Shot Through the Heart: DI Grace Fisher 2

by Isabelle Grey

  The noise of the engine eased abruptly. The bucket of the dredger, covered in slime, had swung round and now dipped down towards the footpath, like some fantasy robot monster bowing its head in submission. One of the men near Grace Fisher moved forward. Robyn could see that he wore thick black rubber gloves with gauntlets like a medieval warrior. He plunged both arms deep into the huge metal bucket and then lifted something heavy, wet and bulky clear of the machine. Standing back with arms outstretched, he turned in triumph to show his dripping silt-covered burden to Grace Fisher. The detective nodded and turned once more to look towards Robyn.

  48

  It was either this or the oblivion of a double gin, Ivo thought as he stared out of the first-floor window of his seafront-terrace hotel room at the windswept sands of Weymouth beach. He’d kept this crap at bay for forty-odd years, yet now it had crept up on him and was turning him into a sentimental old slob. It had been the verdict in the Dunholt inquest late on Friday afternoon that had finally got to him.

  The coroner had stuck to his word and wrapped the whole thing up in a week, which had to be some kind of record. Five counts of unlawful killing and one of suicide, with a brief narrative conclusion to the effect that Fewell had been isolated and depressed since his divorce and driven to desperation by anxiety over the financial consequences of his drink-drive summons. There had been lots of the usual sort of praise for the emergency services on behalf of the three victims who survived, and that was that. Ivo doubted that anyone had given a single thought to Davey and Ella Fewell.

  He had spent most of Saturday fuming, had set off for Weymouth this morning, and then spent the rest of the day freezing his bollocks off outside the development where Donna and the kids were living. He’d not seen them – they’d had more sense than to venture out on such a miserable Sunday afternoon – but he’d waited until the lights had gone on and then lingered until Donna came to the window to close the blinds. It was enough. They were safe. It seemed like the talisman he needed to voyage back to when he’d been Davey’s age.

  It was the housemaster of his prep school that he still had nightmares about.

  Ivo had known during the Christmas holidays how ill his mother was – she’d told him herself as she’d helped him pack his trunk. He didn’t really blame his father, for not coping. It was no surprise that Dad had gone into such a blind funk that he couldn’t face telling Ivo that she’d died. Maybe the funeral had simply been too much for him. Perhaps he had no idea what to do about his ten-year-old son and couldn’t face up to being alone with him afterwards, once everybody else had gone home. His father was a genius at solving problems of aeronautical engineering, but he’d never learned how to speak about his feelings.

  Ten days before the end of term Ivo had been called to the housemaster’s study. Only later did he realize that, even while he was being grilled about a maths test he’d flunked, the man had known that his mother was dead and that her funeral was taking place almost at that very moment – had known but not told him, not considered him worthy of telling. Only when Ivo went home for Easter did he discover his mother had died and it had then been decided – he was never permitted to ask by whom – that it would be best to keep it from him until school broke up for the holidays.

  He should have smelt a rat when his father came by car to pick up his trunk – unusual in itself, as Ivo and it generally went by train with a group of other boys. Ivo had never forgotten the two men, his father and the housemaster, standing on the stone steps and shaking hands while he stood by in ignorance of what had happened.

  When Ivo had returned to school three weeks later, at the start of the summer term, the housemaster had looked down at him sympathetically and told him to keep his chin up and he’d be all right. Only matron had ever openly acknowledged the scale of his loss. And it was only now, decades later, that Ivo saw how much that handshake, once he’d tasted the full diminishing shame of its significance, had determined the course of his life. He had never trusted any institution since: not the old school tie, not the law or the medical profession, and certainly not the family. The only flag he’d ever been prepared to defend was his loyalty to the sharp scent of ink and the aroma of warm paper that had clung to the industry back when he’d blagged his way into his first job on a local newspaper.

  He’d always been proud of his cynical nonconformism, his paid-up membership of the awkward squad. As a reporter, it had helped make him lead dog. But he’d paid with two failed marriages, an estranged daughter and a decidedly dodgy liver. He didn’t want any of that for Davey Fewell.

  John Kirkby was a handshake man. That’s why Ivo had brought himself down here to the bleak Weymouth seafront. It wasn’t right that those in power got to decide what was said – simple as that. Just because Mark Kirkby had had a row of polished buttons on his uniform and a guard of honour at his funeral, it didn’t mean he – or his father – got to have the last word. And if the coroner wasn’t going to do the job properly, then Ivo bloody well would.

