Dead Water

by Matt Brolly

  He was about to knock again when the door creaked open. Bleary eyed, Hogg squinted at him. ‘Lambert?’ he said, a lilt to his words Lambert hadn’t heard before.

  ‘The very same. May I come in?’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Twelve fifty-five am.’

  Hogg opened the door. He was wearing a thick maroon dressing gown, tied loosely across his torso. ‘That late? You better come in.’

  Lambert followed the man into the living room where the reason for the man’s change in voice became evident. A half empty bottle of single malt sat on the mantelpiece, Hogg having already retrieved his glass. ‘Get you one?’ he slurred, swigging at the light gold liquid.

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Lambert, impatiently. ‘We need to speak.’

  ‘I’m here, aren’t I?’ said Hogg, unsteady on his feet.

  ‘You should sit down. May I use your bathroom,’ said Lambert, deciding a scan of Hogg’s house was preferable to talking to him in this condition.

  ‘You must think I was born yesterday,’ said Hogg, clearly more drunk than Lambert had first anticipated. ‘This is where you pretend to go to the toilet and find some incriminating evidence on me.’

  Lambert tensed. ‘Is there some incriminating evidence to be found, Mr Hogg?’

  Hogg was thrown by the question. He swayed on the spot as he considered what Lambert had said, his face an ever-changing mask of comical gestures. ‘Follow me,’ he said, leaving the room and heading upstairs.

  Despite Hogg’s inebriated state, Lambert withdrew his baton not wanting to be taken by surprise. Hogg stopped at the top of the stairs, lurching backwards in a precarious fashion. Lambert skipped up and pressed his hand against the man’s back to stop him falling. ‘What do you want to show me?’ he asked.

  Hogg gestured to one of the two bedrooms. Lambert pushed him aside, his eyes never leaving him as he opened the door into what must have been Hogg’s office.

  Every inch of the room was covered in images and newspaper cuttings about Joseph Wyatt. Hundreds of yellow post-it notes covered the images. Lambert’s hand went to his mouth. He turned towards Hogg for an explanation, but the reporter was no longer there.

  10

  The masked man – Wyatt – fed Tillman intermittently on dry bread and water. The irony wasn't lost. Tillman pleaded with the man every time he appeared in the makeshift prison, but not once did Wyatt speak to him.

  Earlier – that day, yesterday, or minutes ago, Tillman couldn’t tell – Tillman had spat out the bread force-fed into his mouth. Why, he wasn't sure - he was starving and his whole body craved sustenance. He kidded himself it was a way of proving he was still willing to fight, that he wouldn’t be dictated to by the man. But he had enough self-awareness left to know it was desperate attempt to end it. He was refusing to eat because he didn’t want to survive, didn’t want to endure another session of the waterboarding.

  Although his eyes had adjusted to the darkness of his confinement, he still had no clue as to his whereabouts. His prison appeared to be little more than a wooden shed. Every time Wyatt opened the door, Tillman was offered a glimpse of the world outside and in. Naturally, Wyatt always came when it was dark outside, but Tillman still took the opportunity to assess his surroundings as best he could, in the distant hope that it could help him. The interior of his prison was lined with some form of insulation material to dampen the sound. The only noise he ever heard was the droning hum behind him. Through the door he would catch glimpses of the dark world outside: the silhouettes of trees looming in the night sky, the smell of compost and cut grass, and in the distance the faint sound of running water.

  Tillman was too pragmatic to wait for rescue, but he was literally trapped. Wyatt had done a great job of securing him to a metal railing cemented into the floor of the prison. It didn’t stop him trying to shake himself free, but the bursts of crazed energy where he fought his restraints took so much out of him that he’d stopped trying.

  He was keeping sane by working through the exercises he’d been taught in training. The mental agility problems and recollections were helping him keep sane but still he twitched at the faintest sound, fearing Wyatt was returning.

