Dying for Justice (DI Angus Henderson 10)

by Iain Cameron

  ‘Yeah, I should think so.’

  ‘Good. It’ll allow me to finish this coffee and check what’s been happening overnight.’

  **

  The house in Northgate where Pete Hammond was holed-up looked unremarkable, nestled as it was in a sea of similar-looking semidetached houses. At the front, a small garden laid to grass and bordered with rose bushes, a single garage, and with about three compact bedrooms upstairs.

  It was the home of Sonia Leonard, an agent with an insurance broker in the town. Neighbours reported she lived quietly, having moved there about eighteen months back following a divorce. Recently, they had started seeing a man about the place. Their description of him – less than average height, stocky in appearance, with an aggressive, unpleasant resting face – sounded like the man they were looking for.

  In common with many planned estates in ‘new towns’, the area exuded an open feel, something he couldn’t say for the tight, narrow streets of Brighton. As such, it was difficult to move a police car, or any car for that matter, along roads without being spotted. With this in mind, Henderson decided they would have to do this ‘smash and grab’ style. He briefed the Crawley officers and they set off.

  The three cars raced along the road before braking hard, coming to a halt outside the target house. The Crawley officers ran to the rear of the property, while Henderson, Walters, and the other two uniformed cops headed to the front door.

  Henderson rang the doorbell. For this house call he refrained from pounding the door with his fist, or bellowing ‘Police!’ through the letterbox. There was a chance, albeit a slim one, Hammond would still be in bed, unaware it was the police outside and thinking it was the postie with an oversized letter.

  Upon receiving no reply, he rang again. This time he heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs. The door opened and the craggy face of Pete Hammond appeared. He was dressed in working clothes and looked dusty, as if he had been undertaking some DIY work upstairs.

  In a millisecond, he clocked the two uniforms and slammed the door hard. The edge of a copper’s foot was stopping it closing, nevertheless he still managed to engage the security chain. Henderson stood back as one of the burly cops put his shoulder to the door. The sturdy chain didn’t budge. The cop stepped back and shouldered it again, this time with more effort. It was successful and Henderson had to reach forward to catch the material of his uniform to stop him falling as the door sprang open.

  ‘Search the downstairs!’ he called to the two cops as he, followed by Walters, headed upstairs.

  They pushed open all the doors in the upper floor until they reached the bedroom at the end. A window was lying wide open, and unless Hammond and his girlfriend were fresh-air-freaks, he had to be out there. Henderson ran over. Below the window was the flat roof of the porch, and tearing across the road was the ungainly, portly frame of Pete Hammond.

  ‘He’s out there, running across the road!’ Henderson shouted, as he sprinted for the stairs. No way was he tempted to jump on a fragile porch roof, already weakened by Hammond’s considerable bulk.

  Henderson ran outside, and hoped Walters and the cops were on his tail. He also trusted the Crawley boys would have the sense to jump back into their car, because they had lost sight of Hammond, and in the warren of streets around the area he could be anywhere. Henderson approached a road junction, the one they’d travelled down earlier. It was a main one leading into town, and across from there was a small patch of overgrown land filled with trees and brambles.

  He directed the cops to look in the streets to the right, and when the Crawley police car appeared, he instructed them to go left. Henderson and Walters walked straight ahead into the dim light of the trees. The undergrowth looked as though it hadn’t been cut for months, as it was filled with metre-high nettles and thick brambles, some lying across the path and capable of being a trip hazard.

  He indicated for Walters to move to the right and he veered to the left. It was only a small patch of ground and if they didn’t spot anyone hiding the first time round, for sure they would when they walked back. When his eyes became better accustomed to the gloom, he decided to investigate a dark bundle over to the right. A phone started ringing.

  He silently cursed Walters for being so stupid, before remembering he had watched her put her phone on airplane mode at the same time he did, minutes before they entered Hammond’s house. Instead, the glow from an activated phone was being emitted from the dark bundle.

  ‘Get up Hammond. We see you.’

