“I’d say so,” Thatcher answered in a certain voice. “Which means either he’s suddenly very loyal to her and wants to look after her or…”
“Or he knows she did it,” Sharp finished bleakly. Thatcher winced slightly, looking through the glass to Mark Helman, who sat the way his daughter had, curled up in himself, hands in fists.
“How did he learn that she was here?” Sharp asked. “Did she call him?”
“Not that we’re aware of. Smith brought her in from the flat, and she left her phone there. She didn’t make a call from the station. Someone else must have tipped him off.”
“Who?”
“Could have been Agnes,” I said. “The woman who owns the café? If she saw Billie being driven away in a police car, she might have stepped in, given him a call.”
“Does it matter that much?” Thatcher asked. “He found out she was here and is taking, or he’s trying, to take the blame.”
Sharp’s eyes narrowed, and she looked through the glass again, looking him over like a bird of prey. “He doesn’t know much, and for someone who wants to confess to a crime, he’s not confessing anything.”
“What do you want us to do, ma’am?” Thatcher asked her. This was a tricky situation we were in, and one foot wrong could lead to bad consequences, consequences that Sharp would be on the receiving end of before she sent them down to us.
“We’ll keep him here for now,” she said. “The two of you keep working. Head to forensics and see what they’ve turned up. If nothing else, we might figure out if either of the Helmans ever held that trophy recently.”
“Keeping him here might give him time to cook up a proper story,” Thatcher warned her.
“Without the key details,” Sharp shrugged, “not much can be done. If he doesn’t know about the basement, the studio or the trophy, then that’s the main bulk of our case. I think he’s here for Billie,” she said, standing up straight. “You boys found out whether or not he needs to be.”
We nodded, taking her dismissal and walking from the room. We had more riding on this trophy than I cared to admit to, and from the dour look on Thatcher’s face, he was thinking the very same thing.
Twenty-Three
Thatcher
I tried my best to keep my annoyance under wraps as we left the room, my mind racing through everything that Billie had said before her father turned up and threw a spanner in the works. He wasn’t our killer. I knew it, Mills knew it, and from the look on her face, Sharp knew it too. But there was a procedure to follow.
Keeping him here as we raced down every last strand of evidence we had was our best bet for wrapping this up and doing so without giving the press a monumental field day that could come crashing down on our department. By the time we were done with Mark Helman, Billie was long gone. Smith met us by the stairs, walking beside us down to the lab.
“She left straight away?” I asked.
Smith nodded. “Had a few questions about him, about what would happen. I told her we’d be in touch if there was any news, and she told me she’d be at work for the rest of the day. She’s being cooperative.”
“Has been from the start,” Mills added, blue eyes drawn in a frown.
“How did she leave?” I asked, looking around him to better see Smith’s face.
“Got a bus,” she told me, “the one just outside. Takes her home the right way. Do you want to send someone out there, sir? To keep an eye on her?”
I shook my head. “She’s kept to her word so far. If we need to find her, she’ll be where she says she is.”
“Acting innocent doesn’t mean she is,” Mills reminded me darkly. “There’s every chance she might run whilst we have her father here.”
I paused then, not wanting to agree but knowing I had to, and pulled my phone from my pocket. I’d gotten the number of Agnes from the café and pulled it up now, hoping that Billie wasn’t there when she answered.
“Hello, Agnes Lamb,” her warm voice answered.
“Ms Lamb, hello. This is Detective Inspector Thatcher. We met before?”
“I remember, yes.”
“Billie left the station not long ago. We just wanted to make sure she made it back home?”
“Oh yes. About five minutes ago. I told her to take the afternoon off, but she insisted.”
“Will you do me a favour, Ms Lamb, and let me know if Billie leaves? We need to find her right now.”
“I will. Is she in any trouble?” She asked in a wary, cautioning voice.
“Not at present. We have her father here right now.”
“Mr Helman? He came?” she asked, sounding surprised.
