Western Approaches

by Graham Hurley

  ‘Yeah, he has. You want to tell me what this is about?’

  ‘Don’t do the interview thing. Please.’

  ‘OK.’ He turned to the sink, trying to control his temper. Cold water from the tap eased his bruised knuckes. ‘Just pretend I’m a bit confused. Trezillion? Scar? This is a guy that loves you, right?’

  ‘So he says.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’ve been stupid.’

  ‘How stupid?’

  ‘Crazy stupid. Stupid like you wouldn’t believe.’

  ‘Try me.’ Suttle took a seat at the table.

  Lizzie said nothing. She’d never felt smaller in her life.

  ‘You want a Stella?’ she said.

  ‘You think that might help?’

  ‘Yeah, I do.’ She offered him a weary smile and tried to reach for him across the table. He shook his head and withdrew his hand.

  She explained about meeting Pendrick, about how helpful he’d been with the rowing, how attractive he’d seemed, and how supportive.

  ‘With the rowing, you mean?’

  ‘With everything. I was in a bad place, Jimmy. And he seemed to understand.’

  ‘Yeah, I bet he did. But you happen to be my wife.’

  ‘He didn’t know that.’

  ‘Maybe not. But you did.’

  ‘I was Lizzie Borden. That’s who you wanted me to be.’

  ‘Makes no difference. I trusted you. I thought I knew you.’

  ‘Then you’d have known how unhappy I was. How this house . . .’ She tailed off. They’d been this way too often. There was nothing left to say.

  ‘You went to this place Trezillion?’

  ‘Yes. He drove me there.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘On Saturday. I lied to you, Jimmy. We’d sorted the club compound by lunchtime. Then we drove out.’

  ‘You and Pendrick.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It was lovely.’

  ‘What was lovely?’

  ‘The cove. The dunes. Being there with him. Everything.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Nothing. Except we talked.’

  ‘He didn’t try and come on to you?’

  ‘Not at all. He was very sweet.’

  ‘You sound disappointed.’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘You mean that? You were fucking disappointed?’

  ‘I told you. I was crazy. Out of my tree. I didn’t know what I was doing.’

  ‘But you’d have . . .?’

  ‘Yeah. I would. Definitely.’

  Suttle nodded, said nothing. Then he half-turned at the table and stared out into the darkness. I’ve hurt him, Lizzie told herself. I’ve really hurt him.

  ‘The scar?’

  ‘We were comparing accidents. His was a surfing thing. Mine you know about. It was just conversation.’

  ‘Nothing more?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I have your word on that?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘But you would have done if you’d had the chance?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She reached for him again. She wanted to tell him that fucking wouldn’t have mattered. That the truly unforgivable thing was going all that way in the first place. A conversation that intimate, that natural, was the worst possible kind of betrayal. She wondered about trying to put this into words but knew it would only hurt him more. No relationship, she thought, could survive that kind of honesty.

  ‘I love you,’ she said. ‘It’s important you know that.’

  Suttle nodded. His face was a mask. She heard the click of the fridge door opening. He popped a can of Stella and tipped it to his lips.

  Lizzie told him about the landline. Suttle listened without comment. More Stella.

  ‘Is that why he had the wire cutters?’ he asked at last.

  ‘Yeah.’ She felt cold again. She began to shiver. ‘That man’s so damaged, Jimmy. And I never realised.’

  Eleven

  WEDNESDAY, 20 APRIL 2011

  Tash Donovan and Milo Symons were arrested at dawn. Uniforms took them to separate police stations in Exeter and Torbay. They were booked in by the respective Custody Sergeants and provided with legal representation. Tash Donovan chose a solicitor she’d met at festival last summer. Milo Symons was happy with the duty brief.

