by Gytha Lodge
I thought it was all OK, though. It was only later that I began to be afraid of her.
7
Lightman was making good progress with checking up on the Reakes family. He had so far established that neither had a criminal record, and that Niall Reakes had a strong and respectable internet presence through his drug rep work. He’d worked with several of the bigger pharma companies, and was currently listed with Pollai as a clinical sales specialist in the field of arthritis.
His LinkedIn photo was a classic black-and-white headshot, with Niall coming off as both impressive and approachable, an effect helped by his slightly chubby face and beaming grin. There was nothing to suggest any criminal involvement: no articles in which he featured, and no apparent sackings, though that didn’t mean they hadn’t happened. It wasn’t the policy of big firms to broadcast bad hires.
Louise Reakes had her own slick-looking website. It advertised her services as a wedding, event, film and TV harpist, with an impressive list of past work. It was a hugely visual site, with slowly fading images of spring sunshine and Louise herself playing while draped in long, floaty dresses.
He’d just about finished looking the site over when a call came in on the team’s line. Hanson was immersed in something on-screen, headphones in and eyes following some video, so Lightman picked up and found himself talking to the duty sergeant.
‘I have a caller. He says he’s the dead man’s husband.’
Issa Benhawy, Lightman remembered from Hanson’s brief update.
‘Put him through.’
There was a click, and then a very precise voice asked, ‘DCI Sheens?’
‘This is DS Lightman,’ he said. ‘I work with the DCI. He’s just tied up, but perhaps I can help?’
‘Oh, I see.’ There was a pause, and then Issa said, ‘I just wondered about Alex’s things. I don’t want them getting lost.’
‘I understand your concern.’ Lightman pulled his notebook closer and clicked his pen out. ‘We do label and store everything carefully during enquiries, so everything will be kept safely and returned to you as soon as possible. Was there something in particular …?’
There was another pause, and Issa said, ‘There’s a ring that I gave him. And – and his phone.’ When Lightman didn’t immediately reply, he added, quickly, ‘It’s full of photos. I don’t want them getting lost.’
‘Of course,’ Lightman replied, writing carefully in the notebook. ‘With the phone, it’s hard to say exactly when that will come back. Our tech team won’t delete anything, but phones often reveal a lot about who’s been in touch with the victim.’
‘I can help you with that,’ Issa said, immediately.
‘That’s very good of you, but there might be people you weren’t aware of.’
There was another silence, and then Issa said, ‘All right. Just … be careful. With the photos. And please don’t pry into our messages.’
‘It’s never our intention to do that,’ Lightman said, gently.
Once Issa was done, he wrote another sentence in his notebook.
Particularly anxious about the phone and their messages.
And then he underlined it.
Alex Plaskitt’s life turned out to be quite a public one. He had more than three hundred videos uploaded to YouTube, all of them dedicated to helping people achieve a healthier lifestyle. He had twelve thousand subscribers, and clearly used the account to drum up business.
Hanson had started with the most recent video, from a week before. Alex appeared immediately, his head and shoulders visible on the camera and some kind of fitness studio setup behind him.
‘You should never feel embarrassed about the level of fitness you’re starting from,’ he was saying, his blue eyes fixed on the camera. ‘Most of my clients start out struggling to run at all, and I don’t worry about it. Fitness is for everyone and it’s my job to encourage and support you until you start to love it as much as I do. The trick isn’t to go at it hard and feel like a failure. It’s about making small gains. If that’s running for a hundred metres without stopping for the first time in years, then that’s a huge achievement, and I want to be there to celebrate that with you.’
Hanson continued watching and then loaded up a few more. Alex’s YouTube vlogging was miles from the narcissistic fitness clips she’d seen on her Facebook and Twitter feeds. He came across as warm, supportive and one hundred per cent genuine. With his Queen’s English, big blue eyes and chiselled cheekbones, he also came across as a little bit upper class. Where in other people it might have seemed obnoxious, Alex’s laughing apologies for his love of good wine and his trips to Lords were endearing.
