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

by GS Rhodes

  “Phil did it,” Dennis said quietly. “He told me what had happened. He had always cared for Holly, had done from the day he had met her, and while Michael was away, he had gone to see her at their flat. There was an argument and Phil lashed out.” Harrison tensed, his finger hovering over the trigger. “He killed her. I don’t know if he meant to, I wasn’t there, but what happened afterwards was as intentional as it comes. You don’t cut up someone’s body and leave it at a riverside by accident, do you?”

  Dennis shook his head and looked over at Harrison. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was never a father, never a parent, I didn’t know what the right thing to do was in that situation. I wanted to get to know him and if he went to prison then I wouldn’t have had that chance.”

  “So, instead, you let an innocent man go to prison for killing my daughter?” Harrison got closer to Dennis, pressing the gun to his temple. “Did Michael have anything to do with it? Or was it just an easy way out?”

  Dennis’s breathing was heavy now, tears rolling down his face as Harrison pushed the gun hard into the side of his head. Kidd didn’t want to move. If he dived for Harrison, he would pull the trigger and it would all be over. He looked at Zoe, whose eyes were fixed on the scene. There was no movement from outside, no sign of the officers he had asked for. They needed more time.

  “Michael had nothing to do with it,” Dennis said. “Michael Earle was innocent.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Simon Powell arrived not too long after the other police officers had arrived. There weren’t many of them there, a couple of uniformed PCs stood around the outside of the property, another couple fending off nosy neighbours and members of the press who were wondering what was going on. They were stretched pretty thin, or at least it seemed that way.

  Simon remembered what it was like when he was in uniform. There was always a crime scene that needed to be watched over, and it was always a decision about how many officers they could send without leaving the rest of the borough vulnerable. It was all stuff that the general public had no idea about. Sometimes there were barely enough officers to do the bare minimum.

  Ravel and Campbell were already inside having a look around, making sure that Caleb Grant was alright. He probably didn’t remember what it was like when his sister was murdered, but Simon imagined there were a lot of police officers roaming around his house then. It must have been strange.

  “You took your time,” Campbell said, stepping out of the front door. “Didn’t fancy getting back into the field so quickly?”

  “You’re the work-shy one, Owen, not me,” Powell parried. “Have you found anything?”

  “We’re waiting for Forensics,” Campbell said, stretching out his fingers to give a satisfying crack. He was wearing bright blue plastic gloves. He clearly didn’t want to waste any time. “There are some clothes in the back of the cupboard,” he continued. “They’re pretty saturated with blood.”

  “Why do they always choose the back of the cupboard?” Powell asked.

  “I don’t know,” Campbell replied. “Panic, I would guess. They probably just throw them in there thinking that nobody would ever think to look. It’s the first place that I go.”

  “Where’s Janya?” he asked.

  “She’s inside with Caleb,” Campbell answered, shaking his head. “Poor lad is pretty cut-up about the whole thing, if you’ll pardon the expression.” Campbell chuckled, Powell resisted the urge to thump him. “Don’t think he’s stopped shaking since we got here.”

  “Can hardly blame him,” Powell said. “What can I do to help?”

  Campbell looked back at the house, apparently assessing where to send Simon.

  “Garden might be an idea,” Campbell said. “There are a couple more rooms upstairs I’m going to look at, but there’s a garage and a shed, might be worth taking a look.”

  Simon felt like he was being fobbed off a little bit, like Campbell wanted to be the one to find anything that might help the investigation. He’d already found the blood-soaked clothes. He probably wanted to find a murder weapon, something that will make the case as open and shut as possible.

  But Simon wasn’t about to complain.

  He made his way inside, pulling on a pair of gloves before he opened the back door. Even though all of their prints were on file, it wouldn’t do well to contaminate things any more than they had to. Also, you never knew what you were going to find. There were germs and disgusting things everywhere. And who knew what you were going to find in someone’s back garden.

  Powell shuddered at the thought.

