Out of Sight

by Paul Gitsham

  ‘You needed petrol?’ said Warren.

  ‘Yes, I’d been driving around all week in Kamala’s Audi and I was running on fumes. I realised that I would probably run out of fuel if I didn’t fill up, and with everything that was happening, the last thing I needed was to find myself stranded on the side of the road.’

  ‘Where was this garage?’

  ‘Dunno, somewhere along the A506.’

  ‘Let me get this straight. You drove all the way out of Cambridge to the A506, to get petrol, then drove back to your father’s house, which is in Cambridge?’

  ‘Yeah. I wasn’t really thinking straight.’

  ‘But there must be half a dozen filling stations between where you work and your father’s house. Why didn’t you stop at one of those?’

  Warren looked over at Patel’s solicitor; her face was a mask, but he could imagine what was going through her mind.

  ‘Most of them are BP garages, they cost a fortune. I try and avoid them.’

  Warren stared at him for a few more seconds, wondering if it was some sort of joke. Patel finally dropped his gaze and looked back down at the table.

  ‘So why were you travelling so fast?’

  ‘Well I wanted to get to my father’s house as soon as possible.’

  ‘Yet there is a gap of twenty minutes between you being caught on camera the first time, and the second time.’

  ‘There was a queue at the petrol station.’

  Warren took a deep breath. The man’s story was so preposterous, he didn’t know whether he should challenge him on it right now or come back to it later. In the end, he decided to move on. It would be easy enough to ask all of the garages along that route to check their forecourt cameras for Kamala Patel’s Audi. They could then blow his story out of the water.

  It was time, Warren decided, to bring up the search warrant for the couple’s home. He braced himself. Patel didn’t disappoint.

  ‘What, you can’t do that!’ shouted Patel.

  ‘We can, Jaidev, your wife has agreed. Now would be a very good time for you to tell us everything. Have you ever visited your brother’s flat?’

  Patel scowled, before leaning back in his chair and folding his arms. ‘None of your business.’

  ‘Are you sure about that? I have to say, it’s not looking great for you at the moment, Jaidev. You’ve lied repeatedly about how much contact you had with your brother, and despite claiming to have never visited his flat, the first thing you did after hearing of Anish’s death was race towards it.’

  ‘I told you, I was getting petrol.’ He turned to his solicitor. ‘This is bullshit. Can’t you do something?’

  ‘I would remind you that Mr Patel is here voluntarily,’ said the solicitor. ‘He is not under arrest and has not been charged with any crime. He also has alibis over the period you believe his brother was killed. I ask that you either arrest my client or let him go.’

  ‘Jaidev,’ said Warren, ‘the more help you give us the better. If, as you say, you have nothing to do with your brother’s death, then there will be nothing for you to worry about.’

  ‘I can’t believe that you are even attempting that justification,’ said the solicitor. ‘This isn’t a police state.’

  ‘Perhaps you could explain this,’ said Warren, ignoring her protestations.

  He pushed his tablet over, an image on the screen.

  ‘The search team found these at your house. Why do you have keys to your brother’s flat?’

  ‘His lawyer is right, we can’t keep him here indefinitely. He could get up and walk any time,’ said Grayson.

  Jaidev Patel had refused to comment on whether he had ever actually visited his brother’s flat.

  ‘His brother could have given him a key for safekeeping,’ Warren admitted.

  ‘And we still can’t prove that he even drove to his brother’s flat the day we told him Anish had died,’ said Sutton. ‘There are no cameras close enough to the flat to prove he was within a reasonable distance. He could just claim that he was driving around, or near, Middlesbury clearing his head. You’ll need witnesses that saw his wife’s Audi for that to hold up.’

  Warren hissed in frustration. He’d taken a gamble in confronting Patel with the evidence and it had backfired. He knew that even as they spoke, Patel would be busy concocting an explanation. And the moment they released him, he’d likely seek to muddy the waters and dispose of any evidence that he might still have.

  ‘How’s his alibi looking for the day of the murder?’ asked Grayson.

  ‘Checks out so far,’ admitted Warren.

