“Look… Oscar! I’m not sure how you got in…”
“I just told you – the door wasn’t properly closed. I stood outside knocking and shouting… I didn’t know whether you were okay or what. Check the door; I haven’t smashed it in or anything.”
“Okay, okay!” Tom held up his hands “However you did it, I don’t want you in here uninvited. Right?”
“Well, shit! What if you hadn’t been okay? What if somebody had got in?”
“I’ve lived here for four years, quite happily and securely without a neighbour, I don’t need looking after, thank you.”
“Well, I’m not sure about that, Mr Brown. I did see Monday’s papers, you know. And that’s why I was worried. I’m sorry I bothered.”
He turned to leave. Tom reached across and grabbed his arm to stop him.
“You’re right, Oscar. I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve any of that. I guess just because I don’t like myself at the moment, doesn’t give me the right to dislike everyone else.” He smiled. “As you can see, I’m alright, but thanks for your concern.”
“That’s okay, and I’m sorry I said that about the papers. I guess you’ve every right to drown your sorrows after what you’ve been through. Not sure that I could deal with something like that.” He held out his hand. “Can we be friends?”
Tom shook his hand. “Of course. Look I’d invite you for that coffee again, but I need to get a shower and…”
“That’s okay. I’ve got stuff to do. Got to catch up at work. I’ve taken quite a bit of time off to move in the past couple of days. Perhaps sometime later?”
Tom walked him to the door and closed it behind him. He turned to go for his shower, then stopped and turned back. Opening the door a few inches, he released it and watched it close with a decisive clunk. He checked it had locked, and then opened it again. This time he rested it as gently as he could against the jamb, so the spring mechanism could not generate any momentum. Even so, it closed smoothly and locked.
He shrugged and went to get his shower.
*
Jo’s door opened a fraction and half of DI Water’s face appeared.
“Hi, Harry.”
“Hi. You might want to see this news feed, just for information. Putting out a misper appeal on all channels for Sammo. On in a couple of minutes.”
“Okay, thanks. A bit soon, isn’t it?’”
“Better safe. We absolutely saturated Sammo’s patch yesterday after your meeting with Nat and no-one has seen him for nearly two weeks, including his family – parents, siblings. Not been home or anything. Anyway, it’s just coming on.”
She stepped out of the office into the MIT room where a group of detectives from the team covering the murders were gathered round the large TV screen angled high across one corner of the room. One of the Morning is Breaking presenters was announcing the half-hourly local news bulletin.
“And now it’s just coming up to eleven-thirty and time to look at the news where you are.”
The two national news presenters were replaced on the screen by an almost identical couple seated on a similar curved sofa. The missing person announcement was the second item covered. A full facial and a profile of Sammo were shown side-by-side.
“Police are looking for a local drugs trader by the name of Randall Sampson – know as Sammo – in connection with the recent deaths of four users in the Cobham and Woking areas. Mr Sampson, who is listed on the Police Register of Licensed Street Traders, is not a suspect in the case, but police are concerned about his safety, given his close association with the four victims, and ask that he go to the nearest police station and make himself known. Mr Sampson, who has not been seen for nearly two weeks, is five-foot eight to five foot ten inches tall – that’s between 1.75 and 1.8 metres – slim build, with longish dark hair and a Mediterranean complexion. He is not thought to be dangerous, but the police advise members of the public who see him not to approach him but to contact them immediately on one of the three numbers shown at the bottom of the screen.”
*
The Ministerial Director of Justice reached sleepily for her mobile, thinking it was its alarm waking her. She pressed the ‘OK’ key a couple of times to no effect before realising it was an incoming call.
“This is Goody,” she said, putting on her glasses.
“Good morning, darling.”
“Oh, good morning.” She yawned.
“I guess I probably woke you up. What time is it in Chicago? Six am?”
“Five-fifty to be exact.”
“I’m sorry about that, but it means that while we’re talking I can picture you lying there in bed in a hot hotel room in minimal nightwear – perhaps none at all – and vulnerably disorientated by your sudden awakening.”
“And in this fantasy of yours, am I on my own?”
“Well, as it’s my fantasy, then, yes, you’re on your own. So tell me, how close am I?”
“Well, you can forget the hot hotel room. It’s freezing in here with the air conditioning. So, what’s new over there?”
“Did Uncle Don call you?”
“Yes, he told me about his new job. Sounds interesting.”
“Right. Well as far as the rest is concerned, I’m counting the minutes to your coming home, of course. Everything’s ready for you. Rubbish has been cleared out – except the article you wanted keeping. Update on the drug issue is on your desk awaiting your return, and the appropriate items deleted as requested. Look, do we have to talk about work. Can’t we say how much we’ve missed each other and stuff like that. You know, like normal people.”
Grace laughed. “I’ve never really thought of you as being normal. There’ll be time for that very soon. But thanks for the call; must get some clothes on – you know how it is?”
