DCI Isaac Cook Box Set 2

by Phillip Strang

  ‘That’s not what I said.’

  Mason looked over at Constable Bradley but said nothing. Isaac could see that the man was sweating, although the temperature in the interview room was moderate.

  ‘Mr Mason,’ Isaac said, ‘as Inspector Hill asked before, are you a fastidious man, a man who likes to keep a record of who he’s meeting, whose palm he’s greasing, the deals he’s making, and so on?’

  ‘I am, but what’s that got to do with my sitting here?’

  ‘You’ve told us that there’s incriminating evidence,’ Gwen Hislop said.

  ‘Constable, open the case,’ Larry said.

  Bradley followed instructions and withdrew a small notebook, the type that could be bought in any newsagents.

  ‘Is this yours?’ Isaac asked as it was placed on the table between the two police officers and the interviewee and his lawyer.

  ‘What use is this to you?’ Mason said. Isaac noticed he was becoming more agitated.

  ‘Please answer the question.’

  ‘It’s mine. I still prefer to write key details down, notes of meetings that I’ve had, people I’ve met. Nothing wrong in that.’

  ‘As you say, nothing wrong. But that’s not what we’re talking about, is it?’

  ‘Get to the point,’ Gwen Hislop said.

  ‘Don’t worry. Your sister’s sitting upstairs with Sergeant Gladstone, no doubt enjoying a cup of tea.’

  ‘Mr Mason,’ Larry said, looking straight into the eyes of the man opposite, ‘we held your wife due to circumstantial evidence. She had been the closest to Colin Young/Barry Montgomery, and she had consistently lied to us. She told us that she had not been in Hyde Park, and then that was found to be false. She told us that she did not know where the murdered man lived, but she did, even knew his true name, though she never found out that the woman she had seen him with was his sister. She has lied and cheated through this entire investigation, while you, Mr Mason, have played the indignant husband, upset about your wife’s affairs, dismissive of our charges against her. Did you think of her and what she was going through?’

  ‘We’re lost over on this side of the table,’ Gwen Hislop said. ‘Is this a character assassination? You’ve released my sister so you can focus on her husband?’

  Isaac picked up the notebook and turned to the back page. ‘Is this your handwriting?’ he asked, showing it to Mason.

  ‘It’s my notebook.’

  ‘That wasn’t the question.’

  ‘Very well, it’s my writing.’

  ‘There’s a map here with a date in the top corner.’

  ‘It was a demonstration in one of the countries that I visit.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘That’s confidential.’

  ‘We’ve checked it against a map of London. It’s Hyde Park, isn’t it?’

  ‘I can’t remember any weapons being fired there, can you?’

  ‘Mr Mason, before we continue, let me ask you a question, although I can’t be sure of an honest answer.’

  ‘This is a farce,’ Gwen Hislop said. ‘If this is the extent of your proof, then I would suggest that you end this interview and allow my clients to go back to their home.’

  Isaac ignored the lawyer, maintaining his focus on Mason. ‘Do you love your wife? Or was the touching scene in the cells put on for the uniform to duly report to us?’

  ‘Admittedly Christine could get up to mischief occasionally, but she’s been a good wife, a good mother.’

  ‘The difference was that this time she would have left you for another. A dalliance, such as she has had from time to time, is one thing, but Christine was in love with a younger man. You couldn’t compete, you knew that. You had contacts who could keep a watch on her, advise you of her indiscretions. You’re living the good life overseas, and you don’t want it jeopardised, but now, there’s something about to derail it.’

  ‘If you have evidence, present it,’ Gwen Hislop said.

  ‘Very well. It is a map of Hyde Park in the notebook, a cross marked where the Peter Pan statue is, an outline of the Serpentine, the lake that vaguely forms the shape of a snake.’

  ‘That’s not what I drew,’ Tony Mason said.

  ‘It is. And the writing is in code, or should I say Arabic. Do you speak the language?’

  ‘A few words, that’s all. I always have a translator with me.’

  ‘But you can write it?’

