Riddled on the Sands (The Lakeland Murders)

by Salkeld, J J

  Again Capstick thought about it. He seemed to be making a big effort to think carefully, to make the right decision.

  ‘And I don’t have to? If I don’t want to, like?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What do you think, Geoff?’

  ‘What harm could it do?’ said Atkinson. ‘Ray’s explained why he wants to know, to make sure that no-one else has been using your phone.’

  ‘All right, then, yeah. You go ahead.’

  Ian Mann slid an evidence bag under the phone, closed and tagged it, and asked Capstick to sign the label. Then he left the room, and Dixon noted the fact for the tape. He asked a couple of couple of inconsequential questions until Mann came back.

  ‘Do you have any other SIM cards, for your phone?’

  ‘No, why should I?’

  ‘Are you sure? This is important, Pete.’

  ‘Aye, bloody certain. I’ve got an old phone somewhere, but it doesn’t even work.’

  Dixon nodded. ‘Well, then, you’re going to have to help me out here, Pete, you really are. Because on Friday the 14th your phone had a different SIM in it, a pay-as-you-go one, just for a little while in the afternoon. And that’s not all. Because you know what, it made a call, from right in Flookburgh, to a satellite phone that we think was out on the Bay.’

  ‘What? No, that’s all wrong.’

  ‘I’m afraid not. You see, your phone has a unique identity, they all do, and we can see every call it made, even when a different SIM was in it. It’s not easy, but we can. Not a lot of people know that, as someone might have once said.’

  ‘No, you’ve made a mistake. I don’t know what you’re talking about, honest.’ Hall thought that Capstick looked seriously flustered now. ‘I’d like to go home now. I don’t feel well. Must have been the car ride, like.’

  ‘Whatever you want, Pete. You’re here voluntarily, but if you hang on five minutes we can give you your phone back. So maybe hang on a bit, yeah?’

  ‘OK’.

  Hall watched Atkinson. Would he intervene? He looked as if he wanted to say something, do something, but he didn’t.

  ‘It’s a mystery really, isn’t it, Pete?’ said Dixon conversationally. ‘You had the phone with you all that afternoon and evening, you don’t have another SIM card, and you don’t know anyone with a sat-phone. Yet your phone made that call to that satellite phone, it really did.’

  ‘Maybe it was, you know, cloned’ said Capstick.

  ‘That’s a good idea, I’ll look in to that, or rather I’ll ask some of our whizz kids to do it. Because I’ll be honest with you Pete, I’m crap with technology, me. Takes me ten minutes to work out how to turn the bloody dishwasher on.’ Dixon paused. ‘But hang on a minute, if it was cloned then why would someone be using it in Flookburgh? That’s a bit of a co-incidence, isn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe they were trying to pretend to be me’ said Capstick.

  ‘Aye, that’s a possibility, I suppose.’

  They all sat in silence.

  ‘Of course there is another possibility, isn’t there, Ian?’ said Dixon.

  ‘Oh aye, there’s another possibility all right.’

  Something in Mann’s tone made Capstick look up sharply. Perhaps he knew what was coming. ‘What possibility?’

  ‘That it was you got Jack Bell killed out there. Betrayed your own mate. Caused his death as sure as if you’d pulled the trigger yourself’ said Mann. He spoke so quietly that Hall could hardly hear him over the speaker in the observation room.

  ‘No. What are you talking about? Jack was my friend. Anyone will tell you. I wouldn’t do that. Geoff, you tell him.’

  But Mann didn’t give Atkinson a chance to speak.

  ‘Oh, we know he was your friend all right, Pete. We know that all right. And that’s what makes it so unforgivable. You see, I think this is what happened: I think you phoned your friends, maybe they’re new friends, I don’t know, but anyway they’re the ones with the satellite phone and the guns, and you arranged to meet them out on the Bay. But your old mate Jack Bell saw you with them, or saw something he was curious about, because old Jack Bell was a curious sort of bloke, wasn’t he? Interested in everything, Jack was. The wildlife, the history of the village, he loved it all. And I know you didn’t pull the trigger, Pete, of course I know that. You’d never gun down your old friend Jack, but your new friends did. They just opened up on him. Cut him to pieces, didn’t they? They didn’t give a shit about Jack, just like they don’t give a shit about you. All they wanted to do was get their cargo, whether it was drugs or people or guns or whatever it was, transferred to shore. And that was your job, wasn’t it, Pete? Your mate is dead because you got yourself mixed up with people like that.’

