False Witness

by Michelle Davies

  FALSE WITNESS

  Michelle Davies

  PAN BOOKS

  To Granddad,

  for being right about everything

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  76

  77

  78

  79

  80

  81

  82

  83

  84

  85

  86

  87

  88

  89

  90

  91

  92

  Acknowledgements

  DEAD GUILTY

  1

  1

  Tuesday

  Alan Donnelly’s first thought on spotting the children on the ladder was to wonder whether it constituted a sacking offence under the terms of his contract.

  His second was that he’d strangle the little sods when he got his hands on them.

  One of them was already at the ladder’s brow, the other not far behind. He couldn’t see their faces clearly from that distance, but the girl in the lead had long blonde hair worn loose and wavy and was in a red gingham dress. From the size of her she looked as though she might be in Year 5, possibly 6. The boy in her wake had cropped dark hair and was wearing smart grey shorts and a white polo top. He looked physically younger, a skinny little runt.

  Alan threw down his shovel on the soil he’d been using to fill in the cracks in the turf. It was Sports Day next week and the playing field was uneven underfoot, a potential safety hazard for egg-and-spoon and sack race competitors according to the head. Smacking his palms together to clean them, Alan set off across the grass towards the playground, angry at being pulled away from an important task to sort out misbehavers.

  He’d warned Mrs Pullman something like this would happen if they didn’t delay building work until the holidays started. During a tetchy meeting with her and the governors to discuss the plans, he’d likened cordoning off the playground while the kids were still at school to waving a bottle of vodka under the nose of an alcoholic. Far too tempting. They hadn’t taken kindly to his metaphor and decided it would be far worse if they waited until the summer holidays and the work overran and the classes weren’t finished for the new intake come September. Prepare for an early June start, he was told in no uncertain terms.

  Yet here they were three weeks into the project and he was already being proved right. There wasn’t time to be smug, though, because unless he got those kids down off that ladder before anyone else saw them he’d be right in the shit. It wouldn’t matter how they’d broken into the school or got onto the building site, it was the fact that they had, and security was his responsibility as caretaker.

  There were three new classrooms being built, in a single-storey, L-shaped annexe. An outer wall of the first one was already completed – about seven metres high, it was what the children were standing on now. They appeared to be alone, no sign of any others egging them on. He checked his watch quickly. It was ten past seven – he had about twenty minutes before the first members of staff would start arriving.

  His breaths grew shorter as he picked up his pace and he reached into his pocket for his inhaler. He’d been using it a lot these past four days, since the heatwave baking Mansell and the rest of Buckinghamshire and much of the south-east had begun. He hated it, couldn’t breathe it was so hot. Yesterday the temperature had hit twenty-eight degrees and today was meant to be even higher.

  The building site was separated from the playground by two-metre-high interlocking panels, but the door cut into the centre panel was ajar, its padlock swinging loose. Alan couldn’t remember seeing it fastened when he did his rounds the previous evening but if anyone asked he would say it was and the kids must’ve forced it open.

  He stepped through the doorway and his heart skipped a beat. Both children were on the top of the wall, backs to him. The girl was staring down into the hollowed guts of the new classroom but the boy was crouched low with his arms splayed out, as if struggling to keep his balance. Alan guessed the breeze blocks could take their weight but it wasn’t a wide wall, not even for feet as small as theirs. One misstep was all it would take.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he called up, loudly enough for them to hear but not so loud it would give them a fright and make them stumble.

  The boy rose slowly to his feet, then reached out and grabbed the girl’s hand. He whispered something and she angled her head towards him just enough for Alan to see her face. He didn’t know her name but she was in Miss Felix’s class, Year 6. Had a bit of a gob on her like most girls her age seemed to these days, but she wasn’t one of the kids who usually warmed the row of chairs outside the head’s office as they waited for a telling-off.

  ‘You need to get down now,’ he said.

  The boy’s shoulders began to heave as though he was laughing and that made Alan see red. If there was one thing guaranteed to wind him up it was being mocked by cocky little shits. He gripped the ladder and dragged it along the wall so it was closer to where they were.

  ‘You first,’ he said firmly to the girl. ‘Take it steady though.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said, her voice cracking. ‘He won’t let me.’

  The boy’s head whipped round. It was the new kid, the one who a week earlier Alan had caught skulking in the cupboard where they stored the art supplies. He’d read him the riot act, told him it was out of bounds to pupils, but he didn’t report it because the cupboard shouldn’t have been unlocked in the first place. He was still trying to get to the bottom of whose fault that was.

  The girl said something but Alan didn’t catch it because his focus was on the boy who had started moving away from the ladder, pulling her with him.

  ‘Come back here,’ he shouted, too pissed off now to mind his volume. ‘I’ll have you excluded for this.’

  They both ignored him.

