Too Close For Comfort

by Niamh O'Connor

  Jo considered. ‘What was the problem?’

  ‘The builder didn’t have proper planning permission when he built the estate,’ Charles said.

  ‘You’re joking,’ Sexton blurted. He looked down quickly before Jo could catch his eye with an admonishment.

  ‘Any solicitor worth their salt would have seen it,’ Charles went on. ‘It was a right-of-way issue. Amanda must have known.’

  ‘Known what?’ Jo pressed.

  Frieda frowned.

  Charles turned his palms up. ‘That anyone who pleased could take a shortcut through the estate from the neighbouring convent grounds if they wanted, and be perfectly within their rights to tramp through our gardens to get to the main road.’

  ‘The estate’s walled, isn’t it?’ Jo prompted.

  ‘Not where Paul and Jenny Bell’s old house borders the convent grounds,’ Frieda blurted. ‘That’s why we need the right-of-way issue resolved. To stop them coming through.’

  ‘Who?’ Jo asked.

  ‘Hood rats,’ Charles answered. Frieda shot a reproving look at her husband. Jo watched the way he checked to see if she’d noticed. She held his stare but moved on.

  ‘How did Amanda respond to your threat to sue?’ Jo asked.

  Frieda sat up straight. ‘We’d made up with Amanda since,’ she said in a tinkly voice. ‘It was all water under the bridge.’

  ‘You dropped the case …? ’ Jo asked.

  ‘Not exactly,’ Charles said, watching his wife. ‘You could say it stalled. We had some …’ Jo noted the worried glance he’d thrown at Frieda as he seemed to struggle for the right word ‘… problems of our own,’ he continued.

  ‘Nothing we couldn’t handle,’ Frieda clarified quickly. ‘Nothing at all, really.’

  ‘What problems?’ Jo asked Charles.

  When he didn’t answer Jo turned to Frieda. ‘What problems?’

  Jo wasn’t prepared to wait for an answer requiring the kind of thought the couple were clearly giving it.

  ‘One of my officers has been going through Amanda’s recent business activities,’ she said, banging the printouts on the table, and then leafing through for the one with the bent corner. ‘I see she was in the process of remortgaging your home. Can you tell me about that?’

  ‘What? Let me see that!’ Charles said.

  Jo put a hand up to stop him reaching over. ‘I take it that means no?’

  He leaned forwards. ‘I’d no idea. We’d given absolutely no authorization for that. I’ve heard of rogue solicitors – the same as everybody has – remortgaging their clients’ properties to line their own pockets. That’s the only thing that could have been going on. If that’s what Amanda Wells was doing, I can tell you this, she’d have been struck off.’

  ‘Or killed?’ Jo asked.

  Charles sat back quickly.

  ‘Do you have our deeds now?’ Frieda asked. She checked on Charles. ‘Will they be needed as evidence?’

  ‘Sorry?’ Jo asked.

  ‘I mean, we are planning on selling up. They won’t be held up by a court case, will they? Court cases can take years …’

  Charles sighed. His back slumped in the chair.

  ‘Can I remind you that I’m investigating the murder of your neighbour, Mrs McLoughlin?’ Jo said. ‘You seemed very friendly with Liz Carpenter this afternoon. Do you—’

  Jo didn’t get a chance to finish.

  ‘I barely know her,’ Frieda said, looking instantly sorry she’d said anything.

  Charles reached under the table for his wife’s hand and, based on Frieda’s wince, squeezed it too hard.

  ‘Like you barely knew Amanda Wells?’ Jo said. ‘There was an open bottle of wine in Liz’s kitchen,’ she went on. ‘Were you having a drink together?’

  ‘Yes,’ Frieda acknowledged, clearly frustrated.

  ‘Liz Carpenter, the woman you barely knew, but drank with in her home this afternoon, might be in danger. I need to get in touch with her. Have you any idea where she might be?’

  ‘No, none at all,’ Frieda said, softening her voice.

  Jo was growing more annoyed. ‘She never mentioned friends or family to you over the years?’