  ‘No, no, that’s all wrong. None of that happened. I told you. I don’t know what happened to Jack.’

  ‘You did tell us, and I don’t believe you. Not one word of it. And your call to that sat-phone is the first bit of evidence that we’ll use to convict you. Then everyone in Flookburgh will know what you did, Pete. Betty will know, everyone will know. So why not man up and tell us the whole story now? Take a bit of responsibility for what happened out there. You know they say that it’s good to talk about things, get them out in the open?’

  Capstick nodded slightly.

  ‘Well, usually that’s bollocks, isn’t it? But not this time. Because even if you get away with this, and you won’t, then it would eat you up inside, I guarantee you that. So come on, tell us. My version is more or less right, isn’t it? So who are these people? Who shot an unarmed man down for no reason? Tell us and we can go and catch them.’

  ‘No, it’s not true. It happened just like I said.’

  Mann leant across the table, quite slowly, and Capstick pulled back, rather fast.

  ‘In a minute your phone is going to come back, and you know what I think? I think that no-one else has touched it but you. It will just be your prints on that SIM card. Because maybe you didn’t notice this, but we haven’t taken your prints today, and we don’t have them on file. You see all we want to know is that there are only one set of prints on that phone and the SIM. And if there are they must all be yours, mustn’t they?’

  ‘So what? I told you I didn’t lend the phone to anyone. I told you the truth.’

  ‘I know you did. And I believe you about that. Because it was you who called those bastards in, using that other SIM card. I bet they told you to use another phone, because these people are pros, aren’t they? But you forgot, were lazy, whatever, and you used your own phone. That was stupid, and it’s what connects you to all this. And from here on it’s going to be like the worst quicksand you could imagine. The more you struggle, the more you lie, the harder you’ll be sucked down. I know you’re involved, and I won’t stop ‘til I can prove it to a jury’s satisfaction too.’

  Capstick looked like he was about to come apart, and Hall prayed that Mann would back off. And for a few seconds he did, but then he came right back again. ‘Too soon’ said Hall, out loud.

  ‘But I tell you what I think, Pete. I think that this isn’t all your fault, I really do. You didn’t know what you were getting into here, did you? People have always been on with the smuggling job, round where you live, haven’t they? I bet your ancestors were at it, and they’re folk heroes now, aren’t they? You probably thought you were just part of a noble tradition of sticking two fingers up to the customs man, to the government, to the rich bastards who own it all, the whole world, like. That was it, wasn’t it? You didn’t know they were armed, you didn’t know that they’d take out a witness without a second thought. How could you know that? But they did, didn’t they? And you were there. You heard the sound of those rounds hitting metal, and flesh and bone too. And you’ll never forget it, I can tell you that for nothing. I’ve been there too, and it haunts you, doesn’t it? That sound, it never goes away.’

  Capstick leant forward, his head in his hands. He was sobbing. Eventually Geoff Atkinson put an arm round
him.

  ‘I think we’d better finish here, lad. Ray, can you switch off the tape?’

  ‘Of course I can.’

  But Dixon hadn’t even reached forward when there was a knock at the door. Ian Mann was gone for no more than thirty seconds.

  ‘We’re going to need to keep your phone, Pete’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a receipt. And we’re going to need to take your fingerprints and a DNA swab before you go today. And have a guess, how many sets of prints did we find on your phone, on the SIM, anywhere?’

  Capstick was still lying forward, his head buried in his crossed arms. ‘One’ he said.

  ‘How many?’

  ‘One’ said Captsick, more loudly.

