A Carriage of Misjustice

by Charlie Cochrane

  Pru was right again. Sometimes it was the tiny things, occurrences that meant very little to the people who’d seen them, that gave the police a vital clue when drawn together.

  “It’s dulled their curiosity, as well,” Robin said. “They’ve been so wound up in making sure he and Dawn are okay and planning this fundraising stuff that they’ve not been gossiping about the victim. Or so they say. You’d have thought they’d want to know why the bloke was killed and on their turf.”

  Adam had shown that curiosity when there’d been a murder at Lindenshaw school, where he was working. He’d said since that he’d never have been able to get over the incident if the police hadn’t been able to identify the culprit.

  “Greg matters to them,” Callum said, quietly. “Osment doesn’t. That may sound harsh, but it’s true. Nobody seems to be fundraising for a memorial to the dead man or to support his family. And that can’t just be about helping the living rather than the dead.”

  “He didn’t seem to be Mr. Popular, apart from with his wife.” Robin studied the picture of the dead man, as it stared accusingly from the incident board. He remembered telling Adam when he’d been called away on secondment that some poor sod deserved justice. The more he got to learn about Osment, the less he found the term poor sod fitted. Still, he had a duty to serve the law by investigating every case without prejudice, no matter how much he disliked the victim. “We’ve been assuming he was going to the club with a particular person in mind, but what if it was other than that? Narked at getting a thumping on the Saturday, so back to take revenge. The smashed picture in the clubhouse. Pru, you took a snap of it on your phone.”

  “Yes. Hold on.” Pru scrolled through her photo reel. “As vandalism goes it’s nothing much. Niggly rather than nasty.”

  “I was interested in who was in the team. Can you get it large enough to see the faces or names?”

  “Not really. You’ll have to check when you’re chasing up the forensics. Were you thinking Dave?”

  “I’m keeping an open mind.” Time to add scrutinising the picture to his list of jobs. “Let’s say for the moment that Osment went to the club to cause trouble. How did he get in?”

  “Seems obvious.” Laurence lifted two fingers and counted the options. “Either he got a copy of the keys somehow, or he was let in by someone who had a set. We got a list of keyholders from the groundsman, by the way, and it doesn’t help to narrow things down, even when you take into account the change of locks. One of the barmen left two months ago and it took a couple of weeks to get his set back. I’m surprised they didn’t change the locks again after that, although he only had ones for bar area access.”

  Robin nodded. “Can you follow that up? Get in touch with all the keyholders, including for that other dressing room as well as the bar. All their alibis for the night in question and how much chance there was that someone could have borrowed their keys. Not simply the chances of Osment borrowing them. We also have to consider whether the doors weren’t locked in the first place, leaving him an easy way in either by arrangement or to lure him in if someone got wind he was up to no good and was setting a trap. After the deed, the killer simply secured everything behind him—or her—when they slipped away.”

  Laurence scanned down his list, then nodded. “I’ll get right on it.”

  “Good. I’m going to go down to forensics and chivvy them up. I understand they’re stretched but I’d like to see this bumped up the priority list.” Robin knew—from Betteridge—that they were also handling a mass of evidence from a case involving possible sexual abuse of a child. He didn’t envy them having to juggle resources. “Then I want to see Derek Preese. Callum, can you get on the blower right now and organise that for the earliest opportunity today? Pru, I’m going to take Callum with me for the interview, simply because Preese might react differently to men than women. I hate playing that card but sometimes . . .” He shrugged.

  “Sometimes you have to be pragmatic.” The sergeant didn’t seem bothered. “What do you want Sally and me to do?”

  “Talk to Joe. We’ve not been to see him yet, so we can still go down the new team revisiting all the witnesses approach. If you get the chance to talk to his brother, as well, then gently finding out what he was doing that Wednesday would be good. Usual subtlety—his name’s come up in the course of our enquiries. Not easy to achieve the right tone down a phone line, but I’d rather one of us did it than get the local officers involved. Even if local in this instance may well be Abbotston.” Robin jumped off the desk where he’d been perching and clapped sharply, as he sometimes did when notifying Campbell it was time for walkies. “Let’s get going.”

