Blue On Blue

by Dal Maclean

  “Stephen Underwood?” Ingham repeated, bewildered. She looked at James. “Your Stephen Underwood?”

  James flinched minutely, but nodded.

  Ingham looked at the end of her tether. “I’ll bite. What has he got to do with Emily?”

  James began to explain in detail then what Steggie had left behind. And Will thought as he watched Ingham’s horrified reaction, that she’d have to let Clarkson know, if he was running her. If he didn’t already know.

  Their options were narrowing, with every step closer to the truth. It was a race to bring down Joey before he, or the cops he ran, neutralized them.

  “Joey had someone with him in some of the shots taken at the parties,” Will said. “A girl. Her face isn’t visible, but in a couple of the photos you can see she had a tattoo of a rose in her upper left arm.” He handed his phone across the desk to Ingham. “This is Emily’s Instagram account. There are shots of her in a bikini. She has an intricate tattoo on her upper left arm. The center of it is a rose.”

  Ingham stared at him. “Lots of people have rose tattoos. And how would Emily know Joey Clarkson?”

  “She said something about going off the rails after her father died. And that . . . .” Will frowned trying to remember it. “Something woke her up.”

  “Killing Ricky Desmond?” Tom suggested.

  James said, “We know it’s not exactly unprecedented for a privileged kid to see Joey’s world as something glamorous to hook into.”

  “This is . . . .” Ingham rubbed her mouth. “Even if you’re right, we’re in the same position here as with Catherine. Worse, because Emily has serious money and power behind her. If she knows she left her DNA at two murder scenes, she’s not going to give a voluntary sample.” She shook her head. “Her lawyers’d say we’re speculating the DNA on Will’s jacket is hers. They’ll say anyone could have touched it. They’ll say she’s under no obligation to give us a sample of her DNA. And they’ll be right on all counts.”

  “Then we start digging into her past,” James said. “Establish a link with Joey.”

  “That’s still not enough,” Ingham said. “All we have that’s close to solid grounds for investigation is that she and the girl in the photo—which I’m taking your word for—both have rose tattoos. And we’d better be damned sure we have enough to charge her if we do take her in, because the facts haven’t changed. If Joey gets wind we’ve found Ricky Desmond’s killer, we’re painting a target on her back.”

  “But the way this place leaks . . . .” Will pointed out. “The number of grasses Joey has in here, if it gets out we’re investigating her without moving in on her . . . .”

  They considered that dilemma in glum silence. Then out of the blue—a revelation.

  He leaped to his feet. Without a word, he left Ingham’s office and strode across the Incident Room to his own desk, grabbed the almost full wastepaper bin that sat underneath and headed back for Ingham’s office, rummaging as he went, bits of crumpled paper falling unheeding in his wake. By the time he’d closed Ingham’s door behind him again, he’d groped out all four white plastic tubes he’d dumped absently in the bin when he’d had to empty his jacket pockets to give it to forensics.

  If they’d left it till the next day to figure out Emily’s involvement, the cleaners would have thrown them out.

  They all stared at the objects in his hand. Four DNA samples from the final fiasco on the Witness roadshow.

  “You could class them as voluntary . . . .” James said slowly. “If you squint.”

  “Emily knew what was happening,” Will said. “She didn’t object. In fact her willingness is on tape. I guess it explains why I have a text asking me to phone her and a couple of missed calls.”

  “But she didn’t give permission for an analysis,” Ingham pointed out.

  “She didn’t deny it either.”

  “Because she hasn’t managed to contact you,” Ingham countered. She chewed at her lower lip for a few agonized seconds. Then she said, “All right. Let’s try testing.”

  Will cupped the four tubes in his palm.

  “They’re all unmarked,” Ingham pointed out. “How can you prove which sample is hers?”

  “The other options are a police dog handler, an ineffectual TV presenter or a German shepherd. Or it could be the woman whose tattoo matches the one on the arm of Joey Clarkson’s girlfriend, who was present at illegal sex parties involving Ricky Desmond at the time of his murder. If one of those samples comes through as matching DNA found at the two murder scenes, I’d say that gives us reasonable grounds to arrest her.”

