Broken Silence

by Danielle Ramsay

  Madley smiled, baring his perfectly straight white teeth.

  ‘Do you really think I’m going to tell you, Jack? You’re a copper and always will be.’

  Brady looked out of the window. The horizon was a mute grey, matching the depressing sea.

  ‘I need to find Jimmy, that’s all. But I can’t get hold of him. Seems he’s trying to avoid you.’

  ‘What makes you think Jimmy’s hiding from me?’

  ‘Gibbs and that new sidekick of his for starters. It’s hard not to notice those two when they’re sat outside Jimmy’s house.’

  Madley smiled as he shook his head.

  ‘I’ll leave it to Jimmy to fill you in on what he’s done, Jack.’

  Brady let it go.

  ‘I see he’s still with you then?’ Madley said as he gestured towards Conrad’s parked car.

  ‘Yeah,’ muttered Brady. ‘He’s a good bloke to have around.’

  ‘Must be,’ said Madley. ‘What about Claudia?’

  Brady shook his head dejectedly as he stared at the blackening horizon.

  ‘No … nothing …’

  Madley shrugged.

  ‘Give her time, Jack.’

  Brady nodded as he thought it over.

  ‘Martin?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘If you track him down, let me talk to him?’ Brady asked.

  Madley narrowed his glinting brown eyes as he weighed up what Brady was asking.

  ‘I’ve got to find the bastard first.’

  Brady waited until he was outside before calling Matthews. Still no answer.

  ‘You stupid bugger, Jimmy,’ Brady said under his breath.

  The only thing he could do was keep his head down and get on with the investigation in the vain hope that Matthews would see sense and contact him before Gibbs and his sidekick got hold of him.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  ‘Pull over,’ Brady instructed, suddenly realising they were already on Tynemouth Front Street. And he was late. It was after 3.44 pm.

  He had been preoccupied with his conversation with Madley and his insight into Matthews, who still wasn’t answering any of his calls, despite Brady leaving explicit messages to get back to him ASAP.

  ‘Should have guessed,’ Conrad said as he noted Wolfe’s racing green vintage MG parked opposite The Turk’s Head. ‘I take it that Wolfe’s expecting me as well?’

  Brady raised his eyebrow at him. They both knew the score.

  ‘Actually, I want you to attend this afternoon’s press conference on my behalf, while I go over the post-mortem findings with Wolfe.’

  The last place Brady wanted to be was sat before a room of journalists baying for blood. And he didn’t want that blood to be Matthews', or his come to that. The journalist at the crime scene had unnerved him when she had asked outright if Matthews’ suspension from the investigation was connected in any way to the murder. He definitely didn’t want to be held to ransom by her at the press conference. And given that it had only been six months since Brady himself had made the front pages when he had been shot, he didn’t want his failed undercover drugs bust coming up either.

  ‘There is only one slight problem, sir. Gates is expecting you,’ Conrad reminded him.

  Exactly, thought Brady. That in itself was a good enough reason. Gates was starting to get antsy about Matthews. Things were starting to turn from bad to worse. He now had confirmation that the victim had spent the hours leading up to her death with Matthews’ daughter. This was news that he’d have to relay to the rest of the team at the briefing later. What worried him was that it made Matthews’ behaviour at the crime scene, and now his sudden disappearance, all the more problematic. And right now, after his talk with Madley, Brady didn’t want to be answering any awkward questions; either from the press or his boss.

  ‘Tell Gates that I’ll report back to him as soon as I’ve finished with Wolfe,’ Brady instructed.

  ‘Yes sir, but he won’t be happy,’ answered Conrad.

  ‘He never bloody is where I’m concerned, so it won’t make much difference, will it?’

  ‘What about getting back to the station?’

  ‘I’ll get Wolfe to drive me. Maybe I’ll even go home and pick up my own car,’ Brady replied.

  ‘I don’t think you’d get very far. Do you, sir?’

  Brady automatically looked down. Conrad was right. His leg was buggered and there was no way he could use it; every time he put pressure on it he felt as if someone was giving him electric shock treatment, straight up his left inner thigh to his balls. No, he’d have to make do with charity for now.