  ‘The Carpenters kept to themselves, actually. I was afraid of him, if you want to know the truth. Even Liz seemed …’ She stopped.

  ‘What?’ Jo pressed.

  ‘She said something today about wishing Derek was dead.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Jo said.

  ‘Then at the barbecue …’

  ‘What barbecue?’ Jo asked.

  ‘We had one earlier.’

  ‘And Liz, the woman you barely knew but drank with in the afternoon, was there, is that right?’

  Frieda blinked, then gave a dismissive wave. ‘Yes, I think so.’

  Jo ignored Sexton, who was looking from side to side, like he wanted to get in, and asked, ‘Yes, or no?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it appropriate to have a barbecue after your neighbour has just been murdered?’

  ‘It was prearranged.’

  ‘You couldn’t have called it off, in the circumstances?’

  Frieda mumbled something inaudible.

  ‘Who went?’

  ‘Just other neighbours.’

  ‘And what time did she leave?’

  ‘Who?’

  Jo stood up and leaned across the table, exasperated. ‘The cat’s mother! Who do you think? Liz! Was her son with her?’

  Frieda looked at Charles. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘You’re not sure, Mrs McLoughlin?’ Jo repeated, glancing at Sexton, who was standing up, too. ‘How many neighbours were at this barbecue?’

  ‘Um …’

  ‘What am I paying you for?’ Charles demanded, losing his cool with his legal eagle.

  Jo put her pen down on the table and a hand out to Sexton to tell him to sit down.

  ‘Two, three … ten?’ Jo continued to press Frieda.

  Charles jumped to his feet. ‘Too much for this, that’s for sure …’ he told the lawyer.

  ‘Change of plan,’ Jo told the solicitor, before turning to Charles. ‘It’s now clear you’ve withheld information about Liz Carpenter’s last known movements. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right …’

  39

  July 2011: Watford, Hertfordshire

  SEAN HOARE GLANCED at his reflection in the back of a silver-plated soup spoon as he waited in a restaurant for his Wapping contact to show. Considering his doctor had declared he ‘must be dead’, because of the state of his liver, he didn’t look bad for his forty-eight years, if he said so himself. He still had a full head of hair, which looked jet black when slicked flat with his trademark Brylcreem, a throwback to the years he’d spent in Wapping. He still had all his own gnashers, which could be bleached and zoomed as white as a set of milk teeth these days. And the mischievous twinkle in his brown eyes had never dimmed – which was saying something, given the fact that he’d been out of a job for the last few years.

  But his luck was changing: his phone had been hopping all week. The establishment – the BBC, the Guardian, the Telegraph – all wanted him now. It was a long way from the six Shafta Awards, marking his contribution to the worst stories in tabloid journalism, which he’d won as a showbiz correspondent over the years. The one about Posh and Becks buying a private island off Essex was probably his most colourful work of fiction.

  Since making the switch from writing stories to supplying them to the New York Times, he’d been making headline news all over the world. His latest contribution in the secrets-of-a-tabloid-hack vein had been published the previous week, and the fallout promised to make it his most controversial yet. It had the legs to run and run …

  Placing the spoon back in line with the knife, he reached for the carafe of sparkling water. His throat was as dry as sandpaper. He checked the other diners out as he topped up his glass. He’d picked an out-o
f-the-way restaurant for the meeting, but if he recognized anyone, he was out of here. The move from writing stories to becoming one had made him as paranoid as hell. Whistleblowers didn’t exactly have a great survival rate in London. The former KGB informer, Alexander Litvinenko, who’d accused the Russian secret services of staging terrorist acts to bring Vladimir Putin to power, had died of radiation poisoning after a meeting in a sushi restaurant on Piccadilly. And Bulgarian defector Georgi Markov, who’d exposed corruption in Prime Minister Todor Zhivkov’s private circle, had been assassinated with a poisoned pellet fired into his thigh from an umbrella as he crossed Waterloo Bridge, back in the seventies.