  Scenes of Crime, meanwhile, went into the mobile home at Tusker Farm. Within the hour they’d unearthed the Jacobson debit card, the associated ATM slips, a decent cache of cannabis resin and just under a thousand pounds in cash. The latter had been stuffed into a Co-op plastic bag and hidden under the mattress, a hidey-hole the CSI thought quaintly retro. By close of play the previous evening, Donovan and Symons had got the credit balance in the Jacobson account down to a shade over £93K.

  Houghton chaired a meet of the Constantine inner circle at eight. The PACE clock would give the interview teams twenty-four hours before she’d have to apply to a uniformed superintendent for a twelve-hour extension. Under the circumstances she thought that wouldn’t be necessary. The Scenes of Crime team had failed to locate Kinsey’s laptop but they’d discovered two keys in the glovebox of Donovan’s car. The team had the keys seized from Kinsey’s flat and – subject to trying the new set in the apartment door – they were confident they had a match.

  Houghton had asked Suttle to oversee and coordinate the two interviews. He’d already briefed the Tactical Interview Advisers working with each of the teams and agreed a strategy. Open account first, rapidly followed by the challenge phase. In Suttle’s view there was no way either Donovan or Symons could survive the coming hours in the interview suite. They had both the motivation and the opportunity to return to the flat and consign Kinsey to oblivion. It was, he quietly confirmed to Houghton, a definite stone-bonker.

  The eight o’clock meet was brief. At the end the interview teams departed to their respective police stations. Solicitors were due at the custody centres at nine o’clock. Disclosure and client meetings would occupy the next hour or so. By lunchtime, with a fair wind, Constantine might be close to a result.

  Suttle was about to leave when Houghton called him back.

  ‘You look tired, Jimmy.’

  Suttle shot her a look, then nodded.

  ‘Rough night, boss,’ he muttered, heading for the door.

  Both interview teams called a break at midday. Suttle had judged Symons the likelier to break first and had chosen to spend the morning at the Heavitree nick in Exeter. He was able to monitor proceedings via a video link from an adjoining room in the interview suite and had watched Symons explaining the events of Saturday night. His account exactly mirrored the story he’d told Suttle the first time they’d met in the mobile home: they’d won their race, they’d all had a drink or two, they’d walked across to Kinsey’s apartment for a takeaway curry, and then they’d gone home. Only next day, when the detective guy arrived at Tusker Farm, did he realise anything had happened to Kinsey.

  The two D/Cs on the interview team, both experienced, pressed him on a couple of points of detail and then tabled the evidence seized from Tusker Farm. Watching Symons on the video link, Suttle had the impression this moment came as no surprise. Symons admitted at once that they’d been to the ATM in Exmouth. Tash, he explained, needed the money to buy her mum a birthday present. She still had the card from collecting the takeaway and she definitely meant to pay Kinsey back when she next saw him. One of the D/Cs asked whether they’d got a receipt with the money and Symons said yes.

  ‘How much money was in the account?’

  ‘A lot.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Over a hundred thousand pounds.’

  ‘Did that surprise you?’

  ‘Of course it did. We knew Kinsey was minted but that’s a huge amount of money to keep in an account like that.’

  ‘Was your partner surprised?’

  ‘Yes. She thought it was crazy too.’

  ‘And did you
intend to make more withdrawals?’

  ‘Of course not. I just told you. We thought Kinsey was still alive. We knew we’d have to give the £200 back.’

  ‘That’s a lot of money for a birthday present.’

  ‘That’s what I thought, but Tash is like that. Always over the top. You get used to it in the end.’

  The interview continued. The news that Kinsey was dead, admitted Symons, had changed everything. He’d phoned Tash in Yeovil and told her. She still had the card.

  ‘Did she tell you she was going to make another withdrawal?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘When you found out, were you surprised?’

  ‘Not really.’ A tiny hesitation.

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because Tash just gets an idea and goes for it. I was worried, to be honest. I thought there was no way we wouldn’t get found out.’

  ‘You were right.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And Tash?’

  ‘She didn’t see it that way. She said the guy’s dead so we might as well help ourselves. She also said that Kinsey had kept the account secret so no one would know about it.’

