Then She Was Gone

by Luca Veste

  ‘Of course not, but we all know what’s going to happen now.’

  Murphy could sense something, a similar feeling of anticipation to the one he had picked up the other day. ‘What are you expecting?’

  ‘I think we both know what is going to come out about Sam.’

  ‘Humour me.’

  Emma gave him a withering stare, then shifted the paperwork she had set down on the desk to one side. ‘He was a bastard. A smarmy one at that, which is the worst kind to be.’

  ‘You were aware of what he was doing in his spare time.’

  It wasn’t a question. Murphy knew now why she had been so amenable when he’d spoken to her before. She had suspected what Sam Byrne was doing in his private life and didn’t want it to continue.

  ‘I knew something was going on. Something he didn’t want getting out,’ Emma said, unable to look Murphy in the eye. ‘What was I supposed to do, though? He was the boss. It wasn’t just him I would have to contend with either. It would be the people around him too. I bet you’ll never even know they exist, but they’re there. Making sure everything runs smoothly, that nothing can come out that might embarrass the party. That’s the way these things are run.’

  ‘Why are you here then?’

  ‘Because I believe in the greater good,’ Emma replied, still looking away. There was an uncertainty to her answer, which Murphy took to mean she wasn’t quite as sure about this belief as she had been a few weeks earlier. ‘We needed a candidate like him around here. Someone who could start to have some effect in the area. I know what you’re thinking, but for a Tory, his politics were OK. I’ve supported Labour for the past twenty years, ever since I was sixteen and started being interested in politics. The party isn’t the same any more, so I moved to the Conservative Party. I hoped he would stop his extracurricular activities once he was elected.’

  Murphy shook his head, not for the first time wondering about the ability of people to leave their morals at the door in pursuit of selfish aims. It was life in the twenty-first century.

  ‘You need to be straight with me,’ Murphy said, moving closer so he was now in Emma’s eyeline. She still averted her gaze from his, but shrank back a little. ‘If there’s a chance that what happened to Sam may have something to do with what he was doing either here, or related to here, then you need to tell us.’

  ‘What do you think it could be?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe someone found out about what he was doing and decided to try and use it to their advantage? Bribe him or something. I need to know if anything out of the ordinary has happened here recently.’

  Emma glanced up at him. ‘There is something, but he said he was going to take care of it and it meant nothing.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A man came here. Late one evening. I think he thought Sam would be alone, because he’d waited until Charlotte and a few others had left first. He banged on the door and I made Sam open it. This guy came in and started shouting at Sam.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘How he hadn’t changed and that the past was about to come back and haunt him. That he couldn’t get away with it any more.’

  Twenty-five

  Rossi stood in the kitchen, waiting for Charlotte to recover from yet another crying fit. It was becoming a little annoying, but she could understand the young woman’s reaction to the situation she had found herself in. Charlotte was still a teenage girl in so many ways, Rossi thought. Real life hadn’t really been a problem until now.

  ‘I just don’t understand any of this,’ Charlotte said between hitching breaths, dabbing at her eyes with a bit of kitchen roll. ‘I just came here to help, you know? And now all of this is going on.’

  ‘Is there anything you want to tell me, Charlotte?’ Rossi said. She was trying to keep the conversation on track with varying degrees of success. ‘About Sam.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  Rossi was becoming a little more impatient by the second. She had sensed that Charlotte was holding something back in their first meeting, and the feeling was stronger now. ‘I think there’s something you want to tell me.’

  Charlotte shook her head, but there was no force to it.

  ‘Are you worried about what will happen if you tell us something? If people within the party find out? What is it?’

  ‘There’s nothing . . .’

  ‘You know, Charlotte, I do this every day. This is my job, talking to people in these situations. No one ever wants to talk. We’re all the same. We all want the quiet life. We all want to ignore tough issues and act like everything is normal. Well, look around you. This isn’t normal. Nothing that’s happened in the past week is. I suggest you start talking to me. If you don’t . . . well, I can’t promise that the outcome will be a happy one.’

  Charlotte listened to her speak, eyes wide and puffy from the crying. Her hands were shaking in front of her and she rested them by leaning on the kitchen counter. Rossi waited for her to speak, prepared for another battle.

  ‘He wasn’t a nice man,’ Charlotte said finally, her voice quiet and almost childlike. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t apologise,’ Rossi said, moving to Charlotte’s side. ‘I just want to hear the truth. That’s what we all want, so we can make sure something like this doesn’t happen again.’

  ‘He wanted things from me. Things I didn’t want to do. It was endless, the comments, the suggestions.’

  ‘What kind of things?’

  ‘He used to say that he liked the fact that I looked so young. That I was nice and unused. He would ask me if I was still a virgin, but it would be more crude than that. It was constant. He would ask me about my private life in the most disgusting way, but I never said anything about it.’

  Rossi tried to keep her cool, but it was becoming more difficult with each passing sentence. ‘Did he ever do anything physically?’

  Charlotte didn’t reply at first, the silence answering the question for Rossi.

  ‘I don’t want to say anything more about it,’ Charlotte said, not answering the question. ‘It was a difficult time for him, there was a lot going on . . .’