  The bundle moved and Pete Hammond emerged from the gloom of the undergrowth, twigs and leaves falling from his frame. He held a knife in his hand. ‘You lot can’t leave it alone, can you? If you want me, you’ll have to take me, won’t you?’

  Henderson had been half-expecting this and had been keeping his eye open for weapons. Moments earlier he had spotted a stout branch. He reached behind him to retrieve it. The branch was about the length of a baseball bat and just as thick. A whack against a tree verified it didn’t have a rotten core.

  He said nothing and approached their target. By keeping to the left, he had forced Hammond to turn his back on the advancing Walters, who, having spotted the danger, Henderson hoped she would go off and alert the other officers.

  Hammond waggled the knife casually in Henderson’s direction, giving the impression he was a street punk. The DI knew this was a deception, trying to make him think he was unskilled and careless. He was a former soldier and, apart from knowing how to dismantle and assemble a SA80 rifle in the dark, he knew how to handle a blade. For a few moments, they sized one another up; Henderson waiting for him to make a move, Hammond doing the same.

  Without warning, Walters rushed forward and whacked Hammond over the head with a weapon of her own. The branch she used wasn’t as thick as Henderson’s and it didn’t drop the man. Instead, it only enraged him. He turned to deal with Walters, now unarmed and rooted to the spot. Henderson had only seconds to strike. A two-handed blow hit Hammond on the side of his head, and he dropped like a stone, the knife falling without sound into the undergrowth.

  Henderson moved forward and cuffed him while Walters searched for the knife. He hauled Hammond to his feet and read him his rights. His face was streaked in blood and gave the appearance of being drunk.

  ‘Fuck,’ Hammond said, as he was being led away, ‘if it wasn’t for my bloody woman reminding me about an Amazon delivery, you lot would have walked right past me.’

  THIRTY-NINE

  Henderson and Walters walked over to the Interview Suite. He was confident the forthcoming interview would give them the attacker of Clare Mitchell, and perhaps information about the murderer or murderers of Martin Turner and Alex Vincent. On the other hand, would it take them off on another tangent completely, much like it had when they’d questioned Raymond Schofield?

  ‘Did you hear?’ Walters said. ‘Detectives in Derby have now interviewed Allan Blake’s widow, Tracey. When they suggested to her, a bit cheekily in my opinion, that Schofield was spilling his guts down here in Sussex, she confessed to the lot.’

  ‘Did she?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Has she implicated Schofield?’

  ‘Hook, line, and sinker. She verified the reliability of the emails between him and her, and talked about Schofield concocting a plan to get rid of her husband.’

  ‘It’s Schofield’s plan now, is it?’

  ‘She says she knew about it, how could she deny it, but it was Schofield’s decision to kill him. She didn’t ask or tell him to.’

  ‘That’s not what some of the emails suggest, but we can argue it out later with Derby. At last, some good news. I think Houghton is still harbouring a hope Schofield will beat the charges like he did last time. A confession from her puts a big boot into that.’

  ‘It certainly does, and she can deny that she had no part in Allan’s death all she wants, because as soon as Schofield hears about what she’s done, the sparks will start to fly.’

&n
bsp; ‘You can bet they will.’

  Henderson pushed open the door to Interview Room 2 and walked inside. Two people were sitting on the other side of the interview table, Hammond and his brief, David Lomax. It was a toss-up to decide who looked the more uncomfortable in their chairs. Hammond was big, part fat, part muscle, and seemed to dwarf it, while Lomax, he knew, had a fondness for Mars Bars and yum yums, and the suit he was wearing was straining to contain him, never mind the chair.

  Henderson went over the housekeeping while Walters started up the recording equipment.

  ‘This interview is being conducted under caution, Mr Hammond. You are accused of stabbing Ms Clare Mitchell.’

  ‘No comment.’

  Walters opened a file and spread out a series of CCTV pictures in front of Hammond and his brief.

  ‘I am showing the suspect,’ Walters said, ‘CCTV pictures taken from a camera sited close to Hove Town Hall.’

