by Penny Grubb
‘No, what?’
‘I can’t get it out of my head that China Kowalski was right. She was, wasn’t she? Michael Drake killed Pamela Morgan but you’re never going to be able to pin it on him.’
He nodded slowly. Her words floated about bumping into other people’s stray pronouncements.
China Kowalski was right … Not Quinny! … She should have been pleased …
No, China Kowalski wasn’t right. She was wrong. They hadn’t hated Pamela Morgan. They’d worshiped her. Hers was the one death that Michael Drake genuinely regretted. Maybe it was that simple. First thing in the morning, he’d be on to John Farrar.
Chapter 61
It was Webber’s last day at work before Christmas. Tomorrow he, Mel and Sam would drive down to stay with the Bryants. He hadn’t told her that this was anything other than a routine day for him, and he hadn’t told Farrar about the lunch invitation that Melinda had accepted for both of them. After the event would be soon enough for that.
It wasn’t by the book. He shouldn’t be having anything to do with Michael Drake now, but Farrar had agreed to go along with it. The man’s legal team hadn’t seemed anything special; it had felt like a joke that they should try for bail, but they did and it had hung in the balance. Clearly a string of terrible crimes lay beneath the bland wording of the charge sheet but a compelling impression was built that the frail and kindly Mr Drake had been wrongly accused, so how could it hurt to allow him to stay in his own home over Christmas? Thankfully the public safety risk weighed heavily, but it had been too close for comfort.
‘And what if he insists on contacting his brief?’ Farrar had asked when Webber outlined what he wanted to do.
Webber thought it more than likely. ‘Then we go ahead with Drake’s legal team in the room.’ Farrar hadn’t looked at all convinced so Webber had borrowed a metaphor from their Norwegian colleagues. ‘We have this tiger by the tail, John. We can’t let him escape.’
No guarantee that Drake would see him; although the man’s arrogant persona would think himself well able to get the better of Webber, and the cooperative façade would agree without question, only Webber didn’t think the cooperative side of Michael Drake would see the light of day again until he was in front of the jury of his peers who had his future in their hands.
They’d barely started the drive when Farrar’s mobile began to ring and he spent most of the journey issuing orders into the handset. As they neared the gaol, he clicked it off. ‘Pull over here.’
Webber stopped the car and waited. After a moment, Farrar said, ‘We could completely screw things up, Martyn.’
‘We don’t want him walking away from it.’
‘How’s that ever going to happen?’
‘He’ll shove it all on to Edith Stevenson. She’ll fall apart in court.’ He held back the detailed argument. Farrar knew the score. He’d seen emotion smother the most solid of evidence when the courtroom drama played out the wrong way.
‘His defence team’ll crucify you if they get their teeth in.’
‘I know.’
‘Not just you. Melinda … Suzie … young Ahmed.’
Webber pulled in a breath. ‘If he walks free, John, it’ll be like those tigers are loose again.’
‘But are you sure?’
‘I was there with him … that off-the-record chat, remember?’
‘The recording Ayaan Ahmed made wasn’t very distinct.’
‘If there’d been video you wouldn’t have any doubts.’
‘It was quick thinking on his part that there’s any record at all. He’s a good officer, Martyn, you mustn’t resent him.’
‘I don’t!’ Webber felt his jaw clench. If one more person implored him not to resent Ahmed, he was going to start resenting him for that reason alone.
A memory popped up.
Farrar barking at him, If you’re thinking of lobbying me about Suzie’s maternity leave, don’t.
Mel the next day, John told me … said what you’d … it was a nice thing to do.
He was gobsmacked. Farrar had thought he’d gone to lobby for Melinda to take on Suzie’s maternity cover. And that’s what he’d told Mel. That’s why they thought he would resent Ahmed being brought in.
As if he’d have tried something like that … He bit back on a furious reply as he remembered Mel’s smile, the first glimmer of a proper smile that he’d had since Harmer’s bombshell. Had she stayed with him because he’d been prepared to throw out such a fundamental principle for her? He’d probably never know. If there was ever going to be a good time to ask that question, it wouldn’t be any time soon.
