Something about their theory was wrong. Something about their assumptions stopped the facts from allowing them to make the logical conclusion and find the killer. So take it right the way back to the beginning. What do we know? Connie Wells was shot with a bullet that couldn’t have been fired from more than eight hundred metres away. She was facing the harbour when she was shot. And the only thing in that direction eight hundred metres away or less was water.
Water.
Just a little twist in perception and whole different picture collides into place. Just a few degrees.
She glanced to her right and watched as the fishermen loaded lobster pots onto their boats. There were three in the harbour loading up. The Jean Rayner, the Shady Lady, and the Anglian Princess. The Jean Rayner was a pale sky blue with white paint neatly indicating her name and her registration number. The Jean Rayner LN353.
“I really am a fucking idiot.”
CHAPTER 24
She straight-armed the door to the squad room and waved her phone in the air. “I’ve got it. I know what the other numbers are.”
She tapped on the picture she’d pulled from the wreck of the houseboat. It was still covered in its plastic evidence bag, tagged, sealed, and ready for them to study. She pinned it to their board.
The grainy image had obviously been shot at long range using a lens at its maximum focal length. It had been blown up as much as possible to show whatever it was she was now looking at. The rope and steel frame of a lobster pot, water droplets dripping off the rope. The numbers “5” and “3” were clearly visible in the background, even though the leading edge of the “5” had been cut off slightly. It made it look uneven. The background was a pale sky blue with irregular white shapes here and there. The shapes weren’t smooth. There was a granular texture to the edges.
She checked around her to make sure they were all paying attention. “That’s a boat in the background.” She pointed to the splotches. “The shapes are the remains of sea spray that has dried and left a salty residue on the hull of a pale-blue boat. A pale-blue fishing boat hauling its lobster pots.” She pointed to the list of numbers from Connie’s diary. “It was right there in front of us. LN353. It’s a fishing boat called the Jean Rayner owned by—”
“The Robbins,” Tom said.
“Exactly.”
“How does that help us?” Collier asked. “We still can’t make the shot that killed her, kill her.”
“What do fishing boats do?” Kate asked.
He scowled at her, obviously aware that there was a trap ahead but unable to see it to avoid it. “They fish.”
“Uh-huh. How do they do that?”
“In this case, they pull pots out of the water.”
“That they do.” She tugged the chart off the board and located the picture she’d taken of the Jean Rayner’s log book when she’d first questioned Ally Robbins for her whereabouts. Tom, Stella, and Jimmy crowded around her and looked over her shoulder. Carefully, she transposed the coordinates in the log book onto the chart and drew a cross with a circle around it. “To do that, they have to be on the water and, according to the log book, that is where she was hauling pots on the day Connie Wells was murdered.” She tapped the end of her pencil on the mark she’d made.
“From the boat?” Stella asked.
“It’s the only way the evidence physically makes sense.”
“But surely you couldn’t make an eight hundred-metre shot from a moving boat?”
“You wouldn’t have to.” Kate used the pencil and her thumb as a ruler to measure the distance from where Connie’s body was found to where the boat was logged. “Just because the bullet can make eight hundred metres doesn’t mean it was shot from that far.” She held the pencil to the scale marker. “That boat was less than two hundred yards from where Connie was shot. Given what we know of the skills of the Robbins siblings on the range, either of them could have made that shot.”
“Especially given the weather conditions at the time,” Tom said pointing to another piece of paper. “It was raining by nine but at seven, there wasn’t a breath of wind. It was like a mill pond out there.”
“Sands has a boat too,” Jimmy said. “As does Matt Green.”
Kate nodded. “True, but Sands isn’t logged in Connie’s diary at all, and the satellite navigation info from Green’s car puts him at Sutton Bridge just ten minutes before she dies. It’s forty minutes away from here. Physically impossible.”
“Why would either Robbins want to kill her?” Stella asked. “Have we heard anything about a grudge between any of them?”
Kate and Tom both shook their heads.
“And that’s strange, really,” Tom said.
“Why?”
“Because the rest of the village either loved her or hated her. There’s no one really indifferent like they seem to be. Doesn’t fit with what we know of the woman.”
“I don’t know,” Kate said. “Ally seemed to dislike her pretty well.”
“For Leah’s benefit,” Jimmy said. “Nothing else.”
“That’s true, actually. And it struck me as odd at the time. I actually thought she didn’t really care about Leah and would rather she was somewhere else. The outrage towards Connie seemed like bluster to me.” Kate shrugged. “I assumed Leah’d worn out her welcome with the drugs and all and she was just playing her role as good friend or something.”
“But her licence plate’s on the list too,” Collier said. “Leah’s, I mean, while neither Ally nor Adam’s is.”
“Did you find any CCTV footage of those coordinates, Stella?” Kate looked at her.
“No. Each location is just a lay-by on a major A road.” She grabbed Matt Green’s marked map off her desk and spread it out. “No cameras anywhere close. I only know that they’re lay-bys because I looked them up on Google Earth.”