“Okay. But just for now, then. Bye. Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
She ended the call, pulled on a dressing gown and walked over to the balcony of her twenty-fifth-floor suite. She opened the French windows and stepped outside to where the temperature had already climbed to a comfortable twenty degrees. The phone sounded again. This time it was the alarm and she let it run its course while she scanned the panorama in front of her. Beyond the imposing bulk of the Sears Tower – just two blocks away – she looked out across Lake Michigan, the heat haze blending its horizon seamlessly with the early morning sky.
Leaving the windows open she went back inside to prepare for the final day of her extended visit, which would include attending lunch with the US President and a closing address from his Chief of Staff. She was pleased to be leaving. It wasn’t that she hadn’t enjoyed the assignment and, in particular, the time away from Andrew; not to mention the close and charming attention the President himself had paid her. She wondered how many of his security people would have listened in to the carefully guarded and coded phone call she’d just had with her associate back in the UK. CIA? FBI? Perhaps even Homeland Security. She hoped it had sounded innocent enough for it not to get back to the President himself. They seemed to have established a close personal bond, and she didn’t want that spoiled by his believing she had a lover back home.
However, she needed to get back. There were things to do that only she could manage; and the personal issue of Tom Brown to take care of, one way or another.
*
They hugged for a long time on the pavement outside Costa in the small pedestrian precinct close to Guildford New Station. As always, the embrace had a comic element to it; David was just over a foot taller than Jo and, to save arching her back, her face always ended up nestled against his chest.
“You look great,” she said, placing the tray of coffees and cakes on the corner table where David had settled himself.
“And you look wonderful, too,” David said. “Same as last time. Which was only four weeks
ago, come to think of it, so you wouldn’t expect too much degeneration since then.”
She laughed. “And how’s the new job at the college? Not frightening them too much, I hope. Do you wear your street-cred action man disguise?”
“No, the college closes before the nine o’clock watershed, so I’m not allowed. This is only my second week, but it’s going okay, though I wouldn’t really call it a job.”
“So, what would you call it?”
“Well, its official title is part-time lecturer on Local Government Management at Cullen Field College of Higher Education. Two days a week; two forty-minute lectures each day; one in the afternoon, one in the evening. Total working time – one hundred and sixty minutes; less than three hours a week. So it doesn’t seem much like a job. Anyway, most of the questions I get asked are about how I got to be so big, how someone as old as me manages to keep in shape and stuff about when I played rugby.”
“Well, that’s pretty flattering isn’t it?” Jo said, with a sly smile. “There can’t be that many pensioners attracting comments like that from a bunch of teens and twenties. You’d better watch you don’t get a reputation.”
“It’s just as well they don’t ask me questions about the actual subject, because I tell them everything I know up front in the lectures.”
Jo laughed again. “And let me guess. The days you work are Tuesday and Thursday. Right?”
David nodded. “And you know that because I’m here today and last Friday and Monday, I was appearing on reality television. You said I’d work it out, and you were right.”
Jo became serious. “Have you heard about Laser?”
David shook his head. “What about him?”
“We’ve had four killings over the past week – one in Cobham, three in Woking. The first was Laser, in Cobham, late last Wednesday.”
“Shit! How? Why?”
“All shot. One link between the four deaths is Sammo Sampson. They were all his customers and four of the people seen approaching Jack. We’ve been looking for Sammo for the past twenty-four hours and nobody – I mean nobody – has seen him in nearly two weeks. They even asked Kadawe if he knew where he was. This morning they put out a misper on local TV and radio. And, as you’d expect, they checked CCTV in all the places he might be, the most likely of which being…”
“Delaware Street,” put in David.
“Correct. And that’s where they picked you out on camera. In the very same place where they’d normally expect to see Sammo. Harry Waters – remember him? CIO on Jack and Jason’s case – wants to talk to you. This is his case, not mine.”
“Does he know we’re meeting beforehand?”
“Yes. I asked him and he okayed it. Johnny Mac told him the other day, for the first time, that I’d been looking into the Jack and Jason case after the convictions. He had to tell him why, of course, so your part in it had to come out. And to be fair to Harry, he’s been okay about it; a lot more reasonable than I would have been. But less than twenty-four hours after he heard about you and been told you were no longer involved, up you pop on TV. So I’m afraid you’re not DI Waters’ favourite person right now. And I had to tell him that I had no idea what you were doing there. I’m sorry, I felt like I was letting you down, but… well, I didn’t know…”
David held up his hand. “Hey, it’s me who should be sorry – am sorry. You made it very clear that it was job done as far as I was concerned. Laid off, I think you called it. It’s just that when we met last month, I felt you were still unsure, that it was still preying on your mind. And I still regret missing the opportunity to get more out of Sammo when I had the chance instead of charging after the Duke. If I had talked to him about Laser – and the others – well, perhaps you wouldn’t be in this state.”
“I wouldn’t say I’m in a state, David.”
