Although Jessica Kobi had promised to contact her with a suitable time and place to be interviewed, so far Claire had heard nothing from her. Maybe Jonah was forbidding his wife from speaking to her. But all else seemed peaceful and Claire was enjoying the lull. The wards were being managed. Salena was due a couple of days off. Simon was on his week’s leave. All seemed peaceful.
Tuesday 1 October, 11 a.m.
She almost regretted having to leave Greatbach to head back to Stafford prison.
Driving through heavy rain, she wondered whether today she would learn anything further from Kobi. Or would it be another wasted journey?
He was already in the visitors’ room, apparently studying his fingernails as she peered through the glass optic. But she knew he knew she was there. He glanced up as the prison officer opened the door and she stood in the doorway. He half stood up, his polite move, and smiled at her as she sat down.
‘I understand you’ve spoken with my wife.’ His tone was pleasant. They could have been at any social gathering.
Her response was deliberately bland. ‘I did. I hope to meet up with her at some point.’ She omitted to mention her academic interest. He leaned back, folded his arms and lowered his gaze, waiting for her to open the interview. ‘Tell me, Jonah, why do you think the MO of the person who abducted Marvel is different to the crimes against the other girls?’ She’d chosen to distance him from the perpetrator. It was a deliberate ploy. Rather than accusatory this consultative technique gave the suspected perpetrator status, a chance to air some fantasy of his own, the opportunity of involving him, as an outsider, in the investigation, speaking about the crime objectively, casting the killer in the third person and relieving him of the burden of suspicion. It could also give a killer an opportunity to applaud his own crime. And there was always the chance that some detail would leak out.
Claire recalled a lecture she had attended, given by Heidi Faro, her predecessor, when advising about interviewing patients diagnosed with a narcissistic personality disorder. ‘Let them talk,’ she’d said. ‘That is eventually what gives them away, this need to speak and be listened to. They want to be admired, revered. Give them the rope and let them do all the hanging themselves.’
Heidi had been right. But Kobi was too clever to swallow this bait even if it denied him accolade. He leaned forward so close she could see the pores on the side of his nose, watch his eyelashes flicker, feel his breath on her face. And watch him smile. ‘Well, Claire,’ he said, ‘it could always be a copycat killer.’ His voice was soft. ‘Someone who didn’t quite get it right.’
She kept her expression deliberately neutral. ‘I suppose it could be.’
There was a brief silence before he proffered another explanation. ‘It could always be that the girl herself was different.’
Ah!
‘In what way?’
He appeared to be deliberating over how to answer this. ‘There are the obvious differences,’ he said.
‘You mean her appearance.’
‘That and the crime itself. Think of it this way, Dr Roget.’ The way he rolled his ‘r’s’ set her teeth on edge. It seemed a deliberate taunt though how he could have known about her unhappy home life and father’s abandonment she had no idea. Perhaps he’d just read her emotions and hit lucky. He kept his voice so quiet she had to strain to hear him. ‘Maybe I’m just guessing – just as you are. Maybe I don’t have the faintest idea why this girl was selected for different treatment than the ones I chose.’ He couldn’t prevent the triumphant smile from spreading across his face.
She sat forward, elbows on the table. ‘You’re still denying her murder then?’
Kobi followed that up with a sly, sideways look. ‘I’m simply doing what you’re doing. Discussing different scenarios.’
‘Maybe.’ Time to change subjects.
‘I’m meeting Miranda Pullen tomorrow.’
Apart from a flash in his eyes she could not be sure he’d heard her.
She closed the subject down. ‘Tell me about your wife.’
He shrugged. ‘As in …?’
‘How did you get together in the first place?’
‘You enjoy reading romances?’
Her turn to shrug.
‘She wrote to me. One of many.’
‘She wrote to you saying what? That she believed you were innocent?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘Surely you can? You must have continued with the correspondence.’
‘I must have done, mustn’t I?’
‘So how did the relationship progress?’
