The Twisted Web (Detective Hannah Robbins Crime Series book 4)

by Rebecca Bradley

  The police had denied they had created the crime scene and said they were now dealing with it and advised people to stay away and requested that any images not be shared on social media but be forwarded to a Nottinghamshire police email address they had set up for this incident.

  It was a complete mess.

  And he could not drag his eyes away.

  How could these people not see the horror of what they were doing? How could they not see that they were turning this death into something even more ugly?

  His phone rang.

  He ignored it.

  There was a particularly angry outburst happening right now that he didn’t want to miss.

  It rang again, the back of the phone rattling against the kitchen counter as it vibrated. He checked the caller ID.

  His ex-wife.

  Damn.

  ‘Yeah?’ He didn’t have the time for her now.

  ‘Do you have to answer like that?’ She was pissed off already.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘It’s Libbie’s birthday at the weekend.’

  He ran a hand through his hair. ‘You think I don’t know that?’

  There was a long sigh down the phone. ‘I’m trying here. You could at least meet me halfway.’

  He barked out a laugh. ‘You left me, remember? This is what you wanted.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘I’m sorry, was that not halfway?’

  There was silence.

  He watched the screen as it scrolled. Life and death brought alive in two hundred and eighty characters of pure anger and hatred and it fizzed through his veins in a rageful hot ball.

  She finally spoke. ‘Are you coming over at the weekend?’

  He rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. He knew what she was saying but he couldn’t help but go there. ‘I thought I’d take them for lunch.’

  The silence was loaded.

  Why did he do it?

  ‘It might be better if you came here,’ she suggested. Her voice softer now.

  ‘I’d really like to take them out.’ His hand tightened around the phone. Knuckles turning white.

  ‘You know…’ she paused.

  ‘Just say it.’ He could feel a dull ache starting behind his eyes.

  ‘You know that they won’t.’ Another pause. ‘I’m sorry. But after all the press. It’s been hard on them.’

  He wanted to throw the phone against the wall but he held on even tighter. The ache pushed into his eyes. ‘Hard on them?’

  ‘I’m not doing this with you again.’ He heard her shift position. ‘I can’t. Drop by if you can.’ And with that, she ended the call. There was nothing but silence.

  And the scrolling anger on the monitor in front of him.

  With a rigid hand he placed the phone back down and returned his attention to the screen.

  It was this very screen that had changed his life, that had destroyed his life. They were the reason Melissa said his children didn’t know if they wanted to see him. Someone that day, well over a year ago now, nearly eighteen months in fact, someone had taken a short movie clip of him pulling the young lad to safety. Because they had originally been taking movie footage of the chalk woman and her drawing the whole picture hadn’t been captured. What was out of shot was the car behind them and what was in shot was him pulling and pushing the lad and him landing in a heap with his head in a wall.

  It had gone viral in hours. People were calling him all the names. Someone had identified him and then they’d called for his dismissal from his job. It had been endless. His family couldn’t take it, especially the kids. The school had taken a lot of grief and not knowing how to move forward with it they had suspended him pending a thorough investigation. Meanwhile his life had spiralled ever downwards and eventually the school had asked him to resign before they had to take any further action. They said he was a valued member of the teaching team but the furore was having a negative effect on both the school and the children. They didn’t want to fire him and it go against him in the future and they were unsure of their footing, but if he quietly resigned it would be better for all of them.

  So he had and his fall was complete. All at the hands of an internet mob.

  So now he would show them how ugly they looked when something happened that went online. They had brought the events of today on themselves. They had gradually broken him and it had taken some time to find a way to show them how ugly their world was. Now he finally had.

  14.

  The two cops who had attended Nick and Sebastian’s house weren’t on duty until ten p.m. Now this had now turned into a murder inquiry so they came as soon as they woke up and were informed that they were needed. Sharon Bell and Lynette Gregory looked tired as most uniformed cops did when they were working nights. I used to hate that shift. The four a.m. wall did it for me. Yes, we could be on late, or called out in the middle of the night, but we didn’t actually work night shifts as such.

  ‘Thanks for coming in.’ I handed both women a mug of coffee and they looked at my desk, I knew, wondering where they could place them.

  ‘I’m sorry, let me shift something for you.’ My work space wasn’t popular with Baxter. He gave me a look any time he had cause to come in to my office. I moved a pile of folders and dumped them on top of another stack that was already teetering. I held my hands around it for a moment while we gauged whether it would fall or hold and when it stayed upright I sat and thanked them again.

  ‘I’m not sure what we can do to help,’ said Lynette, the older of the two women. ‘We only took the misper report. We weren’t at the house very long. It was late, there were no other jobs at that moment in time so we took the call and paid him a visit.’ I nodded. There was a public misconception that you had to be missing twenty-four hours before you could be reported missing, but it just wasn’t the case and police assess and grade missing calls and deal with them appropriately. ‘Mr Henson had already been out looking for his husband,’ she continued. ‘We took details and told him the morning shift would pick it up after us and someone would be in touch with him again.’

  I smiled, reassured them. ‘It’s not the practical events themselves I’m interested in,’ I said. ‘It’s his demeanour. How was he? In himself?’

