by M. G. Cole
“I suppose if we have nothing to charge her with, she’s out tomorrow?” When Garrick didn’t answer, Harry turned to him and saw the shocked look on his face. “What’s happened?”
“They just found Huw Crawford.”
26
Huw Crawford’s body swung in the cold wind blowing from the North Sea, heralding the storm about to hit Whitstable. He was at the top of a thirty-foot tall metal tower that held a raft of weather monitoring devices. It was accessible by a steel-rung ladder, which is how Crawford had got all the way to the top, carrying a length of rope left amongst the building supplies between the popular seafood shacks. He’d fastened one end of the rope to the rungs, the other around his neck. Every so often the wind would pick up, causing the body to swing wide and clang Crawford’s Timberland boots against the mast. It was the very noise that had attracted a pair of diners to look up as they headed to their car.
If it wasn’t for the wind, the body could have gone unnoticed all night at the top of the mast, wreathed in darkness. By the time Garrick had arrived, the police at the scene had rigged a pair of spotlights to illuminate him.
Garrick’s first instinct was to cut him down, but that proved tricky. Simply slashing the rope would send the body crashing to the ground and destroy vital evidence. It was another two hours before the SOCO team arrived, just as the rain squall moved in. They eventually worked out a safe way of attaching another rope to hoist Crawford to the ground.
It was well after midnight when a uniformed officer knocked on the side window of Garrick’s Land Rover, causing him to jump. He’d been fending off sleep since he took refuge in his car while the forensics did their thing. The officer led him to the foot of the weather mast. A middle-aged SOCO pulled her rain poncho tighter. He recognised her from a few other past crime scenes, which was made easier with her Australian accent. She had to shout over the noise of the rain hammering the metal roofs of the diners and small warehouses around them.
“I can’t be sure, but I think he’s been dead for about three hours. If it wasn’t for the wind bashing him against the mast, I don’t think anybody would have found him until the morning.” She had to raise her voice as the rain pelted harder. It stung Garrick’s eyes every time he followed her finger up to the mast. His hair was plastered to his scalp. His legs were wet, feet soaked, and the water had trickled down the neck of his Barbour, drenching his shirt. “I think it’s odds-on-favourite it was a suicide. Getting a body way up there to fake it would be far too difficult.”
She crossed to a pallet filled with building materials and some junk. “I reckon he got the rope from here. So unless he specifically intended to come to this place, it wasn’t premeditated.”
This was the desperate act of a frightened man. The incident had been all over the news, so it was no secret that PC Lord had survived. He doubted it was the guilt of the hit-and-run that had led him to take his own life. They were only two miles from where Crawford had dumped the car, so he must have spent several hours hiding in Whitstable before making his fatal decision.
“What did he have on him?”
“Nothing. But we found this bag in one of the dumpsters.” She pointed to a line of wheel refuge bins that had all been tipped onto their sides so the team could examine their contents. She led him to the back of a forensic van. They both climbed inside, thankful to be out of the storm. The rain drummed the vehicle as she swapped her gloves for a pair of dry ones and then laid a leather satchel on a sheet on the floor. She carefully drew out a laptop, a medical textbook, and a mobile phone.
Garrick took a pair of latex gloves from a cardboard box and put them on. He opened the laptop. It woke from sleep, showing a password prompt.
“That’s going to be fun to hack,” sniffed the SOCO.
“Is the body still here?”
“In the Ambulance.”
Garrick braced himself as he hopped from the van and ran to the back of the ambulance into which the body had been loaded. He held up the phone so its camera could scan Huw Crawford’s face. It failed to unlock. Garrick tried again. It didn’t work. He’d tried a similar trick with Fanta in the past, and it had worked perfectly.
The SOCO caught up with him and clambered onboard.
“I don’t think this is his phone.”
“It probably has the attention feature switched on.” Garrick’s bewildered expression made her chuckle. “I wouldn’t have known about it if my daughter hadn’t slipped up and told me. So nobody can unlock your phone while you’re asleep, the software checks to see if you’re awake.”
She leaned across the body and used both hands to pry Crawford’s eyelids open. His bulging glassy eyes stared at an angle, but the pupils were just visible.
“Try it now.”
Garrick held up the camera and the screen unlocked. He went straight into the settings and turned the phone’s auto-lock off. It was another handy tip that Fanta had taught him. He checked the call log and saw twenty-three to the same number. A quick check on his own phone confirmed it was Terri Cordy’s mobile. Over the space of several hours, right until nine-sixteen, they had gone unanswered. The only other call was to an unregistered mobile made five minutes after Crawford had struck officer Lord. It lasted for three-minutes four-seconds.
A quick check of his emails, text messages, Facebook and WhatsApp revealed no new activity for the last couple of days.
Garrick’s head was literally spinning. He made a note of the unregistered mobile number and emailed Fanta to check it out as soon as she reached the incident room. He handed the phone back to the SOCO, thanked the team for their efforts, and squelched back to his car.
He turned the radio on and blasted nineties dance tunes from KMFM just to keep him awake. It didn’t quite work as the repetitive beats of Snap’s ‘Rhythm is a Dancer’ lulled him. His mind kept circling the anomalies scattered amongst the evidence.
