by Penny Grubb
In his mind’s eye he saw Mel standing tall by the window, the phone to her ear, all that pent-up distress concealed behind a couldn’t-care-less façade put on for Suzie Harmer in the car outside. His anger crumbled. He deserved everything Farrar could throw, not for the Harmer bitch whose predicament he didn’t see as his fault, but for the other woman about whom Mel must never hear a whisper.
Farrar had done the worst he could do by failing to prevent Harmer’s visit to Mel. And if he’d felt the need to administer a public dressing down to complete the humiliation, he could have used any one of a hundred excuses without wasting scant resources on non-cases.
He looked down at the thin file in his hand which must hold the key to Farrar’s real agenda.
CHAPTER 4
Mid-morning sun streamed through the big windows. Webber chose a corner where he could read comfortably without lights, but it was hard to give his attention to the file. He was aware of the bustle all around that didn’t encompass him, the feel that he was being carefully ostracised. No one wanted to get on the wrong side of him, but even less did they want to get on the wrong side of Farrar.
He paused for a deep breath, laid the folder on the desk in front of him and flipped it open. The first thing he saw was Farrar’s handwriting at the top of the page. The words Brad Tippet were scrawled between two question marks. He flicked through the few pages looking for the name in the official prose, but it didn’t crop up again. There was a summary report from a coroner’s office. It gave the outline of a 2001 suicide of a woman called Pamela Morgan. With it was a brief page of notes that had been written in May, almost six months ago.
Had Farrar picked a non-case at random and scribbled Tippet’s name at the top? Webber shook his head in disbelief. Nothing was worth this level of time wasting, no matter how angry Farrar might be. He flicked through to identify the report’s author and picked up the phone.
‘Martyn Webber here. Some months ago, you wrote up a report for John Farrar on a woman called Pamela Morgan. Suicide. What was it about?’
‘Morgan?’ There was a pause into which Webber read memory being searched for something that had made no dent. ‘Oh yes … vaguely. Has something come up? I thought there was nothing to it.’
‘You’re probably right, but tell me what you know.’
‘John wanted me to look into it. It’d be …’ Again a pause. Webber heard the clatter of a keyboard. ‘Yes, here it is. Wanted me to check if there was anything iffy about it. Woman in her 40s. Took an overdose. It was straightforward, she left a note … oh, that’s right, there was a minor question over the note because it wasn’t signed, but there was no doubt that she’d written it.’
‘Why did John want it looked at?’
‘I can’t remember. Hang on … Lana, didn’t you take the original call on …?’ Webber heard bits of a one-sided exchange before the voice was back in his ear. ‘That’s right. It was his father, Farrar’s father, who called it in. Said he’d been told there was something iffy about the death. Farrar said to have a look.’
‘He’s written a name on the file. Brad Tippet. That mean anything to you?’
‘Yeah, they’ve just pulled his car out of …’
‘No, not that. I mean to do with this Pamela Morgan. Anything from six months ago?’
Again the background rumble of voices, from which Webber picked out a slightly indignant, ‘… never mentioned that name to me …’
His finger tracked the words through the brief report. Pamela Morgan had killed herself because she couldn’t live with what had happened to her husband, who’d died in an accident. No details.
‘No,’ said the voice in his ear. ‘Tippet wasn’t mentioned.’
It occurred to Webber that Farrar hadn’t had his hands on the file, not this morning. ‘So when did John write Tippet’s name on it?’
‘Probably before it was filed six months back. He was the last person to look at it.’
‘What happened to Pamela Morgan’s husband? How did he die?’
‘I didn’t get as far as that. Robert Morgan, wasn’t it? Not the easiest name to trace from cold. I got some stuff faxed from the coroner’s office and that was about it.’
