An email from DCI Mallender asked him for a status report on the hit and run case so he could update his decision log. Another from his union rep asking to schedule a pre-hearing meeting. Coupland made a note on his desk pad to speak to DC Andy Lewis. He’d need to tread carefully, no one liked to feel their every move was being questioned, especially if they were making headway. He pinged a reply back to Colin Ross suggesting a day the following week. Barring acts of God and the good folk of Salford behaving themselves, preparing the statement for his hearing would be his top priority.
When he looked at the wall clock a second time and found it hadn’t moved he pushed his chair back, announcing to anyone who gave a toss he was going for a smoke. It was impossible to concentrate. To breathe. To think of anything other than his mother and the role Johnny Metcalfe might have played in her death. This time he avoided his usual haunt, reckoned HR would already be sending him a reprimand for flouting health and safety regulations after being outed on the fire escape steps. Instead he left the station through the main door and loitered with the other ne’er-do-wells at the smoking shelter, cooling his heels until he heard from Alex.
Chapter Fourteen
When Alex’s text came he stamped out his cigarette, flicking the filter into a bin that clung onto the shelter wall for dear life. She was surprised when he stomped into the interview room. ‘I was letting you know we were back as a courtesy, that’s all,’ she hissed, ushering him back into the corridor. ‘I’ve got this.’
‘Let me sit in.’
‘No chance.’
Johnny Metcalfe looked marginally more pleased to see him. ‘Come to play me some more of your tracks, DS Coupland?’ he called out, smiling, ‘Even though I’ve never heard of them.’
Coupland cocked his head in Johnny’s direction. ‘Does he know why he’s here?’
‘Of course he does! You’re forgetting I’m the only one who knows your connection with the case. He’s come here voluntarily to answer questions relating to his conviction, that’s all. We’re just waiting on his appropriate adult.’
Just then a woman with blue hair walked in their direction behind a uniformed officer. She saw Coupland and raised her hand in greeting. ‘Are you sitting in too?’ she asked when she drew level. ‘Johnny will be glad of a friendly face.’
Coupland kept his smile in check as he turned to Alex. ‘What do you reckon?’
Alex tutted, pushing the interview room door wide. ‘I reckon I must be bloody well off my rocker,’ she muttered, standing back to let him pass.
Once the formalities had been taken care of Alex reminded Johnny that he was free to leave at any time, that this was simply a matter of clearing something up rather than formal questioning, adding that although DS Coupland was present he was there only to observe. He might as well have been the invisible man, seemed to be the message she was conveying.
‘DS Coupland stood up for me against Mr Harkins,’ Johnny commented when she’d finished.
‘Never mind that,’ Coupland said. ‘How come you failed to mention the real reason you were sent to Cedar Falls?’
He felt Alex’s eyes bore into the side of his head. ‘I’ll take it from here, thanks.’ She used the tone she normally reserved for dealing with drunken idiots, kept on staring until Coupland turned in her direction.
‘My mistake,’ he muttered.
Alex opened the file in front of her, traced her index finger down the centre of the first page as though searching for something in particular. ‘It says here you set fire to the flat you’d been renting. Big one by the sounds of it. Caused so much damage the floor couldn’t bear the firefighters’ weight.’
‘They were alright though,’ Johnny answered. ‘No one was injured…’
‘More luck than judgement, I’m reckoning, but why do it in the first place?’
Johnny sat forward in his chair. His hands were splayed flat on the top of the table; he turned them over, inspecting his palms like a fortune teller looking into his future.
A frown formed on Lucy’s face. ‘Johnny has poor reasoning skills, DS Moreton, he may simply not have an answer for you.’
Alex waited anyway.
‘I’d had a row with my girlfriend. She’d gone off in a huff and I... I just wanted to escape the way I was feeling. I felt overwhelmed with everything that was going on around me. I set fire to a pile of clothes. I thought they would smoulder for a while then peter out, that she’d come back and see how upset she’d made me. I promise you I never gave any thought to how quickly it would spread. Yes, the building was badly damaged but as I said, no one else was hurt. That was never the intention. I realise now how stupid I was, it was a reckless act that could have gone horribly wrong.’
