Hand On Heart: An Unputdownable British Crime Thriller (DI Benjamin Kidd Crime Thrillers Book 5)

by GS Rhodes

  “I’ve had plenty of time to rest, sir,” Simon interrupted, forcing a smile onto his face. “A few days in hospital and then a week or so at home with my mum popping around every few hours was more than enough. I thought she was just going to move in at one point.”

  “Not a fan of your own mum?”

  “Oh no, nothing like that,” Simon said quickly. “But she’s a little protective. She tried to convince me to get a desk job or something, stop me getting into any sort of trouble again.”

  Kidd considered it. Though he’d not worked with Simon for all that long, he wasn’t the most front-footed. He was a little clumsy and while it hadn’t cost them a case or anything just yet, Kidd had wondered on occasion if there were quieter jobs that would be better suited to the young lad.

  “If that was something you wanted to—”

  “It’s not,” Simon said firmly. “I know she’s just worried about me but, well, I’m not worried about me. This is where I want to be. So long as this is where you want me.”

  He seemed determined. It was probably the most words Kidd had ever managed to get out of Simon. Maybe getting knocked unconscious by an old woman with a revenge plot was what he needed after all. Though Kidd wouldn’t recommend it.

  “Glad to hear it,” Kidd said. “We missed you on the last one. Could have done with a decent evidence board. Campbell’s work was pretty shoddy.”

  “Oi!” Campbell called from his desk.

  “Look how organised that looks,” Kidd said, pointing at the board. “Yours looked like you’d done it with a blindfold on.” Kidd winked at Simon, which got him a smile. He was going to be okay. Kidd would need to keep an eye on him. He didn’t want Simon Powell getting hurt because of him again. He didn’t want any of them hurt. Not if he could help it.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “He’s a bit of a wreck,” Weaver said as he took them to Oscar Harkey. They hadn’t needed to wait too long before he had arrived and Weaver had burst into the room to bring them to him. He seemed keen to get this case solved as soon as possible. Kidd would put money on another phone call from the superintendent happening shortly after he left his office.

  Oscar Harkey was waiting for them in a slightly less formal interview room. There were sofas, natural light, a little less pressure. It felt like the right thing to do given what he’d been through in the past day.

  “You’ll see, so I’d go a little bit easy on him if you can.”

  “Sure thing, boss,” Kidd said, heading into the room with DS Sanchez in tow. Weaver introduced them before they sat down, each of them taking an armchair that was across from the older gentleman shaking on a threadbare sofa.

  Weaver wasn’t joking when he’d said that Oscar Harkey looked like a wreck. His face was pale, weathered, the wrinkles on it seeming more pronounced than on the picture of him on their evidence board. Admittedly, that photo had been taken from the Harkey & Grace website, so was likely a professional headshot, but even so. It was like looking at a completely different man.

  He wasn’t dressed in a suit as he had been in the other photo. He was in a crumpled t-shirt and a pair of jogging bottoms. His hair wasn’t combed, looking a little bit wild like he’d been caught in a storm on the way here, and his hands were clasped together and pressed into his lap.

  When he looked over at the two detectives, he looked like he was about to burst into tears.

  “Good morning, Mr Harkey,” Kidd said, trying to keep his voice gentle. The man looked like he could shatter at any moment. “Thank you so much for coming in to speak to us. We just wanted to ask you a few questions about what happened yesterday, try and get a few details from you and then you can be on your way, alright?”

  “Sure thing,” Oscar said, nodding slowly. His voice was a little croaky. Kidd wondered if he had even slept.

  Kidd set the tape recorder going, an arrogant beep filling the room before he introduced himself, Sanchez, and Oscar Harkey for the purposes of the tape. Oscar looked more nervous than ever. Kidd really would have to tread carefully on this one.

  “Can you please tell us, in as much detail as you can, everything that happened?” Kidd asked.