  “Dear God, we’re sailing close to the wind,” Ingham said.

  Will fought down his impatience. He knew one of them had to play Devil’s advocate. He’d just prefer it wasn’t the officer in the room under suspicion of taking bribes from Joey Clarkson.

  “Arresting her gives you the legal right to take DNA,” Tom pointed out.

  “Yes,” Ingham said. “But I’m reminding you all again, she’ll have shit-hot lawyers. And if she’s guilty, and we don’t have enough to hold her . . . .”

  James frowned. “We can’t let someone get away with double murder because we’re afraid there might be efforts to silence them. We can put contingencies in place Ma’am, but we have to follow the law.”

  Will thought, with uneasy admiration, that there was nothing quite as implacable as virtue. But at least James also embraced nuance.

  Ingham tapped the tips of her fingers against the tabletop for a few more seconds. “We’ll see what the lab comes back with. I’m going to speak to AC Hansen about the possibility of Witness Protection for her if it comes to that. But if there’s a match, we bring her in.”

  The lab came through before 5:00 p.m. with a match for one of the four samples Will had taken on the TV set, to the mystery DNA found at Desmond’s and Daria’s murder scenes. As icing on the cake, Mrs. Morris, Sir Magnus’s housekeeper, confirmed Emily had arrived at James’s party alone and late.

  Tom left before the result came through to go to a scheduled university lab, so Will sat with James, Hansen and Ingham in Ingham’s office and considered what to do next.

  Will couldn’t pin down how he felt. Euphoric one moment; almost afraid the next.

  He’d found justice for Daria. He’d be able to name her killer. That was the job he’d been supposed to do. Even a kind of justice for June. But it had become so much more.

  After years of hating, and vowing vengeance for Sanjay, he finally had the prospect of grabbing the tiger by the tail. Emily could be the live witness who’d testify about Joey’s corruption of the police to protect her, and his involvement in historic sex trafficking and abuse. But Will had no illusions about the peril they were all in once Joey understood the extent of the evidence they’d accumulated. All of them.

  Hansen’s mood didn’t help. She looked worn-down, which was unnerving, given her customary bulletproof imperturbability. Will couldn’t help the surge of protectiveness he felt toward her.

  But Nick, whom she’d been protecting, had been abducted. She was trying to combat, more or less alone, the corruption infecting the MPS and stretching above her head to the very top. She was about to okay a head-on attempt to bring down the most powerful and untouchable gangster in London. The spider at the center of the web. And she could trust no one but them.

  It was all coming to a head. This was their big play.

  “Arrest her,” Hansen said at last. “You do it, Jo. The higher the rank, the more she’ll understand the severity of what’s happening.”

  Ingham took James with her when she went, and Will was left in Ingham’s office with Hansen, both of them jittery with tension. Will tapped his fingers restlessly against his thigh, thoughts racing in ever more complex scenarios.

  The silence lasted less than a minute before Hansen said: “Joey’s going to do everything in his power to destroy Emily if she cooperates, or to give her a message through destroying you. And we don’t know who
in here will help him.”

  Will stopped tapping. “He’ll do that whether we take her in or not, if we don’t get him first.” Unvarnished reality. “He’s known our every move, even when we tried to keep it secret. I’m sure he already knows we found Emily, and he no doubt knows about the Underwood evidence.”

  Hansen met his eyes and her own were bleak. “The chances of that DNA ending up on your jacket were vanishingly small. By the laws of probability, Emily should never have been identified as the killer. Joey and she should have been clear.”

  “Yeah,” Will said. “Who says the devil looks after his own? Anyway, we can’t keep the arrest of a TV celebrity on murder charges quiet. We have to break her quickly. Have you decided if we can offer a deal in exchange for testimony?”

  Hansen rubbed her eyes. “It depends on how culpable she was in both murders. Her blood all over Ricky Desmond . . . doesn’t bode well.”

