‘No, I do not.’
‘So why in this case?’
She half-laughed because of the tension.
‘You don’t look stupid. I thought he looked suspicious from the moment I saw him in the club,’ indicating Smith, ‘but you were completely convincing. You know perfectly well why I agreed to see him.’
Somehow Smith managed to put his hurt feelings aside, and waited to see how his partner-in-detection would respond to that. But it must have been the tie that was a sartorial step too far…
‘You had some strong feelings for him.’
Said as a statement, and accepted in silence by Marion McFarlane.
Smith decided to move things on.
‘Do you keep a diary, Mrs McFarlane?’
‘No. And if I did I would hardly-’
‘And is your husband in the habit of checking through your phone. Under these sorts of circumstances, it’s a possibility, isn’t it?’
‘I have never known him to do that. I repeat – why are you asking about my husband?’
‘Have you ever told anyone else about James Bell? A girlfriend? Some other member of the club? Presumably people there would have known that the two of you were… Spending time together. Could someone from there have spoken to Mr McFarlane about it? In fact – did your husband ever see James Bell at the club?’
The questions were fired off quickly and deliberately – she was almost too composed again after the initial shock of seeing them and hearing Bell’s name.
‘Donald has been to the club with me but that was months and months ago. He doesn’t have any contact with anyone there.’
‘As far as you know.’
A jingle of bells came from Smith’s jacket pocket. He took out the phone and read the message from Alison Reeve – Just released Aves as agreed. Nothing at his home this am. Forensics will do vehicle this pm. About to re-interview Wood. A stupid or a frightened person might, in Aves’s situation now, make an attempt to contact the third party involved – but Aves had appeared to be neither of those things in his last interview. However, Marion McFarlane would without a doubt now call her husband as soon as they left the house, if only to ask why the police were inquiring about him in their search for James Bell; that was why, despite her repeated question, he had given her no answer.
She said to him then, ‘What has happened to James? Have you found out anything? The local paper said that it was a tragic accident, that he was swept off the platform by a freak wave… I can’t believe it.’
Me neither, thought Smith, and never could, right from the start. Tomorrow Philip Wood is likely to make a brief appearance at Kings Lake magistrates, and then a whole lot more is going to be splashed across the front page of the Lake Evening News. Was there anything to be gained by telling her something of it now? Technically, as one of the last people to have contact with Bell, she was a witness, but she was also potentially useful as a lever against her husband. If he gave her something, even a tiny something, her curiosity would be aroused – she might begin to wonder for herself. She might know something more – he couldn’t be absolutely certain – and in the end it could come down to just how strong her feelings were for James Bell. After all, an open door isn’t as secure as a closed one, and the same probably applies to marriages.
He stood up, saying, ‘We don’t think that it was an accidental death, Mrs McFarlane.’
She stood herself then, smoothing down the long green skirt that she was wearing above the brown suede calf-length boots. There was no shock on her face at what he had said, but he read nothing into that; in this brighter morning light, she looked older than when he had first met her – she had lived long enough to understand that things are often worse than we had hoped.
She walked with them to the front door. As Smith turned there and thanked her for her help and her honesty, he thought that she might even hold out her hand to him. She did not do so, but said then, ‘May I ask – how did you find me?’
He didn’t answer immediately.
She said, ‘How did you know?’
‘From a photograph. On your husband’s desk on the Elizabeth platform. I never forget a face.’
He looked at her for a moment longer and then turned away. Despite herself, despite the situation that she was in as a result of herself, she had smiled briefly at him and his answer, flattered that she had been remembered in that way. Vanity, thy name is – but he never completed the thought. He had another jingle and another message from Reeve: Sally’s here early to do the 4X4. You need to see what she’s brought with her. Get back asap.