  “I told the officers I spoke to yesterday everything,” Oscar said, looking to each of the detectives in turn. “I don’t think there’s anything else to say. That was all of it.”

  “I’d just like to hear it from you,” Kidd said. “For my own peace of mind.”

  Oscar opened his mouth as if he were about to argue but quickly backed down. He seemed to want to get this over with as soon as possible. Kidd couldn’t blame him. If he were in Oscar’s position, he’d want to forget about it too, not have to dredge it up all over again. But while Kidd had read the case file and Oscar’s statement, he wanted to hear it from the man himself. Just in case there was something missing, something that they could use.

  “I came back from a lunch break,” Oscar said slowly. “I don’t usually take them, you see, but my wife has been telling me I need to stop working myself so hard. I’m getting on a bit, as she likes to remind me.” He shook his head. He clearly didn’t agree with that. “When I got back, my receptionist told me that I had a package and gave it to me. I took it to my office and opened it. I… I assumed it was a birthday present.” He laughed, shaking his head. “It seems so stupid now to think that it would be a birthday present when it… when it…” He took a shuddering breath, unclasping his hands to plant them on his thighs. His hands gripped the material, his knuckles burning white. “I’m sorry. This is very difficult to talk about.”

  “Take your time,” Sanchez said.

  Oscar took another deep breath, his shoulders shaking. Kidd sat back and waited for the man to continue, letting him gather himself.

  “This isn’t the first time something like this has happened,” Oscar said, shaking his head. “It’s never been a body part, nothing like that. But when people don’t get their way in cases, when someone goes down, I’ve had hate mail, I’ve had death threats. The other lawyers in my office have been through all of that before. It’s never been something this…threatening.”

  Oscar turned his attention away from the two detectives. “I’ve not even thought about going back to my office since it happened,” he said. “I couldn’t stay there for the rest of yesterday because your people were there looking for prints, evidence, all of that. I didn’t want to anyway. The thought of being there now, knowing that there’s someone out there who’s trying to get to me is too much. It makes me feel sick to my stomach.” He turned back to them, his eyes wild with panic. “Do you know what that feels like? I’ve had all sorts of things come to that office before, but never something that made me want to run away from doing my job. What am I supposed to do?”

  “We’re here to help you, Mr Harkey,” Kidd said slowly. “We want to find out who did this just as much as you do, make sure that they pay for what they’ve done.”

  “And what have you done so far?” Oscar asked, sitting back on the sofa and crossing his arms. It was an immediate shift in tone. Suddenly, Kidd felt like he was the one being interviewed. He didn’t care for it. “I shouldn’t have to be too scared to go to my own office, should I, Detective?”

  “Absolutely not,” Kidd replied, barely keeping a lid on his temper. Kidd had no problem being criticised when he did something wrong, but when a case had only just started and he already had someone out to get him, it didn’t sit right. He took a breath before he responded. “We’ve taken DNA swabs from yourself and from your receptionist to count the two of you out of the investigation and the arm is currently with forensics to see if we have a match on our system. Also, so we can see if there are any prints on it that don’t belong to either of you.”

  “It’s a start,” Oscar said. Kidd wanted to throttle him.

  “There is another thing that I wanted to ask you,” Sanchez chimed in, possibly seeing that Kidd was ready to leap across the room and let the older man have it. “Was there anything familiar about the
arm?”

  Oscar blinked and looked at her confusedly. “As in, did I know who the arm belonged to? I can’t say I did.”

  “No, not that,” Sanchez said, looking back down at her notepad and back up to the man. “I was wondering if there was a connection to one of your previous cases. I know you mentioned people getting in touch when they were upset about something, but I wanted to know if this jogged your memory at all.” Sanchez cleared her throat. “If you can give us a case then maybe it will give us some indication of where we need to be looking, who we need to be questioning.”

  Oscar Harkey nodded, his face darkening as he thought about Zoe’s question.

