The second phone had belonged to Gerry Barham, and a text had been sent from it that afternoon, hours after Gerry’s disappearance and almost certainly after his death, to Sam Ferguson. The text instructing Sam to go to the old chapel at Eastleigh.
Granger was carrying little else when he was arrested, just some cash, a credit card, and a bunch of several keys. Vogel took a bet with himself that amongst these would be keys to Felix and Jane Ferguson’s home, almost certainly also copied by Gerry Barham and forwarded to his mysterious employers.
Granger had the name of what appeared to be a standard High Street solicitor in Exeter. It was way after office hours, and it took time to track the man down. Whilst waiting to begin, Vogel tried two or three times to phone Nobby Clarke in order to report to her directly. She wasn’t picking up, which was unusual.
Meanwhile, DC Perkins reported back on his interview with Anne Barham.
‘She says Gerry was a civil servant with the Ministry of Defence, working in various departments over the years, usually dealing with finance,’ said Perkins. ‘Deployment of funds to the military, that sort of thing. I honestly don’t think she had any idea he might be anything more than that, boss. He was a mathematician apparently.’
‘Ah yes, along with half of GCHQ,’ muttered Vogel, who was also aware that recruits to all three British secret intelligence services, MI5, MI6, and GCHQ, were instructed to use the ‘civil servant with the MoD’ job description in their personal life.
The solicitor finally arrived more than two hours later, to find not a lot was required of him. Jimmy eschewed the opportunity to discuss his case with the man. He had, it appeared, no real reason to do so, as during the formal interview which followed, Jimmy made only one reply.
He answered ‘no comment’ to every question.
The solicitor merely sat in silence.
Vogel suspected Granger had been deliberately time-wasting. He wondered what behind the scenes skulduggery might already be taking place, possibly instigated by the man’s call to London.
Whatever the case, Vogel, who had himself deliberately delayed talking to Felix Ferguson again until after interviewing Granger, now realized that he may as well get on with it.
Saslow activated the video equipment in the small interview room, and made the usual announcement of those present, as a matter of record.
Vogel then took charge.
He began by telling Felix that there had been an attempt on his father’s life and that Gerry Barham had been murdered.
Felix turned ashen. He looked shocked and bewildered.
‘W-what’s happening, Mr Vogel?’ he asked haltingly. ‘I-I don’t understand. Is my father hurt?’
‘Not badly,’ said Vogel. ‘Just bruised and shaken.’
Felix nodded a little absently. He was clearly trying to concentrate.
‘And Gerry is dead? Murdered, you say. Does any of this have anything to do with Jane’s death?’
‘We don’t know for certain, but we think so. It would be the most extraordinary set of coincidences if not.’
Vogel then explained about Gerry Barham’s surveillance operation, the installation of a hidden surveillance camera in Jane and Felix’s bedroom, and Sam Ferguson’s complicity in it all.
Felix was incredulous. Of course he’d had no idea he and Jane were being filmed, he insisted. It was unbelievably shocking. He became even more shocked after Vogel asked him if he knew a man called Jimmy Granger. At first he said he didn’t think so. Then he said the name might be familiar.
‘Wait a minute, he’s a new member of the yacht club, I think,’ said Felix eventually. ‘What’s he got to do with it?’
‘We think he was sent to Instow by persons as yet unknown, after Gerry Barham reported back on the results of his surveillance on Jane. Probably in order to take whatever action might be deemed necessary.’
For a moment or two Felix stared blankly at Vogel, in silence. He seemed to be having difficulty in taking in everything the DCI was saying. Vogel did not entirely blame him.
‘I still don’t understand,’ he said eventually. ‘Why would anything filmed by that damned camera make someone want to kill Jane?’
‘I have no idea, Felix,’ replied Vogel. ‘I was hoping you might.’
Felix shook his head. He did not speak.
‘C’mon, Felix,’ said Vogel sharply. ‘Your wife is dead. You have been arrested on suspicion of her murder. I am trying to get to the truth here. For Jane’s sake, please give me some assistance. At least, tell me all you know.’
