Weep a While Longer

by Penny Freedman

  ‘Liverpool? So why is he in The Scrubs?’

  ‘He requested a transfer down south when Karen and Lara moved here. He was moved five months ago.’

  ‘And the money?’

  ‘Never recovered.’

  ‘When was he convicted?’

  ‘December 2010.’

  ‘OK. Check his associates. See if any of them have been in this area. Paula and I are going to The Scrubs to see him this afternoon so we’ll check on what visitors he’s had.’

  He turned to the two DCs. ‘Morning,’ he said. ‘DCI Scott.’

  ‘DC Mike Arthur, sir,’ the older of the two said.

  ‘DC Darren Floyd.’ The younger man was good-looking, Scott registered, but surly, he thought.

  ‘Eastgate estate,’ he said. ‘You’re looking for a knife, though I doubt you’ll find it, and bloodstained clothing or whatever he used to clean himself up. Gardens, sheds, bins, the usual. DS Powell here will give you the details. Start with the bins.’ He saw a flash of disgust on the face of the younger of the two men. ‘That’s both of you on the bins,’ he said, looking him in the eye. ‘They keep their bins in the front gardens on the estate and this guy left through the front door – SOCO found bloody footsteps on the front path.’

  ‘And no-one saw him?’ the older DC asked. ‘At six o’clock on a summer evening?’

  ‘This is the Eastgate estate we’re talking about,’ Paula Powell said. ‘Thirteen Windermere Road you’re going to. You won’t miss it – it’s got the usual decorations.’

  ‘Windermere Road. Someone’s idea of a joke,’ Darren Floyd muttered as the two men left the room.

  ‘We’ll see you there,’ Paula called to them. ‘We’re off to have another talk to the neighbour.’

  *

  At Eleven Windermere Road, Scott and Powell found that the bell didn’t function but some hammering on the door brought a woman to open it. She was carrying a small child and had another, about the same age, Paula thought, tugging on the leg of her jeans. She looked tired, belligerent and older than she probably was.

  ‘What?’ she asked, and when they showed their IDs she glanced involuntarily back into the house.

  ‘Tina Smith?’ Scott asked.

  ‘I talked to the other one,’ she said. ‘I made a statement.’

  ‘You did,’ Scott said pleasantly, ‘and it was very helpful. We’d just like to check a few things with you, and to talk to your boyfriend, Jason.’

  ‘He can’t tell you nothing. He wasn’t here.’

  ‘Still, we’d like to talk to him.’

  ‘Well you can’t. He’s not here.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He’s at work.’

  ‘I understood from what you told DC Shepherd that he works nights,’ Paula said. ‘That’s why he wasn’t here on Tuesday evening.’

  ‘Well …’ the woman’s pale face flushed ‘… yeah, that’s right. So now he’s asleep.’

  ‘I think,’ Scott said, ‘that we’d better go inside, don’t you?’

  Reluctantly, Tina Smith stood back to let them in and they went into a small sitting room where a teenage boy was lying on a sofa pushing buttons on a mobile phone.

  ‘School’s finished,’ Tina said defensively. ‘He’s on holiday. Go in the kitchen, Gary,’ she said. ‘We’re talking in here.’

  As the boy shambled out, Paula said, ‘Don’t go out, though, Gary. We’ll need to talk to you later.’ She just caught his mumbled obscenity as he left the room.

  ‘Right,’ Scott said as they sat down. ‘First, let me say that I realise that you had a very nasty shock finding things as you did on Tuesday.’

  ‘You’re telling me,’ she said. ‘Not that I got any sympathy.’ She was sitting on the sofa with a child either side of her, both leaning into her, both sucking their thumbs, both gazing at Scott with solemn faces.

  ‘Shock can do funny things,’ Scott continued, ‘and we don’t always remember things clearly as a result, so I would just like to take you through your statement to DC Shepherd and see if there’s anything you want to add or change.’ She seemed about to protest but he carried on. ‘You say you went next door at about six o’clock because the TV was too loud and you wanted it turned down.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He smiled. ‘With a teenage boy in the house and the two little ones I guess it gets quite loud in this house sometimes, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Gary’s a good boy,’ she said. ‘Quiet.’