  ‘That’s right. You’re exactly right. Which means I know for certain that you’re in this, right in this, and I’m coming after you now, Pete. Jack Bell died alone out there, one unarmed man against I don’t know how many, and you did nothing to help. And I know that, because if you had you’d be dead now too. That’s how these people work. But now Jack’s got all of us on his side. And we will win. So do the right thing, help us, and we’ll get the people who did this. You’ll feel better, not just right now but for the rest of your life. So come on, tell us what really happened.’

  But Pete Capstick didn’t speak again. He didn’t even raise his head. Andy Hall slammed his hand down on the desk in front of him. Either Capstick was telling the truth, which he doubted very much, or he’d found the strength to lie. And he knew that fear was the only motivation strong enough to overcome all that weight of remorse. But who exactly was Capstick afraid of?

  Jane usually liked the office best when it was quiet, because it was easier to concentrate without Ray’s constant barrage of banter and jokes. But today she had mixed feelings, because she knew that downstairs, right at that moment, Andy, Ian and Ray might be making a breakthrough in the Bell murder. And even if they weren’t she still wanted to be down there, leading the questioning. She might even have made a breakthrough herself.

  And anything would be better than having to wade through all the rubbish that she’d got from Perkins. She was amazed at how many emails there were. How could people get so worked up about a five quid item that didn’t work properly, or that some old book had a torn dust-jacket? And, with the notable exception of the book-buyers, the angrier that punters got the worse their spelling and grammar became. And given that their first, relatively polite efforts were often pretty hard to follow that really wasn’t saying much. What was about being online that made people behave like that? She couldn’t work it out.

  But her scientific training meant that Jane kept at it, methodically and carefully. And she felt a bit better when Andy and the rest of the team reappeared. She knew from the way that Andy pushed open the office door, just that bit harder than usual, that they’d got nothing worth having from Capstick.

  ‘Nowt’ said Ray Dixon as he passed her desk. ‘Nada, zilch, the square root of bugger all. Ian played a blinder, and I’m not just saying that because he’s bigger than me, but he still didn’t get the bastard to cough to it. We were close, mind, bloody close.’

  Five minutes later the open office was empty again, because Dixon and Mann were in with Andy Hall. Time for the post-mortem. So Jane went back to her ‘possibles’ pile, the punters who looked as if they might, just might, have been angry enough to come and torch Perkins’ garage, and who also had their goods sent to a UK address. She’d already checked, and it was easy enough to find out who was behind Perkins’ operation, and where he lived. It had only taken her five minutes. ‘Not exactly a shrinking violet, are you John?’

  It all seemed so petty, punters bitching on about faulty phone chargers and bad packaging. Most of them were letting off steam, she was sure of it. But despite the fact that it all felt completely futile she ran all of the names and addresses, irrespective of how far away from Kendal they lived, through the computer. Of the thirty names, all men, she found five had records of some kind, and two had convictions for violence. But there was no arson. That would have been too much to hope for.

  So Jane pulled the exchanges between Perkins and the two with convictions for violent offences from the pile and read them again. She didn’t have to refer back to the threatening letters to know for certain that the authors were different. Couldn’t be more different in fact. One of the two lived in Hull, the other in Stoke, so both were a fairly long distance away. Jane checked again, and both men owned vehicles, and neither was currently banned from driving.

  She would have bet her pension that neither man had the slightest intention of carrying out any of the threats they’d made, which were as biologically implausible as they were grammatically inaccurate, but she still drafted an email to go to the DI at both of their nearest stations, which she then forwarded to Andy Hall for approval. At the very least they needed to know that they should tone down their emails, because technically she’d seen about fifty different offences in the whole thread, including a bizarre suggestion that Perkins was part of some huge conspiracy, aimed at bringing the west to its knees through the supply of sub-par golfing accessories.

  When she’d finished, Jane thought about what else she could do. She wanted to get out of the office, but she needed a reason. So she thought about Gary O’Brian. Could she be absolutely sure that he wasn’t connected to Perkins in any way?

