Thirty-Seven
Jake Sullivan parked his car at the roadside and crossed to the electric gates of the imposing property that stood before him. A circular driveway curved around tended grounds, with the first signs of daffodils pushing up through its borders. There was a keypad at the side of the gate where a code could be tapped in; beside that, a button for the intercom that connected to the house.
He pressed the button and stood back, staring at the large, warmly lit building behind a high hedgerow offering privacy from the road. Cyncoed was an affluent area of Cardiff, characterised by sprawling detached properties and populated by the city’s high earners. Jake envied them their surroundings, but he knew that money could only keep someone protected for so long. For the owner of this particular property, that time was running short.
There was a long buzz before the gates began to shift slowly open. Jake stayed where he was, having already promised himself that he wouldn’t enter the house. He didn’t know who else was there, if anyone, and if his suspicions were proved correct, he didn’t want to be alone with this man.
He recognised him when he saw him. He appeared at the front door smartly dressed in dark trousers and a white shirt, although his feet were enclosed in a pair of slippers. He raised a hand in acknowledgement of Jake’s presence, as though greeting someone he knew. If this was an attempt to play the everyday good guy, Jake wasn’t fooled by it.
‘DC Jake Sullivan,’ the man said.
Jake realised the trouble he would be in if anyone was to find out he had continued to involve himself in an investigation after being formally suspended, but it seemed to him that nothing he did now could possibly make things any worse. There would more than likely be an inquiry into his involvement with Kieran Robinson and he would be taken before a disciplinary panel to explain his reasons for concealing the truth from the rest of the investigating team. There was only one thing he could do now that might get him a second chance at his career, and nailing this bastard was it.
‘Do you have ID?’ the man asked, eyeing him coolly.
‘Not with me, no, but you know who I am.’
‘What can I help you with?’
‘I think you know that as well.’
The man pulled a face as he studied Jake intently, the creases that lined his mouth deepening. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve no idea what you mean.’
Jake looked past the man and scanned the vehicles on the driveway. A black BMW and a white Audi convertible were parked alongside one another. He wondered whether either car would hold any traces of his victims, but he was surely too clever for that. He wouldn’t have used his own vehicle.
‘Kieran Robinson,’ Jake said, casting his focus back to the man. ‘You know him, don’t you?’
‘We’ve met, yes.’
‘Oliver Barrett. His name familiar too?’
There was a flash of recognition behind the man’s eyes that betrayed him. His mouth fixed itself in a set line, his demeanour now changed. The nice-guy act had already been jettisoned, far quicker than Jake had expected.
‘Why don’t you tell me what happened, Graham?’
The two men stared at one another, both waiting for the other to react. Despite the flicker in the other man’s eyes, he remained disconcertingly impassive, defiant in the face of his exposure. Jake felt an uncomfortable heat course through him. He knew he was right about this, he was right about him, but now that he was here, the idea seemed naïve and foolish. This man had already been watching him.
‘Is everything okay?’
A woman was standing in the doorway of the house. She was immaculately dressed in a navy-blue trouser suit, her hair swept back from her face and pinned in a mass of curls.
‘This is DC Sullivan. He hasn’t really explained yet why he’s here.’ The man smiled, though there was nothing pleasant in the expression. Jake caught a glimpse of the wave of darkness that pulsed behind his pupils, hinting at the sinister secrets stored beyond. How could his wife – the person presumably closer to him than any other – not see what lay within the man she had given her life to?
As the woman neared, Jake noticed that she wasn’t quite as immaculate as she had at first appeared. There was mascara smudged beneath her eyes, which were red with the aftermath of tears. He wondered whether his arrival might have interrupted an argument between the couple, halting something. Was this woman in danger?
‘Is everything okay?’ she asked again.
‘Everything’s fine. Why don’t you go back inside, my love?’ The man placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘I won’t be long.’