He looked bored. ‘It just did.’
‘So you married her – because you were bored?’
‘Sort of.’
She prompted him. ‘You must get quite a few letters.’
He replied, ‘You wouldn’t believe how many …’ Then he shook his head. ‘Not really.’
This was the first time she’d felt connected. This was the first statement he’d said that rang true. There was even a ring of humility in his tone as he continued, ‘Once you’re sentenced and out of the headlines people soon forget about you and move on to someone else.’
‘What did Jessica say that made you feel particularly connected?’
He gave her question some thought and answered with a certain amount of veracity. ‘Sympathizing, saying she understood about teenage girls, that she’d been a little bugger in her time, and it was a wonder no one had strangled her. She sounded intelligent.’ He tapped his index finger on the desk. ‘Her English and grammar were good.’
‘And when you actually met her, how did you feel?’
‘Huh. That’s an interesting one.’ He put his finger on his chin, pretending to think deeply. ‘I thought she was attractive, interesting. Intelligent. Perceptive.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Put it like this. We clicked.’ He gave a bland smile.
He was feeding her lines and they both knew it.
‘How do you feel about her, Jonah?’
He narrowed his eyes. ‘I fancied her.’ He gave a spurt of laughter. ‘So transparent, Claire,’ he scolded. ‘You’re trying to find out the depth of my sociopathic personality.’ Then the anger bubbled up again. ‘Do you not think I’ve been through enough psychiatrists to almost write the fucking textbooks myself?’ He banged the table causing one of the prison officers to peer through the window.
Claire wafted him away with her hand and moved on. ‘Why do you think she married you?’
He looked disinterested. She felt the detachment from him, his attention slide away. ‘Who knows? Who cares? I don’t. It seemed a good idea at the time. That’s about all I can say.’
She tried again. ‘You love her?’
Another burst of laughter. ‘Love? What a wonderful sense of humour you have. Love under these circumstances? Shall I get philosophical, Claire, and ask in a thespian tone, lerv? What is lerv?’
She felt annoyed now. She was wasting time here. And she was learning nothing.
‘Have you ever discussed your crimes with her?’
His response and body language were casual, hands still on the desk, but his eyes were wary. ‘What do you think? Why don’t you ask her?’
‘I shall, when I meet her.’
He chewed his lip, thought for a moment, then admitted, ‘We did speak about Petra and Jodie.’
He was reeling out a tiny length of rope. ‘And the others?’
‘Too repetitive,’ he said.
Claire dug her fingernails into the palms of her hand as she thought how Shelley Cantor and Teresa Palmer’s parents would respond to this dismissal of their daughters’ murders. Too repetitive.
She made a feeble try. ‘And after Petra and Jodie next in the sequence would be Marvel.’
‘Would be. Yes.’ His mouth curved. ‘Except …’ he said, wagging his index finger at her, in that irritating gesture.
‘Except,’ she picked up, ‘that you have not confessed to Marvel’s murder.’
Kobi
deliberately tipped the interview into farce, putting a finger on his chin again. ‘Oh no,’ he mocked, speaking in pantomime falsetto. ‘That’s right. I haven’t, have I?’
Claire kept her voice low and controlled. ‘This isn’t a joke, Kobi. This isn’t fun. This is serious. I have a job to do, plenty of patients needing my attention. We have a dying man here. A missing daughter. A family who …’ She had been about to say cannot move on but that was untrue and Kobi quickly picked it apart.
‘Then I suggest you return to your patients and to that family who’ – he wiggled his fingers – ‘“cannot move on”. Except they have, haven’t they?’
She eyed him steadily wondering how much he knew, how much was bravado and how much a clever device to twist the knife into her, Tom Trustrom, DS Willard, or anyone else who was affected by this girl’s disappearance. Because that was what it was. A disappearance. No one could say she had been murdered. Girls did disappear in various circumstances and many of them never turned up again. They weren’t all murdered. They weren’t all dead. Some still walked the streets. Incognito.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Let’s go back to November 2013.’