  ‘Did you often have to complain about noise next door?’

  ‘No. That’s the thing. These houses, the walls are like paper but we never heard it usually. The dog sometimes. She’d just got it, two or three weeks back. It was her sister’s but her sister couldn’t cope with it. Can’t cope with nothing that one. But anyway, I’d had a sodding awful day with these two grizzling and fighting and I wanted them in bed and asleep. I was just giving them their tea and I could hear this racket and I knew I’d never get them off.’

  ‘Your … Jason wasn’t here?’

  ‘He went out just before.’

  ‘To work?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where does he work?’

  ‘Well …’ her head went up and they all felt the presence of Jason sleeping above them. ‘It’s … you’ll have to ask him.’

  ‘I will. Let’s go back to you. You went round to complain about the noise. Did you leave the children here?’

  ‘I got Gary to mind them.’

  ‘And how did you get into the house?’

  The door wasn’t locked. I knocked and yelled and then I tried the handle and it opened.’

  ‘And where did you go first in the house?’

  ‘Into the sitting room. I called out like, and then I went in there ’cos that’s where the TV was.’

  ‘And what did you find.’

  ‘Her. She was like slumped on the sofa and there was all this blood.’

  ‘Could you see that her wrists were cut?’

  ‘I didn’t get close. I just saw all the blood.’

  ‘And then what did you do?’

  ‘I ran out. I thought someone might still be there in the house. I ran out. And then I rang you lot.’

  ‘You didn’t look for Lara?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you didn’t go in the kitchen?’

  ‘No. I know what happened. I seen it on the news, Lara and the dog, but I never saw them. I just ran out.’

  They all turned at the sound of feet on the stairs and the door was pushed open to reveal a man in sweatpants and a T-shirt. The two children, Paula noticed, leaned further into their mother, eying him warily. Jason Watts was a big man, muscly and shaven-headed. You had to avoid stereotyping in this business, Paula knew, but she was prepared to bet that his night job involved throwing people out of clubs or pubs.

  Jason surveyed them. ‘What’s this?’ he asked, looking not at Scott and Powell but at Tina.

  She got up and edged past him through the doorway, the two children scuttling after her. ‘They’re here about Karen, Jase,’ she said, not looking him in the eye. ‘You’ll have to talk to them. I don’t know what to … you know …’ her voice tailed off and she disappeared.

  Scott and Powell stood up. ‘DCI Scott and DS Powell,’ Scott said as they flashed their cards. ‘We’d like to talk to you about your movements on the afternoon and evening of Tuesday 17th July. Shall we sit down?’

  Jason remained standing in the doorway. ‘This is my house,’ he said. ‘No-one asked you to sit down.’

  Scott walked across to the window and looked out, noting that DCs Arthur and Floyd were at work on the bins next door. ‘That’s fine,’ he said, ‘but I wonder why you want to hide behind that door.’

  Jason Watts swaggered into the room. ‘I don’t hide,’ he said. ‘Ain’t no-one can accuse me of that.’ He sat down on the sofa, spreading his arms along the back. ‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘Park your arses if you want to.’

  ‘Where is i
t you work?’ Scott asked as he went back to his chair.

  Paula could see the colour rise in the man’s face, under the tanned skin. ‘It’s not like work,’ he said. ‘Not like a job. I just help out a bit.’

  ‘And where is that?’ Paula asked.

  ‘It’s just a club,’ he mumbled.

  ‘And you do what? Bartender? Bouncer?’

  ‘Whatever, bit of everything.’

  ‘Name of the club?’

  Jason Watts shifted uncomfortably. ‘Look, it’s not a job as such,’ he said. ‘Not like official.’

  Paula exchanged glances with Scott and he gave the slightest of nods.

  ‘Jason, if you’re working while claiming jobseeker’s allowance, we’re not interested,’ she said. ‘We’re not out to make trouble for you but we’re investigating two deaths here and we need your full cooperation, and if we don’t get it then we’ll have you for obstruction. OK?’

  He leaned forward, his hands on his knees. ‘And I’m supposed to trust you, am I?’

  ‘No choice, I’m afraid,’ Scott said breezily, standing up. ‘So you give us the name of the club, we’ll check when you got there and we’ll go on from there.’