  Sharon looked to Lynette then back to me. ‘He was distraught. Well…’ she rubbed a hand through her cropped bleach blonde hair, leaving it looking as good as before she touched it. ‘He was a contained distraught if you get what I mean?’

  I did, but I needed her to explain. I needed it out in the open so there could be no mistakes. ‘Tell me.’

  Lynette jumped in. ‘He was pacing about. Talking quickly. Trying to give us lots of information. Information we didn’t need.’

  ‘Which indicated his level of stress. He wasn’t visibly upset, if that’s what you’re asking,’ finished Sharon. She was the most nervous of the pair. Lynette had experience on her side. She knew jobs could go in any direction. Sharon, by the look of her, was still learning the ropes. She may even still be in her probationary two years. She was only young. Just thinking this made me feel old.

  ‘What time did you get to his house?’

  Sharon pulled her bag from the floor at the side of her and rummaged inside. Eventually she pulled out her pocket notebook. Lynette let her. Though I had a feeling she knew the time, but was allowing her young colleague to finish what she was doing now she had started, to prevent her feeling uncomfortable.

  Sharon flicked through the pages. Came to the one she needed. ‘We were State 6…’ at the scene ‘at zero one twenty-six hours.’ She kept her book open and looked at me.

  I nodded. The call had come in from Henson at a little before twelve-thirty. The killer was roaming the streets with Sebastian’s body at two-o-nine a.m.

  ‘How long were you with him?’

  Sharon checked her pocket book again. ‘We left Mr Henson at zero-two-fourteen, Ma’am.’

  It wasn’t Henson. He was in the clear. I was glad abo
ut that. Though we now had a sadistic killer on our hands who we had to find and quickly before they decided to play any more games.

  15.

  As the car headlights swept across the front of my apartment I saw someone crouched on the step. It was dark and they had a hood pulled up over their head obscuring their face. Body curled in on itself. I had no idea of size or gender. My skin prickled. I checked around. There was a group of young men walking on the other side of the road. They were oblivious to what was happening here. Though I wasn’t sure what that was. Other than them I saw no one else. It was me and this person.

  I decided not to park in the gated secure car park as I might need to make a swift exit. I pulled my phone from my bag. Brought up the control room ready to press dial should I need to.

  The figure didn’t move. They must have known I was here.

  When I opened the car door they stood. With the darkness and the hood I still couldn’t make out who it was, but they were too short to be the male on the video I had watched earlier in the day.

  They moved a few steps towards me. ‘Hannah.’

  Shit, I recognised that voice. Why had I come home now? If I’d have left it another ten, maybe fifteen minutes, my front doorstep might have been empty.

  ‘I’ve been waiting ages for you. I thought you were never coming home.’

  I didn’t want to talk to her. I looked back to the group of men who were now nearly out of view. I would rather have a conversation with them.

  ‘If I’d known you were here waiting I might not have come back yet,’ I replied.

  She was closer now and she pulled her hood down. I could see her face under the street light. I couldn’t get used to the fuller cheeks, the roundness of her face. But she looked pale. I had no sympathy.

  ‘Won’t you just talk to me?’ she asked. ‘Can’t we talk?’

  A stony look was my response.

  ‘I’ve said I’m sorry,’ she continued, ‘and I mean it. Dad has forgiven me.’ There was a whine in her tone. This irritated me more and the headache that had been threatening started to deepen.

  I rounded on her. ‘Dad didn’t nearly lose his job because of you did he? His career. In fact, Dad doesn’t even know what you did to me. How you nearly screwed my career over for your own selfish needs.’ I ran a hand through my hair.

  He would forgive her even if he was aware. Following Mum’s death Dad had latched on to me and Zoe for his emotional support. We were the people filling that huge void that had been left in his life. He couldn’t cope if he lost one of us and not through a family fall-out. It broke his heart when Zoe was sent to prison for dealing drugs and he’d lost her temporarily. He had visited as much as he could.

  Zoe stuffed her hands into the pockets of her hoody, bunched up her shoulders. ‘I was a different person, Hannah.’ Her voice was quiet. I had to strain to listen to her. ‘Can we go inside to talk about it?’

  I walked past her towards the door. It was cold out here now.

  ‘Thank you.’ It was barely a whisper.

  I turned and looked her in the face. Tears had welled up in her eyes. I closed my own eyes for a brief moment. Tried to clear my head.

  ‘I’m not letting you in, Zoe.’ I could feel my chest constrict as she dropped her head to hide her face.

  ‘I’m clean, Hannah. It’s all the past. I want to make it up to you. I was a different person. It was the drugs. I never wanted to hurt you. Please.’ This last word was dragged out. Painful. Caught in her throat and in her eyes as she faced me again.

  ‘I can’t. Do you have any idea what you did?’ I turned my back to her and pushed the key in the lock.

  ‘I never thought…’

  ‘Exactly. You only thought about yourself. And here you are again, thinking about yourself and your own feelings. This little display here, it’s not about me. It’s about you and how you feel and about what you want. You aren’t considering me in this scenario. How I might feel or what I might want. If you did you might have gone about it a little differently than accosting me on my doorstep after a long day at work. For Christ’s sake, do you not listen to or read the news?’ My voice was raised now.

