by David Menon
‘Alright, Barton you’ve had your bit of fun’ charged Justin Rankin as he marched up behind him in the corridor shortly after Barton had left the interview room with Rankin and his client Diana Matthews.
‘Excuse me?’ asked Barton after he’d turned round.
‘You know exactly what I mean, Barton and I suggest that if you want to save your career you release my client without charge straight away’.
‘Save my career?’ Barton scoffed.
‘I’m only going to say it once, Barton’.
They were attracting an audience of police officers who Barton could see were loving it and willing him to deliver a knock-out blow to the universally detested figure of Rankin. But not before Barton had put the little shit well and truly put back in his place.
‘You have no power over my career, Rankin’.
‘You’d be surprised’.
‘Well I think you must be letting your recent successes at getting murderers off the hook get the better of your otherwise impeccable thinking, Rankin, because in your position I wouldn’t make threats like that in the middle of a crowded police station full of officers who’d revel in every moment of lynching you. You let some overpaid footballer get off with killing one of our own leaving his wife to bring up three kids on her own without any sense of justice for the loss of her husband. ‘You’re less than scum here’.
‘So that’s it? I do my job as a lawyer and as a result you’re threatening me because of some petty closing of police ranks revenge?’
Barton shook his head and laughed slightly. ‘If that was the case, Rankin, we’d be spending our entire time chasing scum like you so sorry to disappoint’. He stepped closer to him and leered into his face. ‘Now you run along and advise your client who I suspect is up to her neck in it. That’s what doing your job looks like to most of your … profession. And if you carry on doing that you and I won’t fall out. But if you don’t then I will make life as difficult as I possibly can for you. Understood?’
Rankin looked round at all the faces of the police officers who’d throw him out the window if they could. ‘Threats? Now who’s making them in public?’
Barton, who knew this exchange wasn’t particularly professional but who couldn’t give a fuck, looked round and asked ‘Did anybody hear me threatening Mr. Rankin here?’
A chorus of almost a dozen voices called out ‘No, sir!’
‘There we are, Rankin. That’s what loyalty looks like. Now get out of my fucking sight before I throw up all over your nice Italian linen suit’.
‘Well before I do’ said Rankin after waiting a few seconds whist the audience dispersed once they thought it was all over and the lowering his voice so that only Barton could hear what he was saying. ‘You’re right, my success rate is pretty impressive though I say so myself. But do you really believe that I got there all by myself? What if I had help from someone on the inside of your ranks, Barton? What if that individual was high enough to be able to help me and to bring you down if I deemed it necessary and crossed my fingers? Don’t push me, Barton. And don’t ever think you can always rely on being on the side of the angels’.
NO SPOKEN WORD
SEVEN
‘Alright people gather round, please’ Barton commanded of his squad in front of the ubiquitous white board. He had some potentially vital information to share amongst the team but his initial enthusiasm upon hearing the news had now been replaced by the ambiguous words of the lawyer Julian Rankin that were still ringing in his ears as the people around him settled down. So what would it mean if Rankin was getting inside help from high up in the Greater Manchester force? It could explain why vital pieces of prosecuting evidence have gone missing in some of the cases Rankin had been involved with and Barton had dealt with the corruption of fellow officers in the past and from some of his contemporaries the reaction hadn’t been pretty. He’d deal with it again as a matter of principle but he’d rather the poisoned chalice be handed to somebody else this time.
‘We’ve got the mobile phone that was used by Maria Taylor to make and receive secret calls in the days before her death’ Barton announced as he held up the clear plastic bag with the phone inside to the crowd. ‘It was found in the personal belongings of Diana Matthews in the search of her house that’s just taken place but not before the smart thinking of our new kid on the block Louisa here who decided just to call the number and see what happened. Diana Matthews answered it making it one of our main pieces of evidence’.
The rest of them cheered and clapped whilst Louisa went bright red. She was meantime working on another theory that may provide them with some leads. She wasn’t planning to say anything yet though in case her wild assertions made her look a fool. She wanted to work them out a bit more first.
‘Well done, Louisa, you’ve made a great start’ said Barton before carrying on. ‘Now why was this phone in the possession of Diana Matthews? Is she the killer or is she linked to the killer in some way? She has to be either the killer or linked to the killer in some way. Was it Diana Matthews who Maria Taylor was talking to in those days before her death? We haven’t been able to place an origin on the calls yet and as you know they were made to and from a pay-as-you-go mobile. DI Wright is working on trying to place an approximate location on where the calls came from and in the meantime I’m going to push Diana Matthews again in the interview room in the morning after she’s had a night in the cells to loosen up her tongue’.
‘You don’t like her, do you sir?’ said DS Adrian Bradshaw, smirking.
‘I can’t stand the sight of the fucking stuck up bitch but I’m managing to put that to one side, Adrian’ Barton admitted.
A ripple of knowing laughter went round the crew. They all knew that it was all very well maintaining a professional outlook on all the potential suspects they came across in the line of duty but if you really couldn’t stand the fucking stuck up bitch then within the right circles you just had to say it like it is. They are only human after all.
