by CJ Carver
‘If you’re innocent,’ said Mac, ‘why did you run away?’
Calder looked at Lucy. He had deep grooves on either side of his nose, running down to his mouth, that she hadn’t noticed before. Canyons of grief and fatigue.
She was waiting for him to say no comment but he surprised her by saying, ‘I panicked, OK? She scared me.’
Calder’s brief – a stocky man called Justin Tripp, who had a wind-beaten, ruddy face, reminding Lucy more of a farmer than a lawyer – turned to Mac and said, ‘I need a word with my client.’
‘Leave it,’ Calder said.
‘Adrian,’ Tripp began to protest, ‘I really –’
‘Leave. It.’
Silence.
‘Lucy scared you?’ Mac raised an eyebrow. ‘She’s barely five four.’
‘It was her whole attitude,’ Calder said. ‘She was going to arrest me, and from the way she was waving her handcuffs around . . . well.’ He raised his hands as if to say, what do you expect?
‘I can understand how you felt,’ Mac said wryly, ‘she scares me too sometimes.’
Although she knew Mac was being empathetic with the suspect, she sent him a filthy look. What is this? Bash Constable Davies Day? Despite her irritation she couldn’t help noticing he was looking particularly good this morning, brown curly hair slightly messy, mismatched grey eyes clear and bright. When he glanced at her, her stomach did its usual flip. Hurriedly she looked away. Turned her concentration firmly back to the interview.
‘Why were you burning your clothes?’ she asked Calder.
‘We went over this last night,’ Justin Tripp quickly interjected.
‘But not with me,’ said Lucy. After she’d handed Calder over to the custody sergeant in the station, she’d been endlessly debriefed, then released to hammer out her report. Although she’d protested – she’d wanted to be the first to question Calder – Jacko had sent her home. Which had been a good move in retrospect as the instant she’d turned her key in the lock of her front door exhaustion had overcome her. She’d awoken on the sofa six hours later from a dream about Jessie, where the girl had been alive and begging for help, and although the clock said five a.m. Lucy hadn’t bothered trying to get back to sleep. She’d put on her uniform and gone to the station.
‘Look, I didn’t . . .’ As Calder began to speak his solicitor held up a warning hand as he turned to Tripp and said fiercely, ‘I’ve nothing to hide. Nothing.’
‘But you know what I said about –’
‘I want to help the police,’ Calder went on in the same fierce tone. ‘I want them to find who killed my family. This policewoman said she’d help me and she can’t do that if you want to bloody hog-tie me all the time!’
Silence.
‘I didn’t burn any clothes.’ Calder looked at Mac, but Mac didn’t say anything. Just folded his hands on his lap and maintained a neutral expression. Mac was her DI and the SIO – Senior Investigating Officer – but until she was transferred to CID he wasn’t yet her boss. She was still answerable to her sarge, Jacko, and it was only thanks to Jacko that she’d been allowed to stay on the case. To get some CID experience before you start officially, he’d said, but in reality he’d done it because she’d have made his life hell if she hadn’t been allowed to see the Calder case to completion.
Calder said, ‘I was wearing my suit . . .’ – he took a shuddering breath – ‘which was covered in blood because I tried to see if I could save Tasha. And Felix . . .’
Lucy had never seen a more devastated lawyer. If Justin Tripp could have put his hands on his head and wept, he would have done. She could almost feel sorry for him, but not today, not with a murderer trying to confess, or wriggle free. It was hard to tell quite what Calder thought he was doing.
‘The shotgun I was carrying was loaded because I didn’t know –’
‘Adrian, I need a word’ Justin Tripp made a last ditch attempt at controlling his client but Calder kept going.
‘– whether the killer was still around. And I didn’t want them to kill me!’ He shuddered again. ‘I did not kill my family. You have to believe me.’ He looked desperately at Lucy. ‘I wouldn’t do such a thing. I couldn’t.’
Lucy thought back to the familicide she’d attended in London two years ago, where a father had stabbed his three children before jumping into the Thames and drowning. She already knew that in over two-thirds of all cases of murdered children the parent was the principal suspect and Lucy had no reason to believe this case was any different. The only thing that really bugged her was the fact Adrian hadn’t killed himself. Yet.