Kobi’s response was to wet his lips and wait, his eyes trained on Claire.
‘Let me remind you, Jonah. It was pouring with rain. A Saturday. You were in Hanley?’
His eyebrows lifted. ‘Was I?’
‘Maybe marauding? Cruising? Looking for …’ She deliberately chose a word that would appeal. ‘Entertainment?’
She expected anger or a denial but Kobi simply laughed. Genuine humour this time. ‘You won’t catch me out that way.’
‘Let me remind you. You would have been supply teaching then.’
‘Correct.’ He could have been a games master on a TV quiz show.
She switched subjects. ‘You dumped Shelley’s body in Westport Lake,’ she said, ‘watched by a birdwatcher’s camera. Was that a mistake?’
He jutted his chin forward. ‘Guess.’
‘I think you’d had enough of the game. I think you wanted to be caught.’
There was a flame of anger now. He looked around him. ‘And spend my life in a dump like here?’
‘That was always going to be the end result.’
Claire remembered back to the time, the panic that had spread around teenage schoolgirls in the whole of Staffordshire and Cheshire, the extra police drafted in to watch girls going home from school. A fear that the crimes would spread, maybe to Derbyshire or Shropshire or even country wide. The extracurricular activities that had been curtailed. And try telling any fourteen-year-old that they can’t go shopping after school, that they must always stay in pairs, be accompanied. Girls who are latchkey young women and rebellious, girls who are gifted with the conviction that they will live for ever and never grow old. Girls who believe that carrying a mobile phone acts as protection.
She managed to inject some admiration into her voice. ‘One thing’s always puzzled me. With all the publicity. All the warnings. How on earth did you persuade Shelley Cantor to get in the car with you? The schoolgirl murders had been well publicised. Surely she was on her guard?’
Something flickered in his eyes. She’d caught him on the hop. She’d already looked at Shelley’s abduction notes. Either the girl had been dragged into the car or the weather had persuaded her into a warm interior rather than struggling through snow. The clothes she’d been wearing had been school blazer, shirt, skirt, ankle socks and shoes. Hardly prepared for the polar conditions that had swept down the country. There was another possibility: that he’d had an accomplice. Just as Myra Hindley had persuaded children into Ian Brady’s car, a female accomplice would allay any fears. But if there had been one she had not come forward or been identified. Kobi’s car had held traces of Teresa Palmer and Shelley Cantor. No one else.
She frowned and gave Kobi the opportunity to recover his equilibrium. ‘Look, Claire.’ He spoke in a soft, reasonable voice. Probably the very same voice he had used to lure young girls into his car, in spite of their having been warned by recent events not to travel with people they did not know. ‘You’re looking in the wrong place.’ He locked eyes with her, willing her to believe him. ‘I didn’t kill Marvel Trustrom.’
‘So if you can’t help me find her body to satisfy a dying man, why did you allow me to interview you?’
‘Maybe boredom,’ he said. ‘Or maybe something else.’ He shuffled forward in his chair, earnest now. ‘Maybe being a killer myself, knowing girls of that age so well, I can understand events a bit better than you. Maybe I can help you.’
In spite of herself Claire was listening – hard.
‘You need to look a bit closer to home. Look inside her family.’
As she looked into those clear eyes she wondered. Was this the truth? Was Kobi actually trying to help her? Or was it all part of the game?
She decided to play it anyway, throw the dice. ‘OK, Kobi,’ she said, ‘enlarge on that.’
Her belief was still that he was looking for attention. He didn’t know anything. He couldn’t have insight into the mechanisms of Marvel’s family. But, as a killer, his perspective might just be useful.
‘OK,’ he said steadily. ‘You’re wondering how I know about the family?’
‘Yes.’
‘I get the papers here,’ he said, ‘and we have the internet with certain sites forbidden. I’ve followed the case. You have the father who claims he’s dying.’
