Risk of Harm

by Lucie Whitehouse

  Or – her stomach dropped – on his team at all.

  He closed the door behind him with a quiet firmness that struck her ear like a death knell. Often, if it was only the two of them, he sat on her filing cabinet but he stayed standing. ‘You probably haven’t had a chance to see the papers yet.’

  ‘I bought a couple in Sparkbrook.’ Another pang of alarm – was there a piece she hadn’t seen? Something worse? For a moment, she had the wild idea that Luke might have bypassed Kilmartin and gone straight to the media, then told herself not to be ridiculous: as if he had that much initiative.

  ‘Did you see the Herald?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’ Relief, which she hoped hadn’t shown on her face – wildly inappropriate response.

  ‘So the court of public opinion is well and truly in session,’ said Samir. ‘And I’ve got a meeting with Kilmartin at eight. What do I tell him?’

  ‘That we have a subject in custody and we’ll be questioning him as soon as the translator gets here at nine. Which is also when Olly Faulkner’s starting the PM on Lara Meikle – Malia’s going to attend, I’m doing the interview.’

  ‘Is it him? What do you think?’

  ‘All I know at the moment is that he’s like a cat on a hot tin roof and he’s refusing to say a word.’

  ‘Right.’

  Was there subtext in the tone, an ironic Great? No, maybe not – he seemed to be thinking.

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ he said, ‘after the piece in the Herald, if Kilmartin tells the press office to let people know we’ve arrested someone.’

  She frowned. ‘But we don’t know what his story is yet. We haven’t spoken to him.’

  ‘Optics, optics – he’s all about the public face, as you know, and I can guarantee you that little snippet will have ruined his morning. And frankly, with all the anxiety about us losing control, you can see his point. People want proof that we’re on it.’

  ‘Will we still look “on it” if it’s not him, though?’

  ‘Well, that’s the risk. I’ll try and hold him off but let’s talk again as soon as you’ve interviewed him. I’ve got a mound of stuff to do so …’ He headed for the door then stopped. ‘Robin, look, I’m sorry about last night. The Kev thing. It’s none of my business.’

  ‘No,’ she said. It came out sounding much sharper than she’d intended. She saw it land, and then a flicker of something – what? Annoyance at her apparent failure to accept his gracious apology? She thought about saying sorry, trying it more softly, but he was already speaking again.

  ‘I think I was… surprised,’ he said.

  Oh, the ‘disappointed’ approach – Robin felt a flare of defensive anger. ‘By what?’ she said. Poker face, butter-wouldn’t-melt.

  ‘That you’d …’

  Get together with Kev? Sleep with Kev? For some reason, she couldn’t let him say it. ‘What?’ she interrupted. ‘Be good enough friends to ring him early in the morning and ask him to come and help me with Luke?’

  He gave her a look she couldn’t interpret. ‘Yeah.’

  They would need Martin and Stewpot to identify the man as the one they’d seen so when she’d calmed down a bit, Robin rang Good Hope. Daniel Reid answered the phone himself, the warm murmur of voices in the background punctuated with the clatter of pans from the kitchen. ‘We’ve just started breakfast,’ he told her. ‘They’re not here yet but if they come in, we’ll pass on the message straight away.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘We’ve heard about the second woman,’ Reid said. ‘Obviously we want to do whatever we can to help.’ He dropped his voice. ‘We’re worried. Several of the women who come here regularly sleep rough – is there anything we can tell them? Or do to protect them …’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Robin told him. ‘We don’t want people to panic. We don’t know much yet – whether the cases are linked, even. But you could tell them to be careful, to try and stay with groups at night, not alone. Tell them not to take any risks.’

  Their man hadn’t spoken during processing but among the items found in his backpack – along with a minute capsule wardrobe, a toothbrush and travel-size paste, and £14.32 in cash – was an Indian passport from which they’d learned that his full name was Dhanesh Gupta, he’d been born in Bangalore and he was thirty-two years old. They’d also learned that he was in the UK on a six-month fiancé visa though they hadn’t found any official record of a marriage.