He pushed Ahmed and Mel out of his mind. Any spare resentment he had was reserved for Drake for revelling in his moment in the limelight whilst still holding on to the hope that he would wriggle out of the way. He must have escaped many tight corners in the past.
Not this time, Michael.
‘We know they have to put Drake on the stand,’ he said to Farrar. ‘If he just shows a courtroom a glimpse of what I saw in him, no jury’ll want him walking the streets, but …’ He stopped; he was repeating himself. They’d been through all this. So much of the case seemed damning but so much of it was circumstantial … smoke and mirrors …
There was a theoretical chance that Drake wouldn’t take the stand, but in that case they were home and dry. The evidence was overwhelming. Drake’s only chance was to paint himself as wrongly accused, misguided, the unwitting dupe of Edith Stevenson, and that of course played right to Drake’s talents. If he could maintain the charade, he might just do it.
Farrar shrugged. ‘Let’s give it a go.’
* * *
Drake agreed to see him with an alacrity that in itself rang alarm bells. He would store this up for later hay making with claims of coercion and harassment.
It was an old-fashioned interview room that lay empty as Webber and Farrar looked into it from behind the glass. The space they were in was cramped, dusty, a makeshift storeroom. No one used the one-way glass these days. The interview suite was kitted out with recording equipment that currently lay comatose on the desk. They watched as Drake was brought in, saw his glance take in the recorders, the cameras, the fact that they were all switched off.
Webber pulled in a deep breath. He wanted to say, wish me luck, but Farrar wouldn’t like that. He settled for, ‘OK, here goes.’
He didn’t look at Drake as he entered the room but was aware the man was watching him, his expression relaxed, mildly amused.
‘Good morning, Michael,’ he said as he sat down across the table.
Drake glanced again at the equipment, all its reflective screens blank, all its switches set to off.
‘Another off-the-record chat, Mr Webber?’
‘Is that a problem for you, Michael?’
Drake shrugged and smiled. ‘All the usual questions, I suppose. Yes, I’m not doing too badly. The food in here …’
‘No, Michael, I’ve no interest in how you are. I’m here to read you Pamela Morgan’s suicide note.’
Drake’s eyes narrowed in a flare of suspicion and his hand reached forward to stroke the control panel, to feel round the edges as though to uncover a fake and reveal that they were being recorded after all. ‘I heard it at the time of the inquest.’
‘Did you? How well do you remember it?’
‘As well as anyone would remember something like that.’ Drake’s tone took on a sharper edge. ‘Pamela was a dear friend. I’m not sure I want or need to hear it again. And certainly not from you.’ He began to push himself to his feet.
‘Sit down, Michael,’ Webber barked at him.
Another line crossed. Their stares locked for a second then Drake sat back down.
‘The coroner remarked on the anomaly of it not being signed. Do you remember that, Michael? Turns out Joyce Yeatman held back the final page.’
‘I know all about that.’ There was a level of scorn in Drake’s voice now. ‘She told … um, uh … said so.’
>
Webber heard Drake’s small trip as he veered away from saying ‘told me’ or ‘told us’. He was relieved to hear ‘told’ and not ‘showed’, though he was fairly confident Joyce hadn’t shown anyone that last page. Her problem had been the way the key phrases had etched themselves on to her memory. The sheaf of yellowed papers in his hand was something he’d constructed using descriptions of the original.
Joyce Yeatman had burnt that final page before the inquest and the rest afterwards. All he had were the phrases that had eventually been squeezed out of her and the quotes that had found their way into the coroner’s report.
He was confident Drake didn’t know the note had been destroyed. If he’d known then he and Stevenson wouldn’t have invested time keeping an eye on Joyce over the years.
He looked down at the page in his hand and began to quote the extracts that Michael would recognise.
