Motive

by Alan McDermott

  “I’m fine,” Latimer said. He took his vape stick from his pocket and took a deep drag, blowing an aniseed-flavoured cloud towards the floor, where it hung around like a bad memory.

  “MAC-10 will go apeshit if she sees you using that in the building.”

  The moniker had been given to Detective Chief Inspector Carole Ingram within minutes of her posting to MIT 14, partly due to her sharing the same name as the weapon’s creator, Gordon B. Ingram. Few realised at the time that she could be just as deadly as the machine pistol if they were caught in her sights. One sure way to get in her bad books was to use the nickname in her presence.

  “Walls have ears,” Latimer warned him, and Benson looked up and down the stairs to see whether anyone was within earshot.

  Latimer had no issues with her. While many considered Ingram a promotion-chasing megalomaniac, he saw her for what she was: a competent officer who didn’t suffer fools gladly.

  “The lads want to know if you’ll be joining us tonight,” the DS said, changing the subject. “Even if it’s just one.”

  Latimer put his vape stick away. “Not this time,” he said. “I’m gonna go ’round and see Carrie’s parents, give them the good news, then I’m heading home.”

  “Good news” was definitely not the right phrase, but at least it would offer them closure.

  “No worries. I’m off to get some lunch.”

  Latimer watched Benson walk away, a spring in his step as he skipped down the stairs, and he envied the younger man’s emotional detachment. Latimer had been like that once, able to leave work at the office once it was time to clock off. That had changed in recent months, and Latimer wondered if the alcohol had been suppressing his emotions all along. Wake up with a hangover, recover throughout the day, hit the pub as soon as the shift was over. The routine had been the same for at least a decade, leaving him little time to think of anything else but chasing down criminals.

  Even his wife had played second fiddle to the booze, but he’d always been able to justify his actions. If a case was particularly frustrating, he needed a beer after work. If the team solved one within twenty-four hours, it was celebration time. Any excuse would do, and if he had none, he fell back on the idea that his wife, who worked from home, needed the time alone.

  It was the heart murmur that first warned him something was wrong. Actually, not so much a murmur as an earthquake inside his chest.

  He vividly remembered sitting at his desk, enjoying his fourth coffee of the morning when it felt like everything inside his rib cage had disappeared, leaving a huge vacuum. It lasted for a couple of seconds, then his heart started acting like a golf ball in a tumble dryer. The beats were erratic, sometimes two close together, then a worrying gap before the next one. He waited for it to pass, but after a couple of minutes, a colleague came up to him, concerned.

  “You okay, boss? Want me to call you an ambulance?”

  Latimer waved him away. “It’s nothing.” It’s just stress, he thought. A couple of days off and I’ll be right as rain. Ten minutes, later his heartbeat was back to normal, but an hour later, it happened again.

  Latimer took the advice and went to Accident & Emergency. After a long wait for an electrocardiogram, he was asked a few lifestyle questions.

  “Yes, I drink.”

  “How many a week?” the doctor asked.

  Latimer was honest with his answer. “Five or six pints, maybe six times a week.”,

  “That’s rather a lot.”

  “Is it?” Latimer asked. He’d been drinking that much for the last ten years and had never thought much of it. His wife, Fiona, clearly had. She was always on his back for him to cut down, but he always for an excuse to sink a beer: celebrating when his team solved a case; consoling himself when he couldn’t solve a case; the fact that it was his day off…

  “Yes, that’s a lot for a rugby team, never mind one person. I’m going to monitor you for the next hour, but I suggest cutting down to fourteen units of alcohol a week, and maybe lay off the coffee, too.”

  Latimer took the advice with a pinch of salt. By lunchtime he was discharged, and before returning to work, he stopped off at a café for a fry-up. That night, he was in the pub three minutes after clocking off.

  The murmur returned the next morning, though it wasn’t so pronounced. He shook that one off, but when it happened twice more that day, he started to get worried.