Felix sat up a little straighter in his chair.
‘All right,’ he said, a note of resignation in his voice. ‘Jane was having terrible dreams, you know that. There was one night, n-not long before she died, when things got particularly bad. I was woken in the night by screaming. I found her in the children’s bedroom. She had little Jo in her arms, and she was shaking her. It was terrible. Awful. I snatched Jo away from Jane. And, well, then I lost my temper, I don’t often do that. I was in shock, I think. I, uh, I hit out. I struck my wife in the face …’
Felix paused.
‘But presumably you know that?’ he queried. ‘You’ll have seen it all by now, I assume. I mean, we were being filmed. In our own bedroom. Jesus!’
‘No,’ replied Vogel, adding disingenuously, ‘your father doesn’t actually have the footage, but we do expect to recover it in the near future from other sources.’
‘He’s seen it, though? Damn him. Must have done. And presumably told you all about it?’
‘He told us that he had seen film of you hitting your wife, and how your ring cut her face,’ said Vogel. ‘You lied to us about that, didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Felix admitted. ‘But wouldn’t you? It was the only time I ever hit Jane, and I was ashamed. In spite of the circumstances, I regretted it as soon as I struck her. And I knew it would look bad for me, after I realized I was your prime suspect.’
‘What about your wife’s other bruises?’
‘I told you before. She fell in the garden playing with the twins. That was absolutely true.’
Vogel thought it almost certainly was. But he intended to pile all the pressure he could on the other man.
‘Is it, Felix?’ he asked.
‘Yes, yes, I promise you, Mr Vogel,’ said Felix.
‘All right. Let’s say I accept that, for the moment, and we move on. What happened next that night?’
‘Uh, nothing much. We both went to bed and to sleep. At least I slept. I don’t know about Jane.’
‘She woke you up, didn’t she? In the middle of the night?’
Felix sighed.
‘Yes. OK. She woke me up. So you know about that?’
‘Yes. The camera was activated by movement.’
‘Then if you know what happened, why are you asking me about it now?’ asked Felix wearily.
‘I don’t know what happened,’ replied Vogel honestly. ‘Your father indicated that Jane shared with you something of considerable enormity. That she remembered something terrible about her past which she revealed to you that night. And almost certainly it was what she remembered that started the chain of events leading ultimately to her death. But your father wouldn’t tell me what it was. He said he had intruded enough on you and Jane. I need you to tell me, Felix, exactly what Jane remembered.’
‘You said you had sources who were going to give you the film from that night, so why do you need me to tell you anything?’ countered Felix stubbornly.
‘Because I don’t know how long that might take,’ replied Vogel, which in itself was true enough. ‘And I don’t want any further delay in completing this investigation. I should remind you that you are already guilty of withholding evidence. As is your father. And I should warn you, as I already have him, that I am on the verge of charging you both with perverting the course of justice.’
Felix smiled without humour.
‘Not much of a threat as I’m banged up already accused of murd
ering Jane,’ he said.
‘But you have not been charged,’ murmured Vogel.
Felix looked thoughtful, as if he could maybe see a glimmer of at least a certain degree of hope.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Look, one of the reasons I didn’t tell you this before, is that I didn’t really believe what Jane said she’d remembered. I mean. I couldn’t. I couldn’t believe it. If I’d let myself accept what Jane told me as the truth, it would have been the end really, the end of our life together, it would have had to be …’
Felix stopped, lowering his head into his hands.
‘Please go on,’ said Vogel. It was half an instruction, half encouragement.
Felix looked up. There were tears in his eyes.
‘J-Jane said that when she came round after I’d found her shaking Joanna, long-buried memories started to return,’ he began haltingly. ‘Q-quite terrifying memories, which she believed were what lay behind her nightmares, causing her to wake up screaming hysterically. She said she thought her regression therapy may have taken her back to the cause of her bad dreams. But she truly had never known exactly what they were about until that night. Then she just blurted it out.
