by John Barlow
“Yesterday evening. I dropped him back at Oaklands about an hour after that. Then I rang you, Steve.”
But Steve isn’t looking.
“He’d left his car up there,” Den adds, as if in her own defence.
“So John Ray had been with you in your car? Why?”
Den feels the cold waters circling around her ankles, knows she can do nothing about it now.
“We followed someone. Thought they looked suspicious. It wasn’t anything.”
The Super nods slowly.
“Perhaps we’ll come back to that. Have you seen John Ray since? Spoken to him?”
“No. He’s not answering.”
“Tried his flat?”
“He’s not there.”
“We know. You say you left him up at the home?”
“He was going to talk to his dad again, try and find out the truth about the bombing.”
“Did he have plans for the evening?”
“I dunno.”
The Super sits back, places the mug of coffee to one side.
From the corner of her eye Den sees that Baron is now looking at her, something mournful and loving in his face. It’s the face of a good man. She knows that well enough. But she doesn’t want to be reminded of it, not here. Steve’s not going to be good to her now. He’s going to do his job, whatever it takes, whatever it means for her.
“Jeanette Cormac,” the Super says, “was murdered at her rented cottage in Bramthorpe yesterday evening. A man matching John Ray’s description was seen coming out of the house, covered in blood, and driving off at high speed. We’ve found his car, with her blood all over it.”
Her voice is almost a monotone. An old trick. You say it flat and watch for the response. Do they play it calm? Shocked? They’ve only got a split second. Whatever they do, if they’re not one hundred percent convincing, you’ve as good as got ’em.
Den finds herself looking agog at the Super. Doesn’t try to say anything, and to begin with she doesn’t notice that her mouth is hanging wide open. There’s a dense tangle of thoughts inside her head, so confusing that she wouldn’t know where to start if she were to try to understand them. The blood is pumping in her ears, and she squeezes her hands, her toes, anything to keep the panic at bay.
John? John? It’s a mistake. Some sick joke? He didn’t do it. That’s what she wants to say. John? No way. Are they testing her? It’s not John. Whatever’s going on here. There’s just no way.
“So,” the Super says, having let Den suffer in silence long enough, “what we’re going to do is this. You’re going to find Mr Ray and bring him in. Unofficially. As a favour to me. Then we’ll say no more about any of this.”
“But…” Den begins to say.
“Or, as an alternative, you can pop over to the Arndale Centre later this morning and see if there are any vacancies for security staff. Get yourself measured up for one of those nylon uniforms whilst you’re at it. Pay’s not so good, and there’s no early retirement.” Kirk’s eyes narrow a little, out of compassion. “You’ve got yourself into a mess here, Den. Get yourself out of it, is my advice.”
Den forces herself to say absolutely nothing. Experience has taught her that nothing is often a good course of action, especially with senior officers. And even more so when you don’t have a clue what to say, or think.
“Welcome back to the team, Den,” the Super says with no obvious irony. She stands and waits for Den to do the same. “Steve, fill her in on the details. And let her take a look at the file. Just so she knows who we’re dealing with.”
Chapter Forty
“You can use this,” Baron says, showing Den into a small meeting room down the corridor from the incident room.
He’s already told her about the Porsche. She didn’t need much in the way of description. She could imagine exactly the scenario: John sitting alone, all nice and calm, drinking till he was in a stupor, then doing something ridiculously self-destructive. But he would have known there were security cameras at the showroom. He wasn’t hiding. The day John Ray kills an innocent person, she tells herself with absolute certainty, is the day he puts a bullet through his own head. John did not kill Jeanette Cormac.
Baron places the file of the Leeds bombing on the table. Seventy pages. And the Super wants Den to read it.
“Is this supposed to convince me that John’s guilty of something?” she says, sitting down in front of the file and opening it. “A bombing that happened over twenty years ago?”
Baron shrugs. He’s been as non-committal as possible since she arrived, avoiding her eyes. Embarrassment? She can’t tell.
“We’re dealing with two murders,” he says, “possibly three, and there’s a link back to the Leeds bombing. Reid was suspected of being involved, you’ll read about it in there. And now he’s up here sniffing around, threatening Tony Ray.”
“So why isn’t he your main suspect?” she says.
“He’s one of them.”
“And John’s the other? No way, Steve, this is bullshit!”
Baron rubs his face with his hands, talking as he does.
“John Ray was at both murder scenes, and he doesn’t have an alibi for either. Her blood was all over his car. Don’t you think it’s about time to stop being the obedient ex, Den?”
“It’s Reid,” she says. “Suddenly people are talking about the bomb again. Journalist knows too much? She disappears. It’s gotta be Reid.”
“And Roberto Swales? Same MO. Same killer. But what’s the link? Old employee of Tony Ray is what I’m thinking. Imports and exports, eh?”
“Where does Sheenan fit into all this?”
“They’ve not released the details, but he was also tortured. Just like Swales.”
“And I suppose John did that as well?”
Baron sighs. “You’ve got fifteen minutes, then the Super wants you out looking for him.”
“And you?”
“Don’t even try,” he mutters, turning to leave.