  It was inevitable that his mind would return to that day when he’d found Alice and arrested his captor. He wondered if Lambert knew yet the full extent of what had happened that day. The only other person alive that knew the full story was Hogg, and he’d proved to be a reliable keeper of the secret, despite his journalistic leanings – it helped that Tillman had something on the man, a drink-driving arrest Tillman had helped him with.

  When Wyatt had taken Devlin’s life, Tillman had understood immediately why, and he had known that Kirby would be next. Both men had tried to drown Wyatt and now he was out of prison he wanted his revenge. Tillman hadn’t explained as much to Lambert and the team because even at that stage he’d believed they didn’t need to know. It was enough that Wyatt was taking revenge on the men who’d arrested him. Only, that had proved to be an enormous oversight - an example of the arrogant way he sometimes approached things. Maybe if he’d told Lambert the real events from that time, all this could have been prevented. He’d effectively saved Wyatt’s life but he doubted the man remembered as such. Tillman’s memory itself was muddled. He recalled the exertion of moving through the water, trying to pull Devlin and Kirby off Wyatt while Alice was out cold on the shore. As his two colleague held Wyatt under the water, he’d caught the death stare from Wyatt; his unblinking eyes full of accusation as he struggled against his captives. A day didn’t go by when Tillman didn’t wonder if that was what had made him stop his two colleagues. It would have been so easy to let Wyatt drown, and he understood his colleague’s desire to see the man die. Tillman liked to think he’d stopped them out of a sense of righteousness, that he was upholding the law he’d sworn to upheld, but if hadn’t been for Wyatt’s accusatory stare he feared he would have allowed the man to drown.

  And now? Now as the prison door creaked open, and the masked figure of Wyatt walked into the darkness, all Tillman could do was wish that he’d let Kirby and Devlin do as they’d intended all those years ago.

  11

  Lambert found Hogg in the bathroom on his hands and knees, vomiting into the toilet basin. ‘Now you know my dirty secret,’ he said, turning to face Lambert, a line of sick still drooling from his mouth.

  Lambert left the room as Hogg began retching again, unable to bear the smell of regurgitated whisky. What did this all mean? Was Hogg somehow working in cahoots with Wyatt? He would have dragged the man from the toilet and found an answer from him, but he was in no fit state to be questioned. Instead, he waited until Hogg had expelled the foreign bodies from his system and had sat up on the edge of the bath.

  ‘I’m sorry you had to see that,’ said Hogg, glancing at the toilet basin.

  ‘You are?’ said Lambert, moving towards the man and opening the bathroom window.

  ‘After you told me about Glenn…well, I just went to pieces. I’ve been drinking since you left.’

  Lambert returned to the bathroom door, blocking Hogg’s exit. ‘You need to explain yourself. Now.’

  Hogg nodded, his eyes squinting shut. ‘It started after that day at the bar. Wyatt’s parole hearing. Those guys, they just pissed me off?’

  ‘Devlin and Kirby?’

  ‘And Glenn. The three of them were always so bloody righteous even at university. At least, they thought they were.’

  ‘You were friends though?’

  ‘If you could call it that. You saw the dynamics of our friendship that day. If we’d ever been friends, that changed the day Tillman told me what really happened with Wyatt.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ said Lambert.

  ‘Maybe you can, but there was something I didn’t divulge earlier today. I told you I never published anything about the incident because of my loyalty to Tillman and the other two but that isn’t quite true.’

  ‘Go on.’

  �
��The truth is I was warned off. In the strongest way possible.’

  Lambert tensed. The last thing he wanted to hear was that Tillman was bent, that he’d put pressure on Hogg to keep quiet. ‘By Glenn?’ he asked, knowing so much rested on the question.

  ‘No. Glenn helped me out with a drink-driving thing. He thinks that’s why I kept quiet – that, and the fact we were off record. Glenn is old-fashioned that way.’

  ‘So what stopped you talking?’

  ‘Aside from a lack of evidence? Devlin and Kirby paid me a visit. Played their own little version of water torture on me. Hogg broke down as he explained how the two policemen had used waterboarding techniques on him. ‘Long before it became fashionable,’ he said, wiping tears from his eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry that happened to you but why the pictures of Wyatt in your room. Why the visits to the prison?’