While there were plenty of connections between the various players and a snarl of motivation, animosity, and bitter romance, none of them linked in the right way. He had been relying on Crawford to provide him with that spark of final inspiration, but now that had been snatched from him.
Back home, Garrick threw his damp clothes into the bathtub and, naked, collapsed under the bedsheets. He sank into a brooding series of dreams in which he was being pursued while his sister constantly attempted to warn him of something, but the words were never clear and, at times, backwards.
He woke in the morning feeling even more tired than he had at the start of the night.
An email from PC Liu confirmed that the three-minute phone call Crawford had made was to an unregistered pay-as-you-go phone. Garrick made the decision that a grief counsellor should break the news of Crawford’s death to Terri before they interviewed her. That was one session he was not looking forward to today, and one that he couldn’t, as a leader, throw to Chib to deal with. Although she would be much better at handling it than him.
He had a sparky email from Wendy, which painfully reminded him they hadn’t talked since that night in Pizza Hut. What must she think of him? He promised to call her at lunchtime before she thought he was being stand-offish.
Overnight, a polite refusal from Fraser’s bank in Panama to hand over any information had arrived. He was just finishing his breakfast when he received an irate call from Dr Rajasekar.
“You missed your appointment!” she snapped with no preamble.
“I didn’t think we had an appointment booked.”
“For your MRI!”
Garrick’s stomach jolted. “I completely forgot. Wait, I thought it was the end of the week? I remember you saying it was the end of the week.”
“No, David. I spoke to you yesterday and said it was first thing this morning. An hour ago! They called me to ask where you were.”
With everything that had happened, Garrick was getting confused. He remembered her exact words, or perhaps he’d been distracted.
“To be honest, I had to pull a few strings t
o get you that.” Rajasekar was determined to make him feel bad. “This is your health we’re talking about. You must take it seriously.”
“I do.” He sounded like a chastised schoolboy.
“As luck would have it, they’ve had another cancelation this morning and juggled appointments around for you. Get to Tunbridge Wells for ten-fifteen. Same place as last time.”
The words ‘I can’t’ caught in his throat. He glanced at the time; it was eight-thirty. By the time he got to the station, he would have to perform a U-turn and go straight to the hospital, so it wasn’t worth leaving. He mumbled an apology and his thanks before assuring her he’d be there on time. Then he hung up and called Chib, who was at her desk and catching up with the overnight events. Now it really looked as if he was throwing her under the bus as he asked her to interview Terri Cordy. Although, if she thought that, she never let on.
“We’re releasing Rebecca in the next hour. We’re just waiting for her solicitor to turn up. Should we be following her?”
“The way things are going, that will not make us look good if she finds out. Let’s make sure Border Force alert us when she tries to leave.”
He filled her in on his time retrieving Crawford’s body. She had read the incident report, but Garrick’s account added a missing layer of tragedy.
“I don’t get it,” said Chib. “He was a good-looking bloke. A medical student with great grades. Why would he jeopardise any of that?”
“The corny answer is what drives anybody to do extreme things: Love.”
After finishing his call, he realised he had a good fifty minutes on his hands before he had to leave. He made himself a matcha tea and sat in front of his ammonite. He hated the MRI, so tackling the finer details of his fossil with a small metal brush proved to be a relaxing distraction.
He alternatively sipped his tea and used the mounted magnifying glass to peer closer into the ridges of the shell. Apart from the ridges he had accidentally shaved away, the rest of the detail was rather magnificent. Mounted on a base of the rock he found it in, it would look quite handsome on the mantlepiece. He felt proud. Impulsively, he powered up the air pump and use the air scribe to cut away a little more of the base to give it shape. The scribe’s tiny needle chipped effortlessly through the rock, but the shrill whine of the pump triggered another pounding headache. Surely this had to be psychosomatic, he thought. It was a question to pose to Dr Rajasekar. He was distracted. Too distracted.
A chunk of matrix the size of a two-pound coin suddenly fell away. There had been a crack in the rock he hadn’t noticed. As the base material crumbled, the beautiful ammonite fractured in two.
Garrick stopped the pump and angrily tossed the air scribe aside. He picked up the two halves. They neatly fitted together, so he could glue them, but that would be cheating. He was annoyed. A month’s diligent work had been suddenly ruined on an impulse. Disgusted with himself, he threw the two parts onto his wooden workboard.
Then he noticed there was something inside the ammonite. Curious, he flipped it over. No, not inside. It was a claw or a tooth that had cracked the once-living mollusc open from behind. The last act of a predator before something had killed it too, eventually leaving only their fossilised remains. Garrick took heart that predator’s crime had eventually come to light millennia later…
The feeling of being entombed in the MRI scanner was worse than last few times. The experience was further compounded by the machine’s rhythmic, heavy thumping as it scanned the inside of his skull. Each sound sent his migraine pulsing, and he wondered if that would show on the scan.
