Truth or Die

by Katerina Diamond

  ‘We are closing in and they know it. If Gary is right about the game, then we are only missing a couple of pieces of this puzzle,’ Adrian said, not wanting to think about the investigation against him.

  ‘How many people have to die before we figure it out?’ Kapoor said disapprovingly.

  ‘We need to find Russ Beacham, one other young male and, assuming we are correct about how this is working, one other lecturer. Those are the major players we know about. Assuming my mugging was also connected Beacham doesn’t match the description of the guy who attacked me.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Positive.’

  ‘That still leaves the question of who is actually committing the murders?’ DCI Kapoor said.

  ‘We are chasing down some possible avenues. Nothing concrete yet,’ Adrian lied. He couldn’t tell her about Parker. Even if the DCI understood why they hadn’t been able to arrest him, she would have no choice but to do something about it. Adrian wondered why he always managed to screw things up, even when he wasn’t particularly trying.

  ‘Well, keep me informed and stay away from this particular part of the investigation please, Adrian. If it does turn out that Caitlin Watts didn’t commit suicide, the last thing we need is your name anywhere near it. No offence. You concentrate on finding the final players. Once the press hears about this there is no way they won’t say it’s some kind of conspiracy or cover-up. I’m really looking forward to that.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s suicide either then?’

  ‘I think from what you have told me so far then I have to be open to the possibility it isn’t a suicide. It’s strange timing for her to do it. She was essentially off the hook with us, as annoying as that is. Maybe she did feel guilty about what she accused you of, but she had already stated that she was in danger. We can’t just ignore that or pretend she didn’t say it.’

  ‘What do I do now then?’

  ‘Go through what we have already compiled on the case. After that, you can keep running through for any connections between Mitchell, Coley, Sager, Norris and Watts. That’s five bodies; we simply cannot allow anyone else to die.’ DCI Kapoor paused. ‘I don’t understand how Coley is connected, considering he was at a completely different university. I suspect if you track back far enough you will be able to find a connection between the professors. Maybe if we find out when it started we can find the final professor. Look for any leads on Beacham; I have a feeling he either knows what’s going on and has disappeared to keep himself safe, or he is in it up to his neck and he’s in hiding – from us.’

  ‘Or he’s already dead,’ Adrian said.

  ‘I love your unrelenting optimism, DS Miles.’ DCI Kapoor waved him away and he left her office and went back to his desk.

  The files on Sager and Norris were already lying next to his computer. He was more concerned with the other murders though. Understanding why Parker had killed Mitchell, Coley and Lassiter was key to finding out who was next. Maybe there was some kind of society or club they all belonged in together with Norris. In Adrian’s mind, this game must have started as a conversation, which meant they must have all been in the same place at the same time at some point. Not only that, but they must have been close enough to even broach the subject with each other, most likely with prolonged contact. At some point Coley must have been with the others; Adrian was sure that was the key to unravelling this mystery. Maybe finding out when the game started was another possible key to figuring out who was next on Parker’s kill list.

  Adrian’s phone vibrated on the desk. The number was blocked.

  ‘Hello. This is DS Miles. Who am I speaking to?’

  ‘Detective.’

  It was Parker, even from those few syllables, Adrian knew. He was well spoken but his voice was soft, low. Adrian looked around him to see if anyone was looking.

  ‘What is going on? You need to tell me.’

  ‘I’m sorry about the girl. It wasn’t me.’

  ‘I didn’t think it was.’

  ‘I doubt it was suicide either.’

  ‘Do you know about the game? Do you know who killed her?’

  ‘Not yet. I think it was a student, but I haven’t yet figured out who the final puppetmaster is. His identity seems to be the best kept secret of all.’

  ‘You’re sure it’s a man?’

  ‘I would be surprised if it wasn’t.’

  ‘You need to let us deal with it. When you find out who it was then you have to tell me.’

  ‘I don’t think I can. They are dangerous people, they don’t deserve prison, they would probably thrive in there.’

  ‘That’s not really up to you.’

  ‘I understand my return has put you in an impossible situation and I am truly sorry. I didn’t want this. It came to me.’

  ‘There is no way for me to protect you, or myself for that matter. If you get caught, then we are both in a lot of trouble.’

  ‘They won’t catch me, Detective. If they do, there is no way to connect me to the previous murders and I won’t tell if you don’t.’

  ‘What if I hand you in?’

  ‘You’re not going to do that. These people are ruining lives, they have killed people. I just need to get the last of the professors and then it’s over. The world will be a better place without them in it. They almost destroyed you, too. Think of all the innocent people they have hurt, including this girl. You know as well as I do that she didn’t commit suicide.’

  Adrian couldn’t fault his logic, but if he stopped believing in due process and people’s rights then what was he? He had to do things by the book, no matter how much it pained him. There was a little part of him that wanted the people who made Caitlin Watts make those false allegations pay for what they did. As he walked through the corridors at work he could still hear whispers. He had a reputation with women, granted it had been a while since he had done anything like that, but shit sticks, and right now there was a definite stink around him, thanks to the group of people Parker was trying to eradicate. Maybe death would be too easy for them, but perhaps Parker was right, maybe they needed to just not exist any more.