  ‘Some, but what’s the point here? If my wife is free, I should take her home.’

  ‘I would agree,’ Isaac said, ‘but there’s more, isn’t there, Mr Mason?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘Constable Bradley has an Egyptian wife. He’s been studying her language for a few years, not getting too far by his own admission. He has translated what he can in the notebook, the damning parts anyway.’

  ‘Industrial espionage is rife.’

  ‘I don’t think so. If you are travelling to Arabic countries, then where’s the advantage in using their language? It was your clumsy attempt to hide the fact that you’ve been well aware of what your wife’s been up to.’

  ‘I’m subject to security checks at the highest level. I needed to know if Christine was going to impact on that, or if I could be subjected to blackmail and coercion.’

  ‘You’ve known about your wife and the dead man for some time. It’s all in the notebook. It will be translated by someone qualified for it to be acceptable in a court of law.’

  ‘It’s not all in Arabic.’

  ‘The date and the time at the top of the map are.’

  ‘It was the date that Christine was there looking for the man.’

  ‘You admit to that now?’

  ‘I was not there. I was overseas.’

  ‘And if you were visiting countries which England has sanctions against, yet still does business with, especially weapons, would it be possible to falsify a passport entry? Or did you travel to wherever, then catch a plane back to France, and then another passport, another name, and you re-entered England, committed murder and left?’

  ‘The date and time?’ Gwen Hislop said.

  ‘It’s in Arabic, but Constable Bradley understood what was written,’ Larry said. ‘It’s the date and time of the murder. You, Mr Mason, killed the man because you knew that the relationship was becoming serious, more than you could deal with. It was either concern about the life you were living or concern that your possession, namely your wife, was getting away. The notebook, the small writing, the Arabic, indicates a fastidious person, a person who wants everything compartmentalised and in its box. And one of those boxes was about to be emptied, and you had to act.’

  ‘This is conjecture,’ Gwen Hislop said, yet it was not said with the fervour of someone defending her client against the evidence. Isaac could see that she believed the man’s guilt, and it had been her sister that he had been willing to throw to the wolves.

  ‘It’s murder,’ Isaac said. ‘Mr Mason, you will be formally charged with murder.’

  ‘I had to, you must realise,’ Mason said feebly. He was a broken man, yet neither Isaac nor Larry could feel any sympathy for him. He was a man who would have let his wife be punished for what he had done to keep her.

  Outside the interview room, Isaac phoned Jenny. ‘Give me one day, and then we’re off to the airport.’

  One day wasn’t enough to complete all of the paperwork, Isaac knew that, and he would have stayed if he could, but this time, he’d break the habit of a lifetime. He would leave it to others to complete. He would leave it to his team in Homicide. He knew they would not let him down.

  The End

  Six Years Too Late

  Phillip Strang

  Chapter 1

  Marcus Matthews knew of three certainties as he looked out of the room’s small window. The first was that he was at the lowest point in his troubled life; the second, that he was the wealthiest he had ever been; and the third and most crucial, he was dead.

  How had this c
ome about, those who had never met him might have asked, but to Matthews life had always been a challenge.

  The circumstances of his birth: a homeless shelter in the north of England, a mother who was a heroin addict when she became pregnant at the age of sixteen. He was six months old when she died, prostitution the only way she knew to feed her habit and her child.

  When the teenage Marcus reached the age of sixteen, a woman had knocked on the door of his adoptive family’s home. Her name was Molly, the effects of a hard life all too visible.

  ‘Gwen, that was her name, although you must have known that,’ Molly said. That much Marcus knew. ‘She loved you,’ Molly continued. ‘I was there when you were born, when she died.’

  An adolescent teen who had developed a penchant for graffiti and wanton vandalism did not respond to ‘love’, but he was interested enough to listen to the woman as she talked.

  Marcus’s adoptive parents, Brenda and Gavin, sat quietly. They had always known that one day he would learn something of where he had come from; where he was heading back to if he did not mend his ways.

