Nothing to Lose

by Anna Legat

  ‘Trevor Larkin.’

  *

  Could Trevor Larkin also be the man whom Giacomo Vitoli saw in Emma’s car seconds before the collision? Gillian is shaking with excitement. She can feel it in her bones that the finale to this case is within her reach – she has nailed it, she is almost there. All she needs is for Trevor Larkin to tell her how he managed to get out of Emma’s car before it was mowed down by the petrol lorry. Did she stop the car? Did he force her to stop it? Did he get out and run? Was she trapped in it, left behind for dead? This is one piece of the puzzle that remains beyond the realm of logical explanation.

  He must have run for his life, must have got all the way to the other side of the burning lorry, was just beginning to celebrate his miraculous escape when the petrol tank in Margaret Adams’s Fiesta blew up and knocked him out. Just minutes before he was able to get to his car and drive away from the scene...

  He nearly got away with it.

  Riley has found him in some decrepit tenement behind the ghost town of what was once the Lupine Industrial Estate on the northernmost periphery of Greyston. Considering Mrs Orwin’s revelations and Ben Rydal’s accusation of stalking laid against Trevor Larkin, Scarface, reluctantly, authorised the inquiry to be re-opened, low-level. Gillian invited Mr Larkin for an interview at the station. An interview under caution.

  They are sitting in the interview room: Gillian and Erin on one side of the table, Larkin and his solicitor on the other. Larkin doesn’t look good: unshaven, his eyes puffed and with heavy bags underneath, his complexion grey. He hasn’t bothered to put on a decent suit – he’s dishevelled in his nondescript washed-out blue top and baggy jeans. He looks like he doesn’t care what happens to him. Luckily for him, his solicitor looks the exact opposite – one of those sharp, smart-arse lawyers putting on airs and graces of you have no valid grounds to ask my client any questions. It’s going to be a battle.

  The initial pleasantries out of the way, Gillian goes for the jugular, ‘Did you previously own a silver-grey Skoda Octavia estate, 2008 model?’

  ‘Yes.’ Larkin looks surprised at the simplicity of the question. It is a question easy to answer. He was told to watch out for cunning innuendos and deep probes.

  His lawyer however becomes alarmed. He knows nothing of this line of questioning. He smells a trap. ‘Before we go any further, what bearing does my client’s history of car ownership have on this matter?’

  ‘It relates to one of the casualties, Mrs Emma Rydal.’

  Larkin’s face goes into an almost imperceptible spasm. His lips contract and he gives Gillian a reproachful glare, as if she has just, somehow, offended the memory of Emma Rydal by simply mentioning her name. Gillian feels encouraged. She presses on, ‘I put it to you Mr Larkin that approximately three to four weeks before the collision your old car, the silver-grey Skoda, was seen in front of Mrs Rydal’s house –’

  ‘I still can’t see how that could possibly relate –’

  Gillian continues, ignoring the lawyer’s lame interjections, ‘Mrs Rydal alleged at the time that you had been stalking her. What do you say to that?’

  Larkin looks positively hurt. ‘I say it’s not true,’ he says with fire. ‘I haven’t been stalking her. It’s insane to say such a thing.’

  ‘But you don’t deny you followed her to her house and parked outside it, sat in the car for no apparent reason and then drove away?’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘It is not important who said it. Do you deny it?’

  ‘My client may have parked his car somewhere outside Mrs Rydal’s residence at some point or other for whatever innocent reason. That does not amount to stalking.’

  ‘Mr Larkin, do you deny that you were parked outside Mrs Rydal’s house?’

  ‘I don’t know. As my solicitor has just told you, I may have stopped somewhere and it happened to be near Emma’s house, but I never stalked her. Never stalked anyone... Why would I stalk Emma?’

  ‘You knew her, though. You refer to her by her first name – you must have known her quite well to be on a first-name basis with her?’ Gillian clutches onto this tiny slip of the tongue.

  ‘Of course I knew her. She was my bank manager.’

  ‘Only in the last two months, I believe,’ Gillian pages through the case files. She has come well prepared for this interview. She has all the details before her. ‘What made you change banks? I understand you’ve been with the Halifax all your life until, what, two months ago when suddenly you switched to Barclays. Why was that?’

