by GJ Minett
‘Really?’
‘Thought about it. I’m in.’
‘You had me worried there for a minute,’ he laughed. ‘But you don’t know what I’m going to suggest yet.’
‘I know,’ she said, leaping up from the settee and hunting down her Converse trainers just in case. ‘You fancy meeting me for a drink so you can tell me more?’
‘What? Now?’
‘Sure. Why not? You got something better to do?’
‘Ah, no. Not really.’
‘You know Spoons in the Queensway?’
‘Spoons?’
‘Wetherspoons.’
‘You mean the Hatter’s Inn?’
‘I can be there in ten if that’s any use.’
‘You sure that’s OK?’
‘Well, it means I’ll have to put off cutting my toenails till tomorrow but I can live with that if you can.’
There was a pause and for a moment she wondered if he was trying to come up with an excuse. Then his voice came through, loud and clear.
‘OK. Ten minutes. See you there.’
‘And that’, she said as she closed her mobile, ‘is what you call a date. Sorry, boys – this token lady’s otherwise engaged.’
15
NOW: WEDNESDAY, 8TH OCTOBER
PHIL
‘Get in!’
It wasn’t difficult to pick out Holloway, even though the car park was still heaving. He’d driven right up to the front of the complex and parked across one of the loading bays where he stuck out like a sore thumb. He was standing with one leg outside the car, head peering over the driver’s door. And he looked less than pleased to be there.
Phil, who had half an idea what might be happening here, suggested to Anna that she might like to walk on without him for a while and made his way over to the car. Holloway had missed nothing, his eyes fixed on her as she stepped back inside the foyer.
‘That would be the elusive Julie, I suppose?’
Ah!
Phil waited until Holloway had clambered back into the car, then followed suit. Before he’d even closed the passenger door, the engine roared into life and they shot forward, weaving their way in and out of the rows of vehicles until they came to an area at the far side of the complex where the local buses picked up and deposited passengers from Bognor and Chichester every fifteen minutes. Holloway swung two wheels up onto the grass verge and parked there, far enough removed from the hubbub of daily life at Arun Valley to be confident that they wouldn’t be overheard. He left the keys in the ignition but flicked a switch to open the window and unfastened his seat belt. Then he leaned back in his seat, tugging furiously at his tie and undoing the top button of his shirt.
‘You bloody idiot,’ he sighed.
‘I’m not apologising.’
‘Did I ask you for an apology?’
‘And if you’re looking to have a pop at someone over this, then leave her out of it. It’s my fault, OK? My idea not hers.’
‘Jesus.’
They sat there in silence for a moment or two, Holloway staring off into the distance while Phil fiddled subconsciously with his radio mic, making sure it was turned off. He suspected they were probably out of range of the Control Room by now but he didn’t want to take any chances.
‘So how did you find out?’ he asked eventually.
‘Owen Hall called us.’
Phil waited for elaboration, which didn’t appear to be forthcoming.
‘OK. How did he find out?’
Holloway dragged his thoughts back into the car and turned to face him.
‘He saw her. Here. With you. How d’you think?’
Phil nodded. There had always been a risk that might happen. Most people in the area came to Arun Valley at some time or other and he and Anna weren’t exactly low profile. Even so, a bit unlucky, he thought.
‘You want to tell me what you thought you were doing?’ asked Holloway. ‘Apart from wasting valuable man hours, that is. I’ve spent the last hour or so playing the sympathy card with my boss, telling her you’re not yourself after what happened to your boy and that all those years on the job ought to entitle you to a little bit of slack. Trust me, she needed some persuading. What in God’s name were you thinking?’
Phil wasn’t sure how to respond. He didn’t imagine for one minute that anything he had to say was going to cut much ice with Andy Holloway at the moment.
‘Quite apart from the damage you may have done – and trust me, we’ll get to that in a minute – what on earth gives you the right to put that girl’s safety at risk like that?’
‘She wasn’t at risk.’