  He and Callum were halfway out the door when Sally shouted across from the desk where she’d been answering the phone. “It’s Dave, sir. He wants to speak to you.”

  “Thanks.” Robin recrossed the room and took the receiver. “Chief Inspector Bright speaking.”

  “Glad I caught you, Chief Inspector.” Dave sounded less bullish than the day before. “You asked me yesterday if I want to add to my statement. I do. On two counts.”

  “Let me grab a pen.” Robin smiled gratefully as Sally slipped both pen and paper into his hand. “Go on.”

  “Right at the start, we had a team huddle and coach mentioned there’d been some attempted vandalism at the club the weekend before. I wasn’t sure if you knew about that.”

  “We knew about the vandalism.” Not about Derek Preese mentioning it, though. “What’s the other thing?”

  “What happened afterwards. I’ve just remembered and it means I wasn’t the last person in the changing rooms. Joe went for a slash not long after the huddle, so maybe around five or ten minutes past seven. If there’d been a body in the toilets then, he’d have raised the alarm.”

  Why this convenient revelation now? “How can you be so sure of the time?”

  “Because it’s a fining offence.” Dave’s grin was almost audible down the line, although whether it was delight at the fine being imposed or at having got himself off the hook wasn’t clear. “Ask any real rugby fan and they’ll tell you there’s always kangaroo courts on tour and at Hartwood we apply a similar system all the time. Money raised gets split between charity and the Christmas do. It’ll go to Greg, this year.”

  Robin avoided getting into detail about those sporting courts. “Right, I need you to come in to the station and sign an amended statement.”

  “Will do. Not sure how it will help, though. Joe was straight in and out, with only enough time to take a slash, not do anything else.”

  “Put that all in your statement, please, with as accurate an account of the timings as you can give us. Then we can double-check it.”

  As soon as the phone was down, Robin said, “You need to hear this before we go.” He related the conversation as close to word for word as he could manage. “Sally, can you get an amended statement ready, please?”

  “Will do, sir. Odd that he happens to remember this now, isn’t it?”

  “My thoughts too.” Robin glanced at the incident board, then back to his team, who were all no doubt waiting for him to comment further. “If Joe has a twin brother and they’re as alike as two peas, then it’s possible the amount of time he spent off the pitch is irrelevant. He goes off, swops outfits with the brother who then comes on the pitch, leaving Joe with plenty of time to meet Osment, kill him, tidy up, and leave, locking up after himself. A player at the club would have had greater opportunity to copy the keys than the victim would.”

  “Puts Dave in the clear, though,” Pru observed. “Assuming it’s true.”

  “That’s a big assumption without corroboration. And as Sally says, terribly convenient that he’s happened to remember it now and so show he couldn’t have done it.”

  “Why did nobody mention it before?” Pru asked. “Or did they and somehow we’ve missed it?”

  The constables looked at each other blankly. “I’m sure we did ask them about their movements,” Laure
nce said at last, “but I’ve got to be honest and say the investigation didn’t run as smoothly as it should have done in the early days. I’m not a doctor, but I think Robertson wasn’t well before his appendix blew up on him. Maybe his mind wasn’t on the job as it should have been. And Superintendent Betteridge was focussed on the drugs and abuse cases . . .” He shrugged.

  “It sounds like we’re making excuses,” Callum chipped in, “but we were stretched to breaking point. That’s another reason why the superintendent wanted you to come here. Not only the murder case. She says you’ve got a track record of sorting problems like this out.”

  Helping to sweep Abbotston clean of rotten wood counted as a track record, but he appreciated the notion that he could lick people into shape. “I value your honesty. Let’s draw a line under this and start again. It might have been that if you’d asked, they’d not have told us, anyway.”

