by T. M. Logan
My laptop.
I held both hands up to stop her, and she moved to walk around me.
“Hold on,” I said. “That’s my laptop. What are you doing?”
The white-suited policewoman gestured over her shoulder with her thumb. I followed where she was pointing and saw DCI Naylor in the hallway of my house, white plastic overshoes on. He had his arms crossed and was talking to another scene-of-crime officer.
“Boss’s orders,” said the policewoman carrying my laptop. “You’d better talk to him.” She walked away from me down the garden path, toward a parked police van that said Scientific Support Unit on it in large blue letters. William clutched my hand tightly.
A uniformed officer by my front door stepped in front of me and put a hand up as I approached.
“Sorry, sir. That’s far enough.”
“What?”
“You can’t go inside.”
“I live here.”
The officer scrutinized me for a moment. “Name?”
“Joe Lynch.”
“The owner of the property?”
“Yes. Now could you let me in, please?”
He hesitated, then moved out of my way.
55
I stepped inside, William still clutching my hand. Yesterday I had stood here in the silence, knowing that someone else had been there without my permission. I had that same feeling again—but now the house was filled with noise, muffled conversations, footsteps, strangers, smells that didn’t belong here. My home had become public property.
A white-suited officer came down the stairs, carrying the base unit of our PC wrapped in plastic.
“’Scuse me,” he said as he came past. Another officer followed after him, carrying a load of clothes in a clear plastic sack. I could see my work shirts, socks, William’s red school jumpers and gray trousers: the contents of our washing basket.
“Who’s that man?” William said in a loud stage whisper.
“He’s a policeman too. Come on, let’s find Mummy.”
The kitchen was also a hive of activity, crowded with forensic people brushing and scouring, swabbing and taking samples. One of them was removing both the wastebin and the recycling bin, putting them into clear evidence bags.
Mel looked upset, a smear of mascara around her eyes. She was still dressed smartly for work—she’d not even taken her jacket off—and threw her arms around me like she’d not seen me for a year. She folded into me and held on tightly, head against my chest, like a lost child. There was still something about that embrace—the way our bodies fitted perfectly together like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle—that felt so right, despite what had happened between us. Painfully, achingly right.
“Are you OK?” I said quietly into her hair. “Are you all right?”
She nodded but said nothing. When she couldn’t speak—when she didn’t trust her voice—she was really, really upset.
“What’s going on?”
She shook her head. Don’t know.
William held his hands up to her, and we separated so she could pick him up, balancing him on her hip. His gaze switched back and forth between his mother’s tears and the strange men in our kitchen, as if he couldn’t decide which was the more worrying.
I turned to DCI Naylor.
“What’s happening? Why are all these people here?”
“We’re executing a search-and-seizure order, Mr. Lynch.”
“I can see that, but why? We were broken into yesterday and I reported it, but this seems like a bit of an overreaction.”
“We’re not here because of a break-in.”
“So why are you here?”
“Benjamin Delaney.”
“Ben sent you here?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes.”
“You know he’s playing you, don’t you? He’s sitting in a bar somewhere, laughing at how easy it is to hoodwink the police.”
Naylor stared at me, unblinking. “Fresh evidence has come to light since our chat yesterday.”
“Evidence of what?”
“We’ll get to that. All in good time.”
There was a silence between us for a moment as I waited for him to expand on this. But he didn’t elaborate.
“That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say?”
“Not quite.”
DS Redford appeared at his side, as if summoned by a secret signal.
“Well?” I said.
Naylor’s next words hit me like a cinder block.
“Joseph Lynch, I’m arresting you on suspicion of murder.”
56
Murder.
For a moment, I couldn’t breathe out, the air trapped in my chest, hot and heavy, as I thought about the word Naylor had used. The oldest and gravest sin. The worst thing that one human being could do to another.
Two days ago, it had been about a missing person. Now it was a murder investigation.
The bustle and noise of police activity and of Naylor reading me my rights receded as I scrambled to think what had changed since yesterday, since they had told me they were simply trying to get a missing man back to his family. And in parallel, at the corner of my mind—right on the edge—another thought was putting down dark and twisted roots.
What would it be like in prison?
What would it be like to spend twenty years behind a wall?
To be absent when my son sat his GCSEs, passed his driving test, graduated from college?
But that wasn’t going to happen. Because I was innocent. This was all some giant mistake, Ben wasn’t even—
“Mr. Lynch?”
It was Naylor. I blinked, stared at him.
“Mr. Lynch,” he said again. “Do you understand what I just said to you?”
I nodded dumbly.
He held out a white-gloved hand. “I’m going to need your car keys.”
The room came back into focus. Mel looked stricken. She wouldn’t let go of my hand, clutching it to her stomach as if she could keep me in the house by the sheer force of her desperation.
Naylor took the car keys from me and passed them to DS Redford.