  He started in the garage, rummaging his way through bags of old clothes, rubbish, that had been accumulated over the years and dumped here. His mum’s garage was exactly like this. She’d been saying she was going to clear it out for most of his life but she never did. She just kept adding to it. The whole thing was like a time capsule.

  When that felt like it was a bust, he stepped back into the garden and saw the shed. It seemed to loom. Maybe it was because the afternoon was turning into dusk, maybe it was because it was down at the other end of the garden, a couple of trees drooping over the top of it, but there was something about it that looked sinister.

  Powell knew there was going to be something in there. It would be just his luck that there would be something in there.

  He took the keys out of the garage door, finding the oldest looking key he could, a long, rusted one, and marched down to the shed. He put the key in the lock, having to jiggle it a bit to get it to fit. It took a bit of effort to even get it to turn.

  There was a heavy thud as it unlocked.

  Powell took a deep breath.

  He opened it and nearly threw up. He was about to venture further in when a sound came from the house. A scream.

  Janya, he thought.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Kidd stared at Dennis Wool as the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. He’d covered for Phil Jackson the entire time. The pieces of the puzzle that were missing, the story that wasn’t getting told, was all being kept by the DI.

  He half expected to hear a gunshot as Harrison Grant pulled the trigger, but nothing came. Instead, there was the sound of him taking a deep breath and a step back from the man in the armchair.

  “I just wanted to hear it from the man himself,” Harry said, though he didn’t stop pointing the gun at him.

  “Did Michael tell you all about it in prison?” Kidd asked.

  “Exactly,” Harry replied. “We talked about it at length.”

  “Why did you go to see him?” Kidd asked. It didn’t make any sense to him.

  Harrison laughed. “I was in therapy,” he replied. “Around the fifteenth anniversary of Holly’s murder, I started to lose control. I couldn’t handle everything that was going on in my life, I wasn’t coping. So, I started therapy. And it was my therapist's idea that I go and visit Michael Earle in prison, that I face the man who killed my daughter. I had planned to go there and give him a piece of my mind, to tear him apart, but what I found was a fairly docile man.”

  Harrison seemed to be remembering it, like a film playing out in his head. He seemed distracted, distracted enough that maybe Kidd would be able to make a break for him and prise the gun out of his hand, but he didn’t. Kidd wanted to hear what he had to say, wanted to know where this was heading.

  “He apologised for what happened,” Harrison said. “And then he told me that he didn’t do it. I called him a liar, I shouted at him, screamed, but he didn’t react. He just sat there and took it. That reaction was enough to intrigue me. So I let him tell me where he was when she died.”

  “And what did he tell you about Phil?”

  “He told me that Phil had been his best friend, that they had a whole history together and he never expected that he would be betrayed by him,” Harrison answered. “Michael didn’t know all the gory details, of course, but he knew that it was Phil who had done it. He couldn’t put all the pieces of the puzzle together, but onc
e he told me about Phil finding his long lost father and I figured out who that was, it was clear to me what had happened. And this just about confirms it, doesn’t it?”

  “But the body parts,” Kidd said. “Why’d you do that?”

  “A warning,” Harrison replied. “I started with Oscar Harkey, to set the ball rolling and make sure people were nervous. He didn’t really have a lot to do with it in the grand scheme of things, but he didn’t do enough. But the real culprit was our friend Dennis here. Not quite man enough to go to the police when the body part arrived for you, were you?”

  Kidd turned his attention to Dennis who stared back at the detective, somehow still managing to look defiant with a gun to his head.

  “You got the same message as Oscar, didn’t you, Dennis?” Harrison growled. “Just couldn’t bring yourself to tell anyone, because if you did, you would have gotten yourself in trouble, eh?”

  Dennis nodded. There wasn’t a shred of remorse in him. He was looking out for himself, trying to make sure that he got away with it, that no one found out. But even in all of that, he was still too much of a coward to get Harrison out of the picture.