  Brenda ruled the household. Marcus liked her more than Gavin, a well-meaning pen-pushing civil servant. Each working day, he would depart the house, and each night as his wife watched the numbingly boring television with its quiz shows and their inane questions, there he would be at the dining room table, checking figures, fretting over them. And then the money he brought home each week, a pittance. Marcus knew this because he was a thief, and he regularly helped himself to some of the contents of his mother’s purse, his father’s wallet. Not once did they complain, which meant to the unruly Marcus one of two things: either they overlooked what he did, or they were stupid.

  On his twenty-fifth birthday, his luck had finally turned. He’d had a succession of pointless jobs, a result of failing to take notice at school. A fish and chip shop that produced the worst tasting food in the world, each and every day spent sweating over the hot fat, and the potatoes cut into chips, the fish that tasted of anything but fish. From there, a job in a metal fabricating shop, the constant hammering having almost destroyed his hearing, and even a turn at driving a taxi, but he got lost too often, eventually wrapping the vehicle around a telegraph pole late at night.

  And then, there she was, two weeks later, next to him at the bus stop, his driving licence having been suspended. The bus trip was short, but they had started talking; he, a man with little prospects; she, a vision of loveliness in his eyes. Three months later, Marcus and Samantha were married in a registry office, with a reception at the pub, an argument later that night, a baby in a cot within seven months.

  It was Samantha’s father, Hamish, who had made the decision about the wedding. ‘No daughter of mine is going to have a child out of wedlock,’ he had said, but he didn’t attend the wedding.

  Hamish McIntyre was in jail for a botched robbery; there was no way that he was getting out of prison to do his duty by his daughter.

  ‘You made her pregnant, you marry her, and if you harm her, just once, you’d better hope that you can be like a chameleon, because I’ll find you, no matter how long it takes. Do you understand me?’ McIntyre had said when Marcus had visited the depressing prison to ask his permission to marry his daughter; a formality as a phone call from the prison a week earlier had sealed Marcus’s fate.

  ‘I understand,’ Marcus had replied. He would have said that he loved Samantha with all his heart, but the father was not a man for sentimentality. Apart from his daughter and the ugliest dog that Marcus had ever seen, he loved nothing else.

  ‘One word from Samantha and you’re dead meat, don’t you forget it,’ the parting words as Marcus left the prison, words audible enough to be heard by the other prisoners and the prison officers. McIntyre was a violent man; he did not intend to let anyone forget that fact, especially in a maximum-security prison. Marcus had left through the prison gate, his legs still shaking, needing a stiff drink to calm his nerves.

  Marcus saw the love between him and Samantha as eternal. And her father’s offer of a job, once the man had been released, and enough money to buy a small place, was just what he needed.

  For two years, peace reigned, but Samantha was flawed. An indulgent father, a husband who was at work, or only wanting to be at home with her and their child, was not what she needed: she needed a life.

  A violent psychotic was how Marcus had come to see her father. No one could do what he did to a fellow human being and be sane. He had witnessed the slaying of a rival, the knifing of the man, the smile on Hamish McIntyre’s face when he had finished.

  ‘No other bastard is going to cheat me,’ he’d said to Marcus. As strange as it was, Hamish enjoyed Marcus’s company, and the two would spend time together. One patting the other on the back, telling him to drink up; the other frightened that one wrong word and he’d be minus a part of the anatomy that wasn’t getting much attention from Samantha, and none at all for the last five months.

  Hamish had not yet been told of the fancy man that Samantha preferred over her husband. He was eventually when, after a few too many beers, Marcus had opened up to his father-in-law.

  The fancy man skipped town, or so the story went. That was what Samantha was told when her father instructed her to return to the marital bed and to do her duty.

  It would be three years before the man’s body was found. By then, Samantha was still honouring her marital vows, and Marcus had become Hamish’s right-hand man.

  ***

  Outside the small room at the top of the house, the sun was setting. It was going to be a clear starlit night, the night that lovers crave. However, Marcus Matthews was sure that it would be the night that he would die.