‘… I’ve tried but I can’t live with the way it happened … now it plays out in front of me …’
He looked up from the page and rested his gaze on Drake as he said, ‘She couldn’t take the news that autumn, could she? I wondered about the timing when I first read about her. People trapped, knowing that death was moments away.’ He didn’t have the exact quote for that. To minimise morbid press interest, mention of 9/11 had been omitted from the report, and as Joyce remembered it, Pamela hadn’t referred to those events by name, but then they might not have acquired the label that early on. He went back to the page.
‘… we’d quarrelled, never made up … it won’t get better …’
‘Poor woman,’ he said. ‘Having that to live with. Did you know they’d quarrelled when you put him in that warehouse?’
Drake sat motionless, his demeanour calm. Webber could see no sign he was getting under his skin.
‘… and now seeing the same horror multiplied … I can’t stop seeing it … I’ll never stop seeing it …’
Drake murmured, ‘Poor Quinny.’ Webber heard true regret in his tone.
He flicked through the papers. ‘And then that final page,’ he said. ‘The one that Joyce Yeatman hid for all these years.’
‘She told me about it.’
Webber wasn’t convinced; he felt an underlying edginess.
‘Joyce was frightened of you, Michael. I don’t think she ever dared to tell you what she’d read.’ He paused, let his gaze flick briefly over the page.
‘… I can’t live with what happened to Robert …’
Drake remained still, too still, except for his right hand whose fingers rubbed together as though obsessively rolling a scrap of paper.
Webber moved only his eyes; a glance at Drake … a glance at the page. Drake’s gaze was unfocussed. Was he hearing Pamela’s voice from across the years?
‘… I can’t live with knowing it was deliberate …’
The spike in tension was tangible. Webber felt it as a bolt of lightning piercing suddenly and silently, immobilising everything living but making every hair on his body stand on end.
‘… and of all people …’
Drake’s stillness sent a shiver through him. He hadn’t meant to pause at this point. His mouth had dried. Drake was listening hard for the words that Joyce had told him were there, but at the same time seemed to be willing Webber to stop. Webber had a sudden flashback to a warehouse scene that had never happened; a man crouching in the dark realising that the silence was too solid, too complete, that it was a tiger poised within arm’s reach. If he didn’t get the words out now, he was going to bottle it.
‘… and of all people … that it was Michael who did it …’
His gaze slid up to meet Drake’s. ‘Pamela knew it was you, Michael … she knew …’
He made to stand up.
‘No!’ The shriek was deafening.
The crash spun Webber almost off his feet. Something solid, unyielding, crunched into the side of his head. If he hadn’t been half standing he’d have been on his knees.
A moment of realisation. He’d been right!
Murderous uncontrolled fury. The tiger unleashed.
Raising his hands … desperate to fend off the attack, knowing suddenly, viscerally, that Michael Drake could kill him in a fraction of a second … too quick for Farrar to summon help … too quick for Farrar to intervene.
Barely time to thank the heavens the man was unarmed when the claw raked his face … fire igniting an agony of pain. His hands scrabbled at the iron fist … immovable … blood dripped on to his arm.
And it was over almost as it began. The rabid tiger slumped forward, gasping for air, face draining of colour. Webber scrambled to his feet, flapping his hand towards the glass.
‘Medics,’ he gasped. ‘Get the medics in here.’
A second, he thought. It can’t be more than a second since I said it.
Drake’s breath rasped. His eyes rolled. He was losing consciousness. Webber fought an urge to stamp hard on the man, to scream in his face, ‘She knew! Your precious Pamela knew it was you all along.’
This wasn’t the time or the place. He’d done what he needed to do and though his hands were shaking from the speed and ferocity of the attack, he had Drake’s feet hauled up on to the chair before Farrar dived in, his expression horror-struck.
‘Christ Martyn! Medics are on their way. What …?’
Webber shushed him with outspread palm, a finger to his lips. Say nothing. Don’t give him anything to chew on. Leave him with the shock of it.