  ‘Then we’ve got nothing to justify his arrest.’

  There was a quiet tap on the door; looking through the window, Warren could see the red of Rachel Pymm’s cardigan.

  ‘Come in,’ called Grayson.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt, but I thought you’d want to know. We have bad news.’

  Warren smothered a groan.

  Jaidev Patel left the building as soon as he could, with barely a glance back.

  ‘I can’t believe it, he actually did stop at a petrol station,’ said Warren.

  ‘Yeah, although their records indicate that there wasn’t much of a queue,’ said Pymm. ‘He still had plenty of time to make it to Anish’s flat, do whatever he wanted to do, then drive to Cambridge.’

  ‘Well, we can’t arrest him for being mistaken about how long it took him to buy petrol,’ said Sutton, his mood as dark as Warren’s.

  Chapter 25

  Warren arrived home at an almost decent hour, but Susan wasn’t there to make the most of it. It was the final parents’ evening of the term and it would be a late one; as Head of Science, in addition to her own pupils she would also be supporting colleagues having awkward conversations with struggling learners.

  Too ravenous to cook properly, he popped some frozen potato waffles in the toaster; at least Susan wasn’t there to nag him about his diet. As they started to sizzle, he cut thick slices of Red Leicester cheese and splurged a healthy dollop of brown sauce on some slices of bread; at least his waffle sandwich was made with wholemeal.

  Waiting for the toaster, he leafed through the junk mail and early Christmas cards on the doormat until his breath caught. He didn’t need to open the thick, A4 envelope to know its contents, the discreet logo in the corner told him all he needed to know.

  Unbidden, his awkward conversation with Karen Hardwick the previous day came back. If only she knew …

  It had been over twelve months since their loss. In the immediate aftermath, Susan had been adamant it was nothing but a setback – tragic to be sure, but just a step on the road to eventual success. Give it a few months and they would try again.

  There had been a slight hitch when they were informed that the NHS would no longer fund them for another IVF cycle, meaning they had to pay for it privately. Same clinic, same doctors, but five grand, please.

  After the previous year’s miscarriage, Granddad Jack had pledged some of his savings to help them. Warren had felt uncomfortable about the offer, but it had soon become a moot point. The heart-breaking realisation that Jack would never be returning to the home he’d lived in since his wedding had been compounded by the fact that the same home would need to be sold to pay for continuing care, and his savings would be similarly ring-fenced.

  Jack was frail and in need of assistance, but otherwise fit and healthy. His own parents had both lived far longer than most of their contemporaries and the doctors saw no reason that Jack couldn’t enjoy a good few more years himself. Jack currently paid almost eight hundred pounds a week for a room in a residential home. That was only going to get more expensive over time, as his needs increased. The maths had been stark; if Jack lived for another five or more years, then the equity in his house would be all but used up. Warren wouldn’t be inheriting anything but memories, and Jack couldn’t give them the money to pay for their treatment.

  Financially that wasn’t a worry for Warren and Susan – between them, th
eir joint salaries were more than enough to pay for several additional cycles of IVF – but it had left Jack even more depressed than before.

  And it had become another excuse.

  First, they had been too busy to think about the next step; Christmas and New Year had followed an especially gruelling case for Warren. Then there had been the worries with Granddad Jack; finding a suitable care home had taken months, with two false starts, followed by selling his house. It always amazed Warren how some estate agents, despite doing nothing but buy and sell houses all day, still acted as if it was the first time they’d ever done it. Being a hundred miles away hardly helped matters.

  Now though, the excuses were running out. Warren could never predict how busy he was going to be, but they’d made it work before – after all, his input in the process was far less than Susan’s. Her school was very good about time off for such things, so there was really no excuse for not starting again.

  His dinner forgotten, he continued to stare at the envelope. He didn’t know how Susan would react to his attempt to reinvigorate the process. Even if she said no, it was something. For months they’d danced around the subject, always too busy or too tired to talk.

  Before he could change his mind, he picked the envelope up and slid his finger along the opening. Walking through to the living room he placed the shiny brochure on the coffee table where it couldn’t be missed.