“He did. Was it you who informed him that Billie was here?”
Agnes sighed down the phone. “Yes. I had his number from when Billie first started working here in case of emergencies. I’ve never used it, but I thought, well, he is her dad after all.”
“Understandable. Thank you, Ms Lamb. Have a good afternoon.” I hung up and slipped my phone back into my pocket, picking up my pace again.
“She’ll let us know if Billie leaves?” Mills asked, nodding goodbye to Smith and following me down the last flight of stairs.
“She will. She doesn’t strike me as the sort of person to lie to an Inspector either,” I added.
“If she thinks Billie is in trouble, she won’t stay shut about it,” Mills added in agreement.
We headed down the last few steps, down into the colder lower floors where the small, drab labs sat. Mills hung back, letting me stride along down the corridor, burning off a tiny amount of the energy that hovered around me, my shoes clicking on the tiles floor. We reached the forensics lab, and I rapped on the door with my knuckles before pushing it open. Dr Crowe was inside, perched at a desk, sipping from a mug with Dr Rand, who peered up at us from where he hunched over some test tubes.
“There he is!” Lena chirped as I walked in. “Told you if we waited long enough, he’d come to us,” she said with a grin, winking at me over the top of her mug. Dr Rand straightened, smoothed back his fluffy grey hair and grimaced.
“Her idea, Inspector, I assure you.”
“I believe you,” I answered dryly, casting Lena a long look. She just chuckled and slid down from the desk, patting Mills on the arm and handing me a folder.
“Blood match. It’s Vinson’s.”
“So, we’ve definitely got our murder weapon. That’s a bit of good news at last,” I murmured, opening it to look, though I barely understood any of it.
“Any fingerprints?” Mills asked, looking to Dr Rand. He wiped his hands on his lab coat and nodded, walking around the bench to join us.
“Though they don’t match either Belinda or Mark Helman,” he told me, handing me the father and daughter’s prints and the ones taken from the trophy.
My stomach dropped, though I’d been hoping that we wouldn’t have to arrest Billie, it was still a blow that we were no closer to finding our killer.
“We’ll run them through the system,” Mills said brightly. “Maybe we’ll get a match.”
“Wishful thinking,” I muttered.
“Better than nothing,” Crowe pointed out. “And you’re lucky to have any prints on that thing, let alone such clear ones.”
I looked down at the image, nodding. She was right. The fact that the killer hadn’t bothered to clean the weapon, not the blood, their prints, was telling. As Mills had suggested earlier with Sharp, our killer was in a hurry, stashing the trophy and leaving it there, maybe forgetting about it. Someone who knew about the studio, though. From what Billie had said about Edward not sharing that place with anyone else, that didn’t leave us with a huge list of people to go through. Mills was frowning at the prints, and I wondered if he were thinking the same thing.
“Let’s run them through.” I clapped him on the shoulder and turned to the door. “We might get lucky. Thank you, Dr Rand,” I called behind me as we walked into the corridor. “Ta, Lena!”
She waved as the door slid quietly closed, and I tur
ned around, walking back to the stairs with much less gusto than I had come down them with.
“At least we can rule out Billie and Mark,” Mills offered. “Though that leaves us with a grand total of zero suspects.”
“A bittersweet resolution,” I agreed, silently pleased about it. For Billie’s sake, I told myself, nothing about proving my own instincts right and all that, certainly not.
We jogged back up the stairs, beelining for our office, where I slumped down in my chair and woke the computer up.
“I feel like we haven’t sat down in here for ages,” Mills muttered.
“I think it was this morning,” I told him.
“Ages,” he repeated, dragging his chair over from his desk and depositing it next to mine. He fished out two granola bars from his desk drawer and handed me one. I tore into the wrapper as the computer loaded and grumbled under my breath about getting some upgrades sometime this decade. Wasco wouldn’t hear of it, the paranoid weirdo.
