Reach (The Blake Harte Mysteries Book 4)

by Robert Innes

  “Jamie, I don’t know what to say,” Sonia murmured.

  “It was him.” Jamie said quietly. “That’s why she never told me about the baby. That’s why he looked so shocked when I told him. It wasn’t even mine. It was his.”

  Sonia shook her head in disbelief. “How could he do that? He knew how crazy you were about her.”

  Jamie sunk into the chair in front of the desk, furious and dazed. “That’s why she broke up with me. Because she was seeing him. Then all of a sudden she’s pregnant.” He slammed his fist down on the desk, causing Sonia to jump. “I knew it. We were always so careful. We always used protection.”

  Sonia put her hand on his shoulder. “Don’t do anything stupid, Jamie. You’re already in enough trouble.”

  “Oh, I haven’t even started yet,” Jamie whispered, his eyes returning to the screen and to the now empty flat corridor, the footage continuing to roll, with only a door blocking the camera’s view of what was happening behind it. He stood up and threw the reception door open, and stormed out of the building, barely hearing Sonia shouting his name.

  Having spent most of the night tossing and turning with the sparse details he had managed to accumulate of the case spinning around his head, Blake arrived at work the next morning feeling like he had hardly slept at all. The stroll to the station had been slower than usual. He had wanted to arrive at work with some solid theories about what had happened, how Kerry had been killed, whether it was possible for Jamie Salford to have done it, as well as how what would otherwise could be a domestic argument gone horribly wrong could in any way be connected to Thomas Frost. Although he was still waiting for Sally to find out what she could about Frost’s son, Simon, Blake was not even sure whether it would be of any help to him.

  Vaguely nodding at the messages that Mandy Darnwood, the sergeant on the desk that day, gave him as he passed on his way to the meeting room, Blake’s mind went back to the discovery of Kerry on the floor of her bedroom, frantically trying to work out if there was something blindingly obvious he had missed. The bedroom had been fairly dark when Blake had walked in, before Sonia had pulled open the curtains. Was there something he could have missed in the dark?

  Already feeling mentally exhausted, he pushed open the doors and was surprised to find Patil alone in the room, already sat at the table, staring into space.

  “Morning, Mini,” Blake said, pulling off his coat. “You’re here early, aren’t you?”

  Patil looked up at him. “I came in early.”

  Blake sat down opposite her. “Should I be commending your commitment or asking what’s wrong?”

  Patil tried to smile, but instead her bottom lip quivered and she burst into tears. Blake nodded and put an arm around her.

  “Okay,” he said. “Come on. It’s alright. Tell me. Tell me what’s happened.”

  It took a few moments for Patil to calm herself down enough to reply. “It’s Billy.”

  Again, Blake nodded. “What’s Matti done?”

  “He hasn’t done anything, that’s the thing,” Patil sniffled. “It’s all me. I’ve just completely wrecked things.”

  “How?” Blake said, glancing at the clock. He hoped he would be able to calm her down before the rest of the team arrived.

  Patil sighed. “I don’t even know where to begin.” She wiped her eyes and took the tissue that Blake had offered her from his pocket. “I’ve known that man most of my life, Sir. We both grew up here, we joined the force together. I love him. I honestly love the bones of him.”

  “So?” Blake asked softly. “What’s the problem?”

  “He wants us to start a family,” Patil sobbed. “Me and him. A baby.”

  Blake raised his eyebrows in surprise. For the time he had known Mattison, he had never perceived him as a particularly paternal type person. “Matti? Really?”

  “He’d be amazing, Sir,” Patil said, a sad smile appearing on her face. “You should see him with my two year old cousin. She absolutely worships him, and he plays with her, makes her laugh, sorts her out when she’s having a tantrum.”

  “So if he’d be that amazing, why don’t you want to start a family with him?”

  “I do,” Patil replied quietly. “There’s nothing I’d want more. I mean, he wasn’t talking about right now, we’d have to get married first, but, I do really want that with him. But I don’t know if I can.”

  Blake stared at her confused. “Why not?”