  He knew exactly what Susan’s response would be – that a school night, after a long parents’ evening, was hardly the time to discuss something so important. And she was right.

  But when was the right time?

  Tuesday 6th December

  Chapter 26

  Warren stifled a yawn with his fist. Two double-strength coffees had barely dented the fatigue from yet another sleepless night. At this stage in a case it was normal for his sleep to suffer; early starts and late finishes propped up by caffeine – not to mention his tendency to eat even more poorly than normal – would leave his mind abuzz. When he did finally drop off to sleep, weird and unsettling dreams were not uncommon.

  He had been right about Susan’s reaction to the brochure for the fertility clinic. As a couple, they rarely argued about anything of significance and it was unusual for them to raise their voices to one another. Nevertheless, Susan had been far from impressed at Warren ‘ambushing her’ after a long day at work.

  In the end however, his ploy had been successful. Susan had agreed to properly sit down with Warren and discuss their options; Warren hadn’t even needed to decamp to the guest bedroom for the night. They had agreed upon Saturday evening; he just hoped that the case didn’t throw up any excuses to avoid the issue again.

  Warren had decided to start the meeting on a positive note after Jaidev Patel’s release. Conscious that the team needed to avoid falling into a rut, and placing all of their investigative eggs in one basket, he turned to Rachel Pymm first for an update on her team’s progress tracking down the men that Anish Patel had met through Rainbow Hookups. It wasn’t impossible that Anish had been killed by someone he met online, with a motive no more convoluted than simple human jealousy. They still hadn’t accounted for Anish’s regular stays at the Easy Break Hotel, although the visits didn’t seem to correlate with his communications with men he’d contacted through the app.

  ‘The first significant contact he had was with Johnny74 if you recall,’ Pymm started.

  ‘The car lover?’ said Ruskin.

  ‘Yes, but not to be confused with Car_lover12, who we have also been in contact with,’ said Pymm. ‘As I suspected, by all accounts it was little more than a casual hook-up with Johnny74,’ continued Pymm. ‘We did a “bed and breakfast” analysis on the historic location data for his phone and figured out where he usually spends the night. I sent a couple of DCs around to knock on the door and see what he had to say for himself.’

  ‘Anything significant?’ asked Sutton. ‘It was over a year ago that they first met.’

  ‘Well first of all, he has an alibi for the whole period that we are looking at. He was down in London overseeing a community arts exhibition. He spent the days helping set up and the evenings hosting the event. Naturally, the phone he uses for Rainbow Hookups is a burner, which he left in his flat when he went away. He doesn’t like to mix business and pleasure.’

  ‘Convenient,’ said Ruskin.

  ‘Perhaps, but he was happy to hand it over to the officers that interviewed him. He admitted that he was still technically in a relationship when he joined Rainbow Hookups, hence the burner. After he became single again, he saw no reason to change phones.’

  ‘How strong is his alibi?’ asked Warren.

  ‘We have photos of him in the Evening Standard and have confirmed he met with potential sponsors over the course of several days, plus CCTV from his hotel and the train station. There’s just no way that he could have nipped back to the Easy Break Hotel.’

  ‘Did he remember the details of when he met Anish?’ asked Warren. ‘He wouldn’t be the first spurned lover to have someone else kill on his behalf after arranging an alibi.’

  ‘He had to have a bit of a think about it,’ said Pymm, ‘but when he did remember, he was quite open about what happened that evening. He said that he got the impression that Anish was fairly new to online dating and nervous about being seen in public. They met up for a meal in a restaurant and he thought it was rather sweet that Anish insisted on paying for it.’

  ‘What was he expecting from the date?’ asked Warren.

  ‘Well Johnny74, or Mr John Paris to give him his real name, said that he felt that Anish wasn’t clear exactly what he wanted. As for Mr Paris, he said that at the time he was some months out of the aforementioned long-term relationship and was looking for a bit of fun, with something more if he met the right person.’

