by Jill McGown
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I tried to kill Bailey, but I failed. I don’t know why I’m back here.’
‘You’re back here because you sadly underestimated Detective Inspector Hill. I make mistakes, Mr Law, as you were only too pleased to point out in your programme. But I have never made that mistake.’
Inspector Hill started the tape, and sat down. ‘Interview with Curtis Law, Thursday, thirty-first July. Present are DI Hill, DCI Lloyd, and Curtis Law. Mr Law, you are not obliged …’
Curtis listened again to the rigmarole, then smiled. ‘How can I help you this time, Chief Inspector?’ he asked.
‘Let’s see.’ Lloyd went through a lot of mannerisms. Head-scratching, finger-steepling, hand-clasping. ‘It’s difficult to know where to start, really,’ he said, sounding as though he had just arrived at the pithead after a night at the coalface. ‘Videos,’ he said, and sighed. ‘I have seen more videos this week than the most ardent of blue-movie fans.’
Curtis raised an uninterested eyebrow.
‘You wanted to murder Bailey,’ Lloyd said. ‘But Bailey was having closed-circuit television installed, and that obviously presented a problem. So you thought you would turn this disadvantage to your advantage. You decided that the whole thing would be recorded for posterity. Everywhere you went, you were going to be on video. Video was going to prove you had been on a train when Bailey was really murdered. Video was going to prove that Mrs Bailey’s car hadn’t moved from the moment she arrived at the hotel until the moment she left. And video was going to make me suspect you of murder, and look for all those clues you had so obligingly left me.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Curtis removed a cigarette from the packet, and lit it.
‘But we’ll come to the videos presently,’ said Lloyd. ‘ Let’s start with the red BMW two-seater that was seen driving away from Bernard Bailey’s farm at approximately ten minutes to eleven on Sunday the twenty-seventh of July. Were you driving that car, Mr Law?’
‘No,’ said Curtis. ‘At ten to eleven on Sunday I was in a hotel suite with Rachel Bailey.’
‘Well, let’s go back a bit. Where were you at, say, twenty past ten?’
‘The same place, with the same person.’
Lloyd shook his head.
‘For the tape, Chief Inspector,’ said Curtis, archly.
‘For the tape, I am shaking my head,’ said Lloyd. At twenty past ten, you were at Bailey’s farm. You were driving a red BMW with false number plates, and you parked in the road at the front of Bailey’s property.’
Curtis didn’t like the accuracy of his timing, or his geography. Surely Bailey hadn’t had a camera installed that he knew nothing about? ‘Do you have some evidence of this?’ he asked.
‘Evidence? Certainly.’ He went into the pile of stuff, and pulled out a sheet of paper in a plastic folder. ‘I am showing Mr Law a faxed invoice from Wicked Wheels Ltd., a car-hire firm, addressed to a Mr Roger Wheeler, at the address of the flat owned by Aquarius Television in Barton. It is for the twenty-four-hour hire of a BMW sports car of exactly similar specification to that owned by Bernard Bailey, driven by Rachel Bailey, and repossessed by the finance company this afternoon.’
Curtis breathed a silent sigh of relief. No evidence that he had been at Bailey’s farm, thank God. He had had no idea that Rachel’s car was in imminent danger of repossession until he’d seen the repo man on the video Gary took. That would have ruined everything.
Lloyd stood up, flexed his back, and stepped over the pile. ‘It could have taken us a lot of man-hours to find the hire company,’ he said. ‘Naturally, you wouldn’t have used the same one that supplied Roger Wheeler with his Jaguar. But we knew it would be a London firm, we knew it hired upmarket cars – we would have found it in the end. Fortunately, thanks to DI Hill here, we didn’t have to.’
Curtis blew smoke in DI Hill’s direction.
‘She makes notes – I expect you’ve noticed. Well, she’s making them now, isn’t she, even though we’ve got a tape running. And she made a note of everything she found in your flat. Including a mailshot from Wicked Wheels lying in the waste bin along with a couple of other car-hire firms hoping to get Mr Wheeler’s business. Try these ones first, she said. So we did. And bingo. I imagine the false number plates have been destroyed, but we’ll keep looking in likely places, just in case. And of course enquiries are proceeding in an effort to find where you had them made up?