  Patil clutched the tissue in her hands and glanced at him, looking uncomfortable. “It’s a bit of a delicate issue, Sir.”

  “It won’t go any further.” Blake told her.

  Again, Patil sighed. “I’ve not even told Matti. That’s sort of why we’re not great at the minute. I couldn’t bring myself to be honest with him. I’ve got something wrong with me.”

  Blake’s heart skipped a beat. “What?”

  Patil must have seen the horrified look in Blake’s eye, because she smiled at him again. “It’s nothing like that, don’t worry. But I don’t know if I can have children. I’ve got PCOS.”

  For a second, Blake frowned, trying to remember if he had heard the term before, but Patil answered his question for him.

  “Polycystic ovary syndrome, Sir. You don’t need to know all the ins and outs of it, but it’s something I picked up genetically. My mum had it.”

  “Okay,” Blake said. “So, does that mean you can’t have children?”

  “Not exactly,” Patil said, wiping her eyes with the remains of the tissue. “But it can make fertility a lot harder and even if I do get pregnant, there’s no guarantee…” Her voice drifted off.

  Blake exhaled. “Mini, you need to tell him.”

  “I know,” Patil exclaimed, starting to cry again. “But I know how much it means to him. He said to me he’s always wanted to start a family. What if I can’t give him that? I don’t want to lose him!” She started sobbing into her tissue again. “And last night, we had another row, because he just thinks I don’t want to have kids with him, and I was an idiot. I said he was too immature and then I stormed out. He walked in on me being chatted up by someone. I swear, I wasn’t interested, but it’s just made things ten times worse.”

  The door to the meeting room opened and Inspector Royale walked in. “Ah, Blake,” he boomed. “Good to see you here early.”

  Patil quickly rubbed her eyes. “Morning, Sir.”

  Royale raised his eyebrows. “Oh! Mini! Glad to see you’re committed. Are you alright to take today’s meeting, Blake? I don’t feel a hundred percent. I had a bit of a funny turn last night. I’m sure it’s just a bug or something, but my wife is insisting I take it easy. Not really possible with this murder to solve, but you know how it is. I’ll be in my office if you need anything.”

  “Right, Sir,” Blake said. They watched Royale stroll into the office and close the door behind him.

  “Bless him. I could be sat here on fire and he wouldn’t notice.” Patil smiled.

  Before they could say anything else, the door opened and Gardiner strolled in, soon followed by Mattison and a few other officers.

  Blake took one last look at Patil to see if she was alright then stood at the front of the room.

  “Good morning, everybody,” he began. “Let’s get started.”

  “Have we managed to work out how the killer snuck past you yet?” Gardiner drawled. “Seems to me once we worked that out, it should become a lot easier.”

  Blake glared at him. He was in no humour for Gardiner’s acerbic observations, especially when they were about how the murder had happened right under his nose. “Not as yet, Michael, no. But I’d be delighted to hear any suggestions you have?”

  Gardiner shrugged. “Seems to be the only logical way she could possibly have been killed is before you heard that crash. If, as you claim, Thomas Frost has been puppeteering some of his cronies on the outside to do his bidding, it’s hardly beyond all reasonable doubt that they could mastermind some sort of elaborate plot.”

>   Blake scratched the back of his head, a deadpan expression on his face. “Such as?”

  “How should I know?” Gardiner scoffed. “I’m not a criminal mastermind.”

  “No, I think we’re all fully aware of that, Michael,” Blake replied sardonically as he pulled the whiteboard to reveal the case details and photographs. “But you and Inspector Royale were at the flat yesterday. Did you find anything that might be of any help?”

  “Yes, I was there,” Gardiner drawled, pulling out his notepad. “Fine job for a sergeant, I must say. Trawling through a dead woman’s flat.”

  Mattison groaned loudly. “Did you find anything, yes or no?”

  The room went silent for a few moments. Gardiner’s eyes bulged. “Don’t you speak to me like that, Mattison! May I remind you that I am your superior, –“

  “That’s enough,” Blake said sharply, eying Mattison pointedly. “Can we get on? What, if anything, did you find at the flat?”

