A Price to Pay

by Paul Gitsham

  The news wasn’t a big surprise; even allowing for the two sisters’ muddled accounts of the events that day, it was unlikely that they could have failed to notice that the killer was heavily pregnant.

  Nevertheless, it didn’t rule her out of the killing entirely. Her fiancé, Anton Rimington, was still a suspect; it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that she had conspired with Rimington to kill his rival. Her name would stay on the board for the time being at least.

  Thanking Grimshaw, Warren headed back to his office. Unfortunately, he didn’t walk quickly enough to miss Grimshaw’s aside to Martinez.

  ‘I tell you what, Jorge, I might start going to those NCT classes myself. There’s something about a pregnant woman that does it for me.’

  Warren paused; he was losing count of the number of times he had spoken to Grimshaw about inappropriate ‘banter’ in the office. He looked over his shoulder. Nobody else seemed to have heard Grimshaw’s comment and Martinez was studiously ignoring his colleague’s boorishness. Warren sighed; he’d bring it up at their next meeting. He didn’t have the time right now.

  Chapter 16

  Malina and Biljana Dragić arrived at the station promptly for their follow-up interviews. They met Neda Stojanović, the translator who had sat in on their original interviews on the night of the murder.

  The two sisters looked tired and nervous but were soon put at ease by Mags Richardson’s breezy efficiency, and Moray Ruskin’s friendliness. Warren had decided to downplay the importance of the interview, in the hope that a more relaxed atmosphere would make the interviewees more open.

  Both interviews started with the women being shown a headshot of Ray Dorridge, the farmer that the White Stag’s glass collector, claimed to have seen arguing with Cullen.

  Both women denied knowing, or recognizing, Dorridge. Warren wasn’t entirely surprised. There was no record of his name, or his contact details in the massage parlour’s ledger. Neither his phone records, nor the massage parlour’s, gave any indication that he had ever visited, or had dealings with the business. Inquiries were ongoing to see if there were any other links, but so far it seemed that he largely shunned social media, so was unlikely to have had contact with either of the two women, or for that matter Stevie Cullen, that way.

  The only app that he used with any regularity was an online dating site. They had requested the records from the site to see if he could have socialized with either woman that way, or their aunt, who would seem to be more in his age range. The app also catered for same-sex relationships, so they decided to check if Stevie Cullen was also a member. It would be embarrassing to say the least if they missed a connection because they were too old-fashioned to think of it.

  In the meantime, Warren chafed at the continued delay at retrieving the mobile phone records for the two sisters; he wouldn’t be entirely satisfied until they arrived.

  When specifically asked if Dorridge could be the black-clad killer, the two women had shrugged and admitted that he might be. Neither had sounded confident.

  Turning to the events at the time of the killing, the two women largely repeated what they had said before about hearing Cullen scream.

  ‘I still don’t think the timings add up,’ said Richardson, in the post-interview debrief, agreeing to disagree with Martinez, who again theorized that Malina had heard Cullen scream, not her sister.

  ‘I’m more interested about what happened after Cullen was stabbed,’ said Grimshaw. ‘They’ve changed their story on that.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say changed,’ countered Martinez, ‘they’ve just remembered more details.’

  ‘Still, don’t you think it weird that they both suddenly remember all those extra details about what happened?’ said Grimshaw.

  ‘Not really, they’ve had a couple of days to process it,’ said Martinez. ‘You know how unreliable witnesses are. It’s not uncommon for them to remember things weeks or even months after the event. And they’ve probably talked about little else since it happened.’

  Grimshaw scowled but conceded the point reluctantly.

  ‘Whatever the reason, their accounts match the evidence that we saw better,’ said Warren. ‘Stevie jumped off the table after being stabbed, then collapsed with the blade still in him – which would account for the bruises on his left side. The killer then removed the knife and fled the scene.’ He looked at his notes. ‘Cullen then got back to his feet, and the sisters helped him back onto the massage table, where they tried to stem the blood flow. He then bled out on the table.’

