by Oliver Tidy
A tear streaked down his pimply cheek. Romney felt great sympathy for the youngster. In a softer tone, he said, ‘Would there have been much money in the till?’
The youth wiped at his face with his sleeve. ‘Some. It wasn’t a busy shift. A couple of hundred at most, I suppose. I don’t really know. Claire dealt with the money.’
‘The plastic ties he made you secure her to the table with, where did they come from?’
‘His pocket.’
‘You’re sure? He brought them with him? He couldn’t have picked them up in the garage?’
‘No,’ said Park. ‘We don’t have anything like that.’
With the top from a condom packet being recovered from the scene, Romney had intended to question Park, then physically unknown to him, with suggestions that perhaps he and the unfortunate Claire Stamp might have whiled away a boring evening or two gaining more intimate knowledge of one another in the back room using condoms from the garage’s stock. Now he saw this as a needless and unnecessary line of enquiry. He settled for asking, ‘How was your relationship with Miss Stamp?’
The spotty youth seemed baffled by the question. ‘All right, I suppose.’
‘How long have you been working here?’
‘About six months.’
‘Is there anything else you can think of that might be important?’
‘He wasn’t English. He didn’t say much, but he had one of them eastern European accents.’
‘That’s interesting,’ said Romney. ‘How do you know it was eastern European?’
The young man snorted. ‘You can’t live in Dover and not know what an eastern European accent sounds like. Bloody Kosovans are everywhere.’
Romney exchanged a look with Marsh. ‘I hope your head’s all right, son. We’ll be in touch soon to get a formal witness statement from you.’
Once more Romney patted the young man on the knee, and the police officers shuffled out. Romney waved at the paramedics sheltering in the garage shop.
The police were halfway across the concrete forecourt when a voice called out behind them. They turned to see the rear door of the ambulance open and Carl Park standing on the top step. ‘What did he do to her?’
Romney just raised a hand in farewell, as though he hadn’t heard him properly, and strode off leaving Marsh standing awkwardly between them.
She caught up with him inside the garage shop where he’d taken refuge in the warmth. She could see from his face that he was a lot less happy than he’d been before going into the back of the ambulance.
‘Guns, foreigners, what looks like pre-meditated rape and one of the nastiest bastards in town arrested. Christ. What a mess.’ He ran his fingers through his thick wavy hair.
‘It could have been a fake gun,’ said Marsh. ‘And accents can be faked. Park doesn’t strike me as too bright.’
Marsh’s phone rang. She answered it. Romney took a look around. He noticed the cigarette rack behind the counter was completely full, apart from one section that was empty. He was staring at this when Marsh caught up with him.
‘That was the station. They’ve been through all the footage they have of cameras around this area. Nothing of a man fitting our description for the last couple of hours. Maybe he did have a car but parked it away from the garage.’
‘Maybe. Make a note to find out what brand of cigarette is missing from there.’ Romney indicated the rack with his chin. ‘And find out whether it was full before they were attacked.’ Marsh jotted in her notebook. ‘Who was first into the building?’
‘Two uniforms. One of them is by the door.’
Romney looked over at him, but he couldn’t put a name to the face. He didn’t look much older than the youth he’d just spoken to in the ambulance. Romney reflected sadly that these young men shouldn’t be witnessing these kinds of horrors. How could it not deeply affect them?
Romney beckoned him over. ‘Constable...?’
‘Marrin, sir.’
‘Right. Constable Marrin. You were one of the first in?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Tell me how it went.’
‘Constable Spencer and myself received a call to investigate the concerns of a member of the public who’d come to collect his girlfriend after work. When we arrived, we found the man banging on the doors. The place looked closed and locked up, but the man was adamant something was wrong. In fact, while the lights had been turned off inside and out and the doors locked, the pumps were still operational. The alarm was also not activated. We contacted the station, and they located the manager. He was here within twenty minutes. He opened up, and Constable Spencer and I investigated.’ The young officer paused to swallow and moisten his lips for what he had to say next.
‘In the back room of the garage we found a female, bound by the wrists and ankles to the surface of the table.’ He hesitated before continuing. ‘Her top had been pulled up over her head, and she was naked from the waist down apart from socks and footwear. She was conscious and hysterical. A male, the youth in the ambulance,’ he added, looking up at Romney, ‘was lying on the floor unconscious. His wrists had been similarly bound behind him. He was bleeding from a head wound. Constable Spencer and I cut the woman free and made her as comfortable as we could. The ambulance service was called. The first ambulance took the female victim with Constable Spencer to the William Harvey Hospital. The female victim’s boyfriend, a Mr Simon Avery, was arrested for assaulting a police officer and taken down to the station.’
Romney sighed heavily. ‘Where’s the manager now?’
The constable pointed through the window at a car parked in the shadows. ‘We asked him to wait in his car until we need him, sir.’
‘Thank you. That’s all for now.’
The constable moved back to his position at the door. Romney checked his watch. The ambulance with Carl Park inside drove off the forecourt.
Grimes checked with Romney that there was nothing else required of him. He headed back to the station to circulate what scant details they had of the assailant.