  Gardiner flicked through his notebook, flipping the pages with an air of great irritation. “Nothing that we could find relating to how the murder was committed, no. Aside from that leaflet from the clinic, the only thing we found that wasn’t in her case notes was a packet of medication in the bathroom. Other than that, no unusual fingerprints, signs of a struggle, or anything.”

  Blake sighed and rubbed his eyes. “What was the medication?”

  Gardiner snorted. “I could hardly pronounce it. Car-bam-aze-pine or something like that.”

  Blake pulled his phone out of his pocket and pulled up the search engine. “Say it to me again?”

  “Car-bam-aze-pine.”

  After a couple of attempts at spelling what Gardiner had said correctly, Blake finally was presented with what the medication was.

  “Not especially helpful,” he said, scribbling it into the case file.

  “What is it?” Patil asked.

  “Epilepsy medication,” Blake replied. He stared at the white board again and murmured to himself. “A fact that adds nothing as far as I can see to how a woman could be throttled in a locked apartment, who stuck that note on my door, or why, or how any of it is connected to a serial killer in a prison over thirty miles away.” After a few moments of thinking, Blake turned to the room again. “Who have we got in terms of suspects?”

  “Apart from your friend in the prison, not a lot,” Gardiner replied. “Apart from Jamie Salford,” Mattison added. He threw a dirty look at Patil. “And God, do I hope that he did it.”

  Blake raised a disdainful eyebrow. “Why?”

  Mattison glanced at Patil again then looked down at his notes. “I just don’t like him.”

  “We can hardly arrest people for murder just because we don’t like them Matti,” Blake replied. “Otherwise, the prisons would be ten times more crowded than they already are. What do we have on Salford though?”

  Patil cleared her throat. “He’s got a criminal record. Nothing concrete to tie him to the murder, though he has got previous for drunken violence.”

  “And was heard making threats towards Kerry just a few hours before she was killed,” Mattison pointed out. “And I wouldn’t say drunken violence isn’t linked to the murder considering when he made those threats, he was, according to a witness, very drunk. It must have been him.”

  “It’s circumstantial, though, Matti,” Blake said, sighing. “Yes, in terms of anything else we’ve got, he is top of the list, but how? Kerry was alive and well when she closed the door of her apartment at about two o’clock, but was dead when we ran inside after we heard that crash.”

  “Then we bring him in and get him to tell us,” Mattison said, throwing his pen down onto the desk.

  “You’re obsessed, Billy!” Patil exclaimed. “We can’t just pull him in without any hard evidence.”

  Mattison shook his head and savagely opened his notepad again. “That’s right, stick up for your boyfriend.”

  Blake held his hand up. “Can we stop?”

  “He’s not my boyfriend!” Patil cried shrilly.

  “Didn’t look that way last night.”

  “Do we have to do this now? Will you just grow up?”

  “So you keep saying!” Mattison shouted back, now ignoring any pretence of trying to keep their argument quiet.

  “Oi!” Blake shouted. “The pair of you, I want in Inspector Royale’s office –”

  He was interrupted by Mandy Darnwood walking into the room. “Everyone? Just had a call from Clackton. Somebody called Sonia Carmichael?”

  Blake turned to her, frowning. “Sonia? What’s happened?”

  “She sounded really distressed,” Darnwood replied, her bored tone sounding as far away from urgent as it was possible to be. “She says she’s found a body of someone she knows. Something about a Jamie Salford?”

  The team exchanged glances.

  “A body?” Blake repeated, stunned.

  “I’ve got the address,” Mandy said, carelessly passing him a post-it note that she had scribbled on. Blake took it from her.

  “This is Jamie Salford’s address. Alright, everyone with me.”

  Blake looked down at the body on the ground, a mixture of sadness and confusion swimming around his head. The rest of the team gathered round him, Patil in the next room taking a statement from an extremely distressed Sonia.

  “Who is he?” Gardiner asked, as they watched Sharon Donahue examine the body.

  “His name is Marcus,” Blake murmured. “Marcus Langton. He was Jamie Salford’s housemate.”