‘No, of course she wasn’t. Keep telling yourself that. You can’t have it both ways, for Christ’s sake. You’re so sure Owen Hall represents a danger to society, yet you’re happy to mess around with his head and then send her off with him in his pickup? How does that work?’
‘She was never in any danger. They were never out of my sight. I was right behind them all the way.’
‘Oh right. No chance of anything going wrong there, then.’
‘And she does MMA. She can look after herself if she has to.’
‘And your boy was handy enough, if I remember rightly, and had a baseball bat for extra protection.’
‘Yeah, well, thanks for the reminder, Andy. I guess that’d slipped my mind.’
Holloway held up his hand to apologise for his clumsiness and Phil was reminded instantly of what a decent bloke he was. A genuinely good man. Holloway’s opinion of him mattered for some reason. He didn’t want to be thought of as some hapless amateur stumbling around in the dark and trampling everything he came across into the dirt. He wanted him to understand.
‘I had to try something,’ he said eventually. ‘I tried talking to you about it but didn’t feel like I was getting anywhere. And you weren’t looking in the right direction.’
‘Oh really? And that would be your considered opinion – based on all the evidence and all your years in Major Crimes, I suppose?’
‘It’s Hall, Andy. Forget all the other crap about jealous ex-husbands and the Bellamy brothers and people who’ve been ripped off in dodgy financial deals. They’re just a sideshow. It’s Hall who killed Callum and I had to find some way to get you to take him seriously.’
‘I repeat. Evidence.’
‘The guy’s not right in the head, for God’s sake. He’s an accident waiting to happen. I’m not denying he had a tough time of it as a kid, but the guy needs help. He shouldn’t be out among the general public. You’ve only got to talk to him for five minutes to see that. He was following Callum just two nights before he was killed. What more do you want? And the temper on him – it’s something else. He nearly came after me with a spanner the other day for no reason. Out of nowhere. There was just this . . . this explosion of anger. If you’d been there –’
‘And yet you still felt comfortable about putting her in the truck with him?’
He tossed his head in irritation.
‘And that’s it?’ continued Holloway. ‘That’s your evidence?’
‘It’s enough for me.’ He sighed, took a deep breath. ‘Look, Andy – I’m not stupid. I know you need more than that. I just thought maybe if we put him under a bit of pressure he might start to panic a bit, make a mistake. There’s got to be some way of tying him into all this. He can’t have thought of everything. He’ll have slipped up somewhere.’
‘It’s not how we work, OK? I don’t need to tell you that, for God’s sake. We don’t just pick our square peg and then try to find some hole we can ram him into. It’s the other way round. We go where the evidence takes us because eventually that’s how we’re going to prove who did it.’
‘But that’s the point,’ snapped Phil, his frustration coming to the boil. ‘How are you going to find the evidence? Why aren’t you searching his truck? Have you been through his house? Have you tried taking him in and sweating him for a few hours? I just don’t get why you aren’t doing more to spook
him. Have you talked to his father? I went to see him and even he hasn’t got a good word to say about him. Did he tell you about the other boy? His twin brother, and what happened to him? And what about the photos I put in his truck? I bet he didn’t tell you about those, did he?’
‘He did, as a matter of fact.’
‘Straightaway? Or after he’d had a chance to work out you might have seen them on CCTV?’
Holloway opened his mouth to reply, then closed it again. He drummed with his fingers on the dashboard while he worked out the best way to respond. Then he shook his head and sighed, as if the effort to keep things on an even keel was taking its toll.
‘Phil,’ he said. ‘All those years on the job, you still haven’t got a clue how we operate. The absolute tonnage of what you don’t know would sink a freighter, I swear to God. You remember the first thing I said to you? How you needed to stay out of this and leave us to do our jobs? How I wouldn’t be able to tell you what was going on for solid operational reasons but you just had to trust us? You don’t have a bloody clue what we’re doing on a day-to-day basis and you make that obvious every time you open your mouth, yet you think it’s OK not just to formulate half-baked theories but to pursue them with no regard to the havoc you’re wreaking.’
