But Keith Wade had gone a step further — he’d smartened himself up for his interview at the police station. Not many people cared about looking good in an interview room. But at least he’d ditched the woolly Arbroath smoky, and Fry could risk breathing.
‘Mr Wade, thank you for coming in earlier to give us your fingerprints.’
‘For elimination purposes, you said. Is that right?’
‘Well, that was the idea.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘First of all, I want to take you back to Sunday night again, when you first noticed the fire at your neighbour’s house.’
He looked irritated. ‘I think I’ve told you everything. Twice, probably.’
‘How did you get into the house?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Surely you must do. You saw the smoke, went to make the 999 call, then …?’
‘I opened their front door.’
‘You opened the front door of number 32? Do you mean you broke the door down?’
‘No.’
‘Surely it wasn’t unlocked?’
Wade decided not to answer that one. He began to look sulky. In a moment, she could be into ‘no comment’ territory.
‘You’ve got a key, haven’t you?’ said Fry.
‘Like I said, I knew Brian and Lindsay well. I keep an eye on their house when they’re away.’
‘They leave you a key. That’s how you got in.’
‘Yes.’
‘You knew Brian was out that night, didn’t you?’
‘Well, yes. I always see him come and go.’
‘Mr Wade, how did you get on with boys? Jack and Liam?’
‘Oh, them — ’
‘They were nice lads, you said.’
‘Little bastards, that’s what they were.’
‘One was seven years old, and the other four, Mr Wade.’
He stared at her sullenly. ‘I know that.’
‘You’re a smoker, aren’t you, sir? It was obvious as soon as I walked through your door.’
‘There’s no law against it, is there?’
‘Actually, yes. But not in the privacy of your own home.’
‘So?’
‘Unfortunately, you took your matches and lighter fluid out of your house. You took them to your next-door neighbour’s, in fact.’
‘Brian’s a good bloke,’ said Wade, leaning forward urgently.
‘He says the same about you, funnily enough. But he couldn’t be more wrong, could he?’
‘He’s my mate. I look out for him.’
‘So why did you go into his house that night, pour lighter fluid in the sitting room and set fire to it? Why did you murder his wife and children?’
‘What?’
‘There’s no point in denying it. We have your fingerprints from the can of lighter fluid that you used and left in a bin down the street.’
Wade shook his head. ‘Brian’s better off without them. Look at me — I’m a lot better off without my wife. It was the best thing that ever happened to me when she went. I ought to have kicked her out a lot sooner. Once they start giving you trouble, the best thing is to get rid of them.’
‘You mean you thought you were doing Brian Mullen a favour?’
‘Well, you could put it like that. He was a brave bloke, but not that brave. I think that’s why Brian went out so often, he couldn’t face it. He needed a helping hand, like.’
‘So you stepped in. Watching out for your neighbour, Mr Wade? That’s just great. Thank God we don’t all have neighbours like you.’
‘I don’t want to talk any more.’
‘You’ve said enough.’
Fry began to get up, then stopped. ‘When you said Brian went out so often, what did you mean?’
‘He’d been staying out really late.’
‘Like Sunday night, you mean?’
‘Yes, Sunday. And Saturday.’
‘Saturday? Brian Mullen was out on Saturday night as well?’
‘Oh yes, all night. Past three o’clock, as I recall.’
‘Why didn’t you mention this before?’
‘You never asked.’
She had a sudden memory of her conversation with Jed Skinner, Brian Mullen’s friend, his alibi. Had Skinner just slipped up when he mentioned Saturday instead of Sunday, the night of the fire? But then, why should he have thought that Saturday was the night Brian needed an alibi for? Did he think he was covering for an affair?
‘That’ll do for now, Mr Wade,’ said Fry. ‘You’ll be charged with the murder of Lindsay Mullen and her two children.’
Wade looked at her with something like distaste. Surely it ought to be the other way round. But there was no accounting for what went on in people’s minds, their rationalizations and self-justifications.
‘You know, I thought Lindsay would welcome a bit of company, with Brian being out,’ he said. ‘A bit of male company, like. But she was a bitch, like all the others. Brian is a lot better off without her.’
Hitchens kept his chair still for once, instead of making it squeal on its swivel. Perhaps he was finally reading her thoughts, responding to the force of her unspoken will. Fry made a mental note to ask someone to come in and oil the thing when the DI was off duty.
‘The SOCOs found Wade’s digital camera,’ he said. ‘But all the photographs of the fire had been deleted from the memory card.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Fry. ‘He was worried we might find something incriminating.’
‘Like what?’
‘I think he probably started taking photographs long before he made the 999 call. We’d have been able to see the time of each photograph on the memory card, wouldn’t we?’
‘Yes, that’s right. Or even on a jpeg copy if he’d emailed them.’
‘Well, then it might have occurred to us to compare them to the time of his call. And he’d have some difficult questions to answer. I don’t think our Mr Wade is too technical. He wouldn’t have known how to check the time stamp of each photo, so he deleted the whole lot.’
‘You must have had him worried from the start, Diane.’
‘He was an amateur. Look at how many mistakes he made.’
‘Well, you always said the answer to the Mullen case would be close to home.’
‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ said Fry. ‘I was thinking about a member of the family. But I suppose your next-door neighbour is pretty close. The Mullens put their trust in him.’
Hitchens stood up from his chair. ‘Let’s go and see the DCI.’
In the DCI’s office, they found that Kessen had just received the results of the latest actions from the incident room — a detailed assessment of Rose Shepherd’s financial circumstances.
‘Miss Shepherd had several savings accounts at different banks,’ he said, ‘but they were practically empty. Unless there are some investments or deposits we haven’t located, the victim’s funds were getting dangerously low.’
‘She doesn’t seem to have had any income, either,’ pointed out Fry.
‘That’s right. Apart from interest on her savings, nothing has been added to any of the accounts as far back as we can go. Since the house purchase, the flow of money has been in one direction — into her current account, where it’s been used to pay bills. We had a quick calculation of her annual expenditure. At her present rate, she couldn’t have survived more than another six months, I reckon.’
Fry took the print-out he offered her. ‘Was she spending heavily?’
‘Not really. Well, her big expenditure was on the house purchase and everything that went with it — solicitor’s fees, and the work she had done, like the gates and the burglar alarms. That must have made a huge hole in her resources. But since then, it’s just been normal living expenses. Council Tax, utilities, telephone bills. Not to mention food and general household expenses. They’ve all been increasing.’
‘And interest rates have been falling.’
‘She must have miscalcu
lated badly, if she thought she could hide herself away in Bain House for the rest of her life.’
‘In any case, she must have been able to see what was going to happen not too far in the future. She was going to run out of money.’
‘Bain House would have had to go, for a start. She could have survived a few years longer if she’d flogged it and bought a terraced property in the city somewhere.’
‘She could have got a job,’ said Fry.
‘Look at the way she lived here,’ said Kessen. ‘Neither of those two options would have seemed possible to Rose Shepherd. She was too frightened of being tracked down.’
‘Yes, of course.’
Kessen coughed. ‘Are we nearly finished here? We need all the manpower we can get at Matlock Bath. Don’t forget we’re still looking for the child. And whoever assaulted DC Cooper, of course.’
‘Thank goodness the Zhivko bombing is C Division’s baby,’ said Hitchens. ‘We couldn’t have coped with that as well. By all accounts, it’s proving a big headache for them.’
‘I’ll send them our sympathy.’
‘What about Brian Mullen?’ asked Fry, turning back to the room. ‘Should we interview him again? It does seem a bit tough on him, so soon after everything else that’s happened.’
‘Leave it for now,’ said Hitchens. ‘I’ll have another try at Tony Donnelly first.’
‘No, look,’ said Donnelly a few minutes later. ‘All I did was nick a car and torch it afterwards. That’s nothing. You just get a ticking off for that. Community service, that sort of thing. It’s no big deal.’
‘You’ve done it before, Mr Donnelly, haven’t you?’
‘Well, yeah. Everybody has. When we were kids, we did it all the time round our way.’
‘But you’re not a kid any more.’
‘No. Well, I had given it up. This was just a one-off.’
‘Found something more lucrative, did you?’
‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’
‘I think you do,’ said Hitchens.
Donnelly shook his head.
‘So why this one-off?’
‘Look, it was a favour. Someone wanted a car for a bit, that’s all. A decent car, a four-by-four. I found one for him, and I did it as a favour.’
‘This would be the Shogun?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you saying you didn’t know what the vehicle was being used for?’
Donnelly chuckled. ‘No, of course not. You don’t ask questions like that.’
‘We do.’
‘Yeah, well …’ He shrugged. ‘I can’t tell you, can I? No matter how long you keep me here, I can’t tell you, because I don’t know.’
‘We don’t need you to tell us that, Mr Donnelly. We already know. The car you stole was used to commit a murder.’
‘Eh?’
‘A shooting in Foxlow.’
‘No. Well, I heard about that, but you can’t- Well, you can’t, that’s all.’
‘Mr Donnelly, unless you tell us who you did this favour for, you’re our number one suspect right now.’
‘For a murder? You’ve got to be joking.’
‘Not at all, sir. I’ve never been more serious. I suggest you start being more co-operative, or you could be here for a lot longer yet.’
Donnelly stared at him for a long moment, his eyes flickering anxiously as he worked out the odds. Either way, they didn’t look good.
‘He was good to me,’ he said. ‘He gave me a job, and he helped me to set up on my own when things started to go pear-shaped. I owed him a favour, that’s all. He’s a good bloke. I did it as a favour, I don’t know anything else.’
‘Who are you talking about, Mr Donnelly?’
Donnelly took a deep breath before finally committing himself. ‘OK, I’ll tell you.’
Cooper caught up with Fry in the car park, between the security gate and the custody suite. A light drizzle was falling, and Fry seemed to want to get to her car quickly, but he stopped her.
‘Ben? What the heck are you doing here? You’re supposed to be at home recuperating.’
‘I don’t need to recuperate. I’m fine.’
He waited for the response he expected, wincing as he remembered what Liz had said to him when he put his jacket on to leave the flat. But, from Fry, it didn’t come.
