‘Shut up,’ hissed Jarvis.
‘All the way up here I kept on thinking, He can’t have done it. He can’t have killed his own daughter. Oh I knew what you’d done to Diane and Callie and God knows how many other girls, but I kept telling myself murdering Sandra was against nature. The truth is, you could kill another man’s child when she was threatening to destroy you – and Sandra would never have seen it coming because she didn’t know, did she? Did the poor girl turn her back on you, Frank? Is that what happened?’
‘Shut up,’ he said again.
‘When did you kill her? During the argument up here, or was it later? We know she never left Newcastle. That was one picture that was a fake. When we find out which bent copper identified that girl at the railway station as your daughter and derailed a massive missing person’s enquiry, he’ll be arrested too. Maybe he’ll have a story to tell. Perhaps he’ll do a deal.’
‘What did you do with the body?’ asked Tom. ‘How did you get rid of it?’ And then Tom remembered something else, something someone had told him before his first meeting with Frank Jarvis. ‘She never left, did she, Frank?’ He looked round the allotment. ‘That’s why old Harry never saw her come down off the allotment that day. You killed her here, didn’t you?’
‘Shut up!’ he roared. ‘Just shut up, for God’s sake!’
‘No, Frank, I won’t shut up. Harry caught you out, didn’t he? You didn’t see him creep up here while you were digging a trench to bury Sandra. You panicked and told him it was for your potatoes but it was the wrong season. Harry thought you were a poor gardener but you were so proud of growing all your own vegetables you wouldn’t have got that wrong. Was Sandra’s body in the shed? Did you wrap it up in something and bury her here? I’ll bet you did, and Harry will be able to tell us exactly where, won’t he?’
‘I’ll get a team up here now,’ Bradshaw told him. ‘If you’ve got something to say, any mitigation you want to give before that happens, then now is the time to tell us.’
Jarvis turned slowly back to the bench and sat down.
‘Suit yourself, Jarvis,’ said Bradshaw. ‘You’re on your own now.’
‘Alright,’ Jarvis said wearily, ‘I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything.’
Chapter Fifty-Four
Tom, Helen and Bradshaw formed a semicircle around Jarvis.
‘Where is she?’ asked Tom, and the councillor answered by pointing to a rough area of overturned soil where nothing grew but weeds.
‘What happened?’ asked Bradshaw.
‘You may as well tell us,’ Helen informed him, ‘we know most of it already.’
‘I was sitting here that day,’ he began, ‘when Sandra marched up to me. She was angry. She said she knew about Diane Turner. I didn’t even know who she meant.’
‘You never bothered to learn their names,’ said Tom.
‘I didn’t want to know their names,’ Jarvis corrected him.
‘That made it too real.’ Helen hissed the words at him angrily.
‘Sandra told me she knew all about me,’ he said. ‘She called me such terrible names, used words I’d never heard her say before.’
‘And of course you denied everything,’ said Tom.
‘What choice did I have?’ Frank reasoned, ‘but Sandra wouldn’t believe me. She said it was true and she’d get this Diane girl to tell everybody about me. She said they would put me away. I didn’t think she was capable of that much hate. I tried to explain it to her. The lasses at Meadowlands are not like other girls.’
‘Bet she didn’t take kindly to that,’ said Tom.
‘She kept saying Diane was innocent.’ He shook his head. ‘I told her she was a long way from innocent.’
‘Why didn’t Sandra just go to the police about you?’
‘She wanted me to admit it all. Sandra told me I had to go to the police and tell them what I’d done. If I didn’t, she’d produce this girl who’d tell the whole world about it. Nobody would believe a girl like that but if my own daughter was standing next to her when she said it … they’d think I was a paedophile and a rapist.’ Jarvis snorted at the absurdity of that description.
‘Well, you are,’ said Helen.
‘I’m not a paedophile!’ he raged, ‘I’ve never harmed innocent children.’
‘But you raped underage teenagers,’ said Tom quietly.
‘If you think I’m the first man to lie down with that Diane then you’re a bloody fool. She’s been with dozens of men.’