  When they came into the interview room, he was sitting with his hands in his lap, his head bowed. For a moment Robin thought he was asleep but then he slowly raised his eyes and looked at them. It was as if someone had unplugged him – all the darting, panicky energy they’d seen in Sparkbrook was gone and instead he was resigned. Resigned but still frightened: the room was kept warm deliberately but he’d left his anorak on, zipped all the way up to the chin, a flimsy kind of armour. A sheen of sweat covered his forehead. He’d been offered but refused a solicitor, even when he’d been told it was free.

  Sitting next to him at the table was Kunal Singh, top of the list of approved Hindi translators. A neatly dressed man in late middle age, he’d helped on a case they’d had in the autumn. He had a teacherly manner; his striking light brown eyes watched whomever was speaking with such focus it was as if they, rather than his ears, absorbed the words. In the earlier case, he’d calmed their witness down significantly; could he somehow have managed the same thing here in the minute or two before she and Varan had come in?

  Varan turned on the tape and did the opening spiel. She asked if Gupta understood the reason for his arrest. Singh asked him in Hindi; Gupta nodded then said ‘Yes’ in English.

  Varan slid the CCTV still across the table towards him.

  ‘Mr Gupta,’ Robin said, ‘the body of a young woman was discovered at the former Gisborne works on Bradford Street on the morning of Sunday, June ninth, four days ago. The post mortem puts her time of death between one o’clock and four o’clock. This was taken by a camera on the building opposite Gisborne’s and it’s timestamped 4.37 a.m. as you can see.’ She pointed to the bottom right-hand corner. ‘We believe the man we see here is you – do you agree with that?’

  Gupta’s eyes were trained on the image as he listened to the translation. When it finished, he didn’t move for three or four seconds but then he turned urgently in his chair, put both hands on Singh’s forearm and spoke so fast it sounded as if he was tripping over his words. Varan looked at Robin with an uh oh, you’re not going to like this expression.

  ‘What’s he saying?’

  Varan deferred to Singh, who told them, ‘Mr Gupta agrees that he is the man in the picture but he says he had nothing to do with the death of the young woman. His situation’s complicated and he’s afraid of the legal consequences, which is why he’s so nervous, but he wants to tell you everything.’

  Dhanesh Gupta kept his eyes trained on his hands as he told his story. His fingertips, Robin noticed, were dyed strawberry red. He told them that he’d arrived in the UK a month ago – they could check his passport, Singh translated, he had a visa, date-stamped – for a marriage arranged online. At first, all had gone according to plan: he’d been picked up at Heathrow – Terminal Five – by his future father-in-law who welcomed him warmly, and when they reached Birmingham he’d been put up at a cousin’s house.

  He’d expected to meet his fiancée immediately but her father said she’d had to go away at short notice to fill in for a sick colleague at a conference. Modern women, he’d joked, and assured Gupta she’d be back next week and was looking forward to meeting him.

  ‘I wasn’t supposed to know but at night I overheard the cousin and his wife talking in the kitchen,’ Kunal Singh translated. ‘The girl didn’t want an arranged marriage – she was born and brought up in England, she wanted to choose her own husband – but her father and uncle had arranged one in secret. When she found out, she was very upset and she ran away. They were keeping me waiting, hiding the truth from me while they
found her.’

  Gupta blinked hard. ‘Before I came to England,’ Singh translated, ‘I’d been told that she spoke fluent Hindi, but it wasn’t true. She spoke a few words and my English isn’t good – we couldn’t communicate. She is younger than me, and I am not handsome. I saw it through her eyes – an older man, not good-looking, not even speaking her language well enough to have a conversation. I went to the father and told him that I could not marry her, it would not be fair. We should cancel the arrangement so his daughter could have a different husband. But then he refused to give the money back.’

  ‘What money?’ Robin asked.

  ‘We had arranged to pay him thirty-five thousands pounds. That was the price – if we were married, I could live and work in England, eventually have citizenship. But the father said that because I said we shouldn’t get married, I broke the contract so he would keep the money.’