  It wasn’t just dissidents who’d had personal safety issues. Sean, for one, hadn’t bought the supposed suicide of the former UN weapons inspector, David Kelly, in Oxfordshire. The circumstances surrounding the death of the man who’d leaked Tony Blair’s weapons of mass destruction dossier had left more questions than answers.

  So Sean had taken precautions himself. He’d made sure to leave his mobile phone at home in case anyone tried to ‘ping’ him. The irony wasn’t lost on him. The current story that had everyone on the far side of the Atlantic talking, but had silenced whole swathes of the press at home, revealed how, for a three-hundred-pound payment to the Met, an individual’s movements could be tracked and pinpointed to within a few yards by a simple triangulated calculation of which three masts their mobile phone signal was pinging off. Only people on very good terms with their consciences could afford to carry a mobile these days.

  He ran a napkin across his brow and along the back of his neck. He knew exactly how much power the Murdoch media empire wielded with Downing Street and the Old Bill.

  Sean needed to keep his head down for a while. The last thing he wanted was a prison sentence. Not that he had any regrets for coming clean about the real story behind all the News of the World scoops. All he’d ever wanted from his old bosses was fair play. For years it had suited the paper to treat Sean’s drink and drug problems as an occupational hazard. Everyone knew the only way to infiltrate the world of models, rock stars and actors was to take pills, drink too much, and snort cocaine with them. His expense account had been designed to cover the cost of doing things that no sane man would attempt. Once upon a time, the paper had promoted him for being prepared to go above and beyond the call of duty to rub shoulders with celebrities. That was how he’d ended up spending about a thousand pounds a week taking three grams of cocaine a day and drinking Jack Daniel’s for breakfast.

  But all that came back to haunt him when Princes William and Harry twigged that their phone messages were being listened to by the newspaper. Sean had stood up for the royal correspondent as the newspaper tried to distance itself from methods that had once been par for the course when breaking or stacking up a story. Sean’s drinking and drug use turned into a reason to fire him. But their cover-up was built on a house of cards. How could you blame one rogue reporter when you needed two people – one to ring and tie up the line, and the other to ring a couple of seconds later in order to get straight into the mailbox, enter the security code and listen in?

  ‘Ready to order, sir?’ the waiter asked.

  Sean studied him, and wondered why he looked so familiar, and then shook his head. ‘I’ll wait for my friend.’ He surveyed the menu, glancing over the top of it from time to time to try and work out if he did know the waiter after all.

  He didn’t want to put his contact in any jeopardy by being seen with him. He still had friends in the newspaper industry, people in the inner circle who looked up to him for taking a stand, and were willing to give him a steer about how his revelations had gone down, and what Murdoch’s next move might be. Up to now, News Corporation had only tried to smear the New York Times, claiming Sean’s story was published because of corporate rivalry alone: attempting to assassinate his character by dismissing him as a troubled crank.

  The funny thing about it was, they’d treated his dubious moral repute like a badge of honour when he’d worked for them. He’d been actively encouraged to practise his ‘dark arts’ – hack phones, blag his way into people’s confidence by pretending to be anything or anyone other than a journalist, ping, or bribe anyone who had a price. The right source in the police could give you anything – run a car reg to tell you who was driving behind you, a social security number to tell you what they were earning, even give you their last credit-card transaction. He had contacts in the banks, the internet companies, the phone companies. The better the stories, the more readers the newspaper gained. The more readers it had, the more advertising it got. The more powerful it became, the more money it had to sluice around. Even the Green Book – containing a list of phone numbers, and tips about the movements of the Queen, Prince Charles, senior royals, and their friends and contacts – had been acquired from a cop on security detail for less than two grand. Everything and everyone had a price.

  Even the Old Bill were covering their tracks.

  ‘Sir, I’ve been asked to give you a phone message. The person supposed to be meeting you has sent his apologies.’

  Sean looked up in surprise. The waiter had returned. He definitely knew him from somewhere. The voice and the face were from so far back, he couldn’t put them in context.

  ‘Have we met?’

  The waiter shrugged. ‘Not that I’m aware of, sir, but you meet a lot of people doing what I do. Would you like to order now?’