  ‘You need to let us take care of this,’ Adrian said unconvincingly.

  ‘I don’t have any faith in your justice system, I only trust my own.’

  The phone went dead. He was gone.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Adrian continued to look through the files, but his mind kept going back to Caitlin. He had tried not to think about her for a while now, since before she made the allegations against him. He had been attracted to her on some level; maybe if she was older and they were in another life, he wouldn’t have hesitated to take the opportunity she had offered to him quite plainly.

  When he was younger Adrian was quite a vulnerable teen himself, which was how he ended up being a father at sixteen. His parents were both preoccupied with their own problems; his mother virtually a ghost and his father an addict. He was left to fend for himself with no real guidance and a compulsion to seek refuge in the arms of his girlfriend, now the mother of his child, Andrea. She was the closest thing to love that Adrian had ever known. Although looking back now, he realised it wasn’t love, just lust and, more than that, a desire to belong to someone, to be wanted by at least one person in the world. Caitlin had her grandfather; he was her home and her family. He could understand how she would do anything to keep hold of that and to keep him safe, and so Adrian couldn’t be angry with her for what she had done. She really was a victim in this, too. He had been lucky enough when he was a teenager not to fall in with the wrong people. His father’s experience had made him hate anything to do with drugs, and so he never touched them and stayed away from the dealers that used to hover by the back gates of his secondary school.

  Sick of thinking about himself, Adrian opened the report on Owen Sager’s staged suicide. The pathologist had told them that it would require some force to break his hyoid bone. Assuming it was the same person who had then attacked
Caitlin, there should be some physical evidence on her. He wanted to get justice for her, even after what she had been forced to do to him.

  Imogen walked in and sat down, letting out a huge sigh.

  ‘Bad?’ Adrian said.

  She was wearing a police-issue tracksuit and her hair had been washed. Her clothes were obviously being processed to look for any evidence that it was foul play. He hadn’t actually spoken to Imogen since they parted after breakfast this morning. DCI Kapoor had informed Adrian of what had happened at Caitlin’s. He still hadn’t been cleared to leave desk duty.

  ‘We need to find out who is doing this and quickly,’ Imogen said. ‘I don’t want to walk into anything else like that as long as I live. Her grandfather is a hollow shell right now. He just sat there staring into space, her blood on his hands and face. There was nothing I could say. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.’

  ‘Why didn’t you call me?’

  ‘So many reasons, most of all to protect you: you can’t go anywhere near that place right now. You’re too close to this case. I thought it would be better coming from the DCI anyway. Don’t be mad.’

  ‘I understand. I’m not mad, just worried. Are you OK? That must have shaken you up.’ He wished he could go and hold her but that was out of the question here in the station.

  ‘Just seemed like such a waste. All of it, you know? Why does life shit on some people more than others? For all her faults that girl was chosen because she was vulnerable and easy to manipulate.’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m sure there’s some higher reasoning behind it, but as a lapsed Catholic I can’t tell you what it is. Free will or something.’

  ‘Don’t even go there.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘What have you been doing?’ Imogen asked.

  ‘Looking into Sager and Beacham. Realistically, I’m not getting anywhere. I feel like I’m missing something obvious, but I can’t tell you what it is.’

  ‘Maybe you need to step back a bit.’

  ‘I don’t see how.’

  ‘Rather than looking for connections, focus on Beacham. We need to find him,’ Imogen said. She had that haunted expression they all got sometimes when you see something you wish you hadn’t seen. She was putting on a brave face, for him. Her mind was somewhere else.

  ‘How did she look?’

  ‘Dead, Adrian, she looked dead.’

  ‘You know what I mean. Did she suffer, do you think?’

  ‘We spoke to Nigel Watts and he said she was fine when he left for his morning service. He got back to the house at around nine thirty, by which point she had been left alone for two hours. We arrived there soon after and she had been dead a while. If someone else did it, they must have been waiting outside for the reverend to leave. I think it was quick; there was a lot of blood though.’

  ‘Was there any evidence of a struggle?’ Adrian couldn’t stop himself from asking.

  ‘No, but she was clothed and the force with which her wrists were cut points to someone else being involved. She could have perhaps cut one, but I don’t see how she then would have had the strength to do the other one with the same effort and precision.’

  ‘What was she cut with?’

  ‘A vegetable knife, one of those small serrated ones. It was on the floor in the bathroom. Can we talk about something else?’ Imogen shuddered.

  Adrian knew how to distract her. ‘He called me.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘He did – Parker. Told me he didn’t kill Caitlin.’ Adrian could see Imogen visibly tense as he spoke.

  ‘Jesus Christ, and you waited ’til now to tell me?’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell. He said he doesn’t know who the others are, but he was sorry about the girl,’ Adrian whispered, aware that there were other people close by.

  ‘Did you believe him?’

  ‘He doesn’t seem to lie, so I don’t see what he would have to gain from starting now. Yeah, I believed him. He said he is trying to find the puppetmaster.’