  “But why kill Michael? You were trying to help him, to clear his name,” Kidd said. “It doesn’t make any sense to kill him.”

  “Not the best moment in all of this,” Harrison said. “I hadn’t planned to.”

  That much Kidd had gathered. The fact that they’d had his DNA all over the place told them that much. But it still didn’t make sense to Kidd.

  “When he found out what was going on, Michael was scared,” Harrison said. “I went around to talk to him about it, to tell him that I was going to clear his name and make sure Dennis and Phil went down for what happened. But he wasn’t happy. He didn’t want it to be this way. I tried to tell him that I was just trying to help him, just trying to avenge my Holly, but he was angry, he didn’t want me to do it. He told me that the way I was doing things was putting him in the frame for another murder and he didn’t want to go back to prison.”

  Harrison shook his head. He didn’t regret killing Philippa Kay, he didn’t regret cutting up her body and sending parts of her to people as a warning, but he did regret killing Michael Earle, the person he was doing this for in the first place.

  “It got heated and I lashed out,” Harrison said it plainly, like he was trying to remove any emotion from the situation. “I lashed out because I thought he would go to you and it went too far and I…I ended up killing him. I didn’t think before I left the house, I just ran, I had to get away and finish the job. I figured you’d be onto us at some point, especially with Michael dead. It was one less person in the frame for it. The eyes weren’t my idea though.” There was a gleam in Harrison’s eye. Was it pride? Whatever it was, it sent a chill through Kidd. “They were Caleb’s idea.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Kidd breathed. He suddenly thought about his three officers at the Grant residence. He hoped that there was safety in numbers, that there were other officers there who could assist. He’d thought it was one or the other, he didn’t think it could have been both.

  And he’d had Caleb right there. He’d had Caleb in custody, in the police station, in interview and he’d fooled him.

  “So Caleb killed Philippa Kay?” Kidd asked.

  Harrison smirked. “A team effort.”

  Kidd felt sick.

  “We thought the eyes would be enough to throw you off the trail,” Harrison said, still smirking. “And it worked, didn’t it? When Caleb came back from the station he said he’d turned you onto Phil, that you didn’t suspect a thing.”

  “Lucky for us you fucked it up so badly killing Michael Earle then, eh?” Kidd snapped, feeling that rage bubbling beneath the surface. He was trying to figure out a way to do this without anyone getting hurt. He was sure he could hear sirens in the distance. Would they make it in time to do anything? Would it just panic Harrison and make him do something really stupid? Kidd didn’t know if it was a chance he could take.

  Harrison was still smiling. It made Kidd angry, more angry than he ever thought possible. Not a shred of remorse.

  He turned the gun on Dennis Wool again and it took every bit of Kidd’s strength not to lunge for him. He’d distracted him all he could, time was up and he needed to act fast.

  As Kidd was about to leap at Harrison, a clattering sound came from the other side of the room. A door swung open, a figure bursting through it and running at Harrison. Kidd barely recognised him, the room was so dark it was hard to make him out.

  There were two gunshots and a thud as the figure hit the floor.

  Instinctively, Kidd and Sanchez ran over to the body as Harrison made a break for the door. The man groaned, blood already seeping out of him and onto the hardwood floor.

  “Go,” Sanchez barked. “I’ll call an ambulance, go after him.”

  Kidd made a break for the door, hurrying down the hallway in time to see blue lights flashing outside on the street. He heard someone yelling at Harrison, “GET DOWN!” Kidd carried on to the end of the corridor, making it there in time to see armed police surrounding Harrison Grant. Kidd directed the officers inside to where Dennis was, telling them about the man who had been shot. He let out a heavy breath. The night wasn’t yet over. He took out his phone and called DC Powell.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  The Grant residence was a hive of activity. Two police officers had grabbed hold of Caleb Grant and taken him out of the house, piling him into the back of a police car and driving him off to the station. The forensics team arrived on the scene and had taken the body Powell had found in the shed away for testing, though it was pretty clear that it was going to be Philippa Kay.

