‘Do you know where Jeremy is now, Mrs Birch?’
She raised her head and clasped her hands together to stop them shaking. ‘It’s Wednesday morning. He’s been going to work.’
When Robin got back upstairs, Malia was at her desk, crossing out a name on a sheet covered with two columns of them. ‘The conference attendees,’ she confirmed. ‘I took out the women first, which was the easy bit; now I’m working through brokers’ websites, looking at headshots where they exist, ruling out anyone who’s obviously too old or too brown. I’ve got four possibles in the West Midlands so far – Daventry, Leamington, and two here in the city, including this guy who looks about the right age and colouring.’ She tapped her mouse to wake up her screen where Robin saw a photograph of a brown-haired man in his mid-thirties. Jeremy Birch, Senior Broker, said the name underneath.
‘I’ll speak to him first, as soon as I’ve finished.’ Malia turned the paper over. ‘I’m on the last page but one so …’
‘You can speak to him now,’ Robin told her.
*
‘They’re here,’ Varan called when he spotted Malia’s car returning, accompanied by the squad car that held Jeremy Birch.
In an echo that turned Robin’s stomach, the team crowded at the window to watch as he was brought inside. Charcoal suit, white shirt and tie – he looked smart, all business, especially for a man whose mental balance, if his mother was to be believed, had been so disturbed eight days ago that he’d been driven to kill.
He was six foot five, they knew now, and even with cuffs on, his pace a third of what it was on the Vaughton Street tape, the officers either side of him struggled to match his loping stride. They’d watched the tape again.
‘Is that what she’s saying? “Jeremy”?’ Robin had squinted over Tarka’s shoulder.
‘Hard to say a hundred per cent, but yeah,’ he nodded, ‘I’d put money on it.’
The bucket of bleach was gone from beneath Jeremy Birch’s sink and it would be Forensics’ job to determine if any of his knives revealed traces of Lara’s blood. Frankly, Robin doubted it; even if Birch was cold or stupid enough to hold on to the murder weapon, bleach would likely have destroyed any usable DNA. ‘But,’ said Rafferty, calling from the flat’s kitchen, ‘one of the guys noticed his tea-towel drawer was catching on something when he tried to open it, so we took a closer look. He had an envelope taped to the bottom and inside? One security pass for a conference at the Excel Centre in London last November.’
‘It’s hers?’
‘Lara Meikle. Her name and a little headshot. Pretty girl, wasn’t she?’
The team were live-streaming the interview in the main room but Robin watched at her desk. The breakthrough had been a welcome distraction but the second her mind wandered, it went straight to Lennie. Her anxiety was bordering on paranoia now, to the extent that she thought the team were talking about her in subtext.
‘He was asking to be caught, wasn’t he?’ she’d heard Phil Howell say as he passed her door. ‘Keeping the knife when his mum had a key to the flat?’
‘Got to hurt, being dobbed in by your mum,’ Niall replied.
‘Maybe he thought the old bird would cover for him.’
She wrestled her attention back to the screen where Malia, by contrast, was a needle of mental focus. She should be a DI, Robin thought, she needed to get on with that, take the exam. But if she wanted to stay in Homicide at West Midlands, there wasn’t much point for now: there was no inspector vacancy and no prospect of one while their budget was so tight.
But maybe there was a prospect, said a dark voice: if she lost her job, Webster could finally move up to DCI and Malia could take his spot.
Physically speaking, Jeremy Birch’s height was really the only thing that made him remarkable. He was passably good-looking and yet somehow his face was unmemorable, his features regular, nothing to command a second glance one way or the other, his brown hair cut with no particular flair. He was currently sitting up to the table with the posture and facial expression of a man in front of his bank manager in hopes of arranging a loan both parties knew he’d be good for. Middle class, reliable, surely-there’s-been-some-sort-of-mistake-here. Earlier, though, she’d heard he’d been in tears in his cell. Genuine tears or was he hedging his bets, she wondered, seeing which way the wind blew before deciding definitively how he needed to present himself?
His mother’s view, that this was a spur-of-the-moment act of passion by someone driven from his right mind, was not widely shared among the team.