‘So that makes it alright? We know you raped her when she was fifteen. She was probably a lot younger than that when you started.’
‘Oh come on! You keep calling it rape and it’s far from it. They’ll sleep with you for a packet of fags!’
‘What is wrong with you?’ asked Bradshaw. ‘They are just kids.’
‘I have a weakness,’ admitted Jarvis, ‘that’s all.’
‘A weakness for young girls?’ asked Helen and he nodded.
‘Did you tell your daughter that?’ asked Tom. ‘Because I’m guessing she was about as sympathetic as we are.’
‘She didn’t understand,’ said Jarvis. ‘She told me she would ruin me, said she was ashamed of who I was, told me I was no longer her father. I had to laugh at that one. I was never her father.’
‘And that’s why you could bring yourself to kill her,’ said Tom.
‘I had no choice!’ roared Jarvis. ‘She left me no option!’
‘There’s always a choice,’ said Helen. ‘You could have let her go.’
‘You should have killed yourself,’ observed Bradshaw.
‘What happened?’ asked Tom.
‘She said her piece then tried to leave.’ Jarvis spoke so quietly he was almost inaudible. ‘I knew I couldn’t let her go. She turned her back on me so I grabbed that.’ And he glanced at a large shovel that was sticking out of the ground nearby. They all stared at it. ‘And I hit her.’
‘You hit her round the head?’ asked Bradshaw and Jarvis nodded. ‘And that’s what killed her?’ Jarvis nodded again.
‘Then you buried her out here and started the biggest cover-up you could,’ observed Tom, ‘but you couldn’t have done that alone. You were in the deepest shit imaginable, Frank, and you needed a powerful friend. It had to be someone who knew people, somebody who could fake sightings of a missing girl all over the city, so no one knew the last time she was alive was up here with you. He could even get a bent detective to say he’d found Sandra on CCTV at the railway station. Most of all, you needed someone who could find Diane Turner and make her disappear.’
‘I didn’t know what to do …’ he protested.
‘What else could you do,’ asked Tom, ‘except go and see someone you’ve known all your life who didn’t mind doing your dirty work: Jimmy McCree?’
‘There wasn’t anyone else who could …’
‘Tidy up your mess?’ asked Bradshaw.
‘Where did he find Diane?’ asked Tom.
‘That bit was easy,’ said Jarvis. ‘She was in my daughter’s room at her lodgings in Durham. There was nobody else there because it was reading week.’
‘So she was on her own when they took her,’ said Helen, ‘poor thing.’
‘She didn’t stand a chance,’ said Tom, ‘did she?’
‘I didn’t know they were going to …’
‘Kill her?’ asked Helen angrily. ‘What did you think they would do?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Jarvis. ‘I just wanted all this to go away.’
‘You did know,’ said Bradshaw. ‘As long as Diane was alive she’d be a walking, talking threat to you and a link to Sandra. When you got Jimmy McCree involved you knew there was only one possible outcome.’
‘Did you pay him?’ asked Tom and Jarvis shook his head. ‘No, you didn’t have to. You just stepped down as head of the council and walked away from the planning committee and the Riverside tender. Then you backed Joe Lynch as your successor, because he was already on McCree’s payr
oll. That’s how McCree managed to get in with Alan Camfield. He brought the leader of the city council with him. You stepping down was the price you paid for cleaning up your mess, wasn’t it?’
‘He made me do that. I had no choice.’
‘So the city got saddled with Joe Lynch.’
‘That’s not my fault. McCree insisted on it. Joe Lynch is the corrupt one and I tried to expose him.’
‘You haven’t said a word against him since he became leader of the council,’ said Helen.
Jarvis looked at Helen as if she was simple. ‘Who do you think has been sending you your tip-offs on Lynch?’ A chill went through Helen because she knew she’d been played then. ‘I love this city and Lynch isn’t worthy of it, so I helped you with your articles and they have done him some real damage.’
‘Lynch might be a bad man,’ Bradshaw told him, ‘but as far as I know he never asked Jimmy McCree to kill a young girl.’