  ‘I’m under orders from DCI Gates to be your chaperon for the next few weeks, sir. Until you settle back in, so to speak,’ Conrad stated uncomfortably.

  Bloody great, thought Brady. He needed to get back into Matthews’ house later and the last person he wanted witnessing his break-in was Conrad. He didn’t want to involve Conrad any more than he had to.

  ‘Conrad? Not a word about my visit to Madley.’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell, sir,’ answered Conrad.

  Brady got out of the car. He steeled himself for his update with Wolfe. If his hunch was right, the post-mortem would have uncovered a darker side to Sophie’s life.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Brady breathed in the lingering stale smell of alcohol and furniture polish as he walked into the pub.

  He nodded respectfully at the one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old collie dog, lying immortalised in a glass display box mounted against the wall. This was The Turk’s Head, otherwise known affectionately by the locals as The Stuffed Dog for obvious reasons.

  ‘You’re late, laddie!’

  Brady smiled to himself. He would recognise that wheezy gruff accent anywhere. Despite having worked in the North East for years he still hadn’t lost the rough edges of his northern Scottish tongue. He turned to see Wolfe.

  ‘It’s been one of those days,’ Brady apologised.

  ‘Tell me about it!’ Wolfe wheezed. ‘Just finished with that girl of yours and they’ve already put someone else on bloody ice for me. And I’ve got three more before I get to him. It’s like a damned conveyor belt.’

  Brady raised his eyebrows.

  ‘A floater. Dragged out the Tyne about two hours ago.’

  ‘Jumped or pushed?’

  Matthews’ problem with Madley was still niggling him. He knew what Madley was capable of and that worried him.

  ‘Why are you so interested?’ Wolfe asked. ‘Haven’t you already got your hands full with the murdered girl?’

  ‘Just the copper in me.’

  ‘I’d say suicide,’ answered Wolfe. ‘But can’t say for sure until I’ve had a proper look.’

  Relieved, Brady nodded. He was keenly aware that Matthews’ disappearance was starting to make him paranoid. He tried to relax and put his concerns about Matthews to the back of his mind.

  ‘Do you want another pint?’ Brady asked, heading for the bar.

  ‘I want a smoke. That’s what I want. Bloody ridiculous, at my time of life I shouldn’t have to freeze my bollocks off just to have a ciggy,’ Wolfe wheezed.

  Brady frowned as he watched Wolfe suddenly gasp for breath.

  ‘Just need a ciggy, that’s all,’ he wheezed breathlessly as he bent forward and thumped his chest.

  Wolfe shot Brady a questioning look when he returned with a soft drink.

  ‘So, are you going to spit it out?’ Wolfe asked, eyeing Brady suspiciously. ‘I’ve known you a long time, laddie, and I’ve never seen you off your drink. Not a healthy sign if you want my medical opinion.’

  Brady resisted the urge to tell Wolfe his medical opinion was worth shit. The only patients Wolfe dealt with were well past resuscitation. Coupled with the fact that Wolfe was a hard drinker, whose gut instincts made him deeply suspicious of any man who didn’t drink. Sobriety wasn’t a voluntary condition in his book.

  ‘First day back and there’s a lot of shit flying around,�
�� said Brady.

  ‘Matthews or your murder victim?’

  ‘What have you heard about Matthews?’ Brady questioned, trying not to look concerned.

  ‘That the lad went a bit soft at the crime scene and ended up being pulled from the investigation. Why? Is there more to tell?’

  ‘No, that’s as much as I know.’

  Wolfe shook his jowly head as he studied Brady.

  ‘You look like shit. You need a proper drink in you, laddie.’

  ‘Thanks!’

  ‘How long have I known you?’ Wolfe asked.

  ‘Too bloody long.’

  ‘Long enough to know that it’s got to be something serious for you to be off your drink.’

  Brady shrugged.

  ‘Like I said, first day back and all.’

  ‘The job’s never gotten to you before, laddie.’

  Brady casually shrugged.

  ‘I should have known. Claudia, eh? You should have told me to keep my bloody mouth shut,’ Wolfe stated.

