by Louisa Scarr
The man stops shrieking and is taken away to his cell. Freya approaches the desk.
‘DC Freya West,’ she says. ‘We spoke earlier?’
‘Come round, come round,’ Watts replies, diverting her into his inner sanctum behind the plastic screens. ‘Sit down, you want tea?’
‘I’m fine, thank you.’
‘Biscuit?’ He pulls a packet of chocolate Hobnobs from his desk drawer. ‘I save the good ones for the visits from the pretty detectives.’
He’s gently flirting, and Freya enjoys the banter. He’s old-school police, from the days before #MeToo: a guy untouched by compulsory inclusivity and diversity training. Freya takes his comment in the way in which it’s intended, and selects a biscuit with a smile.
‘You wanted to talk to me about a call-out two years ago?’ he says. ‘I can’t promise I’ll remember much.’
Freya shows him the photos. ‘Amy and Jonathan Miller. Domestic disturbance, possibly DV?’
He squints at their images through his thick glasses. ‘Okay, yes, vaguely. I remember her, at least.’
‘Who called you out?’
‘The neighbours. Said it was a dreadful racket. And even when we got there, I could hear smashing from inside.’
Freya swallows. She can barely bring herself to ask. ‘And what was he doing?’
Watts takes another biscuit from the pack. He shakes his head. ‘Not him, her.’
Freya’s surprised, and pauses, chocolate melting on her fingers. ‘What do you mean?’
‘That’s why I remember it. We knocked, expecting the usual shitbag beating the crap out of his wife, but when the door opened it was him. Had a gash across his forehead. House was a mess, broken crockery and glass on the floor. And she was something else.’
He takes a bite and chews, thoughtfully. Freya waits. ‘She was quite a wildcat. Still hurling plates as we walked into the room.’
‘But you didn’t arrest her?’
‘No. He was apologetic, didn’t want to press charges. We made sure he was okay, the cut had stopped bleeding, then left him to it.’ He stops eating biscuits. ‘Why do you want to know? Has she killed him?’
Freya stutters for a moment. ‘Why d’you say that?’
‘Because that’s what normally happens, doesn’t it, love?’ he says, matter-of-fact. ‘The abuser kills the victim. Men or women, doesn’t matter,’ he adds cynically. ‘Did she push him out of a window?’
‘No, we…’ Freya stops. ‘We don’t know what happened yet.’
‘But he’s dead, yeah?’ Watts says. And Freya nods. ‘Always comes to that in the end,’ he finishes.
* * *
Freya walks back to the incident room, her mind reeling. She met Jonathan a year after this happened, but she remembers the many times she saw marks on his body. Accident while playing squash, tripped over, he would say, and she didn’t think anything of it. But had that been Amy?
The anger overtakes her, then the tears. She stops for a moment in the empty corridor, leaning against the wall, her hands over her face, trying to stop herself from crying. What must he have gone through, her kind, honest Jon? She feels her legs wobble and crumples, sliding down the wall.
‘Hey, you okay?’ A female PC she doesn’t know stops and crouches next to her.
Freya takes a deep breath in. ‘Yes, sorry.’ She forces a smile. ‘Just having one of those days.’ She wipes her eyes with her fingers, sniffing back the tears.
The woman’s eyes are sympathetic. ‘Don’t I know it,’ she replies. ‘Have a little sob, makes you feel better. That and a large G and T at the end of the day.’
Freya stands up again, feeling foolish for her public display of emotion. ‘I’m fine. Thank you,’ she says, and the woman smiles then continues on her way. ‘Shit,’ Freya mutters. She can’t do that again. What if that had been Baker? She needs to hold it together. For Jon.
She starts walking again, and as she goes into the incident room, a bespectacled guy stops her.
‘You’re working with Butler, yeah?’ he stutters nervously at the floor.
Freya nods and he thrusts an evidence bag in her hand, laptop inside. ‘Greg told me to bring you this. Password on the front,’ he mumbles, and scuttles off.
She carries it to Robin and plonks it on the desk.
