Dead Weight

by Frank Smith

  The colour had drained from Stephen Lorrimer’s face. He looked to Melrose for help, but the solicitor merely spread his hands and shook his head in a way that said Lorrimer was on his own on this one.

  ‘Mr Lorrimer?’ Paget prompted.

  Stephen Lorrimer puffed out his cheeks and made a vague gesture of apology. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I lied, and I apologize. I know it was wrong, but it had nothing to do with the disappearance of Justine, and I didn’t see what good it would do to have my … association with Justine brought out into the light of day for no good reason.’

  ‘Apart from concealing your affair from your wife,’ Tregalles said bluntly.

  ‘It wasn’t an affair, Sergeant,’ Lorrimer said testily. ‘It was …’ Seeing the expression on Tregalles’s face, he decided it was pointless to try to explain. ‘Anyway, it had nothing to do with your investigation, because Justine didn’t disappear until the following day.’

  ‘I think we will have to be the judge of that,’ said Paget, ‘after we’ve heard your version of events – under caution, of course, Mr Lorrimer. Sergeant?’

  When the caution had been given, Melrose laid a hand on Lorrimer’s arm. ‘You’re not obliged to say anything, Stephen,’ he warned. ‘I think we should talk about this before we continue.’

  But Lorrimer pulled his arm away and shook his head impatiently. ‘It’s all right, Howard,’ he said brusquely. ‘I really didn’t think it was anybody else’s business, but now that my relationship with Justine is out in the open, I’m quite prepared to explain what happened. It’s not as if I’m trying to hide anything.’

  Even Howard Melrose had trouble masking his reaction to that statement by his client, as did the two detectives.

  Lorrimer closed his eyes for a moment to collect his thoughts. Or to try to work out what he could get away with, thought Paget cynically.

  ‘Yes, well,’ Lorrimer began nervously, ‘I suppose it really began when I received a message from Justine before I left London at the beginning of the Easter break. It was very short. All it said was “Must talk as soon as you get home. Urgent!” I replied right away – in fact, I sent several messages, but Justine didn’t reply to any of them.’

  ‘This was a text message from Justine?’ asked Paget.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘On your BlackBerry? Is it still there?’

  Lorrimer shook his head. ‘I deleted it on the train before I got home.’

  ‘But the original message to you might still be on Justine’s phone, if we can find it,’ said Paget, but Lorrimer was shaking his head again. ‘She sent it from a disposable phone. I bought it for her so we could keep things more … well, more private.’

  ‘A disposable phone that is also missing,’ Paget observed drily. ‘Go on, Mr Lorrimer.’

  ‘As I said earlier, I could see something was troubling Justine, and we tried to talk several times, but we just didn’t get a chance, so I told her I would come back from Worcester on Saturday night. Justine was to leave the door to the outside stairs on the latch, and we could talk in her room without anyone else in the house knowing I was there.’ Lorrimer grimaced again. ‘But it all went wrong,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want anyone to hear me drive in, so I parked the car a couple of streets away and walked in. But nothing worked out as planned.’

  ‘So what went wrong, exactly?’

  ‘For one thing, the light was on in Justine’s room, and I’d told her to turn it off so it would look as if she’d gone to bed. As well, the door at the top of the outside stairs was locked and I didn’t have a key. I thought that perhaps Michael was having trouble sleeping – he does sometimes – and Justine was looking after him. But the door stayed locked and the light stayed on. I sat there on the top step, expecting Justine to come to the door at any moment, but after about an hour, or maybe a bit more, I decided we would have to find another opportunity to talk, so I left.’

  ‘You didn’t attempt to phone or text her?’

  ‘I didn’t know what was going on in there, or who might be around, so I didn’t dare try to contact her. Besides, I’d waited this long to find out what was troubling Justine, so I didn’t think another few hours would hurt. At least Terry would be out of the way.’

  ‘And in all this time,’ said Paget, ‘that is, from the time you got home on the Wednesday of that week, till Saturday, you are saying there was no opportunity for Justine to tell you that she was pregnant? Is that correct, Mr Lorrimer? I find that very hard to believe.’