I ate the bar in three bites, chewing it down as I opened up the database and put our fingerprints through, then I sat back, letting my head drop over the back of the chair as we waited.
“Any word on Elsie getting out from hospital yet, or is it too soon?” Mills asked.
“Too soon, I think. Though I doubt she’ll stay long. She’ll pester them into letting her go if she has to,” I said with a grin, running my hand through my hair. “Should make sure her house is ready for her actually, get Sally to help, I know how much she loves dusting.”
Mills chuckled, and I peered over to look at him. “How are things with Susanne?” I asked.
“Good,” he said, beaming. “Really good. If we’re still good to go,” he said with a nod to the computer, “she’s coming to lunch at my mum’s on Sunday.”
“Ah, very good,” I said, nudging him with my elbow. “Meeting the infamous Mills matriarch. I’d like to meet her,” I informed him.
“I’ll bring you next time,” he told me with a joking grin. “Make sure you bring chocolates.”
“Only the fanciest,” I muttered back, looking at the screen as a box popped up in my face. I shot upright, blinking at it. “We’ve got a match.” I couldn’t hide my disbelief as I clicked on the box, which took me to a case file. I looked at the name that came up and froze, my fingers stilling over the mouse. Mills leant forward, eyes scanning the screen, and he swore.
Freya Fox. A picture came up of a much younger Freya Fox. An old case, then. But still her, her fingerprints on our murder weapon. I was confused enough, shocked enough, that I just sat there for a moment, staring at her name.
“Was she arrested?” Mills asked quietly, jolting me back into the present.
I shook myself and scrolled down, making myself focus on the case file, looking at how she had ended up in our database. Not an arrest, not of her, anyway.
“No. It’s from about five years ago. Christ almighty,” I sighed. “A sexual assault allegation. Man involved got away scot-free, like someone else we know.”
I had no memory of the story, must have been handled somewhere else. Perhaps Fitzsimmons had been the one to deal with this gritty side of the job. Freya would have been fifteen, only a bit older than Stella. She and her mother had made the report; the man had been arrested, trialled, but had only been sixteen himself, so there were little consequences for him.
Things started to click in my head, the strands we’d picked up tying together as I imagined Freya in all of these situations instead of Billie. Freya, who had been at that party, who had known all of them, probably fancying Edward when he was with Billie. Who’d helped her look for Stella, who’d stuck up for Edward. She was with him after he’d seen Billie in the street that day, maybe had cleaned up his bloody nose for him. Believed him to be innocent, only to find out that he wasn’t.
“Freya’s prints are on the trophy,” Mills muttered, letting it all spell out aloud as he liked to do. “She’d have access into the building, probably knows about the basement, knows Edward’s schedule, knew about the studio. Hell, she told us about the bloody thing!” He blew out an irritated breath.
“She gets assaulted, then learns that one of her closest friends did the same thing to another girl. A friend that she defended and stuck by,” I said darkly, looking at the file. It’d be a horrible thing to live with, and to not help another girl that it had happened to. To not believe her, to side with him. It must have knocked the air from her lungs to realise all that.
“Finding out that he was guilty,” Mills said. “If she saw his stuff in his room, or saw the photographs…” he trailed off, and I jumped to my feet.
“Let’s find her,” I snapped, pulling my coat on.
I wanted to kick myself. It all seemed so bloody obvious now. She hadn’t gotten away from the building that night, she was there when we turned up. Just had to clean herself up a bit, change her clothes. No problem there. Sneak in the back and out again, but she hadn’t snuck out. She’d walked out, vomited, and called us. The blood in the basement must have been from where she changed, where she’d hidden her bloodied clothes.
Questions spiralled up in my mind. Did she have spares? Did she take Edward’s? Was it all planned then? Or was it rushed, hurried, frantic? Did she panic, or did she know exactly what she was doing? We needed to find her to get those questions answered.