Jarvis shook his head. ‘We never had that conversation. He said he would make sure the girl never said a word against me. I thought he might pay her off or …’
‘You knew he would never do that,’ said Bradshaw.
‘What about the photograph?’ asked Tom. ‘Didn’t you try to get it?’
‘I didn’t know anything about it. I never knew there was a photograph.’
‘Sandra must have been keeping that up her sleeve in case you wouldn’t admit everything. McCree had Diane Turner killed before she could tell anyone about the photograph,’ Tom said, ‘but someone must have found out who her best friend was so he could arrange those fake postcards to be sent to Callie from London and nobody suspected she was dead.’
‘Then you started the campaign to find your daughter,’ said Tom. ‘I have to hand it to you, Frank – of all the cynical, soulless, ice-hearted exercises I have ever come across, this one takes the absolute prize.’
‘I …’ he began.
‘If you tell us you had no choice one more time, so help me …’ And Tom balled his fist in readiness.
Jarvis shook his head. ‘Don’t you see, I only did what I would have done if Sandra really had disappeared. That’s all.’
‘To alleviate suspicion?’ asked Bradshaw.
‘If I had sat back and done nothing, everyone would have wondered why. I had to quit because McCree made me but this campaign was the excuse I needed to step down from the leadership.’
‘So nobody suspected you’d been got at,’ said Helen, ‘and no one assumed you’d killed your own daughter.’
‘Killing one girl in a fit of high emotion is a terrible thing,’ Bradshaw told him. ‘You’ll get life for that but it might not mean life,’ he told the councillor and Tom was immediately back in the world of Richard Bell and his tariff. ‘The other girl, however.’
‘But that wasn’t me,’ protested Jarvis, ‘that was McCree.’
‘Only because you begged him,’ said Bradshaw. ‘The leader of the council in his back pocket? It must have been like Christmas for Big Jimmy. He won’t be so happy once he hears you’ve been arrested for murder though Frank, because he’ll know the only chance you have left is to make a deal.’
‘A deal?’ Helen was shocked. ‘He doesn’t get any deals.’ She jabbed a finger at the distraught councillor. ‘He’s a bloody murderer!’
‘And so is Jimmy McCree,’ Bradshaw told her, ‘and I want them both.’
Jarvis seemed to snap back into reality at the mention of McCree’s wrath. ‘I want a lawyer. I’m saying nothing more.’
‘You’ll get one,’ Bradshaw told him. ‘They’ll be queueing up for a high-profile case like this one.’ He turned to Helen and Tom. ‘I think we’re done here. I’ll call this in,’ he glanced at Sandra Jarvis’s burial site, ‘and get a team out here.’
‘Read him his rights,’ Tom told Bradshaw, ‘then bring him down the hill.’ And with that, Tom turned and started to walk down the hill himself.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Helen.
Tom turned back to face them. ‘Me? I’m going on ahead so I can knock on every door. I’m going to tell everyone to come out and watch Frank Jarvis being led away in handcuffs.’
‘Don’t,’ pleaded Jarvis, ‘please. I’m begging you.’
‘Fuck you,’ Tom told him and he carried on walking.
Frank Jarvis looked completely destroyed at that moment, so Helen told him, ‘You deserve this.’
Chapter Fifty-Five
It didn’t take long to find her. Sandra was buried right where Frank Jarvis said she would be. The team who scraped away the soil found a badly decomposed body wrapped in plastic sheeting a few feet below the surface.
Sandra Jarvis was no longer missing.
News that Frank Jarvis had been arrested on suspicion of his own daughter’s murder spread quickly through the city. It wasn’t long before Jimmy McCree was tipped off by one of his police contacts but he didn’t run. Maybe he reasoned he could clear his name one more time. Perhaps he thought Jarvis would be too scared to do a deal with the police or he could silence the councillor before he did. Maybe he just didn’t fancy trying to hide on the Costa del Sol for the rest of his days. Either way, they found him sitting quietly in his armchair when they broke down the door.