She tried not to think about the fact that he would never upload another video, and scrolled down to look at what his viewers had written on some of the latest. She half expected to see tributes to him, but knew it was too soon. News of his death had not been officially announced.
Instead there were lots of profoundly grateful comments. Viewers told him how much weight they’d lost since starting his fitness plan. Others were clearly direct clients, referencing sessions with him and recipes he’d recommended.
And then, of course, this being the internet, there were other comments, too. The kind that made the human half of Hanson burn with anger, and the cop part sit up.
After fifteen minutes of scanning the abuse, Hanson felt in need of a gin. Or at least, she thought, a coffee. She slid her headphones off, but before she could move, the chief came over for an update. Lightman dived straight in.
‘We’ve checked for criminal records for the victim, his husband, and Louise and Niall Reakes. Nothing for any of them, and the husband seems fairly high-powered.’
‘Nothing linking the Reakeses to Alex?’ Sheens asked, looking between him and Hanson.
Hanson shook her head. ‘They aren’t Facebook friends or following each other on anything, and it doesn’t look like Louise was a client of Alex’s. But his online presence is actually pretty interesting.’ She swung her screen round to face him square on, showing a still of Alex Plaskitt’s face from one of the videos. He was caught grinning at the camera, his mouth half open as if he’d been in the middle of speaking. ‘Alex is a minor vlogging celebrity. Twelve thousand subscribers, so not huge. He seems to use it in part as a way of drumming up business, and in part to inspire people to become active.’
‘So he had a chance of being recognised while out,’ Sheens said, thoughtfully.
‘Yes, and some of these are interesting.’ She scrolled down to the comments on the video, letting her mouse rest on a comment from someone called S88*burger, whose comment was five homophobic slurs in a row.
‘Are there more like this?’ the DCI asked.
‘Quite a few. There are a few other videos that feature Issa briefly, or where he talks about him. They attract quite a bit of attention. But most of the accounts seem to be throwaways.’
The DCI’s phone rang, a summons from the pathologist to attend the post mortem. There was a nervous twist to Hanson’s stomach as Sheens glanced around at his team. She’d managed one post mortem in her career so far, and knew she would survive another one if necessary. But that wasn’t to say that she would ever feel positive about them.
Sheens’s eye eventually fell on Lightman, and Hanson slid away to make coffee with a slightly shameful sense of relief. She was safe for today, free to dig into the murky world of internet trolls.
Louise waited until the door to the interview room was shut before she opened up her contacts list. Her thumb hesitated over Niall’s name. It was right at the top, with a star next to it. Her favourite. Her husband. God, she didn’t want to do this.
But it was like pulling off a wax strip, she thought. It might sting at the time, but it was never as bad as you imagined.
Which was a shit analogy, she realised. Because this might turn out to be infinitely worse than she’d imagined. The stripping away might never stop.
As she hesitated, her phone buzzed. April, se
nding another message of support, and obeying her request to text instead of calling.
I can’t even imagine how awful that must be. I’m so sorry! I want to call so let me know as soon as you’re out of there, OK? I have the mother of all hangovers but I’m here. Xx
It was a good message to read before dealing with her husband. Unquestioningly supportive. Kind. Normal.
Niall was none of those things. At least not now. And that thought made her feel even worse.
She sighed, minimised the text, and pressed the call button. She rubbed at her right temple as the phone rang. She should have asked for paracetamol. No. Not for paracetamol. For codeine. Morphine. Something strong enough to knock her out until everything had somehow improved.
‘Hey sweetie! How’s it going?’ Niall asked, over background noises of people talking. Presumably he was still at the conference, and she’d caught him in a gap between meetings. She almost wished she hadn’t.
‘Fine,’ she said, automatically, and then corrected herself. ‘Well … not really fine. There was … Someone was killed right outside the house. I found them this morning.’
There was a silence, and then Niall asked, ‘Are you serious?’
