by D C Vaughn
‘He was probably standing before you started hitting him.’
Rebecca had burst out laughing.
She stared at the windows for a long moment as the memory faded from her mind’s eye, leaving in its wake a sense of warmth, the comfort that she had felt whenever she was around Sam.
Rebecca turned, grabbed her keys, and headed for the door. There was only one family who could tell her what had really happened, and she couldn’t bear another moment of not knowing the truth.
***
VII
‘What do we think?’
Hannah sat at her desk as Kieran pondered the contents of the case file. He didn’t look up as he responded.
‘What do we think about what?’
‘About Rebecca, obviously.’
Kieran said nothing for a moment, wondered why he’d asked Hannah that when he’d known precisely who she was talking about. You’re evading, came the answer. Rebecca was an issue in his life that he hadn’t always wanted to confront. A great partner and a solid detective, they had worked several cases together, often during unsociable hours, tackling horrendous crimes, enduring the burden of witnessing horrific crime scenes that stayed in the mind for months, even years afterward. Not since the Marines had Kieran had to deal with such terrors, the sight of the dead and the mangled strewn across Iraq’s dusty streets, often the corpses belonging to men who had been close friends of his.
It was inevitable that under such stress and conditions, romantic attractions pervaded. Those on the outside did not understand the pressures, they didn’t “get it”. It wasn’t like a fling at an office party, the random night with the neighbour’s wife. Only those who had served understood. Kieran and Rebecca had never shared such an attraction overtly, but he was sure that they both knew that it was there, simmering away somewhere beneath the surface. Neither would have countenanced an affair as such, for Rebecca was with Sam and Kieran was married to Sophie. But now, he was considering divorce and Rebecca…
‘I don’t know.’
He was staring down at the pages of the file without really looking at them as an excuse to field an immediate reply. The fact was that right now he didn’t really know what to think – things had happened so fast, changed so fast, that he felt as though he was still running to catch up.
‘She’s looking good for it,’ Hannah pointed out, ‘and there’s nobody else on the hook, no one who appears to have the slightest motive for killing Sam Lincoln.’
The river authority was still dredging the Exe south of the Quayside footbridge, and right now Kieran didn’t hold out any hope of them finding anything. The river linked to a number of canals before broadening at Topsham into the Exe estuary a few miles downstream. After that, it was the English Channel. The teams had started work both at the site of the shooting and also three miles downstream, the estimated distance a body might have floated overnight down the river, but so far nothing had been found. The issue was that the missed body could by now have reached the Channel, while at the same time the gun, whether tossed or simply dropped by Rebecca Kyle after a failed suicide attempt, would still be reachable but was such a small target that the chances of the divers stumbling across it in the Exe’s murky depths was almost nil.
‘I don’t think we can make any judgement calls about Rebecca until we know more,’ he said. ‘She’s still recovering.’
‘From a possibly self–inflicted wound,’ Hannah pointed out.
‘We don’t know that for sure. If she had tried to take herself out then the weapon should have been easy to find. It can hardly have walked off on its own.’
Hannah conceded the point with an incline of her head.
‘The OCD issue bothers me,’ Hannah said.
Kieran knew that he didn’t have a good response other than to defend his partner.
‘Rebecca isn’t like that. She’s never shown any sign of that condition affecting her performance or her personality.’
‘Until now,’ Hannah pressed. ‘We’ve got to consider every position, right? Becky’s not the first person any of us would have thought capable of murder, and yet here we are. You ever read up on mental illness?’
Kieran had, of course. One of the biggest changes in policing in the UK in the past couple of decades had been the extraordinary growth in the amount of time spent dealing with the mentally ill. Officers whose sole occupation had once been to locate and arrest criminals now found themselves spending half their time handling victims of domestic abuse and mentally unhinged criminality, often compounded by rampant drug abuse. As much social workers as law enforcement officers, the police were literally being crushed beneath the weight of mental health problems affecting broad swathes of society, and that in one of the most advanced and prosperous nations on earth.