To Marsh, Romney said, ‘Well, Sergeant, I’ll let you finish things up here. I suggest that once you’ve told the manager he can have his petrol station back you go home and get a good night’s sleep. What’s left of it. Tomorrow is going to be a very busy day.’
‘Ms Stamp, sir?’
‘I doubt very much that she’ll be any good to us tonight and vice-versa, especially if she’s been sedated. We’ll see her tomorrow.’
‘What about this Simon Avery bloke, sir?’
‘You’ve not had the pleasure of meeting our Mr Avery, I suppose, in the short time you’ve been with us?’
‘No, sir.’
‘He’s a nasty piece of work. He has as many pretensions as he has convictions. As a villain he’s on the rise. Small time today, but he’s one for the future. A rising dark star. A night in the cells won’t do him, or Dover, any harm.’
The DI nodded to the constable whose name he had already forgotten, walked out of the shop, got into his car and drove away. Home was not on his mind.
***
2
Romney had started seeing Julie Carpenter – a Primary school teacher and several years his junior – a little over a month before. They had met when he had visited her school as part of a regional campaign for something he now struggled to recall. Another pointless initiative dreamt up by someone at Area with nothing else to do except find ways to justify their position and their nice fat salary. Still, that cloud had had a silver lining. After two failed marriages and staring down the barrel of middle age, he hadn’t expected to make such a connection again. In fact, he had sworn to himself that he wouldn’t. However, as he had cause to reflect often in his chequered personal past, just as boys would be boys, men would be men, and there was little he could do about it except enjoy it while it lasted. It was a philosophy that seemed to be having positive repercussions in his private life, even if they might prove to be short-lived.
The homes were little more than prefabricated hutches, huddled together. The dividing walls were wafer thin, and there was nowhere for the children to play other than the street. Every bit of greenery had been sacrificed, it seemed, in order to squeeze another couple in. Someone should have made the planners move in for a few years – see how they liked it.
Romney had been enjoying a comfortable evening at Julie Carpenter’s home – good food, a bottle of wine, a film and the promise of another of the kind of nights he didn’t think at forty-two he’d ever see again – when he’d received the call about the petrol station.
He checked the time. It was late. Very late.
His mobile signalled a waiting message. He checked it as he drove. His spirits dampened when he read that she had gone to bed in preparation for a busy day tomorrow. He cursed. At the fork in the road that headed left, up the steep climb to her home, or right, in the direction of the rambling old renovation project he’d saddled himself with, he turned for home.
*
Marsh sensed an opportunity to make up some ground on the investigation quickly and possibly earn herself some credit into the bargain. After overseeing the final processes of the initial police investigation, seeing the SOCOs off the site and handing back control of the premises to an anxious and fidgety manager, she decided to drive the fifteen miles up the motorway to the William Harvey Hospital. With the clear run that she would have at that hour, she reasoned, it shouldn’t take her twenty minutes each way. Factor in another thirty minutes at the hospital, and she could still be in bed for threeish. She’d managed later nights with earlier starts before.
Balking at having to pay to park in an almost empty car park and seeing no one in the attendant’s kiosk, she ignored the pay and display machines and the warning signs. Faced with an exposed walk in inclement weather, she wrapped her coat around her and crossed the deserted expanse of tarmac towards the hospital entrance. The doors were locked. Spying the A&E unit, she went along and, showing her ID, discovered that Claire Stamp had been taken up to a more private room.
Marsh was shown through to the bowels of the hospital and given directions for where she would find the rape victim.
The hospital at night was eerily quiet. Absent were the people and activities that made every hospital in the country a mirror image of itself: the flower sellers, the ‘friends’ volunteers, the bewildered relatives, the uniformed medical staff, the sick-but-mobile shuffling about in their pyjamas dragging wheeled contraptions dispensing essential fluids or collecting them, sometimes both. The smell was the same though: stewed root vegetables, disinfectant, urine and sickness.
Marsh navigated her way using the strangely and at times confusingly positioned directional notices. More by luck than judgement, she eventually stumbled upon the suite of rooms she was looking for. In the small ante-room a uniformed woman police constable sat leafing through a glossy magazine. Not recognising her, Marsh showed her identification.
‘Don’t bother,’ said Marsh, as the woman made to stand. The constable slumped gratefully back into the seat. ‘You ride in with her?’
‘Yes, Sarge.’
‘How was it? She say anything?’
‘Nothing much. She was pretty hysterical from the moment we found her.’
‘You found her?’
‘Yes. I’ve never seen anything like it. I hope I never do again. Whoever did that to her is one very sick individual.’
‘How long you been a copper?’
‘Eighteen months.’
‘What were your first impressions? I mean the reasons for it?’
The woman thought for a moment. ‘It looked to me like it was all about the sexual assault. Whoever it was must have had an understanding of what was there. You know: the layout, the timing, the staff, even down to the furniture.’
‘Why do you say the furniture?’
‘The way she was positioned, tied to the table like that. It struck me, he was there for the rape and that the details of it were planned down to the position he was going to have her in. That couldn’t have been his lucky coincidence to walk in and find a table just right for his purposes.’