  ‘Why secret?’

  ‘I don’t really know. To hide the money, I suppose.’

  ‘To hide the money from who?’

  ‘I don’t know. The taxman? I don’t know.’

  By now, he said, they had £400. A couple of days went by and nothing happened so they made another withdrawal and then another. In the end, he said, it became a kind of routine. Like the money was their own.

  ‘But it wasn’t, Mr Symons.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It belonged to Kinsey, to his estate. We call that theft.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘But you just carried on.’

  ‘We did.’

  The interviewing D/C wanted to know how long these withdrawals would have gone on. Rosie Tremayne was a woman in her thirties, one of Houghton’s stars, and Suttle admired the cool rapport she so quickly established with Symons. It had been Houghton’s idea to put her alongside the man in the belief he responded well to older women, and in every respect it had worked. He told her they’d have kept hammering the ATMs until the account was empty.

  ‘And what would you have done with the money?’

  ‘There’s a project I’m trying to get off the ground, a film. Kinsey had helped me already, so in a way I was telling myself it wasn’t really theft, just something he might have done in any case.’

  ‘But you didn’t know that, did you?’

  ‘No. He’d promised me £45,000 but not that much, not a hundred grand.’

  ‘So it was still theft? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Yes. We stole the money. That’s what we did.’

  It was at this point that Suttle felt the first prickles of apprehension. Milo Symons was playing these questions with the straightest of bats. He wasn’t evasive. He wasn’t attempting to justify himself. He didn’t seem to be hiding anything. On the contrary, there was a naivety – even an innocence – in his willingness to cooperate. From Constantine’s point of view, this would be a quick win when it came to a theft conviction. But would this man really have killed someone?

  During the coffee break Suttle phoned the Tactical Interview Adviser supervising the other interview. His name was Frank Miller and – like Suttle – was an incomer from another force. After an uneasy start, Devon and Cornwall had definitely grown on him. Not least because major crime investigations exposed him to suspects like Tash Donovan.

  ‘She’s nuts, mate. Totally barking. We could have sold tickets for this morning.’

  Like Symons, her description of the Saturday night in Exmouth Quays hadn’t departed one jot from her initial witness statement. One of the two interviewing D/Cs was Luke Golding. The TIA had told him to press her on the relationship with Kinsey, and when he’d done so she’d happily complied, offering detailed descriptions of the movement sessions they’d shared up in his apartment. Once she’d even got to her feet in the interview room to demonstrate a particular cycle of gesture therapy and it was only her solicitor, in the end, who’d managed to get her to sit down again.

  ‘What about the rest of it?’

  ‘The sex, you mean? We got lots of that too. She had this guy for breakfast, but he was paying good money so he must have got something out of it. Five hundred quid for a quickie? Maybe they were both barking.’

  ‘You think she liked him?’

  ‘I don’t think liking came into it. The woman’s an actress. She can play a part. Bottom line, Kinsey was a punter. End of.’

  Confronted with the evidence from the ATMs, Donovan – like Symons – had admitted everything. Yes, she’d lifted an initial 200 quid from his account that Saturday night. Yes, she meant to give the money back. And yes, once she knew that Kinsey was dead, she’d seen no point letting all that money go to waste.

  ‘She said that? She used that phrase?’

  ‘Yeah. It was like she had some right to it. The dosh was hers. It was written in the stars. It was the earth giving her a little prezzie. Total bollocks, of course, but quite amusing. You have to hand it to this woman. Second house starts any time now. If you’re looking for something a bit different, you should pop across.’

  Suttle declined the invitation. He wanted to know how Donovan had been so sure they’d never get caught.

  ‘To be honest, mate, I’m not sure that ever really occurred to her. At one point she told us that Kinsey was always boasting about his money, and how clever he was, making all this moolah. He told her about his ex-wife too, and how he’d managed to dream up some clever scheme to hide loads of dosh from the old dragon. Donovan said he called her the Gobbler. I think she assumed the Jacobson account was part of all that. I guess it was empty when the wife walked out and Kinsey filled it up again and kept it going.’