‘You’ve scared the techies so much they won’t even talk to you now,’ she says.
Robin looks at the laptop, then back to the door. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ he grumbles. He starts pulling at the sticky top of the evidence bag, as she sits down. They set up the laptop in front of them.
‘Was Watts helpful?’ Robin asks, clicking and logging on using the password hastily scrawled in biro on the plastic.
‘Yes, but not what we thought. DV, but her abusing him.’
Robin looks up, surprised. ‘She was beating him up?’ he asks. ‘Did he ever tell you?’
She shakes her head.
‘That’s not unusual,’ Robin says, softly. ‘Many victims don’t report the abuse.’
She knows he’s trying to let her off the hook, and she appreciates his efforts. But she still feels shit. ‘I’m police, we’re trained to recognise this stuff.’
‘But we expect to see men abusing women. When it’s the other way round it’s not so easy to spot. Was there anything in his medical records?’
She turns and looks, scrolling down, eyes flicking through the many lines of text. ‘Broken ribs in 2015, fractured wrist in 2019.’ She looks up. ‘I remember that one. He said he’d slipped on ice in his driveway. You think that was her?’
Robin lets out a long breath of air. ‘We’ll never know.’ He frowns apologetically, then goes back to the computer. ‘Oh, see, this is odd,’ he says, pointing at the screen.
Freya looks. It’s Jonathan’s inbox, rows and rows of emails. Robin scrolls down, until the line of bold abruptly stops.
‘That’s where the read emails end, and here are the new ones,’ he says, cursor hovering over the subject headers. They all say things like Risk Assessment and Contract 4896.4, all boring stuff Freya assumes is related to his work. She looks at the dates.
‘So he hadn’t read any emails since Friday at four,’ she says. ‘That’s when he met me.’
‘And nothing Monday, when apparently he was working from home,’ Robin adds.
They carry on looking at the computer in silence. Freya watches as Robin loads up Jonathan’s work diary. No meetings on that Monday, so no one would have noticed his absence. Nothing in sent messages.
‘What does his car telemetry say he was doing?’ Robin asks.
Freya scoots across to her computer and opens the file. ‘Nothing,’ she confirms, ‘until the driver’s door opens at 16:47, then closes again.’
Robin looks over her shoulder. ‘Seat position five,’ he reads. ‘What does that mean?’
‘The car records every change from the sensors. So that includes the electronic seats moving.’
‘Freaky-arsed cars,’ he replies. ‘So position five is…?’
He watches as Freya does a quick search and pulls up a Mazda owner’s manual. She reads for a second. ‘Furthest away from the wheel,’ she replies at last.
‘So consistent with the man driving being taller,’ Robin replies, then mentally curses himself for not matching it up sooner when Greg told him about the man in the CCTV. ‘Satnav?’
Freya goes back to her reports. ‘Satnav wasn’t used, but the telemetry shows the car going from the house to the Premier Inn. Then the driver’s door opens and shuts.’
‘So all consistent with him working from home on Monday, as Amy said.’ He looks back at the laptop and the emails. ‘Except he wasn’t working. Oh, here’s something.’ Freya watches as he clicks on a folder, simply called video. ‘Our hidden cameras?’ he asks, clicking on the first icon.
They’re .mov files, multiple recordings, seemingly one per day, the first a fisheye view of his office. Freya checks the date – it’s from Friday morning, and the
y watch as Jonathan goes into his study, picks up his laptop and bag, then walks out again.
Her breath catches in her throat. The air suddenly feels hot and thick. He’s wearing a suit and tie, and Freya remembers it from him arriving at her house later. He’s walking in his usual loping stroll, and Freya misses him so, so much. She’s been so absorbed in the case, she hasn’t stopped to think. About not seeing him again. About how this, this grainy shit black and white video, shows the last traces of his life.
‘You okay?’ Robin asks softly. She nods, sniffing back the tears.
‘He was just so…’ She pauses. ‘He was so much more than this.’ She taps the screen angrily. ‘This video. He was funny, and smart, and…’ She angrily wipes the tears away with the back of her hand, glancing around the incident room, relieved that none of their colleagues have noticed. ‘I can’t believe he’s gone.’