‘Who’s Zama?’ she asked.
Adrian Calder’s expression didn’t change one iota. ‘Who?’ he said.
His brief, however, wasn’t as composed. Justin Tripp reacted as though he’d heard his phone ring – the involuntary response of surprise.
Lucy said, ‘When we were in the tree house, you said what about Zama? Why were you worried about him? Is he a relative of yours?’
Calder shook his head. ‘You must be mistaken. I don’t know anyone called Zama.’
He was lying. Why?
Long silence while she considered him. Then Mac spoke. ‘I’d like you to tell Lucy about your business.’
Adrian Calder nodded. ‘I run a chain of fast-casual restaurants called Melted.’
Lucy knew Melted. They were all over London and when she’d been at the Met she’d used them at least twice a week. Her favourite melt had been La Dolce Vita, slices of fontina with salami Napoletano and rocket, on garlic bread. Seriously delicious.
‘Over a hundred restaurants,’ said Mac, checking his notes.
‘A hundred and eleven,’ Adrian Calder said.
‘Any debts?’
Calder leaned back and rested his hands in his lap, holding Mac’s gaze openly, seemingly relaxed, but the little hairs on the back of Lucy’s neck rose. Calder’s shoulders had crunched slightly, almost infinitesimally, just like her father’s used to when he felt defensive.
‘I have one bank loan. And a mortgage on the house.’
Justin Tripp revived fleetingly to say, ‘Is this really necessary?’
Calder rounded on his lawyer. ‘Shut up and let them do their job.’
Tripp sank back with a sigh, hands held high, expression long-suffering as if to say: I did my best.
Mac took Calder through his finances, what he owed at what percentage, how he offset his mortgage, how his business loan with the bank worked, and although Calder’s body language appeared unperturbed, the tension in his shoulders remained.
‘You’ve sold some restaurants,’ said Mac. ‘Fifty-two, am I right?’
‘As franchises,’ Calder agreed and as Mac changed the subject, Calder’s shoulders dropped. The movement was tiny, caused by a release of stress, and she doubted Mac would have seen it, but to her it was like watching her father all over again, denying he’d been down the pub, denying he’d been unfaithful, denying he was leaving them, denying he was emigrating to Australia with a yoga teacher called Tina who lived just down the road . . . Dad would look Lucy and her mother straight in the eye as he spoke, but his shoulders gave every lie away.
Lucy let Mac and Calder talk about the restaurants for a while before she tested Calder’s tell. By leaning forward, she let Mac know she had a question. He gave her a nod. She brought out her pocket book and pretended to check something. ‘I just wanted to go over what you said about debts.’
The instant she said the word debts, he leaned back and affected a casual, confident air, but his shoulders crunched. And when she released him from the subject, handing the interview back to Mac, the same delicate dropping movement occurred.
Gotcha, she thought triumphantly. They’d have to check his debt situation really closely now. Make sure every decimal point was accounted for and then check again, and again.
‘Why is your company being investigated?’ Lucy asked.
‘It’s not,’ Calder said. H
e didn’t seem perturbed by the question. No shoulder crunching. ‘It’s just that HMRC didn’t like the fact my income reduced so radically, so quickly. There’s nothing illegal going on.’
Lucy looked at him.
Calder spread his hands. ‘The franchise restaurants have been losing money. They used poor advertising and poor quality control. Then there was a health and hygiene scare in Manchester last year. It put customers off.’
Put them off? Lucy stared. It had nearly killed them if the newspapers were to be believed. Over a hundred people had been hospitalised. When the health inspectors went in, they found salmonella in the chicken products and listeria in the cheese. Lucy hadn’t eaten in a Melted since then and she wasn’t the only one. Even Howard, a confirmed Melted addict, hadn’t been back.
‘All outlets started making a loss,’ Calder added. ‘Hence the reduced income. I declared less income which meant I paid less tax, hence the investigation.’