Chapter Twenty Four
Chris Waters was alone in the incident room when they arrived back – as far as he knew, DI Reeve and Mike Dunn were in the process of completing the second major interview with Philip Wood. Smith asked him first where Murray was, only to be told an ante-natal class, their first one. ‘Dear me’ couldn’t quite cover that. Then he asked Waters to telephone Audrey Meacham for confirmation of where her boss would be today; it was all good practice for the young detective and meant that Smith would have time to recover from his encounter with one rapacious woman rather than having to encounter another. Perhaps it was his age – perhaps they saw in him the sophistication, the savoir faire that comes to some men in their later years…
When Alison Reeve and Mike Dunn appeared a few minutes later, Smith could see on her face – set, intense and business-like - a look that he recognized. There had been developments. She was carrying folders and a notebook, and one of the folders was SOCO pink. She opened it and placed it on the desk for all of them to see – it was a print-out of a set of results from the genetic fingerprinting process, with data presented diagrammatically in graphs as well as in words. Smith’s eyes went to the date of sample collection, and it was the day on which he had visited the Bell’s flat with the one and only Sally Lonsdale; then, nature of sample – human hair; finally, point of collection – bathroom wall, sample 8.
Waters said, ‘I thought we’d already drawn a blank on that one.’
Reeve answered him – ‘We did – but not any more.’
She turned over the sheet to reveal a similar one beneath it. This had yesterday’s date and consisted of the results of a saliva sample for a suspect under arrest – Stuart Aves. Smith glanced at the scientific summary, the protocol that had been used, but it could only be short tandem repeats; nothing else could have produced results so quickly. Low copy number testing still took weeks but was more accurate, the chances of two people having the same result then being about a billion to one. STR was not as precise, and he had known defence counsels create doubts in jurors’ minds when the forensic evidence in a case was critical. He pointed to it, looked at Reeve and said nothing.
She said, ‘I double-checked with her. It’s a strong match, in the millions to one. I’ve asked for the additional analysis but we’ve a good case for saying that this puts him in the bathroom of the flat he says he never visited.’
Smith thought it over before he spoke again.
‘It certainly won’t make his day when we interview him again… But this on its own? It might not be enough. He could argue that Bell had been in his vehicle recently and there might have been transfer. Though quite how it could have got onto the bathroom wall would take some explaining.’
‘There might be more. Sally called me from the Nissan just now. She’s only looking through a hand lens but she thinks the same fibres are present in the back of it. Lots of them, even though it has been recently hoovered out.’
‘Any news on those?’
‘They’re still narrowing it down but probably from a carpet of some sort.’
He turned to the others.
‘I don’t like cases built on one forensics result. In here amongst ourselves they look bomb-proof, but believe me, when you’re standing in the witness box and a QC starts firing probabilities at you, you’ll soon be wishing everyone had looked a bit harder for the smoking gun. I’ve seen officers quit afte
r an experience like that. But if the fibres match as well, that’s better. Much harder to argue both results away.’
Mike Dunn said, ‘So we bring him straight back in?’ and Smith saw Waters make an involuntary movement towards the door – the boy seemed to have developed a thing about putting handcuffs on people. Reeve was looking at Smith as she spoke next, and he guessed that they would be thinking along the same lines.
She said, ‘Let’s think. We sort of apologized when we let him go. I said we had to complete our tests on the vehicle as a matter of routine, and we gave him a lift home. He imagines he’s in the clear or nearly so because his solicitor will have told him that unless there is evidence, he won’t be convicted on the say-so of someone like Philip Wood. But he’s had a fright and he might make contact with someone else who was involved. Am I right in thinking, DC, that you made progress this morning in the area of establishing a motive for what was done to James Bell?’
They sat down and Smith summarized their interview with Marion McFarlane. Her husband had undoubtedly known whom she was currently seeing – the only interesting question was how he had known where to find James Bell that Saturday evening. Had he read the text on her phone? By whatever means he found it out, the information had been relayed to Aves; Wood had revealed as much when he said that Aves had made some remark about knowing he would find Bell in The Wherryman that night. Waters asked the question, then – if his wife had not told him whom she was meeting, whom she was getting serious about and meeting away from the club, who had?