  Latimer resorted to self-help. He went to the local shop and purchased a jar of decaf coffee—he hated the fancy ground stuff that came out of a machine and always insisted on instant—and that night he went straight home after work. His wife was surprised to see him completely sober, so much so that she asked what the matter was. He laughed it off, saying he just fancied an early night.

  The next day, the tremors started. He was in the bathroom, trying to shave, but felt like he was strapped to a washing machine on max spin. He managed to nick himself half a dozen times, and as he stood in front of the mirror waiting for the bleeding to stop, he looked at his reflection. The face staring back was unrecognisable. His hair used to be dark brown, but grey was starting to take root, and the broken capillaries on his face gave him an unhealthy ruddy complexion. The bags under his eyes looked like they belonged to a sixty-year-old, not someone just turning forty.

  Still, it hadn’t been enough of a wake-up call. That night, thinking the day of sobriety had given his liver the rest it desperately needed, he was back in the pub.

  He was on his second pint when it struck.

  The episode he’d experienced the previous day was back with a vengeance, only this time there was what he could only describe as a total reset. He was sitting at the table with his hand over his heart when everything shut down. There was a split-second of complete darkness and silence, then he was back. Latimer stared at his pint for five minutes, waiting for something else to happen and praying it wouldn’t. He eventually got up and walked the few hundred yards home.

  The next morning, on his way to work, he phoned the doctor and booked an appointment.

  They performed a battery of tests over the following year, culminating in the echocardiogram. That had shown him to have an extremely high total coronary calcium score.

  He still remembered the meeting with the doctor as if it had been that morning. The result had been cc’d to him and arrived the day before, and on reading it Latimer thought he had seconds left to live. He’d phoned his GP and arranged an urgent appointment for later that day, wondering if he’d still be alive by the time he got to the surgery.

  “Your age and gender-adjusted calcium score is above the 90th percentile, which would indicate a high future cardiovascular risk,” the doctor had told him. It was the lack of concern that struck Latimer first.

  “I read that. It sounds bad.”

  “Actually, it’s not uncommon for people with your lifestyle.” The doctor checked Latimer’s health history. “It says here you consume in excess of seventy units of alcohol a week. When it’s that high, it’s usually a conservative estimate and more like a hundred.”

  Latimer had confessed that he perhaps might have missed off a few here and there. “So how long have I got?” he’d asked.

  “Hard to say. If you’re willing to cut out the cigarettes and reduce your alcohol intake to less than fourteen units a week, plus get plenty of exercise and eat a healthy diet, I’d say around thirty to forty years. If you carry on as you are, five, maybe ten.”

  Latimer had opted for option A. He’d dumped his cigarettes and lighter in the doctor’s waste bin and stopped off at a vape shop on the way home. He thought it would be a simple process involving buying a stick, some juice and away he went, but he’d spent an hour listening to the salesman explaining all the various configurations and sampling dozens of flavours.

  “One stick is fine, but what are you going to do while it’s charging for four hours?”

  Latimer knew he wouldn’t be able to go without his nicotine fix that long, so he’d bought
a second stick to use while the other was charging. His purchases, which included thirty different varieties of vape juice, numerous spare coils and expansion kits, had set him back almost three hundred pounds. When he considered how much he spent on cigarettes each month, it was a bargain.

  After picking up his prescription for statins and aspirin, pills he’d take daily for the rest of his life, he’d gone home, removed the dozen beers from the fridge and put them in a box in the garage. He could still drink, but would limit it to once a week to start with. He already exercised by playing golf every Sunday, but decided to step that up and bought a bicycle to get to work and back. As it was a short journey, he took a circuitous route in each morning.

  “Sir, the DCI’s looking for you.”

  Latimer looked at the constable who’d stuck his head out of the door. He nodded, took out his vape stick for one more puff, then walked up to the fourth floor and along to Ingram’s office.

  He knocked and waited for her to answer. Too many people had made the mistake of entering before being beckoned.

