Brock picked up the notebook and flicked through the pages until he came to a passage written in a script that vaguely resembled his own. It read, I’m still denying I killed the Vasile bitch, but Danny can see through my lies.
‘Well,’ Brock said, ‘I can see you’re not in here for forgery, Danny. Do I detect an element of desperation?’
Danny said nothing, standing there, staring at the floor, fists clenched tight.
Brock said finally, ‘Sit down, old son. Tell me all about it.’ He sat and waited until Danny finally slumped onto the edge of his bunk.
Brock checked through the rest of the notebook, frowning like a disapproving schoolmaster. ‘They’re putting the hard word on you, are they?’
Danny’s bowed head gave a little nod.
‘Come on then, you might as well tell me.’
He sighed and finally spoke. ‘I’ve got a little girl, Isabella.’ He nodded at the photograph on the pinboard. ‘She’s eight. They’ve taken her into care. They say she’s at risk and they’ve told her her dad’s a murderer. She won’t come to see me.’
He sniffed. ‘The cop told me they’ll fix it for me to get manslaughter with mitigating factors and be out of here in three years, if I do what they want. That way there’s a chance I can make things good with Isabella. But if I don’t, they’ll make sure I get eighteen years minimum, and she’ll be grown up by the time I get out, and it’ll be too late.’
‘And what do they want you to do?’
‘To get you to tell me why you killed that woman.’
‘And if I don’t tell you?’
‘Then I’ll probably never see my little girl again.’
‘That’s rough,’ Brock said. He went over and studied Isabella’s photograph. He’d sometimes wondered what it would have been like to have had a daughter, if things had worked out differently. ‘She’s very pretty.’
‘Yeah, and bright. My little angel.’
‘This detective have a name?’
‘Flint.’ Danny shuddered. ‘Hard as.’
‘Well, the only comfort I can offer you is that things could be a lot worse.’
Danny snorted. ‘Oh really? How?’
‘I’m not going to confess to you, and I’m not going to tell you why I killed that woman, because I didn’t. And if you go ahead and tell them I did, and invent a lot of bullshit like this—’ Brock shook the notebook at him ‘—then on top of everything else you’re going to find yourself up on charges of perjury and trying to pervert the course of justice, and you’ll have another three years minimum added to your sentence.’
‘Jesus.’ Danny buried his face in his hands and his shoulders shook. ‘What can I do?’
Brock sat silent for a while, then said softly, ‘Leave it with me, old son.’
It was after eight that evening when Kathy finally met with Torrens and Hughes. Torrens was in his shirtsleeves, tie loosened and looking weary. He took a bottle of Scotch from a cupboard and poured three glasses. ‘It’s been a bugger of a day,’ he said. ‘So I hope you’re not going to make it any worse, Kathy. What’s the problem? A connection, you said?’
‘Yes. As you know, we’ve been trying to track down connections between Walcott and Jarvis, and we came up with something odd. Seventeen years ago they were both involved with a criminal trial which was highly publicised at the time—the Causley brothers.’
Torrens nodded. ‘Yes, I remember.’
‘Walcott was the judge and Jarvis the Crown prosecutor. But it turns out that both Brock and Pettigrew were central figures in that trial as well, Brock as SIO and Pettigrew as jury foreman.’
‘Really? Quite a coincidence, but so what?’
‘I wonder if it’s too much of a coincidence, given what’s happened to those four men since the Causley brothers got out of jail.’ And Kathy told them what she’d learned about the Causleys since their release. As she spoke she saw the frowns deepen on their faces. ‘I think it’s a possibility that the Causley brothers might be involved in our four current cases, and I believe it’s a possibility that we can’t afford to ignore.’
‘Hm.’ Torrens glanced at Hughes. ‘Alun?’