‘Is there anything you want to add?’
Johnny looked down. ‘She’s not my girlfriend anymore.’
Alex fished in her pocket for a pen and wrote something down as though Johnny not having a girlfriend was a salient point.
Johnny pointed to the papers in front of Alex as though she should get this down too. ‘The judge wanted to send me to jail but my lawyer argued that prison wasn’t the right place for me.’
‘It wouldn’t have been,’ added Lucy. ‘I’ve worked with Johnny long enough to know he wouldn’t have coped.’
‘You’re here to observe that Johnny’s needs have been met,’ Alex said, turning her attention to the care assistant. ‘Not to provide a running commentary.’ Her tone was polite, but warned she was in no mood to repeat herself a second time.
Coupland gave the tiniest of nods. If he’d suspected Alex wouldn’t command the same level of control in the interview room as him he needn’t have worried.
‘The thing is, Johnny,’ Alex coaxed, ‘in light of this information we need you to account for your whereabouts prior to the fire being discovered at Cedar Falls.’ She was pushing her luck, and PACE guidelines, but Coupland wasn’t about to call time. He sat back, decided to see where Metcalfe’s answer led them.
Metcalfe was already shaking his head. ‘You can’t think I had anything to do with that, surely?’
‘We want to be able to eliminate you from our enquiries, that’s all. I’m sure that’s what you want too.’
Johnny slumped back in his chair, slack-faced. ‘I don’t remember a great deal,’ he said.
‘Try,’ persisted Lucy, ‘It’s really important.’
Alex nodded, glancing down at her notes. ‘I understand from the manager, Alan Harkins, that you’d been moved from your room on the first floor to the second-floor annexe, can you remember why that was?’
‘The care home manager doesn’t like me. Ask DS Coupland, he’ll tell you.’
‘I want to hear it in your own words.’
‘He said the other residents had been complaining.’
‘About what?’
‘I get annoyed when Ellie plays her music too loud in her room, and when Roland pushes in front of others in the dinner queue. They said I swore at them…but I wouldn’t have done if they didn’t keep getting on my nerves.’
‘Did you get on with the other residents?’
‘Most of the time.’
‘And other times?’
‘I admit I probably lose my rag a bit with them.’
Lucy had been silent throughout this exchange, head bowed as if in prayer. Alex picked up on her sudden reticence. ‘So, we’ve established you had a run in with two of the victims killed in the fire, what was your relationship like with…’Alex pretended to look for the other names in her file, ‘Sarah Kelsey?’
A shrug. ‘I don’t know her.’
Lucy started tugging at the hem of her tunic, her thumb and forefinger running over the piping edged round it.
‘How about Catherine Fry?’
‘She accused me of stealing.’ Alex stared at him. ‘What?’
‘It was all a misunderstanding I’m sure,’ Lucy piped up, a fray forming on her tunic.
‘I won’t ask you again,’ Alex warned,
her attention returning to Johnny. If she was aware that Coupland was starting to fidget as well she didn’t show it. Johnny was opening up, but she needed to tread with caution, she’d crossed the line as it was. ‘What did Catherine accuse you of taking?’
A sigh. ‘Her headphones, but I already have a pair, why would I want hers?’
Alex addressed her next question to Lucy. ‘I take it there’s a procedure that deals with any allegation of theft?’
Lucy’s smile was tight. ‘We searched Johnny’s room,’ she said.
‘And?’
‘And we found them.’
‘I didn’t bloody put them there!’ Johnny’s face was twisted in anger, his hands curled into tight fists.
‘Who found them?’ Coupland asked, already sensing the answer.
‘Barbara,’ replied Lucy.