  ‘You won’t speak to me when you come to Dad’s!’ She was shouting herself now. And we were still outside, for my neighbours to catch every word. This was so damn typical of her. To have this conversation this way. Rather than in a private place away from prying eyes and ears.

  ‘In fact, you’ve started to avoid Dad. He’s noticed, you know. That you only come when you know I’m not there. It’s upsetting him. I had no choice but to come to see you at your home because you won’t give me the time of day at mine.’

  ‘It’s not yours.’ Why couldn’t I control myself around her? ‘It’s Dad’s home. He’s letting you stay there while you get back on your feet.’ I barked out a laugh. ‘Which you won’t, will you? This is you. You’ll suck the life out of him.’ I was getting warm now. My whole body reacting to the stress she was creating.

  She took a deep breath, ‘You’re so self-involved you can’t see anyone else’s point of view. How the hell do you help people, Hannah? You help so many people but when it comes to one of your own, your family, you close off.’ Tears spilled down her cheeks. ‘I was a mess when I stayed with you that time. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was out of my mind. The drugs controlled me. I would never hurt you that way. Not on purpose. You must know that.’

  I turned my back on her. I was tired. Worn out. ‘I have to go, Zoe. I’ve got another long day ahead of me tomorrow.’ I stepped into the hallway.

  ‘I was worried sick when you were stabbed. I thought I was going to lose you without being able to make it right again. Don’t let that be the way this plays out.’

  I closed the door. Leaned my forehead against it and let the tears flow.

  16.

  I’d decided to start my day by checking the online news pages. I wish I hadn’t bothered. All the mainstream news websites were leading with the murder of Sebastian Wade and the public response to the mimic crime scene that had been set up around his body. They had done their homework, though it wasn’t difficult in the world of the internet, I was finding out, as they linked him up as a true-crime blogger. And how it was strange his own murder had been staged the way it had. They had obviously picked up this information from the stream of noise the public made. Though much of what had been online the previous day had been rubbish and emotional hysteria, some of it, like the fact that Sebastian was a true-crime blogger, was factual, and the press had selected this information out of the pandemonium, researched for truth, and run with it.

  The blog, Sebastian’s blog, was an area we still needed to get to grips with, to see how it impacted on the investigation. What he may have said on there or who he may have upset.

  Yesterday had been a long and busy day. There were many lines of inquiry on this case and it wasn’t one that would be resolved in a matter of hours. Now that Nick had been ruled out, there was no clear suspect for us to home in on. We had to trace Sebastian’s steps. It had also been made complicated by the very clear message that whatever was behind his murder, his blog was involved and we needed to dig deeper.

  I pushed the door open to Evie Small’s office. Our station analyst and my best friend was already in, as I knew she would be. Her trademark curls were piled up on the top of her head today, tendrils falling down randomly where she hadn’t managed to tuck them in. She did organised messy brilliantly.

  Me, I just did messy.

  She turned from what she was working on. ‘Hey, lovely. How’s things with you this morning?’ She pulled open her drawer and pulled out a third of a packet of chocolate biscuits, pointed them at me like a weapon.

  I shook my head. She frowned.

  ‘I didn’t bring a drink with me,’ I said in response.

  ‘Biscuits don’t need tea. It’s the other way around. Tea needs biscuits. It’s too wet otherwise. Didn’t you know that? Why do you think I always have a p
ack?’

  I grunted at her in response and wondered how she managed to stay so slim.

  ‘Please yourself.’ She fished one out the pack and shoved half into her mouth. ‘What can I do for you?’ she mumbled through the crumbs.

  I adored this woman.

  I pulled a chair over from the corner of the room and sat beside her. ‘What do you know about blogs?’ I asked.

  ‘The same as you, I imagine.’ She swallowed the biscuit. ‘The ones I read have their own niche and are updated on a regular basis. What is it you need to know?’

  She followed blogs?

  ‘You use Twitter?’ I asked instead.

  ‘Don’t you?’ She gave me a look. ‘Of course you don’t.’ She shoved the other half of the biscuit into her mouth.

  ‘What do you talk about?’ I was digressing. But, Twitter, I was too busy to living my life, to stop what I was doing and put the details online for people to ignore. I didn’t understand it.

  Evie chewed, her eyes twinkling as she regarded me then she fished out her phone from the drawer at the side of her. Unlocked it, tapped the screen then handed it to me.

  I took the phone. ‘What am I looking at?’

  She raised her eyebrows.

  ‘I can see it’s Twitter.’ I grabbed for the pack of biscuits on her desk.

  She smiled as I picked a biscuit out and started to eat while still staring at her phone. ‘It’s my feed. It’s what I tweet out. If you look at that, I can then show you the feed I look at when I’m on. It’s what other people I am following are saying.’

  The last thing she had tweeted was a brief review of a movie she had been to see the previous evening.

  I looked at her. ‘Date?’

  She took the phone out my hand. ‘Might have been.’ And tapped the screen a couple of times before handing it back to me. ‘That’s the feed I follow of other people.’