  They fell into brooding silence.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” Hansen said suddenly. “About Carl.” Will frowned. And then it registered. Carl Hansen. Her husband. His eyes widened as he looked at her, a gap of apprehension opening in his chest. Hansen seemed to see his dismay. Her mouth twisted. “I didn’t tell you, because . . . I couldn’t leave him. For many reasons. And I couldn’t lose you. So I buried my head in the sand and told myself you had no reason to find out. Because I knew if you did, you’d leave.”

  Will swallowed. He didn’t know what to say, but his heart was racing. Hansen stood up.

  “You did matter,” she said. “And losing you was difficult. I just wanted you to know. Given any one of us may find Eddie Butts at our door at any minute.”

  It was ancient history. Why not give it a good burial?

  “Thank you,” he said. “Chris.” And then, because it was true, “You mattered too.”

  He saw something in her eyes, a moment of bleakness, a flinch of pain, before she pulled her expression back to neutrality and pulled down her uniform jacket.

  “Carry on DI Foster,” she said, and left him alone in Ingham’s office.

  He sat there thinking, worrying at an impossible notion—did Hansen still have feelings for him?—until he was shaken back to himself by James’s and Ingham’s return.

  Emily was in custody. The clock was ticking.

  “We’re waiting for Simon Callaghan,” James said.

  Will sighed, but they’d expected it.

  Simon was Mark’s boss and one of the most effective and unscrupulous defense solicitors in London. Mark was effectively Simon’s mini–me, though Will had been more than glad of Mark’s tactics when Tom’d been in trouble. But Simon was Joey’s solicitor.

  It could mean nothing. Simon was the elite’s go-to brief—an effective get-out-of-jail-free card for people with money who hit trouble with the police. And Emily had money.

  But it could also mean everything. It could mean Emily had called Joey for help.

  “By the way,” James set down a large manila envelope on the desk. “I got one of the copies of Steggie’s evidence out of the bank when you were doing the telly. In case we needed them.”

  “Jamie,” Will said. “When this is over you and me are going to get sloshed. Or maybe married.”

  James grinned. “When it’s over.”

  They picked out seven photographs of Joey and his purple-haired girlfriend to scrutinize, taken on different occasions, going by clothing.

  Will moved the one on top with a restless finger studying faces he recognized from the newspapers, from TV, some from the cultural landscape of his childhood. All tainted now.

  Another image underneath showed the same scene maybe seconds later, but the crowd had parted slightly. Joey could be seen a little back from the action, purple-haired friend tucked under his arm, her face hidden by someone in front of her. Other men in the crowd were laughing or apparently cheering on the sex act they were watching, but Joey’s expression was blank.

  Will moved the photograph aside. There was another underneath that must have stuck to the one above because it shouldn’t have been in the pile. It was taken at one of Fred’s pedophile parties, but Will’s attention caught on a gray-haired man talking to Fred, still frustratingly familiar to him.

  “I know him,” he said. “Ring any bells?”

  James looked closer. “Nope. But he’s definitely going be out of context. Try picturing where you saw him last.”

  Will stared at the man’s face until he thought it must be branded on his retina. Then on the point of accepting defeat it came to him.

  James was right. It was all to do with context.

  A photograph he’d seen many times years ago. And again very recently, though he hadn’t really registered it. Just two well-dressed, apparently content, elderly people.

  He’d read about blood turning cold. As if every bit of warmth had been pulled out of him through his spine. His thoughts were thick and slow like congealing honey.

  He fumbled out his phone and stared at the dark screen for a second before he could make himself open it up. The search engine results came in the blink of an eye.

  “Will?” James asked sharply. “What’s wrong?”

  Will slid the phone across the desk.

  “Malcolm Delingpole,” James read. “Chief Constable of Kent. Former Chair of the Association of Chief Police Officers, Retired 2017.” He sighed “Another copper. You know him?”

  “No,” Will said. “He’s Hansen’s father.”