There was an audience in the street as I was led out to a police car. Bystanders, spectators, neighbors. A woman across the street, standing in her open front doorway, talking on the phone as she looked at the scene unfolding in front of my house. We babysat her kids sometimes. The softly spoken widower who lived opposite, half-hidden by lace curtains in his front window as he peered out on all the police activity. I fed his three cats when he went to visit his grandchildren up north.
Despite my protests, Naylor insisted on handcuffing me.
A teenage boy on the pavement opposite filmed the whole thing on his cell phone. He was in tenth grade at Haddon Park, and I wondered how long it would be before his video appeared on Facebook. They wouldn’t use handcuffs if he wasn’t guilty as sin.
* * *
Redford stayed with me, a silent presence, as I was booked in with the custody sergeant at Kilburn Police Station and told to empty my pockets. It all went into a clear plastic bag: two cell phones—both mine and the secret phone that I’d found in Mel’s handbag—wallet, keys, a ballpoint pen, and loose change, before I signed at the bottom of a form and it was sealed for storage in a custody locker behind the counter.
The custody sergeant slid two more forms across the desk. The first was basic information about my name, address, and any medical conditions. The second form requested consent for the police to take fingerprints and DNA samples from me. I had done nothing wrong, and yet … there was something about this that felt like crossing another line. In the system, forever, my unique set of numbers stored in a computer, waiting for the day when I stepped out of line. It felt like giving up a small piece of freedom.
Being arrested was starting to feel very real indeed.
I signed the form, and the sergeant fingerprinted me, carefully and methodically. He led me into a side room where another officer took a sample of DNA, a swab in my chee
k for saliva. Left cheek, right cheek, sealed tight inside a labeled tube, job done. Then another one: identical procedure, identical routine.
“Why do you need to do it twice?” I asked the policeman, a young officer who looked barely old enough to drive.
“One’s the control sample, one’s the secondary,” he said. “We test them both to make sure they’re consistent with each other before we put them into the database. It’s like a backup.”
“In case of mistakes?”
He shook his head. “It’s about our procedures being watertight. A match is a match: DNA doesn’t lie.” He glanced up at me. “Unlike people.”
Redford swiped us through the reinforced door that led into the back of the station, showing me into a small interview room, smaller and shabbier than the one I’d been in yesterday. She disappeared. There was no offer of tea or coffee this time.
Forty minutes passed.
Redford was the first to return, a laptop under her arm, her face as blank and expressionless as marble. She was followed by Peter Larssen, who sat down next to me in a cloud of aftershave. Naylor was last to arrive, his tie pulled down below an open top button, folder in hand, hangdog expression firmly in place.
Larssen asked for five minutes alone with me before we got started. The two detectives left us, and I told him about my discovery of Mel’s secret phone—her link to Ben during their affair—and that I had surrendered it with my own phone at the front desk.
“Naylor should have his people look at it,” I said. “Maybe it will help to track Ben down.”
“They’re going to want your wife’s normal cell phone as well.”
“OK. Why?”
“The texts from Ben last night, when you were setting up the meeting between him and Mel at the shopping mall. There could be something in the phone records that they can use.”
He made a note to that effect on his pad, then capped his fountain pen and spoke quickly and quietly, laying out the rules of engagement: he would deal with questions; I was not to comment or respond unless he indicated it was OK to do so—and then only with short, factual responses that related directly to the question. There were to be no exceptions to this rule. I was to remain calm and courteous, not let them rattle me, and not introduce new theories about Ben’s whereabouts. That’s their job, not yours, he said with some force. Above all, I was to say nothing about my relationship with Ben, Beth, or my wife.
His rules seemed clear enough.
“I don’t get it, though.”
“Don’t get what?” he said.
“How they’ve gotten to this stage already. What evidence can they possibly have to justify arresting me?”
“We’re about to find out, Joe.”
Naylor and Redford came back into the interview room and sat opposite us. There were butterflies in my stomach, but it felt good to have Larssen riding shotgun beside me. Redford pushed a button on the Dictaphone.
“Interview with Joseph Michael Lynch commenced at 5:51 P.M., October 11.” She turned her dark brown eyes on me. “Please state your full name, date of birth, and current address for the recording.”
She went through various formalities and the names of the other three people present in the interview room. Naylor reminded me again that I was under caution and that anything I said could be given in evidence, but it might harm my defense if I failed to mention something now that was used later in court. He gave me his we’re-all-friends-here smile.
“So, Mr. Lynch,” he said. “You know why you’re here, correct?”
Larssen said, “My client is here because you arrested him.”
“Of course,” Naylor said. “I’m merely asking about Joe’s knowledge of the bigger picture.”
“Please fill us in, Detective,” Larssen said.
Naylor ran through the spiel he had given me on Monday morning, about the missing persons report being filed on Ben Delaney and the proof-of-life inquiries they had been carrying out over the last forty-eight hours. Since yesterday, new evidence had come to light, he said, which had altered their focus on the case.
“As I mentioned, this is not being treated as a missing persons inquiry anymore.”