  Alan knew he had to act, and fast. The teachers who liked to start early would be arriving soon, not to mention the construction workers. He had to get the kids down from that wall. He started to climb the ladder, muttering all the swear words he wished he could say out loud but would get him sacked if he did.

  A noise from above made him stop. The children were lurching ominously from side to side, holding hands, as though they were performing a dance.


  ‘Stop that now!’ he hollered. ‘You’ll fall if you’re not careful.’

  They stopped. The girl panted, her cheeks inflamed, but the boy was calm, his mouth curled into a lopsided grin.

  ‘Right, let’s stop this nonsense,’ said Alan croakily as he scaled the rest of the ladder until his feet were only a few rungs from the top. He grabbed the rough-hewn ridge of the wall, hands shaking and legs like jelly.

  ‘Walk towards me and I’ll help you down,’ he ordered. ‘You’ll have to let go of each other first.’

  ‘Don’t do that!’ the girl suddenly screamed at the boy.

  Alan shot out his right arm, stretching as far as he could, but his fingertips grasped only thin air and the ladder tilted violently under his shifting weight. Sights and sounds came at him like rapid gunfire and he cried out.

  A lopsided grin . . . a blur of red gingham . . . a hand reaching out . . . streaming blonde hair . . . a high-pitched scream . . . a thud.

  Then, silence.

  2

  Maggie didn’t want the day to begin. She wanted to stay perched on the sill of the open window, her face, neck and exposed forearms warmed by the early-morning sun and the promise of another hot day. Tilting her chin up and closing her eyes, she imagined she was on holiday, on a balcony somewhere exotic, until the sharp blast of a guard’s whistle below jolted her from her daydream.

  Her flat overlooked Mansell railway station and she watched as a commuter train heading to London pulled away from the platform. Without thinking, she began counting under her breath as it disappeared out of sight, knowing that when she reached fifty-six the train would pass the house where her sister, Lou, used to live.

  Her nephew Jude had made her time it once – him on the phone in the back garden where the tracks ran parallel, talking to Maggie as she stood at her lounge window above the station. She’d suggested they use a stopwatch for accuracy but Jude wanted them to count themselves and it had amused her that, despite a world of technology at his disposal, he was old-fashioned in his methodology. It was like her, a detective constable, preferring face-to-face instead of emailing witnesses.

  The memory induced a smile from Maggie, though it was tinged with sadness. Seven months had passed since she’d seen or spoken to Jude, same for his siblings, Scotty and Mae, and their mum, Lou. Less than a year but more than half, it already felt like a lifetime.

  The technical term for the current status of their relationship was ‘estranged’, a word that rolled off Maggie’s tongue in a disconcertingly agreeable way when she said it out loud. But there was nothing pleasant about being as close as a person could possibly be to their family one day, the next being ‘as good as dead’ to them – as Lou had phrased it in a final, caustic text before cutting off contact completely.

  In the crying-herself-to-sleep stage, Maggie wondered if it might be easier to think of her sister in the same way. Death allowed a person to grieve their loss, whereas estrangement meant being in perpetual limbo, with nothing but the hope things might resolve to hang on to. Now, seven months on, the hurt was levelling out largely due to the distraction of work and in particular the commendation she’d just received from the Chief Constable for her conduct on her last case as Family Liaison, the specialism she was trained for alongside being a detective with Mansell Force CID.

  The second distraction stopping her from moping round the clock was gently snoring in her bed next door. Her mood began to lift as she pondered the noise Will Umpire made as he slept. It wasn’t earth-shatteringly loud, rather a gentle, rhythmic hum she had grown accustomed to and liked very much.

  She checked the time. Twenty past seven. She should wake him so he could leave hers before the roads became clogged with commuters and school-run parents. Umpire was a DCI and headed up the Homicide and Major Enquiry Team (HMET) at their force’s area headquarters in Trenton, a town as far north in Buckinghamshire as Mansell was south. If the traffic was bad it could take him more than an hour to get there.

  As though he’d sensed her thinking about him, Umpire appeared in the doorway. He was wearing her pale green silk bathrobe, which was indecently short on his six-foot-three-inch frame and revealed the soft, strawberry-blond hairs that densely covered his upper thighs. Maggie felt a stab of lust closely followed by regret that there was no time to drag him back to bed.

  ‘Any more where that came from?’ he asked, peering into her empty mug after he’d crossed the room to kiss her. His scent was a honeyed blend of laundered sheets and musky aftershave. She breathed in deeply, wishing the smell of him would stay with her all day.

  ‘Pot’s full.’

  She got to her feet and used the heels of her hands to smooth the creases on the navy cropped trousers she’d plucked from her bedroom floor when she got up. Having a semi-permanent house guest had done nothing to improve her untidiness.

  ‘I need to get going,’ she said. ‘I forgot to bring the leaflets home for my talk. I’ll have to pick them up on the way.’