As Marsh considered this, the woman said, ‘I’ll tell you something else, Sarge. The lad we found lying on the floor: I’d bet a week’s money he wasn’t as out of it as he’d like us to believe when we got in there. I’ve got kids. They’re old enough to have tried playing asleep with me, and I spot it a mile off. Mind you, I don’t blame him. Poor sod. He was probably as scared shitless as he was embarrassed at his part in it all. He can only be a couple of years older than my eldest.’ She shook her head at that.
Marsh said, ‘Any visitors?’
‘The manager who pitched up with the keys had emergency contact details for her. He phoned a number while we were still there, but there was no answer. He said he’d keep trying. No one’s been.’
Marsh peered through the glazed panel in the small ward’s door. Soft lighting showed the face of an attractive woman sleeping peacefully, one would think. Something heavy assumed a position in Marsh’s chest when she imagined what Claire Stamp would go through when she awoke.
She said good night and headed back through the labyrinth of corridors to A&E and then outside into a cold night made more inhospitable by heavy rain. The lateness of the hour closed in on her, and she looked forward to her bed. It was to be a reunion, she realised with a stream of profanity, that was to be considerably delayed by the bright yellow clamp on her nearside front wheel.
***
3
Marsh was dismayed to see Romney already at his desk when she arrived the following morning. In spite of her difficulties in the small hours, she was not late. This feeling turned to embarrassment when he glanced up to catch her sneaking past his glazed office wall to her desk. She really wanted a coffee before it all began. He waved her in and looked at his watch. He took his suit jacket from the back of the chair, stood up and threw back the last of his own drink.
‘Morning, Sergeant.’
‘Morning, sir.’
‘Dump your things. You’re coming with me. Let’s go and pay a visit to our house guest. It’ll be good for you to meet Mr Avery.’
Marsh trailed him down the stairs and through the warren of corridors until they came to the holding cells in the basement of Dover police station.
Romney nodded to the duty sergeant.
‘Morning, guv.’
‘What sort of a night did he have?’
‘Quiet. Eventually.’
‘We’ll see him in number two when you’re ready.’
Five minutes later Simon Avery was shown into the interview room. A tall and wide constable took a position just inside the door. Marsh was at once struck by the truly weasel-like appearance of Avery: late twenties, slight build, thinning hair and pointed little features. He had a miserable and wispy goatee beard. His small eyes shot quick glances around the room. Despite his less than intimidating physical appearance, he exuded an aura of menace that made Marsh instantly wary of him. He was dressed well and didn’t look like he’d spent the night in a cell.
‘Mr Avery,’ said Romney.
‘If you’re going to interview me, I want the court appointed lawyer present.’ Avery hadn’t yet moved up enough in the world to start demanding and commanding his own solicitor.
‘This isn’t a formal interview, Mr Avery,’ said Romney, smiling. ‘Just a friendly chat. Sit down. You’re actually a potential witness to a serious crime.’
Avery’s face darkened, but he did as he was told. ‘What happened to her?’
Romney stared intently at the man’s face for several long seconds. His level gaze was returned. ‘What is your relationship to Miss Stamp?’
�
��She’s my girl.’
‘And how long has she been your ‘girl’?’
‘About eighteen months.’
‘Tell me, why is the ‘girl’ of someone like yourself – someone in your position in the community – working the late shift for minimum wage in some grotty, run-down garage?’
Marsh felt a crackle of energy spark in the room. It seemed suddenly very quiet.
As if sensing her for the first time, Avery looked up and met her eye. ‘Who’s this then?’ A humourless smile distorted his thin lips.
Romney had his reasons for dignifying the question with a response. ‘This is Detective Sergeant Marsh. She’s new. I’m sure you two will have ample opportunity to become better acquainted before long.’
Avery nodded slowly. Knowing he was the focus of their attention, he allowed his eyes to wander over the standing form of the woman police officer. ‘I shall look forward to that,’ he said, with an undisguised suggestion of something lewd and disgusting.
Marsh flushed, which only encouraged him further. His smile widened at her obvious discomfort to reveal yellow, pointed teeth. The weasel-like image was complete.
‘She liked her independence,’ he said, returning his interest to Romney. ‘What’s it got to do with anything?’
Romney maintained his civil manner. ‘Oh, just asking. Seems odd that’s all. I mean, there’s you, a moderately successful local businessman, and your long-term girlfriend is working the night-shift in some grubby out of the way petrol station. That must be a bit of an embarrassment for you. Can’t fit well with the image you’re trying to cultivate.’
‘I’ll ask you again: what’s this got to do with last night?’ said Avery, obviously struggling with his composure at Romney’s poking.
‘If you mean: what have your business dealings got to do with the serious sexual assault that took place last night, I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.’
The implication hung in the air for a long moment before Marsh saw realisation dawn for Avery as he made the suggested connection. His jaw set, and his eyes roamed as though he had become oblivious to his surroundings and transported to another time and place. The overall effect was of a confused man of mean intelligence struggling with shocking information.