  Lorrimer shrugged. ‘Believe what you want, Chief Inspector, but it’s true.’

  An audible snort of disbelief came from Tregalles.

  ‘Does your wife know all this?’ asked Paget. ‘About your coming back from Worcester to see Justine, then sitting outside for an hour or so before going back without seeing her?’

  Stephen Lorrimer blinked as if taken by surprise by the question. ‘I … well, no, actually, she doesn’t,’ he said. ‘I mean, I didn’t think it necessary to mention it. I didn’t want to hurt her any more than I had.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  Ormside set his coffee aside. ‘I’ll buy the first part about Lorrimer being the father of the child, because he knows that DNA will prove it,’ he said, ‘but driving back to Broadminster from Worcester in the middle of the night to have a serious talk with his girlfriend, then turning round and going back to Worcester without making more of an effort to see her? That doesn’t make sense to me.’

  ‘Nor me,’ Tregalles said. ‘The boss let him go, but I still think he’s lying.’

  ‘So do I, if we’re talking about Stephen Lorrimer,’ said Paget, who had caught the last few words as he entered the room. ‘But until we can prove it, he goes free. Which means we will have to work just that much harder to get at the truth.’

  ‘Speaking of lying,’ said Ormside, ‘Lorrimer isn’t the only one who’s been lying to you.’ He walked over to his desk to pick up a sheet of paper, and put his glasses on. ‘I got a very cool reaction from the university in Leeds when I mentioned Sebastian Mills’s name,’ he said. ‘The person who finally agreed to speak to me about him, would only say, “Mr Mills is no longer enrolled in any course or programme here; in fact, he left before the end of the spring term and is not expected to return.”’ Ormside took off his glasses. ‘Which made me curious, so I contacted the university security service. Even they were pretty closed-mouthed, but they finally told me that Mills was asked to leave after several female students complained of “persistent and aggressive sexual harassment”.’

  ‘What about this girlfriend he is “almost” engaged to?’ asked Paget.

  ‘He isn’t,’ Ormside said. ‘Apparently, he was pretty serious about one of the foreign students, but when she heard that he was telling people that they were about to become engaged, she dumped him. A few days later, rumours that she was having an affair with one of the profs began to circulate on line. It escalated into hate mail – hideous, suggestive stuff. Everybody knew that Sebastian was behind it, but it was coming from all directions, and they couldn’t prove it. The result was the girl abandoned her studies in the middle of the semester and went home. The person I spoke to wouldn’t give me her name or where she came from, and they said if we needed more information, we would have to go through official channels. However, that seems to have been the trigger for other young women to come forward to complain of sexual harassment and rough treatment from Mills, and he was asked to leave. Which,’ Ormside concluded, ‘is when he came down here in March.’

  ‘I told you,’ Tregalles said smugly. ‘So, what’s the betting he tried it on with Justine and it all went wrong? He hit her and the next thing you know, she’s dead. Well?’ he said, looking for some reaction from the others.

  ‘It’s one possibility,’ Ormside conceded neutrally. He picked out a couple of pictures from several on his desk. ‘Once we learned that Lorrimer was here in town on Saturday night, I had Kajura look at the tapes covering the earlier part of Saturday
evening, and these are some of the stills she took from it.’ He handed Paget a picture showing the back of an SUV as it was turning off Edge Hill Road into Lorrimer Drive. The picture was time-stamped 21:40. It wasn’t as clear as it might have been, but the number plate was readable. ‘It belongs to James Bradley,’ Ormside said, ‘and he doesn’t leave again until well into Sunday morning.’ He handed Paget another picture time-stamped 04:21.

  ‘Maybe Mrs Lorrimer invited Bradley over for the night after her husband rang to say he’d be staying on in Worcester,’ Tregalles suggested. ‘Come to think of it, Lorrimer must have seen Bradley’s SUV in the car park when he came in, but he never mentioned that, did he?’

  ‘Perhaps he did notice it, but wasn’t surprised,’ said Paget. ‘Do we know if Sebastian was in the house?’

  Ormside looked at his notes. ‘He went out at nine minutes past eight and came back at eleven nineteen.’