  ‘I wasn’t happy with the quality of customer service at the Halifax,’ Larkin appears to smirk. It is an odd expression that doesn’t quite go with his face and downtrodden disposition.

  ‘Is this leading anywhere?’ the lawyer asks stupidly, just to say something, Gillian reckons, and to remind his client why his charges are so high.

  ‘Let’s go back to that day when you were parked outside her house, Mr Larkin.’ Gillian won’t be answering stupid questions. She proceeds with the interrogation, ‘That day Mrs Rydal told her husband you had been stalking her. What do you say to that?’

  ‘He made it up,’ Larkin says and looks her straight in the eye with a stubborn, firm conviction. ‘He imagined it. I suppose he’s looking for someone to blame.’

  ‘You know him too?’ Gillian fakes innocent curiosity.

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  Now it’s her turn to look hard at him. ‘Yes, you do. You greeted each other at the inquest – I was there.’

  ‘Well, I may have been offering my condolences to the husband... I can’t remember.’ He rubs his temples, putting on that all-familiar show of forgetfulness.

  ‘You weren’t, actually. You just said hello, he said hello, see you later, that’s it. No condolences.’

  ‘Oh yes!’ he forces a smile onto his lips, but his eyes remain clouded and unsmiling. ‘That man! I didn’t even know he was Emma Rydal’s husband. He's just a man from the arboretum. He works there. I’m a frequent visitor at the Botham House arboretum. You can check that –’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘All right, then?’

  ‘It’s not all right, Mr Larkin, because if you don’t know the man then how can you speculate about his motives for telling us what he did – making it all up, you said? You don’t know the man and yet you accuse him of lying?’

  ‘He doesn’t know me and yet he accuses me of stalking.’ Larkin looks and sounds exasperated. ‘He made it up. I know it because I never stalked Emma. She would’ve never said that.’

  ‘You knew her that well, then, and you’re absolutely sure you can tell what she would and wouldn’t have said to her husband?’

  ‘My client didn’t say that. My client only said he didn’t believe Mrs Rydal would’ve accused him of stalking her because it wasn’t happening.’

  ‘That’s your interpretation of his words,’ Gillian snaps back at the lawyer.

  ‘Let’s ask him directly so we’re perfectly clear.’ The bloody lawyer simply won’t keep his nose out of it. He won’t let her ask any leading questions or put any slant on Larkin’s answers. He’s too sharp for that. Gillian will need to stick to undeniable facts.

  ‘That’s what I was saying – she wouldn’t have said I was stalking her because I wasn’t.’ Larkin repeats after his lawyer like a parrot.

  ‘The problem is that according to her husband that is exactly what she said.’ Gillian puts on her baffled face. ‘She pointed you out to him from their kitchen window.’

  ‘Is that a question?’ the lawyer fixes her with a nasty stare.

  ‘Let’s move on to the day of the accident. I’ve got your statement here – somewhere here...’ Gillian takes time to shuffle the papers in the file. She pulls out several photos of the carnage. She slides them, as if inadvertently, to the middle of the table: the burned out remains of Luke Orwin’s cabin with his charred remnants, the skeleton of Margaret Adams’ Ford Fiesta lying on its side, Victor Adams’ blackened body drap
ed across the passenger door, parts of it missing; Emma Rydal’s squashed and crumpled Audi, with just a glimpse of her unrecognisable corpse through the shattered windscreen. Larkin shuts his eyes. Gillian pretends not to take any notice. ‘Oh yes, found it! Here it is... You said in your statement you were ahead of the accident, in your car. When the force of the explosion slammed into the back of your car you realised what had happened... you tried to run to Victor Adams’s rescue as he was climbing out of the window and... that was when the second explosion knocked you down. And you can’t remember anything else. Is that still the case?’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ he says, but it is a very weak statement, uttered without his previous conviction.

  ‘And you don’t wish to make any alterations to your statement?’

  ‘My client didn’t come here to make any changes to his original statement. You asked him here to help you with your inquiries, but it seems you don’t have anything concrete to put to him. This is just a fishing expedition and unless you have anything concrete to put to my client, this interview should be terminated.’