‘What false number plates? I hired a car. That’s all you know.’
‘You hired this car from seven o’clock on Sunday evening to seven o’clock on Monday evening. And shortly after you had received dinner in your suite together with Mrs Bailey, you left the hotel by the Executive Wing door, picked up that car and drove it to Harmston.’ He turned away, and seemed to be reading a notice about AIDS.
‘Prove it,’ Curtis said to his back, then turned to Inspector Hill. ‘Prove that car ever left London. I hired a car, using an alias. Perhaps I was hoping to defraud Aquarius TV. That’s all you’ve got.’
‘You left the car,’ said Lloyd, still with his back to him, ‘and you went to Bailey’s gate. You told Bernard Bailey that you had just seen a badly injured sheep on the road. Not one of his, of course, or the alarms would have been set off, but that wouldn’t matter to Bailey. He liked animals. Not so keen on women, but he liked animals.’
Curtis shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No – you’re mixing your suspects up. That’s his daughter’s story.’
Lloyd turned, his face like thunder. ‘ No, Mr Law,’ he said, his voice low and threatening. ‘That is your story. The one you told Bernard Bailey to get yourself through his gate and into his house in order to murder him, the one that you hoped would make Nicola Hutchins look a liar.’
Curtis smiled.
‘Now, I don’t know exactly how you did it, but the pegs are very conveniently situated. I think I would hang up my jacket, perhaps drop something, bend to pick it up, and remove the phone connection from its socket.’
Spot on. Prove it, Curtis said nothing.
‘Bailey would, of course, attempt to phone his daughter. But the phone would be dead, since you’d just pulled it out of the socket. And you would kindly offer your mobile phone.’
Curtis lit a cigarette. ‘ I left Rachel the mobile,’ he said.
‘For the tape,’ said Lloyd, ‘I am shaking my head again. You didn’t leave Rachel the mobile.’
‘Then how did I ring her about the newspaper? Doubtless you’ve checked. She didn’t receive any phone calls through the hotel switchboard.’
‘You didn’t ring her about the newspaper,’ said Lloyd. He sat down again. ‘ If you really had had occasion to ring her about the newspaper, you would have told her that you had inadvertently dropped your newspaper at the scene of the crime, and asked her to get rid of it. Much simpler all round. But you didn’t want her to get rid of it, because it was very important that we find that newspaper, wasn’t it, Mr Law?’
Oh, Jesus Christ, thought Curtis as he looked at the blue eyes that looked coldly into his. Lloyd knew exactly what he’d done. He’d slipped up somewhere. He must have. But they had to prove it, he told himself. They had to prove it. Guesses weren’t worth anything.
‘Oh, Mr Law,’ Lloyd said, shaking his head. ‘You thought you had been so terribly clever, didn’t you? But you have been found out. And the beauty of it is that it was Nicola Hutchins whose actions found you out. Poetic licence may be foreign to your journalistic nature, Mr Law, but I’m sure you recognize poetic justice when it jumps up and bites you.’
Curtis decided that from this point on, he should say nothing. He hadn’t asked for a solicitor. Perhaps he should ask for one, but he wouldn’t, not yet.
Lloyd reached back into the pile of stuff. ‘I am showing Mr Law a fax of the printout of calls made on the mobile phone issued to Roger Wheeler. At ten twenty-nine on Sunday evening, a call was made from that phone to the surgery of Mrs Ni
cola Hutchins.’
Shit.
‘We weren’t supposed to check the calls made on this phone, were we, Mr Law? You knew that as soon as we suspected you of stabbing Bailey, we’d search that flat, knew we’d find the phone charged up. But you confessed to leaving it with Rachel. We had had to wring that confession out of you. So why on earth would we check that it was the truth?’
That had been the general thinking. Curtis stubbed out his cigarette.