‘Mr Birch,’ Malia said. ‘Given the evidence we already have – the CCTV, your mother’s account of the knife in bleach, your possession of Lara’s security pass and the fact that it was concealed, we think you’ll have a hard time convincing a jury it wasn’t you who killed Lara Meikle.’
Compelled by guilt at her own treachery, no doubt, Ann Birch had appointed Godfrey Cowper of Seymour Cowper Price, one of the best and most expensive local firms, to represent her son. Cowper was widely disliked in Homicide, a ‘pompous git’ according to Webster, to the women, the sort of man who’d stand too close at parties and look down your top, maybe stick his card down your bra.
He was at peak condescension today. ‘Now let’s not leap to any conclusions, shall we?’
Malia ignored him. ‘And, as you know, Mr Birch, the search of your flat is only very preliminary so far. Who knows what else forensics might find. Did Lara visit you there?’
‘No comment,’ instructed Cowper.
‘At this point, the question isn’t so much whether or not you killed her as under what circumstances – in what state.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Birch.
‘Psychologically speaking.’
He shook his head as if she’d lost him completely. Playing dumb.
‘We’ve started to look at your electronics, too. We’re interested that you cleared your search history last week, only,’ she made a show of consulting her notes, ‘nine hours before Lara died.’
‘Of course. I do it every week – more often, if I have a minute.’ Though he’d grown up in Birmingham, his voice was only mildly accented. ‘Doesn’t anyone sensible?’
‘So let’s say, for the sake of argument, that your clearing your history hours before she died is pure coincidence. How about the fact that she died in exactly the same way as the woman found dead at the former Gisborne works two days previously? That both were stripped – or almost – of anything potentially identifying? Is that a coincidence?’
‘Until proven otherwise, absolutely,’ Cowper’s smile was serpentine. ‘Moreover, by far the more likely explanation of that is that the same man was responsible for both murders and as we’ve discussed, my client has a cast-iron alibi for Saturday evening.’
‘But the thing is, Mr Cowper,’ Malia said, and Robin heard the pleasure in her voice at outsmarting him, ‘we’re not looking for the same man. We know now that there were two different killers. Mr Birch,’ she nodded at him, ‘our belief is that, having discovered that Lara had made a mockery of your feelings for her and moved on permanently – to the extent that she threatened you with the police should you contact her again – you learned that a woman of a similar age had been killed within half a mile of Lara’s new home and you saw an opportunity.’
Robin peered at the screen, trying to read Birch’s face. She wasn’t sure but she thought she detected a trace of contempt.
‘Pure conjecture. Don’t say a word,’ barked Cowper at him.
‘When we prove it,’ Malia said, unperturbed, ‘it’ll destroy any hope of a loss-of-control defence, I’m afraid. To us, that looks about as premeditated as it gets.’
The entire room, officers and support staff, stood to applaud as Malia came in. She looked embarrassed but then, with her usual poise, she took it in her stride and bowed.
Varan clapped and whistled, Robin noticed, then almost immediately sat back down at his computer.
‘What are you doing over ther
e?’ Howell asked him. ‘Checking your Facebook?’
‘Nope,’ Varan said. ‘Yours. Three friends – you’ve added one. Oh, hang on, it’s your mum.’
‘Ha ha.’
‘Seriously, though, guv,’ Varan looked at Robin, ‘I think I might have found Miriam Chapman.’
Chapter Forty
The photograph had been taken at a party thrown by an evangelical church in Buenos Aires. On wooden decking outside a white modern bungalow, a group of thirty or so people in summer dresses and blazers stood chatting, holding glasses and plates. A dark-haired boy of about four rode a red tricycle towards a barbecue where a man in a striped apron holding a pair of tongs was waiting, free hand outstretched. Next to him in a short-sleeved yellow dress was a woman who, from what they could see of her face and hair, looked very like Jude Everleigh.
‘Mimi Lopez,’ said Varan.
‘Who?’