  ‘You might have picked a more secretive place to attack someone, Pete. Here’s you walking along Church Road, and again in Tisbury Road, and stopping at what used to be Hove Town Hall. The crossroads where you were standing has two commercial banks at opposite corners, and if there’s one business paranoid enough about security to install plenty of cameras, it’s a bank.’

  ‘Yeah, so I went for a walk in Hove and stopped for a smoke, so what?’

  ‘Is this the best you can do?’ Henderson said. ‘Stopped for a smoke? We’ve got witnesses who saw you, and we’ve got the knife you used, the one you pulled out on me.’

  ‘This is conjecture, Inspector,’ Lomax said.

  ‘I’m surprised to hear you say that, Mr Lomax, as the witnesses and the knife are fact. You’ve seen, and I assume have read, the witness statements yourself. We have one lady who saw the whole incident. She was the one who made the 999 call. No way would I call her evidence conjecture.’

  Hammond shrugged as if the six to eight years he might receive in prison didn’t bother him.

  ‘I know you stabbed Clare Mitchell, this isn’t in question. What I want to know is, why did you do it?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘She was going to expose you, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Or, maybe she had something on Schofield?’

  Hammond leaned over the table, his face a twisted expression of menace and anger, and pointed a finger at Henderson. ‘She’s got fuck all on him, and it’s Mr Schofield to you, copper.’

  ‘So, is this what it’s all about? Raymond Schofield?’

  ‘She fucking set him up, didn’t she?’

  ‘This is why you accosted her in Hove?’

  ‘Do not answer that question,’ Lomax said.

  ‘Mr Schofield wouldn’t be in jail if it wasn’t for her.’

  ‘How do you make that out? Did Schofield pass you a message from jail.’

  ‘Did he fuck and stop calling him that. I bloody told you, it’s disrespectful.’

  ‘So, she put him in jail, and you stabbed her in revenge?’

  ‘Bloody right I did. No way was she getting away with it.’

  ‘How did she set him up? It’s not as if your boss is facing these charges for the first time. He’s been through it all before.’

  ‘I don’t know, I just know he wouldn’t be where he is if it wasn’t for her.’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘Whenever she was with him, it was like she was holding something back, something she didn’t want Mr Schofield to see.’

  ‘Take it from me, Pete, a lot of women are like that, reluctant to commit.’

  ‘Whatever, but it’s what I think.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so, it’s what you’ve been told. You’ve talked to Mr Schofield since he’s been in prison, haven’t you?’

  Henderson had asked someone to check, but Lewes Prison hadn’t as yet come back to them; still, there was no harm in fishing.

  ‘What if I have? It’s not a crime the last time I looked. I needed to know what was happening with a few things he’d asked me to do.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Nothing to interest you lot.’

  ‘Try me.’

  Hammond sighed. ‘Now and again, he’d visit a couple of women who are like caretakers at some of the houses he owns. He usually calls me if there’s something needing doing, like plumbing or electrical work.’

  ‘Or to sort out any men who are hanging around.’

  Hammond gave him a quizzical look. Clare Mitchell had told him, but he wouldn’t be saying this to Hammond.

  ‘Believe what you like.’

  ‘When you talked to Mr Schofield, did he ask you to kill Clare Mitchell?’

  ‘You’ve no need to–’ Lomax said.

  ‘No fucking way!’ Hammond exploded. ‘If I’d wanted to kill her, she would be dead and no mistake.’

  ‘So, stabbing her was, what? A warning, some form of retribution?’

  ‘To tell her to keep her fucking nose out of it.’

  Henderson didn’t want to go around in circles with this one. He believed Schofield’s hand was behind Clare’s stabbing, but unless Hammond said it out loud, he couldn’t prove it. Why Hammond was willing to do Schofield’s dirty work and take the fall for it, was beyond him.

  ‘Tell me about the time Mr Schofield asked you to retrieve a document from the offices of Jonas Baines.’

  ‘There is no mention of this on the charge sheet,’ Lomax said.