  It was getting too dark to make out anything much beyond the lights on the esplanade. He thought he could hear the sea, now a huge well of blackness before the faint light of the horizon kicked in, but it was more likely just the wind. He drew the curtains and switched on the bedside lamp, feeling the well-worn mattress sag under his weight as he swung his feet up to lie on the coverlet and reached round to punch a couple of pillows into the right shape to support his dodgy back.

  Ivo had been at a very different funeral two days ago, and he blamed it for leaving him in such a maudlin, retrospective mood. Once upon a time, Jock Scott had reigned over the cuttings library at the Courier. It had been a black enough day in Ivo’s book when the old British Newspaper Library in Colindale had been demolished to make way for luxury flats, but that was a lifetime after the Courier had moved out of Fleet Street and the yellowing wonders of Jock’s cuttings library had been chucked on a bonfire. The funeral service had been held at a crematorium in Enfield, where after the committal Ivo had hung around in the shelter of the echoing brick arches to exchange greetings with various former nabobs of the compositing rooms. He hadn’t seen most of them in twenty years or more and had been ridiculously shocked by how much they’d all aged, for these were men who, in their day, had wielded unthinkable power. They too, erstwhile fathers of the chapel, had been handshake men – until Maggie Thatcher cut a deal with Murdoch.

  Their old unchallenged allegiance to the trade union and the closed shop had been tribal. Some of their kids had gone to school with cousins they weren’t allowed to speak to because their dads had been on opposite sides of the picket line in the Wapping dispute. Families who still didn’t speak. Never would. For many, their greatest hatred was still reserved for the way Thatcher had destroyed those bred-in-the-bone working-class loyalties.

  He suspected that the same kind of tribal allegiance was at play out in Vale do Lobo. Morale in the police service was low, and with no current threat from the ‘enemy within’ for the government to require a paramilitary force, the fiercest loyalty of the boys in blue was increasingly reserved for each other.

  Ivo wondered how far those ancient loyalties still reached. An official HMRC query on an old tax return had arrived in yesterday’s post. He’d tossed it aside, but earlier today, when he’d handed over one of his credit cards in exchange for his room key, it had been refused. A quick phone call established that a stop had been put on it because of a bogus fraud warning. It was further proof that someone somewhere wanted to convince him that, should they so choose, they had the clout to seriously fuck with his life.

  Trying once more to make his old bones comfortable on the creaking bed, Ivo thought about the extraordinary cross-referencing system stored inside Jock’s head which had also vanished in a plume of smoke from the crematorium chimney. It was easy to recall their first encounter. Standing behind a wooden counter in his khaki storeman’s coat with a stub of thick-leaded pencil behind his ear, Jock had wordlessly accepted the chit Ivo
handed him and disappeared into his mysterious dominion of bulging shelves stuffed with folders. He’d returned almost immediately with a single sheet of paper to which had been pasted a solitary newspaper cutting, a single column three inches long. Ivo, still wet behind the ears, had asked indignantly if that was all there was and been stared into submission. He had learned fast to show proper respect, and in time – meaning years rather than weeks – had been rewarded with entire folders, stained with coffee and reeking of cigarettes, which had prepared him for tricky interviews and backed up his riskier stories. Sometimes a note was attached to the cutting, written in Jock’s stubby pencil – a correction or a coded warning that the subject of an article was likely to sue. Once in a while Ivo would be handed an empty file. Nothing was said, but this signified that the material had ‘gone upstairs’ thanks to a government D notice.

  Jock had liked nothing better than a good conspiracy theory, and, a staunch union man, he’d kept close tabs on long-running stories such as who in Operation Countryman was aligned with whom. If anyone could have traced the connections Ivo needed between Jerry Coghlan, John Kirkby and Leonard Ingold, and between Peter Burnley and whatever he’d been up to, it would’ve been Jock. Back then the chains of command – or webs of corruption, whatever you wanted to call them – were real, and everyone played to the same rules: honour among thieves, working-class solidarity, old boys’ networks, decent honest criminals, checks and balances, rotten apples, party politics, baksheesh, you scratch my back and I’ll watch yours. Handshakes.

  And for all today’s political correctness and vigilant management policies, those rules still applied. Look at what had happened to Grace Fisher back in her old job: punished for not giving a mate the benefit of the doubt, for not ‘making allowances’ for her thug of a husband. Her bullying colleagues had no doubt regarded their actions not as corruption but as upholding an essential esprit de corps.

  Not for the first time, Ivo wondered what had driven Grace to stay in the police after her experiences in Kent. She was relatively young, had a good degree and could, he assumed, have easily found another interesting line of work. He’d also give a lot to know what kept her warm at night, what raft she clung to in the wee small hours. He’d never been much of a player, but if he’d been a quarter of a century younger he liked to think she’d have reached for his hand when the going got rough.

