Risk of Harm

by Lucie Whitehouse

  ‘You don’t recognize her?’ Robin asked. ‘You never met?’

  ‘No. Unless she came to the shelter. She wasn’t one of our regulars but she might have come in. There’s no way to check that, I’m afraid, no records. We make a point of it.’

  ‘You’re familiar with the Gisborne works, though?’

  Reid met her eye and smiled again. ‘Yes. Not intimately but yes – we talked about it when you came to Good Hope last week.’ Again, Robin thought, in different circumstances she might have been charmed that he remembered the minutiae of their conversation. ‘Through Stuart and Martin,’ he said, turning to his solicitor. ‘Two of the homeless men who use us pretty regularly. They’re witnesses in the case – the police have left messages with us when they’ve needed to contact them. I mean, I say they’re witnesses – I assume that’s what they are at the moment, given that I’m under arrest.’ He looked back at her, eyes crinkling. ‘I’ve been with them a couple of times to bring food to a group of homeless who live at the back of the building.’

  ‘On the subject of Stew and Martin, we’ve been trying to locate them since Saturday. I left a message on your machine.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘So you haven’t seen them at all since then? They haven’t been in?’

  He met her eye again and held her gaze as if challenging her to prove him wrong. ‘No.’

  ‘Right.’ She let the word hang. ‘Where were you on the evening of Saturday the eighth of June, Mr Reid?’

  Andrew Davies touched a hand to his arm but it seemed motivated by a desire to look like he was doing his job rather than any real urge to caution.

  ‘Saturday before last? I was at home.’

  ‘All evening?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about the afternoon?’

  ‘Same. I had a lazy day, pottered around, read a book.’

  ‘Can anyone confirm that?’

  He grimaced. ‘I’m afraid not, I was on my own. The neighbours would have seen my lights on after it got dark but no.’

  ‘But you definitely weren’t out with Hannah Lopez on Saturday afternoon?’

  He frown-smiled: No, you loons, how could I have been when we’d never met?

  ‘For the tape, Mr Reid.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t.’

  Robin looked at Malia, who opened the folder again and slid a new image across the table. It was Tark’s pièce de résistance, a still from ten seconds of footage from a single camera, found an hour ago. ‘At last,’ he’d said, letting his forehead rest on his keyboard. ‘At last.’

  When the men looked at it, the lawyer jumped infinitesimally before he could stop himself.

  ‘The image is taken from CCTV of Warner Street on the afternoon of June eighth,’ Malia said, ‘at four twelve in the afternoon. The image, we believe, shows you, Mr Reid, with Hannah Lopez.’

  ‘No,’ he said, impressively cool. ‘Like I said, there’s a mistake. I was at home. I don’t know Hannah Lopez.’

  ‘I’m afraid we’d be more comfortable taking your word about that,’ said Robin, ‘if we didn’t know that, in fact, Hannah was your daughter.’

  The solicitor looked between them, Robin then Reid. ‘What the hell is going on here?’

  ‘Mr Reid is Hannah Lopez’s biological father, Mr Davies. Her mother is Miriam Lopez, née Chapman, who disappeared from her home in Whitley Bay on New Year’s Eve 1999. Hannah Lopez grew up in South America, where Mr Reid had arranged for Miriam to go on ahead of him, when they learned that she was pregnant by him. Aged fourteen.’

  For a moment, Reid’s composure seemed to falter. Then he shook his head. ‘This is rubbish,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you’re smoking round here. Did you get it from Stew and Martin? They’re junkies,’ he told Davies, dismissive. ‘Hopeless.’

  ‘When Miriam Chapman agreed to run away to Brazil – and she did agree, I know that,’ Robin nodded at him, ‘because I spoke to her last night – she was leaving for a new life with a man she knew as Philip Hatton or Brother Philip, because he was the leader of the church group she attended with her parents and her sister, Judith. I spoke to Judith an hour ago and she identified you by the photographs we took earlier, Mr Reid, as that same man.’

  ‘I’d like time with my client, Detective Chief Inspector.’

  ‘I can imagine. Before you do that, though, so you know the full scope of what we’re looking at here – so far – I should tell you that on top of Hannah’s case, we’re also looking into Mr Reid’s – or Mr Hatton’s or Mr Philips’ – connection to the disappearance of Victoria Engel, aged fifteen, five years ago.’

  ‘Victoria Engel?’ Davies looked alarmed. Clearly her father’s awareness campaign had worked on him.

  ‘Victoria was volunteering with her father at a charity in Coventry in the months before she disappeared. We’ve contacted them with your photograph this morning, too, Mr Reid, and they told us you’d been head of fundraising for their group, as well as a weekend volunteer in the same branch as Victoria and her father, between 2012 and 2014. My team have also spoken to staff at a shelter and soup kitchen in Zimbabwe who identified Victoria from a photograph as the young woman who’d volunteered there until last year. As did you, Mr – should I call you Mr Reid? They seemed to know you as John Daniels.’

  Reid turned to his solicitor. ‘This is nuts.’