While waiting to go in, he had scrolled through his phone and found his original appointment was in his calendar, put there yesterday by himself when Rajasekar had called. Yet he distinctly recalled her telling him it was at the end of the week. He remembered every word of the message. He recalled the sinking feeling of having to go through the whole experience again. Was he so tired he was getting easily confused? Had he latched onto a false memory and convinced himself it was real? Either way, it alarmed him. And he wasn’t completely sure he should mention it to Rajasekar during their next session.
He was in and out in thirty minutes, knowing the results would land with his doctor soon. He only hoped that it would be good news.
27
He arrived at the station to discover Chib still hadn’t interviewed Terri Cordy as she had broken down when told about Huw Crawford. Now, a few hours later, she could talk. Garrick hadn’t escaped the ordeal after all.
He was surprised to find Terri remarkably composed. Her eyes were bloodshot, her voice was quiet but firm.
“Huw and I were no longer dating.”
Garrick nodded in understanding. “How long have you been apart?”
“Well, we were never really a constant item.” She flushed and kept scratching her nose, embarrassed about discussing her personal life. “It was more off than on.”
“When did you last see him?”
She exhaled a long sigh as she thought. “Two months. Maybe more. He called me a lot. I got annoyed. Told him not to. He wouldn’t leave me alone.”
“And how did he react to that?”
“He was very upset.”
“Aggressive? Argumentative?”
She gave a snort. “Huw was always argumentative. But never violent.”
Garrick mentally logged Rebecca Ellis’s lie.
“I’m curious about why Huw might have a grudge against Derek.”
“Where to begin? Derek has a talent for rubbing people up the wrong way.”
“Anything specific?” Chib asked with a tinge of hostility that surprised Garrick. She clearly wasn’t buying into Terri’s suddenly calm and vulnerable persona.
“Derek and I had a real relationship. Something he couldn’t have.” Was it Garrick’s imagination or did she sneer?
“But you and Derek split up because of the baby.”
“He left me! I wanted us to stay together, but he left me! We could have worked things out if only he’d given it a chance.”
“Your affair led to his divorce.”
“That was on the cards anyway. Those two mutually loathed each other from the beginning. God knows why they got married.”
“You must have hated Rebecca Ellis for taking him back from you.”
“No. It wasn’t her fault. The only reason he tried to patch things up with her was because it would ruin him financially.”
“Because she would take half his possessions. The liquid ones. Leaving him with nothing.”
“That’s more than he deserved.” She folded her arms and grimaced at the memory.
Garrick was confused. “I thought you were in love with him?”
“Not after he chucked me away. I was naïve then. I’m not now. When I heard that he’d died, I was glad. It actually made me miss Huw.”
Garrick drummed his fingers on the table, taking some pleasure to see it was irritating her.
“Back to why Huw would break into Derek’s hotel room. Threaten him with a gun to steal some valuable artwork.”
She frowned. “What?”
“Come on. You can’t be the only person who didn’t see him make a fool of me on the television news.”
“I saw that. But it was Huw?”
“You didn’t recognise him?”
“Are you serious? It was too blurry and shaky. I didn’t even recognise you. Huw wouldn’t have done that.”
“Maybe he did it to impress you?” Chib suggested.
“And how would that impress me? No. I don’t believe he would do that.”
Garrick pursed his lips. “For the sake of argument, suppose he was trying to steal them to get a better deal with the art buyer, a man you happened to both know. A man who was perhaps using his business to launder money.”
Terri nodded. “Mark. Typical.”
“You knew about Mark’s extracurricular activities?”
“Detective, please!” her solicitor cried out, speaking
for the first time since he had arrived. “You’re leading her.”
“How else can I say it? Did you know he was a crook?”
She raised a hand dismissively. “I suspected it. But I didn’t know it. I didn’t want to get involved. I met Huw through him.”
Chib made a note in her pad. “While in London?”
Terri nodded. “He was just folding up his shop in Islington and thinking of moving down south.”
“And how did they know each other?”
“Huw tried to sell him a few pieces of his art.”
Garrick was surprised. “He was an artist?”
“That’s what we had in common. He was good, but I suppose he thought there was more money to be made being a doctor. We were friends, I suppose. He moved to Kent to study when Derek and I got together. I hardly saw him until Derek dumped me. He was a rebound thing.”
Chib thoughtfully tapped her pen on the notepad. Garrick suspected she had just reached the same conclusion he had. He showed her the CCTV footage of her and Rebecca placing the holdalls in the back of her car.
“Talk us through what is happening here.”
Terri studied it for a long moment. Then tossed it aside.
“They’re my things. I told you I was moving. Rebecca is taking them to Portugal and as soon as I have my passport, Ethan and I will join her.”
“That’s a very generous thing for a woman like her to do, especially as her ex-husband was sleeping with you. Why would she humour you? She’s a person you admit to not knowing very well.”
Terri looked at Garrick as if he’d announced he was the Pope. “She’s a nice person. But she’s not doing it for me. She’s doing it for Ethan’s father.”
Now it was Garrick’s turn to look confused. “Derek?”
“Oscar!” She looked between Garrick and Chib. “Oscar is Ethan’s father.”
Garrick lolled back in his seat, scrambling to insert this new piece of knowledge into the puzzle. “You took a paternity test. You said Ethan was Derek’s child.”