  ‘I’m not interested in the excuses he would give, Charlotte. I just want to hear the truth of the man, that’s all. He made life difficult for you. His behaviour had nothing to do with what was happening to him.’

  ‘It was just . . . banter.’

  Rossi shuddered at the use of her most disliked word in the English language. ‘It’s amazing the sort of behaviour people try to explain away with the word banter,’ Rossi said, spitting out the final word with all the venom she could muster. ‘He was responsible for his own actions. The only thing I need to know is if it had any relation to what happened to him. Is this behaviour indicative of the man?’

  ‘It was just the way he was with me,’ Charlotte said, tears being held back at that moment. ‘I don’t think he was like that around other people. He had this side to him, which just came out sometimes. He was a good man, underneath it all. Honestly, he was.’

  Rossi tried to work out what line of thinking would lead anyone to call Sam Byrne a good man, but failed. The more that was revealed about the guy, the more she really wished she’d never heard the name.

  The fact that her brother was involved with him in some way was what really burned, however. She still had no idea how, but the thought that someone she had grown up revering – as she had all her brothers – was somehow linked to Sam Byrne hurt in a way that she didn’t think would be easy to recover from.

  She needed to know how Vincenzo Rossi was caught up in this mess. Without anyone finding out.

  * * *

  There was a stony silence between Murphy and Rossi as they made their way back to the car. He was too lost in his own thoughts to notice it much, but he was aware of it on the periphery. It was something which was bothering him, but it seemed irrelevant.

  ‘What did Charlotte have to say?’ he said, once they were in the car and on the r
oad back to the station. ‘She seemed to be upset when she showed us out.’

  ‘It was just more examples of Sam Byrne being the last person who probably deserves any kind of justice,’ Rossi said, going on to relate the conversation she’d had with Charlotte. Murphy listened with a growing sense of displeasure, gripping the steering wheel in front of him in lieu of an actual live Sam Byrne to grab around the throat.

  ‘What does it all mean?’ Murphy said, once Rossi had finished speaking, glad that the silence had lifted. ‘What does it have to do with his death?’

  ‘He was a deeply unpleasant man, probably someone who craved power, just so he could keep raping women.’

  ‘And that got him killed?’

  ‘I think so,’ Rossi replied, pushing the button on the side of her door and letting the window down a little. ‘We’ve heard the same thing now from a number of women. Not only did he have no problem in saying the most disgusting things, but they were all framed around one type of fantasy.’

  ‘The young thing?’

  Rossi gave him a sharp look, which Murphy accepted. ‘Sorry, I know, not the best way of putting it.’

  ‘Damn right,’ Rossi said, looking away from him again. ‘He liked the sex workers he took back to his apartment to look like young girls. He liked Charlotte because she looked young. I don’t know if that has anything to do with his murder, but it’s worth thinking about. What if someone got wind of it? Wouldn’t be the first time we’ve had a vigilante in the city.’

  ‘True,’ Murphy replied, thinking back only a few years to one particular case. One that had affected his life in a major way. ‘I don’t feel like that’s what is going on here, though. This feels more, I don’t know . . .’

  ‘Weird?’

  ‘Well, yeah, but there’s something we’re missing.’

  Rossi didn’t answer him, allowing the cogs of his mind to grind into action.

  ‘What about this guy who just shows up one evening? I don’t even know how to go about tracking him down.’

  ‘Did she even know when it was?’ Rossi said, pausing between gulps from an energy drink.

  ‘Not really. Narrowed it down to a month or so ago. I showed her the picture of Sam and the other members of that club at university. Said she didn’t recognise any of them as being the guy.’

  ‘Could just be an angry constituent, I suppose.’

  ‘Maybe we should talk to the guy in prison? Probably has nothing to do with it, but can’t hurt, can it? Maybe there’s something linking the fact he’s in prison and Sam’s death. Seems a bit of a coincidence, two out of the eight being indisposed.’

  He turned to Rossi, waiting for a response, but she was staring glassy-eyed out of the window to her side. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘About what?’ Rossi replied, slowly turning her head back to him. ‘Didn’t hear you.’

  ‘Right, nothing, doesn’t matter.’

  Back at the station, the mood hadn’t lifted much. DC Hashem was still working on finding one of the men on the list, whilst Hale and Kirkham were on the phone to Neil Letherby’s partner and someone who might know Chris Roberts respectively. Murphy dumped his keys on his desk, looked over at the boss’s office and put his hands on his hips when he saw it was empty.

  ‘Where’s she gone?’ he said to DC Harris. ‘Only just coming up to seven.’

  ‘No idea,’ DC Harris replied, rubbing his left eye with the palm of his hand. ‘I’ve been glued to this screen for the past couple of hours. Everything is starting to get a little blurry.’

  Murphy walked around to DC Harris’s desk, CCTV images on his screen coming into view. ‘Anything?’

  ‘Nothing. Sorry. I have gone over and over it, but there’s just no clear sighting of anyone. It looks planned to me. Very careful job. They knew where the cameras were, so have managed to either avoid them, or cover themselves sufficiently to make sure they couldn’t be recognised.’