  ‘I do have something concrete. It’s a statement made by Giacomo Vitoli, the driver of the white Vauxhall van. It was made before he died.’ Gillian pauses here and examines Larkin’s face. He didn’t know Vitoli had made any statements to the police. Does he fear what the man might have remembered? Larkin’s face is impassioned, without a trace of curiosity. Gillian is slightly disappointed – she hoped he would start, by now, to lose his composure. She thought he would become defensive and start making mistakes. She gives it another go, ‘Mr Vitoli’s statement does not correspond with yours. Before I go on, I’ll ask again: do you wish to make any alterations to your statement?’

  ‘You are battering my client! Unless –’

  ‘OK,’ Gillian puts up her hands in mock surrender. ‘Mr Vitoli told us he saw a man in Mrs Rydal’s car as it was overtaking him, heading towards the Poulston junction. I put it to you, Mr Larkin, that man was you. What do you have to say to that?’

  He looks at her, a straight and open gaze of an innocent man, ‘I was not in Emma Rydal’s car. Mr Vitoli must’ve been mistaken. I was never in Emma Rydal’s car.’

  His lawyer stands up, an expression of tired disbelief in his measured body language. He draws in his chair. He says, ‘That’s it, then. Frankly, I can’t believe you brought my client here. Mr Vitoli may have seen a man in Mrs Rydal’s car – a man. Obviously, Mr Vitoli didn’t say he saw Mr Larkin, am I correct? I take it I am. My client has just told you he was not the man Mr Vitoli saw. This puts the matter at rest.’

  Bastard! Gillian is livid. The bloody lawyer knows Vitoli won’t be able to identify Larkin. He knows Gillian’s only witness is dead. He knows she has nothing else on Larkin. ‘Mr Larkin, look at these pictures – five people are dead,’ she implores the man, who is still sitting in his chair, heavy and ungainly, his head thrust forward, his eyes on the photographs. ‘Giacomo Vitoli saw you. It can’t have been anyone else! Were you driving Emma’s car or were you a passenger? What happened? How did you get out?’

  ‘That’s enough, DI Marsh!’ The lawyer puts his hand on his client’s shoulder. ‘You don’t have to answer any of these questions, Mr Larkin. These are pure speculations. We’re leaving.’

  Larkin forces himself up and lets his lawyer guide him towards the door. He sends an apologetic glance back to Gillian, ‘I’m sorry it happened. You’ve no idea how sorry I am, but you’ve got it all wrong. I wasn’t in Emma’s car.’

  *

  Gillian bashes the table with her fist. ‘Damn! That damned lawyer! I know I’m right.’

  Erin stares at her, slightly disconcerted. She has been allocated to Sexton’s Canning CID to complete her detective training with Gillian as her mentor. Gillian slowly realises the show she has just put on is not exactly the best way to model conducting interviews with suspects. She collects the photographs from the table. ‘Right,’ she says, ‘I don’t suggest you try suspect battering techniques at home just yet.’

  Erin smiles. ‘That lawyer didn’t look too pleased with your methods.’

  ‘No,’ Gillian shrugs. ‘He’s just doing his job. And I’m doing mine, and I need to know who Vitoli saw in that bloody car! He saw someone – it wasn’t a ghost!’ She passes the file to Erin. ‘Let’s go. Back to the drawing board!’

  They walk down the fire escape at the back of the building, overlooking the visitors parking. Through the window on the first-floor landing, Gillian notices Trevor Larkin and his lawyer shake hands and head in opposite directions. Game, set, match. ‘A free man,’ she points out Larkin to Erin.

  ‘Until proven guilty.’

  Larkin opens an impressive crystal-black Aston Martin and slides into the driver’s seat. He lowers the roof, but doesn’t start the engine. He puts his head on the wheel and stays in that position.

  ‘Nice machine,’ Erin comments on the car. ‘My husband’s an Aston Martin dealer. He loves those cars more than he does our kids! The stuff he tells me about them – totally useless bits of information. Like the acceleration rate. You see that model there? It’ll reach 60mph in under five seconds. As if anyone would like to try that on a busy road!’ Erin chuckles. ‘Men and their cars!’

  ‘You can say that again!’ Gillian agrees absent-mindedly. Something is bugging her. Something fleeting, seemingly insignificant, some flippant remark, some tiny inference she knows she has failed to draw.