‘Sure, but OCD isn’t on the list as a known trigger of homicidal activity.’
‘No, but it is on the list as a cause of homicidal or suicidal thoughts.’
Kieran winced. ‘Big reach there, Hannah.’
‘I’m just saying, OCD can cause sufferers to have homicidal thoughts that they wouldn’t necessarily ever act upon, but they’re there just the same. We have it on record that Rebecca was suffering abuse at the hands of Samuel Lincoln. She’s a copper, Kieran, she served her time on the beat and knows that putting up with abuse isn’t the way to deal with it. She complained to that company Sam Lincoln worked for, Neuray? She didn’t come to us. What if she decided to take matters into her own hands, shot Sam, realised what she’d done and then decided to take herself out of the picture too?’
Kieran weighed the theory in his mind, then rejected it.
‘It still doesn’t explain the missing murder weapon.’
‘It explains a lot more than Rebecca has.’
‘You’re real keen to keep her on the hook for this.’
‘And you’re real keen to avoid the one thing that we have here.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Motive.’
Kieran stared at Hannah. ‘What motive?’
‘Broken relationship, insurance claim. I checked their financials; Rebecca stands to see their mortgage paid off if Sam’s declared dead.’
Kieran stared at her for a moment. ‘That’s not really enough to suspect her, she’s a police detective you know? She’s more than aware we could head down that road.’
‘Tell me it’s not a motive.’
Kieran couldn’t argue, but experience told him that while speculation could lead to new avenues of enquiry, evidence was far more important. Rebecca couldn’t recall the events of the night when Sam was supposedly shot, so more conventional needs were required.
The streets around the area were, like most major UK towns, rife with Closed Circuit Television Cameras and security equipment. Kieran, along with the rest of the MCIT, had spent much of the past couple of days going through hours of footage in search of some piece of evidence that might cast light on what happened on the towpath.
The only witnesses they had to the crime were bystanders and passers–by who heard two gunshots, and susequently saw a figure fall into the River Exe. Upon investigation, they found Rebecca and called the police and an ambulance. All statements had been taken and were both consistent and mutually supportive: there were two people on the river walk, nobody else was seen.
‘A dead body doesn’t just sink,’ Kieran said as he kept one eye on grainy black and white footage of an underpass that was playing on his computer monitor. ‘If Sam was shot and went into the water as witnesses are saying he did, then he should have floated downstream from the point where the shooting occurred. I don’t know about you, but I’m not seeing that.’
Hannah shook her head.
‘Not so far, but it’s autumn. Both Sam and Rebecca were wearing winter coats. The weight of that in the water would probably be enough to quickly drag the wearer under, especially if they were already unconscious.’
Kieran could get on board with that. Sam Lincoln was six–foot tal
l, maybe a hundred and seventy pounds, a hundred–eighty tops. Winter coat, boots, jeans, all would be saturated within seconds and the river water would be cold despite the latent heat of the warm summer they’d just enjoyed in the south east of England. That alone could take a person’s breath away in reaction to the sudden chill, not to mention their heightened adrenaline and possibly shock from just having been shot. Gunshot, ice water, heavy clothing. Sam Lincoln could have just gone under.
‘None of the cameras cover the towpath where the shooting occurred,’ Hannah pointed out. ‘We’ve got nothing in the immediate area, only covering ingress and egress routes to the north, south and east. If there was someone else involved, they could have tabbed it out of there real quick and vanished into the city.’
Kieran smiled tightly. “Tabbed” was army vernacular for a rapid, forced march, a relic from Hannah’s time in the British Territorial Army before joining the police. In the Royal Marines, Kieran and his fellow soldiers had called the same march “yomping”.
‘Keep watching,’ he said, but he doubted whether they’d pick anything up. ‘If another shooter was on the scene, they’d have likely walked out of the area at a normal pace to avoid attracting attention, and stayed away from places likely to have CCTV.’