  “There is one, yes,” he replied. “It’s the thing I’ve been most worried about actually, since it appeared. I…” As he trailed off, he suddenly looked a few shades greener than he had before.

  Kidd leant forward in his chair. “What is it?”

  “I’d thought of it when I first saw arm, but figured I was losing it,” Oscar said. “My wife was the one who brought it up again and that confirmed it.”

  “Who, Mr Harkey?” Zoe asked.

  “Michael Earle.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It didn’t ring any bells with Kidd, which wasn’t altogether surprising considering how long ago it was, but it was enough to make him sit up a little straighter and pay more attention to the man. The information that Oscar was about to give them felt vital.

  “It has to be nearly twenty years ago, that much I’m sure of,” Oscar started. “I’m sure you’d be able to find that out on one of your fancy computers or something. But Michael Earle was the suspect. I was defending him and it didn’t go our way. He was imprisoned after murdering a young woman called Holly Grant. It was all over the news at the time.”

  Kidd tried not to watch the news if he could help it. More often than not, it was sensationalist rubbish anyway, and when it wasn’t, it was the kind of stuff that he would hear about at work anyhow.

  “Michael was…” Oscar’s gaze turned to the window. “Michael was actually a very nice man,” he said eventually. Zoe recoiled next to Kidd. “He protested his innocence the whole way through the case and I tried to put that across to the court but everything that your lot had was…well, it was pretty damning. There was no getting out of it no matter how hard I tried.”

  “You tried to get a murderer off?” Zoe asked.

  “I defended a man who claimed innocence,” Oscar corrected. “Innocent until proven guilty, DS Sanchez, that is the law, is it not? Therefore it is every solicitor’s policy. We can’t judge the people who come in and pay us to defend them. I did all I could and, well, all I managed was stopping him from getting a life sentence.”

  Zoe was seething next to Kidd, he could practically feel the heat coming off of her. A volcano about to blow.

  “What did he do?” Kidd asked. He knew it was information that he would gather eventually but he was curious, and he was certainly curious to hear exactly how Oscar Harkey would spin it given the opportunity.

  “Holly Grant’s body parts were found severed and dumped by the riverside in Twickenham,” Oscar said flatly. Kidd recognised the way that he spoke, that matter of fact way that keeps you at a distance from it. It had done a decent job of protecting him over the years, it wasn’t altogether surprising that Oscar employed it too. When you were dealing with things like that, they could creep into your everyday life. You needed a way to disconnect. Some people kept everything at arm's length, some people made jokes, it was a coping mechanism. “They had a romantic relationship and the assumption was that it had gone sour and Michael had reacted badly to it.” Oscar shook his head. “I don’t remember all the details, of course, it was quite some time ago but that is the short version.”

  “What did he get, if not a life sentence?” Zoe asked.

  “The evidence was stacked against him,” Oscar said. “I told him to plead guilty to get a lesser sentence and it worked. He got twenty-five years, so, practically a life sentence.”

  Zoe took a few notes, her pen scratching so hard into the notepad Kidd was sure it was bleeding through to the next page, maybe even the one after that.

  “Do you keep your old case files?” Zoe asked, not looking up.

  “Of course,” Oscar replied.

  “Would we be able to see them? It might help us to see what kinds of things Michael was telling you, versus what we have here,” she said.

  “I’ll have my receptionist bring them over as soon as possible,” he said.

  “Are there any other details of the case that you can remember now, Mr Harkey?” Kidd asked. “Anything that you think might help us. Even something you don’t, you never know.”

  Oscar chuckled darkly. “I remember that it all happened very quickly,” Oscar replied. “The stories came in quick, the alibis for everyone else, the statements, the interviews. At the time I didn’t think anything of it, but hindsight is twenty-twenty after all. It felt…rushed.”

  “Rushed?”

  Oscar nodded.

  “Are you trying to say that you think there was a miscarriage of justice?” Kidd asked.