Smith said, ‘I think it was James Bell.’
Alison Reeve’s face remained impassive, while the other three registered various degrees of surprise.
‘I might be wrong but it’s the only explanation I can think of for the money.’
Serena Butler said, ‘Blackmail?’
Smith nodded.
‘Or something like it. It’s my guess that when Bell first met McFarlane’s wife, he had no idea who she was. But they must have talked in between times, and there won’t be too many Donald McFarlanes in the drilling business. A few more questions and he’ll have been pretty certain this was someone he met years ago up in Aberdeen. Now he discovers this chap has lots of influence and lots of money – and a local reputation to protect. We know that Bell liked to spend and that he hated the flat in The Towers. He was a wide-boy with a conviction for fraud, remember, and a player, as some of the ladies involved in this investigation have been saying from the start. This was too good a chance to miss.’
They sat and thought about it before Mike Dunn said, ‘So, if McFarlane paid him off, what went wrong?’
‘I think it was the job first. Nothing wrong with that, asking an old acquaintance to put in a word – it happens all the time in the force,’ with a glance at Reeve, ‘except that one is not usually bedding the requestee’s wife when one asks for such a favour. Well, not in my limited experience… Anyway, we know that Bell mentioned McFarlane and gave his company phone number when he first went into Marinor, and then he gets a job pretty quickly. After that, it’s just speculation. Did McFarlane attach a condition – that Bell kept away from his wife? Or was that what the money was for? Maybe Bell demanded the money to do that and then got in touch with her anyway. We should go back and get Mrs McFarlane to tell us about every time she met Bell… But anyway, if anything like this happened, that would be enough to annoy Mr McFarlane, wouldn’t it? The point is this – only two people ever knew all the answers to those questions, and one of them isn’t coming in for questioning any time soon, is he? If I’m right about McFarlane’s part in all this, he has played it very cunningly. No texts, no phone calls, he won’t have appeared at any of the important places so no forensics, no contact with Philip Wood, and the pay-off for Stuart Aves was not financial, not directly, so no bank account activity. He will have to explain the four thousand, but what’s the betting that he has a perfectly convincing story about that? If anyone has any devastating questions for him that I haven’t thought of yet, please put them on the back of a postcard today.’
They talked it through but Smith received no postcards. Then Alison Reeve took over and told them what Wood had revealed in the second long interview. There had been no great conspiracy. Aves had contacted him on the Saturday afternoon and said that a friend of his needed a favour – he wanted the frighteners put onto someone. It was a person known to Aves already, a worker on the gas platform. This someone needed a bit of a warning, that was all, and there would be a good drink in it for Wood. Aves never told him who the friend was or why they were warning off this somebody, and Wood didn’t ask; going to and fro from the platforms, dealing with the containers that went back and forth, was a useful business for Wood, and Aves was a more than useful person to have owing him a favour or two.
Wood had told them in the first interview how they had met Bell in the pub, had persuaded him to have drink or three despite the fact that he seemed to have other plans. At about ten thirty the three of them left; the pub was packed and noisy, and Wood did not know whether anyone would be able to say that they were seen leaving together. Aves was driving his jeep thing, as Wood called it, and they went back to The Towers. Bell had said that his wife was away and that they could get a drink there and he could pick up some more cash if they were going on to do some more drinking or partying. Wood said that Bell was pretty far gone, and they stood outside the flat for a while as he tried to unlock the door – long enough for Esme Fairhead to have seen them there.