  ‘And was Anish the right person?’ asked Sutton. ‘We speculated that Anish may have moved his relationship onto an app-based communication platform, rather than text messages, so we don’t know if they continued communicating.’

  ‘Well, he was rather coy about what happened after the meal,’ said Pymm, ‘but just as we suspected, it seems that it was him that broke off the relationship. If you recall, there was a text message exchange the morning after their date that I surmised was Johnny74 saying “thanks but no thanks”. Without being asked he opened his phone and showed the text message exchange between him and Anish; it seemed that they parted on good terms.’

  ‘Sounds like he’s unlikely to have been involved,’ said Warren. ‘Anything on the computer about him?’

  ‘Nothing, not even a speeding ticket. He was quite happy to be fingerprinted,’ said Pymm. ‘For what it’s worth, the lead interviewer has been in this game for years and has a pretty good nose for these things. She reckoned that his reaction when he was told was one of surprise, and though he was sad and shocked, it wasn’t over the top for what appears to have been little more than a one-night stand over a year ago.’

  ‘OK,’ said Warren. ‘Let’s move on. Who else have you found? You mentioned Car_lover12?’

  ‘Yes. He was a lot more recent; he contacted Anish on the 16th of June this year,’ said Pymm.

  ‘That’s barely five months before Anish was killed,’ said Ruskin. ‘That’s not so long for a person to bear a grudge.’

  ‘This one was a little more awkward,’ said Pymm. ‘The team tracked him down to Stenfield; a couple of uniforms knocked on the door and he almost vomited … his wife and kids were in the living room.’

  There was a collective wince. Regardless of their personal views about the rights or wrongs of Car_lover12’s clandestine online persona, they were police officers not grubby tabloid journalists seeking to expose the private failings of innocent people.

  ‘There’s a possible motive, right there,’ said Hardwick. ‘Could Anish have threatened to tell his wife? A spot of blackmail could account for his mysterious cash income.’

  ‘He does potentially have a lot to lose,’ sa
id Pymm. ‘Mr Isaiah Otis is a full-time pastor and youth worker at the Stenfield Community Evangelical Centre. Fundamentalist Christians preaching how you should love your neighbour – but not in the way that Otis loved Anish.’

  ‘What about means and opportunity?’ asked Warren. ‘How cooperative was he?’

  ‘Once they calmed him down he voluntarily attended the local nick and happily brought his burner phone with him.’

  ‘Did he consent to being printed?’ asked Warren.

  ‘Yes, and swabbed, and once he started talking, they struggled to get him to shut up. Poor bloke had a lot to get off his chest, by the sounds of it.’

  ‘I’m assuming I’d have heard about it if he confessed,’ said Warren.

  ‘No such luck, I’m afraid,’ said Pymm. ‘His story is that he contacted Anish and they exchanged a few text messages. He was a little embarrassed, but to be honest they’re pretty tame. They agreed to meet for a meal out of the way in Stevenage. He wouldn’t say if they spent the night together, but the text the following morning was a simple “thanks for the lovely night” from Anish and a polite, “see you around” from Otis. He claims that they didn’t really click and neither wished to continue the relationship.’

  ‘What about WhatsApp or other messaging apps?’ asked Sutton.

  ‘His burner phone was too basic to install any,’ Pymm scowled in frustration. ‘We really need access to Anish’s handset to pursue that angle.’

  ‘What about an alibi?’ asked Hutchinson.

  ‘The burner phone stays hidden in his car’s glove box,’ said Pymm, ‘and we’ve tracked his usual mobile phone. Neither have ever been near the Easy Break Hotel, or any place else we know that Anish frequented. Nor has his car, or his wife’s car, been photographed anywhere suspicious. He claims to have been home each night and working at the church and youth centre during the days we’re interested in. His devices seem to back that up.’

  ‘Any corroboration?’ asked Hutchinson.

  ‘Yes, his wife says that he was home each night and he was in meetings each day that the other participants confirm.’ Her face took on a sympathetic cast. ‘It sounds as though she didn’t fully buy the “routine inquiry” line. I wonder if she has been having doubts?’