‘She’s one of that sort who think the law is something that passes her by even when I can clearly see she knows more than she’s letting on’ said Barton. ‘But like I say, we’ll see how she feels in the morning and get her reaction to what she said on the phone’.
‘Can we hear that, sir?’ asked DS Bradshaw.
‘I thought you’d never ask, Adrian’ Barton replied
He played her response to Louisa’s call to them.
‘Well she didn’t know it was Louisa who called but she certainly thought she knew who was calling’ said DI Ollie Wright. ‘So does that make her a killer or an accessory?’
‘And what do you think she means by saying that questioning the loyalty of herself and her husband James to the service being inappropriate? What service is she talking about?’
‘Well it must be the intelligence services’ said Bradshaw. ’I’m convinced that people who get as high up in the diplomatic service as James Matthews did must also be overlapping with the intelligence services at some point, especially in sensitive places like Moscow’.
‘Yes, James Matthews and his brilliant career’ said Barton as he turned to look at the picture of James Matthews on the white board. ‘Overlooked for promotion for several years after he was senior enough but then when he did get it he retired six months later all of a sudden and out of the blue. That all seems a bit odd to me but I’d like it to be looked into, please, as far as we can considering it’s the diplomatic service we’ll be probing’. He turned back to the board. ‘Which brings us back to Diana Matthews and who she thinks she’s talking to? Now we’ve also discovered that Maria Taylor’ partner Sylvia Clarke had what you might call form for infidelity. She left the second murder victim, Tony Ward, for Maria over twenty years ago. Might she have been feeling the itch again?’
‘Well if so then towards which gender?’ asked DC Joe Alexander.
‘Good point, Joe’ said Barton.
‘But Kath Ward swears blind she would know if her husband T
ony was having an affair with Sylvia Clarke’ said DI Ollie Wright. ‘Because of the closeness of their friendship’.
‘The most loyal wife is always the last to know, sir’ said DS Bradshaw and he should know. He’d cheated on his late wife Penny with other men several times although he always maintained that he’d remained faithful to her in his heart if not with his body. None of them could ever have come even close to snatching him from her and she never found out until the last time. And he was missing a bit of man love at the moment. His usual secret sex partner of late, the openly gay DI Ollie Wright, had called a halt to their twice-monthly arrangement because it was growing potentially too compromising for him and he wanted to concentrate on his relationship with his boyfriend. They wanted to adopt kids and have a family apparently and having an open type of relationship no longer fitted into what they wanted the future to look like for themselves. Adrian had taken it well but how else could he take it? He’d had three of his own kids the usual way so he couldn’t deny Ollie going about things the way he was doing. And being bisexual had its compensations but not when you were as horny as hell at night and in desperate need of a man’s touch. He didn’t want to go out and pay for it because that carried too many connotations too. And he didn’t want a woman. That’s not what he was craving for.
‘I don’t think so in this case’ said Barton. ‘If Sylvia Clarke was having an affair and planning to leave Maria then I don’t think it was for Tony Ward’.
‘So why was Tony Ward there at the scene with a loaded gun?’ questioned DC Joe Alexander. ‘And why did he lose his life for it?’
‘And why did he clearly lie to his wife about why he was going there that afternoon?’ said Wright. ‘There must’ve been something sordid going on?’
‘Unless it was made to look that way’ said Barton. ‘Unless a cold-blooded murder was planned inside some crime of passion triangle but …’
‘… but somebody came along who had a bigger reason for killing Maria Taylor?’ Louisa said out loud but in tune with the theory she’d been working on all morning. ‘You know, I mean somebody who had a bigger axe to grind with Maria than that of just a jealous lover?’ She was suddenly aware of the room having gone quiet and everybody had turned round to look at her. It reminded her of when she came up with potentially the right answers at school and people would stare at her as if she was some upstart. Can’t have someone from an estate like hers coming up with something that may sound a little bit intelligent. That would never do and her God awful useless teachers would never let the sun shine on her talent. And although she was certain that nobody was looking down their nose at her here but it still took her all those years back.
Barton turned back to the board. He focused on the picture of Maria Taylor and for some reason the nags in his head about James Matthews and his glorious diplomatic career came back to the forefront of his thinking. ‘Go on Louisa?’
Louisa pulled her skirt down over her knees nervously. ‘Well I know we were going to come to it later on in this briefing and I’m being a bit premature but we know that Maria Taylor’ father, a man by the name of Vincent Taylor, spent several years in the Soviet Union after he defected’.
‘Defected?’ Bradshaw questioned.
‘That’s right, sir’ Louisa went on. ‘He and his wife Marjorie defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 and left their daughter Maria to be brought up by his mother, her grandmother. When he came back to the UK twelve years later he said that his wife had died of a heart attack a couple of years after arriving in the Soviet Union. Nobody questioned anything about it’.
‘What do you mean when he came back, Louisa?’ asked DC Joe Alexander. ‘I’ve never heard of someone actually coming back from having defected?’