  Jason stood too. ‘The Caz Bar,’ he said, throwing it out like a challenge.

  Paula suppressed a snarl. The Caz Bar was Marlbury’s newly opened lap dancing club, operating in a basement beneath a hairdressers only a stone’s throw from Marlbury Abbey and given the go-ahead by the town council despite howls of protest from all sorts of people from the shocked elderly to student feminists. Paula herself had taken part in a protest march and vigil outside the town hall.

  Scott made a show of writing down the name. ‘How did you get on with Karen?’ he asked. ‘Did you like her?’

  ‘Not much, if I’m honest. Too up herself with no good reason.’

  ‘Did you ever do odd jobs for her?’

  ‘Like what?’

  Scott looked at the blank incomprehension on his face. ‘Did you ever go into her house at all?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Why would I?’

  ‘Just being neighbourly?’

  Jason shook his head in pitying disbelief. ‘You people,’ he said.

  *

  Driving to Hammersmith in sullen drizzle, Scott said, ‘If I’d realised, we could have done this interview this morning before I left London. But at that point I hadn’t read up on the case.’

  Paula said nothing. He let the silence linger for a moment and then said, ‘I should have phoned you.’

  ‘It would have helped,’ she said.

  ‘Yup.’ He decided not to say he was sorry again. She wasn’t experienced or senior enough to be SIO on this case and at some time she’d probably acknowledge that. She was disappointed, of course, but she was going to have to get over it. He drove on in silence.

  When the great prison gates opened for them and they drove in between its ornate towers, the officer on duty said, ‘The governor would like to speak to you, sir, if you’d go up to his office.’ He indicated a direction in the far corner of the courtyard.

  The governor, new since Scott’s last visit to the prison, was a lean, shortish man with a leathery, creased face that suggested that he spent his leisure time tramping moors or climbing mountains, as well one might, Scott thought, if one spent one’s working days in a place like this. He greeted them briskly and said, ’I wanted to warn you, Brody reacted badly to the news. Became violent, had to be restrained.’ He gave a blink of mild embarrassment. ‘Fairly roughly, it turns out, but he attacked an officer and that calls for strong measures.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘In the infirmary. Purely precautionary. He took a knock to the head and he’s under sedation.’

  ‘And we’re seeing him there?’

  ‘Unless you have any objection?’

  ‘No. As long as we have privacy.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Brody was in a room hardly bigger than a cubicle. He was propped on pillows with his head turned away from the door and as they entered he didn’t move to look at them. Two chairs had been set at the near side of the bed. ‘Mr Brody,’ Scott said, sitting down.

  Brody didn’t move and Scott was able to take in the dressing taped to the side of his head and the scabbed knuckles of his right hand. Paula, who had moved to the end of the bed, was able to see a bruised cheekbone and a black eye. They waited and eventually Brody turned his head to look first at Paula and then at Scott. Close to him as he was, Scott was taken aback, in spite of the governor’s warning, by the fury in the man’s eyes. The face was puffy and slackened by sedation but the eyes were so venomous that he felt glad of the panic button on the wall and the two officers posted outside.

  ‘Let me say first of all,’ he said, ‘how sorry we are for your loss.’

  Brody’s mouth moved as though he was trying to speak, but he said nothing and Scott saw that he was trying to gather enough saliva in a dry mouth to spit at him. He decided to be brisk and get this over with.

  ‘We believe,’ he said, ‘that both Karen and Lara were murdered, and we are, of course, making every effort to find their killer. The killer may be someone you know, so we need you to tell us anything you can that might help.’

  Brody’s eyes continued to bore into him but he said nothing. Scott wondered if he was too drugged to be able to speak. ‘The money from the bank hold-up,’ he said. ‘You’ve never told the police where it is. We think Karen could have been killed by someone who wanted that money.’

  Brody made a rough wheezing sound which they recognised after a moment as a rudimentary bark of laughter. ‘Haven’t got it,’ he slurred. ‘Didn’t take it.’

  Paula came and sat down beside him. ‘Prisons are full of people who ‘didn’t do’ what they’re in for, Doug,’ she said. ‘If we’re going to find out who killed Karen and Lara, you’re going to have to level with us.’