  Gupta looked at them, eyes huge, as if they could answer the question for him: how could this have happened? How had he found himself in this situation? Weren’t people essentially good? Then, with a rush of words, he swung his hands together above his head.

  Robin looked at Singh, who looked pained.

  ‘When I tried to complain,’ he translated, ‘he said he would hurt me. With a poker from the fireplace. He threatened me.’

  Her stomach registered a sensation like a stone sinking through deep water. He was guileless, she thought. Guileless, and completely credible.

  ‘You said “We had arranged”?’

  Gupta bowed his head.

  ‘He and his father, he says,’ said Singh. There was another flood of words from Gupta. ‘My father’s brother – my uncle – has four sons, all successful,’ Singh translated. ‘Two are in India, two are overseas, one in San Francisco working for Apple, one in Germany with Audi. My uncle is always boasting – my son this, my son that. I am my father’s only son and I wanted him to be able to boast about me, to make him proud. I persuaded him to let me make a marriage in England. I would come here, work hard and be a success. But I failed, and now my father’s life savings, thirty-five thousand pounds, are gone. How can I tell him? How do I tell him his son’s a failure who lost his money?’

  Varan shifted beside her. He believed him, too, Robin thought.

  ‘Mr Gupta, tell us why you were at the factory in the small hours of Sunday morning.’

  ‘I was staying there. Sleeping. After the father threatened me, the cousin told me to leave his house. I stayed at a cheap hotel for a week but I couldn’t afford it after that. I slept in parks, on benches, but it was frightening and cold. Raining. Then, walking around, I saw the factories. The big one was no good, the condition was too bad – no roof except for where other people were living already. I was thinking about the tunnels but then I found a way through into the place next door that no one else had found so I moved in. Until the girl was killed and the police came – I came back from work on Sunday and there were police in the street. I was afraid.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘On my visa, it’s forbidden for me to work. I didn’t want the police to know. I am working to buy a flight back to India but it is hard to save money. We work every day but we’re paid by how many trays we pick and I’m slow. I had to buy a new blanket, I had to leave one at the factory, and after I’ve bought food …’

  ‘How did you find the job, Mr Gupta?’

  ‘One of the other workers,’ translated Singh. ‘I met him at an Internet café – I go there to email my friend in Bangalore; I needed to tell someone what’s happening and he won’t tell my father. I heard a man speaking Hindi at this café, talking about work, so I asked him. He told me to meet him early the next day.’

  Robin looked at the timestamp on the CCTV picture. ‘The van picks you up at five fifteen every day? Even on Sundays?’

  Gupta listened to Singh then pointed to himself in the photograph.

  ‘Here,’ Singh translated, ‘four thirty-seven, I was going to work.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  She’d forgotten her mother’s box of leftover chicken again, though given the four thirty start and the situation in general, it seemed forgivable. By half past two, however, she’d had nothing to eat except the clammy muffin she’d bought from Kapoor, and the incident room was beginning to feel oppressive. If she was going to think clearly, she needed air, food and a change of scene. She chucked her notebook in her bag and told Varan she was going out.

  Harborne High Street was a couple of roads away. The area had changed dramatically since her childhood (though, to be fair, in the years she’d been in London, she’d constructed a mental image of the whole of Birmingham existing in a permanent Eighties time-warp, Noddy Holder as local presiding deity/spirit animal). Harborne was distinctly middle class now – there was a Marks & Spencer and a Waitrose. Her favourite café occupied a Victorian school building worthy of Coketown but the first time she’d come inside and seen the industrial light fittings and painted boards, she’d thought she’d fallen down a wormhole to Shoreditch.

  She chose a small table so no one would join her then got out her notebook. She’d meant to do the brain download in bed last night but she’d fallen asleep with the pen in her hand. Now she wrote ‘Dhanesh Gupta’ and the sinking feeling flooded back. They were keeping him in custody while they checked his alibi for Lara’s murder – he’d been sleeping in the city centre, he said, a few doors down from Marks, so there’d be plenty of CCTV – but she’d bet her life savings (all £462 of them) that he had nothing to do with either case.