  Sean wished he could place him. ‘Did the caller give his name?’

  ‘He did, sir, but I’m afraid I didn’t catch it.’

  Sean shook his head. Something was wrong. The waiter took the menu from him, and walked away.

  It was funny the way things turned around, Sean thought, grabbing his coat.

  But six years after being sacked, Sean had assumed the high moral ground by holding his hands up to everything he’d done. Life was a lot easier on this side of the story, free of the stresses put on reporters to come up with an exclusive at any cost.

  He sat back down to sip some water, trying to settle his nerves. When he looked back now, he could see that the problem was that the culture that had developed in the newsroom was not so much morally dubious as barking mad: young female reporters had been made to wear lingerie so they could get into swingers’ parties; a reporter had been required to sit in a glass box in the newsroom for twenty-four hours to emulate a stunt performed by magician David Blaine. And when the competition ratcheted up, the insanity knew no bounds. When pictures appeared in a rival newspaper of a reporter swimming in the water with a bottle-nosed whale beached in the Thames, the News of the World powers that be had dispatched a reporter to the North Sea to help find the whale’s family, rather than be outdone.

  The public would have to decide for themselves who was telling the truth and who was lying.

  He put his arms in his coat. Complete strangers probably knew more about his secrets than his nearest and dearest. A person’s life could change in the space of a few minutes. Or end.

  Sean hurried home, aware at this rate the stress of paranoia would kill him, if nothing else.

  40

  IT WAS CHARLES McLoughlin who cracked – before Jo had finished advising him and Frieda of their rights.

  ‘We didn’t even bring her there. We just went to check she was OK …’

  ‘Shut up,’ Frieda snapped.

  ‘Who?’ Jo asked.

  ‘Liz,’ Charles said. ‘George wanted to keep her somewhere to lure Derek back. He was trying to buy Liz’s car off her because he’d seen it out real late on Friday night. He was convinced Derek must have used it to get rid of Amanda’s body. He thought if we had it, we’d have forensic evidence against him we could use to blackmail him back. Derek’s behind all this. He’s the one you want—’

  ‘You stupid, useless …’ Frieda blurted, cutting him off.

  ‘Get her out of here and charge her with obstruction,’ Jo told Sexton.

  Sexton advanced and restraine
d Frieda, who tried to resist. ‘Coward,’ she screeched at Charles.

  ‘She’s going to need you more than he will,’ Jo told the solicitor, who was bustling out after them.

  Charles sat down and put his head in his hands.

  Jo stood up. ‘Where is Liz now? Is Conor with her?’

  He shook his head slowly. ‘I can only tell you what George told me. He’s the one who followed her to the circus. He said she got separated from the kid. He got her into the car and brought her back to Nuns Cross. This is all Derek’s fault. He’s the one holding everyone to ransom. He assaulted Amanda. He’s the reason it snowballed. If he hadn’t …’

  Jo leaned in. ‘Where is Liz Carpenter?’

  ‘We were just trying to put things right, trying to contain the situation by keeping her in one place. We would never have hurt her,’ he said, covering his face.

  Jo slapped her hand on the table. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘I don’t know. George took her to the vacant house in Nuns Cross. But when we went back to check on her, just before we came here, she was gone. There was so much blood.’

  41

  AFTER LEAVING FRIEDA with the duty officer, Sexton left the station and jostled his way through Molloy’s pub, around the corner on Talbot Street. Swallowing his first sip from a pint of Guinness, he cleared the fluffy moustache with his lip as the gargle slid down his gut, taking some of the day’s tension with it. He’d been gumming for a jar, drained from watching Jo try to prove Derek Carpenter’s innocence. Locating a group of colleagues, he used his free arm as an oar and headed for them.

  Sue pulled a seat out from under the table when she saw him coming. She was the one who’d nudged him on her way out of the incident room to tell him to be sure to join them. She wasn’t bad-looking. He wondered if he’d a chance with her. He had to be moving on from Maura’s death if he was starting to fancy women again, which was good.

  ‘Cheers,’ he said, clinking glasses.