  “We only spoke to him yesterday,” Mattison said. “Look at the state of his face, Sir. Only Salford could have done this.”

  “Let’s wait till we know all the facts, Matti,” Blake told him.

  As if on cue, Sharon stood up and addressed them. “Okay, as you can tell by the bruising all around the face, he was given a pretty nasty beating. I would estimate that he was knocked unconscious by a punch in the wrong place.”

  “Is that what killed him?” Blake asked.

  Sharon pulled a face. “No, I don’t think so.” She knelt down to the body and gently lifted his head. “If you look here, we can see he’s been knocked quite hard on the head. Judging by the position, I’d say it was from behind. I’d guess whoever was attacking him just grabbed the nearest thing they could get their hands on.”

  Blake stared at the battered face of Marcus. “He gets two rounds of hell beaten out of him and then gets whacked on the head?”

  Sharon shrugged. “I’d need to examine him further, but a whack this hard, I would say at this point that this is the cause of death.”

  Blake sighed. “Okay. Thanks, Sharon.”

  He walked into the living room where he found Patil and Sonia. Sonia was shaking and crying, with Patil gripping tightly onto her hand. They both looked up as Blake entered.

  “I’m starting to make a habit of this,” Sonia said to him, tears in her eyes.

  “What happened, Sonia?” Blake asked her softly.

  Sonia shook her head. “It’s all a bit of a blur to be honest. I knew Jamie was angry, but I didn’t think he was capable of doing something like this.”

  “What was he angry about?”

  “He found out last night that Marcus and Kerry had been seeing each other. In fact, he reckons that Marcus is – was – the father of Kerry’s baby. There’s footage on the apartment security cameras of them together.” She took a few deep breaths to calm herself.

  “Take your time,” Blake told her.

  “He turned up last night and found the footage, I don’t know how he found out, but he stormed out, threatening about what he was going to do. When I finished work, I came here. I didn’t know what he was going to do, I’ve seen such a dark and dangerous side to him these past couple of weeks. When I got here, Marcus was –” She stopped to stifle another sob. “Marcus was just arriving home. He’d been on a night out, and was only just getting home. I warned him that Jamie knew about Kerry, but then Marcus opened the door and Jamie w
as just on him. Punching him, kicking him, he just had this absolutely crazed look in his eyes. Then he picked up a vase or something from the side and slammed it into his head, pushed me out the way and ran out of the door. I’m scared, Blake. What if he comes after me next?”

  “That won’t happen, Sonia,” Blake told her firmly. “We’re going to find him.” He turned to Patil. “Mini, can I leave you to deal with things here?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Blake stood up and walked back into the hallway, where he found Mattison writing in his notepad, watching Sharon take Marcus’ body away.

  “You want to help me find him?” Blake asked him.

  Mattison looked up from his notepad. “Too right I do.”

  “Come on then.”

  Soon, Blake and Mattison were driving around Clackton, their eyes searching every street and alleyway. Deep down, Blake was not expecting to find him.

  “If he’s got any sense, he’ll still be running as fast as he can,” Mattison said as they drove through the centre of town. “He could be miles away by now.”

  They had already put a call out for surveillance around the town to get in contact with them if they saw anybody fitting Jamie’s description, but Blake did not have high hopes.

  “While I’ve got you on your own,” Blake said as they scanned the streets around them. “Do you want to tell me what the hell this morning was all about?”

  Mattison scratched the back of his head. “It’s nothing, Sir.”

  “Didn’t seem like nothing. Let me save you the effort of trying to fob me off with something, Matti. I’ve spoken to Mini, I know what this is about.”

  Mattison turned to him. “You do?”

  “Yep. And trust me, it’s not what you think. I’m not going to get involved, but let me assure you of one thing. That girl loves you. No accounting for taste, right?”

  Mattison rolled his eyes at Blake’s joke but smiled, returning his eyes to the street. “Salford was trying to chat her up last night. He was practically all over her. Then when I stopped him, he was all mouth. I just sort of lost it.”