‘Well … this is the first I’ve heard of this notion, but frankly, sir, I think it’s extremely fanciful. The Walcott and Jarvis cases are entirely different from the other two. It may be that there is some link between the Pettigrew and Brock cases that we haven’t completely clarified as yet, concerning the Orwell manuscript, but that’s got nothing to do with the Causley brothers, surely. No, no, I’m sorry, Kathy. I don’t buy it. Coincidences happen all the time. That’s all this is.’
‘I agree,’ Torrens said shortly.
‘Sir,’ Kathy said, ‘I’ve established that neither brother appears to have an alibi for the morning of the eighth of January, when Elena Vasile was murdered. I’d like your approval to test this in the least intrusive way, by tapping Jarrod Causley’s phones, accessing his bank accounts and monitoring his movements, and to mount a search for Dean Causley’s present identity and whereabouts. Neither of them need be aware of our investigation.’
Torrens yawned, shook his head. ‘No. Not on the basis of what you’ve told us. I can’t see any judge approving it. And apart from that, it’s a distraction from the Falstaff investigation that we just don’t need.’
Outside, in the corridor, Hughes said, ‘Didn’t see that one coming, Kathy. You’ll do anything to get your pal Brock off the hook, won’t you? Bloody brilliant, but it doesn’t fly. And hell, woman, you’d be undermining your own case against Pettigrew.’
‘Brock taught me that sometimes we pursue a wrong idea because we simply can’t bear to dump all we’ve invested in it. He said a good detective knows when it has to be done.’
‘And sometimes we get distracted from the truth because we just don’t want to acknowledge what’s staring us in the face. Pettigrew and Brock are both guilty, Kathy. The forensic evidence is unequivocal. If you want to cooperate on finding out where that manuscript fits in, I’ll be very willing to help. But not with this fanciful nonsense.’
He was right of course. But as she drove back to the office she remembered Brock’s argument that the forensics could have been forged—Pettigrew’s DNA planted at Caroline Jarvis’s murder scene, her necklace placed in Pettigrew’s house. It seemed hardly credible, but was it possible?
There was a voice message waiting for her from Brock. God, Kathy, I had to queue for an hour to get a turn on this bloody phone and you’re not there! I need to talk to you!
She sighed. She couldn’t ring him back at the prison. He’d just have to wait.
The following day, halfway through the rush to finish her unit’s report on the Walcott/Jarvis cases, Kathy went through her checklist of tasks. There were several lines of inquiry left unfinished, and one that particularly bothered her was a follow-up on the report from the coroner’s office on Walcott’s death. The coroner had never referred the case to Homicide and Serious Crime as a possible murder, rather than a suicide, and she wasn’t sure whether the possibility of murder had ever been seriously tested. So, hyped up on strong coffee after an almost sleepless night, she phoned the coroner’s office and was eventually put through to the police officer there who’d worked on the case.
‘Yes, ma’am. I advised the coroner on the Walcott death.’ He sounded cautious. ‘I authored the report that was sent through to you for the Falstaff Committee.’
‘Yes, thanks, I’ve read it. I just wanted to clear up one point. I know that hangings are usually assumed to be suicides, but surely in the case of a High Court judge the coroner would have referred the case to Homicide for investigation?’
‘Oh no. Hanging is such a common form of suicide that they’re only referred in cases of exceptional anomalies. I’ve seen hangings where the hands of the deceased were bound with tape and they still weren’t referred. Suicides sometimes do that, you see, to try to prevent themselves changing their minds at the last minute. There were no exceptional c
ircumstances in the Walcott case to indicate homicide. On the contrary, the location, the open computer, the nature of the bruises, all suggested an accidental autoerotic suicide. We’ve seen a few of those, believe me.’
‘And the teddy bear,’ Kathy added.
‘Yes, ma’am, the teddy bear. But most of all the computer. It was full of child abuse videos. The screen was unlocked, and he’d obviously been looking at it just before he died.’
‘How can you be sure of that?’
‘Well, someone had, and there were no signs of anyone else having been there.’
‘No obvious signs,’ Kathy said. ‘So would it be true to say that it was never investigated seriously as a homicide?’