‘I know,’ Robin says, almost in a whisper. ‘And it’ll come back to you at the weirdest possible times. You’ll see traces of them in someone else’s smile. Or you’ll watch a TV programme and it’ll make you laugh because of something they said.’
Freya looks at him. She hasn’t stopped to appreciate just what Robin has been going through these past few years. She’s lost Jonathan, but he’s lost his entire family. Suddenly she understands him just that bit better. And how strong he must be to have kept going.
And in a flash, she understands why Robin killed Trevor Stevens. That anger, that rage. It’s what she’s feeling now, bubbling below the surface.
While she’s been thinking, Robin’s been scrolling through the other videos. She’s barely noticed as he’s moved through hours of nothing but the empty Miller study, and has now progressed on to the living room. There’s video as Jonathan Miller passes through, bag in hand, out to work on Friday morning. Then Amy Miller comes into shot.
They watch as she stands at the window, looking out at their driveway.
‘Waiting for Jonathan to leave?’ she asks Robin, but he doesn’t reply, his hand covering his mouth, his gaze locked on the screen.
She looks at it too, then freezes. Because what’s showing on the video is so strange, so bizarre, she can’t articulate it in words.
Freya opens and closes her mouth. She looks at the video then back to her boss.
‘What… the… fuck…?’ Robin whispers.
58
Wednesday
Kal lies motionless in the darkened room. It must be seven o’clock, maybe eight in the morning, he’s not sure. He’s been here for days, at home, doing nothing more than wander around his house. He called in sick to work on Monday. He can’t concentrate. He just thinks about him. About Jonathan.
He can’t sleep. He can’t eat. He can just about manage to drink, whatever he can get his hands on, to take the thoughts away. He knows he needed to shower, but what is the point any more?
He thinks about calling the police. But even when the phone is in his hand, he can’t bring himself to do it. So when he hears the doorbell ring and pulls aside the curtain to see the blue and yellow of the patrol car, he feels a swell of relief. It’s out of his hands now. He knew they would come.
He walks slowly to the front door and opens it: two detectives wait – the man and woman who interviewed him in London that day. He doesn’t say anything, just moves out of the way of the door and gestures for them to come in.
The man’s wearing the same shit suit from days before. Even through his addled haze Kal still recognises cheap off-the-peg when he sees it. But then, who is he to judge? He knows he hasn’t cleaned his teeth; he can sense the smell of his own sour sweat.
The male detective is holding handcuffs.
‘Khalid Riaz,’ the woman begins, and he turns to look at her. ‘We are arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Jonathan Miller. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court.’
He feels his wrists being pulled behind him, the cuffs fastened in place.
‘Anything that you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand?’ the woman finishes.
‘I didn’t kill him,’ Kal says. It’s the first time he’s spoken in days, and the words feel rough on his throat. ‘I didn’t kill him.’
59
Freya’s ready. Robin can feel her fidget beside him as the two of them sit opposite Khalid Riaz in the interview room. He’s wearing a police-issue grey tracksuit, the blue blanket draped over his slumped shoulders.
Robin was shocked when they turned up at his door this morning. He’d been expecting Kal to lawyer up immediately, to confront them with arrogance and cries of discrimination and unfair treatment. But the man they arrested was broken.
He was wearing dirty boxer shorts and a T-shirt. With some persuasion they managed to get him dressed, shoes on his feet, and a coat round his bony shoulders. He looked like he hadn’t eaten in days.
Apart from his first words when they arrested him, he was silent the whole way in. He gave the bare minimum as he was booked into custody. The transformation to this husk of a man is so absolute that Robin asked him to be checked over by a doctor before they interviewed him.
But the doctor came and went, and Kal was given a sandwich and a bottle of water. So here they are.
Robin was reluctant to allow Freya into the interview room, but she insisted, on the proviso she stays quiet. They have a bulky file in front of them, packed out with spare paper from the photocopier to make it look like they have more on him than they do.