  “Come.”

  Latimer entered and stopped in front of her desk. It was police issue, functional chipboard with a laminate finish. Some senior officers like personal touches and the odd little luxury—family photos, hardwood desks, recliner chairs. Not Ingram.

  “You wanted to see me,” Latimer said, a statement more than a question.

  “Yes. Take a seat.”

  He sat in the chair opposite her and wondered why so many were scared of her. She wasn’t physically intimidating. In fact, if he weren’t married, he might have been interested. She was the same height as Latimer, with short, dyed platinum hair cut in a side parting. She wore minimal make-up and no jewellery, apart from a pair of stud earrings.

  Certainly no wedding ring.

  There were rumours that she was a lesbian, but Latimer doubted their veracity. He didn’t care either way.

  “Hampshire Constabulary has asked us to bring in a murder suspect. A body was found near Hook and his prints were found on the murder weapon and the victim’s wallet.”

  “Can’t you send the…uniformed officers?” He’d almost said “wooden tops,” the derogatory term used by plain-clothed officers for their uniformed colleagues. He knew from experience that Ingram hated the term. “I have to go round and let Carrie Higson’s parents know that we’ve charged the suspect.”

  “I’ll visit the Higsons,” Ingram said. “I want you to handle this transfer. You know the suspect.”

  Latimer frowned. “Someone I’ve banged up before?”

  “Hardly. It’s James Knight.”

  A face jumped into Latimer’s head, but he quickly dismissed it.

  “You can’t mean my first DCI.” He couldn’t think of anyone less likely to commit a crime.

  Knight had been promoted to Ingram’s grade four years before taking early retirement in his late fifties. Latimer had stayed in touch with him in the last four years, and they played golf together once a month.

  “The very same,” Ingram said. “I must admit, I was shocked when it was suggested he could have been involved with a murder, but the evidence they presented makes for a pretty solid case.”

  Latimer was stunned. “You say they have prints? You mean a partial, something that could be discredited?”

  “When I say prints, I mean lots of them.” She turned to her computer and tapped at her keyboard. “A full set on the handle of the hammer, another—”

  “A hammer!?”

  “Yes. It was found on top of the body, along with the victim’s dog and his wallet. They lifted another set of prints from that, too.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Latimer told her. “James was one of the best cops I’ve worked with. Even if by some incredible stretch of the imagination I believed he would kill someone, there’s no way he’d behave like an amateur and leave his prints all over the crime scene.”

  “My thoughts, too, but it appears that’s what he did. They also found a few hairs and are waiting to get a DNA sample from James so that they can verify that they belong to him. They also want you to pick up a pair of shoes.”

  “Don’t tell me, they found shoe prints at the scene.”

  Ingram’s expression was all the answer Latimer needed.

  “This sounds like a setup,” Latimer said.

  “Or James wanted to be caught,” Ingram suggested. “Either way, I want you to deliver him to Basingstoke today.”

  She turned back to the computer and clicked the mouse a couple of times. The printer to Latimer’s left spewed out a few sheets of paper. “That's what Hampshire sent over. Take a look before you pick him up.”

  Latimer nodded, retrieved the documents and walked out without another word.

  What could he say?

  He went to his office and closed the door, a sign that he didn't want to be disturbed. Once he'd made himself a cup of instant decaf, he sat down and looked through the information Hampshire had sent over.

  It made for worrying reading.

  The victim had been identified as Sean Conte, aged fifty-five, from Wimbledon. The name rang a bell. Latimer searched his mental database and came up with a conversation he’d had a year earlier.

  It had taken place on the golf course.

  With James Knight.

  And while it was a stretch, Latimer knew that what Knight had told him could be seen as a motive.

  Another tick in the guilty box, yet Latimer still found it hard to believe his old boss could have done it.