He let it hang in the air for a moment, waiting for either me or Larssen to bite. Neither of us did.
“It’s now being treated as a no-body murder inquiry.”
That word again. Hearing it once, in front of my wife and child, had been bad enough. But to hear it again inside a police station, with my DNA sample on the way to a lab, was a whole lot worse.
One word. Two syllables. Enough weight to send you to the bottom of the ocean.
Murder.
“On the basis of what new evidence?” Larssen said.
“We’ll get to that in a moment. Suffice it to say we now have enough to elevate the status of the investigation.”
I looked from him to Larssen and back again.
“A ‘no-body murder’ sounds like a contradiction in terms,” I said.
Larssen frowned at me but said nothing.
“Not really,” Naylor said. “We have very grave concerns for Mr. Delaney’s safety. We have a steadily increasing amount of evidence that foul play is involved, even without the discovery of a body.”
“There’s no body to find,” I said. “Because no one’s died.”
“Our evidence suggests otherwise.”
I shook my head, and Larssen shot me a look that said, Let me handle this.
“It’s not common, Joe,” he said. “But it does happen. Makes the police’s job much more difficult.”
“That depends on what else we’ve found,” Naylor replied.
“Can you give us an idea of what that is?”
“You know that I don’t have to disclose it at this stage, Peter.”
“I realize that, absolutely.”
“But I’m going to all the same, in the interests of keeping you fully and properly informed. Three further items of evidential value that have developed over the last twenty-four hours.”
“Thank you, Detective Chief Inspector. We appreciate it.”
Naylor opened a folder he’d brought in with him. “Remember on Monday, Joe, when I told you about the blood found in Mr. Delaney’s car and how we were able to match it to his record in the database from a case last year?”
“The guy he fired from his company.”
“That’s the one. Blood traces recovered from the underground parking lot of the Premier Inn, near Brent Cross, have also been matched to Mr. Delaney.”
In my mind’s eye, I saw the blood dripping from Ben’s ear onto the concrete.
“We found a second blood trace at the scene,” Naylor added. “Not matched to Ben Delaney. We’re still working on tying that sample to a suspect.”
Larssen wrote something else on his pad and circled it. “Sure. What else?” he said in a tone that suggested he thought the DNA match was nothing to worry about.
I couldn’t believe how calm he was.
“DNA at the scene is number one,” Naylor said. “Number two was also found at the scene.”
He produced a clear plastic evidence bag from his folder and laid it on the table.
57
There was something thin and black inside the evidence bag. Circular. The right size to fit around a wrist. A leather bracelet. My bracelet. The one that Mel had given to me on our third wedding anniversary. I’d lost it in the scuffle with Ben on Thursday night.
“Evidence item four-four-one-nine-six-slash-A is shown to the suspect,” Naylor said. “This item, a bracelet, was recovered from the scene, and it also has traces of Mr. Delaney’s blood on it. Do you recognize the bracelet?”
“My client has no comment,” Larssen said without looking up from his pad.
“Sure?” Naylor asked me.
I said nothing.
“I was rather hoping that Mr. Lynch would recognize it. Because he posted a message on Facebook about losing it on Thursday night.”
“That was Ben,
” I said.
“When he supposedly hacked your account?”
“Yes. I lost my phone; he must have picked it up.”
“Where?”
Larssen shot me a look and said, “No comment.”
“Is that why you deleted the message later?”
I said nothing.
“It’s an obvious thing, but we can often learn more from the messages a person thinks they’ve deleted than from the ones they leave up. In fact, you deleted two Facebook messages you posted on Thursday night.”
“I didn’t—”
“My client has no comment,” Larssen interrupted.
“Of course, nothing’s ever really deleted, you know,” Naylor said. “From anywhere. There’s always an electronic footprint. A record on a computer server somewhere in the world. Imagine that. Every message you ever sent, every website you ever visited, every picture you upload, every post on social media. Everything. The amount of information people are putting out into the public domain about themselves today … it’s unprecedented in human history. It’s all out there, all that data about you, stored forever. It’s just a case of knowing where to look.” He paused for a moment. “And our technical people are very good at knowing where to look. It’s a gold mine, as far as law enforcement goes.”
“The thing about a gold mine,” Larssen said, “is you generally just end up with lots of worthless rock to show for your trouble.”
“But when you uncover a nugget of gold, it makes it all worthwhile. And it’s the nuggets that we’re looking for. Which leads me on to our third evidence strand. Mr. Lynch’s cell phone.”
“My client’s already indicated that he lost his phone,” Larssen said.
“Convenient,” Naylor replied.
“Happens to thousands of people, every day of the week.”
Naylor said, “Do you know what metadata is, Joe?”
I shook my head.
“Literally speaking, it means ‘data about data,’” he continued, turning to another sheet of paper in his file. “Information generated as you use technology. In the case of your average smartphone, metadata will give you a list of numbers, coordinates, dates, and times.”