‘Kal,’ Robin begins, gently. The video is rolling, the warnings have been issued. ‘Do you know why you’re here?’
Kal stays staring at the table. He nods slowly.
‘We know why you did it, Kal,’ Robin says.
Kal looks up quickly. He meets Robin’s gaze for a moment, then drops it back to the table.
‘We know what your father used to do to your mum.’
This time Kal’s head lifts, and he stares at Robin as he pulls photos out from the beige file in front of him. First, the photo of the woman. Face bloodied, nose broken.
‘We understand, Kal,’ Robin says.
A look crosses Kal’s face. ‘You understand?’ he says angrily.
Robin waits.
‘Your dad used to hit your mum, did he?’ Kal hisses. ‘You used to watch as your father beat your mother senseless, as he dragged her round by her hair, as he threw her down the stairs?’ The man’s features contort with anger. ‘You don’t know shit.’
‘I know you stood up for your mum,’ Robin says. ‘I know you got your father convicted for what he’d done.’ He takes the second photo from the file – this time of the older man. His eyes are blackened, and Robin knows that his jaw is broken, his ribs shattered. Kal glances down at the photo then glares again. ‘That takes bravery, Kal.’
Kal shakes his head. ‘Not soon enough.’
‘Is that why you killed Jonathan Miller?’
Kal stares back at the table. Robin can see his hands are shaking as he picks up the plastic cup of water and takes a sip.
He carries on. ‘You thought Jonathan was beating Amy up, and you had to do something about it.’
‘Cowards,’ Kal says quietly. ‘That’s all they are.’ He looks up at Robin. ‘Bullies.’
‘And you had to stop Jonathan?’
Kal shakes his head again. ‘I didn’t kill Jonathan,’ he whispers.
‘Tell us what happened, Kal,’ Robin says. ‘We understand. You couldn’t stand by again. You couldn’t let someone beat up their wife and do nothing. You should be commended, Kal,’ Robin says, and he feels Freya tense next to him. ‘Any jury in the land will go easy on you, after what you’ve been through with your mum. Just tell us what happened.’
Kal looks up. He meets Robin’s gaze.
‘I didn’t kill him,’ he says again.
Robin sees Freya look at him and nod. He knows what she’s saying: put everything on the table,
show him what we have. But Robin’s reluctant. They know there’s domestic violence in Khalid Riaz’s background, but everything here is backwards. Amy wasn’t being beaten up, Jonathan was. And he’s the one that’s dead.
But they have one chance to find out what happened. Robin opens the file.
‘Kal. Here’s what we know. A man of your height was seen getting out of Jonathan’s car on the night of his murder. You’re what, six foot three? We know the seat of Jonathan’s car was pulled right back, to a position that someone of your height would need to drive it. We’re still waiting for your DNA results, but we’ve already used your father’s DNA from the file, and it comes back as a familial match to the sample we found on the steering wheel of the car.’ He pauses, then takes a photo out. He notices Kal’s gaze flick to the picture.
‘Do you recognise this magazine, Kal?’ Robin asks. ‘Porn, found in the room along with Jonathan’s body. And it has your fingerprints all over it.’
‘I gave it to him,’ he says, but his protest is weak.
Robin continues. ‘We got back in touch with Lisa, your now ex-girlfriend, I believe? And once we explained that making a false statement to the police can come with a prison sentence, she was keen to put us straight. You weren’t with her Monday night, Kal. You left work at three, and then where did you go?’
No response.
Robin glances at Freya, and she opens the lid of the laptop. ‘We know you would have seen the bruises on Amy’s face on the night of your party,’ Robin says. ‘But what you don’t know is how she got them.’
Kal’s head snaps up. Robin knows he has his attention. Freya turns the laptop to face him, and now Robin presses play on the video, winding it forward to the part of the tape he needs.
At first, Kal seems confused. He glances at Robin. ‘What is this?’ he asks.
‘For the benefit of the video, exhibit Five B. This is a video camera, placed by Jonathan Miller in the living room of his own house. We believe it was put there so that Jonathan could record Amy attacking him.’