of his throat.
‘What are you strapping to my leg?’
‘I’m not listening to this,’ said Truman. He grabbed the gag, stood behind Hawkins as he strained in the chair, and pulled the material sharply at either end, forcing it into Hawkins’s mouth. ‘If you make the burning cones fall off your knees, I’m going to stop being fair to you and put you, in the chair, on your back. Then I’ll put dozens of cones on your chest.’
Hawkins stiffened, his cries of pain smothered by the gag.
Truman placed a chair in front of Hawkins, sat facing him at eye level and watched impassively as he wept, eyes rolling, face twitching.
Hawkins closed his eyes, his face soaked in tears.
Truman leaned forward, pressed the sharpened point of the bicycle spoke against the top of Hawkins’ right nipple and, lightly, started drawing a circle around the circumference. Hawkins opened his eyes, looked down and back at Truman with horror and terror flashing in his eyes.
‘You bit that little autistic girl’s right nipple so hard she had to have seven stitches. And that wasn’t the only place you bit her.’ Truman touched Hawkins’s left shoulder with the sharpened tip of the spoke. ‘You bit her there.’
Hawkins shook his head.
Truman touched Hawkins’s right bicep with the tip and, again, Hawkins shook his head as his eyes followed the progress of the spoke.
‘And there. When the police took an impression of your teeth, it was a perfect match for the bite marks on the child’s body. I think you behaved so savagely because you were planning on killing her.’
Hawkins shook his head.
‘There was a large industrial-strength bin liner in the shed. Just one. And one little girl. But you didn’t manage it, did you? Stop shaking your head. These are facts that stood up in a court of law. Here’s another fact. When you rolled off her and on to your back, she reached out in the darkness and she found the handle of a tin of paint. She sat up and smacked you on the head with the tin of paint, knocking you out cold.’
Hawkins made two noises, one after the other. Then he made the same two stifled sounds, louder and stronger.
Truman stood behind him, untied the gag.
‘Kill me! Kill me!’
Truman sat facing him.
‘Kill me!’
Smoke rose from the glowing red wounds on both his knees.
‘Not yet. Not for a long while. She left you in the shed and wandered out on to the street, naked, bleeding, covered in your filthy DNA and straight into a woman who was running at night when the roads were quiet. The police were there within a matter of minutes and a quarter of an hour later they followed the girl’s trail of blood back to the shed in the back garden of the house you lived in. They found you knocked out and with your trousers halfway down your legs, with a gaping wound on your forehead and your blood on a tin of paint. The girl’s mother was fast asleep in her bed, with a half-consumed glass of vodka and orange and full of sleeping pills that were prescribed for you. Tell me it didn’t happen. You can’t, can you?’
Hawkins’s head dropped as Truman walked behind him.
He made his way back with a spade.
‘Yes... When you die where would you like to be buried?’ He held up the spade. ‘I want to respect your wishes on that one.’
‘Fuck you!’
‘Pardon? I’m respecting your wishes and you speak to me with such disrespect?’ Truman put the spade down.
‘I’m sorry, it just slipped out...’
‘You’re not sorry; it’s what you’ve been thinking all along. Well – a part of you might think you’re sorry but you’re not. You are going to be very sorry for that outburst. You know, the thing with all of you deviants is that your personalities shine through. I’ve never murdered two specimens who were quite alike.’
Truman shook two ponatinib tablets from the bottle on the table.
‘Are you not well?’ asked Hawkins.
‘You could say that.’ He popped the tablets in his mouth.
‘Do you mind me asking what’s wrong with you?’
‘Are you a doctor? Stop trying to pretend that you’re at all interested in my health. Stop trying to manipulate me. You’re transparent. Stop insulting my intelligence.’ He took a bottle of water from the altar and washed the tablets down.
‘How unwell are you?’
‘Enough.’
‘I’m... genuinely sorry you’re not well.’
‘Are you?’ asked Truman.