“Okay, wrong choice of words. Still haunted, then. How’s that? And if I’m honest, I actually enjoyed tracking down Laser and Sammo and Mickey Kadawe. That’s what I’m good at; not preaching to a bunch of kids who are just counting down the minutes until they can go home. So I thought I’d try to find him again and put it all to bed. Naturally, I started back at the place where I found him last time.”
Jo was silent for a while, then she reached across the table and placed her hand on his. “Thanks, David. You’re always looking out for me, aren’t you? And you’re right; I haven’t let it go, although I’d told myself I had. I didn’t fool you, though, did I? And if I convinced Johnny Mac, then I’ve just unconvinced him by charging into his office telling him the killings prove I was right – which they don’t, of course.”
Neither spoke for a long time. David took the opportunity to demolish his cake.
“There’s something you need to know,” he said, “unless you’ve already spotted him on camera as well. On two of the nights I was on Delaware – Friday and Monday – Tom Brown was there as well. Same place, more or less the same time each day – six-thirty-ish – right opposite where I was standing. First time, he was going into a pub and hadn’t come out by the time I’d left. Second time he got into an altercation with some young guy outside the same pub. Then he got into a cab and left. And you must have seen these.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a couple of folded sheets of newsprint, spreading out the front pages of Monday’s Mail and Mirror on the table.
Jo nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Terribly sad, don’t you think?”
David nodded. They sat in silence for a while.
“So,” David said, eventually. “What happens now?”
“We’ll go in and I’ll introduce you to Harry. He wants to see you immediately after his four o’clock team meeting. You’re not a suspect, but, obviously, he needs to ask you some questions, given that you were looking for the same guy that we are – a guy now possibly linked to a number of deaths. My guess is it will be fairly informal – no recording, for example, although he’s likely to have Detective Sergeant Belmont with him. He’ll probably warn you off, and it would be better for both our sakes if you heeded that warning, David. Although I really am grateful – honestly.”
David smiled. “Okay. And what about afterwards? Are you going to take me for dinner? One coffee and two pieces of cake aren’t going to keep me going until I get home.”
“Two pieces of cake?”
“Well, you haven’t touched yours. I just thought…”
*
The interview room was small but not unfriendly, with a pale-brown woven carpet and four comfortably upholstered chairs placed two either side of a rectangular beech-top table. It was well-lit by spotlights set in a cream tiled ceiling, the same colour as the walls. Harry Waters and David Gerrard faced each other across the table with Craig Belmont on Harry’s left. In the middle of the table was a tray containing three mugs of coffee. Craig had a small notebook open and ready in front of him.
“Thank you for coming in, Mr Gerrard. I’m Detective Inspector Waters and this is Detective Sergeant Belmont. I believe you have already met with DI Cottrell and she will have told you why we need to speak to you. She may have also mentioned that this will be an informal meeting, if what you tell us is what we expect. You are not a suspect. We value DI Cottrell’s judgement far too much to believe she would be friends with a serial killer.” He smiled and David gave a little laugh. “Okay, Mr Gerrard?”
“Okay. But please call me David?”
“That’s fine with us, David, but we do need answers to some questions. And, before we get to those, I think it’s only fair to tell you I am not impressed with the fact that you accosted a number of people on my patch a few months ago in pursuit of proving that I had failed to do my job in the Tomlinson-Brown case.” He held up his hand as David leaned forward to speak. “However, I do understand why you did it and I have enough respect for Jo Cottrell to put that on one side. I just wanted to get that said and
out of the way. Okay?”
“Okay. But let me say that DI Cottrell never questioned the integrity and efficiency of the investigation. Her concern was with the issue of fast-tracking under the new regime, and the pressure that puts on officers to, perhaps, accept things more readily than they would otherwise.”
Harry nodded. “So, on the subject of DI Cottrell’s concern, can you start by telling us in your own words why you were pursuing Lawrence Newhouse and Randall Sampson in the first place?”
Harry leaned back and Craig reached for his note pad. David paused to collect his thoughts before answering.
“Jo Cottrell has the best instincts of any police officer I have ever worked with. You have to appreciate that to put into context what I did. I understand she was not involved in the case you mentioned except to lead the raid on Etherington Place, and that she was chosen to do that because she was new and because Tom Brown and his family had some very close friends in the senior police ranks at Guildford. It suited the needs of the case to use someone with no previous history with the target. Right?” Harry nodded; David continued, “So when she carried out the raid and found the drugs, she was meeting the family – or the three that were there – for the first time. She had no knowledge or preconceived ideas as to what they were like and how they would react in that situation.”
“I understand all that, Mr Gerrard – David, but what is your point?”
“That her assessment of Jack’s reaction was one hundred percent objective, uncluttered by any expectations. And she was convinced that he had no idea that the drugs were in his room.”
“And because of that belief, she chose to ignore all the rest of the evidence which pointed towards his being a dealer?”
“Absolutely not, but you know how it is with instincts and, as I said, Jo Cottrell’s are the best.”
Harry got up from his chair and paced back and forth in the limited space available.
Lost Souls Page 6