She’d wanted to correct his statement but something in Kobi’s eyes stopped her. He leaned forward. She could see the size of his pupils, the flare of his nostrils, the slackening of his mouth. ‘He says he’s dying but I guess you haven’t seen his medical notes, have you?’
She shook her head, began to say, I don’t need to, but stopped before the words were out.
Kobi continued. ‘Check Marvel’s dad’s medical history. It’s possible’ – he opened his eyes wide – ‘that he is not about to die. It’s just that his conscience is, at last, catching up with him.’ He reached across the table. ‘At least look into it.’
She kept her head still, neither nodding an affirmative nor shaking out a negative.
‘So my suggestion is that you look first at Tom before investigating Marvel’s mother, brother and two sisters.’ He grinned. ‘Since Marvel’s disappearance the family’s split apart, haven’t they? Like an old, rotten, dead tree.’
Claire didn’t respond. Her instinct was still that this was Kobi playing his game, wasting time, diverting her attention. He would love to see her scurry around, asking irrelevant questions, making herself look silly, feeling now, even from behind the prison walls, that he was in control. She shook her head, smiled and stood up. She was not going to allow Kobi to pull her strings.
But he hadn’t finished with her yet. ‘Think about it, Claire,’ he said urgently, reaching out to touch her hand and something in his voice caught her attention. ‘What have I got to gain by making it all up? I’m in here for life. I know that. I’ve got a wife outside. We’ll never live together. I’ll never fuck her. We’ll never have a family of our own. I am paying for my crimes with my life. I won’t get parole. So what do I get out of it?’
She headed for the door before turning around. ‘I shan’t come again, Jonah – not unless you really can help me with Marvel’s case. And I don’t mean trying to shift the focus on to the Trustrom family. It’s a waste of my time. I have a hospital full of patients and endless queues of outpatients too. If you have something concrete to tell me let the prison warder know and I’ll call. Otherwise it’s goodbye, Mr Kobi. Thank you for agreeing to see me in the first place but I can’t say you’ve really helped.’
The expression on his face stuck with her as she took the three steps towards the door. He should have looked crestfallen, but he didn’t. He looked … triumphant.
She knocked on the door and the prison warder let her out.
TWENTY-FOUR
After such a day home should be peaceful. But ev
en here there was no respite from conflict.
She heard the voices as soon as she opened the door that evening. ‘Oh yeah, pull the other one. It’s got bloody bells on it, mate.’
As Claire let herself in and stood in the hall, she sensed the woman’s hostility like a dark cloud rolling down the stairs. The woman, presumably Simon’s wife, was descending, Simon galloping down behind her. Both stopped and stared. This was her house, but in this instant it didn’t feel like it.
Simon stepped in front of his wife. ‘Claire,’ he said, his face flushed and uncomfortable. ‘This is Marianne.’
Claire held out her hand to the small, dark-haired woman with tight lips. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said, expecting at the very least a return of civilities.
But Marianne Bracknell ignored the outstretched hand and studied her. ‘So you’re Claire, are you?’ She looked at her husband and then back at Claire. ‘Sorry to break up your little twosome.’ Her voice was positively venomous. ‘Did he tell you he was married?’
‘Yes. Of course. From the first.’ Though that wasn’t one hundred per cent true it was near enough.
And, by her response, Claire suspected Marianne sensed this. ‘Oh, really?’
Claire winced at her scepticism. She tried once more to be pleasant to the petite woman bristling with anger. ‘You’ve had a nice weekend, Marianne?’ She didn’t dare look at Simon who was even more flushed and embarrassed than usual at his wife’s hostile outburst.
He managed to conjure up an answer for both of them. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Thanks. Lovely.’
The three of them stood awkwardly in the hall until Claire made the first move towards the stairs. ‘I’ve been to the prison,’ she said. ‘I need a shower.’
Sitting in her bedroom, still slightly damp, she now regretted her decision to share her home with her colleague. His wife was nothing like she’d imagined.
A Game of Minds Page 14