‘Shall I tell you why? Because Bernard Bailey hadn’t rung a doctor. He had to have known that he was very ill for some time before he became too disoriented to deal with it. But he hadn’t rung a doctor. Why? It had to be because his phone wasn’t working, we thought. He’d rung his daughter from some other phone, which further suggested that his phone wasn’t working, but since he hadn’t left the premises all day, how had he done that? Answer. Someone brought a phone to him. And that’s why we checked Roger Wheeler’s charged-up mobile phone to see exactly what calls had been made from it, and when. And the silly thing is, that isn’t why he hadn’t rung the doctor at all. I doubt if he even tried.’
Curtis lit another cigarette, drawing calming smoke into his lungs. ‘You can’t prove where the phone was when that call was made,’ he said. ‘ Or who made it. You can’t prove that Rachel didn’t have it. She might have called Nicola for a chat. She might be knocking off Gus for all you know, and called him.’
‘Quite true, Mr Law.’ Lloyd sat back. ‘ Which is something you may live to regret. But let us return to our sheep,’ he said, and smiled broadly. ‘Bailey tries to ring his daughter about it, finds the phone isn’t working, and you offer your mobile. But you wanted the house to appear empty, and Mrs Hutchins would be bound to look in the office, and the sitting room, so you chose the kitchen. She would see that it was in darkness through the hatch, so she wouldn’t try there. He’d be unconscious, or as good as, so with luck she would never know he was in the house.’
Very, very good. And all totally unprovable. Did Lloyd seriously think he would break down and confess, or what?
‘So … how to get him there? I think you would take him to the back door, where you would try to show him where exactly you had seen this poor, distressed animal that urgently needed veterinary attention. You showed him, he rang Nicola, and as soon as he had relayed the sheep’s position …’ Lloyd smiled. ‘You jammed a hypodermic into his neck, and knocked him out. Now,’ he said. ‘ Which of us should tell the rest of this story, Mr Law? You or I?’
‘I’m fascinated,’ said Curtis. ‘Why don’t you carry on telling it?’ He still wasn’t convinced that Lloyd had real evidence. It was psychological trickery.
‘Then you injected the morphine, taking care this time not to find a vein, because he might have died there and then, and that wouldn’t do. That wouldn’t do at all. He had to stay alive for several hours if your plan was to work in its entirety.’
Curtis tried to look calm and unruffled. It was as though he really had carried out this murder on camera.
‘You left the back door unlocked, took his key to the alarm system, and switched off the alarms by opening the box on the wall, so you could leave the back way, over the fence, dodging the cameras that you helped set up in the first place.’
He had told Bailey that blind spots were inevitable, as he had positioned the cameras to leave himself a clear run, not to the fence, but to and from a gap in the hedging. He hadn’t wanted to be spotted climbing over a ten-foot fence by some courting couple.
‘You then ran the tape back, and recorded over your arrival. We all missed that, I have to confess, because of course by the time we saw it, the tape had been recorded on again, and there was no jump in time to give us a clue. But the tape didn’t run itself back until ten thirty-nine, and a twelve-hour tape running from ten-thirty in the morning would normally run itself back three or four minutes past the half-hour at the most. That one ran nine minutes past the half-hour, and a test has revealed that six minutes of that tape must have been run back and recorded over We should have spotted that at the time, rather than in retrospect. But as you pointed out in your programme, we do make mistakes.’
So, someone had tampered with it. It wasn’t proof that he had. Inspector Hill might have worked it all out, but that was no good without proof, and that she hadn’t got.
‘You amused yourself in the meantime by working out what clue you were going to leave for me on your voice-over for your report of the murder, and you saw the open safe, and the money that was lying in it. So you closed the office door. But we’ll come back to that.’
Curtis lit another cigarette.
‘And then you left by the rear, ran round to the front, waited until you saw Nicola Hutchins’s car in your rear-view mirror. You knew she would be arriving sooner or later, as she would not, of course, have found the sheep. Once you saw her, you drove off, making certain that she saw your car.’
And it had worked beautifully. Nicola had driven towards the farm, obediently going to confess to Daddy that she hadn’t found his sheep, and get herself beaten up for it. The woman needed her head tested.
