by GS Rhodes
“Totally understandable,” Janya said.
“We wanted to talk to you about Michael a little bit, if you don’t mind,” Campbell chimed in, pulling out his notebook and shuffling to the edge of the sofa, leaning in. “Our DI, Benjamin Kidd, he came around to see Michael yesterday and you were present for that.”
“Oh, God,” Brian groaned. “And now he thinks I’ve…that I’m the one that…”
Campbell cleared his throat, breaking the silence. “There was some shouting between you and your son, wasn’t there Mr Earle?” Campbell continued. “No one is accusing you of anything, I want you to remember that okay? But we would like to know what that was about.”
Brian looked skyward, his bottom lip wobbling as he did so. He looked like he might be about to break down.
“I can’t believe you’re trying to pin this on me,” he said.
“No one is pinning anything anywhere,” Janya said. “We would just like a little bit of clarification on what it was you were so upset about with Michael. And then, if you don’t mind, we would like you to let us know what you were doing yesterday afternoon between twelve and four in the afternoon.”
Brian’s gaze came back to the two of them so fast it was a wonder he didn’t make himself dizzy. “What’s that now?”
“We need to know what you were up to yesterday,” Janya repeated.
“To make sure I didn’t murder my own son?” He seemed outraged, the upset that Michael’s death had caused giving way to anger quicker than either Janya or Owen could blink.
Janya stood firm. She refused to be intimidated by him. “Absolutely,” she said. “You’re telling us that you didn’t do it, you are innocent until proven guilty. Give us an alibi or a location and we can count you out of our investigations. It makes our life a heck of a lot easier, to be honest.”
Campbell gave a sharp intake of breath next to Janya. Perhaps that might have been a little too harsh.
Brian eyed her carefully, seemingly not knowing how to take her. But he took a breath and steadied himself. At least he knew that the right thing to do wasn’t to start shouting the odds at Janya Ravel.
“I went round to see him because your lot had come round and harassed my wife yesterday,” he said. “She was distressed, upset that Michael was going to get in trouble again for something that he definitely didn’t do.”
“Which case are we talking about here?”
“I’m talking about this one,” Brian said. “My wife would be referring to the Holly Grant case too. She doesn’t think he killed her.”
“And you do?”
“I…I have my suspicions,” Brian said. “I like to think that what you lot do is the right thing and that he wouldn’t have gone down for it if he hadn’t done something. My wife is obviously convinced that isn’t quite how things worked out.”
Janya nodded, taking a few notes before looking at Brian again. They seemed to be getting somewhere with him at least.
“So your reaction yesterday was because…” She trailed off, waiting for him to fill in the blank.
“My reaction yesterday was because of him bringing all this trouble to us again,” he said. “I…I didn’t think he’d done anything wrong. He changed while he was in prison, apparently everyone does, but he came out more docile than he’d been. I didn’t believe he would be doing something like that, but…well…I had to make sure. I thought, if I went round there and had a word with him, if it was him, he would stop.”
“It was a little more than a word,” Janya said. “That’s what I heard anyway.”
“We’re very similar, he and I,” Brian said with a little laugh. “We’re both stubborn, neither one of us really likes to be called out on things, told what to do.” Janya probably could have told him that herself. “So me going round there and being confrontational definitely wouldn’t have helped things. He gave as good as he got. I guess DI Kidd just didn’t hear that part.”
Brian took a breath and looked back at the TV. There was a news report rolling around about Michael now. The news reports of his death didn’t look like they were being particularly kind, constant mentions of Holly Grant, of her murder, how he was a suspect in the current investigation too. Brian shut the TV off.
“I was trying to protect my son,” Brian said bluntly. “It was all I could think to do in the situation. Prison did awful things to him, and I…I didn’t want that to happen to him again. Not if I could help it.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
“I’m outside,” Andrea said into the phone. There wasn’t really a, “Hello,” not so much as a “How do you do?” before she launched straight into what she wanted from Kidd. Hardly the best way to get the DI’s attention, but because it was Andrea, he was listening.
“Why are you here?” Kidd asked. “I told you, I don’t know where he is, I—”
“Please,” Andrea said. “I don’t want to do this over the phone. It’s important.”
Kidd’s blood ran cold. Before he could even think to stop it his brain was running into overdrive as it thought of every single scenario that could be about to play out. Had they found Craig? Had they caught him? Had he gotten himself into even more trouble because of what Kidd had said to him last night?
“Where?” Kidd asked.
“We’re parked just outside The Rose Theatre,” she said. “You can’t miss it. Big black Mercedes.”
Kidd hung up the phone and started out of the station. He wasn’t about to tell Zoe where he was going, or that he was even going anywhere. He couldn’t deal with the questions. This was a moment where he needed to work alone. And he hated that for himself.
She wasn’t kidding when she said it would be obvious where they were. The car was literally parked outside the front of the theatre just opposite the police station. There were probably already five or six calls from the theatre and concerned members of the public. It wasn’t a parking space, but Andrea obviously didn’t care about that.