She’d beaten around the bush when it came to Billie and Stella. Had learnt the truth about that night too late. Had she confronted him? Had she demanded to know the truth, had she been in the stupid and seen the photos, the trophy and just snapped? And why tell us about the studio? Unless she forgot it was there, hoped we’d see the photos and the drawings of Billie and not bother looking for anything else. Buying herself time, perhaps, but for what?
“Sir,” Mills called me, snapping me from my endless rabbit hole of questions. He was over by the door, and I joined him in a few long strides.
“Where first?”
“She’s probably still at uni,” he suggested as we crossed the room, over to the stairs. “We can start there, send someone over to her house in case she turns up, or we miss her.”
“Good. Send someone,” I ordered.
He nodded and ran down to find us a spare PC to send over there. I walked right into Sharp’s office without knocking, and she didn’t scold me. She just looked over my expression and nodded.
“News?”
“Prints on the trophy belong to neither Billie nor Mark Helman. They are, however, a match for Freya Fox.”
“Freya Fox. The witness?” she asked.
“The very one. Mills and I are heading to the university to see if we can find her there. We’re sending a constable to her house to cover that base as well.”
“Good. Get on it. I’ll handle Helman, don’t worry.”
“Thanks, boss,” I said, tapping the door frame and striding away, checking my pockets for everything that I would need before hitting the stairs. Mills was at the bottom, and we walked outside as a police car peeled away onto the road. We jumped straight into my car, and I rammed it into gear, silently apologising as they ground together as I reversed out and hit the road.
“Bring her straight in, ask questions later?” Mills checked.
“Absolutely. Sharp’s handling Helman,” I told him, my fingers drumming the steering wheel, my knuckles white. I tried to keep my legs from bouncing and talking seemed to help. “She should get in touch with Billie too, let her know that’s she’s clear.”
“You were right,” Mills said, “about Billie.”
“And completely wrong about Freya,” I muttered, speeding off into the city.
Twenty-Four
Thatcher
I had Mills call the university as we drove so that when we arrived, nobody stopped us as we parked, jumped from the car, and strode towards the reception building. The lady at the desk was waiting for us, a schedule pulled up on her screen.
“Inspector,” she nodded. “Sergeant.”
“Is this
Freya Fox’s schedule?” I asked, pointing to the screen.
“It is, yes.” I bent down over the computer, scanning the timetable.
“Her last lecture finished fifteen minutes ago.” I cursed under my breath. “Can we know if she’s still on campus?” I asked the receptionist, who shook her head.
“I’m afraid not,” she said.
I held in a scowl and nodded to the lecture hall. “What building can we find this in?”
“It’s the East Wing,” she said, pulling out a map and pointing out the building. It was beside the one we had seen Freya run into earlier, and I nodded, pushing myself up and off the desk.
“We’ll head there,” I told Mills as we walked out into the drizzling rain. “If she’s not there, we can track down one of her friends, see if they’ve seen her anywhere.”
“Nothing from PC Dunnes,” Mills told me. “There’s no sign of her at home. He’s outside the house, just down the street.”
“Good, let’s get a move on.”
We walked back the way we had come, through the car park and over to the large brick building. There were few students outside, trying to avoid the rain, and I hoped that Freya had chosen not to brave the weather as we walked inside, trying to find the right floor for the lecture hall. I stopped a passing student, who directed me down the corridor to a set of double doors, thankfully, that was left open. We walked in, the hall deserted, but the lecturer was still down by the little podium, stuffing her work into a satchel.
“Excuse me,” I called, jogging down the stairs, Mills behind me. “Detective Inspector Thatcher, North Yorkshire Police. Did you have Freya Fox in this lecture?” I quickly showed her my warrant card.
She blinked, startled, but nodded. “Freya. Yes. It surprised me that she came back so soon, but she was here.”
“Did she stay for the entire lecture?”
“She did,” the professor told us, swinging her bag onto her shoulder. “Always does.”
“Any idea as to where she might have gone to after she left?” Mills asked.
Guilty Conscious Page 19