  ‘When you reach my age, Lambert, you start thinking back. You know, regrets. I knew Wyatt would be up for parole at some point and I got to thinking that it wasn't too late. That the world could know what really happened that night.’

  ‘And what would that achieve?’

  For a second, Hogg’s demeanour changed. Gone was the pathetic creature perched on the edge of the bath. In its place Lambert glimpsed the resolution in the journalist, the anger that had driven him to this place. ‘They tried to kill him, Lambert. Whatever Wyatt did, they shouldn’t have taken the law into their own hands.’

  ‘Did you kill them, Dan?’

  Hogg did a double take. ‘No, of course I bloody didn’t. My plan was to write a story about Wyatt. I met Wyatt to find out what he remembered about that night.’

  ‘You visited him ten times.’

  ‘Yes, well that was as much a surprise to me as it is to you. I admit I visited him as a means to get back at Devlin and Kirby. I wanted Wyatt’s version of events so I had back up for my story. I even tried to speak to Alice but she didn’t want to speak to me. However, when I met him I stopped thinking so much about retribution. Wyatt is a fascinating person. I decided I wanted to write a book about him.’

  ‘He’s a cold-blooded murderer.’

  ‘Yes, of course, I understand that. He destroyed so many lives and I believe he understands that.’

  Lambert couldn’t hide his incredulity. ‘But what? You think he’s changed?’

  ‘He has changed. We all change, Lambert. I’m not the same person I was when I was twenty. Are you?’

  ‘No, but I didn’t murder two innocent girls and try to kill a third.’

  ‘No one is excusing what he did. But there is more to it than that. He suffered a major trauma and no one knew how to deal with that. After his mother died he was put in care and suffered abuse, all the time having to deal with his mother’s death. I don’t think he meant to kill Michelle Lewis. He was obsessed with water and drowning. He held her under the water too long, and that experience did something to him.’

  ‘You can’t possibly believe that. Look at Lisa Bradford, what he tried to do to Alice Fowler.’

  ‘His obsession overtook him. You must see that in your line of work all the time. But he changed in prison. He received counselling and began to understand his actions.’

  ‘Jesus, he really did some number on you, Hogg. I thought you were a professional. What about Devlin and Kirby? If Wyatt is so rehabilitated, then why the hell did he torture and kill them.’

  Hogg sighed. ‘That’s exactly my point. I don’t believe he did.’

  12

  ‘Come on, Hogg, you can’t really believe that?’ said Lambert.

  ‘I’m not stupid, DCI Lambert. I know how it sounds, and I know the lengths some convicts will go to avoid another second in prison, but I would stake my reputation on it. Wyatt has grown to understand what he’d done and why. His remorse was genuine. He had great plans for making amends when he was released.’

  ‘Did you ever meet him outside prison?’

  ‘Yes, on two occasions. He was settling into the halfway house and had begun volunteer work. I’d never seen him happier and then he disappeared.’

  ‘Yes, three weeks before Devlin went missing. You must see how convenient that sounds.’

  ‘I agree, but I swear it wasn't him.’

  ‘Then who the hell was it?’

  ‘You’re the detective, Lambert. You tell me.’

  Lambert called for backup and Hogg was taken into custody. There was no point officially interviewing him while Hogg was still drunk so Lambert left the paperwork to the uniformed officers and returned home.

  He managed to sneak into bed without disturbing Sophie but he was too restless to sleep. He kept thinking about Hogg and his relationship with Devlin, Kirby, and Tillman. Lambert didn’t like to think of his superior as a bully. Yes, he was arrogant and forceful with his instructions and often gave the impression that he didn’t listen to anyone but himself, but Lambert had accepted this as a result of his antiquated management technique. Tillman wasn't above accepting confrontation, and occasionally advice. It was disappointing to think he’d kept the events of Wyatt’s arrest to himself, but somehow more disappointing to think he’d had a part to play in the abuse of Hogg; someone he’d once called a friend.