Jake wondered if she knew about any of it: where her husband had been, who he had been with, what he had done. He wondered if she had any idea of the kind of man he was. He must have told her a multitude of lies over the years they had been together, each more complex and elaborate than the last. Jake was guilty of his own lies – a string of untruths he wished he could breathe back in and make disappear – but even he was not exactly prolific when compared to this man. Maybe the more lies that were told, the easier lying became. Jake had thought so, but the previous twenty-four hours had proven wrong everything he had believed.
The man was glaring at him now, the temper that was flaring behind his eyes concealed carefully from his departing wife with a turn of his head. ‘If you don’t have anything of relevance for me, I’m going to have to ask you to leave my property.’
‘Of course,’ Jake said. ‘I apologise.’ He took his mobile phone from his pocket and swiped the screen to unlock it before holding it out to show the man one of the images that had been saved there: an invoice for materials that didn’t exist displayed above a message sent from Darren Robinson’s phone number.
‘I need to talk to you about this.’
Thirty-Eight
Alex and Chloe stood side by side at the sinks in the women’s toilets. It was one of the few places where they got to talk without prying ears picking up on their conversations, and Alex knew there was never going to be a right time to break the news.
‘I’m handing in my resignation,’ she said, glancing in the mirror and pushing a length of dark hair from her face.
Chloe smiled. ‘April Fool’s Day is a couple of weeks off yet.’ She checked her appearance in the cracked glass, noting the dark shadows beneath her eyes. No amount of make-up was going to conceal the effects of the past week. Scott could be forgiven for thinking he’d been made newly single and that no one, least of all Chloe, had thought to tell him.
She turned to look at Alex, her smile fading at her friend’s unchanging reaction. ‘You’re not serious? But … I thought everything was okay. You’ve not mentioned anything before.’
‘You’d have only tried to talk me out of it.’ Alex raised an eyebrow, challenging Chloe to deny the fact.
‘Is this to do what happened with Dan? Because everything’s forgotten about now, you know that. I thought things were fine.’
Alex shook her head. ‘It’s about me.’
Fourteen months earlier, she had been talked out of handing in her resignation by Superintendent Blake. He had presented a convincing argument for her staying in her job, yet it couldn’t overrule the other ambition that had been present in her mind for longer than she had known Chloe.
‘There are things I want to do,’ she explained, ‘and if I don’t do them now, it’ll only be another thing I end up regretting.’ She placed her bag on the sink and reached into it, retrieving the letter she had kept there for the past few days, carrying it with her as though leaving it behind might destroy the future it promised. She passed it to Chloe, waiting for her to scan its contents.
During those past couple of days, her fears about becoming a parent had been pushed to the fore by the heartache she had seen endured by so many: Mrs Lewis’s grief at her son’s disappearance, Nicola Barrett’s frustrations at her apparently wayward son; Linda Robinson’s violent reaction to the worst kind of not knowing. Dan’s daughters were a constant source of worry to him, ye
t she knew that they were also his life’s greatest source of joy.
Yet too many of her choices had been influenced by other people. She had spent so long wanting to prove something: to a mother she had never been close to, a father she missed every day though he had died almost two decades earlier, a husband she had been unable to make happy. Later, she had needed to prove something to herself. The job made her strong at times when she had known she wasn’t; it had given her purpose when she had believed that she had nothing to offer. She had done what she’d set out to achieve. Years of trying to prove something had only proved exhausting. There was no one she had to try to please now other than herself.
‘This is brilliant,’ Chloe said eventually, looking up at Alex with glazed eyes. ‘I mean it,’ she added when Alex narrowed her eyes as though questioning her enthusiasm. ‘You’ll be brilliant.’ She handed the letter back. ‘You never said anything. I thought the process took years.’
‘So did I, but apparently that’s not the case any more. I completed what they call a registration of interest form last summer, not long after my mother died. I heard back just after this.’ She raised a hand to her face, allowing her fingertips to trace the uneven tracks of the scars that ran down her neck. ‘I thought it might ruin my chances, but if anything, it might actually have gone in my favour. I think they see me as some kind of hero or something.’