  When Kidd and Sanchez arrived, the team were gathered outside, DCI Weaver stood among them. He beckoned them closer, the six of them stood outside the Grant residence bathed in the blue lights of a nearby police car.

  “Just in time,” Weaver said as they approached. “Everything alright?”

  Kidd explained what had happened at DI Wool’s house, how Harrison had admitted to everything and also incriminated Caleb along the way.

  “Didn’t really need to tell us about Caleb,” DC Ravel said. “Got to experience that one firsthand.”

  “What happened?” Sanchez asked.

  “Campbell was upstairs looking through things while I was with Caleb,” she started. “He wanted to use the bathroom so I let him go, not really thinking anything of it. Next thing I know there is a blood-curdling scream upstairs—”

  “I would hardly call it blood-curdling,” Campbell interrupted. “A perfectly manly howl of surprise.”

  “Sorry, mate,” Powell chimed in, unable to keep the smile off his face. Owen Campbell would never live this one down. “I’m going to have to go with Janya on this one, that was a scream. I heard it from the end of the garden.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Anyway,” Janya continued. “I heard this scream so I rush up the stairs, closely followed by one of the officers from outside and then Simon. And Caleb is over Owen with a knife in his hand.”

  “He jumped me,” Campbell said. “I was rummaging around in his cupboard—”

  “They always hide things in the back of cupboards,” Kidd said.

  “Exactly,” Campbell continued. “So I’m looking in the cupboard and hear a noise, I turn around and Caleb is running towards me with a bloody knife in his hand. He caught me off guard so I’m already on the back foot.”

  “I had to drag him off Campbell,” Ravel said. “Then the officer cuffed him and took him away. It doesn’t sound quite as eventful as what was happening to you, but all the same, we weren’t exactly sitting around and doing nothing.”

  “We’ve also got to the bottom of the Michael Earle case too, boss,” Kidd said. “Well, I say we’ve got to the bottom of it, it looks like Harrison got there ahead of us, but we can get all of that cleared up now I think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mi
chael was away just like he said he was,” Kidd said. “Phil killed Holly after an argument, and DI Wool helped to cover it up.”

  “What?” Weaver asked, confused. “But why?”

  “When DI Wool saw the news about Camille, Phil’s mother, dying he recognized her as someone he’d slept with. He found that he was Phil’s biological father and sought him out,” Kidd said. “The two had been getting to know one another when everything happened with Holly and, I’m little fuzzy on the details of this part, but Phil either asked him for his help, or Dennis offered to do it. Either way, it wasn’t Michael.”

  Kidd explained the story as best he could, trying not to leave out any of the details but it was still a little bit fuzzy in his head. It had all happened so quickly.

  “Phil tried to save him,” Kidd said. “He jumped out from the other room and tried to stop Harrison from shooting Dennis. He got shot twice. Harrison panicked, I think.”

  “Is he alright?” Campbell asked.

  “Do you want to maybe get shot twice and then we’ll ask you that question?” Janya snarked.

  “He’s alive,” Kidd replied, not able to keep the smirk off his face. “One bullet in the arm, the other in the shoulder. It turns out Harrison isn’t a particularly good shot.”

  “Lucky for Phil,” Zoe added.

  Weaver took it in. A lot had happened in the last hour or so, and really, the work had only just begun. As beneficial as it was that Harrison had admitted it, incriminating his son in the process, there was no guarantee that he would continue to help them as the case moved on. As for Phil and Dennis, if they’d denied it and tried to get away with it before, there was nothing to say they wouldn’t try to do it all again. That would take some time.

  “Good work,” Weaver said eventually, addressing the team as a whole. “A job well done, I think.” He looked back at the Grant residence and then back at the team. “Back to the office, I think,” he continued. “We’ll get to work on getting all of this processed tomorrow. Get your things and get yourselves home. I don’t want to see a single one of you at your desks when I get back there.”