‘You’d need to talk to forensic services, but that is my understanding.’
Kathy had already done that. Volume crime cases in the Metropolitan Police area were handled by crime scene examiners, who together had to deal with over eleven thousand cases in an average month. More serious crime scenes were referred to crime scene managers, who could spend much longer on each scene. The Walcott case had been handled by a crime scene examiner. Kathy wished she could have talked to the senior investigating officer again, Detective Inspector O’Hare, to find out who’d made that decision, but of course he was presently lying on some distant beach, unable or unwilling to take messages.
The following night, short of sleep and headache throbbing, Kathy finally delivered her report to Torrens’s office and headed home. After Thursday’s brief spell of spring-like weather, winter had returned in earnest, with a freezing wind and hard rain lashing the city, and by the time she reached home she was sure she had a cold coming on. She hung up her coat, kicked off her shoes and made herself a hot toddy to her Uncle Tom’s recipe—whisky, hot water, honey and a squeeze of lemon juice. She slumped down into the armchair with a sigh.
The phone at her elbow rang. It was John, and for a moment she had the thought that he must have been watching the tower to see her light come on.
‘Hi, Kathy. How did it go?’
‘Oh, okay, I hope. I’ve just got in. Where are you?’
‘In Battle. Suzanne invited me down here for a day or two.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘You sound exhausted. Any chance you can join us? Suzanne told me to ask.’
‘That’s good of her. Please thank her, but I’m going to have to stay around here in case I’m needed.’
‘Sure.’
There was a moment’s silence. She tried to think of something to say. ‘Any more luck with The Promised Land?’
‘Maybe. I found …’ He hesitated, then said, ‘It’s a bit complicated. I really need to show you. Not to worry. You sound bushed. You need to get a good night’s sleep.’
‘Yes, you too.’
She rang off, thinking she should have found something more to say, something encouraging, but she was just too tired to think.
John hung up. He returned to the living room where Suzanne was drinking a mug of hot chocolate and sat down.
‘How’s Kathy?’
‘Very tired. I did pass on your invitation, but she’s too tied up to leave town.’
‘That’s a shame.’
He was aware of her observing him over the rim of the mug.
‘You all right, John? Worried about your dad?’
‘He seemed to be coping better than I expected. I had these visions of an ex-cop being bashed by the other convicts, but it was nothing like that.’
‘I know what you mean—I think boredom must be the worst thing.’
‘Yes. Imagine spending the rest of your life in such a place.’
‘I’m hoping it won’t come to that. But maybe you’re bored, down here.’
‘No, no.’
‘Something’s bothering you though.’
John smiled, remembering what Brock had once said about Suzanne’s interrogation technique. ‘Well … I feel kind of useless and in the way.’
‘Of course you’re not. Why do you say that?’
‘Well … I tried to have a chat with Stewart, but he made it pretty plain he wasn’t interested in having me around.’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry. He’s impossible. He drives—drove—Brock mad. He’s rude, has almost no real friends and his school results are going downhill. These last weeks he’s been worse than ever. I don’t know what to do. The trouble is, I can see his mother in him. She was just the same at that age.’
‘I was wondering …’
‘Go on.’
‘Something Brock said when I saw him, about how he would have liked to take up gliding again, and how he now knew how a caged bird must feel. He mentioned a gliding club over by Lewes.’
‘Yes, we did talk about that. I stopped him going, but now I wish I hadn’t, then he might never have got mixed up with Maggie Ferguson and got into this mess.’
John said, ‘I checked the club out on the web, and they have trial lessons on Sundays, taking people up for a first flight to get them interested. I wondered if I could persuade Stewart to come with me tomorrow, just the two of us.’
‘John, it would be a miracle if you could get him off that computer and out of his room for a few hours.’
Kathy stared at her dining table, which was looking much like her desk at work, covered with notes, photocopies and computer printouts. Among them lay the enlarged image of Dean Causley’s face taken from his driver’s licence in the name of Ethan Hawke. She felt weary and defeated just looking at the mess.