  He read through the rest of the information. Conte had been found two days earlier in woods near Hook, Hampshire, following a tip-off. It didn’t say how that had been communicated, so it could have been a phone call or email. Latimer made a note to follow that up with Hampshire CID. He’d also request permission to visit the crime scene. A shovel had been left next to the shallow grave, and several prints had been lifted from it. On exhuming the body they’d found a blood-stained folding wallet with another good set of prints on the inside. Even more had been found on the hammer that was on Conte’s chest. The preliminary cause of death had been recorded as blunt trauma to the head, though the autopsy report would provide a definitive answer.

  Latimer sipped his coffee, and one question kept rearing its head: why would an experienced police officer, even a retired one, leave so much evidence behind?

  The hairs found underneath the victim’s fingernails were still being analysed, but Latimer knew that they would belong to James Knight.

  It was time to find out what his old boss had to say.

  Chapter 6

  John Latimer signed for a pool car and began the twelve miles to James Knight’s house in Merton Park. Protocol dictated that he take another officer with him, so he’d chosen DS Benson.

  He’d have much preferred to go alone.

  “What did the guy do?” the younger officer asked.

  Latimer had told him they were to pick up a suspect and deliver him to Basingstoke, but hadn’t given a name.

  “Hopefully, nothing.”

  Benson looked over at Latimer. “You’ve lost me.”

  Latimer pulled onto the A20. “A body was found in Hampshire and the prime suspect lives in London. His name’s James Knight.”

  “As in DCI James Knight?”

  “The very same.”

  Benson looked the way Latimer had felt on hearing the news. “He’s the last guy I’d have pegged as a killer. What do they have on him?”

  “Prints on the murder weapon, possibly DNA, shoe prints, motive, you name it.”

  “Wow. I mean…wow!”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Latimer said. He wound the window down, took a long drag on his vape stick and blew out a white cloud. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”

  He spent the next few minutes explaining exactly what was in the document Hampshire had provided, from the tip-off to locating the body and the mountain of evidence gathered from the scene.

  “I see what yo
u mean. Even a moron would know not to leave prints behind. I can only imagine—if he did it, that is—that Knight wanted to be caught.”

  “Then why not just kill Conte and hand himself in?” Latimer asked. “Why go to all the trouble of taking him to Hampshire and burying him? They lived next door to each other. He could have just popped round, killed him and called it in.”

  Like Latimer, Benson had no answer for that one.

  They drove the rest of the way in silence, and Latimer tried once more to make sense of the situation. If he hadn’t known the suspect for so long, one look at the evidence against him would have been enough to convince him that Knight was guilty. The only explanation he could come up with was that his friendship with the old DCI was clouding his judgement.

  It took fifty minutes to reach Knight’s house, a 1930s semi-detached on a tree-lined street. Latimer had been there many times before, and he recognised Knight’s Volvo in the driveway. He pulled in behind it and turned the engine off, then took a couple of drags on his vape stick.

  Keen as he was to hear his old friend’s side of the story, Latimer wasn’t looking forward to the conversation. He sat for over a minute, his hands on the wheel as he stared at the front door.

  “You okay, boss?”

  Latimer looked over at Benson, his face blank. He was far from okay, but he wasn’t about to reveal his feelings to a subordinate. He liked Paul. He was a good copper, but that was as far as the relationship went. He was still the detective sergeant’s boss and had to maintain that professional distance.

  “I’ll do the talking,” Latimer said. He got out and walked to the front door, which had been painted in recent weeks. Now retired, Knight had plenty of time on his hands, and he’d clearly been using some of it to get the house up to scratch. The last time Latimer had been there, the door had been a faded red, the paint peeling in a couple of places. It was now a shiny royal blue.

  Latimer took a deep breath and rang the bell. After thirty seconds and no response, he rang it again.

  The door opened and James Knight smiled when he saw Latimer. He was in his late fifties but looked younger, with a blue jumper and beige slacks covering his thin frame. His hair was black with a few flecks of grey, and thinning on top.