Webber’s gaze scanned the pages as he listened. Pamela Morgan had left a note addressed to a friend. It was referred to as ‘long and detailed, but unsigned’. There were a few extracts … the way it happened … plays out in front of me …
‘It says here the husband died in an accident, but that …’ He turned the page. ‘There’s a reference to perpetrators …’
… we’d quarrelled, never made up … it won’t get better …
‘Yeah, it’s coming back to me, but I didn’t have time to chase it. 2001, wasn’t it? I wondered if he’d been a 9/11 victim? Not that I found anything to say he was working in the States or anything, but …’
Webber flipped through the pages to find the date of Pamela Morgan’s suicide. It fitted. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Could be.’
There was another name on the file that hung at random like Tippet’s, bracketed by question-marks, but this time not written by Farrar. ‘How about Dr China? Where does he fit into it?’
‘I think that was Lana … Hang on …’
After a pause, a different voice came on the line. ‘As far as I can remember, Guv, Dr China was the person who told Mr Farrar … uh … Chief Superintendent Farrar’s father, I mean, about the woman who committed suicide, but he wasn’t sure about the name.’
‘How do you mean not sure?’
‘He said it was noisy. I think he’s quite old.’
After he’d ended the call, Webber pulled forward his keyboard then hesitated. Someone called Dr China had talked to John Farrar’s father six months ago and told him that a woman called Pamela Morgan who had died 15 years earlier might not have been the suicide of the official record. He started with a search for Pamela and Robert Morgan. The information wasn’t there, but the databases he trawled through weren’t designed to track blameless people who went through life never stepping out of line. He fired a brief email to the coroner’s court that had provided information last May, asking for Pamela Morgan’s full file.
A clatter from across the room snapped his attention to his immediate surroundings. A minor fracas erupted as fallen boxes were retrieved. He smelt fresh coffee, saw someone tugging the wrapper from a sandwich. He blinked and stretched his arms, astonished to see the clock show it was after midday, surprised at how engrossed he’d been. But what had he found? Nothing. And Farrar needed a report.
Robert Morgan. The name began to feel familiar, but he supposed he’d encountered a few Robert Morgans over the years. His hand hovered over the phone handset. Farrar would jump down his throat if he found resources expended. Who could he trust to do a bit of digging without making a song and dance of it? Lana, who’d taken Farrar senior’s call in May, knew her stuff, but in the circumstances he’d better not use a female officer. And of course, it needn’t be anyone stationed in York. He thought back to an earlier conversation and picked up the phone.
‘DC Ayaan Ahmed,’ said a familiar voice.
‘Hello Ayaan. Martyn Webber here. How are you?’
‘Oh … I’m fine, thanks. Uh … how are you?’ The slight hesitation told Webber all he needed to know about how far the rumours about him and Suzie had spread. ‘I’m coming over to York later,’ Ahmed went on. ‘Tom Jenkinson. I’ll kill the little sod if he’s gone off the rails after all we’ve done for him.’
Webber laughed. ‘Get the information out of him first, but that’s not why I’m ringing. Tell me, how busy are you on a scale of 1 to 10?’
‘Tennish without a trip to York. Off the scale really.’
‘Good, then you can do something for me. Married couple, Pamela and Robert Morgan. The wife committed suicide in 2001 after the husband was killed, possibly a 9/11 victim, never formally verified, something like that. He doesn’t crop up on any of the obvious lists. I want to find the detail of his
death, but I don’t want a big drama made out of it.’
He heard the ghost of a sigh, as Ahmed said, ‘OK, give me what you’ve got.’
After he’d ended the call, Webber realised he hadn’t congratulated Ahmed on his forthcoming marriage. At least that was what he’d heard on the grapevine. He’d say something when they next spoke.
His phone beeped a request for a video call. The woman from the lab. He looked around for Davis but couldn’t see him anywhere. Probably off stuffing his face. He accepted the call and the woman, still in her white lab coat, came into view on the small screen.
‘Ah, tracked you down,’ she said. ‘We’re done with the car.’
He should stop her and say he’d get Davis to call, but was curious to know what they’d found.