‘That’s her new name – or maybe not so new, I don’t know yet how long they’ve been married.’ He pointed at the man with the tongs. ‘That’s her husband, the vicar of the church – Matias Lopez.’ He clicked to a different photograph which showed Lopez in a white shirt and dog collar laughing with another man. Mimi was with them, too, but she’d angled her body towards her husband, showing herself only from the side and bending her head towards his shoulder. ‘She appears to be camera-shy,’ Varan said. ‘There’s another two more or less the same, her kind of … ducking behind him.’
‘But it is her, isn’t it?’
‘I think so. Yes.’ He smiled.
‘How did you find this?’ Cumulatively, all the people she’d had on it since yesterday had logged a hundred search hours or more and no one had turned up a thing.
‘I searched in Images, not Google, Google. Images of Christian groups in South America: churches, missions, charities – mix-and-match, delete-as-applicable. I was going country by country – after Brazil, I tried Guyana because it’s English-speaking, then Argentina. I found the church’s website first,’ he clicked back to the summer party, ‘this one, and that gave me their names.’
‘What about Brother Phil aka Philip Hatton aka John Philips? Any sign of him?’
Varan shook his head. ‘No.’
Robin called the embassy in Buenos Aires and was eventually put through to a man named Toby Bolton, who was blisteringly posh but trying not to sound it. She told him as much as they’d been able to glean about Mimi and Matias Lopez in the interim.
Unsurprisingly, and despite the prevalence of both his names in Argentina, Matias Lopez was proving much easier to research than his wife. The church site alone gave them more than they’d learned from any other source bar Jude in the entire investigation so far; it was almost shockingly helpful by the standards they’d grown used to.
Matias, it said, had been vicar there since 2012, before which he’d been in Patagonia. Before that, using the language gifted to him by his Brazilian mother not his Argentinian father to spread the good news of Jesus love, as Google Translate put it, he’d preached in São Paulo, Minas Geras and Salvador.
The wife of Matias, Mimi, has lived in South America for twenty years and shares the mission of her husband and our church to promulgate the Good News of Our Lord along with their children, Hannah, Beatriz and Paulo.
Toby Bolton listened so quietly that twice Robin thought they’d lost their connection. ‘We’ve got familial DNA evidence that the body of the woman we found is Mimi’s daughter, Hannah,’ she told him. ‘Which, unfortunately, I’m sorry, means she’ll have to be notified of the death.’
‘Understood. My colleague and I will speak to her.’
‘Mr Bolton, it’s an extremely sensitive situation, but we don’t think Matias Lopez is Hannah’s biological father. We also need to find out who her real father is and whether he’s currently in the UK.’
‘Leave it with me,’ Bolton said. ‘I’ll be back in touch as soon as I can.’
‘Will that be today, do you think?’ The time difference was three hours; it was still early afternoon in Buenos Aires.
‘I don’t know. If we can find her, if she’s in the city, we’ll go as soon as possible.’
At seven o’clock, confronted with the news from Forensics that the hair found stuck in her blood matched the DNA sample he’d given them and that Rafferty and his team had found another hair, long and magenta, on the carpet beneath his bed, Jeremy Birch broke down and confessed to the murder of Lara Meikle.
‘There’s one detail we don’t understand, Mr Birch,’ Robin told him after he’d been charged formally. ‘How did you communicate with Lara, while your relationship was going on? We know you didn’t call her at her office and we’ve been through her phone records for the past year without discovering any trace of your number or any other, in fact, that we haven’t been able to identify.’
Birch muttered something under his breath.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I said, she had a burner phone. So Pearce wouldn’t find out. She sold it to me as our “special phone”, only for us, but it was him she was protecting. Keeping me at arm’s length. When she’d had enough of me, she chucked it away, like she chucked me away.’ For a moment his face was transfigured by rage. ‘Fucking bitch.’
‘I need to tell Deborah Harper we’ve charged someone,’ Robin told Samir in her office. ‘I should go over there.’
He shook his head. ‘No.’
‘But I did the Knock.’
‘Someone else can tell her. You can speak to her tomorrow. Go home.’
She was about to argue when her landline rang.