  The relieved expressions on the young officers’ faces spoke volumes.

  “You’ve done well so far on my watch,” Robin added. That was true, and it helped nobody to kick someone when they were down. “Right, in light of this, there’s a change of plan. Pru, I want us to go and see Joe this afternoon. I’d like to reassure the rest of you that strategy is nothing to do with what we just discussed—if we were at Abbotston, Pru and I would be handling any equivalent interview.”

  “You can trust him on that,” Pru said, with an impish grin. “He’s one of the few coppers I’ve ever known who struggles to tell a lie. That’s why he doesn’t play poker.”

  “That’s enough of that.” Robin was glad of the endorsement, though. “Instead of complimenting me, can you contact Andy and ask him about Joe nipping off for a slash. He’s the only one of them I think I even halfway trust at the moment. Sally and Callum, I’d like you to go through all the other players’ statements in case there are any other instances of people going off the field we might have missed. Then follow your noses about finding a connection between Joe and Osment. Or Sam and Osment, come to think of it. Keep us up-to-date with what you find. And if there’s any chance of finding out whether Sam can do first aid, that would be great.”

  Having chivvied the forensics team—they promised they’d have all the information back by late afternoon if not before—Robin and Pru set off to see Derek Preese. Slight change to the original plan of two male officers tackling him, but the new information about Joe had meant Robin wanted his best officer at his side for this interview. Preese had agreed to meet them at the local branch of a well-known optician where he worked.

  “We can add that to the list of places we’ve conducted interviews, sir,” Pru chirped. “Never done an optician’s before. Or a dentist, come to think of it.”

  A discussion about strange venues for meeting witnesses kept them going all the way to the most convenient car park, Pru tactfully avoiding mentioning interviews in school libraries and offices, although those had been the first ones to spring to Robin’s mind. Adam’s green eyes flashing across a junior-school-sized table and all the inappropriate thoughts they’d given rise to.

  Once ensconced with Derek Preese in a small but private office, Robin could see why the female officers had got flustered about the man. He was feeling rather hot under the collar, as well. The coach must have been a stunner thirty years ago and he’d kept the aura. How many young men under his care fantasised about a May to December—or to be fair, September—relationship with him? Robin recalled something a mate of his at university had said about the rowing coach, who was in his fifties. “He’s a total silver fox.” One who’d been drooled over by all the girls and some of the blokes.

  Time to get his mind back on the case or else Pru would rib him mercilessly, especially after the stick she’d received after the first interview.

  He thanked the bloke for seeing them yet again, emphasising that fresh information was cropping up all the time, which meant them needing to revisit things they’d already asked about. “For example, we’ve got a small discrepancy the night Greg got injured. According to your statement, when you rang Dawn, she said she was going to drive to the hospital.”

  “That’s right.”

  “She says she had no intention of driving because she’d had too much to drink. She needed to get a lift or a taxi.”

  Preese, sighing, spread his hands. “I wish she’d told me that. Plenty of the lads would have volunteered to go and get her. I can only think that she said she’d drive without thinking—she must have been in shock. Or maybe she said she couldn’t drive and I misheard because I was in shock.”

  Without a recording of the conversation, Robin had no way of assessing who was telling the truth, nor whether it mattered if both were giving half the tale. Still, discrepancies niggled at him. “Okay. So, changing tack, can you talk us briefly through what you did on the evening. I’m guessing you’d start with drills.”

  “We start with warm-ups,” Preese said, “or else I’d have a string of injuries on my hands.” His voice—with a gentle Welsh lilt—flowed mellifluously through exercises and technical drills, then on to some training ground moves. They’d been working on those when Greg went down.

  No wonder this man was so popular with his charges, given that he spoke with a weight of authority and what sounded like a wealth of affection for the players.

  “Thanks for that.” Robin pretended to consult his notes. “Thing is, you haven’t mentioned that you talked to the players about the recent vandalism at the club.”