‘There was a book of some sort in a pocket at the side of the boot space. Owner’s manual probably. We’ll have a go at it. Other than that …’
He listened as she told him they’d had nothing from the plastic sheeting, just the evidence of a fatal head injury. ‘No sign of anything else,’ she said. ‘And I’d guess the whole body was in there.’ She talked about blunt trauma to the back of the head as opposed to the debris that might accumulate from a severed neck.
‘When will we get the DNA results?’
‘Tomorrow morning.’ His surprise must have shown, because she said, ‘Your Chief Super wanted it fast-tracked. Didn’t you know? Said he wanted it out of the way.’
‘That’s going to cost–’ He swallowed the phrase, an arm and a leg, and let the sentence hang.
A smile of satisfaction spread across the woman’s face. ‘Given the circs,’ she told him. ‘We’re going to give it a spin with a new toy. Lab-on-a-chip technique, you’ve heard of it?’
Webber nodded. He’d heard the phrase. With geekish enthusiasm she began to explain hydrodynamic pumping, whatever that was. He wondered if this stuff would be admissible in court. ‘… it’s the electrophoretic movement …’ Her voice washed over him. It didn’t matter. Two dead guys had killed another dead guy 30 years ago. This wasn’t going to court. They just needed to confirm the ID. He let his hand rest on the Pamela Morgan file, gently pushing the pages aside so he could skim them whilst the accolade to science washed over him.
‘That reminds me,’ he said into a pause. ‘DI Davis has taken this over. I’ll pass this on but you should contact him when you have the DNA result.’
She laughed, hint taken. ‘Conductive polymers remind you of Davis, do they? Yes fine, I’ll report back to him. So what are you working on? Anything else that’s going to come my way?’
‘No, it’s nothing much. It’s …’ He paused on a sudden impulse. She would have easy access to a different type of information, including 9/11 databases that went beyond the official lists. ‘There is something, but only if it’s at your fingertips. I don’t want you spending time on it.’ He told her what little he had on Robert Morgan. ‘Some kind of an accident is all I actually have in front of me.’
‘But you think it might have been 9/11?’
‘The timing fits.’
It was no more than a shot in the dark, but Webber felt a stab of unease as he cut the call. Perhaps he’d get back to her in a while, tell her he didn’t need the information after all.
Constructing a substantial report out of the thin data on Pamela Morgan wasn’t easy. The only new information he had was that it was Farrar’s father’s call that had initiated the thing in the first place. Not something that would be news to Farrar.
A movement caught his eye. Davis had returned and was heading for his desk. Webber felt his eyes narrow. He supposed the man was looking forward to a post-prandial nap. Since he had no intention of allowing Farrar to catch him anywhere other than hard at work for the rest of the day, he called Davis across, updated him on the lab results, and sent him off with an order for a sandwich and coffee.
It was as he finished his report and was about to send it that an email popped up from the coroner’s office. Webber hesitated. He hadn’t expected them to be as quick. He didn’t want to risk being late – when I get back from lunch had been Farrar’s order – but nor did he want to miss anything significant. He clicked on the new email and opened the attached file.
Speed-reading the pages gave him a blurred, whistle-stop tour of the events surrounding the end of Pamela Morgan’s life. There were more extracts from the note she’d left.
… the horror multiplied … can’t stop seeing it … we’d quarrelled …
A pall of despair, a woman without hope. In losing her husband, she’d lost everything that mattered to her, and in the end she’d lost her life. Despite skimming it at speed, he absorbed the picture of a placid sensible woman. Cheerful, loved by everyone. Even allowing for the tendency to speak well of the dead, the picture seemed sincere.
He paused to pull in a breath. Suppose something terrible happened to Mel, could he find himself in Pamela Morgan’s shoes? No, because there was Sam. There’d always be Sam. The Morgans couldn’t have had children or she wouldn’t have done what she’d done. He caught references to friends, but not family. In the end he supposed, friends couldn’t bridge the gap.