  ‘Well, seeing as you feel so bad about it you can take these off my hands then,’ Brady said, suddenly remembering the concert tickets he’d stuffed in his coat pocket months ago. They had arrived a few days before he had been shot and he had grabbed the envelope off the hall floor, not wanting Claudia to see them. He had shoved them in his jacket and had forgotten about them until today.

  He pulled out an envelope from the inside of his jacket.

  He pushed it towards Wolfe.

  ‘What’s this?’ Wolfe asked as he looked at the two tickets inside.

  ‘I booked these for Claudia and I before …’ Brady faltered, shrugging. ‘Well, I’ve got no use for them now.’

  ‘How did you get hold of these? I heard they’d sold out within a few days?’

  ‘I have my contacts.’

  ‘I can’t,’ answered Wolfe, as he ran a hand over his smooth, bald head. ‘It wouldn’t feel right. Why don’t you give them to Claudia instead?’

  Brady shook his head.

  ‘She’s in London and from what I’ve heard she’s got no intention of coming back.’

  Wolfe still looked unconvinced.

  ‘Seriously, you’d be doing me a favour. Take a date with you,’ Brady suggested.

  John Tavener was one of the few contemporary British composers that Brady really liked. In particular, ‘The Protecting Veil’ was an evocative and haunting piece that had remained with Brady from the first moment he had heard it, more than a decade earlier. But, despite his appreciation of the piece, the last place he wanted to be was at The Sage in Gateshead, sat on his own, listening to music that would painfully remind him of everything that was wrong with his life. He could do that at home, sat in the dark holding on to a bottle of Scotch.

  ‘When the hell have you ever known me have a date, laddie?’ snorted Wolfe as he resignedly accepted the tickets.

  For once Wolfe had him. Brady couldn’t answer because he couldn’t remember either. It was fair to say Wolfe was married first to his job and then to drink. Ormaybe it was the other way round? Brady wasn’t that sure any more.

  Regardless of his relationship with alcohol, Wolfe was always impeccably dressed. He wore tailored suits, silk shirts and matching ties. And he always sported a silk handkerchief in his suit pocket. But his jowly face was starting to show the telltale signs of his affair with booze.

  ‘Right!’ blustered Wolfe, eager to leave his personal life behind. He ran his hand over his gleaming head before getting down to business.

  ‘I’ll obviously email you the report once it’s been put together. But I thought you might be interested in some of the things I uncovered during the post-mortem.’

  Brady bent forward, keen to hear what Wolfe had found out.

  ‘Time of death was approximately between 12.30 am and 2.00 am.’

  ‘Can you be more precise?’

  ‘I thought I was being. I’m not the bloody detective here. All I’ve got to go on is the victim’s body temperature, rigor and liver mortis and stomach contents. But if you can do better, laddie, then by all means!’

  Brady kicked himself. He knew better than to tell Wolfe how to do his job.

  ‘Can I continue?’

  Brady nodded apologetically.

  ‘There was no evidence of finger-shaped bruising or nail marks on or around the neck, but there were signs of swelling. Petechial haemorrhaging was present above and below a red ligature mark, and when I opened her up the hyoid bone had been fractured. All typically in keeping with ligature strangulation. Manner of death was without adoubt, homicide,’ Wolfe concluded. ‘However there were self-inflicted scratches at the front of the neck. They matched the skin tissue found under the victim’s nails. Presumably the poor girl must have struggled to loosen the scarf from her neck while she was being choked.’

  Brady had expected this. The scarf around Sophie’s neck had turned out to be more than just a fashion statement. Someone had used it to strangle her to death.

  ‘The skull was fractured and bone matter was present in the brain, but there was no bleeding between the skull and dura. Which means, as I’m sure you know, she was already dead before any trauma occurred to her face and head.’

  Brady edged forward in his seat for what was coming next.

  ‘The examination of her pelvic area indicated that the victim had not given birth and was not pregnant at the time of death. But,’ Wolfe paused to get his breath, ‘I found evidence of recent sexual activity but no indication that the sexual contact was forced. As you’d expect, I’ve had vaginal and anal fluid samples removed for analysis.’