‘Your income disappeared to nothing practically overnight,’ Mac remarked placidly. ‘A financial correspondent in one of the newspapers at the weekend said you could be facing bankruptcy if things don’t turn around fast.’
Calder looked away. ‘It’s just a glitch.’
It was the first time he’d looked ashamed, unable to meet their eyes, and Lucy felt a welcome wave of anger. Anger was good. Anger kept the mood demon at bay. Had Calder been unable to bear his family facing poverty, the shame of it, the fall of societal ideals? Was that why he’d murdered them?
Daddy.
She heard Jessie’s desperate whisper in her mind. The girl had just turned fourteen. Her life had barely started. What a horrific waste. And all thanks to the arrogance of Calder’s actions. The sheer unadulterated conceit of the man thinking his wife and kids wouldn’t be able to cope with a drop in living standard. But it wasn’t about them. It was about him. His shame. His failure. His inability to stand in front of them and their friends and admit he’d fucked up. His stupid macho ego.
She looked at Adrian Calder but inside her head she was trying to staunch Jessie’s gunshot wound, seeing the fear in the girl’s eyes, seeing his wife sprawled dead on the kitchen floor, her lifeless baby daughter in her arms.
‘What did your wife think about the state of your business?’ she asked. Her tone was brittle, making Mac glance across, but she ignored him.
Calder blinked. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Did you discuss the fact you wouldn’t be able to pay for your children’s private education?’ Both Felix and Jessie had gone to Ampleforth, one of the finest co-educational boarding schools in the country. The annual fees for one kid came to more than she earned in a year.
‘Of course.’ He looked baffled, as if to say who wouldn’t?
‘And?’ Lucy prompted.
‘She agreed we’d have to talk with the school heads. See how to transfer them to state school with minimum disruption. Polina was upset, understandably, but she didn’t panic. She’s made of sterner stuff than that. She knows what’s important and it’s not private schools. They’re a luxury.’
‘A luxury?’ Lucy repeated, hoping to dig a bit deeper into his wife’s psychology and expose him for what he was. A family annihilator who couldn’t cope with having no money. Because without the money, he couldn’t keep up appearances. He’d killed his wife and kids because he couldn’t face them knowing he was a failure.
‘Her mother, Irene, is Russian,’ Calder said. ‘She was brought up during Stalin’s time. The purges.’
Lucy remembered what he’d said in the tree house. That his wife loved snow and had wanted to take the kids to Russia. ‘Go on.’
‘Godawful time, from the sound of it. People who spoke out against the regime were executed. They died in their millions.’ He rubbed a hand over his forehead. ‘Irene’s father was quite powerful in the party apparently, but even so her in-laws were sent to death camps. Although she was born in England and has never been to Russia, Polina’s marked by her mother’s experiences, her stories. If we weren’t starving in some hovel in sub-zero temperatures, then we were OK. That’s what she believed. She’s a strong woman, like her mother.’
‘Did she believe there was a way out of your financial problems?’
‘Er . . .’ For a moment, Calder looked nonplussed. ‘I don’t think so. I mean, she agreed we had to start pulling our horns in. Downsizing. Economising.’
‘So, no more horses and ponies to play with.’
Her tone had been more acidic than she’d planned and Mac turned his head and frowned at her. Tripp leaned across to Calder, about to say something, but Calder spun round like an angry snake, hissing, ‘Let me be, for fuck’s sake. They have to know.’
Shaking his head, the lawyer sank back into his chair.
‘Polina understood what was going on,’ Calder said. ‘We hadn’t discussed the details of how to downsize, but we’d already agreed we wouldn’t get rid of the children’s horses. Not Squirrel, anyway. All the children adored that pony. That would have been awful.’
Lucy stared at him. She made sure she held his gaze as she spoke.
‘By “Squirrel” I assume you mean the little grey pony in the stable? The little grey pony who’d been shot in the side of his face, shattering his jaw? The pony who was left to bleed to death in the most appalling agony?’
What little colour Adrian Calder had drained out of his face.
Lucy leaned forward. ‘Why did you kill the animals?’