The document gave him nothing substantive to add to his report, and with the mood Farrar was in, he wouldn’t chance his arm making nebulous comments. Nonetheless, the weird events of the morning had forced him to take a step back, to see things differently. The new angle somehow shone a spotlight on the gravel pit as though it had played the role of catalyst. Two weeks ago they’d found a car down there. Then a few days later and quite unrelated some kids had rampaged about the city like a chaotic virus, flaring and dying away, only to re-erupt in yesterday’s near carnage at a junction showing green traffic lights in all directions.
Pamela Morgan’s suicide sat there as another unrelated curiosity. Not that he could put his finger on what was odd about it, except maybe that it was on his desk at all, and it had Brad Tippet’s name on it. The Tippet case. The handle Farrar had given to each file in turn. Tippet was linked to a 30-year-old crime by being the victim of a theft. His only link to Pamela Morgan was his name scribbled on a page.
Webber looked across to where Davis suddenly became busy at his keyboard, perhaps conscious of his stare. Few of the people catalogued inside either his or Davis’s files were still alive, and of all the deaths recorded, maybe only Pamela Morgan’s was unrelated to any crime. Six months ago, someone had tried to throw doubt on that.
His report said none of this. He had no way to articulate it that Farrar would engage with. Turning back to his email, he pressed the send button.
CHAPTER 5
Farrar’s name popped up so quickly in his inbox that Webber thought their emails had crossed. Then he saw it was the automatic read receipt for the report he’d just sent.
Deleted unread.
When the phone sprang to life a second later, it wasn’t hard to guess who it would be.
‘Well, was it a suicide?’ Farrar’s voice rapped out.
‘Yes.’ As he answered, Webber saw his mobile buzz a call, Ayaan Ahmed’s name on the screen. He let it go to voicemail.
‘Any doubts?’
‘No.’
‘Car in the gravel pit, what are you doing with that?’
Wait a minute, Webber wanted to say, you took that one off me; go and ask Davis. ‘I told them to check out Tippet’s original statement and to have a word with the divers who found the car.’ He chose his words carefully. ‘But not to set any hares running before we have the forensics back.’
‘It’ll be the third brother, will it, the one who disappeared after the post office raid?’
Big brother post office, thought Webber. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The question is whether or not he’s still down there.’
‘The other one, Pamela Morgan, the suicide, anything to follow up?’
‘I’d like to get chapter and verse on the husband’s death. Find out why she did it.’
‘You’ve had hours. W
hat’s your investigation there?’
Webber wanted to ask why Farrar had written Tippet’s name, but said only, ‘Nothing. I just wanted a full picture.’
‘There’s no time for that sort of indulgence. Not with things stacking up the way they are. What’s the latest on that traffic lights scam?’
Irritated, Webber said, ‘I don’t know. I’ve been busy on this.’
‘For God’s sake, man, get a grip! Someone could have died yesterday. Get it sorted.’
Permission to resume ordinary life. Webber felt a weight lift.
There was a pause, then Farrar said, ‘Tippet knew the older brother. They were at school together. Now get to the bottom of that bloody traffic chaos.’ And the line went dead.
Webber sat with the phone in his hand, listening to the drone of the dialling tone. What was he to make of that? Farrar had told him to get back to work, back to his own team. And he intended doing just that, but what was the crack about Tippet? Was he saying Tippet had been involved all those years ago but they hadn’t been able to prove it?
He stood up, grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair and marched across to Davis. He pointed at the file. ‘Ring me in the morning. Keep me up to date.’
‘Sure.’ Davis smiled up at him. ‘I’ll get on to you as soon as I’ve heard back from the lab.’
‘No,’ said Webber. ‘You’ll ring me first thing. And you’ll let me know when you hear from the lab.’
He pulled out his mobile as he made for the exit. Ahmed had left a text and a voicemail. The text read,
Found your guy. All over the papers. Article here.
Webber looked at the link but didn’t want to stop to decipher a newspaper website on a tiny screen. He’d check later. Reliable officer, Ahmed. He’d be over here now to deal with Jenkinson. With luck he might get across town in time to see how it panned out, and catch a word with Ahmed before he returned to Scarborough.