  ‘There’s definitely no evidence that she might have been raped?’

  ‘That’s what I said. There was no indication of sexual aggression,’ Wolfe repeated.

  Brady nodded.

  ‘How recent was the sexual intercourse?’

  ‘Within the hour before she was killed,’ answered Wolfe. ‘But that’s not all, there was also a significant amount of internal and external vaginal and perineum tissue scarring roughly dating back four years.’

  ‘Suggestive of sexual abuse?’

  ‘With that sort of severe trauma, I would say it was more than likely,’ answered Wolfe.

  Brady nodded, not surprised. He had had a gut feeling that there was a lot more to the victim’s life than her parents would have him believe.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Isn’t that enough?’ asked Wolfe, raising his eyebrow at Brady. ‘We’ll have a clearer idea of whether she was high on drugs or alcohol once the lab comes back with the samples I’ve submitted.’

  ‘Sure,’ Brady replied.

  ‘They grow up damned fast nowadays, laddie,’ Wolfe added as he picked up his glass.

  Brady didn’t disagree. Given what he already knew, it would come as no surprise if the toxicological reports found traces of drugs and alcohol in her blood and urine. But the fact was, she was just a kid; a kid who was having sex. Add to that forced sex from as young as eleven.

  Paul Simmons immediately came to mind.

  Statistically, step-fathers were not only more likely to kill a step-child than the biological father, but also four times more likely to sexually abuse a step-child. Brady couldn’t shake the bad feeling he had about Simmons. It had been there from the moment he had met him. That coupled with the fact that Simmons had walked into Sophie’s life over four years ago, around the same time that Wolfe suggested the sexual abuse had started.

  But there were also the photographs of the victim that Brady needed to consider. Photographs which uncannily echoed Wolfe’s sentiments that in today’s society, kids grew up fast. Too damned fast.

  ‘She was just fifteen,’ Brady stated as he looked at Wolfe.

  ‘Well, the evidence is there whether you like it or not,’ Wolfe said as his sharp eyes scrutinised Brady. ‘The question is what are you going to do with it, laddie?’

  Chapter Thirty

  Brady picked up the evening edition of Th
e Northern Echo.

  Someone had thoughtfully left it on his desk; along with an in-tray of emails he needed to answer and a pile of reports marked urgent. He noted that Rubenfeld had made the front page. Not only that, he had also got the newspaper to put up an award for any information leading to the apprehension of Sophie Washington’s murderer. Brady knew it was a canny ploy at selling papers and gaining local respect. The cynic in him understood that the reward had nothing to do with helping the police but more to do with inflating the newspaper’s profit margin.

  Brady hated this kind of empty publicity stunt but he knew it had to be done. Sophie Washington’s murder might last a few days in the headlines before the public got bored and circulation figures dropped. The public had an insatiable, even ghoulish appetite for murder and sex, sometimes in that order. Sophie Washington’s life would be picked apart until there was nothing left. Then the scavengers, like Rubenfeld, would move on to sabotage someone else’s life.

  Still, Brady had to admire The Northern Echo‘s coldblooded attitude. It was clever; of all the rewards the paperhad ever offered, he couldn’t remember a single one being paid out. The paper couldn’t lose, it was a win-win situation. And the credit was down to one man: Rubenfeld. No other paper would have that headline yet, so getting in first with a big reward was all the sweeter; it meant they had some kind of ownership on the story. And a reward of twenty-five grand would attract a lot of attention; this was the North East after all. Money was short and times were hard. There was a recession on, and unemployment was at a record high which meant people were desperate. Families had to be clothed and fed and the rent still had to be paid. In reality it meant a shed load of extra work for the police who would now have to screen thousands of bogus calls from people who would stitch their granny up if it meant they were better off by twenty-five grand.

  He chucked the paper in the waste bin and reached over and picked up the photograph of the victim and her form tutor. Regardless of what Kate had said, it just didn’t feel right.

  Brady looked at his watch. It was just before 5 pm. He picked up his mobile phone and started dialling.