‘Yes. Sorry.’ Louise gave a short laugh. ‘I wish I wasn’t.’
‘Killed how?’
‘Stabbed,’ she said. ‘In the stomach.’
‘Who – what, a teenager?’
‘A bit older, I think. He looked quite big.’
There was another silence, and she felt her heart rate speed up as he asked, ‘So just … some stranger? Not someone you know?’
The post mortem of Alex Plaskitt was uncomplicated, but it left Jonah feeling sombre. He and Lightman had watched Shaw’s initial examination of the knife, and listened to his quiet voice describing the three-inch, slightly tapered blade. He’d noted that it had a decorated metallic grip. This was not a utensil, but a weapon, and one that almost certainly had a sheath that had not yet been recovered.
‘McCullough’s putting us in touch with a weapons specialist she knows,’ Jonah told Shaw. ‘We may get something useful back from him.’
The pathologist moved on to look at the hands, which showed bruising on the knuckles, but no abrasions.
‘Would you still say they were defensive wounds?’ Jonah asked.
‘They could be, but they could equally well have happened a little earlier in the evening,’ Shaw said. ‘Slight swelling and visible bruising has begun to appear, which would have taken at least some minutes. But then he would have taken some minutes to die.’
Shaw moved to look at the knife wound and surrounding tissue. Removing organs in turn, he explained the damage to the upper part of the large intestine and the splenic artery.
‘The entry wound has cut the wall of the large intestine just below the stomach. However, it slid fairly neatly between the spleen and stomach above.’ He lifted an elastic pinkish-grey strand. ‘The damage to the splenic artery, which is what almost certainly caused his death, happened when the knife was removed.’
‘You’re sure?’ Jonah asked.
The pathologist gave a small smile. ‘I always am.’
It took Jonah a moment to get the joke: that he was always Shaw.
When he gave a small laugh, in spite of himself, the pathologist went on, ‘You can see here that the back and underside of the artery has been damaged, while the upper and forward parts remain intact. The cause looks to be upward movement of the blade as it was pulled out. The rupture would have caused extensive bleeding, which would have resulted in death within fifteen or twenty minutes.’
Jonah asked quietly, ‘Any indication of whether it was removed by his attacker?’
Shaw gave a slight shrug. ‘It’s not clear, but if you’re asking whether he might have pulled it out himself, then yes, it’s entirely possible. I don’t know how that ties in with it being wiped, though, unless the killer deposited it there later.’
Jonah glanced at Lightman and nodded. They had both been part of investigations into knife attacks before; and both remembered a teenage boy who would probably have made it if he hadn’t pulled a blade out of his chest before going to get medical help.
It was all odd and dissatisfying. If Alex had removed it, he must have done it elsewhere or there would have been more blood. If the killer had deposited it next to him, there should have been footprints. Whichever way he looked at it, the series of events was muddy and unclear.
‘We could really do with some witnesses,’ he said to Lightman, once Shaw had finished with the other organs and taken blood samples. ‘I’m going to head over to that nightclub.’
Louise Reakes was allowed to go home at twelve fifteen, which felt to Hanson like at least six p.m. It looked like Louise’s involvement in this enquiry was done. A quick follow-up call to the Reakeses’ neighbours at number nine Saints Close had produced no suggestion of any rows or strange behaviour. Louise, they said, was generally free to do her own thing, and did so. They gave their opinion that the two would be fine if only Louise would stop drinking.
This filled Hanson with relief. The idea of having to delve into a case that involved an abusive partner had made her feel distinctly sick. It was too close to the past, and to the present, too. Too close to everything she was trying so hard not to think about.
On top of that, it felt like a dangerous topic for her own relationship. She was four months into dating Jason, and she’d never quite got round to telling him about Damian, the abusive partner she’d tried to leave behind in Birmingham.
Jonah dropped Lightman back at the station and picked up O’Malley, who had printed out photos of the victim. His Irish sergeant was generally the preferred choice for casual meetings with witnesses, assuming he was actually somewhere to be found and not off pursuing his own leads. There was a warm humour to him that both disarmed the more obstructive folk and encouraged the more helpful ones to bend over backwards.
