Her Mind's Eye

by D C Vaughn

  Hannah knew that Stone might be right, but she wasn’t going to let it go so easily.

  ‘Two murders in the space of days, so we believe, in the same location in a town that doesn’t have more than a couple of homicides a year? That’s pushing it. There must be something linking them.’

  ‘You think Rebecca Kyle wandered down here last night and took this guy out for some reason?’

  Hannah had not in fact thought of that as a possibility but now that Stone had planted the seed in her mind, she decided that she may as well play along with it.

  ‘Well, let’s suppose that she did. I was down here trying to identify a possible rough–sleeper captured in the video evidence we handed over to you when you arrived. Then I find this guy, dead. What if Rebecca did kill her fiancé, realised that we had a possible witness, and then came down here to finish him off herself?’

  Stone stared down at the body, deep in thought for what felt like a long time. Harris frowned at Hannah.

  ‘You think that’s even remotely possible? How would she even know about this guy being a witness? We haven’t identified him as being the person in the footage, so she’d be killing someone who may know absolutely nothing about what happened down here.’

  ‘Harris is right,’ Stone said. ‘There’s no motive. This guy may have just arrived in Exeter, or may have been asleep across town the night of the original shooting. We don’t know ourselves who he is, so how would Rebecca know anything about him?’

  Hannah backed off. She knew that she could not argue with the logic, but finding two bodies down here within days of each other and with Rebecca apparently becoming increasingly distressed as time went by, she felt certain that there was something she couldn’t see yet that was hiding just beyond her grasp.

  Her cell phone buzzed in her pocket and she saw Kieran’s name on it.

  ‘Kieran, what’s up?’

  ‘Are you down by the river?’

  ‘Yeah, Stone’s team are about to recover the body.’

  ‘You got a description?’

  Hannah shrugged. ‘Male, Caucasian but with darkened skin consistent with rough living, forties, thick beard, dark jacket. Why? You got an identification?’

  ‘I might be onto something, I’ll get down there as soon as I can.’

  Kieran shut off the line, and Hannah turned to watch as the victim’s lifeless body was lifted out of the river, water streaming from the corpse to splatter onto the pavement.

  ***

  XIV

  Rebecca Kyle sat in the passenger seat of a late model Mercedes, and listened as Kieran Russell spoke into his cell phone.

  ‘I might be onto something, I’ll get down there as soon as I can.’

  Kieran shut off the cell and stared out of the windscreen. ‘I think that the body of the man calling himself Greaves has just been fished out of the river.’

  Rebecca’s head slammed back against her seat’s headrest and she closed her eyes. ‘This can’t be happening.’

  Rebecca had known that she could not allow Greaves’s evidence to go unreported, and so she’d called the only person she could trust. Despite the restrictions on Rebecca’s involvement with the investigation and the fact that Stone and his team from CID were now in command, she had called Kieran first thing that morning and he had agreed to meet with her. When she’d told him what Greaves had said, Kieran had agreed to pass the information on as his own. They’d been talking about how best to do it when the announcement on the radio of a body found in the River Exe had sent Rebecca into spasms of terror.

  ‘I can’t do this,’ Kieran said as he slipped the phone back into a pocket.

  ‘I know.’

  By assisting Rebecca, Kieran was in danger of being accused of perverting the course of justice. He had an impeccable police record and a bright future with the constabulary. Just by meeting with Rebecca he was endangering everything he stood for and she felt terrible placing him in the position he was, but Kieran was the only person that she felt she could trust.

  ‘How can this be happening?’ she asked out loud, knowing that Kieran could not possibly have the answer.

  ‘You went to see this guy last night?’ Kieran asked.

  ‘No,’ she reminded him of what had happened, ‘I was down there doing some investigating of my own, hoping that the teams had missed something. Greaves ran up on me from behind, then told me everything he knew. He sounded afraid, said that he didn’t want to be seen with me.’

  Kieran shook his head slowly. Rebecca knew what he was thinking and it wasn’t good.

  ‘If anyone saw you down here last night, it’s going to play into the investigation’s hands and convince them that you’re involved in two homicides, not one,’ Kieran said. ‘They don’t have enough to charge you right now, but Hannah was out and about in town this morning trying to track down the witness in the video, whom we can now assume was Greaves. Once they make that link…’

  Rebecca didn’t need to finish his sentence. They would be able to issue an arrest warrant, and hold Rebecca for up to thirty–six hours. She knew the drill. She would be questioned at length, and the whole process would be to try to understand how she could be so closely linked to two serious crimes, both of which had taken place within a hundred yards of each other and just down the road from her own home.

  ‘I feel like I’m going insane,’ she said finally. ‘Like this is all some kind of nightmare and I’ll wake up in a minute. I wish I could.’

  Kieran dragged a hand down his stubbled jaw as he considered his response.

  ‘You need to stay put and not get involved. Everything you’re doing seems to be putting you in the frame for the murders.’

  ‘You know I can’t just sit on my arse and do nothing!’ she pleaded. ‘It’s not me.’