  ‘Are you sure someone else can’t do it?’ Umpire called from the alcove kitchen.

  She answered him as she crossed the lounge to retrieve her bag, discarded the previous evening by the foot of the sofa.

  ‘The head asked for me personally because she knows me and I said I’d do it. I’ll be fine.’

  Umpire came back into the lounge sipping from a coffee mug branded with the slogan ‘World’s Best Auntie’. It took every ounce of willpower not to duck away from his watchful stare, because if she did he’d know for certain she was lying.

  She was giving a talk on cyber bullying at Rushbrooke Primary School, where until seven months ago her nephew Scotty had been a pupil. Not seeing him sitting amongst his little gang of friends during the assembly was going to hurt like hell but she couldn’t pull out.

  ‘You could’ve been honest about why it might be difficult for you,’ said Umpire.

  ‘Last time I checked, rowing with your sister doesn’t count as a reason not to do your job,’ she said wryly.

  They both knew she was trying to make light of what had happened, when it went far deeper than a stupid argument. Maggie had done something to hurt Lou immeasurably and no apology or excuse was adequate enough to make up for what she’d done, or the many years she’d spent keeping it a secret.

  ‘Will I see you tonight?’ she asked, keen to change the subject. ‘I can come to yours.’

  Umpire owned a house in Trenton where they split their time together.

  ‘Depends how manic it gets. I’ll call you later.’

  As he kissed her goodbye and went off to shower, Maggie was reminded again how seamless their transition had been from colleagues to couple. Perhaps it was because Umpire was older – forty-two to her twenty-nine – that it had been so easy: he didn’t play games and was honest about his feelings, telling her he loved her far sooner than she’d expected.

  That wasn’t to say there hadn’t been – and still were – hurdles. The start of their relationship had coincided with her falling out with Lou and it had cast a shadow over their nascent happiness. Fortunately, Umpire was enlightened enough to acknowledge that tears and passion didn’t make for easy bedfellows and exercised patience when other men might have tired of her distress.

  Besides, he’d had his own predicament: settling into a new custody arrangement with his two children, Flora, now fourteen, and Jack, two years younger. They spent every other weekend at his but their mother was railing against them meeting Maggie, saying they ‘weren’t ready’. Maggie suspected it was Umpire’s ex-wife who had the problem but she made herself scarce on the weekends the kids were with him without complaint because, deep down, she wasn’t ready to meet them either. The thought of stepping into a proxy stepmother role made her uneasy, yet she couldn’t quite put her finger on why.

  Outside the flat she was getting into her car when her phone went. It was a CID colleague, DS Anna Renshaw.

  ‘I need you up at Rushbrooke Primary now,’ said Renshaw. She was outdoors
and sounded out of breath, and Maggie could hear other voices in the background.

  ‘Am I late? My talk’s meant to be at nine thirty.’

  ‘It’s not that. There’s been a suspicious death in the school grounds. Victim’s a pupil.’

  ‘I’m on my way.’

  3

  The first person Maggie saw on arriving at Rushbrooke was a young male PC called Olly Talbot. Not long in the force, he had been tasked with logging the arrivals and departures of personnel at the crime scene and was hugging a clipboard to his chest like a soft toy as Maggie approached him to sign in.

  ‘You okay?’ she asked.

  Talbot nodded but his eyes betrayed him. He blinked furiously to hide the evidence of his distress.

  ‘Were you here first?’

  He nodded, then cleared his throat.

  ‘I was a First Responder, with PC Pritchard. There was nothing we could do for the poor lad.’

  Maggie intuitively knew it was Talbot’s first body and sympathy tugged at her. She could remember seeing her first corpse as vividly as if it’d happened yesterday. Her sister’s fiancé, Jerome, run over and killed in front of her. His death was the reason she’d joined the police and trained as a FLO. She had wanted to help alleviate families’ grief in the same way the liaison assigned to Lou and to Jerome’s parents helped them.

  ‘The first one’s always the hardest,’ she said, gently taking the clipboard from Talbot’s clenched, white-knuckled hands.

  ‘Mr Matheson asked me to describe what I saw when we arrived but my mind went blank. I couldn’t remember anything. He must think I’m an idiot.’

  ‘He won’t,’ Maggie reassured him. ‘Mal understands more than anyone how awful it can be.’

  Mal Matheson was the Chief Crime Scene Examiner for their force, a popular, grandfatherly figure known for his willingness to go the extra mile. His presence meant their young victim was in the best of hands now.

  ‘I’ve been going over it and I’ve remembered what the eyewitness said to me the second we arrived. I know it’s important, but I can’t leave my post to tell Mr Matheson,’ said Talbot anxiously.

  ‘Anything to do with witness statements you should tell the SIO, not Mal. What did they say?’