‘So what do you think you’re going to do here?’ she said.
‘I want to help. Are there any developments?’
Fry brought him up to date on Keith Wade, then told him about Rose Shepherd’s dire financial circumstances.
‘God, she must have been getting desperate,’ said Cooper. ‘There wasn’t even anyone she could turn to for help or advice. She was dealing with that prospect alone.’
Fry leaned against the side of a police van. ‘You know, in those circumstances, I think you’d probably get to a point where you didn’t care any more. You’d be asking yourself what the point of it all was. I mean, how could her life have been worth living? Rose Shepherd was sixty-one — she was facing the prospect of another twenty or thirty years living like this, but with her deliberate isolation becoming more and more difficult to maintain day by day. Personally, I think Rose Shepherd might actually have welcomed her fate, when it came.’
Cooper stared at her, surprised by her sudden burst of empathy. Fry stood beside the van, a slight figure, hardly enough of her to catch the rain.
But Cooper wasn’t at all sure about what she’d just said. He couldn’t feel convinced that Rose Shepherd had welcomed death. In this case, there had been too much of a tendency for people to think they could let the dust settle and return to some kind of normal life, their offences forgiven or forgotten, their past put far behind them.
But dust had a habit of showing tracks if it was left undisturbed too long. And, like the dust gathering in the Mullens’ smoke alarm, it could even mask the approach of danger, when it finally came burning out of the night.
‘Diane, there is another possibility that Miss Shepherd might have considered,’ said Cooper.
‘What’s that, Ben?’
‘I wonder if she thought she’d found a lifeline. She might have made contact with someone she thought she could get money out of.’
‘What?’
Cooper saw the sceptical look in her eyes, and started his train of thought all over again. ‘I asked about the rifle. You remember, the Romanian semi-automatic?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, apart from the military sniper rifle, there’s a sporting version of the PSL made for export, the Romak-3. It’s very similar, but has the bayonet lug ground off and some other modifications to comply with US import laws.’
‘A sporting version. Do you mean a hunting rifle?’
‘Yes. A hunting rifle.’
Fry tilted her head slightly to one side as she looked at him. ‘What are you thinking, Ben?’
He smiled at the echo of Liz’s words earlier. Liz had known what he was thinking before he said it. She’d known, even though he denied it. But Fry was different — she wanted it spelled out. She wanted to hear him explain it. They connected on quite a different level.
‘I listened to the tapes of John Lowther’s interviews,’ he said. ‘You remember his sentence referring to hunting? He said some people go “hunting for whores. No, for babies …”’
‘Yes, I remember.’
‘I wonder if that was an example of what Dr Sinclair called “clang associations”, a confusion of words with similar sounds or the same initial letters. I wonder if he meant some people go hunting boars.’
‘Boars?’
‘Wild pigs. They still hunt them in parts of the world. Bulgaria, for example.’
‘So?’
‘There’s another thing. When Henry Lowther had that business trip to Bulgaria, it wasn’t all vodka and red wine. His business contacts took him wild boar hunting.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘You asked him where he went and he mentioned the na
me of a place. Dounav. That was a mistake on his part, but I suppose he couldn’t think of anywhere else in Bulgaria on the spur of the moment. There are some lies that you need to plan.’
‘What’s wrong with Dounav?’
‘I looked it up,’ said Cooper. ‘Dounav is a state game preserve in northern Bulgaria. One of its hunting ranges is called the Bulgarian jungle because of its deep forests. Hunters go there to shoot deer, foxes and even the occasional wolf. But mostly wild boar.’
With the back of her hand, Fry wiped a bit of rain from her face and began to walk towards her car again. ‘OK. So …?’
‘Well, how do you go about hunting boar?’ said Cooper. ‘Those are big animals. I doubt if you’d use a bow and arrow.’
Fry stopped in her tracks. ‘You’d use a hunting rifle, right?’
‘I think so, don’t you?’
Her expression had changed. The rain was getting heavier, but she let a trickle run into her eyes and hardly noticed.
‘OK, I’m with you, Ben. Let’s see if we can check out Henry Lowther’s financial status. He seems to have parted with money pretty readily when they were getting Zlatka Shishkov out of Bulgaria. But does he really have such deep pockets? I’m no expert on property prices, but I’d guess that bungalow at Darley Dale is probably worth less than Bain House.’
‘If Rose Shepherd was making an attempt to blackmail Mr Lowther, she might have seriously misjudged his ability to pay.’
‘Yes. But we’ve got to be discreet — I don’t want him to know we’re checking him out.’
‘Right, Diane. And what then?’
‘I’ll talk to the DI. When we’ve got everything together, we’ll go and see the Lowthers again.’
‘They’ve lost both their children in the past week,’ said Cooper.
‘I know. No one said this was going to be easy.’
38
Rain spattered on the glass roof of the Lowthers’ conservatory and ran down the windows in long, slow streaks. The stone angel had turned a darker shade of grey, puddles were forming on the backs of the flattened tortoises. Inside, the atmosphere was humid, condensation forming on the leaves of the tree ferns. It almost made up for the icy stares from Henry and Moira Lowther, sitting together on their settee.
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