  He had been a day and a night in that room, and apart from visiting the bathroom, he had not left it. He knew that he could; the door was not locked, and there was no one watching the house. No one would question if he left the city or the country, and he had money. Others might have questioned his reason for staying, but he did not.

  He sat down at a small table and opened another chocolate bar, his diet since he’d made his way to the room, climbing stairs that were almost too narrow for a person to navigate. Samantha had been back with him for fourteen years since her lover had vanished, and, on the whole, they had been good years, he reflected.

  A creaking on the stairs, the door opening. Marcus stood up as the person walked into the room.

  ‘A man who could always be trusted to keep his word.’

  ‘A man’s word is his bond,’ Marcus replied. He felt a sense of unease as a gun was pointed at him. ‘Come in. There’s always time to talk.’

  ‘It would be best if I do what I must and leave.’

  ‘Why so soon? We have much to talk about, you and I.’

  ‘It pains me to do this.’

  ‘It is what was agreed.’

  The two men sat down at the small table. Marcus produced a bottle of wine and two plastic cups. He poured the wine into the cups and handed one to the man who was going to kill him. ‘Here’s to you,’ he said.

  The other man laid his gun on the table and held his plastic cup up. ‘Here’s to better times,’ he said.

  The air was charged with emotion, the tension palpable, yet the two men, one a murderer, the other a victim, passed the time talking and laughing and reminiscing about people they had known, people that had died. For nearly ninety minutes the conversation was animated and emotional, and then the bottle of wine was empty.

  It was Marcus who spoke first. ‘It’s time,’ he said.

  The man opposite offered his hand, which Marcus shook. He then picked up the gun and shot Marcus twice in the chest and once in the head. He then put the weapon in his jacket pocket and left the room.

  If anyone had seen him, they would have seen the tears in his eyes. If they had been able to hear, they would also have heard, ‘I did what had to be done.’

  With that, the man closed the door to the small room and descended the stairs. />
  Chapter 2

  It had been the mother of one of the youths who had phoned the police after her son came in screaming about what he had seen. Billy Dempsey, the more daring of the two boys, a skinny youth with bad acne, had been the first through the window at the back of the house; the preliminary details relayed to Homicide by a Constable Hepworth who had answered the call.

  ‘We’ve had trouble with him before, stealing from shops, so we didn’t believe him at first. That’s why we checked before we called you,’ Hepworth said.

  A pair of amateurs was what Gordon Windsor, the senior crime scene investigator, had called Constables Hepworth and Lipton, although he had added a few angry expletives. ‘They’re told there’s a body, and still they have to stick their collective noses and feet in.’

  Detective Chief Inspector Isaac Cook, the senior investigating officer in Homicide at Challis Street Police Station knew that Windsor was right. A phone call in the late afternoon from Katrina Dempsey, Billy’s mother, and Hepworth couldn’t resist the chance to take the initiative and go with his offsider, a drinking buddy when off duty, to have a look.

  ‘It doesn’t look as if Constables Hepworth and Lipton have much of a future in policing,’ Isaac said after Windsor had calmed down.

  Windsor had seen the damage the two men had done when they had forced the back door, and then their footprints in the house, not even having the sense to keep their hands in their pockets either.

  ‘It’s time we’ll waste. Was it made clear that there was a body?’ Windsor said.

  ‘According to Billy Dempsey and his friend, Andrew Conlon, that’s what they said. It was Dempsey’s mother who had caused the confusion, questioning her son’s veracity, and Hepworth had had dealings with the youth before. It appears that Billy Dempsey has a sense of the dramatic; lying and exaggerating come only too easily to him.’

  Pathology had conducted a post mortem within twenty-four hours of the discovery of the body. Nothing had been found apart from an approximate date of death determined by what was left of the corpse, an empty bottle of wine, and an old newspaper on the table in the centre of the room, and that the man had been shot three times at close quarters. The crime scene investigation team had been over the room, checked for fingerprints. The two boys had not entered the room, neither had the two constables, a plus in that the murder scene hadn’t been contaminated.