‘No, but I thought I should tell you it’s Peter Hunter’s job. I don’t know how this will affect your thinking, but it seems his wife has finally given up on him and she’s left. He’s taken a leave of absence – he’s been signed off with stress.’
Becky was silent. She really didn’t know what to say, and Tom being the man that he was, he didn’t press her for a comment.
She stared out of the window at the white clouds below. So Peter was free now, was he? Just a few months ago, that would have filled her with joy and hope for the future.
She tried to dig around in her own emotions. What do I feel? Do I want him back? But all she came up with was emptiness and she realised that finally, she felt nothing – neither satisfaction that he had got his comeuppance nor joy that he was free.
Becky leaned back against the headrest and turned slightly towards Tom with a grin.
‘You’re not getting rid of me that easily, Tom.’
‘Good decision,’ he muttered with a trace of a smile, turning his attention back to his notes.
62
Thursday
Tom had spent the night thinking about everything he knew and everything he suspected. He hadn’t seen Leo; he had just sat in his kitchen with a bottle of wine, a plate of pasta and a pen and paper. Nothing got written down, though.
He needed to see Philippa.
As he walked into her room, Philippa stood up with a beaming smile, reaching across the desk to shake his hand.
‘Well done, Tom. That was a particularly excellent piece of police work, and I’ll make a point of seeking out DI Robinson to tell her. But please pass on my congratulations to the team.’
‘Thanks, Philippa. But before we get over-excited, have you got a minute?’
‘Of course, take a seat. Why so glum, Tom? You should be ecstatic.’
Tom wasn’t quite sure where to start.
‘You know Robert Brookes is claiming he’s innocent of Jahander’s death, don’t you? He swears he never left the hotel that night, and that somebody else must have taken his car and driven it back to Manchester to frame him. And of course there isn’t a body as yet.’
Philippa shrugged. ‘Nor likely to be, if it’s at the bottom of a reservoir, as you suspect. And of course he’s going to proclaim his innocence. We wouldn’t have expected anything less, would we? Who else could have wanted Jahander dead?’
Tom shook his head. He had a feeling it wasn’t that simple.
‘Robert asked us to check if the spare keys to his Jag were in the drawer at home. They weren’t – but we’ve only got his word they were ever there.’
‘Tom, we have an open-and-shut case here. We know that Jahander called Robert Brookes in Newcastle. We know that they arranged to meet and Brookes came home. He was seen by not one, but two people. We found the blood in the house and in his car, which was back in Newcastle by the morning – a knife was missing, and it was subsequently replaced. By Robert. And Jahander is missing. Nobody has seen or heard of him since last Wednesday.’
‘I know, Philippa, but there’s something not quite right about the whole thing. Robert bought a replacement knife but we have no idea what happened to the original, and it’s odd that although he had the precise product code written down, it was the wrong product code. Yes, somebody did call Robert from Sophie Duncan’s phone. But they could have said anything. We have no evidence other than Sophie’s word that it was Danush setting up a meeting. But that’s only one of the things that seems off. I tried to write it all down, but it didn’t make any more sense than just picking random threads out of my head.’
‘Well, whatever’s bothering you, fire away with those random thoughts and I’ll jot them down. See if we can sort it all out that way.’
‘I think Olivia Brookes has played a very clever game,’ Tom said. ‘She managed to convince her husband that she was somewhere she wasn’t on at least three occasions that we know of. With Sophie Duncan’s help, of course.’
‘Who can blame her? From everything we’ve learned, it seems that Robert’s obsession was getting more and more out of hand. Olivia is a clever and resourceful woman, and thank goodness for that.’ Philippa nodded her head, as if with respect.
‘She is. But I’m fairly certain that Olivia must have been the one to tamper with the videos on Robert’s computer.’
Philippa gave Tom a puzzled frown.
‘Why would she do that? Was it to fool Robert into thinking she’d been there all along?’