  ‘Perkins International Trading’ said Perkins, when he picked up the phone. Jane smiled, picturing him standing among the boxes in his mother’s living room.

  ‘It’s DC Jane Francis, Mr. Perkins. I wanted to ask you to check something for me. Have you ever sold to, or bought from, a local man by the name of Gary O’Brian?’ Jane gave the address. ‘Could you check and call me back?’

  ‘No need, I can do it now. This is a virtual business you know. It lives in the cloud.’

  Jane waited.

  ‘No, I haven’t sold to him, or anyone at that address. Give me a second and I’ll check I haven’t bought from him either.’

  Jane could hear the rapid tapping of Perkins’ fingers on the keyboard.

  ‘No, nothing. And I would have remembered. So he’s your prime suspect is he, this O’Brian?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. It’s just a routine enquiry.’

  ‘I bet that’s what you say to all the boys.’

  ‘Goodbye, Mr. Perkins.’

  Jane wasn’t surprised, but it would have been nice to get out. The grey-green walls, the stained carpet tiles below, the flickering fluorescent lights above, it was all just so depressing. Usually she didn’t notice, but today she did. She could hear laughter coming from Hall’s office now, then a pause, then some more. She found herself becoming irritated. Didn’t they have a murderer to catch? ‘Bloody boys club’ she said, beneath her breath. ‘That’s all this place is.’

  Jane got up and went and made a brew, and didn’t even bother other asking the others if they wanted one too. But she still felt slightly guilty as she sat back down at her desk when she’d made it. She sighed, then leant forward and looked again at what Perkins had sent her, the stuff about the people he’d bought from, and she phoned the numbers for the three shops that were local. All three numbers were unobtainable, suggesting that the businesses had closed down.

  So Jane spent half an hour tracing the three proprietors, and then she looked at her watch. A quiet run out to the one in Kirkby Lonsdale and back would take her nicely through to knocking off time, and she wasn’t in the mood to give Cumbria Constabulary, let alone DI Andy Hall, anything for free that day. So she made a call, washed out her mug, and put it back in her desk drawer. The others laughed at her for doing it, but they were the ones who’d have to scrape the concrete remains of other people’s packet soups out of their mugs, not her.

  As she drove along the A65 Jane’s mood lightened. A warm westerly wind had cleared the air and polished the views. For some reason seeing Farleton Knott always lifted her spirits. She pushed a USB stick that Andy had given her into h
er Mini’s stereo, and listened as she drove. Some of the stuff was a bit sentimental, she thought, and she had no idea who most of it was by, but she sang along to the ones she recognised. And, unlike Andy Hall, Jane could actually sing.

  Her sat-nav took her to one of the narrow streets close to the centre of Kirkby Lonsdale, and she had to park a little way away from the address that she had for Miles Peter Robinson. No criminal record, age 71. She didn’t know much else about him, except that he’d run a bookshop in Kirkby Lonsdale for over forty years. Jane looked at her watch. She was ten minutes early, so she walked quickly to Main Street, and soon found the shop he’d run for all those years. It was locked and empty, and all the shop fittings were gone. There was a brief note in the window, politely thanking Robinson’s customers for their many years of loyal support, and already the tape holding it to the window was starting to yellow and peel.

  Jane knocked on Robinson’s front door at exactly 3.30pm, and listened to the sound of a chain being removed, and two locks being turned. The old man opened the door cautiously.

  ‘I’m DC Francis. I called earlier.’

  ‘Someone claiming to be a detective constable of that name did indeed telephone me earlier. Might I trouble you for sight of your Warrant Card?’

  Jane fished it out of her bag. Robinson was holding out his hand. She handed it over and watched as the old man removed his glasses, and looked at it closely.

  ‘Have you seen a Warrant Card before?’ she asked, after a few seconds.

  ‘An excellent question.’ He handed the card back and smiled. ‘And the answer is, of course, no. I don’t believe that I’ve so much as spoken to a police officer since I was a boy. But I do pride myself on being able to identify authentic artifacts, although I freely admit that I can’t always do the same with people.’