‘Are we headed to Blue Underground for some moody daytime drinking?’ O’Malley asked, once he’d levered himself into the car.
‘You know it?’ Jonah asked, with interest.
‘I met a witness there once.’ O’Malley shrugged. ‘It’s OK. Cocktails and a pretentious DJ one floor down, and an eighties disco cheese-fest the floor below. But it’s not drugged up, and there’s not a lot of brawling, either.’
Jonah nodded, remembering that it was the expensive, exclusive Midnight Bar that had been closed down a few years ago after a drugs bust. The most likely clientele for party drugs were, it turned out, wealthy men and women in their forties.
Twenty minutes later, Jonah pulled into a pay and display space a few yards down from the club. The doorway to Blue Underground lay between an estate agent’s on one side and an oriental food shop on the other. The sign above it spelled out the name in cursive lettering on a midnight-blue background, and almost managed to look classy.
They made their way down the stairs and turned the corner to find the entrance barred by a security door. The sound of a vacuum cleaner came from just beyond it, and Jonah rapped sharply.
The vacuum cleaner grew louder and then ceased, and a middle-aged Latino man wearing a black polo shirt and matching trousers opened the door.
‘DCI Sheens,’ Jonah told him. ‘I spoke to Charlie earlier.’
He let them into a slightly featureless corridor and pointed them down to a bar at the far end. Bright overhead lights had turned what was presumably a dimly atmospheric night-time grotto into a slightly tatty-looking cellar. The chairs were all up on the tabletops, and there were boxes of beer standing on the bar, where a tall thirty-something man with a Mediterranean look was discussing stock with a diminutive girl in another black polo shirt.
‘Would you be Charlie?’ Jonah asked him.
The man turned, revealing a cheerful, tanned face marred by a bruise on his cheekbone.
‘Yes. You’re the police?’ He moved to the end of the bar and walked round it. ‘Come and have a seat. We�
��ve got coffee if you want it?’
His accent was pure Sheffield, and the chirrupy manner was encouraging. He liked their chances of getting as much help as they needed out of Charlie.
‘No coffee, thanks,’ Jonah said.
‘Joanne, could you make me a cappuccino?’
The diminutive Joanne disappeared through an archway, and Charlie took three chairs down off a table with a ‘Here.’
‘We’d like a little help from you and your staff. We’re looking for anyone who can remember this man,’ Jonah told him, handing over a photo. ‘He was here last night.’
Charlie took the photo and studied it, and O’Malley added, ‘He’s a big guy. Six three and quite stacked.’
‘Yeah, he was definitely here,’ Charlie confirmed. ‘I sort of know him. He’s been a few times. He had a friend with him. Also a regular.’
‘Do you remember any incidents involving him?’
The sound of a coffee grinder started up beyond the archway, ridiculously loud in the brick-walled space. Charlie spoke loudly over it. ‘Nothing major. He’s a nice enough guy, I think. He got a bit tetchy with one of the bar staff, but that’s pretty common.’
‘He didn’t do that?’ O’Malley said, nodding towards Charlie’s cheek.
‘Sorry? Oh.’ Charlie put a hand up to the bruise and gave a rueful laugh. ‘No, that was the arsehole who didn’t like being told he’d had enough to drink, and went for one of the guys before I stepped in. Fortunately doesn’t happen too often, and the bouncers were on it pretty quickly.’
‘Did he get kicked out?’ Jonah asked, thinking that an aggressive and aggrieved man hanging around outside the club could well be involved in attacking Alex.
‘Your guys picked him up,’ Charlie said. ‘He wouldn’t stop lashing out, even when a squad car got here, so he ended up getting himself arrested.’
That almost definitely put him out of the picture, Jonah thought, since anyone arrested for assault late on would probably have spent the night at the station. But he made a mental note to check last night’s arrests.