‘It could have been. But she wasn’t coming back – so what did it matter what Robert thought? I think we were supposed to work out that they were fake, but assume Robert had tampered with them. Which, of course, is exactly what we did.’
Philippa was tapping her pen on the desk.
‘I’m struggling to see quite why this matters, Tom.’
‘Okay, why did we search the house?’ Tom didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Because we thought that Robert had lied to us repeatedly. If he hadn’t done a runner, the next thing we were going to do was check his computer. We would have found the videos, analysed them and discovered that they were all faked, as was the schedule on the kitchen wall. Once we knew that, we would have been certain that Robert had been lying to us about Olivia’s whereabouts and when she’d last been in that house, and I would have had to call in the crime scene boys. I think this trail of evidence was all left for us so we would eventually bring in the forensic team, search the house and find the blood.
Tom wasn’t making any headway, and he could understand why not. He hadn’t been able to work it all out himself, but he was sure that he was pretty close.
‘And there are little things, like the security light suddenly being knocked out of position so that it shines in the neighbour’s house and wakes her up. Too many coincidences.’
Philippa was leafing through the papers on her desk.
‘Tell me about the folder you found in Robert Brookes’ possession.’
Tom sighed. This made it all so much worse.
‘We think this is what he was hiding behind the bookcase. It had a false back with a space that appeared to have been accessed recently. The folder’s a good fit, but we’ll never know for sure. Anyway, inside the folder there were hundreds of photographs of Olivia, and a key.’
‘And what do you surmise from that.’
‘The photographs of Olivia were from when she was a student at university. They were obviously taken without her knowledge – they’re a bit grainy as if a not-very-good telephoto lens was used. Olivia at parties, Olivia doing a charity pole dance, laughing, dancing, studying in the library – just hundreds of them – all taken before she claims to have met Robert Brookes. My guess is that he was obsessed with her for a long time, and perhaps thought he was in with a chance until she had the baby.’
Philippa nodded, as if this sort of obsession were normal. But of course, it just made his ramblings seem even less compelling.
‘And the key?’ she asked.
‘I would never be able to prove this, I don’t suppose. But I suspect it’s a key to Olivia’s parents’ home. If he’s as smart as I think he is, Robert would have had the locks changed when he was put in charge of selling the house. As a precaution. This is his memento.’
Philippa leaned back in her chair.
‘Wow. You think he killed her parents?’
‘I’m sure of it, but I’ve no evidence. At some point when he was checking out the flat – I don’t know, measuring space for his TV or something – he must have nicked her keys and had one cut. Knowing what we know about him now, he probably had the whole lot copied, just in case they ever came in handy. He would have known that without her parents, Olivia was all alone and she would only have him to rely on. It was the perfect way to make her utterly dependent on him at the worst time of her life.’
‘You seem to be saying that you believe Olivia has framed Robert Brookes. So let me get this straight. You think he killed the parents, but you don’t think he
killed Danush Jahander.’
Tom shook his head. ‘No, not at all. I’m absolutely certain he killed Jahander.’
Philippa lifted her arms and let them fall by her sides in total bewilderment.
‘But it wasn’t last week. I think he killed Danush Jahander nine years ago.’
63
Tom had stayed with Philippa for the best part of an hour, going over everything he believed to be true, and in the end she had told him to go home. She wanted him to think very carefully about this and about his next steps. So he had called Leo. She was at home today with no lectures, and she sounded unusually welcoming.
‘You sound depressed, Tom. Come here to my apartment. I’ll make you my version of a late lunch, and we can talk or just listen to music, or you can sleep if you like.’
That sounded like bliss to Tom. Leo was the most soothing company he could imagine, and within half an hour he was ringing her doorbell.
To begin with, he said nothing about the case, other than to tell Leo what a magical place he thought Alderney was. He found himself saying they would have to go there some time, and Leo agreed. He couldn’t think about what that might mean just now.