‘Chief Inspector? It’s Toby Bolton. My colleague Rachel and I are just back from talking to Mimi Lopez.’
Robin sat down and pulled herself in to the desk. Samir raised his hands, palms up: What was I saying?
She held up a finger: wait a moment. ‘Mr Bolton,’ she said, ‘I’ve got Detective Chief Superintendent Samir Jafferi with me here, West Midlands’ Head of Homicide. Would you mind if I put you on speaker so we can both hear you?’
‘Of course not, go ahead.’
‘Thank you. Mr Bolton is at the embassy in Buenos Aires,’ she explained to Samir, ‘and he’s spoken to Mimi Lopez or, as she’s better known to us, Miriam Chapman.’
Samir’s eyebrows leapt. He came down off the filing cabinet and drew the fraying chair up to the other side of her desk.
‘She was at home,’ Toby Bolton said. ‘When we told her you’d discovered a young woman’s body and believed it to be Hannah, she was understandably panicked until I said she’d been found in the UK. Then she relaxed and said it couldn’t be her because she was in Santiago, Chile, doing a two-week silent retreat.’
Which explained why they hadn’t been looking for her, Robin thought.
‘So I showed her the e-fit and the photograph you sent. She was … distraught,’ he said, delicately.
Robin nodded, looking at Samir, forgetting that Bolton couldn’t see her.
‘When I told her we needed to notify Hannah’s father and asked where he was, she told us he was at the church. Matias Lopez adopted Hannah formally a year after they married, and Mrs Lopez was adamant that he was her “real” father.’
‘So she’s Hannah Lopez?’
‘Yes, and she has been for a long time – they married in 2004.’
Robin looked at Samir again. ‘The year the man I think is her biological father left Salvador.’
Robin had asked her dad to meet Lennie from school and stay with her until she could leave work. She’d told them both it would be nine o’clock at the latest but when Samir left, she rang to tell Lennie she had one more call to make. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s okay,’ Len mumbled.
‘We got one of the two killers.’
‘Okay,’ she said again, expressionless. Robin remembered their fit of hysterical laughter upstairs on her bed and was filled with despair.
Despite the nearly twenty years Mimi Lopez had lived in South America,
Robin heard her Geordie accent straight away. The accent, her timbre – she could have been talking to Jude, except that her voice was thick with crying.
‘Mrs Lopez,’ she said, ‘before anything else, I want to tell you how deeply sorry I am for your loss, and to promise we’ll keep doing everything we can to find your daughter’s killer.’
The sound of a hard swallow. ‘Thank you.’
Robin looked at the note-covered paper in front of her. In a career filled with challenging conversations, this might be the toughest so far. She glanced at the chair opposite and wished Samir was still in it, not for any strategic reason but for the moral support. She took a mental breath. ‘I know Toby told you some of the details but you must have a lot of questions. Shall we start there?’
‘I need to know,’ the woman sobbed, ‘whether she suffered. Knife wounds – it’s so violent, and …’ She failed to suppress a sob.
‘Mrs Lopez, I—’
‘Would you call me Mimi? It would help. Mrs Lopez sounds so … distant.’
‘I’m sorry. But Mimi, we honestly don’t think she did suffer very much. I hope that’s a crumb of comfort. The blood loss from her wounds – she would have lost consciousness very quickly, it was one of the first things the pathologist told us. Within a minute or so, most likely. We know she was conscious, at least briefly, because she grabbed the blade a single time, but there was no prolonged struggle.’
A sob. ‘And nothing … sexual?’
‘No. Maybe it would also help to know she was found quickly, too.’ She knew it would plague her to imagine Lennie lying for hours or days on end, all alone. ‘She died in the small hours of Sunday morning and she was found shortly before eight a.m.’
A sort of hum came down the line as Mimi tried to contain a long keening sound. ‘Why?’ she managed after several seconds.
‘That’s what we’re trying to establish,’ Robin said carefully. ‘I think Toby explained that one of the reasons we’ve only now been able to notify you is it took us several days to discover Hannah’s identity. Her killer left nothing that identified her at all, and because she’d grown up overseas, we had no official records.’
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