  Robin nodded. ‘Isn’t it? But it’s why Hannah died. As you know, having delivered her yourself, she was born in May 2000 so she came of age last year. She’d started making enquiries about her biological father and – impressive, given the obstacles you’d thrown up – she’d traced you here to Birmingham and got in touch asking to meet. Maybe she did come just to meet you but more likely, we think, given the outcome, she came to confront you with what she’d learned. Your past was threatening to unravel and you couldn’t have it. Killing your own child – very tough. But sometimes in life you have to make difficult choices, don’t you?’

  When they resumed half an hour later, Reid’s sangfroid was less convincing, especially when she told him that a tech at the consulate in Buenos Aires would be going through Hannah’s computer and email account, including looking for any messages she’d deleted to cover her tracks if Miriam smelled a rat about the Chilean silent retreat.

  ‘Here’s the thing,’ Robin told him. ‘We do know we’re going to find messages.’

  Reid said nothing but his eyes challenged her again, any warmth gone. Yeah? How?

  ‘Hannah’s death was immaculately planned. You couldn’t have done it unless …’

  ‘Again: I didn’t do it.’

  ‘Unless you’d had significant time to plan – probably weeks. The CCTV cameras – the entire length of Warwick Street without being caught on tape.’ She shook her head. ‘And the Tramadol you gave her – the levels in her blood were enough to keep her asleep for a couple of days, Forensics said, had the physical shock of being stabbed not woken her up. But you needed that time, didn’t you – if you’d killed her earlier and been seen with her body, it would have been a disaster. Hiding on the roof for hours and then coming down outside where you’d calculated we might put the cordon, and outside the time frame when we would be looking, having been tipped off by Stew and Martin’s discovery of the body, or so you hoped, and assuming our killer was long gone.’

  Reid’s solicitor now had the look of a man several fathoms out of his depth.

  ‘But patience is your thing, isn’t it, Mr Reid? It’s why you’ve been able to do this for so long. Meet an underage girl, groom her, pack her off overseas, then wait until the heat’s off before quietly sloping off to join her. Most people don’t have that degree of self-control. Even when you move on. Attention to detail – if they’re happy, why would there be repercussions? Did you find Victoria a Matias?’

  ‘This is harassment,’ Davies said limply.

  ‘It’s police work, and this is only the start. You’ve hit the jackpot, Mr Davies. Hundreds of
billable hours – thousands. Who knows how many other missing girls we’ll find stashed in hidey-holes by the time we’ve finished?’

  Malia had been quiet since they’d come back in. ‘Attention to detail is one thing,’ she said now, ‘but then there’s the calculation. The cruelty. One of the things we’ve been asking from the beginning is how Hannah’s killer got her to go into that wreck of a factory. But you’d go in with your dad, wouldn’t you? Your charity-worker dad who asked you, his Christian daughter, to help him drop off food to the homeless and desperate? I don’t think Hannah was coming to unmask you, Mr Reid. I think she came because she wanted to know who you were. And I think she found out.’

  Chapter Forty-six

  Rhona wasn’t at her desk. Before knocking on the internal door, Robin tucked her shirt in and ran a fingertip under her eyes to collect errant mascara. That would be typical Kilmartin: ignore the two murders they’d solved and the two long-standing mispers, one of them famous, to pick up instead on the fact that after multiple nights of appalling sleep and eighteen-hour days, she looked a bit unkempt.

  When Samir called her in, however, he was at his desk and alone, the afternoon light free to stream through the long window unimpeded by manspreading.

  ‘Hi. Thanks for coming so quickly. Could you close the door?’

  Robin was instantly on alert. ‘Thanks for coming’ – after all this? And after the last time they were here on their own together?

  ‘I need to show you something,’ he said, opening a laptop next to the computer on his desk. Ben Tyrell, she thought at once, but if it was, it couldn’t be anything new. Steve Taggart, then – had he taken up the online mantle? But no, of course not, he was in custody, too, where they were throwing the book at him and his Heil Hitler moves.

  When they’d watched Tyrell’s rants, Samir had called her around the desk next to him; this time he turned the computer so that she could see from the other side. Not Facebook or a vlog but amateur video, filmed on a phone. When she understood what she was looking at, Robin’s heart seemed to stop before it restarted with a single painful beat.

  Samir dragged the cursor two thirds of the way along the bar at the bottom then let it play.

  The protest, the phone’s struggle to keep filming recalling exactly her own experience of being buffeted by the crowd, pushed backwards then forwards, barely an agent of free will. Everything at eye level – faces, shoulders, signs, flying cans and plastic bottles.

  The shiny globe of a helmet dominated the picture for several seconds and then, when it moved away, Robin saw her brother’s face. Even with the chaos and the poor-quality image, she could tell that he was alarmed, not only by everything that was going on around him, by what he’d just done, but something else. Something specific. In the group of people in front of him, among the thicket of heads and arms and shoulders, he’d seen something.

  And then Lennie came into view, as if she’d been hiding and popped up suddenly. Hiding or bending to pick up something from the ground.

  Away to the right of the screen, screaming like a Visigoth at the sack of Rome, Robin saw the same skinhead who, a minute later, she’d seen herself in the flesh laid out on the ground.