  “Oh no, nothing like that,” Oscar said, but then stopped himself as he thought about it. “Though, now that you mention it…” He ran a hand over his face. “It was so long ago, I could be misremembering, but as I said, it happened very quickly. And I remember that it set my father on edge a little bit that it all seemed to be done in a rush. From your standpoint, I mean.”

  “The police?” Kidd asked.

  “Yes,” Oscar said. “But we did all that we could with what we had. It just didn’t stand up in court like we had hoped. Nothing we can do about it now, though, I suppose.”

  Kidd nodded. He was suddenly eager to get his hands on that case file. There might have been something in what Oscar was saying. If nothing else, they would need to track down everyone else who was involved in the case to see if they were in the frame for this. The list of people who would be pissed off about the case would be miles long, extending from Michael to Michael’s family, to people who knew Michael and beyond. If he’d managed to convince Oscar that he was innocent, and Oscar believed him, then who knew who else he could have convinced.

  Kidd paused in his train of thought for a moment. Though there was always the possibility that the case was mishandled, that things were missed. Twenty years was a long time in policing. Technology and the way that they solved crimes had come a long way since then.

  They spoke with Oscar a little while longer, reassuring him that they were doing their best and that he should return to his office when he’s ready. If anything else were to come up, however, Kidd heartily recommended that he ran for the hills. Or at least for the police. After he left, Kidd and Sanchez remained in the room for a little while longer.

  “You familiar with the case?” Kidd asked.

  Zoe shook her head. “A bit before our time, isn’t it? And there have been a heck of a lot of bodies in that time.”

  More than I would like to think about, Kidd thought. When he first started the job he remembered making a solemn vow that he would remember each and every body he encountered, each and every life that he hadn’t managed to save, like he was going to carry them with him. But that quickly faded away. Not because there were so many, but because thinking like that in a job like his would have been enough to drive anybody insane. The weight of those bodies would drag any detective down. Liz would tell Kidd that he was too dedicated to the job as it was, and the less he took home with him the better.

  “What did you think about what he said about the case?”

  “That Michael Earle was innocent?” Zoe said. Kidd could tell she was resisting the urge to roll her eyes. “I’ve got to have faith that the justice system works, right? And if the officers working on the case and the CPS did all that they could, then who are we to go digging around to prove that he was innocent.”

  “But what if he was?”

  “Then we made a big fu
cking error,” Zoe said. “But surely Oscar has to say something like that. He was the one defending him. I know that lawyers can be assholes, but surely none of them are going to be going around proudly announcing that they protected a murderer.”

  Kidd shook his head. He wasn’t so sure. He knew that sometimes the solving of a case could be quite quick, it could be done in days when it was pressing, hours if the evidence fell at the right time, but if Oscar and his father were worried about it going quickly, maybe something was missed. Or maybe that was Oscar’s way of defending what he did. Kidd couldn’t be sure.

  Perhaps it was Michael Earle who was sending things to Oscar, and possibly to other people who were involved in the case, he would need to look into it. Some kind of vengeance for him being convicted. But why would he be doing that if he was still in prison? How would he be doing it? The more Kidd thought about it, the more questions he found that needed answering.

  “I need those case files,” Kidd said. “The second we get back to that room, I want everyone on it. I’m going to need a list of people who were involved, parents, family members, all that fun stuff. I want to know everything there is to know about Michael Earle—who he’s talked to, who’s visited him, what time he took a shit yesterday. Everything.”

  “Gotcha,” Zoe said, the two of them getting up from their seats and heading towards the door. “One thing first,” she added.

  Kidd practically held his breath. “What?”

  “Coffee,” she said. “I’m gasping.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The case files were kept upstairs at Kingston Police Station, way up on the fourth floor in a room that time had almost certainly forgotten. They had acquired coffee, and all the details of the case that they needed in order to find the right file. Now it was just a matter of finding it in a room of disorganised boxes masquerading as a competent filing system so that they could really begin their investigation.