“Green said he was selling something. That he met a bloke who was a delivery driver and he didn’t know his name.” Kate looked at the lobster pot picture again, then back at the diary page. She tapped the map and let her gaze drift, trying to see beyond what was in front of her to what was actually happening.
“What’re you thinking?” Stella asked.
“That I really want to know what’s in that.” She tapped the grey block in the lobster pot. “And that we need to bring Timmons in. I think this is a whole lot bigger than one DB.”
* * *
Timmons looked at the evidence they had lain out for him, moving one page to the back of the stack before carrying on.
“So these Robbins’? Do we know if they have registered firearms?”
“Still awaiting the confirmation,” Stella said.
“Okay, don’t arrest either until we know for sure.”
Stella nodded.
“So what are you thinking?” He looked at Kate.
“I’m thinking that I might have watched too many action films with drug runners in them, but I think that,” she said, pointing to the block, “is a brick of something and that these locations are transfers of drugs from the Robbins and cronies to the sellers or dealers next up in the chain.”
“Are you winding me up? We’re talking about a tiny little village on the friggin’ coast here. This isn’t the Costa del Crime, or Florida, you know?”
“I know. And, no, sir, I’m not winding you up. I think Connie was trying to break this.”
“Why?”
“Those drugs took everything she had and turned it to shit. Her partner got hooked and wouldn’t come off them.” Another piece of the jigsaw dropped into place. “Sammy said Connie was determined to help Leah. She said she was working on a project to help her, and I quote, whether she wanted the help or not, as a leaving present.”
“Okay, but why not come to us with it? Why not tell us what’s going on in Norfolk’s new crime capital?”
“I don’t know.”
“She did,” Collier said.
“Excuse me?” Timmons looked at him.
“She did, sir.
She came here in April and made a statement that she suspected drugs were being smuggled in and out of the harbour by persons unknown and that we needed to look into it.”
“How do you know this?”
“When we arrested Green, I was talking to the custody sergeant. He said he was surprised we’d gotten anywhere looking for the murderer of a slandering bitch like her. Said she’d made a number of scurrilous complaints about several people in the village. He told me about the one where she claimed they were big drug smugglers. The interviewing officers laughed at her.”
“Why didn’t you mention this before, Collier?” Stella asked, her cheeks reddening with visible anger.
“I thought it was just a bit of time wasting, like he did. Didn’t think anything of it.” He had the good sense to look like a puppy being kicked. “He thought she was just some crazy busybody out to cause trouble. It was a bit of a laugh, that’s all.”
“It wasn’t looked into at all?” Timmons asked.
Collier shrugged. “He said a couple of PCs went down to the harbour and had a look round, spoke to a couple of people, but there was nothing to it.”
“So they wrote it off.” It wasn’t a question, just a statement of fact. “Christ.” Timmons tossed the sheaf of papers back on the table and ran a hand over his face. “Good work putting this together, Brannon, but we need concrete evidence that this is a drug smuggling ring before we bring them in for this. I need more to charge anyone with the murder of Connie Wells, given this new information.”
“What about Matt Green? We have him in custody,” Stella said.
“Pursue the reckless endangerment of a child charge and then we can continue to question him about this other evidence. He’s clearly implicated. Let’s see if he’ll talk, now we have better questions to ask.” He stood up. “Good work, team. Keep me up to speed.”
“Sir, you don’t want to take over?” Stella asked.
“You’ve got it under control for now. I’m at a critical stage with the other murder hunt. Gather the evidence. Hopefully, by the time you’re ready to move on this, I’ll be through there and we can finish this up.” Then he was gone. The door banging shut behind him.
“Well, that was different,” Tom said.
“Yeah.” Stella looked at Collier. “I should arrest you for impeding a police investigation, you idiot. Why the hell didn’t you tell us all that?”
“I didn’t think it was relevant.”
“Well, clearly it is.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not good enough. You can go down and talk to your new mate and get all those not-relevant statements that Connie made.” Stella curled her fingers in the air, indicating just what she thought of that response. “And feel free to tell your buddy that she was most probably murdered because none of them did their jobs properly. Let’s see how that little nugget sits with them.” She pointed towards the door. “Actually, you know what? I want to see their faces when they find that out. I’ll come with you. I could do with cheering up right about now.” She marched to the door. “Well, come on,” she shouted as she pushed open the door. Collier skulked away behind her.
Tom chuckled. “Not sure who I feel more sorry for, Collier or the sergeant.”
“Collier,” Kate said. “He’s inexperienced and it really was too late for him to help at that stage. The sergeant could have saved her life.”
“Maybe.”
Kate just stared at him.
“Okay, almost certainly, but we still don’t know for sure.”
“I know.”
“Well aren’t you just the little genius. But we still need evidence to convict. Suspicion isn’t enough.”
“I know.”
“So, good cop, silent cop again?”
She nodded. “Yeah, let’s see what Mr. Green has to say about this little lot.” She scooped up her files and followed Tom down to the custody suite. She could hear Stella’s voice over the normal din of the working station and was really glad she wasn’t on the other end of that tongue lashing.