  ‘It certainly matches the evidence at the scene,’ said Martinez.

  Warren was forced to agree, but something in his gut didn’t sit quite right.

  They really needed those phone records.

  Friday 06 November

  Chapter 17

  ‘I’m still not happy about Ray Dorridge,’ said Warren.

  The team were seated around the main briefing table. Warren took another swig of his lukewarm coffee – his third cup that morning. The previous evening’s bonfire night celebrations had carried on late into the night, with random bangers that sounded more like a car bomb than a firework, being set off well into the early hours. Not that he and Susan had been in much of a mood to sleep. The enormity of the upcoming changes to their lives had finally hit home, and they had spent much of the night talking and planning for the future.

  It was still a bit early for them to start choosing baby names, but both of them had lists of names that they didn’t want; Susan’s were largely based around former pupils whose passage through the school had made a lasting – and negative – impression. A number of them overlapped with Warren’s own list – for largely the same reasons.

  Forcing himself to focus on the task at hand, Warren continued, ‘So far, we can find no link between Dorridge and the massage parlour, but when Moray and I interviewed him, he was clearly holding something back.’

  ‘After what Benny Masterson told us yesterday, I called the council,’ said Ruskin. ‘Apparently he’s complained about fly-tipping on his property three times in the past twelve months. Each time, the council shifted a lorry-load of rubbish; everything from fridges to mattresses to building rubble from kitchen or bathroom refits. They routinely go through it to see if there’s anything they can use to track down the original source, but it’s been picked clean. It’s definitely a professional job.’

  ‘So, the question is whether Dorridge is a victim of illegal dumping, or if he partnered up with Cullen to make some money on the side,’ said Grimshaw.

  ‘It’s not much of a reason to kill someone,’ said Martinez, ‘especially if the council takes it away for free.’

  ‘Fair point,’ conceded Grimshaw.

  ‘What else do we know about him?’ asked Warren.

  ‘He received a police caution back in February,’ said Pymm. ‘It resulted from an argument leading to minor damage in the Café Rouge on the high street. The person he was arguing with left before the police attended, and Dorridge refused to name them. There isn’t much else on the PNC.’

  ‘Get onto the arresting officers and see if they can add some more information,’ ordered Warren. ‘I’m particularly interested in who he was arguing with. How’s his alibi looking?’

  ‘We just got his phone records through,’ said Pymm. ‘No calls to Cullen’s smartphone that we retrieved from the murder scene, but plenty of calls to unregistered numbers. Including one number that he speaks to regularly; including twenty-four hours before each of his three complaints about fly-tipping.’

  ‘Now that’s interesting,’ said Warren. ‘If he was working a fly-tipping scam with Cullen, that could be Cullen’s business phone.’

  ‘Which was nowhere to be found when we searched his room,’ said Hutchinson.

  ‘Run it by Compliance and see if we have enough to justify a request for the phone’s records,’ said Warren. ‘If it is his phone, we might be able to use it to identify anyone else he has dealings with. We might even be ab
le to track his movements.’

  ‘What does the GPS on Dorridge’s phone show for the day of the killing?’ asked Hutchinson.

  ‘It shows the handset as largely present on the back field from first thing in the morning until about an hour after the murder,’ said Pymm.

  ‘Which confirms his alibi,’ said Martinez.

  ‘Not necessarily – he could just have left the phone in his tractor out in the field,’ said Hutchinson. ‘The killing was clearly well organized and premeditated. Leaving his phone behind would be the least of his preparations. I’m no farmer, but presumably if he was trundling up and down his field all afternoon in a tractor, the GPS would show movement. Did the handset move during that time?’

  ‘The data’s ambiguous,’ admitted Pymm. ‘The GPS signal is only accurate to a few tens of metres, and the phone signal out there is too patchy to narrow it down any further. I can send it off to IT to see if they can be any more precise.’