‘You’re my hero,’ Chloe said, adopting a mock-American accent and giving Alex a wink.
‘Don’t ever do that again,’ Alex said with a smile, picking up her bag.
‘In all seriousness, though, the selfish part of me is gutted. I’d just assumed that things would always stay the way they have been. I thought we were going to grow old together.’
‘Don’t think it means you’re rid of me for good,’ Alex quipped. ‘You’re not that lucky.’
‘What about an income, though? You can’t afford to finish work for ever, can you – not unless you’ve had a lottery win you’ve been keeping quiet.’
‘I can go part-time, hopefully stay within the force somehow. Admin job will suit me fine.’
Chloe raised an eyebrow and was about to question the truth of the statement when there was a knock at the door of the toilets. A moment later, Dan’s head appeared around the corner. ‘Sorry. Not interrupting anything, am I?’
‘Only the obvious,’ Chloe said, raising her hands. ‘Privacy is dead, apparently.’
They stepped out into the corridor, where Dan told them he had received a call regarding Oliver Barrett. He repeated what Paul Ellis had told him, and also, perhaps most tellingly, what he hadn’t been able to put into words.
‘I had to say it for him,’ Dan explained. ‘Stan Smith sexually assaulted him. It happened during a Scouts’ trip. Ellis said Smith cornered him in the shower block of the campsite when no one else was around, and when he told one of the other adults, he was accused of making it up. He’d recently been suspended from school and he admitted he had a well-documented history of telling lies. It seems no one believed him when he did finally tell the truth.’
‘Could Carol Smith have known about this accusation?’ Chloe asked.
‘Maybe,’ Alex said. ‘Though she was just a kid at the time. If everyone else believed Paul Ellis was lying, that’s what Carol would have believed too. Perhaps it was kept hidden from her. Even if she did know about it, why would she want to bring it back up now, when all it would do is make her father appear guilty? Either way, we need to speak with her again.’
‘So what are we thinking … Stan Smith assaulted Oliver Barrett before killing him?’
‘Seems the most likely scenario, doesn’t it?’
Dan looked at Alex. ‘There’s something else. Before Paul Ellis called in, I found this on the printer in the incident room.’ He handed her the sheet of paper. Ellis’s name was listed halfway down the page.
‘I don’t understand. This was on the printer before he called in?’
Chloe stepped towards Alex and scanned the sheet. ‘What is that anyway?’
‘No idea. I sent something to print, and when I went to collect it, this was just waiting there.’
‘Okay,’ said Alex, heading towards the incident room, Dan and Chloe following. ‘Can you give me Ellis’s number? I’ll call him back – see if he recognises any of these other names. Dan, is there any way you can find out whose computer this was sent from?’
‘Should be able to.’
Alex stopped as Chloe and Dan dispersed to their desks, returning her focus to the list of names in her hand. She couldn’t explain why, but a feeling of growing anxiety was beginning to creep through her.
Thirty-Nine
Jake parked near his block of flats, but he wasn’t ready to go home just yet. Sam was busy that evening, working late, and he wasn’t looking forward to an evening by himself with only the television and his own thoughts for company.
Instead of going inside, he made the short walk from his flat to the centre of Cardiff Bay, which, despite the encroaching darkness of early evening, was bustling with life: couples with their coats zipped to their throats sipping coffee on the terrace that overlooked the docking area; groups of friends drinking pints behind the floor-to-ceiling windows of the large bar that stood on the corner of the wooden walkway; families heading home for the night, their children dawdling behind them, already resisting their approaching bedtime. Jake loved this part of the city with all its bustle and life, yet sometimes it made him feel lonelier than he had ever thought possible.
He stopped at the railing of the main pedestrian walkway that ran the length of the increasingly popular bar and restaurant area, leaning over to look down into the murky water below. He watched as it sloshed noisily against the dock wall, the repetitive slapping sound strangely hypnotic. Jake had never been much of a drinker. Now, though, he felt he could gladly reach for a bottle in which to drown himself.