  ‘That’s the problem,’ Kieran replied evenly. ‘You can’t stay out of it, but at the rate things are going the next conversation we’ll end up having will be in the bloody incident room, with you under caution! You have to stay out of it. I have to stay out of it. The only person we know who remains involved is Hannah Marchant.’

  Rebecca scoffed. ‘She’s got it in for me, I can tell.’

  ‘She’s doing her job,’ Kieran defended the DC. ‘She’s determined to make her mark.’

  ‘By taking my place,’ Rebecca shot back. ‘Convenient.’

  Kieran shook his head again, still staring out of the windscreen, and Rebecca belatedly realised that he was losing faith.

  ‘You’re starting to agree with her, aren’t you?’

  Kieran closed his eyes briefly and sighed.

  ‘I can’t help you right now, Becca,’ he said finally. ‘If Hannah links you to Greaves in any way, shape or form, that’s going to give them confidence that you’re a person of interest in this case. The ACI will be brought in, IOPC informed, and your life will get turned upside down.’

  The Assistant Chief Inspector would be drafted in to the Major Incident Staff Team to oversee the investigation due to the involvement of a serving officer in the crime, while the Independent Office of Police Complaints would be informed right about the same time as Stone’s CID team issued warrants and seized Rebecca’s cell phone, computer, car, everything. They would search her apartment, repeatedly question her family and friends and generally expose every inch of her life in their search for the truth.

  She placed one hand on the door handle, eager to get out and free Kieran from any risk of investigation, yet at the same time knowing that once she got out, she was entirely on her own.

  ‘I didn’t do this, Kieran,’ she said, looking at him. ‘I don’t know what the hell’s going on but I didn’t kill anyone.’

  Kieran offered her a faint smile of encouragement. She knew that he couldn’t believe that she would have killed two people, and yet she could also tell that he could not rule it out either. She had nowhere to go, but she got out of his Mercedes as though she was in a hurry to be somewhere and shut the door behind her.

 
She didn’t look over her shoulder as she heard the car pull away, back toward the town centre, while she walked in the opposite direction across the car park.

  Greaves was dead. She knew it, even though she had only spoken to him once and had no access to the crime scene. It was too great a coincidence, and like all police officers Rebecca detested coincidences. Worse, with Greaves gone, even if he had been correct in his testimony it was now completely lost and any evidence that he might have been able to provide had gone with him.

  How? The question kept coming back to her again and again. How could anyone have known that she’d spoken to Greaves? She hadn’t even known that she was going to meet him, because she wasn’t: he’d jumped her as she passed under the north bridge, and they’d talked without her ever seeing another soul around them. The towpath had been deserted and she hadn’t seen anybody on her walk there or when she’d headed back to her apartment.

  You’re being watched.

  Despite what folks saw on television, few police officers received the kind of training that taught them to spot trails and lose followers. Such activities were confined to the security services of MI5 and MI6, or American counterparts in the CIA and FBI. Likewise, most folks believed that Detective Chief Inspectors and Superintendents did all the legwork in investigations, when in fact they spent most of their time signing off paperwork and advising or overseeing investigations. Detective Constables like Rebecca and Hannah Marchant, along with Detective Sergeants like Kieran were the ones doing all the field work, with uniforms sometimes helping out in the Major Incident Room.

  As if she didn’t have enough to worry about, now she had to contend with rampant paranoia. Rebecca started taking more notice of her surroundings as she walked. Her heightened state of awareness fed into her fear that someone, somewhere was trying to position her to take the fall for the shooting of her fiancé and now the killing of Greaves. She knew that Hannah, if she was indeed as determined as she seemed, would eventually spot the link between the dead vagrant and Rebecca. They wouldn’t fail to check CCTV coverage once again, which would then reveal her presence on the towpath and maybe even her meeting with Greaves if the resolution and angle was good enough. That, as Kieran had not even needed to point out, would make her one of the last people to see Greaves alive, which would shoot her right to the top of the suspect list if she wasn’t there already. Finally, if she was taken into custody, a search of her cell phone would reveal her calls to Kieran, and that would force him to reveal that he’d known about her meeting with Greaves. So, whichever way it panned out, she was going to be firmly in the frame for Greaves’ murder.

  She had to do something.

  On an impulse she changed direction and headed into the town centre. The cold wind was now flecked with rain that fell sideways, icy little bullets that made her squint as she walked, her collar pulled up high around her neck. She hurried along until she found the place she was looking for, the Nandos in the parade off Roman Walk.

  The interior of the parade and the restaurant was blissfully warm as she hurried inside and asked a waitress to fetch the manager. She was confronted by a young lady of maybe thirty years of age, all polite smiles and positive attitude.

  ‘Good morning madam, how can I help?’

  With great effort, Rebecca forced a smile onto her face. It felt as though she was trying to bend an iron bar with her lips.

  ‘Detective Constable Rebecca Kyle, Exeter CID. Would you by chance have an active camera system in operation in the restaurant?’

  The manager was openly surprised. ‘Er, yes, we do.’

  ‘Would it be possible to take a look? I’m investigating a series of crimes down by the river and one of the victims may have frequented this establishment last night.’

  The manager took a moment to realise what Rebecca was referring to. ‘Oh my god, yes, the murder by the river.’