  ‘Stephen Lorrimer made no mention of that, either,’ said Paget, ‘and yet he must have seen Sebastian drive in if he was sitting at the top of those stairs. And Sebastian must have seen Bradley’s SUV when he came home, and wondered what he was doing there at that hour. It sounds as if there was a lot going on in Simla House that night. We have Mrs Lorrimer, Bradley, Sebastian, and Justine and Michael inside the house, and Stephen Lorrimer outside … assuming he’s telling the truth.’

  ‘So what are you thinking, boss?’ Tregalles asked.

  ‘I’m thinking we’ve been lied to by practically everyone in that house from the moment Mrs Lorrimer walked in here to file a missing person’s report,’ Paget said grimly. ‘And I swallowed her story hook, line and sinker. There was no reason not to believe her at the time, but still …’

  He pointed to the whiteboards. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘we know that Justine was alive at eight o’clock on Saturday evening when she phoned Mrs Tillman. We also know that the rug had been changed and the room sanitized by eight o’clock on Monday morning. Mrs Lorrimer herself was forced to confirm that when I asked her about it, because to say anything else would have been inconsistent with what she’d been telling us. She and the others have gone to great pains to give themselves alibis that can be confirmed from roughly eight o’clock on Sunday morning right through till Monday, including a session at the hospital on Sunday night and the early hours of Monday morning with Michael.’

  Paget tapped the whiteboard. ‘Put all that together, and that tells me that Justine Delgado never left the house to go to mass on Easter Sunday, because she was already dead. And since we know it had to have taken at least two people several hours to sanitize the room, and we can account for everyone’s movements for the rest of the time that weekend, the only time Justine could have been killed is late Saturday night or early Sunday morning. I think Stephen Lorrimer did get into the house, and did meet with Justine in her room on Saturday night, and that is when she was killed. Whether he killed her or someone else did, I don’t know, but he certainly didn’t hang around to do any of the cleaning up. He took off back to Worcester and left someone else to do that, and I see Mrs Lorrimer’s hand in that part of the cover-up. And if she was directly involved, Jim Bradley must have been involved as well, since he didn’t leave till sometime after four on Sunday morning.’

  ‘Perhaps we’ve been looking for the wrong cars on River Road,’ Ormside suggested. ‘We’ve been looking for cars belonging to the Lorrimers and Sebastian, but perhaps we should have been looking for Bradley’s SUV. If he was involved, he could have taken Justine’s body out when he left. I’ll have Kajura look at the tapes again, and have her check from the time Bradley left the house.’

  ‘I suspect you might have better luck if you check the River Road tapes from, say, midnight to three o’clock on Monday morning,’ Paget told him, ‘because Bradley didn’t leave Simla House until after four on Sunday morning, which wouldn’t leave him much time to get rid of the body before daybreak. Now all we have to do is prove which one – if it was only one – actually killed Justine.’

  There weren’t many people in the White Hart pub when Tregalles popped in late that afternoon. ‘Easter Saturday? Sorry, can’t help you,’ the man behind the bar said when shown a picture of Sebastian Mills. ‘I wasn’t working that night, but Kelly was. Kelly Goodman – she’s the manager. You’ll find her in the office in the back. You can go through if you like. Down the passage, second door on the right. Just knock and go in.’

  The woman seated behind a cluttered desk when Tregalles opened the door looked vaguely familiar. Blonde, trim figure, a little plump in the face and under the chin, but still a good-looking woman, he thought appreciatively.

  She looked surprised, then suspicious. ‘I know you,’ she said warily. ‘Used to be a regular in the Hart a few years back. You’re the copper, right?’

  ‘DS Tregalles,’ he said. He remembered her now; she’d been the barmaid back then – and one of the reasons he used to drop into the White Hart after work. ‘You’ve got a good memory,’ he said. ‘That was before I was married.’

  A sly smile touched her eyes. ‘So you told me several times, if I remember,’ she said. ‘So, what brings you back now?’