Hannah kept her eyes on her own monitor and said nothing more. Kieran got the impression that she didn’t much like Rebecca. Hannah saw her military experience as putting her a cut above the rest. She was competent for sure, but that wasn’t enough for Kieran to put her on a pedestal just yet: the black and white of military life didn’t cut it on the streets, where shades of grey clouded almost every case and…
‘What’s this?’ Hannah murmured, frowning at her screen.
Kieran got up from his seat and wandered across to her desk, leaning in as she gestured to something on the footage she was watching.
‘Check this out,’ she said, and hit the play button.
The screen showed a grainy, black and white image of the towpath from a position some thirty or forty metres up–stream from where the shooting of Samuel Lincoln had taken place. The camera actually covered the north bridge over the river, monitoring traffic headed east across the city on the A377, but in doing so it also covered the towpath on the opposite side of the river.
Kieran watched as the traffic flowed across the bridge. Then, he saw two figures moving slowly along the river walk. At the distance the camera was placed and at the resolution available, there was no way that they could indentify the two walkers, but the timing on the camera was unmistakeable.
‘That’s got to be Rebecca and Sam,’ Kieran said.
The low–resolution footage rendered the two figures as black blobs and two sets of moving legs, and they were walking so closely together that they almost appeared as one.
‘Arm in arm,’ Hannah guessed.
‘Not the actions of someone about to shoot their fiancé.’
‘Unless you’re luring them into a false sense of security.’
Kieran didn’t respond as he watched. The two figures walked out of sight under the south bridge and vanished from sight.
‘Too far out,’ he said finally. ‘We might be able to pick them up closer from any cameras on the north shore.’
Hannah shook her head.
‘It’s open ground on that side of the river. There’s a large Harvester pub on the far side that might have cameras, but we’ll have the same problem with resolution.’
‘Take a look anyway,’ Kieran advised.
He was about to leave her to it when he hesitated. Something on the image that looked out of place caught his eye and he turned back.
‘What’s that, in there?’
Hannah leaned forward and peered at the screen. ‘I can’t make it out.’
Kieran watched for a few long seconds, staring at a small black blob tucked against the bridge where Sam and Rebecca had vanished. It seemed to be moving a little, a pixelated black mass shifting slightly in shape and form, and suddenly he understood what he was looking at.
‘That’s a witness.’
Hannah glanced up at him. ‘How do you know?’
‘There are a few homeless folks who will curl up at night under the bridges there to protect themselves from the rain. Rebecca said that it was a wet night, or than it had been raining prior to them leaving the pub. Anybody who was under the bridge that night can’t have missed what happened to Sam Lincoln. They’d have been within fifty yards of the shooting.’
Hannah nodded as she took one last glance at the screen.
‘Leave it with me,’ she said. ‘I’ll go take a look as soon as I get a chance, see if any of the homeless folks can’t tell us about what happened.’
***
VIII
Rebecca hesitated, feeling as alone now as she had ever done in her life.
She was standing on the pavement in a cul–de–sac of smart four–bedroom homes out near Stoke Hill, surrounded by neatly trimmed hedges, perfect lawns and late–model cars. The sky was darkening, low clouds tumbling through the autumnal skies as leaves gusted in whorls along the road nearby. Streetlights cast sodium–yellow pools down onto the damp pavements as she walked, and inside the windows lights glowed, warmth against the on–rushing winter.
Memories flickered through her mind: images of the house that Sam’s parents had lived in for the past two decades or so. It had been the home in which he’d spent his teenage years growing up before heading off to university to study biology, the place where she had first met his parents when she and Sam began dating. Her memories of the home were fond, of warmth and a loving family, always welcoming, always smiling, proud of their only son and a partner they clearly approved of.