‘I think we should stop here,’ Alex said, gathering up her notes. Coupland coughed several times but she wouldn’t play ball, instead she ushered Johnny and Lucy into the corridor. ‘When we reconvene I’d like to have a solicitor present,’ she told them, thanking them for their time. She paused at the reception desk to arrange for a patrol car to take them back.
‘Seriously?’ Coupland spat when she returned to the CID room. ‘You uncover a motive then let him go?’
‘He’s hardly a flight risk, Kevin. We need to tread carefully, kid gloves on right to our armpits with this one.’
‘Why? If he’s capable of murder…’
‘You know as well as I do that’s got nothing to do with it. But if some lawyer turns round and says he didn’t have enough rest breaks, that we didn’t give him time to prepare his answers let alone caution him, then the CPS will throw it out anyway.’
Alex was right, a trial proceeded on the weight of evidence produced, not how much you wanted someone to be guilty. Still… Something didn’t sit right. ‘I can’t see it though…there’s nothing about his demeanour that makes me consider him for this,’ said Coupland. ‘For a start it’s in a different league altogether from the offence he was convicted for. That was attention seeking, this was malicious.’
‘And he still might not be involved; we’re just proceeding with caution, that’s all,’ Alex reasoned.
‘I suppose.’ Had his mother really been killed over a set of headphones?
‘I get the impression Johnny thinks he shouldn’t be in residential care.’
On this Coupland agreed. ‘He said as much to me, that he was fed up with the way people spoke to him differently, how he was treated like a second class citizen because he couldn’t process things like everyone else.’
‘Did he? Well I’m afraid if anything that puts him back on the hook.’
Coupland looked at her quizzically. ‘How?’
‘Look at the world from his point of view. People might think it’s hard getting a place in one of these institutions, Kevin, but try getting out of them when you think you are well but no one agrees with you. To someone desperate enough, burning the place down in order to leave it might seem like the only option.’
*
He’d had better days, Coupland decided as he pulled out into slow moving traffic and pointed the car towards home. Ones that were right up there, as close to good as it got. These days it didn’t take much to tick that box. Something decent on the TV. A can of beer. Sex. Sex while watching TV and drinking beer, now that was a result…
Today had been the opposite. There was normally a buzz when a case he was working on started to take shape, when suspects began digging holes for themselves and kept on digging. Instead he felt nothing. Just a numbness where elation should have been. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as he waited at the traffic lights. Patched a call through to control, asked for a patrol car to stay close to the primary school overnight. It was clear Alan Harkins didn’t like Johnny; if he let slip to Kieran Tunny he’d been helping police with their enquiries he wouldn’t put it past the gangster to send his in-house interrogators to speed Johnny’s confession up a little.
Coupland was off as soon as the lights turned to amber, the tension leaving him as his house came into sight. He parked up, scrolling through a sea of emails, his shoulders dipping when he saw two reminders from the EMU. Shit. He’d forgotten his mother’s belongings were still in his desk drawer. He toyed with turning the car round and returning to the station but he didn’t have the appetite, hoped an early morning grovelling session would do the trick. He climbed out of his car, bleeping it locked behind him.
He paused in the kitchen, opened the fridge to check its contents, bottles of baby milk stacked where his beer used to be. A home-made vegetarian dish covered in cling film. He closed the fridge with resignation. Lynn was in the garden deadheading heleniums. Sometimes it worried him, the energy she put into it, there was a fervour about her actions which bordered on demonic. She looked up to catch him watching her. ‘What does a fella have to do around here to get a drink?’ he sighed.
Lynn paused, secateurs mid-air as though considering a new target. ‘Hell, sweetcheeks I don’t know, maybe you should phone your 1950s wife and ask her, or failing that get your arse down to Aldi…’
Coupland felt his neck redden. ‘I was just asking!’
Lynn turned back to her plants. ‘Ask away, but don’t be offended if you don’t like the answer.’