‘“I killed my own sister, I stabbed her to death, that is what my dreams are about,” she said.’
Felix paused to wipe away the tears which were now running down his cheeks.
Vogel remained silent, with difficulty. He certainly had not expected this. He knew he was blinking at speed behind his spectacles. He was aware of Saslow sitting very still beside him. Both of them were waiting anxiously for Felix to continue, desperate that nothing should stop him from doing so.
‘Jane looked absolutely stricken, and I was just completely stunned,’ Felix began again, after just a few seconds.
‘“When you found me holding Joanna, shaking Joanna, it all came back to me,” she said.
‘She’d remembered back to when she was a little girl, to one night when her mother came into the bedroom she shared with her sister, and a kind of horror story unfolded. She suddenly became aware that her sister was dead beside her. And, that she was holding a knife. A knife dripping blood.
‘“I was screaming, and my mother was screaming – at least I think the woman was my mother, she must have been, but it wasn’t clear,” Jane told me. “Everything else was crystal clear. I had this knife with a big long blade in my hand. And there was blood everywhere.”
‘Well, I just couldn’t believe my ears. I didn’t handle it well. I didn’t handle it at all. I just jumped out of bed shouting that it couldn’t be, she must be mistaken, the damned trick cyclist had messed with her brain. It was all just another dream.
‘Jane wouldn’t have it. She said she was quite sure of what had happened. That she was suddenly very certain about her early childhood. She’d been one of twins, like our children. And the sister who died, the sister she had killed, had been her twin. That seemed to make it even worse, somehow, if anything could be worse.
‘I still insisted that I didn’t believe her. That it couldn’t be real. It was all just inside her head.
‘But the truth was I didn’t know what the hell to believe. I did know that if I admitted to myself that I had any doubts at all, I would have to leave Jane, I would have to destroy our family because I wouldn’t be able to trust Jane with our children. I just ran out of the room, leaving Jane with tears running down her face. And afterwards I went into a kind of denial. I was worried sick, of course, but I just kept on telling myself it had only been a dream, it must have been only a dream. Jane had never killed anyone, whatever she thought she remembered. The only way I could carry on was to convince myself of that. And tell no one. I wouldn’t even talk about it to Jane.
‘Then later, of course, I believed it was the reason that Jane had killed herself. Which we all thought she had. At first, anyway. I felt so guilty that I hadn’t helped her.’
Felix stopped quite abruptly. Vogel decided it was time to intervene.
‘Yet, after Jane’s death, you withheld this information from the police, even though you must have known how significant it could be,’ said Vogel sternly. ‘Why did you do that?’
‘For my children,’ replied Felix. ‘I feared it all becoming public knowledge. As it probably would have done at an inquest, let alone a trial. How could I let my children grow up thinking their mother was a killer?’
Vogel was a father. He couldn’t help feeling considerable sympathy for Felix Ferguson. He decided to put the other man out of his misery. In as much as anything could under such tragic circumstances.
‘All right, Felix,’ said the DCI. ‘You should know that Jimmy Granger has been arrested on suspicion of the murder of both Jane and Gerry Barham, and of attempting to murder your father. And in view of this development, I am going to arrange for you to be released from custody.’
Felix sat back in his chair and closed his eyes, just for a few seconds. Vogel could see the relief washing over him.
‘I still don’t understand, though, Mr Vogel,’ he remarked. ‘Suicide would make an awful sort of sense. But murder? Why would Jane’s dream, true or not, make anyone want to kill her? Now. All these years later.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Vogel honestly. ‘But I intend to find out …’
Quite abruptly, Felix sat bolt upright.
‘I’ve just realized something,’ he said. ‘If my father hadn’t made that wicked pact with Gerry Barham, Jane would still be alive. Nobody would have known that she had remembered the cause of her dreams. Nobody would have known anything.’
‘Well, we can’t be sure of that, Felix,’ said Vogel.