  ‘You’re right, Mr Lomax. I’m not accusing Mr Hammond of doing anything illegal, merely trying to fill in a few blanks.’

  The client looked at his lawyer, who nodded.

  ‘Rebecca, Mr Schofield’s wife, had taken a schedule out of Ray’s office,’ Hammond said, ‘which he didn’t want her lawyers to have. He wanted it back.’

  ‘Was it this schedule?’ he asked, placing a printout in front of Hammond.

  He pulled it towards him. ‘Nah, that’s not it.’

  Henderson reached into a file and pulled out the real one. If he had produced it first, Hammond might have denied all knowledge of it, but this way, Henderson wanted him to acknowledge that he knew what it looked like.

  ‘My mistake,’ Henderson said. ‘Is this it?’

  ‘Yeah, it looked something like that. Accounts and amounts.’

  It was good enough for Henderson. It didn’t prove much, only that he had gone into Jonas Baines to retrieve it. The big question was, when?

  ‘You took this from Alex Vincent’s files?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘When were you there?’

  ‘I was up on an assault charge. I went too far with one of the men taking too close an interest in one of Mr Schofield’s women.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I’d arranged to see Trevor Robinson, one of the criminal lawyers at Jonas Baines. Ray suggested it and offered to pay and it’s true what they say, you get what you pay for. This guy did the business for me. He was heaps better than the guy I used before.’ He turned to Lomax, ‘No offence, mate,’

  ‘What happened when you were there?’

  ‘Before I went, I put a call through to Alex Vincent, Rebecca’s divorce lawyer, and got him off the premises. When Robinson went to the loo, I sneaked into Vincent’s office and picked up the document.’

  ‘How could you do this in the middle of the day? I’ve been there, it’s a busy office.’

  ‘When lawyers are out for the day, they lower the blinds in their offices, I suppose to tell everyone they’re away. All I had to do was go in there and find the file.’

  ‘Which you did.’

  ‘Like I said.’

  ‘You didn’t come up with a blank, go back at night and break in to retrieve it?’

  ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘It’s a fair question. Did you pick it up first time, or did you go back later and try again?’

  ‘No, I fucking didn’t go back again. I picked it up that afternoon. Breaking and entering is not my style.
’

  FORTY

  Henderson drove into the car park at Jonas Baines with a heavy heart. He had hoped the next time he came here he would be the bearer of good news. Unfortunately, this wasn’t it.

  He climbed the stairs to the second floor. It had been two weeks since the death of Alex Vincent, but his death, and the murder of Martin Turner five weeks before, had left its mark. To an outsider, it might look like a fully functioning office, but the mood was subdued and voices were hushed.

  Pete Hammond had now been charged with stabbing Clare Mitchell, resisting arrest, and being in possession of a knife. No deals were on the table as Henderson was confident Hammond had nothing more to tell him, other than that Schofield had instructed him to do it, and this he would never say. The only thing he was interested in finding out was who killed Turner and Vincent, and even if Hammond knew, which he suspected he didn’t, no deal he could offer would ever encourage him to admit to that.

  Hammond, for all his thuggish attributes and mentality, was not, in Henderson’s opinion, a good fit for the man they were looking for. Hammond was short and stocky, and waddled like a heavyweight boxer. The man who appeared on the CCTV pictures the night Martin Turner was murdered, and the person who had stood behind Alex Vincent at Brighton Station, was tall and slim.

  At some later stage, he would question Schofield about the stabbing of Clare Mitchell. Henderson suspected it was his hand behind it, but no way would he expect the man to admit to it and have another charge added to his sheet. Henderson’s aim was to try to understand the connection between Schofield and Hammond, and Schofield’s relationship with Clare Mitchell. A few weeks back, she would have been described as the closest woman to Ray Schofield, not to mention his business partner. Why then did he turn on her with such violence, treating her like a chattel, to be disposed of when he was finished with her? Was this the measured, anticipated reaction of someone betrayed, or the actions of a psychopath?