  ‘What’s the best we’ve got?’

  DC Harris paused the video he’d been studying, clicking open another tab. ‘This is it,’ he said, moving out of the way of the screen. ‘All we can make out is a hunched-up figure over a steering wheel, wearing some kind of black jacket with a hood, or a hoodie, sunglasses and something else covering ninety-five per cent of their face. It’s not enough.’

  ‘Keep working on it. Send it over to the forensics team as well. They have the numbers to go through it frame by frame if needs be.’

  ‘No problem.’

  Murphy turned to face the office, scanning for anyone who could possibly alleviate the feelings of helplessness which were threatening to overwhelm not just him, but everyone else in the damn room.

  He saw DC Kirkham put the phone down and lean back in his chair, covering his face with both hands.

  ‘Jack, what is it?’

  DC Kirkham turned in surprise as Murphy made his way towards him.

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure,’ DC Kirkham said, standing up as Murphy reached him. ‘Could be nothing, but, well, I’m not sure.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter, just tell me.’

  ‘I’ve been trying to track down Chris Roberts – which hasn’t been easy, as you can imagine with a name like that – and I think I have. All the details seem to match up.’

  ‘What did he have to say?’

  ‘That’s the thing. I couldn’t speak to him. He killed himself ten months ago.’

  Murphy rocked back on his heels a little. ‘OK, that is weird. That’s three of the eight names with either prison or death in their lives.’

  ‘That’s not the end of it,’ DC Kirkham said, breathing a little harder now. ‘I spoke to his business partner. The inquest determined suicide, but no one who knew him believed the verdict. There’s been some kind of campaign to overthrow the verdict.’

  ‘Right, this is getting a little more interesting. Tell me the details.’

  DC Kirkham pulled his notepad off the desk and began reading from it. ‘He was found at the bottom of a cliff down south, with marks on his hands and arms. Postmortem categorised them as looking like defensive wounds at first, but then they found a video on his phone. It was taken as a suicide note.’

  ‘We don’t even write those things down any more? Bloody hell . . .’

  ‘It was him, on video, saying he couldn’t live any longer, a few more things as well, but ostensibly that the guilt was just too much.’

  ‘Guilt over what?’

  ‘Didn’t say and his business partner told me none of his family or other friends could tell anyone what it could be. Local police looked into things, but there was nothing. The family think he was coerced into saying it, but there was no other evidence that could suggest murder, so everything pointed to a suicide.’

  Murphy leaned on the back of DC Kirkham’s empty chair, steadying himself as it almost tipped over. ‘Another coincidence?’

  ‘They’re piling up now, to be frank, sir.’

  ‘You’re right, they are,’ Murphy said, scratching the back of his head. ‘Three out of eight . . . I don’t like those odds.’

  By the next morning, the tally was four, which moved the odds even further out of Murphy’s comfort zone.

  Twenty-six

  It was a month since he’d seen Sam. Now, he was dead.

  Vincenzo Rossi felt nothing.

  He shouldn’t have gone there but things had spiralled out of control and into a situation he’d had no intention of being involved with. He’d stupidly thought Sam would be willing to do something about it all.

  All Sam had been interested in was how things would look for him and his campaign to become MP.

  Vincenzo had gathered as much information as he could about what had happened to the group since leaving university. Visited them all one by one.

  They had no idea what they had left behind. The lives they had destroyed.

  One in particular. Someone who couldn’t be saved.

  He shouldn’t be involved in any o
f this, he thought now. If he could turn the clock back, he would return to that day two years earlier, when she’d first come to him, and stop himself promising anything.

  Now, it was all too late. That first meeting had changed all their lives.

  No, if he could, he would go back to an earlier date. Nine years ago. That first meeting they’d had in the pub. He should have stood up as the voice of reason. He was the older member of the group, the one they might have listened to.

  Instead, he’d let them carry on. Stood on the sidelines as they grew in number and power. He could have done more back then.

  Now, things had gone too far.

  He tried her number again, but voicemail kicked in immediately. He hoped it had come to an end. That he could breathe easier and that he didn’t have to worry that his sister and a bunch of her copper mates were about to boot his door in and arrest him.

  What did they have on him? What evidence could have been left behind?

  He couldn’t be sure.

  Vincenzo put the cigarette in his mouth, a small tremble in his hands as he flicked the lighter and inhaled the first glorious drag.

  He knew everything was going to crumble soon. That his world would change forever. His future would be altered and malformed. All the work he had put in to make his life better would ultimately be for nothing.

  He would end up in a cell, he thought. Maybe even next to his old friend Tim Johnson. That would be karma right there.

  He should have said no. He should never have helped her.

  How could he have let her do it all on her own?

  Sam was dead. Others were too. And it was his fault. He was to blame for the whole thing.

  There was no way around it. It was his responsibility.

  They all deserved it. Every last one of those eight men in that club deserved exactly what was happening to them.

  ‘Why do you feel guilty then?’ Vincenzo whispered to himself, the smoke filling the car around him. He slid the window down a touch, allowing it to drift out into the night.