They ate lunch, which meant Leo had been to the deli on the corner and bought some delicious cheese, crusty bread and red onion marmalade. It seemed perfect with a glass of wine, and Tom felt himself begin to unwind.
‘Have you thought any more about the cottage?’ Leo asked. He knew she meant the break-in, but this was a gentler way of reminding him.
‘Steve’s taken all the files into storage for me so the papers are safe. But you know what? I’m going to look through them all when I next get a few days off. I’m going to find out what on earth is so interesting about my brother’s documents. Because there’s something, I’m sure of that.’
‘If you need any help, you only have to ask.’ Leo said, standing up from the kitchen stool and heading towards the coffee machine. She pointed to it and raised her eyebrows.
‘Yes please, that would be perfect.’
‘Well, you go and relax, and I’ll bring you some coffee as soon as it’s ready,’ she said, making shooing gestures with her hands.
Tom sat on the sofa and leaned against the soft cushions, his head back, gazing blindly at the ceiling. He felt, rather than saw, Leo place a mug of coffee on the small table next to him, and she knelt between his legs resting her hands on his knees.
‘Tell me,’ was all she said.
And so he did. Without taking his eyes off the same point on the ceiling where a thick beam was supporting the roof, he told her everything he knew, and everything he suspected.
‘So if you’re right, who was the man that visited Sophie Duncan?’
‘We’ve shown Mrs Evans a photo of Dan, but it’s nine years old. She wasn’t able to confirm or deny it. We were obviously supposed to believe it was him, though – we had to have as much evidence as possible that he was alive and kicking ten days or so ago.’
‘Can you prove any of this?’ she asked. At that he shifted his gaze to look at Leo and after a brief pause shook his head.
‘I don’t think so. If I’m right about how they did this, we would need enough of the blood found at the scene to test for citrates.’
‘What would that prove?’
‘If, as I suspect, nobody really did die in that room, the blood must have come from a living person. To take so much blood and not kill somebody it would have to be done a pint or two at a time over a period of days or even weeks – and the blood would have to be stored ready for being sprayed on the wall. They’d need to add a chemical to stop the blood from coagulating. Some form of citrate. I looked it up last night to be sure, but it’s not part of a routine forensic test.’
‘So what’s the problem?’
‘Jumbo told me they found microscopic amounts of blood. Enough for DNA, but not enough to test for citrates.’
‘And what does Philippa say?’
‘She said emphatically that she doesn’t want any further investigation. We have what appears to be a cast-iron case against Robert, and I have absolutely no evidence at all that he’s been set up. If I can prove it, she’ll look again but gut instinct alone isn’t enough. And of course, if I’m convinced Robert Brookes killed three people nine years ago but I can’t prove it, we should go with what we’ve got. I can’t prove a thing about either then or now. What I do know is that he swore he didn’t know Olivia at university, but he was lying. And when we told him that the person visiting his wife in Anglesey – when we still believed it was his wife – was Jahander, he actually thought it was funny, which you might expect if he knew the guy was dead.’
‘So Philippa wants you to leave it, and you don’t agree.’ It was a statement, not a question.
Tom closed his eyes. He didn’t want to say this, but he had to.
‘Do you remember last year I told you there was one secret that I would keep from you – and from anybody – for the rest of my life?’
He knew she wouldn’t have forgotten, and he had always wondered if this was the last remaining hurdle that they couldn’t overcome. He didn’t need to wait for her answer.
‘The truth is, I let a murderer go free. I acted as judge and jury, and my conscience has plagued me ever since. I still think I was right. But it’s not my job to make those decisions. It’s why we have a justice system – and a bloody good one at that. Sometimes, occasionally, you know that the outcome of playing it by the book won’t be morally right. That’s Philippa’s view in this case. But I’m not sure I can do it again and live with it.’
Leo grabbed his hands, and pulled one towards her cheek. She kissed the palm gently.