  Warren thought about her suggestion. He knew from experience that such analysis was far from guaranteed and could be costly and time-consuming. However, Hutchinson’s question was a good one. They could very well catch Dorridge in another lie.

  ‘Do it,’ he ordered. ‘In the meantime, Mr Dorridge stays on the suspect board. Somebody arrange for him to be picked up. I want another chat with him.’

  Warren took a sip of his coffee. ‘Next up, what about Anton Rimington?’

  ‘He hasn’t done himself any favours,’ said Ruskin. ‘He turned his mobile off Sunday night after his argument with Vicki Barclay and after he’d rung his mate to say he was coming around. That’s when they started drinking. He switched it back on a couple of times on Monday, including ringing in to work to claim he had the flu, but he was obviously sulking and switched if back off again after ignoring Barclay three times. He didn’t switch it back on again until Wednesday morning, which was when we ploughed in and arrested him.’

  ‘So, we can’t use his mobile phone to track his movements the day of the attack?’

  ‘Nope, he could have been anywhere.’

  ‘Which begs the question, did he turn it off to avoid the missus or was it to help build an alibi?’ asked Martinez. ‘There can’t be many people who don’t know that we can track their phone’s location these days.’

  ‘What does his mate say?’

  ‘Again, no help. He reckons they drank the house dry Sunday night. He somehow managed to make it to work for eight and didn’t get back until gone seven p.m. He rang Rimington at about lunchtime, to see how he was, but it went straight to voicemail. When he got back, he says Rimington was already pissed again. He reckons he’d been drinking all day.’

  ‘How would he know that if he hadn’t been with him?’ asked Pymm.

  ‘Good point,’ admitted Ruskin.

  ‘He wouldn’t be the first person to commit a murder and then drink themselves into oblivion to forget what they’ve just done,’ said Martinez.

  ‘What about people in the neighbouring flats? Did any of them see Rimington at the time of the killing?’

  ‘Nobody we’ve spoken to was around during the day, and there’s no CCTV. The flat has its own door, so Rimington could easily have left without being seen by the neighbours.’

  ‘OK, let’s carry on testing his alibi,’ said Warren. ‘In the meantime, he would have needed to get to the massage parlour. His mate’s flat is on the other side of town.’

  ‘It’d be a walk of several miles,’ said Richardson, pointing out the pins on the wall map. She placed her tablet on the table. ‘His car’s licence plate wasn’t recorded on any ANPR cameras that day. The locations of the fixed cameras on that side of town make it impossible to travel more than halfway to the massage parlour without being tracked. If he did use his car, he’d have had to have parked it so far away from the murder scene, you’d have to ask what the point of driving was.’

  ‘Did he have access to any other cars?’

  ‘His mate took his own car to work that day – probably unwisely given how much he claimed to have drunk the night before. His place of work is in the opposite direction to the massage parlour and we have him on a fixed camera arriving and leaving work at the time he said. His car stayed in the car park all day.’

  ‘What about friends and relatives?’

  Richardson pursed her lips. ‘His fiancée, Vicki Barclay, doesn’t own a car, nor does his mother, who is his only close family. As for somebody else … we’re looking at CCTV and ANPR in the area around his flat for a link to anyone who could have given him a lift, but we don’t really know what we’re looking for.’

  ‘Could he have changed the licence plates on his car to avoid cameras?’ asked Ruskin.

  ‘That would have required some serious premeditation,’ cautioned Grimshaw.

  ‘It’s worth pursuing,’ said Warren. ‘Check the PNC for reports of stolen licence plates – or even stolen cars for that matter.’

  ‘Unless he stole them off a car the same make and colour as his own, then wouldn’t that show up as a mismatch between the vehicle on the DVLA’s database and the car caught on camera? I’d like to see him explain that away,’ suggested Ruskin.

  ‘If you want to visually match all the cars in the area to their records in the DVLA database, be my guest,’ said Grimshaw.

  ‘It’s a good idea, Moray,’ said Warren quickly, not wanting the probationer to lose heart, ‘but a big job. Let’s see what Forensics say first; they may be able to tell us if the car’s plates were tampered with.’