  ‘That’s the one,’ Rebecca replied. ‘If it’s not going to take too much of your time?’

  The manager gestured for Rebecca to follow her, and she was led out back to a series of small offices and rooms next to the kitchens.

  ‘We run cameras twenty–four hours a day,’ the manager reported, keen as mustard to help, as were most citizens when the police came knocking. ‘The data is held for several days.’

  Rebecca felt a tingle of excitement, the same one that she had so often felt when tracking down a suspect.

  ‘Great. I need to see the feed from around five yesterday evening.’

  ‘No problem.’

  The manager reversed the film to just before five o’clock, and Rebecca settled in to watch as the manager left the room to continue with her work. Rebecca watched the footage for only a few minutes before she spotted the person she was looking for.

  Greaves shuffled into the Nandos and placed his order, the restaurant quiet just before the evening rush. The vagrant waited patiently for his food, watching the world passing by outside the restaurant windows. A tall man despite his condition, he stood out easily among the other people in the restaurant. Rebecca watched as he got his food and went to sit down at a table that was just in shot of the camera. Several other customers came in and ordered their own meals, Rebecca observing them and keeping tabs on all of them while watching Greaves.

  The vagrant ate slowly, probably savouring both the food and the warmth of the restaurant for as long as he could before he would be forced to move on. She felt a pang of sympathy for the man, for others suffering the same plight. Nobody joined Greaves or even looked in his direction other than to pick a seat as far as possible from him. Even when just eating a meal Greaves was entirely alone, rejected by society without so much as a word.

  Greaves ate half of his meal, then got up and made his way to the exit. He left Nandos and turned right, probably heading back to his meagre home beneath the bridge. Rebecca watched the other customers in the restaurant, and one caught her eye. He’d been sitting with a coffee and a book, reading quietly but facing the spot where Greaves had sat down. Now, he stood up, put his book in his pocket and set off out of the restaurant, his coffee barely touched.

  He turned right, in the same direction as Greaves.

  He was plainly dressed, slim in stature, perhaps in his early forties and utterly unmemorable. The kind of guy nobody sees. The grey man.

  Rebecca got up and hurried out into the restaurant, thanking the manager before she left. She needed another camera to confirm what she suspected: Greaves was being followed from the moments after she’d met with him, and perhaps before.

  ***

  XV

  ‘You did what?’

  Kieran sat at his desk and shot Hannah a look that was clearly intended to warn her to keep her bloody voice down. The shift was just changing and two teams of detectives were milling around in the Major Incident Room, the light outside fading fast into an autumnal gloom.

  ‘She needed to meet, said she had a lead.’

  Hannah tossed her cell phone onto her desk in disgust.

  ‘Seriously, have you degenerated into some kind of idiot? You know damned well that if Stone finds out he’ll have you up for perverting the course of justice.’

  ‘She had a lead,’ Kieran snapped.

  ‘In an investigation where she is a person of interest,’ Hannah shot back. ‘You think that if she’d just killed two people she’d cheerfully lead you to the evidence required to convict her?’

  Kieran rubbed his temples. ‘Look, she’s trying to figure out what’s happened and I doubt she’d be so bloody helpful if she’d put bullets into Sam Lincoln, whose body has not yet been found in case you’d forgotten.’

  ‘One body has! What’s the chances of that, right where Sam was shot?’

  Kieran couldn’t say anything further, and instead changed the subject. ‘What about the first body we found? Has the coroner turned anything up?’

  Hannah shook her head. ‘Forties, medium build, no identification. Uniforms managed to spare a car to go around collectin
g CCTV footage to try to retrace the guy’s steps but we’re not having much luck. He seems to magically appear where he was in the water, the cameras on the far side of the river didn’t see anything.’

  Kieran frowned. ‘What, he came out of the trees or something?’

  ‘From out of shot, that’s all we know. They’ve gone back over a week in the footage and he doesn’t show. Coroner suggests the body’s been in the water for no more than three to four days and the cold temperature preserved the remains well.’

  ‘Cause of death?’

  ‘Drowning,’ Hannah replied. ‘No other marks, no evidence of knife, bullet or blunt force trauma.’

  Kieran shook his head. ‘Alcohol in the system?’

  ‘Toxicology will take at least another week. The guy’s a real mystery and could possibly be the coincidence I don’t want it to be.’

  Hannah wasn’t being vindictive toward Rebecca. A lead was a lead, and it was always a shame when they didn’t pan out. Should the John Doe be a random man unconnected to the Rebecca Kyle case who had maybe got drunk and fallen into the Exe, then they were pretty much back to square one.

  ‘The lead,’ Hannah asked him. ‘What did Rebecca say?’

  Kieran kept his voice down.

  ‘She said she met with the deceased, before he was found in the river. He called himself Greaves.’

  Hannah stared at Kieran with jaundiced eyes. ‘She was the last person to see him alive?’

  ‘As far as I know.’

  Hannah stared at her desk in thought for a moment. ‘No wonder she didn’t want to come to us with it. That’s three dead bodies in a few days with Rebecca connected to both of them.’