‘Then let Philippa be the one to make the decision. If this man goes free, will he kill those children?’
Tom leaned back again, and he felt his eyes sting.
‘Probably.’
‘So you’re locking him up for life for a crime he did commit, only not in the way your evidence suggests. That can’t be wrong, Tom. But let this one be on Philippa’s conscience. Not on yours.’
He said nothing and stared back up at the beam.
They were both silent for a moment. Tom felt her move closer, her soft breast brushing against the inside of his leg. He almost groaned. He could hear her breathing, shallow and fast, and he could smell the subtle spice of her perfume. So close.
‘I think what I love most about you, Tom,’ she said, her voice low and hesitant, ‘is how honest you are. You never let anybody down. You’re the first man I’ve ever felt I could truly trust.’
Tom held his breath. If only she meant it. Despite all his efforts to control his feelings, he knew without a doubt he was in love with this woman. He lowered his head, and looked at her beautiful, wary eyes. She met his gaze and he felt as if nothing else existed in the world.
He felt Leo’s hands move. They slid up his thighs and she leaned towards his chest.
‘Stay with me tonight,’ she said softly.
Tom reached out a hand and stroked her hair. ‘And tomorrow?’
She turned her face and kissed his hand where it lay against her hair.
‘And tomorrow,’ she smiled, ‘and maybe even the day after.’
64
November
The car is bumping along the narrow track, and I’m trying my best to avoid the largest of the boulders and the holes in the road. At last I’ve got a decent car instead of that stupid Beetle that Robert bought me. Pretty as it was, it had to be the most impractical car possible for a woman with three young children. I can still remember my horror when Robert turned up with it. Fortunately, he translated my open mouth as awe and delight.
‘Fuck, Liv, can you just be a bit more careful. You’ll have me back in bloody hospital if you jerk me around much more.’
I laugh out loud. It is so wonderful to be with my friend. Unfortunately Sophie has been forced to have another round of operations on her leg as Robert’s attack did more damage than the docto
rs had originally thought. But she said she wouldn’t miss today for anything. She knows how much I need her.
We have reached the end of the track, and it’s time to get out and face the early November weather. A thin drizzle hangs in the air, as if suspended. I shiver, but there is something magnificent about the bleakness of Saddleworth Moor. Standing here, it’s hard to believe we are so close to Manchester. The only signs of life are the sheep and a scattering of stone farmhouses in the distance, nestling in their protective hollows. The hills are treeless at this height, but the ground is covered with a blanket of grass interspersed with patches of bare peat, forming a carpet of green and brown mixed with the faded purple of spent heather.
‘How far do we have to walk?’ Sophie asks me, grabbing her walking stick from the back seat.
‘Not far,’ I reply, hoping I have remembered correctly. I don’t want any more damage to Sophie on my conscience.
‘Are you sure it’s the right place?’ she asks.
To be honest, I’m not. But it will be close enough.
We start walking away from the track and on to the moorland, clambering over a wooden stile.
‘Do you think he’ll come?’ I ask Sophie. I’m nervous about seeing him, but it’s right to have him here.
‘He said he would, and he’s never let you down before, has he?’ Sophie plonks herself down on the spongy surface, clearly oblivious to the damp that must be penetrating her jeans. ‘Do you want me to leave you on your own for a bit?’ she asks.
But I don’t want to be alone. I just want to wait to see if he comes.
We’re quiet while we wait, perhaps both listening to the silence. Finally we hear the distant sound of tyres crunching over stones on the rough track. A pheasant is noisily disturbed from the undergrowth and its loud raspy cackle makes me jump.
The car pulls up behind mine, and a man gets out, slamming the car door behind him. I gasp. He has grown his hair to just below his collar, where it curls in the damp air. Just for a moment, I believe the impossible.
Sophie is struggling to her feet. ‘You found us then,’ she calls.
Tom Douglas Box Set Page 110