‘You knew that naturally, she would assume it was Mrs Bailey that she had seen,’ Lloyd said. ‘ You knew that naturally, whether she wanted to or not, she would tell us that, and that the alarms had been off, and the house empty. Naturally, we would suspect her, especially when we checked up on the whereabouts of Mrs Bailey’s car. There she was, telling us about a sheep that didn’t exist, and a phone call that had never been made, and alarms that had unaccountably been switched off in an empty, unlocked house, when we had been told that Bailey had been in mortal fear all day, and would never have put the alarms off or left the farm late at night. And we would conclude that since she was there at the material time, complete with drugs, that she had had to lie about the alarms to explain how this mythical sheep had got out in the first place, lied about the car to incriminate Rachel, and lied about the house being empty because she had murdered her father.’
So how come he was here and she wasn’t?
‘She had the motive,’ Lloyd went on. ‘ She had been abused all her life, had been deliberately omitted from her father’s will. We would think that she was hoping to lay the blame at Rachel’s door, knowing, as she did, of Rachel’s relationship with you, and knowing, as everyone did, your relationship with drug suppliers. We were supposed to think she was trying to frame you, when all the time you were framing her.’ He leaned forward. ‘And there was the possibility, wasn’t there, that sooner than incur anyone’s displeasure, she would actually confess to murdering her father, wasn’t there? You knew that. She might give the impression of being in control, but you know just how unstable she is, because Rachel had told you, hadn’t she?’
Curtis smiled again. This was all guesswork. It was right, but it was guesswork.
‘And – most importantly – you knew that she would be too frightened of her father to put the alarms back on again without his permission, which he would be unable to give, since he wouldn’t, as far as she was concerned, even be there.’
Curtis stubbed out his cigarette, and sat back, arms folded. ‘I don’t see you producing evidence of any of that,’ he said.
‘N,’ said Lloyd. ‘And I can’t produce evidence that you then drove the car to Barton, almost certainly to the Aquarius flat, changed out of your jeans and into a suit, then drove away again and parked close to the station. Or that you joined the passengers leaving the eleven-thirty from St Pancras, and drove hack to where you had parked the BMW, stopping only to pick up your accomplice on the way.’
No proof. No evidence. As long as he kept his mouth shut, they could prove absolutely nothing. All Lloyd was doing was digging a great big hole for himself.
Lloyd got up again, walking round the little room as he spoke. ‘Your accomplice gave you the newspaper and the cancelled return ticket, and drove the BMW back to London, to be collected by Wicked Wheels later that day, and you drove back to Bailey’
s farm. You parked on the road, this time at the rear of the property, for an hour and a half, and you did the Times crossword. You smoked and drank Coke, and for someone with a conscience about forest fires, you have very little regard for the litter laws, because you threw out your Coke cans, you emptied your ashtray … in other words, you left clues. Big, bold clues that even an incompetent copper like me couldn’t miss.’
Curtis looked away. Lloyd was enjoying this. He was centre stage, and loving every minute. But he wouldn’t enjoy it for very long, because providing he said nothing, it was all just guesswork, however clever his detective inspector had been.
‘Then, when you felt you had crossed off enough clues in your crossword, and left enough clues on the roadway, you let yourself in to Bailey’s property the same way you had left it. If the alarms had all gone off, you would have driven away before anyone got there, but they didn’t. True to form, Nicola had interfered with nothing. Or so you thought.’
Now, they were coming to whatever it was he had done wrong. He was supposed to ask what she’d done, he supposed. Lloyd really was skating on very thin ice. He wondered how much the tabloids would pay for his story after this.
‘You went in by the back door, locked it, went to the drawer and chose a knife entirely unsuited both to cutting apples and to murdering anyone. An old, blunt, short-bladed vegetable knife. The last thing you wanted it to do was finish him off, or even be capable of doing him much damage. But it couldn’t look as though you’d chosen it. It had to look as though you had just picked it up, so you hacked an apple in two with it, and put it on the coffee table.’
Now, Curtis lit another cigarette. Pretty good, except that he had chosen the knife weeks before, when he was helping Bailey with the cameras. He had taken it away, deliberately blunted it, kept it. Rachel, if she had missed it, would just think she had mislaid it. That wasn’t it, wasn’t what had got Judy Hill on to him. It was something to do with Nicola Hutchins, but he couldn’t imagine what. It didn’t really matter. Proof was what Lloyd needed.