The door closes and she finds herself alone with the case file of an unsolved bombing. She flicks straight through to the victim reports. A young mother who’d been out shopping with her two-week-old boy. Craig Simpson was his name. Fourteen days old and his life was over. She imagines the little gravestone with his name on. Just the name, nothing else. He hadn’t done anything else, no time to become a person. A name, all the mother would ever have to remember him by.
She reads the interview with the boy’s mother, the horribly flat language, the stark, unavoidable facts of that morning. They’d been out getting things for his christening party. They were going to have it at her parents’ house, where she lived.
She?
Den scans the statement. No father mentioned. No father on the birth certificate either. A mother on her own, two weeks after giving birth, and when they pull her from the rubble they have to tell her the baby’s dead.
She feels a lurch in her stomach, trying not to think about what happens to a two-week-old’s body as the blast of a bomb lays into it. And as she does so she realises she’ll never make Superintendent. Fast-track? She’ll go no higher than DCI, if that. As a detective working a case you can focus on the leads, one after the other, identify, interview, eliminate. It’s a job, nothing more.
Upstairs things are different. Cases multiply, victims become numbers. You see the full span of evil, every crime in the city, file after file, day after day. A dead baby? Just another piece in the jigsaw. Gotta keep a clear head, don’t let yourself get involved. A dead baby’s mother? A useful source of information, a detail from the crime scene, probably irrelevant to the enquiry. What kind of a person can think like that?
She closes the file, lays her hands on the cover, taking a few deep breaths. Then she opens it again, tries to focus. That’s why Kirk is up there in her own office, she tells herself, running her hand over the first page, a Superintendent because she allowed something inside her to wither and die.
She reads through the report, ski
mming where necessary. There’s not a lot about the bombing itself. Pro job, nothing much in the way of clues. Semtex packed into champagne bottles. The Semtex itself had been traced back to a theft from a secure storage unit in Kiev, right when the Soviet union was collapsing, when everything was up for grabs. Wednesday the 20th of June, 1990, just a week before the bombing. Given the distances involved, it probably entered the UK at the weekend.
That was all the information they had. Bernard Sheenan had refused to name any of those involved. There was a note suggesting that it was a crew from the north of England, possibly Leeds. But the source of the information wasn’t given, and follow-ups had proved fruitless.
She ploughs on. Steve’s right to be non-committal. He was right about it all, most often is. John is in the frame, and he’s gotta come in and talk. It shouldn’t be her that brings him in, though. They shouldn’t be sending her to find a suspect. But it’s not as if she has much room for complaint, not now.
The door opens.
“Den?” a young woman says. “Is that you!”
It’s a support clerk whose name Den can’t remember. And she’s pregnant.
“Wow,” Den says, “look at you? When’s the big day?”
“A month,” the woman says, rubbing the bottom of her back. “Aches like a bastard, and they’ve dragged me in on a friggin’ Sunday.”
She staggers to a chair and flops down, legs wide apart like a straight-backed Falstaff, cradling her huge belly with pride. “Is that the file?”
“Yeah, I’m just about done.”
“Good. I need to make some copies.” She tuts with disgust. “Couple of weeks old that baby was. Do you remember it? I was only a kid, but I’ve just seen it on YouTube, that lad coming out, little bairn in his arms. I hope they get ’em this time. Think of the poor mother.”
Den flicks through the file again, finds the mother’s statement, name and address.
“Right, I’m done. Hope everything goes well with, y’know, that!”
“Thanks,” she says, patting her belly. “Nice to see you, Den.”
The Super is in the doorway of the incident room.
“You still here?” she says. “Come on, you’ll need someone to sign you out.”
They take the stairs in silence. You can almost hear the cogs grinding inside Kirk’s head as she tries to make things fit, dead babies, shipments of explosives, ex-terrorists, John Ray…
“Hope you had a good look at the file,” she says as they get to the security doors leading out to the public reception.
“I did,” Den says.
“Nasty case, this one,” the Super says. “Don’t quite know what we’ve got yet. Anyway, off you go.”
She yanks one of the heavy security doors open.
“Make it snappy, Den. We’ll be putting a wanted report out on him this afternoon.”
“He won’t be far,” Den says, eyes down as she goes.
“Hope you’re right.”
But Den’s not sure. As the cold wind that swirls around Millgarth hits her square in the face, she’s not sure about anything. Champagne bottles? That was never made public. So how did Jeanette Cormac know? And why was she trying to tell John?
Jeanette knew too much, and it may have cost her her life. But what about John?
Chapter Forty-one
The pain begins in his neck, where it is the most acute, and spreads out across his shoulders and down both arms. There’s more pain right across the upper half of his back and in his hands. But this is flatter, duller. He pushes his head back down beneath the water, wincing as once again the pain intensifies, to be followed by a moment’s respite as he comes up for air. Then the pain returns.
He’s got the place to himself, the sky threatening rain, the wind picking up. His breathing is racked with phlegm and his lungs heave like an asthmatic’s.