She forced herself to her feet, went into her bedroom and fell immediately to sleep.
Three hours later she opened her eyes wide and said, ‘The Spaniards Inn.’
She got up and washed her face with cold water, then went through to her computer, logged on to the MPS intranet and into the files of the Heath murder investigations. At the time they were investigating the plumber’s van in the car park of the Spaniards Inn they had accessed the pub’s external security camera for the periods around both the Giannopoulos and Jarvis murders, and from these they had enlarged and enhanced images for every person recorded passing by. Kathy now began scrolling through those images until she came to the one she wanted—an unidentified male carrying a shoulder bag, walking along Spaniards Road opposite the pub at seven sixteen on the morning of Andrea Giannopoulos’s murder. She zoomed in on the face, then copied and pasted it alongside the face from Ethan Hawke’s driver’s licence.
‘It’s possible,’ she murmured. ‘Very possible.’
17
The following morning at the breakfast table, despite Suzanne’s prediction, a small miracle did happen. Stewart sat as usual, head down, saying nothing, when John took the seat next to him and slapped a sheet of paper down in front of him.
‘What do you reckon, mate?’ He tapped the sheet.
‘What?’ Stewart mumbled, stared at the paper, shrugged and continued eating his porridge.
‘You and me. We’ve got flying lessons today.’
‘What!’ Miranda cried. ‘You’re going flying?’
‘Yep. Stewart and I are booked to go up at midday.’
‘That’s fantastic!’ She punched her brother on the arm. ‘You lucky thing.’
‘No.’ Stewart shook his head. ‘No way.’
‘Come on,’ John said. ‘I’ve paid. Don’t let me down, mate.’
‘You’re not scared, are you?’ Miranda goaded.
Stewart looked in alarm at the two of them, then at his grandmother.
Suzanne said, ‘You’ll have to go, Stewart. Now John’s paid.’
They didn’t think he would, not until the last minute, when John appeared at the foot of the stairs with Stewart in tow, both with their coats on.
This time Edmanda was determined to put her foot down. ‘I know you’ve been in a lot more police interviews than I have, Brock, but you’ve never been on this side of the table before, have you?’
Brock nodded humbly. ‘True enough, Edmanda. True enough.’
; ‘And I think, despite your long experience, that I may know the law a little bit better than you. So please, let me do my job.’
‘Point taken.’
‘Maggie told me that your most effective technique when interviewing suspects was your silences. Let’s try that now.’
Alun Hughes came bustling in, the merciless DS Bulimore at his heels. ‘Morning, morning. How are we this wet and dreary morning?’
Silence from Brock.
Hughes looked a little disconcerted. ‘Well, let’s get down to it, shall we?’ He unpacked his bag and took up his notebook. ‘Nothing major, Brock. Just a few little odds and ends, points of detail I’d like to clear up, that’s all. Hmm …’ He consulted his notes. ‘Did you recognise anyone else on Hampstead Heath that Friday morning, the eighth of January?’
Silence.
Hughes tried again. ‘Was Elena Vasile wearing the same clothes that day as on the previous time you met her, in Walworth on the nineteenth of December?’
Silence.
‘On either occasion, did she have any visible bruises? Any signs of having been assaulted?’
It went on like this for some time, Brock saying not a word, until finally Hughes, exasperated, threw down his notebook. ‘This won’t do, Brock! It’s all very well saying nothing at the beginning of an inquiry when the police are just fishing, but not now, not when we know everything. All it does is antagonise us, and strengthen the prosecution case.’
Brock made no response, and Hughes began again, going through his long list of questions and getting silence in return. Finally he closed his notebook with a snap. ‘Very well. If you’re not going to talk to me, there’s nothing I can do for you. I’m disappointed, Brock. Very disappointed. I can see you spending the rest of your life in jail. Think of that. I am now suspending this interview.’
The Promised Land Page 18