  ‘Look at that,’ Erin points. ‘Look how smooth it is!’ Larkin has reversed his big black Aston on a single, unbroken curve. Its wide rear wedges neatly between two police cars and then the beast takes off. It is more like a pounce – a black panther’s kind of pounce. ‘What did I tell you about the acceleration!’ Erin enthuses.

  Gillian stares. She knows! Trevor Larkin was in that car – all along he was driving that car! That’s why it came so naturally to him to insist he had never been in Emma Rydal’s car! He was telling the truth! But Giacomo Vitoli did see him. He wasn’t imagining a man. He saw Trevor Larkin overtake him in his Aston Martin just seconds before the petrol lorry rolled over Emma Rydal. ‘I had it all wrong,’ Gillian tells Erin. ‘He was right – there was no man in Emma Rydal’s car. Larkin overtook Vitoli in his Aston Martin. He wasn’t ahead of the collision, he was the cause of it! That’s why he was only metres away in his superfast car – only metres in front of Vitoli. Because he had just overtaken him! We need to bring him back! Get a car!’

  *

  Trevor wishes he had been in Emma’s car – in her place. He should’ve been there. That’s how they always did it.

  It was their little game they played, just for laughs. Emma had started it and it went on from there. It was always done the same way: she would come from behind, catch up with him somewhere along the carriageway between Sexton’s and Greyston, and then she would overtake him. He would go after her. Follow her. Sit on her tail. Look into her eyes through her rear-view mirror. That’s how it should’ve happened. But that day, Trevor went wrong. He wanted to show off.

  He is driving along the same carriageway, in the same direction as he did that day. It isn’t the morning – it’s late afternoon and the sun is in his face, stripping the surroundings of colour and blurring shapes in front of his eyes. He is blinking rapidly, trying to soothe the stinging pain in his eyes. He smiles again recalling their private joke, the one he told Emma when he set up an account with her, the one about the poor customer service at Halifax. It had made her smile. Made him smile once again when he told it to that policewoman. She didn’t get the joke. Of course she didn’t. She didn’t know him, didn’t know Emma, didn’t know anything. She really believed Emma would’ve accused him of stalking! Emma would have never said to anyone that he was stalking her! She loved the game. She had started it.

  At this time of the day, there is more traffic rolling into Sexton’s Canning from the city of Greyston than there is going out in the opposite direction. That day, it was the other way around. It w
as the morning rush hour – people going to work, amongst them Emma and Trevor.

  That day, she had caught up with him about a mile before the Poulston turn-off. He could see her red car growing in his rear-view mirror. He watched her overtake a couple of slowcoaches he had overtaken seconds before her. She was in a hurry to get to him. Trevor smiled. They were a pair of rascals, daredevils they were! They thrived on adrenalin. He hadn’t known that about himself before he met her. She had taught him a lot about the man he truly was.

  He has lost a lot of that spark since then. Today, he is a slowcoach himself, like he used to be, settled into the steady, lukewarm speed of a middle-aged man with a heavy heart. His foot however is feather-light on the accelerator; his mind isn’t on it, his heart isn’t in it. Not like it used to be.

  That day, when he saw her car approaching, his heart jumped for joy. At first, as was their everyday ritual, he slowed down so she could level up with him. They would look at each other. Sometimes she would send him that wicked little smile of hers – her chin down, her lips’ corners twitching, her eyes peering from above the rim of her sunglasses. His heart would melt and he would let her jump over, and then, in an instant, he would take after her. And the chase would begin. Their own hunger games.

  But not that day.

  It was that cursed white van! It was bumbling in front of Trevor, plumes of black smoke trailing behind it. He didn’t want to be stuck behind the bloody thing. He hesitated at first. If he overtook it straightaway, he would have to wait that little bit longer for Emma to catch up with him again. Then he realised she wouldn’t suffer the white-van fool gladly – she would zoom over him in no time. So he went for it.

  It is an eerie déjà vu for now he is approaching that very stretch of the road where it all happened. Car after car tumbles down from the top of the hill, their makes and colours swallowed by the sun behind their backs. There is no one in front of Trevor – he could speed up if he cared.