  “Very true, Mr. Bright. They’d have wanted to know, seeing as Jamie was one of ours and they worked so hard to raise money for the bench. I also wanted to make sure they took good care of their belongings, so I gave them a heads-up before we started.” Preese fiddled with what might have been a piece of optical equipment, a small metal device resembling an instrument of torture. “I suppose I should have mentioned it on my statement but it didn’t seem relevant. You’re going to say you’re the people to decide what’s relevant, I guess, so you’ll have to forgive me.” He produced a flashing smile that would have had most people forgiving him anything.

  “Did you know that Osment is suspected of doing the vandalising?” Pru asked.

  “Never.” Preese peered at the sergeant, then at Robin. “You mean it, don’t you? What a little shite.” He raised both hands. “I know I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but from what I hear from Greg and Dawn, he’s no great loss. Did Tom Weatherell recognise him? He hasn’t mentioned it if he did.”

  “He says he didn’t realise.” And until they had the forensics to link Osment to the scene on the Saturday, this was still all conjecture. “The fundraising. You put half the money towards educating players about drinking. Don’t take this question the wrong way, but was Jamie Weatherell a heavy drinker?”

  Preese shook his head. “He had his moments, like all lads that age, but he was growing out of them. Had a lucky escape, see. Nearly came off his bike postmatch because he’d been on the sauce. Stuck to shandy after that. Sensible lad. We all miss him.”

  “I’m sure you do.” Details noted, Robin pressed on. “Why did you insist Dave got cleaned up before he went to casualty? They’re not going to be bothered at the hospital by a spot of mud.”

  “No, but we were getting bothered by Dave. He was making the situation worse, going on about how sorry he was and saying he’d never forgive himself if Greg was paralysed. Not what Greg needed to hear.” Preese raised his eyebrows. “I wanted to get him out of the way.”

  That chimed with what Andy had told them. Maybe they could clear up another niggle while they were at it. “You wanted to get him out of the way, but he kept refusing to go into the changing rooms. You can imagine how suspicious that appears. Like he knew about the body in there and didn’t want it discovered.”

  Preese gave Robin a long, thoughtful look. “I thought he was being bolshie. He can be, you know.”

  “What else has he been bolshie about?” Pru asked.

  “Oh, this and that.�
� Preese dismissed the question with a wave of his hand. “Type of person who makes a decision and then sticks by it, right or wrong. He felt responsible for Greg so he wasn’t going to let him out of his sight, no matter what we said. If that makes sense.”

  Pru kept her own counsel on that. “Can you tell us about Joe Woakes leaving the field during training?”

  “He did, that’s right. He had a quick visit to the loo. Taken short, the daft sod. Most expensive slash he’s ever had, given that it cost him ten pounds.”

  “Why wasn’t that in your original statement?” Robin wondered if other titbits would emerge, the longer the case remained unsolved and as people began covering their backs.

  “Probably because he was in and out like a flash—any longer and his fine would have gone up.”

  “All this stuff about fines makes it even more mysterious why people didn’t mention his brief absence.” Robin waited for an answer, but all he got was Preese shrugging and spreading his hands. “Do you know Joe has a twin brother?”

  “Everybody knows that. Everybody in the squad. Sam, I think he’s called. Mind you, with lads that age if you shout Sam, Ben, Tom, or Joe at them, you’re ninety percent certain of getting the name right. Why do you . . . Ah, I get it. You’re not thinking he went in the changing room but his brother came out in his place, giving him an alibi? Or the other way around, I suppose.” Preese pushed away the metal object he’d been fiddling with. “Isn’t that a bit far-fetched? I’m sure I’ve seen something similar on the telly.”

  “I’ve seen things in real life that trump that for implausibility,” Robin insisted.

  “There was a case in the news, recently,” Pru said. “That bishop who was done for sexual abuse. He had a twin brother whose place he sometimes took at services. They got away with the switch.”