‘Great, you tell me nothing and then it’s my fault somehow for not being in the picture –’
‘Wrong. I don’t blame you for knowing nothing. I blame you for acting as if you know everything. You’re so convinced it’s Owen Hall that you’ve shut your mind off to all other possibilities.’
‘What other possibilities?’
‘No – we’re not doing this. I’m not feeding you a list of suspects so you can go off and harass them the way you did Owen Hall. And Ezra Cunningham, for God’s sake. Have you got a death wish or something? You’re going to stay out of it, you understand?’
‘Dream on.’
‘I mean it, Phil.’
‘Yeah, well, so do I.’
They sat there in silence for a moment, each aware that nothing was going to be achieved by gradually cranking up the volume. Holloway snapped the sun visor into place to shield his eyes from the glare that was reflecting off the windscreen. Phil, for his part, opened the passenger door to allow a stiff breeze to circulate throughout the car.
Holloway picked up where they’d left off. ‘Look,’ he said, pressing his neck against the headrest as if trying to drill a hole through it, ‘I can only imagine what you’re going through and how frustrating it must be, but I can’t have you thinking we’re sitting on our thumbs and doing sod all. You think we’re not looking at Owen Hall? You’re wrong. I’ll tell you this much in the strictest confidence, OK? If it gets out, I’ll come after you with a baseball bat myself because this is just between you and me, right? For old times’ sake.’
‘OK.’
‘You’re wrong. You’re so wrong on so many levels I can’t even begin to tell you. We haven’t ruled him out by any stretch of the imagination. We just haven’t managed to come up with anything so far that ties him in directly. Everything’s circumstantial. Motive? Yeah, he’s angry about the way he was bullied at school and blames your boy for it. Big time. But it would be nice to have something a bit more substantial than that. Lots of kids get bullied. They don’t necessarily go after the chief culprit with a baseball bat – and certainly not twelve years later. Opportunity? Maybe – just about. But it would be the tightest of fits because we know he was picking up his ticket from Cineworld at eight forty-two. We’ve got a definite time for that and CCTV footage of him in the car park. It was him all right. And unless your daughter-in-law is going to come up with yet another version of exactly when she left his place that makes it really, really tight. So what we’ve got here is a real Catch-22 situation. We need to come up with something that ties him to the scene in Honer Lane and right now we haven’t got a single shred of physical evidence to suggest he was anywhere near there. Nothing. Zilch. And in order to get it we’d probably need to search his house and do a more comprehensive forensic job on his truck but we can’t do that without a warrant and to get that we need something that ties him to the scene. Like I said, Catch-22. And unlike you we can’t just go flinging accusations around based on personal dislike and prejudice. We need evidence. So we’ll keep looking, keep chipping away, until we find out who did it, which we will do eventually. Put your house on it. We’ll get there in the end. And when we do, I’ll tell you what . . . you’d better hope it wasn’t Owen Hall who killed your boy because, if it was, our chances of gaining a conviction have just been made a damned sight more remote than they were before you started pissing on them from a great height.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘What I mean is that you’ve opened such a bloody great hole that any defence solicitor worthy of the name is going to be able to drive a bus through our case it if it ever makes it to trial. Whether you accept it or not, we’re dealing with a vulnerable adult here and it’s not going to take Perry Mason to come up with grounds for dismissal. It’s not like the old days. They scream entrapment at the drop of a hat nowadays and this is like a textbook definition of the word. You couldn’t have done a better job of protecting him if you’d tried.’
‘So because he’s vulnerable that means he can’t be touched? Is that what you’re telling me?’