  She thought she might puke as she watched her brother try to push his way through the crowd to reach Lennie, thrust back again and again. At last he managed it but then the crowd swelled behind them, trapping them in place, pinning their arms to their sides like toy soldiers.

  Then, rage written across her face, Lennie got her arm free, pulled it back and hurled the stone through the air.

  Samir hit ‘stop’. ‘I’ve had a call from Marshall, who’s running the investigation. Your brother’s handed himself in. He’s confessed to hurting the student with the sign and to throwing the stone.’

  Robin waited, hearing her pulse in her head.

  ‘I saw it happen, Rob,’ he said. ‘I saw her throw it. That’s why I’ve been trawling the Net for these. This is the only one I’ve found so far that caught it.’

  ‘Has anyone else seen it?’

  ‘Thirty-seven other people according to the page but, Rob, so far, in the comments, no one’s made the connection. The stone leaves her hand but this didn’t catch him getting hit, we don’t see that. Unless you were trying to put it together forensically, you wouldn’t necessarily make the connection – there’s so much other crap flying through the air.’

  She sat down. ‘Does he have this? Marshall?’

  ‘No.’ Samir lowered his voice. ‘And I’m not going to give it to him.’

  ‘But they’ve got CCTV.’

  He smiled – actually grinned. ‘No. They haven’t – he was lamenting the fact. Apparently, right in front of the camera that would have caught where the stone was coming from, there’s a woman with a bloody enormous sign. #ForQueen&Country, no less.’

  ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘Nope.’ His eyes sparkled with amusement.

  ‘Then you’ve got to give them this. If they find out later you knew about it and …’

  ‘They won’t – how would they? Are you going to tell them?’ He pushed the lid of the laptop gently shut. ‘Robin, your brother’s going down, stone or no stone – half of Force Homicide were watching from the window when he shoved the sign in that guy’s eyes. They might not know he’s your brother but there’s seven or eight people who could pick him out of a line-up.’

  ‘They don’t know yet.’

  ‘Like I said before, we can handle that. And if he can handle this for Lennie, let him. Let him and let me. Give her that chance.’

  He eyeballed her, refusing to let her look away until she said, ‘Yes. All right, yes.’

  ‘Good.’

  An awkward silence followed; Robin felt compelled to break it. ‘Thank God you’re broadly benevolent,’ she said, ‘because you’ve definitely got dictatorish tendencies.’

  ‘Oh yeah, drunk on my own limitless power, that’s me.’

  He looked towards the window where the light caught his eyes and turned their deep brown to golden. ‘You know, given Martin Engel’s talent for publicity,’ he said, ‘you’ll make it into the papers for the right reasons for a change. And even without Engel. Have you spoken to him yet?’

  ‘Just now.’

  ‘How did he take it?’

  ‘He was … I actually don’t think there’s a word.’

  ‘Joy?’

  ‘To the power of fifty. A hundred.’

  He shook his head, smiling. ‘This case, man. It’s huge. Already huge. Robin – thank you.’

  ‘For what? Putting something in the plus column for a change? Me and Webster, by the way. At least when Kilmartin comes rattling his sabre, we’ll be ready for him now. For a couple of weeks, anyway. Then he’ll be mincing in again, voice two octaves higher due to the spray-on trousers, and …’

  ‘Could you stop pissing about for a moment?’

  She stopped, surprised by his tone: real impatience.

  ‘I’m serious,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to be serious. To say thank you – for all this.’ He came around the desk, stopping a couple of feet in front of her. ‘When I asked you to apply for the job, I told you I needed you. You’ve seen that now, graphically. How many days – will it be a whole day? – before the next one?’ He looked away and his gaze seemed to land momentarily on the photographs on his desk. ‘Look, what I’m trying to say … I didn’t just need you. I wanted you here – I want you here. Please don’t leave again.’

  Acknowledgements

  I am hugely grateful to Helen Garnons-Williams, whose editorial judgement is second to none, and to Victoria Hobbs, for her deep wisdom and clear-sightedness. I’m privileged to have worked with you both. Thank you.

  Anna Kelly, your care and enthusiasm for this book are enormously appreciated, thank you.

  I’m grateful to Alex Gingell and Nicola Webb at 4th Estate, and to Alexandra McNicoll, Alex Elam, Vickie Dillon and Gosia Jezierska at AM Heath.

  A big thank
you to Colin Scott, to Neil Lancaster for his police insight and expertise, and Judith Cutler, doyenne of Birmingham crime-writing, for her local knowledge and support

  Written as it largely was in 2020, Risk of Harm would not exist without two unorthodox ‘writer’s residencies’, first with my brother- and sister-in-law Paul and Suzy Rosen in Delaware and then with Millie Perry and Andrew MacArthur in Maine. Thank you all for the time and the space, the suppers, the fun and the desk-delivered gimlets. This one’s for you.

  Joe and Bridget – Captain Logistics and the Leopard Lady – I don’t have to tell you that this book would not be finished without all your efforts and sacrifices. Thank you.

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