They stood over him, wary, until running footsteps sounded and the door burst open again.
Webber pressed his hand to the side of his face, keeping his head turned away, hiding the blood that seeped through his fingers.
‘He’s in shock,’ Farrar told them. ‘We’ve got his feet up.’
As the warders eased Drake to a more comfortable position, Webber’s eye caught the glint of silver as something slipped from the man’s hand. Making a pretence of brushing down his trouser leg, he picked it up, concealed it in his closed fist to dispose of later; didn’t need the extra complications of this encounter coming under the spotlight.
‘I’ve never seen anyone move so quick,’ Farrar said as they headed out. The disbelief in his tone matched the shakiness that Webber was trying to suppress.
Drake’s guard never dropped, he realised, not for a fraction of a second. He hadn’t arrived with anything in his hand, the warders couldn’t have been that careless. There must have been a weapon nestling in a groove beside the console, and Webber would bet that Drake had spotted it the second he’d walked through the door. He remembered watching Drake’s fingers feel their way around the recording equipment. It hadn’t been a surreptitious inspection, Drake had done it openly, and Webber had fallen for it. In his hand he could feel the shape of the roughly straightened paperclip, the claw that had raked the side of his face.
‘They’ll need security to be on the ball when he’s in the dock,’ he said.
He tried to feel satisfaction in having been right, but couldn’t shake the suddenness and ferocity of the attack from the front of his mind.
‘He’ll be wearing his frail and ailing personality again by then.’ Farrar spoke with a sneer. ‘I hope he won’t have had time to come to terms with it.’
‘He won’t. It’s how many years since his first wife died? He could barely contain his fury when he told me how she’d lied about the policy. And that was only Tina. This is Pamela.’ Webber spoke with conviction. He’d seen it from up close; too close.
And he’d had the conversation last night with Melinda. She’d asked, ‘How did he do it, Martyn? It was barbiturates, the same as he used on Tiffany and Harmer, but how?’
‘I think he might have been trying to repay that huge financial injection she’d given him,’ he’d said. ‘I think that’s where it started. He’d have done anything for Pamela, so when she was fool enough to voice complaints against her husband he decided to get rid of him. It was bad luck that it all got entangled with Will
Jones and his plan to release those tigers. The three of them, Drake, Yeatman and Morgan, were on a secret mission to Dorset to stop Jones. I think Drake told Yeatman it was a desperate plea from Edith Stevenson but she was in it up to her neck.’
Her brow had furrowed. ‘I know how he killed Robert Morgan. I was asking about Pamela.’
He’d told her that in the end it had been the same murder. ‘He killed her the moment he killed her husband the way he did … or rather the way that it came to be painted in her head. She couldn’t live with the thought of Robert’s last moments. If he’d told her what he’d done, that Robert was dead before the tigers reached him, then she might have got past it, but he couldn’t bring himself to do that.’
Melinda’s expression had been close to indignant. ‘Are you saying he didn’t feed her drugs and trick her into writing a note?’
‘No, she did those bits herself. Drake murdered her husband in a way that killed her too. And it took her fifteen years to die.’
Drake could only cope with being responsible for Pamela’s death as long as he could believe she’d never known that he was the one who had killed her husband. He’d seen her suspicions grow, must have suspected that she’d worked it out. It had festered in Drake’s subconscious over the years but the man had never faced it. Except that now he’d had to. Webber had forced it on him.
There would be a long time to mull it over before it came to court. Long enough that there would be nothing left of that initial bolt of shock, there would be no dramatic collapse to be misinterpreted, just uncontrolled fury at whoever was going to voice the unthinkable.
‘All those years ago,’ Farrar said. ‘Brad Tippet was right. When did you suss him, Martyn?’
Webber had formed a don’t-know shrug before realising that there had been a moment of realisation. ‘After he’d gone off with Ayaan,’ he said. ‘I was listening to China Kowalski on tape and looking up Charlie Sheen quotes. Something struck a chord.’