  ‘I’m not here to give you any trouble,’ he assured her. ‘It’s one of your customers I want to ask you about. He says he was in the White Hart with a friend on Easter Saturday. I wondered if you would remember him.’ He took a picture of Sebastian from his pocket and showed it to her.

  Kelly Goodman looked at it and nodded. ‘Easter weekend,’ she said slowly. ‘Oh, yes, I remember him. Made a right nuisance of himself. I refused to serve him in the end and sent him packing.’ She handed the picture back. ‘Why? Someone complained, have they?’

  Friday, 18 May

  Stephen Lorrimer had just stepped out of the shower when he heard the sound of his mobile phone ringing insistently in the bedroom. He ignored it. Six forty-five in the morning? It had to be a wrong number. And if it wasn’t, they could ring again if it was really all that important. He towelled himself dry and padded naked into the bedroom. His BlackBerry was on the bedside table, but he didn’t pick it up until he was completely dressed and ready to go downstairs. Even then, he was tempted to put it in his pocket without looking to see who had called, but curiosity wouldn’t allow him to do that. He looked at the screen and caught his breath.

  ‘Two eggs?’ Julia asked when her husband appeared in the doorway. She stood by the Aga, frying pan in hand. ‘There’s a nice bit of ham left from yesterday’s lunch if you’d like it?’ She frowned. ‘Stephen? What’s wrong?’

  Lorrimer took a deep breath as he moved into the kitchen and sat down. ‘Jason Cutter rang while I was in the shower,’ he said. ‘I called him back. He wanted to know if it was true that the body recovered from the river “down our way”, as he put it, was that of our missing au pair girl. When I said yes, he expressed his sympathy and that of the prime minister, then asked if there were any “implications” that he should know about.’

  Julia set the frying pan down. ‘What did you tell him?’

  He shrugged. ‘What could I say? I just told him that we were all very shocked and quite devastated, and the police were investigating.’

  Julia’s eyes narrowed as they searched his face. ‘And …?’ she prompted.

  Lorrimer furrowed his brow and pursed his lips as if thinking deeply. ‘Let’s see, now,’ he said. ‘How did he phrase it? Ah, yes. He said that, while he was quite sure there was nothing to worry about in my case, he just wanted to remind me that there were those in the media who might try to make something of the fact that Justine had been employed by a sitting MP. He suggested that we keep responses to a minimum, and focus their attention on how devastating this has been for our son. Oh, yes, and by the way, he’d liked to be kept “in the loop, so to speak”, regarding any progress in the investigation into Miss Delgado’s untimely death.’ Lorrimer pushed his chair back and got to his feet. ‘I think that about covers it,’ he said tightly. ‘And don’t bother about brea
kfast; I’m really not hungry. I think I need some fresh air.’

  It was mid-morning when Paget arrived in the incident room after attending a meeting in New Street. He was greeted by Ormside, who eyed him critically. ‘Can’t see any scars,’ he said. ‘How are things in New Street these days?’

  Paget smiled. ‘A lot quieter than they were,’ he said, but didn’t go into details. ‘What’s happening here? And where’s Tregalles?’

  ‘He’s gone to pick up a fax,’ Ormside told him. ‘He should be back any minute now. As for anything new, we’re not doing very well. I was hoping we’d have some results on how they got that body to the river, but there is no sign of Bradley’s SUV on any of the tapes. Forensic thought they might be able to trace the ten-kilo weights that were wired to the body, but it turns out they were made by a Belgian firm that went out of business in the 1970s, so that came to a dead end.’

  Tregalles appeared with a sheet of paper in his hand. ‘Just got this in from Simon Lerner,’ he said. ‘He’s in Tel Aviv. Got his number from his parents here in town, so I spoke to him early this morning, and he faxed me a brief statement confirming what he told me on the phone.’ He saw the quizzical expression on Paget’s face, and grinned. ‘But, then, you don’t know, do you? I dropped into the White Hart on my way home, yesterday, checking up on Sebastian’s movements on Easter Saturday, and I spoke to Kelly Goodman – she’s the manager, but she was behind the bar that night. She remembers Mills and Lerner coming in – Sebastian in particular because he wasn’t a regular, and secondly because of his good looks.