  Unless his call-centre salary ran to hiring a hit man, hopes that David Pearce was their man were fading, too. His father was more ill than Lara’s mother had known and Pearce had stayed with him at the hospital until after ten o’clock. The nurses would be able to confirm it, he’d told Varan; there were cameras in the hospital car park, and he’d stopped at a petrol station to fill up on the way back to his dad’s and bought an almond Magnum to cheer himself up. He’d produced a receipt timed 10.42 so he would have had to push the land-speed record to get back to Birmingham in time.

  On Saturday night, when the Gisborne Girl had died, he and Lara had been to a house-warming party in Nottingham and stayed over. There’d been about thirty people there, ten of whom could vouch for them staying for the fry-up at eleven the next morning.

  And anyway, they’d still to discover any link between the two women.

  Robin’s phone rang. Malia. ‘Just finished,’ she said. ‘Walking to the car now.’

  ‘Anything interesting?’ A half-hearted question; she’d have called straight away if there had been.

  ‘Nothing we didn’t know already really,’ Malia confirmed. ‘Cause of death was stab wounds, probably the lower of the two in the neck most immediately, Olly says, but any of them would have been enough in a couple of minutes, with the blood loss.’

  ‘No sexual assault?’

  ‘No sexual assault.’

  Thank God. Though from a forensics standpoint, sexual contact made it infinitely harder for an attacker to leave no trace of himself.

  ‘There was one thing, though,’ Malia said. ‘Might be nothing but if we’re lucky, it might not be. There was a hair on her blouse, stuck in the blood – no one saw it until they took the blouse off. About an inch and a half long, medium brown, probably, though it was soaked so …’

  ‘It wasn’t hers? In pictures, hers looks that colour naturally.’

  ‘She’d redone the dye recently, though. Olly said her hair’s a pretty universal colour, not like when it’s natural and lots of different shades.’

  ‘Did it have a root?’

  ‘Yes but it was dead, it didn’t have the waxy bit on the bulb.’

  Bugger. So it had fallen out naturally, not been pulled out during a struggle. Which was what she’d have guessed, though: the SOCOs hadn’t found any hair at the scene and if Lara had yanked it, she’d have got more than a single strand. But it could still be her attacker’s; stabbing involv
ed physical proximity, too. And it being stuck in the blood was encouraging.

  ‘Well, let’s keep our fingers crossed,’ she said.

  When she hung up, she tipped her head back and heard her neck crick. Come on, think, she told herself, what are you missing?

  Suddenly she felt self-conscious, as if there were eyes on her. She turned around but no one was looking at her. Everyone was either chatting to their companions or eating; the only other single table was a woman in her twenties engrossed in her phone. No sign of a looming Martin Engel, ready to pounce.

  Dhanesh Gupta. An hour ago, she’d sent a couple of officers round to speak to his would-have-been father-in-law, first to confirm the story, second to ask if he’d prefer to return the thirty-five thousand before or after they referred his case to the local CID team. Bastard.

  Her scrambled egg arrived aboard two enormous rafts of sourdough toast covered in mashed avocado. Well, technically she was a millennial, she thought, even if she felt Gen X to her bones, probably because she’d had Lennie so young. Even though he was two years older, Luke was more millennial in outlook, not in any of the positive ways, obviously, but definitely in his sense of feeling hard done by. Spare her his rants about boomers. Or her unfair advantages, whatever they were. She picked up her phone again and rang Dunnington Road. It was answered sooner than she expected and she hard-swallowed her mouthful of toast and coughed.

  ‘Love?’ Her mother’s voice, sounding surprised.

  ‘Yes, sorry, just choking to death. How are you?’

  ‘I’m all right. Are you?’

  Subtext, Robin thought, why the call? ‘Fine. I was ringing to see how Luke is.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Mum, I’m not a complete monster.’

  ‘Oh, I know, it’s not … Well, you’re busy, aren’t you? Anyway, that’s kind of you, thank you. He’s a bit better – the hangover’s gone and Billy’s coming this afternoon.’