  ‘She was specific about that? Donovan?’

  ‘Not in so many words, but that was the drift. Like I say, Donovan lives on another planet. I don’t think it’s ever dawned on her that some of the stuff she does might have consequences. It’s all hippy shit, I know, but it seems to work for her.’

  ‘You think she’s worried?’

  ‘Not in the least.’

  ‘You think she killed Kinsey?’

  ‘I’m starting to wonder.’

  The interviews recommenced at 12.45. This, Suttle knew, was the moment of truth. It fell to Rosie Tremayne, in Exeter, to suggest that Symons’ misdemeanours might not have stopped at theft.

  ‘In your statement to D/S Suttle you denied that your partner, Tash, had any kind of relationship with Kinsey.’

  ‘I said he fancied her. Like everyone fancies her.’

  ‘But you also said it ended there.’

  ‘Yeah. That’s true.’

  ‘But it isn’t, is it? Because your partner, Tash, has told us she had regular sex with Kinsey.’

  ‘For money.’

  ‘Yes. But it happened, didn’t it? So it didn’t – as you put it – end there?’

  ‘That’s shagging. That’s all it is. For money.’

  ‘But you knew.’

  ‘Yeah. Me and Tash don’t have secrets. The shag money was for the film fund. The one I told you about.’

  ‘Sure. I believe you. But the fact is your partner was having sex with another man.’

  ‘He was crap at it. Why would that worry me?’

  ‘Because it might not end there.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Because Kinsey might want more of Tash than you thought. The man had money, lots of money. Tash is a professional actress. Just lately, as we understand it, she hasn’t done much. She’s still attractive. She might still dream about making the big time. Kinsey could help that happen, couldn’t he? With all his money? All the support he could give her? And all those doors he could open?’

  Symons was staring at her. He was visibly upset. Rosie had touched a nerve. Suttle was tempted to applaud. At last,
he thought.

  ‘I don’t have to listen to this, do I?’ Symons was looking at his solicitor.

  ‘Mr Symons?’ Tremayne was waiting for an answer. ‘Milo?’

  Symons, angry now, abandoned his solicitor and turned back to Tremayne.

  ‘You think Tash lied to me? Is that what you think? You’re telling me she had something else going on with him?’

  ‘I’m asking you a question. I’m suggesting that might have been a possibility.’

  ‘Then the answer’s no. No way. We’re like that, me and Tash, always have been.’ He interlinked his forefingers and tugged them hard. ‘You know what I mean? Tash would never do that to me, never.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because she wouldn’t.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because she knows what it would do to me. How I’d feel about it.’

  ‘And how would you feel about it?’

  ‘I’d feel shit about it. I’d hate it.’

  ‘So what might you do . . .’ Rosie gestured at the space between them, which had been warmed by this sudden burst of temper ‘. . . if you got really angry?’

  Symons stared at her. It was beginning to dawn on him where these questions might be going.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said.

  ‘I’m asking you whether you have a temper. The answer appears to be yes. I’m also asking you whether Tash was – is – important to you.’

  ‘Of course she’s important. She means everything to me, Tash.’

  ‘So what would you do to keep her? If you thought she might be tempted to go off with someone else?’

  ‘But she wouldn’t. Not Tash.’

  ‘But she might, Milo. Or you might think she might.’

  ‘Never. I never thought that. Never.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. Look at it from our point of view. Tash means everything to you. You’ve just admitted it. You know she has sex with this man Kinsey. You know that Kinsey has the kind of money that might make a big difference to her career. You also know he’s mad about her. Are you really telling me you were never – ever – worried she might leave you?’

  ‘For him, you mean?’ He laughed. ‘You’re mad. This is crazy.’ He looked at his solicitor again. ‘Tell her to stop.’