CHAPTER 25
They had to wait twenty minutes for his brief to appear before they were sat in the interview room, recorder running, facing a truculent Matt Green. His arms were crossed over his chest, hair in disarray, and his clothes very dishevelled. Kate didn’t feel like wasting any more time.
“Matty, Matty, Matty, you’ve been up to no good.” She laid a copy of the diary entry in front of him, followed by the marked map, a picture of his licence plate, and one of the Jean Rayner. She watched his reaction. Each one elicited a marked response. A growing number of sweat beads formed first on his forehead, then on his upper lip, then a trickle ran down his neck. His breathing picked up, getting steadily shallower, closer to a pant than a steady breath. She could see his pulse at his temple increase, a steady sixty when he walked in, now climbing towards the hundred mark.
But she wasn’t done. She’d used the twenty minutes to get the grainy shot she’d pulled from the houseboat blown up to A3 size. Forty-two centimetres by almost thirty of pale-blue hull, steel, two colours of rope, a white painted “53”, and a grey block in the bottom, right-hand corner. A grey brick, shiny and slick with water. As grey as Matt Green’s face had just turned. Another trickle of sweat ran down his neck, leaving a wet stain on the collar of his T-shirt, and his pulse went way over a hundred.
“We can do this the easy way and you can confess to what you’ve been up to at Brandale Staithe. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll get out of jail in time to see your grandkids get married.”
He didn’t respond.
“Or we can do it the hard way and you’ll never see Sammy again.”
Nothing.
She pointed to the marked map. “Recognise this?”
He said nothing.
“We got it from your house. It was in your study, and I’m guessing that someone isn’t going to be very pleased that you marked up all your transfer locations.”
He still said nothing.
“Okay, we’ll come back to that. This is a page from Connie Wells’ diary.” She pointed to the top line. “This is your licence number and these GPS coordinates correspond to a lay-by just outside of Sutton Bridge. The one you have circled,” she said, pointing to the map, “right here. And this number. The number twenty. Is that the number of bricks you exchanged or how much you were paid? I’m guessing the number of bricks. I don’t think Connie would have been able to get close enough to count pound notes. Do you DC Brothers?”
“Don’t think so,” Brothers replied.
“I’ve got a friend in SOCO who’s using this picture to figure out the quantity of drugs that will be in that little block. He did explain how he planned to do that. Something about scale of the lobster pot and the extrapolation of the data and some other bollocks, but I’ve got to admit, it went over my head. The bit I did understand was that he could prove how big those blocks were, and, therefore, how much shit you’re dealing in.”
“I’m not a drug dealer,” Green said between clenched teeth.
“No?”
“No.”
“Then what’s in the bricks?”
Silence.
“Come on, Matty, you can’t say you’re not a dealer and then pull back. You’re a tease.” She leaned forward. “I know this is about drugs. I know it for a fact. Do you want to know how I know that?”
He said nothing.
“I know it because Connie loved Leah.”
He snorted a laugh. “Bullshit.”
“She did. She couldn’t live with her. Couldn’t trust her. But she still loved her. This,” she said, sweeping her hands across the contents of the table, “was her last attempt to help her. Her going away present to the woman she loved.” She pointed to another registration number. “That’s Leah’s car. Was she working off some of her tab? Lent her car to one of you?”
“It wasn’t like that.” Matt spat and his brief touched his shoulder to get his attention.
“Really? What was it
like, then?”
He stared at her.
“Are you going to tell me again that you’re not a drug dealer? Because I don’t think anyone in this room’s going to buy that.”
“I’d like to consult with my client,” Green’s brief said. “In private, DS Brannon.”
Kate nodded. “A wise precaution. But remember, this is where he can help himself.”
He nodded and Kate led Tom out of the room.
“Think he’s going to ’fess up?” Tom asked as soon as the door was closed behind them.
She shrugged. “He’s said enough for me to be sure it’s drugs at the root of this. But that opens up so many more questions.”
“What kind of drugs?”
“More than that. Where are they coming from? My marine biology isn’t exactly top notch but I’m pretty sure the sea bed doesn’t sprout grey bricks full of whatever that shit is. So where are they coming from? Who are they selling them to? Are they working for someone bigger or are they in business for themselves as couriers of sorts? The variety of GPS coordinates seems to lend itself to that theory for me. But if they are, where are they getting the drugs in the first place?”
“You couldn’t just start with the easy stuff?”
She chuckled. “I think we’re already way beyond the easy stuff. How big a problem is the drug issue round here?”
Tom sighed. “Probably as big as in the city to be honest. Boredom and little in the way of entertainment during the winter, and bloody long hours during the tourist season. A lot of the kids, in particular, dabble, as my niece calls it. Apparently, it’s not serious, just a bit of fun.”
“Not for Leah. Not for Connie.”
“No.”
“And what’s the drug of choice?”
“Same as everywhere else. There’s tourists coming in from London and every other big city in Britain every weekend. Getting hold of stuff really isn’t hard.”
Collide-O-Scope (Norfolk Coast Investigation Stories Book 1) Page 21