  ‘So maybe we can find out the final players before he does.’

  ‘What are the chances of that?’ Adrian said, unsure whether he wanted to find the person first. Maybe Parker was right and prison wouldn’t stop them from manipulating people for their own entertainment. There were plenty of vulnerable people in prison. The only saving grace was that now all their playmates were dead. He probably shouldn’t feel that way, but Adrian was fresh out of sympathy this week.

  ‘Let’s go and see Russ Beacham’s parents. We have more information now at least. Maybe we can find out what hold the professors have over him,’ Imogen said.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Russ Beacham’s mother, Judith, answered the door to her apartment set among a small, low-level red-brick council block. Her eyes wandered up and down the detectives, then she walked back inside the house and left the door open for them to follow, obviously clocking that they were police immediately. Imogen always wondered what it was that gave them away; neither she nor Adrian particularly dressed like the rest of CID. She was always in her baggy trousers and Adrian generally looked like he had just got off a bender of some kind.

  Judith Beacham sat on the sofa and lit a cigarette straight away, facing the window and crossing her arms. Here was a woman at the end of her tether.

  ‘What’s he done now?’ she said, nervously sucking on the cigarette as soon as she had finished speaking.

  ‘Do you know where your son is, Mrs Beacham?’

  ‘Ms,’ she corrected Imogen.

  ‘Have you seen him?’ Imogen asked.

  ‘I haven’t seen him for a couple of weeks now,’ Judith Beacham said.

  ‘Is that unusual?’ Adrian asked.

  ‘Probably means he is sponging off someone else for a change.’

  ‘Did your son get a scholarship to Exeter University?’ Imogen said.

  ‘Someone else is paying for him, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Has he been in trouble before?’ Adrian asked.

  ‘Never had the police round before, but it’s not really a surprise, not with the way he’s been the last few months.’

  ‘What’s he been doing?’

  ‘He nicked a load of booze from the shop on the corner, but luckily the man who runs it decided not to press charges. He knows me, knows us.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Took my mum’s car for a ride when she was visiting one day, and he doesn’t have a licence. He’s stolen money from me, broken things. He beat some kid up in the park, but I managed to convince the mum not to report it.’ She took a long drag before looking up at them. ‘So what has he done now?’

  ‘We need his assistance with our enquiries on a case,’ Adrian said, ever the diplomat.

  ‘I am sorry, I have no idea where he is. I don’t even know him any more. He’s always been a good kid, doesn’t make any sense. I’ve tried talking to him, but nothing seems to get through. They always said he was too bright at school, that that would mean he got bored.’

  ‘What are his grades like at university?’ Adrian asked.

  ‘Good, as far as I know. He didn’t quite get the right grades to get in, but we had a few problems while he was doing his exams, so they said they would give him a shot.’

  ‘You said someone else was paying for him,’ Imogen probed.

  ‘Yeah, my stepdad. Well, my mum’s boyfriend. They’re quite close, have been since Russ was about five.’

  ‘Have they seen him? Your parents?’ Imogen asked.

  ‘No, and now they aren’t talking to me any more. Said I’ve ruined him and I need to sort it out. I don’t know what to do.’ Judith Beacham’s eyes glassed over, and she sniffed before wiping her eyes with her sleeve.

  ‘Do you know if your son was hanging around with anyone new?’ Adrian asked.

  ‘He stopped telling me anything a couple of months into uni. Only got in touch when he wanted something. He was seeing a girl for a bit, but I don’t know her name.
I saw them together in town once and he practically ran away from me.’

  ‘What did she look like?’

  ‘Black hair, blue eyes. She was really pretty; I wondered if she was the reason he went off the rails.’

  Imogen pulled out her phone and found a photo of Caitlin Watts. She showed it to Judith Beacham. ‘Is this her?’

  ‘Yes. Definitely.’

  So, Caitlin and Russ had a relationship. Had she been the worm that got Russ Beacham on the hook? Imogen wondered what they had threatened Russ Beacham with, how they got him to do the things he did. Had Russ Beacham been involved in Caitlin Watts’ death? Had he killed her? Imogen’s mind flashed to the image of Caitlin’s black hair in deep pink water and she shook it off.

  ‘You don’t know of anyone else your son might have been involved with?’ Adrian asked.

  ‘No, I’m sorry.’

  ‘If you hear from him, or if you think of anything else, then give me a call.’ Imogen handed her card to Judith Beacham.

  ‘Is he in a lot of trouble?’ she said, a hint of defeat in her voice – as though she already knew the answer.

  ‘We just want to eliminate him from our enquiries.’ Imogen smiled, the stock reply when you didn’t want to give the game away.

  In a way, it was the truth, it would be great to be able to take him out of the equation, but from what Judith Beacham had said about his escalating bad behaviour, it seemed entirely possible that he was involved. Was he involved enough to have killed Caitlin, though?

  They had linked the pair together now, which was at least something. They still needed to find the person who assaulted Adrian. Adrian had been certain it wasn’t Russ Beacham and Imogen couldn’t imagine he would feign any kind of certainty if it wasn’t true, so that meant there was at least one other student involved.