“John… Ray…” he says, forcing himself on, further and further, punishing his body until it shrieks with agony. But he powers through it, pushing himself on until something breaks. “John… Ray…”
From just above his nose a faint line of blood runs each time his head comes out of the water, the gash wide open, the scab washed away. And when he reaches the edge of the pool and stops, sucking in breath so hard it seems impossible that he might go on, the thin pink line of blood makes its way down his face, and his wheezing turns to sobbing.
Then he pushes off again, arms pulling through the water as hard as he can make them, his face screwed up in agony.
Chapter Forty-two
“What’s that?” Baron says as he walks into the incident room. The place is full, bodies dragged in on a Sunday, CID officers and a small army of clerks typing up reports, everything going into the database, two murder cases at full-tilt.
The Cormac murder has gone to DCI Rollin, who is nowhere to be seen. It hardly matters. Rollin doesn’t have an agenda, and he’s a good copper; he’ll listen to Baron if ‒ when ‒ things start to click together. There are several small groups working on each murder, CCTV, friends and family, murder scenes, and it looks as if they’re working pretty well without the constant involvement of Baron or Rollin.
There’s no breakthrough on the Roberto Swales case, though. The victim had no close family, and his only known associates are from way back. He’d been keeping his nose clean for years, although his recent purchase of the Park Lane bar from Lanny Bride is hardly the act of a man who’d turned his back on crime. Neither is being shot, tortured, and having his head caved in.
“Is that Ray’s?” he asks, approaching a young DC in the corner who’s staring at a Macintosh laptop, its large screen emitting a clear, bright light that illuminates his pallid face.
“Found in the Porsche,” he says as Baron comes and stands behind him. “Back from forensics.”
Steele appears in the doorway, joins them, and the three of them peer at the screen. The DC is clicking through scanned newspaper articles, dozens of them, all about the Leeds bombing.
“It’s Jeanette Cormac’s,” the DC says. “Username for her webmail was saved.”
“A book,” Steele says.
The young officer glances over his shoulder, confused. His eyes are bloodshot and his breath stinks. Out on the piss last night. This should have been his day off, then a call from Baron first thing, about thirty rings before he answered.
“She was writing a book about Sheenan and the Leeds bombing,” Steele explains. “The Reluctant Bomber.”
“Yet the laptop was in John Ray’s car,” Baron says.
“I’ve had the hard disk copied,” the DC says. “They’re looking through it now.”
“Who is?”
“Couple of blokes from forensics.”
“Get more people, anybody you can find. We need to know exactly what she’s been doing in Leeds. Names, places. Anything.”
“I already know a bit,” he says, reading from notes scribbled on an A4 pad. “Week before the Leeds bombing, a shipment of Semtex was brought into the UK. Suspected gang from Leeds behind it. Hull ferry from Zeebrugge. June 22nd 1990. Friday.”
“Names?”
“None. She doesn’t seem to write names down. She uses ‘BS’ for Brian Sheenan. Unless it means bullshit…”
Baron pulls a face. For a moment he doesn’t understand.
“Why are you joking about a murder?” he says.
Steve Baron loses all sense of humour when he’s this deep into a case, his social skills becoming borderline autistic. At times like this he’ll willingly give money to beggars on the street, automatically handing it over rather than disengaging from his line of reasoning.
As for his home life, there came a point in his marriage when Stella insisted he stay in the city when he was on a serious case; she didn’t want him in the house, the boys’ happiness snuffed out by their father’s indifference, and any affection that she might show him ignored; his gaze would go right through her, as if his thoughts were written on the wall behind her and she was merely in the wa
y.
“Sorry, Sir.”
“We know the date of the ferry for sure?” Baron asks, as if the apology is beside the point.
“It looks like she was taking that as the confirmed date, yes.”
“You,” says Baron, pointing a finger at him, although he’s only a couple of feet away, “make sure we’ve got plenty of people looking at the hard disk, then follow up on the ferry crossing. Ship’s manifest, vehicles, passports. And make it quick.”
“Hull?” the young man says.
“Now!” Baron balls at him. “Take someone with you. And if you get any trouble, knock some heads together.”
The buzz in the room dips almost to nothing, then immediately picks up again as people return to their work with renewed energy. Last year Baron got a result on the murder of Lanny Bride’s daughter. A lost cause, they’d all thought, black on black, crime against other criminals hardly ever gets solved. But Baron had solved it. No one would bet against him doing the same again.
Chapter Forty-three
It’s a year since Lanny Bride’s estranged daughter was murdered, and Lanny is now sitting opposite DI Baron, the man who got the credit for finding the killer. But they both know who had really sorted it out: John Ray. In fact, all four men in the room know it, although the topic is unlikely to get aired today.
Lanny Bride’s been in a cell all night, yet he looks fresh and composed as the interview begins. It’s not simply sang froid either; Lanny’s blood might be as cold as ice, but there’s something more. He looks amused and just a little bit curious. There’s not the slightest hint of apprehension about him.
Everybody gets edgy in the interview room. People fall apart. They sit down and immediately they’re stammering, their voices uncontrollable, their breathing off-kilter. Even the calm ones fidget, their scowls masking huge, calculated apprehension. No, it takes a special kind of person to be in here, a murder investigation in progress, two CID detectives across the table, and to look subtly amused by it all.