‘I am.’
‘I scarcely give a damn!’
‘Ahhh, ahhh, it’s burning...’ Hawkins’s eyes swam, closed and his head lolled forward.
‘It’s not really a case of fuck me. It’s really a case of fuck you!’
He sniffed the air. ‘To me,you smell like pork, Hawkins!’
Hawkins opened his eyes and peered crab-like at Truman.
‘And to answer your earlier question, the thing that I’ve strapped to your leg is a bomb.’
97
10.49 pm
Hendricks looked at the turning blades of the fan that cooled the overheated incident room and wondered if the combination of heat in the room and cold autumnal darkness outside the window was making his mind play tricks on him after the fourth reading of Lucien Burns’s medical notes and a background investigation on the internet.
As Barney Cole put down the landline receiver, Hendricks asked, ‘What are you up to, Barney?’
Cole stood up, took his overcoat from the back of his chair and slipped it on.
‘I’ve been doing a bit of background digging for Eve.’ He looked at James Peace’s birth certificate on screen on Ancestry UK and saw his mother’s name, Amanda Peace. He looked at his father’s name, Antonio Agua. On a registrar-headed letter-headed paper attached to the birth certificate was a note: Father, Mexican national, merchant seaman. ‘Now she’s asked me to go on a message with Carol White.’
‘A message with Carol?’
‘She’s meeting me at the front in five, says she’ll explain. What about you, Bill?’
‘Thinking the unthinkable and fathoming the unfathomable.’
‘Business as usual then?’ Cole laughed. ‘This bloke I’m looking up for Eve, Jimmy Peace, his father was Mexican, a sailor. Isn’t that a weird coincidence given all the links to Mexico in the Vindici case and the shit we’re wading through now?’
‘Barney, I don’t believe in coincidence. Do you?’
‘No I don’t. But maybe that’s another coincidence.’
‘Business as usual,’ replied Hendricks as he moved on to Google, clicked Images and, from the battery of squares and rectangles that filled his screen, his attention was arrested by a Roman sculpture, a white marble figure of a sleeping woman, face down on a rippled sheet, her breasts and the front of her body concealed. Her immaculate hair was curled and her face
was serene and beautiful.
He started at the top of her head, followed the curve of her back to her rounded buttocks and the folds of the sheet that covered her lower calves. Hendricks could feel the love of the sculptor for his work, the expertise and fine attention to detail.
Clicking on the image, he saw it in a larger form alongside a collection of related pictures including a shot of the same sculpture from the other side, with the detail of the hair on the back of her head visible and her face largely obscured.
The landline phone on Cole’s desk rang but to Hendricks’s ears it sounded as though it was ringing on a different floor.
Viewing the same object from two different angles, Hendricks had the clearest sense of its ambiguity. From one point of view the statue was male but from another female.
The ringing stopped and he heard Cole introduce himself to the caller.
He came out of Google Images and, returning to Lucien Burns’s medical notes, felt the breaking light of understanding and, with this, compassion. He picked up his phone to put a call through to Clay.
‘Shit, oh shit, no, no,’ said Cole.
Hendricks paused at the growing dismay in Cole’s eyes.
‘OK. OK. I’ll pass it on. Thanks for letting me know,’ said Cole.
Cold air from the fan sliced through the humid dark. Hendricks, his hand growing clammy on his mobile phone, felt a dark premonition and sickness spread through his centre.
Cole placed the receiver down and stared into space. ‘They found his car parked on Otterspool Prom.’
Silence beneath the chopping blades of the fan.
‘Bob Rimmer threw himself into the river,’ said Cole.
98
11.31 pm
At 143 Primrose Road, Cole rang the bell of Carol White’s mother-in-law’s front door for the third time. He glanced over his shoulder at Carol as she sat staring straight ahead in the passenger seat of his car. As they’d pulled up outside the house, Carol had said, ‘Can you do this on your own, Barney?’