‘No. What I’m saying is because he’s vulnerable, we need to play it by the book and have everything tied up neatly. No short cuts. No loopholes. And no bloody sideshows the defence team can seize on to blow smoke in the jury’s eyes. And I understand it’s a long, drawn-out process but if it’s too slow for you and you feel left out of things, just grow up for Christ’s sake! This isn’t about your need to prove something to yourself or whatever it is that’s driving you on here. It’s about you keeping out of the way and letting the professionals do their job, and if you can’t do that –’
He broke off, leaving the rest of the threat unspecified. Phil was still smarting over the crack about wanting to prove something to himself, more so because he recognised more than a grain of truth in what Holloway had said.
‘So just how much trouble am I in at the moment?’ he asked.
‘Not as much as you ought to be,’ came the reply. ‘This is your official reprimand. Warning as to future conduct. I’ve told them you’re a reasonable bloke under unimaginable pressure and that once you get your head out of your backside they can trust you to do the right thing. I’ve called in a few favours but from hereon in you’ve got to be squeaky clean. I can’t have you flying off on kamikaze missions like the last one, Phil. You need to stay out of it.’
Phil took a handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘I thought you said you weren’t going to apologise.’
He shook his head. ‘Not what I meant. I’m not sorry for what I’ve done. I’m apologising because I know I can’t just stay out of it.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t.’
‘Then they’re going to throw the book at you.’
‘So let them. He’s guilty, Andy. I know we don’t have any evidence yet. But he did it. And I’m not going to stand back and watch him get away with it. You tell me your hands are tied. OK. I understand. But mine aren’t, and if there’s a way of finding something that ties him to the scene, I’m going to find it. One way or another. I’ll find it.’
There was a brief silence, then Holloway snatched the keys from the ignition and got out of the car. He shut the door behind him and walked over to one of the picnic tables dotted around the rear of the complex, rolling his head to stretch his neck muscles as he did so. Phil watched as he took off his jacket and laid it on one of the wooden benches before taking a seat there. He gave it a minute or two, then followed him, sitting on a bench alongside. A small plane trailing an advertising banner made a coughing sound, causing them both to look up in momentary concern before the engine picked up again. They watched as it flew off across the ope
n countryside, heading towards the Sussex Downs in the distance.
‘I remember I had a good chat with your wife once,’ Holloway said eventually. ‘Sally, right?’
‘Right.’
‘You invited the Littlehampton boys to a house-warming party. Years ago, this. Barbecue, I seem to remember. And your kid must have been two or three at the time. I remember he had this double-decker bus thing – you remember? You sit astride them and scoot your way round the place? And he was flying round your back yard on it all evening. Kept crashing into people’s ankles.’
‘Yeah, that’d be about right,’ said Phil, chuckling at the memory although it hadn’t seemed quite so amusing at the time. Every door, in fact just about every item of furniture at ground level, had dents and scuff marks where Callum had driven full-tilt into it. They’d tried taking the bus away from him one evening and he’d screamed the place down until they relented and gave it back. Was that the start of the slippery slope, the point where they should have stood their ground? No means no?
‘I’d just moved over to CID and I’d been bending your ear for months about doing the same. Surely you weren’t going to stay in uniform for the rest of your career. I remember telling Sally you were the most stubborn person I’d ever met.’
‘She wouldn’t have needed telling.’
‘No, you’re right. She didn’t. But she insisted it wasn’t just a case of sheer bloody-mindedness. According to her, you only dug your heels in when it mattered. Most of the time, she said, you were a soft touch and she had to be careful not to take advantage of you because you were so generous about things. But when the chips were down, when it really mattered, she said you had the turning circle of the QE2. Once you’d picked your course and set sail, there was no way anyone was ever going to get you to turn round. QE2,’ he added, sketching a straight line out ahead of him with the vertical palm of one hand.
‘And you’ve just remembered that?’
‘Yeah,’ said Holloway, rolling up his shirt sleeves. ‘Funny that.’
A woman and two teenagers came into the picnic area, carrying afternoon snacks on trays they’d picked up in one of the takeaway franchises on the ground floor. She smiled as she walked past, heading for the most distant table available.