She was in the passenger seat, a heavy-set white man in a pair of dark sunglasses was in the driver's seat. It all looked a little bit official, like he was a hired chauffeur, but he had never thought of Andrea as the type to have such a thing. Though he also hadn’t thought she was the type to be running drugs all over the borough. Kidd was learning a lot about the people he thought were close to him over the last couple of days. The more he learned, the less he wanted to know.
“Get in,” she said as he got closer.
“Andrea, I have work to do, I can’t just—”
“When I said it was important, I meant it,” she interrupted. “Please, get in, this won’t take long.”
Kidd climbed into the back seat of the car without hesitation. He sat back in the plush, leather seat, trying to manoeuvre himself to get a little more legroom but the driver wasn’t allowing him that much. It looked like he would be chewing on his knees for the duration of this chat.
“Let’s go,” Andrea said to the driver.
“Wait a second—”
The doors to the car locked and the man in the front seat pulled away from the theatre so quickly it nearly pulled Kidd off his seat.
“Andrea, what the bloody hell are you doing?” Kidd barked. “I thought you wanted a chat.”
“I do,” she replied, suddenly sounding a lot calmer than she had over the phone. “But so does my husband.”
“And he couldn’t come with you to talk to me here?”
“He’s a very busy man, Ben, he has work of his own to do,” she replied, the eye roll implied in her tone. “It won’t take long. He just has a few questions for you, wants to clear things up.”
“So it’s not about Craig?”
She turned in her chair to look at him, her expression ice cold. “Oh, it’s definitely about Craig.”
“You had me worried over the phone that something had happened to him,” he said, breathing a sigh of relief. “So he’s okay?”
Andrea didn’t answer, turning her attention back to the road as the
driver swung them around the one-way system and beneath the railway bridge. There was a pub on a corner not too far away from town. They pulled into a side street and the car came to an abrupt stop.
Kidd’s heart beat double in his chest, the sweat quickly forming on his brow. This didn’t look good, not one bit. For all of the advice that he had given to young people in his life about not getting into cars with strangers, he’d just gotten into one with someone he assumed to be a friend, and look what was happening.
“He’s waiting inside,” Andrea said, her tone clipped, like something had annoyed her in the five minutes it had taken them to get from the station to here. “Samuel doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
Kidd’s phone pinged in his pocket.
ZOE: Where the bloody hell have you got to now?
He quickly tapped out a reply.
KIDD: Needed to pop out for some air. Won’t be long.
ZOE: Not to repeat myself, but don’t do anything stupid.
He pocketed his phone, quickly tapping a few buttons before he did so. He had no idea what was going to happen once they walked through those doors, but he certainly didn’t like how this was looking.
Fuck’s sake, Ben, how have you gotten yourself into this mess? he thought.
The Queens Arms was a beautiful red-brick building with ivy covering the outsides of it. The windows looked a little bit grubby, the planters hanging just below them looking like they needed a bit of attention, but maybe they looked a lot nicer when it didn’t feel like you were being forced inside against your will.
The driver got out of the car and watched Kidd intently, only following when Kidd followed after Andrea. He didn’t like this, he didn’t like this one bit.
She opened the front door and took them into the main bar area. Sat in a booth not too far away from the door was a man in a sky blue t-shirt and a pair of jeans. The t-shirt was a little bit bobbly where it had been through the washing machine one too many times, and the man filled it out quite well with muscular shoulders and a big chest. He wasn’t paying attention to them as they walked in, his eyes laser-focussed on his laptop and notebook.
“Won’t be a minute,” Samuel said, his voice a little growlier than Kidd remembered. Perhaps he was smoking a little more these days. After a few moments, he shut the laptop and turned to look at Kidd, and he managed to get a look at his face for the first time in about two years.
He’d not seen Samuel since the memorial service for Craig that had happened when the police had given up looking for him. It could have been the light, but time hadn’t been kind to Samuel. Gravity had taken hold and started to drag it towards the ground and the way he’d let his scraggly beard grow in, a patchwork of dark brown and grey hairs, made him look older than he truly was.
“Benjamin, lovely to see you,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Thank you for coming to see me at such short notice.”
“Didn’t really have much choice,” Kidd said with a forced smile. “When someone locks you in the back of a car, you just have to go wherever they’re taking you.”
“Well, after your chat with Andrea yesterday, I couldn’t see you coming along willingly,” Samuel said with a forced smile of his own.
Kidd almost wanted to laugh at how much of a cliché this was. He felt like Samuel should have been wearing a black suit and smoking a cigar, maybe even with a small glass of whiskey in front of him even though it was still morning. He had to stop himself from laughing, he couldn’t imagine that would go down well.
“What do you want?” Kidd asked. “Andrea said something about having questions.”
“Yes, I had one or two,” Samuel said. “Would you like to sit down?”
“I’d like to go back to work,” Kidd said. “I’m on a very time-sensitive case and this is a distraction.”
Samuel blinked. He clearly didn’t like being talked back to. “Well then, I’ll make sure I keep this short,” he said, closing his notebook and locking eyes with Kidd. “Where is Craig Peyton?”