Rebecca’s own parents were very elderly now and lived in a nursing home on the other side of the city. Although both were mentally and physically able, they were too weak for her to bring all that had happened to their doorstep, and she knew that the worry would cripple them in their twilight years. This was something that she had to face for herself, but the gusting wind seemed to push against her as though trying to convince her to leave. She braced herself, walked up the front path to number seventeen and knocked on the door.
A light came on in the hall and Rebecca saw the form of Sam’s mother make her way to the door. The latch clicked, the handle turned and the door opened.
Helen Lincoln’s welcoming smile beamed out at Rebecca for a fleeting instant. Rebecca smiled back, but then saw Helen’s expression stiffen as the smile evaporated. There was a brief moment of confusion, perhaps even alarm, and then Rebecca’s world tilted sharply sideways and she staggered back off the porch step, one side of her face stinging sharply as she heard a crack explode in her ears.
Tears stung Rebecca’s eyes as she put one hand to her face, staring at Helen. Sam’s mother looked as though she might explode, her body trembling as she struggled to say something.
‘Pete!’
Rebecca held the side of her face as she saw Sam’s father hurry to the door, take one look at Rebecca, then hustle his wife back into the house. Rebecca heard Helen’s sobs as he guided her out of sight, one hand on the front door, and then cast a glance back at Rebecca.
‘What do you want?’
For a moment, Rebecca forgot why she had come to the house. She urged her mind into motion again.
‘I, I’m trying to understand what happened,’ she managed to say. ‘I don’t know what happened to Sam.’
Pete Lincoln stared at her. She saw no hatred in his gaze but nothing that suggested warmth either. He looked as though he was still trapped in some kind of limbo between shock and outrage, unsure of which path to choose.
‘You accused him of beating you,’ Pete snarled. ‘Isn’t that enough?’
Rebecca felt fresh tears spring from her eyes. ‘I don’t know, I can’t remember what happened.’
The wind gusted again down the street and ruffled her hair, revealing the heavy bruising and medical dressing on her temple. Pete
’s gaze flicked to the damage and for a moment his features softened, but then they returned to a visage of stoic grief.
‘What goes around,’ he said finally, the stress of losing his only son etched deeply into the lines on his face. ‘We’ve been advised not to talk to you. You’re not welcome here.’
Rebecca tried to say something but her voice would not work. The door slammed shut in her face and the light within was switched abruptly off.
Rebecca stood for a few moments, her face still stinging, and then she suddenly felt exposed, a trespasser standing on a stranger’s land. She shoved her hands into her pockets and walked back down the path, her head down and her mind a turmoil of shame and confusion. Did they somehow blame her for Sam’s death? Wouldn’t they, like she was, continue to hope that he was still alive, that this was all some terrible misunderstanding? She reached the street and was considering what to do when her cell phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out and saw the name Jenny on the screen. Relief flooded through her as she answered.
‘Jenny, thank God it’s you, I’m going insane here.’
‘Hi Becca, why didn’t you tell me you were out?’
‘It’s been kind of tough. Are you free?’
‘Sure, head round now if you like.’
Jenny Harwood had been Rebecca’s best friend at school. Although inseparable as children, they were complete opposites when it came to their course in life. Jenny was a college drop–out who had gone travelling for two years, spending time in Australia and the Far East. Worldly wise and radiating confidence with her every step, they still shared a similar, no–nonsense outlook on life that bridged the gap in their disparate lifestyles. Jenny preferred to live the life of a free spirit, beholden to nobody, and lived in a rented apartment just a couple of miles from Rebecca’s home.
As ever, the apartment was scented with cigarette smoke, although Jenny always smoked out on the narrow balcony overlooking Exeter’s busy streets. She was petite like Rebecca, with blonde dreadlocked hair and a tiny ring through her nose, one of those girls who dressed grungy but somehow annoyingly still managed to look good doing it. Slim, lithe and with a mischievous glint in her eyes, Jenny managed to be what Rebecca feared she would have become had she not joined the police force.