A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. ‘I remember a time when you’d rush to the door when you heard my car pull up outside…’
‘And welcome you with a gin and tonic before I ran you a bath? Dream on sunshine, I was never that girl.’
‘A man can but live in hope,’ he volleyed.
‘That’s what wives do, Kev, every day of the week.’ A pause. No comeback. Banter was their thing, their way of communicating when it had been a shit storm of a day. She glanced up to check he was still there. ‘Tough day?’ she asked.
Coupland shrugged. ‘I’ve had worse.’
Lynn’s brows knotted as she studied him. ‘Want to talk about it?’ It was something they never did as a rule, preferring euphemisms and sighs to indicate the depth their day had plummeted to. Being a neo-natal nurse had many downs between the ups, and Coupland’s days started with him wading knee deep in someone’s sorrow. A look flitted across his face she hadn’t seen before. This man of hers was as easy to read as the day was long, he went from gobby to grumpy at the flick of a switch but he always had their back, would sleep with one eye open if it kept them safe. Lynn put the secateurs down and stepped into the kitchen. ‘Kev? What’s going on? You were odd the other night but I put it down to work. Then you crept outside yesterday to speak to someone on the phone without giving me a running commentary on who it was. I’d be worried you were seeing another woman if it wasn’t for the fact you went out this morning wearing the superman underpants Amy bought you last Christmas.’
‘Maybe this other woman has a sense of humour.’
‘She’d need one.’
Coupland grew serious. ‘There is another woman of sorts,’ he began, raising his hands in mitigation when Lynn’s eyebrows shot into her hairline. ‘I’ve found my mam.’
Lynn’s eyebrows stayed in her hairline. ‘Christ, Kev!’ She searched his face for some indication of how he was feeling; if she was hurt he hadn’t told her straight away she didn’t show it. ‘Is that what you got up to yesterday? Were you meeting her?’
Coupland held her gaze. ‘No. I went over to our Pat’s, Val was there too. I wanted to tell them in person.’
Lynn looked confused. ‘You make it sound like she’s dead!’ She laughed, but it was laced with caution. He was a joker but she couldn’t see the joke and there were shadows under his eyes that she hadn’t seen since she’d been ill. Lynn’s hands flew to her mouth. ‘She’s really dead?’
Coupland’s nod was slow. ‘I wanted to find out what they remembered of her. She was one of the victims of the fire at Cedar Falls.’ His voice was flat. As though telling her the full time score of two teams he didn’t give
a toss about.
Lynn kicked off her wellingtons and hurried into the dining room, returning with a bottle of malt his team had bought him when the baby was born. She poured some into a glass, took a slug before passing it to him. He gulped at it, though his gulps were half hearted. His hand shook as he raised the glass to his mouth a second time. The whisky not tasting quite so good as the first time he’d opened it.
‘Was she a patient?’ Just as his sisters had, Lynn was trying to find a Pollyanna spin on things. His mother had abandoned him because she’d been institutionalised. The white van spiriting her away to save him the agony of her clinging to the lamp-post, shouting his name.
He shook his head. ‘She worked there.’
Disappointment flitted across Lynn’s face before she could hide it. ‘Oh,’ she replied, ‘And how long had she been there..?’
Coupland stared into the bottom of his glass, swirling the contents round before swigging them. ‘A couple of years,’ he said, reading her mind. ‘Long enough to make contact if she’d wanted.’
‘Assuming she ever left Salford,’ Lynn countered.
It wasn’t like her to see the bad in folk, but he looked at her with gratitude. Sometimes it was better not to pussy foot around things. His mother had left without a backward glance. ‘I’ve been wondering about that. Whether she gave us any thought, I mean.’ Any moments of regret that saw her standing by the school gates to get a glimpse of him? Coupland chided himself. In his line of work he saw the depths people sank to, and even loving mothers could do selfish things. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t picturing Davina McCall rocking up to the door with a letter she’d written to us or anything like that, but, I wondered, you know, in time…’
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