Kidd rolled his eyes. “You’re not serious?” he replied. “I spoke to Andrea about this yesterday, she came to my house. I don’t know where Craig is. I said I would help you, but I can’t help you at the drop of a hat. Now, if you’ll let me go back to work—”
Kidd turned around to head back out the door to see that the driver of the car was blocking the way, and a friend had joined him. The friend wasn’t quite as tall, wasn’t quite as well built, but certainly looked like he could do some damage if asked. And Kidd had a feeling that Samuel wouldn’t hesitate to ask.
“This is all a bit much, isn’t it?” Kidd said with a laugh. “You trying to run some kind of Mafioso from a pub outside of Kingston Upon Thames?”
“I don’t think you should be laughing right now, Ben,” Samuel said. “You’ve really disappointed me.”
“Because I don’t know where someone is who’s played an expert game of Hide and Seek for the past two years?” Kidd snapped. “Carry on playing your little Mafia games, Sam, I don’t know where Craig is, and I’ve got a job to do.”
“Yes, you do have a job to do,” Samuel said. “And your first job is going to be letting us into your lovely boyfriend’s apartment so we can have a word with Craig.”
Kidd’s eyes widened.
“That got your attention, didn’t it?” Samuel said. “Maybe it’s best that you don’t take a seat, Ben. We’ve got places to be after all.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
“Thank you, Brian,” Janya said once he had given them the full details of his alibi. There were a few things to check out, a couple of people to check on to make sure he was telling the truth, but it felt watertight. After everything he had said, Janya had enough confidence to say that he didn’t kill Michael. It didn’t seem like he had the capacity to. “Can you tell us a little more about Michael?” she asked. “You mentioned how prison had changed him.”
Brian nodded and sighed. “He was always such a jolly person,” he said. “He was always out with friends, or with Holly and her friends. We didn’t get to see a lot of him, but when we did he was always in good spirits. Prison broke him. It absolutely shattered him.”
Janya had seen it many times before. Even the hardiest of people came out of prison broken, not quite the same as they were before. It was a fault of the system as far as she was concerned, not that she could ever voice that of course. It was the only system they had right now and it wasn’t her job to reform it. They needed rehabilitation, and that was in short supply.
“We used to visit him all the time,” Brian said. “We had to, it was what kept him sane. He got lonely in there. We could only go once a week, we tried to up it to twice but it was hard to keep up with it when we both have jobs and lives of our own to live.”
“You shouldn’t feel bad about that,” Campbell said. “Your lives couldn’t go on hold for him.”
“I wish we could have done more, though,” Brian said. “We live in a very nice area, you’ve seen it, it’s lovely. But that means it's expensive so we’re both working as often as we can just to get by.”
“Completely understandable,” Campbell said.
“He did start to brighten up towards the end of his sentence though,” Brian said, the ghost of a smile dancing on his lips. “When there was light at the end of the tunnel, you could see it in him. He didn’t know when exactly, but he knew that it was coming to an end for him. It was like seeing the old Michael. And he kept talking about other people that had come to visit him.”
Janya blinked. “Other people?”
“I don’t know what happened exactly,” Brian said. “But it changed him, it really did.”
“How?”
“He started talking about himself a little more, about his life before, not about his life in prison,” Brian said. “He would talk about how he was innocent. My wife heard more of it than me because I was at work a lot of the time. I’m glad I wasn’t there for it because it would have been hard for me to hear aft
er he pleaded guilty in the courtroom, but he started to talk about it more and more. I was wondering if he was going to try and appeal it when he got out but…” He held his hands out. “Nothing really came of that. No one was really looking into it until…well…until all this.”
“Who was it that went to visit him?” Janya asked. “Do you think they were influencing what he was feeling?”
“Oh, I have no doubt,” Brian said. “Lindsay wouldn’t stop talking about it. She thought this person was some kind of angel who had come to save her son.” He shook his head at that. “I think that’s why this hurts her all the more. She thought his life was going to turn around when he got out and…it just seemed to get worse for him, didn’t it?”
“Do you know who was visiting him?” Janya asked.
Brian took a moment, seeming to wrack his brain as he tried to figure out exactly who it was he had been speaking to. Eventually, the shook his head.
“I don’t know who it was,” Brian said. “I don’t think he ever said. But he was glad to have someone who was listening to him, glad to have someone to talk to about being innocent. I think he had spent so long feeling like he was guilty, feeling like he deserved it, that he couldn’t see it for himself anymore. But once they started visiting he wanted a life again. And look where that got him.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Andrea hadn’t left so suddenly last night. After she’d finished talking to Kidd she had waited around to see if he had been lying to her. It turned out to have been the smartest thing she’d done since they had started looking for Craig. Without even meaning to, Kidd had taken her right to him and he cursed his own stupidity that he had let that happen.
They took him back to the car, Samuel joining them this time, and drove to John’s apartment building. Kidd’s heart was in his mouth the whole way.
For once in your life, please have listened to me, he thought. Please have vanished.