The police had taken the usual precautions but the crowd that gathered outside McCree’s home that day was strangely subdued as they watched their ‘community leader’ being marched away in handcuffs. They were used to seeing him arrested when a rival had been brutally beaten or even killed but the general consensus was always that he was just protecting his turf from outsiders. If you were daft enough to try and take on Big Jimmy you were asking for trouble and at least McCree was one of their own, which partly explained the usual hostility towards the police when they came to take him.
Not this time though. Word had spread that McCree had done some kind of deal with a local politician. They were despised as much as the police round here. The whispers on the street were that two young girls were the victims this time and a collective shudder seemed to go through the community.
So much for Robin Hood.
Ian Bradshaw was standing on the pavement outside McCree’s home as he was led away. He had been invited to tag along by his colleagues in the Northumbria force, since he had brought them such a huge scalp and there was no way he was going to turn down the opportunity to see Jimmy McCree in handcuffs.
McCree stopped when he saw Bradshaw. ‘You again?’
‘Your luck finally ran out, Jimmy.’
‘We’ll see about that,’ the big man retorted but he didn’t look quite so sure now. The two burly officers escorting him dragged McCree away.
After he was gone, Bradshaw heard an old lady whisper to her neighbour, ‘They say one of them was nowt much more than a bairn,’ and she shook her head sadly at the state of the world. Bradshaw knew then that no matter what happened in court, Jimmy McCree would no longer enjoy the indulgence of a community that had finally learned just who they had been protecting.
It had been a very long day. Graham Seaton had overseen the publication of the newspaper’s biggest edition in years. Then he fielded calls from other news outlets around the country, desperate for the inside track on a series of stunning news stories written by reporter Helen Norton. The newspaper devoted a series of pages to several related articles.
The body of Sandra Jarvis had been discovered on land a short distance from her home and a man arrested on suspicion of murder. That man was her own father and the former leader of the city council. If that were not enough, police raids had been carried out on the Meadowlands children’s home where Sandra had worked as a volunteer and a number of other properties in the area, including an off-licence, burger bar and taxi rank. A total of thirteen men had been arrested, including a male care worker from Meadowlands. The girls had all been removed for their own safety then placed in care elsewhere and it was rumoured Meadowlands was likely to close for good.
In a separate article, Helen reported t
he arrest of well-known local businessman Jimmy McCree, on suspicion of a second murder linked to an unidentified body with a burned face, discovered in a scrapyard on the outskirts of the city. Readers were gleefully reminded that McCree’s security firm was part of Alan Camfield’s current bid for the Riverside tender and both men recently met with Councillor Joe Lynch in a city-centre restaurant.
Between them, Helen and Graham managed to draft each article so that readers would be in little doubt all of these events were linked. The edition was a chronicle of crime and high-level corruption that was the basis of radio and TV news broadcasts all over the region and beyond.
Graham left the office later than usual that evening but with the pride of a job well done. He was exhausted but his mind was buzzing. He was in a state he would have described as ‘wired’. This was what journalism was all about. Seaton even allowed himself a quick daydream about the possibility of an award for their coverage as he drove his car out of the car park.
He felt bad that he wouldn’t get to see his kids tonight; his wife would have packed them off to bed hours ago but she’d understand. He’d managed a brief phone call home to explain things to her but had to cut her off in mid-sentence so he could take yet another call from a London tabloid keen to hear his views on the situation, in exchange for a mention that would reflect well on both him and his newspaper. He hadn’t even had time to end the call with his usual, ‘I love you.’
He was on the dual carriageway heading north when it happened. He couldn’t have been more relaxed about his career at that point. Every newspaper in the country was reporting on their exclusive and he felt vindicated at last. Helen Norton deserved a lot of the credit too. She’d done a great job and he saw her as a future Chief Reporter for the paper.
That was his last thought before the other car hit him. Seaton hadn’t even seen it until the final moment because it drew up alongside his vehicle at great speed from the inside lane and as it reached the mid-point of his car it suddenly sent him barrelling into oncoming traffic.
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