‘Oh, yes we can,’ said Felix, the horror of it showing in his eyes. ‘If he had reported Barham to the police, none of this would have happened. I don’t see that there is any doubt about that.’
At three in the morning, after another two unsuccessful attempts at interviewing Jimmy Granger, an exhausted Vogel and Saslow prepared to return to the Seagate.
On the way Vogel called DI Peters, who was also still at work, to check on developments at the incident room.
She quickly told him that the second interview of Sid Merton, the witness who claimed to have seen Gerry sailing towards the estuary on the morning of his death, had produced highly significant results.
‘When pushed he admitted that the person at the helm of the Lady Anne had been wearing a woolly hat pulled down over his ears and sunglasses, that the boat had been right in the middle of the river, and that he couldn’t be absolutely sure it was Gerry, but had just assumed it was because it was Gerry’s boat.
‘He also said that, upon reflection, there had been something a little unusual. He’d noticed that the Lady Anne was towing one of the rubber dinghies the NDYC members use as tenders to get out to their boats on their river moorings. Apparently, they usually leave them on the moorings.’
‘Do we know if those dinghies have outboards?’ asked Vogel.
‘Only small ones, boss, about two hp, but yes they do,’ replied DI Peters.
‘Do we know if one of those dinghies could get someone ashore from way out in the estuary? Particularly in the weather we had yesterday.’
‘I’ve already had it checked out, boss. Apparently the answer is yes. It could do the job. And don’t forget the weather didn’t kick up until three or four hours after Barham set off.’
‘Well, well,’ said Vogel. ‘That might solve one mystery, mightn’t it?’
He then asked Peters if there was any news from CSI at Granger’s flat.
She replied that she wasn’t sure if they’d even got there yet. HQ at Exeter had diverted the team she’d allocated to a major road traffic accident on the Devon link road, involving more than one fatal casualty.
‘They said that as Granger was in custody he couldn’t hide any evidence there might be at his home, so there was no urgency,’ Peters reported.
Vogel cursed silently. He remained unable to contact Nobby Clarke. Peters’ CSI news adde
d to his unease. He feared he might no longer be entirely in charge of his own investigation.
‘What about Granger’s keys?’ he asked.
Peters replied that CSI had the keys, which they would be checking out as part of their further investigations.
When they finally got to any of the crime scenes, thought Vogel.
Peters also told him that all attempts to trace the London number stored on Granger’s burner phone had failed. As Vogel had more or less expected.
‘It’s unlisted,’ she said.
Vogel had blue-toothed his phone through the car’s speakers so Saslow could hear the conversation. She’d been unimpressed.
‘How the heck can a number like that be unlisted?’ she asked Vogel irritably, after he’d ended the call. ‘I didn’t think there was any such thing. It’s an 0207 number isn’t it?’
‘Was,’ said Vogel. ‘I’d take a bet it no longer even rings out. I’ll try it again later just to make sure. With the people we are dealing with anything is possible. They play by different rules to the rest of us.’
‘And since when did teams on a murder enquiry get diverted to an RTA?’ Saslow continued.
‘I’m not sure I know the answer to that, but I do know I’m not happy about it,’ said Vogel.
‘Surely, we’ve got Granger bang to rights, anyway, though, haven’t we, boss?’ continued Saslow.
‘I do hope so, Dawn,’ said Vogel. ‘And I think we now know how he staged Gerry Barham’s death too. I reckon it was Granger that Sid Merton saw at the helm of the Lady Anne, and Gerry Barham was already dead and hidden from view. Then, when he was far enough away from shore, Granger rigged up the rudder so that the boat would carry on going out to sea until it ran out of petrol, whilst he decamped into the dinghy to get himself home. Once the storm got up, the helpless Lady Anne was swept in on the next tide and smashed to pieces – as the RNLI reported, and just as Granger had planned. The North Devon coast must be one of the most unforgiving in the country, too. We’ve seen that for ourselves, Saslow.’
Dreams of Fear Page 27