  Brody shifted the heat of his gaze to her. ‘Fucking idle. Fucking stupid,’ he said, and now Scott could hear the Liverpool in his voice. Gina, he thought, would know the technical terms for those clotted consonants and curdled vowels. Gina. He would have to let her know he was back in Marlbury. But not today. Not while he had all this to get a hold on. Momentarily distracted, he realised that Brody was still speaking.

  ‘Too fucking stupid, too fucking idle to do their job. Easier to finger me. Plenty of previous. Easy fit-up.’

  ‘You were recorded on CCTV, Doug, committing the robbery.’

  ‘Mistaken id—’ he broke off and shook his head as though ‘identity’ was too much for his drugged tongue to manage.

  ‘So, if it wasn’t you, Doug, who was it?’ Paula asked, leaning in towards him.

  His mouth worked for a few moments. ‘Your job,’ he said finally. ‘I couldn’t say.’ He closed his eyes and turned his head from them.

  As they were leaving the room, they heard a sound from the bed and turned. Brody’s face was turned to them, contorted in a rictus of grief. ‘I wasn’t there for them,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t there.’

  *

  Having talked briefly to the senior prison officer on Brody’s wing, they drove out of London, beating the early Friday exodus.

  ‘This shouldn’t be too bad,’ Scott said.

  ‘Plenty to talk about, anyway.’

  ‘Really?’ He glanced at her.

  ‘Well, we know that Brody requested a transfer to the Southeast so that his wife and daughter could visit, and that they didn’t miss a single visiting day.’

  ‘Which could mean that they were terrified of him and he was pulling the strings.’

  ‘Except that he’s genuinely distraught. Don’t tell me he was putting that on.’

  ‘And I must be from thence,’ he said.

  ‘Shakespeare?’ she asked.

  ‘Macbeth. It’s what Macduff says when he hears that Macbeth has murdered his wife and children.’

  ‘And this gets us where, exactly?’

  ‘Nowhere,’
he said. ‘Nowhere at all. But the mistaken identity thing, what was the evidence against him, do you know? Apart from the CCTV footage?’

  ’There was some DNA evidence but the defence brought in a forensics expert to question it. He’d sprayed tiny specks of saliva into the face of the bank cashier but it was quite degraded.’

  ‘And the CCTV pictures, how good were they?’

  ‘The guy was wearing a beanie pulled well down, and a scarf pulled up, so it wasn’t conclusive, but he was picked out in an identity parade.’

  ‘No fingerprints?’

  ‘No. Gloves.’

  ‘So it’s possible that he didn’t do it, but someone thought Karen knew where the money was. When she wouldn’t say, he killed her.’

  ‘And Lara? Why? It doesn’t make sense to me. If there’d been signs that someone had tortured her …’

  ‘No. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. But the chances are our killer is someone Brody knows.’’

  ‘I’m not writing Jason Watts off,’ she said. ‘I want to check his alibi. He’s a nasty piece of work and his girlfriend and children are scared stiff of him.’

  ‘You pursue that. We need to talk to Karen’s friends and fellow students as well, and go through Steve’s list of Brody’s criminal associates. Anything else you can think of?’

  ‘There was an episode with the dog,’ she said, ‘but we can leave that for another day.’

  7

  Thursday 19th July

  Counter Intelligence

  When I go in to teach my wives on Thursday afternoon, I find a major international incident going on. I thought we had got past this sort of thing and arrived at a modus vivendi. In my pious, liberal, deluded mind, we had reached an East–West, Christian–Muslim–humanist fusion in which we acknowledged and respected difference and celebrated diversity et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Apparently not. This afternoon, Athene is in full oratorical mode, thumping her fist on the table and looking rather magnificent. Juanita, sitting beside her, has her head down and her hands over her ears as Athene yells across her at Farah and Jamilleh, who are, I see, wrapped in their coats and headscarves once more. Our blundering intruder on Tuesday did his work thoroughly. Farah is scowling at what I see is today’s edition of the Marlbury Herald and Jamilleh is glaring at Athene with tears in her eyes. Ning Wu has retreated to a corner at the back of the room and is busying herself with her iPad. No-one seems to notice my entrance.