‘I didn’t!’ He looked horrified. ‘I could no more harm them than harm my children!’
‘Did you think nobody could care for them as well as you did? Was that the reason you gave yourself? That they’d be happier dead rather than being alive and looked after by someone else?’
‘No!’ His voice rose. ‘I didn’t kill them! I swear it!’
Mac made dampening motions with his hands. Intellectually she knew she should remain unemotional and not give the defence any ammunition they could use against the police later, but she couldn’t bear him sitting there protesting his innocence when she’d touched the bodies of his wife and daughter, and young Felix, still warm.
‘You had wealth,’ she continued. ‘You had possessions, went on foreign holidays, African safaris, skiing in Europe. Thanks to your restaurants going down the pan you couldn’t give your family any of these things any more. You killed them as an act of mercy in your eyes. To prevent them having experiences of any hardship and—’
‘NO!’ This time Adrian Calder leaped to his feet. His face had turned red with fury. ‘You are bloody well WRONG! I AM INNOCENT!’
She snapped her mouth shut as Calder’s lawyer jackknifed to his feet, both hands raised. ‘Time out,’ he snapped.
Lucy didn’t bother with any niceties. She simply pushed back her chair, got to her feet and walked out. The demon was now well and truly gone from her mind. No dark cloud, no fog. But at what cost?
Behind her, she heard Mac’s angry footsteps in the corridor behind her. He yelled: ‘My office, NOW, Lucy!’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Lucy dragged her feet all the way to Mac’s office. Nobody likes being told off and even though she knew she had to get it over with she still dawdled, chatting to people she met in the corridor along with a couple of undercover cops who’d just returned from a stake-out.
Finally, she was outside his door. He’s just a cop, she told herself. He’s not even your boss yet. Focus on that, and not the spectacular sex you’ve had with him, and you’ll be fine. You just have to go in there, let him tear a strip off you, and leave. Simple.
Lifting her chin, she rapped on the door.
‘Come in!’
She stepped inside to see Mac turned away from her, frowning at his computer screen. Strong jawline, broad shoulders, hands with square fingertips that were big and strong but could feel as gentle as velvet. God, what she’d do to feel them on her skin again, but it wasn’t to be. Yes, he was delicious, and yes, the sex was fantastic, bu
t the last thing she wanted at this stage of her career was to be undermined by having a relationship with her boss. She’d already been transferred once, booted out of the Met to land in poverty-stricken Stockton, and she had no intention of being transferred again. If she dated Mac and it went tits up, well, it wouldn’t be him – rising star Detective Inspector – who’d be shovelled off to Land’s End or John O’Groats and forgotten about. It would be her, a lowly constable, who was expendable.
At least that’s what she told herself, but the truth went far deeper: she couldn’t risk falling for him. She was terrified that if she allowed him to see her as she really was, showed him the truth of her, that he’d run a mile. Just look at Nate, her last boyfriend. Nate had pronounced her crazy and got his GP to put her on mood-suppressing drugs. It had been like living in the bottom of a milk bottle and the minute she’d ended the relationship and headed up here, she’d chucked the pills in the bin.
If Mac saw how crazy she got sometimes, he’d dump her without a second’s thought and she’d have to see him every day, work alongside him while her heart was breaking. Much easier not to start a relationship. It was the only way she could protect herself.
Mac swivelled his chair round, rose to his feet. Folded his arms and propped a hip against his desk.
‘Your temper,’ he said.
‘Sorry,’ she said. She kept her eyes glued firmly on the wall past his left shoulder, her body straight, as though she was on parade. ‘But he was acting so innocently, being so goddamned helpful, I couldn’t bear it any more.’
‘You’re going to have to learn to bear it, OK? You’ve got to appear non-judgemental and not fly off the handle. It could be incredibly destructive in an investigation. You’re bloody lucky Calder’s brief isn’t making a complaint.’
Bully for him, Lucy thought, feeling sulky, but she knew Mac was right. She’d behaved in a totally unprofessional manner and although she kept her head raised and didn’t let her gaze waver, inside she was squirming at her behaviour.