‘Well according to the file Taylor came back as part of a prisoner exchange that took place in West Berlin in the early seventies. They were mostly German prisoners who were exchanged but there were a couple of Brits in addition to Taylor, plus a couple of Americans and a French man’.
‘But why was Vincent Taylor included?’
‘Nobody knows’ said Louisa. ‘Well, someone does but it’s classified’.
‘Well they never taught me that as part of history’ said Alexander. ‘People who defected from the West were in most cases never seen again if you went from us to them. They gave them a Moscow council flat, a lover according to whether they were straight or gay and a KGB follower who made sure nobody from the West ever managed to make contact with them. Yes, there were exchanges of prisoners but not defectors. That’s where my belief in all this is struggling’.
‘You’re right to be cynical, Joe’ said Barton. ‘On the surface of things it doesn’t appear to make any sense at all’.
‘So what’s the real story here, sir?’
‘Vincent Taylor must’ve been sent back for a reason’ said Barton. ‘That may or may not have something to do with this investigation’.
‘But hang on’ said Alexander. ‘If that’s the case then the Foreign Office and MI5 must’ve known all about it from the word go?’
‘They must’ve had some kind of operational reason for accepting whatever they did’ said Barton. ‘But this was the height of the Cold war. Harold Wilson was in power but he was terrified that a domestic coup was being organised within the political establishment to get rid of him. They in turn, the political establishment, thought that Wilson was some kind of KGB spy and was taking money from Moscow to do their bidding. None of it, from either side has ever been proved but these were paranoid times in British politics. But there’s more to where we came in. Louisa, tell them the last little bit of this part of the puzzle’.
‘Well’ said Louisa who slipped off the edge of the desk where she’d been perched and stood up straight. ‘Sir. Vincent Taylor was flown back to Britain from what was then West Berlin and the first thing he wanted to do was to be reunited with his mother at the family home in Prestbury. So intelligence officers took him straight round there. They’d already spoken on the phone and Joan Taylor had been initially excited but then during the conversation her attitude changed apparently and she turned lukewarm towards the son she hadn’t seen for ten years. This was documented in the file after conversations with two friends of Joan Taylor She had no other close relatives and Vincent was an only child’.
‘So what happened when Vincent Taylor went home as it were?’ Bradshaw asked.
‘Joan Taylor dropped dead’.
‘What?’
‘She took one look at Vincent and literally dropped dead on the spot’.
‘So what happened then?’
‘Vincent wasted no time. He immediately got himself reinstated on the board of Arrow Aviation which had been started by his father at Handforth near Stockport, getting his old job back as Chairman wasn’t difficult on account that the family still held the majority of the stock’.
‘So he walks straight back into his old life?’ said DI Wright. ‘Just like that?’
‘Well minus his mother’ Louisa reminded him.
‘So the man who admired communism so much that he defected to the Soviet Union was happy just to slip back into his old capitalist ways as Chairman of a large private sector company after his little ten year holiday in totalitarianism?’ Alexander questioned, unable to take in what was being served up to them. He didn’t doubt that this was what had been officially recorded but it was the reading between the lines that interested him more. ‘Is he still alive, Louisa?’
‘Oh yes’ said Louisa. ‘And still at the head of the firm as Chairman but the management board run it on a day to day basis. But he’s about to retire once he completes the sale of the company to a firm of venture capitalists called MISP which apparently stands for Made in St. Petersburg’.
‘They’re Russian?’
‘It seems so’ said Louisa.
‘But what happened to his daughter Maria?’ asked Joe. ‘I mean, between her father coming back from beyond and her ending up murdered in her own shop?’
‘She went to live with her father after he came back and yet her father hasn’t contacted us since it was announced that she’d been murdered. Doesn’t that strike you as a bit strange?’
After years and years of suffering the most deadly negative self-image problems Louisa was loving being the centre of attention of all her male colleagues in the pub that night. All those times when her mother had discovered her applying her make-up and painting her nails and the rows that had followed that on some occasions had turned violent, Louisa had always shut herself in her room and cried her heart out. She was never able to see any way out of her pain and her parents had been like brick walls when she’d tried to explain to them how they were making her feel. They’d lost a child. They already had one son and then they lost another to a cot death when he’d been barely a year old. Louisa came along and had been seen as some kind of replacement but in some perverse way they’d rejected her almost as soon as she’d taken her first breath. She could never do anything right. She could never say the right words. They always found a way to put her down and to blame her for everything that went wrong in the family home. Louisa’s other brother got off lightly but Louisa grew up feeling like a stranger in her own home. But it was when she started to feel like a stranger in her own life that the problems really began. That’s when she knew that she’d have to get a hold of her life and save it but doing that had led to the ultimate rejection by her parents. She’d shown herself to be strong, capable, and emotionally honest in a way that they could never be, and yet they rejected her for it. Her friend said that Louisa’s parents were terrified by her strength of character but that was no good in the middle of the night when the chill of desolation ran through your soul because you knew that your parents didn’t love you anymore and had never really loved you that much to start with. So she needed this attention. She needed to feel like she was attractive to men and she could play out these scenes as well as any other young woman of her age.