Once inside, Bell went to a drawer and took out a handful of twenties. Aves looked at Wood as if to say, ready, and then he said to Bell something like ‘I’ve got a message for you from a friend of mine. He says, lay off. He says you’ll know what he means.’ Bell had just laughed and when Aves had repeated it, moving closer and making it a threat, Bell had told him to eff off and gone into the bathroom. Wood had said then in the interview, ‘The funny thing is, he was singing in there, drunk and singing away, but he had a great voice…’
Aves had said to Wood, ‘Come on,’ and followed Bell into the bathroom. Wood had hesitated for a moment, his eyes on the drawer that contained the cash, and by the time he went into the bathroom, Bell had Aves by the neck, banging his head against the bathroom wall. Wood had punched Bell in the back, low down, aiming for the kidney and it had the desired effect; Bell had let go and turned around, in a lot of pain but still swinging a punch at Wood. Then Aves had put his foot into the middle of Bell’s back and pushed him as hard as he could forward onto the bathroom sink. The sink had stopped him but his head kept going and smashed into the cabinet above the sink, shattering the mirror. Bell had stood back and then collapsed onto the floor. There was some blood on the broken mirror. They assumed he had been knocked out and went back into the flat.
After ten minutes they went back in but Bell had not moved. Aves had kicked him to wake him up and then bent over and lifted his arm. There was a large pool of blood. Aves felt for a pulse in the neck – Wood said that he seemed to know what he was doing – and then he pulled Bell’s head around. A sliver of the mirror was poking out from the side of his throat.
Wood had made to run for it then but Aves stopped him. He said that they were both in it now and that they had to get rid of the body and any sign that they had been there. Then he told him that he, Wood, would have to stay and keep watch while he, Aves, went to fetch something to move the body with. “And then what?” Wood had said. At that point, he didn’t think that Aves knew what to do – he thought that Aves was just going to leave him there. Aves left the scene, and Wood watched from the walkway outside, hiding in the shadow of a doorway.
Aves was gone for more than an hour. Wood decided to leave as well but on the stairs he met Aves coming back with a roll of carpet and a bucket with cleaning things in it. It was almost one o’clock in the morning, but now Aves seemed to have a plan. They rolled the body onto the carpet after wrapping it in some plastic sheeting and taping that up. Then they dragged the body i
nto the hall and began mopping up the blood with tissues and toilet paper, flushing these away. They used cloths and disinfectant until all the visible blood had been cleared but they were hurrying and probably missed some. Then they went over the flat, checking for any other signs that they had been there. Wood saw Aves pick up something and pocket it but he didn’t know what it was. Finally, Aves went down to get a sack barrow from his jeep. Wood went to the drawer and took the rest of the money.
Smith said, ‘What a charming story. A sort of morality tale, isn’t it? Where did they take the body?’
Reeve said, ‘Straight to the boat. They left it on there until the morning, and then went fishing.’
‘And the boat came back considerably lighter than when it went out. Security cameras at Scanlon’s?’
Mike Dunn said, ‘Yes, and working, but only on the main gate and buildings. Wood has a key to a side-gate.’
‘Whose idea was the phone?’
Reeve said, ‘Aves. This all rings true – Wood could never have thought of what they did next.’
Smith said, ‘And I’m not certain that Aves did either. Where did he go in that hour? His place is no more than ten minutes’ drive – pick up the bit of carpet and a bucket, he’d be back well inside half an hour. I suppose he might have stopped for a kebab. But it’s more likely he went and got some advice – and I don’t mean from Mrs Archer. Sorry for the interruption, ma’am…’
‘No, something Wood said confirms that. He said that Aves came back with a plan, he suddenly had it all worked out. He told Wood to buy the phone. Then, on the Monday morning they drove out to East Denes, sat in the car park and Aves told Wood what he was going to have to do if he didn’t want to face a murder charge.’
Smith looked at Serena Butler and Waters.
‘Well? Mike’s heard it and John guessed it days ago. What happened next?’
Waters answered first – ‘They got someone to take the Samsung mobile and a couple of other things belonging to Bell onto the platform, using Bell’s security pass.’
Luck and Judgement Page 30