Though he’d had no real feelings towards Kieran – no feelings that reached beyond the physical attraction that had spurred that initial conversation – the thought that his life might have ended somewhere near this place filled Jake with an unsettling anxiety. While the majority of his brain told him that it was Kieran who’d been watched that previous Thursday night, there was a part of Jake still clinging to the sickening possibility that he too had been targeted. Someone wanted to hurt him – if only in the sense of ending his career – but he had no idea why. If there was nothing else he could do now, he owed it to Kieran to find out what had happened to him, and he believed that he was now closer than ever.
Pushing his upper body over the railings, he leaned down to scan the underside of the walkway. There was a ledge that ran the length of the water’s edge, wide enough for a person to lie on. Surely it wasn’t possible that someone could have killed Kieran here, just feet away from the bars and restaurant above, and concealed his body on the ledge to return to later? Unless the divers had somehow managed to miss his corpse in the water, either Kieran had been abducted from somewhere near where Jake now stood, or his body had been removed after death without arousing the suspicions of anyone in the vicinity.
It didn’t make sense. It never had. But it seemed clear now: as obvious as it should always have been. If Kieran was dead, he hadn’t died in this place at all. He had gone somewhere with someone he knew and trusted. He had gone somewhere with a man he had no reason to fear.
Jake left the waterfront and the busy main roads and took a side street that led him past a quiet pub and an Indian takeaway. At the top of the street was the internet café he preferred to use, a place that was always quiet and where he could find privacy for his online activities. He would never use the internet at his own flat, always fearing that Sam might one day use his laptop when staying over; that he would somehow access the search history and Jake would be forced to explain his deceptions. He didn’t want to lose Sam, but there was something in him that needed this other, secret life; an existence that he could keep for himself, that wa
s for him and him alone.
He ordered a large Americano and took it with him to one of the computers in the furthest corner of the café. After using the café’s login details to access the internet, he searched for the website on which he had first met Kieran. Curiosity had led him there, but it was an insatiable need to be desired that had kept him coming back. Monogamy wasn’t right for Jake, but the safety of his relationship with Sam was something he needed. It had never felt wrong: he lived two separate lives, neither one affecting the other. Nobody was hurt by it. But now he realised how naïve that assumption – that hope, perhaps – had been.
All his conversations with other website users would be stored in his account; it had occurred to him that perhaps Kieran might have mentioned something at some point during one of their online chats – some detail he hadn’t noticed at the time – that might now have greater relevance. He had gone through their dialogue once already, but with little else to occupy his time and his thoughts, checking it again seemed as productive as anything else he was now able to do.
He typed in his username and password and waited for the home page to appear on the screen. His profile picture appeared at the side of the page: a heavily filtered selfie that had been taken the previous year; an image that looked barely like he had then and nothing like he looked now. That was the beauty of the internet, he thought, moving away from the photograph and opening his inbox: you could be the best version of yourself, even if it was a version that didn’t exist. You could be someone else.
Scrolling back through the message history, Jake felt his nerves begin to regain their strength. That afternoon had made him uneasy, but he felt empowered again now; more confident in his own abilities than he had felt in quite some time. He needed to search that house, but without a warrant, it was going to prove impossible. He had known he wouldn’t be able to do it that day, and there was part of him that was relieved. He knew exactly what the man was capable of. There was something that had occurred to him, though. He might not be able to get into the house, but he knew someone already corrupt enough to find a way. Darren Robinson. It had seemed a ludicrous thought at first, but the more he had lingered over it, the more credible it had become. All he needed to do was work out a way in which he might be able to make it happen. Perhaps the threat of a charge relating to his attempted blackmail would be enough to persuade Darren that Jake was his only way of avoiding a potential stretch in prison.
A Promise to the Dead: A gripping crime thriller with a brilliant twist Page 18