  ‘What about other methods of transport?’ asked Martinez.

  ‘I’ve already contacted the local bus companies for their CCTV to see if Rimington was a passenger that day.’

  ‘How about cab firms?’ asked Grimshaw.

  ‘There are no journeys recorded on the app on his phone. There are also no calls to cab firms on his mobile or his mate’s landline,’ said Pymm. ‘I’ve arranged for his mugshot to be circulated amongst local firms to see if anyone did a pick-up off the street, although as you know, only black cabs are licensed to do that. We’ve had mixed success getting drivers to admit to illegal pick-ups in the past.’

  ‘Well Benny Masterson also fingered Stevie Cullen as potentially the father of Vicki Barclay’s baby,’ said Martinez. ‘If even the village drunk had worked that one out, how likely is it that Rimington didn’t know until Sunday night? I reckon he still has the biggest motive out of all of them.’

  ‘Let’s not narrow the suspect field prematurely,’ cautioned Warren. ‘There are still plenty of other people who probably aren’t mourning the loss of Stevie Cullen, not least Ray Dorridge. I’d also like to see the sisters’ reaction to a mugshot of Rimington. We’ll see what they have to say next time we get them in for questioning.’

  Chapter 18

  Ray Dorridge put up a good show of merely being irritated at his time being wasted, but the way he fiddled with the polystyrene cup of water belied his nervousness.

  ‘He’s lawyered up, this time,’ Grimshaw observed before they entered the interview room. ‘Feels like a man with a guilty conscience.’

  Warren chose to ignore the Americanism – Grimshaw was a big fan of US cop dramas. ‘Or he’s a sensible person who is concerned about being questioned for a second time, and a search warrant being executed on his property.’

  This time, Dorridge was interviewed under caution, although he still hadn’t been arrested. He’d come willingly, and Warren didn’t want to start the custody clock ticking until he needed to.

  ‘In our last interview, you said that you only had a passing acquaintance with Stevie Cullen?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right.’

  ‘Just drinking buddies?’ asked Grimshaw.

  ‘We both liked a pint down the Stag,’ agreed Dorridge.

  ‘But you were aware of his reputation with women?’ Grimshaw pressed.

  Dorridge shrugged. ‘It’s hardly a secret.’

  Warren leant back slightly in his chair. ‘I
’ll be honest, you aren’t the first person who’s mentioned his, shall we say, “philandering nature”. Can you tell me a bit more about it? Who else might he have annoyed?’

  Dorridge also leant back in his chair, visibly relaxing. ‘Form an orderly queue. As I said before, he’d target anything in a skirt.’

  ‘So he had numerous affairs?’ pressed Warren.

  Dorridge made a slight rocking motion with his head. ‘Not necessarily affairs. I think it was more about taking the piss. Some of the women he hit on clearly weren’t his type; he was just winding up their husbands or boyfriends.’

  ‘How did they take it?’

  ‘It varied. Some blokes were all right with it. I reckon they knew he was just being a prick and it wouldn’t come to anything. Others … well I guess they probably felt a bit threatened. He was a good-looking bloke, and he usually had a wad of cash in his back pocket. I imagine a few were worried that it might go somewhere if they weren’t careful.’

  ‘Was there anyone in particular who got upset?’

  Dorridge thought for a moment. ‘Harry Raynor was pretty annoyed with him one night. He and his missus, Teri, had had a row earlier that evening on the way to the Stag. He went into the back room to play pool and left Teri in the bar area. When he came back Teri and Stevie were drinking, and were sitting pretty close, if you get my drift. Harry called Stevie a wanker, grabbed Teri’s hand and took her home. Didn’t even finish his pint. I reckon it might have got a bit more messy if Stevie’s brother Frankie hadn’t been in there. Stevie shouted something like “Facebook me if you need something bigger” and waggled his little finger. I heard that they broke up a few days later, although everyone knew they’d been having problems for a while.’