  24

  James’s eyes seemed to pull against their will back to the phone screen.

  “That doesn’t have to mean anything,”

  But they both knew it did.

  In the vanishingly unlikely event that Hansen hadn’t known about her father’s activities before they gave her the photographs, she did now. And she’d never mentioned the fact he was pictured in them, breaking the law in one of the most nauseating ways possible, aided and abetted by the Clarksons.

  There was no way Joey would have missed the chance to turn the daughter, even if only by using her father’s sins against her.

  Hansen hadn’t been worried about a corrupt superior officer shutting down the investigation if they found out about it. She’d been worried that their investigation might reach her and the others Joey owned.

  “She set us up,” Will said. “At Nick’s. I told her about Steggie’s evidence the night before. She must have told Joey and set the sting with Tom in motion at once. She used Nick to get us in place for the hit because she knew my history. And she used my affair with her to get to Tom. It was her.”

  “But she refused us the address,” James said. He looked devastated.

  “She knew we’d find it.”

  “She couldn’t, Will. But . . . now I think of it, I thought she was going to tell us, but she changed her mind.”

  Will tried to recall the details of the conversation but he’d been distraught when it played out. He felt barely less distraught now.

  “It was after she realized we’d made copies,” James said. He ran a hand through his thick, fair hair. “Which officers has she warned us off? That could be an indication who’s sound?”

  “Who the fuck knows who’s clean and who’s dirty, Jamie? The force is riddled with Joey’s people. There were two senior officers in these pictures alone. And Hansen is . . . .”

  His voice cracked on the name, and he had to stop.

  He’d trusted her totally. He’d flattered himself that he knew her. That she even cared about him. Just minutes before he’d been worrying about the hurt he thought he’d seen in her eyes when he’d talked about his feelings for her in the past tense. During the shit show of the previous summer, he’d come to see them as almost part of the same team, fighting undercover for justice when they had to. What a fucking patsy.

  “We could be jumping to conclusions,” James said. “Again. You can’t deny she’s been the driving force behind what we’ve done. She hasn’t tried to stop us or hold us bac
k has she? Maybe she didn’t know about her dad until she saw the photos. I mean, put yourself in her shoes . . . you wouldn’t say anything about your dad would you? Until you’d found out the truth for yourself?”

  But for Will, the time for self-delusion was past. It was all so fucking clear now.

  “The truth is, her father attended parties run by criminals. To have sex with . . . to rape children. The moment I found out June hadn’t murdered Ricky Desmond, this whole fucking conspiracy was under threat. And the best way to limit the damage was to take control of the investigation herself until she could remove us and pass it on to other bent coppers. And I was the fucking mug who took all the evidence we found straight to one of Joey’s narks.”

  “You had to trust someone Will. And you still don’t know . . . .”

  “But Joey does. Joey knows. Because she reported everything we did.” Will met James’s worried eyes. “It’s close to endgame and they know everything we have. We can only trust each other now.”

  James pressed his lips together. He looked exhausted.

  “What can just two of us do?” he asked.

  “Surprise them,” Will said. He felt eerily calm. Steady, the way he imagined people felt on Death Row, as they chose their last supper. “We have to break Emily.”

  “And what then? Without Hansen we can’t guarantee her safety if she talks, or that the case won’t be closed down at once.”

  “We can’t guarantee her safety if she doesn’t talk. Or ours. June didn’t talk, but she’s still dead. This whole putrid network succeeded because it existed in the shadows. Joey owning cops; there was never hard evidence. The Clarksons running their criminal empire . . . we haven’t been able to lay a glove on either of them. But if we get Emily to roll on Joey, we have an eyewitness to those parties. To using cops to pervert the course of justice. We have Steggie’s evidence and his posthumous statement—proof and testimony the Clarksons were running the show. And we have Lauren Newman. And once we start to lean on the very important people in those pictures, Joey’s invincible edifice starts to crumble. But to do all that, we have to drag everything out into the light.”