  The only saving grace was that Hogg had only accused Devin and Kirby of the waterboarding. Lambert hoped his instincts were correct, and that Tillman had no part to play in the journalist being warned off.

  Hogg had sounded so convinced that Wyatt wasn't responsible for the deaths of Devlin and Kirby. Lambert didn’t want to dismiss the journalist’s theory out of hand, but his argument was flimsy at best. It was obvious he’d grown close to Wyatt during the times they’d met, and however much he might protest the chances were that Wyatt had manipulated him. How else to explain subsequent events? Perhaps once he was sober, Hogg would be able to take a more pragmatic view and offer them something worthwhile.

  He must have managed to fall asleep as he was startled awake at six-thirty by Sophie’s alarm. ‘What time did you come to bed last night?’ she asked, springing out of bed into her dressing gown as if she’d been awake for hours.

  Lambert groaned. ‘I had to pop out,’ he said.

  ‘Well, pop out of bed now and help me make breakfast.’

  Lambert closed his eyes but he wasn't returning to sleep. He stumbled out of bed in a daze and headed downstairs where Sophie had a pot of coffee on the go.

  ‘Lazy,’ said Chloe, smiling as she played with one of her toys on the floor.

  ‘I’ll show you who’s lazy,’ said Lambert, picked her up and whirling her in the air.

  ‘Not the best idea before breakfast,’ said Sophie.

  ‘Sorry, boss,’ said Lambert, sharing a conspiratorial smile with Chloe as he placed her back on the ground.

  He often took such moments for granted, but today he savoured the simple joy of breakfast with his family. Now he had a child of his own, he understood the cliché of children growing up too quickly. It seemed like only yesterday that Chloe was a babe in arms, and here she was now getting herself ready for school. Such things were inevitable, but sometimes he wanted nothing more than to quit work so he could spend more time with his daughter.

  Lambert was surprised by the strange melancholy that crept over him as later he dropped Chloe at school. He presumed it was a response to the growing deadline on finding Tillman. It was still hard to believe his boss was missing. Lambert couldn’t picture Tillman in captivity but he hoped that was where he was now. Better that than the alternative.

  Adrienne had already set up the teams by the time Lambert reached headquarters. With the news out, the rest of the Group had been recalled and were doing everything in their powers to locate Tillman. By the time Lambert stood up to speak he’d already been taken aside by three of the team who’d complained about not being informed beforehand about Tillman’s disappearance. Lambert passed the buck onto the Chief Constable but understood their concerns. If Wyatt was true to his past, then there were only five days until Till
man’s body would be washed ashore, and in hindsight it made no sense that they’d not been informed.

  Lambert told the team about his meeting with Hogg, ignoring the derision as he recounted Hogg’s suggestion that Wyatt wasn't responsible. Hogg was still in custody and Lambert planned to speak to him again after the meeting.

  Jeff Ballard, one of the SOCA officers, spoke. ‘I don’t like to jump to conclusions on anything, but all the evidence points to Wyatt. He disappears days before Devlin is murdered and the MO is identical. Wyatt is obviously manipulative, telling this journo what he wants to hear. And he did the same at that bloody parole hearing.’

  Lambert agreed, but he also couldn’t dismiss Hogg out of hand. In his inebriated state, the journalist had appeared so convinced Wyatt was innocent that Lambert was certain it hadn’t been an act. ‘I just want us to keep our options open. We need to focus on finding Wyatt.’

  ‘The boss did exactly that when Wyatt first went missing. The man’s disappeared,’ said Ballard.

  ‘We’ve got less than five days,’ said Lambert, ending the meeting.

  ‘Where are we at on the river property searches?’ he asked Adrienne, at her desk.

  ‘It’s the proverbial needle in a haystack. There just aren’t the resources or man hours available. Obviously, we’ve coordinated the searches outwards from the locations of where we discovered Devlin and Kirby but it’s a mammoth job.’

  ‘I’m going to speak to Hogg. Study his replies on video link.’