  Ivo was amazed at how he could lie peacefully on a bed in a quaint English seaside hotel listening to the wind rattle the thin glass of a Georgian bay window and consider things he’d seldom permitted himself to think about before. His mother had loved him, yet had packed him off to boarding school telling him it would be fun to be with other boys, but in reality it was so he wouldn’t have to watch her sicken and die. He hadn’t been allowed to say he’d rather stay with her; he hadn’t been allowed to cry or plead or bargain for things to be different; he had been honour-bound to say he loved every minute of homesickness and misery.

  Something like that drove Grace Fisher too – he could feel it in his bones – something with the power to keep her awake at night, to make her not give up, to make her hold tight to her reserve. She was never going to confide in him, any more than he’d tell her about his mother, but it made them two of a kind. Not that he’d ever bought into any of that British stiff-upper-lip nonsense. His younger self had had no choice except to maintain the same front as his parents and his housemaster, but as soon as he’d been able to make good his escape he’d gone looking for his own heroes. He might now be a brash muck-raking dried-out-alcoholic reporter on a trashy tabloid with a huge circulation and the power to ruin people’s reputations on a whim, but he was here on a noble quest. He was here to look out for Davey Fewell.

  49

  Grace was forced to spend most of Monday morning on tenterhooks waiting to hear back from the ballistics lab. She had been informed on Saturday afternoon that a repriming tool had been among the various metal objects found inside the bags retrieved from the marshy creek a quarter of a mile beyond the boundary of Leonard Ingold’s property. Now the lab was testing to see whether, if used to prime a new round, the tool would leave the same microscopic scratch marks found on primers inside shell casings recovered from Dunholt and elsewhere.

  It was always stressful anticipating the return of forensic tests that might negate weeks and sometimes months of work on a case, but she felt keenly that even more than usual was riding on these particular results. It was possible that, if it transpired that Leonard Ingold was not, after all, the Lion King, no lasting harm would be done to Robyn’s relationship with her parents. And maybe Leonard’s ownership of the Algarve villa, while of interest to HMRC, would also turn out to be irrelevant to whatever had taken Peter out to Vale do Lobo. Yet, even without forensic corroboration, Grace knew that neither Robyn nor Lance would ever accept that their corrosive suspicions were unfounded, and both would forever remain haunted, mistrustful, stuck. In her instinctive opinion, they’d be right.

  She tried to distract herself with work on the Gordon Church murder. Yesterday an interceptor car on the M25 had spotted a burning vehicle on a track between fields just north of the motorway. It turned out to be a metallic-grey Renault Kangoo with no number plates, which put it in the frame to be the van spotted leaving the hospital grounds immediately after Church had been shot and also the vehicle linked to the Grantham and Ely murders. Grace had arranged for it to be recovered and forensically examined, and was pushing her team for swifter results on tracking down all owners of that make, model and colour, prioritizing any vehicles reported stolen in the past four months, when Curtis Mullins appeared at the door to the MIT office.

  ‘You wanted to see me, ma’am?’

  ‘I asked to see you on Thursday,’ she said, trying to keep her voice low, to remain cool and authoritative. She didn’t like to admit to herself that it wouldn’t take much to make her afraid of Curtis Mullins. He made no reply, his blue eyes sullen and resentful. Grace decided not to argue over his timing.

  ‘Ruth Woods told me it was you who signed in Gordon Church?’ she asked.

  ‘I did, yes.’

  ‘Was there was anything he said or did that might shine a light on what happened to him? Did he have any concerns, for instance, about being followed?’

  ‘He came to the desk. I gave him the book to sign. He signed it and left.’

  ‘You had no conversation?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘That’s it. Thank you.’ She turned her back on him before her anger got the better of her and didn’t turn round until she heard his retreating footsteps. She caught Lance watching her and read an even more bitter anger and frustration in his expression. She gave a shrug of apology tiny enough not to be noticed by anyone else in the office and nodded for him to join her in her cubicle.

  ‘I know how you feel,’ she said. ‘It’s just as galling to me to let him walk in here like that, but you can see how he’s spoiling for a fight. But if we give him one, what’s the next thing he’ll do?’

  She had already had this argument with Lance before they’d taken Robyn’s information to Colin on Friday in order to green-light a search of the creek. Lance had wanted to lay before their boss everything they knew about Ingold’s villa, the Vale do Lobo connection between Peter and Adam Kirkby and Adam’s friendship with Curtis, and she had struggled to persuade him to wait, to accept that it was best to take it one step at a time. She’d had no choice but to tell Colin about her interview with Warren Cox and explain how her hunch about the identity of the Lion King had taken her out to Ingold’s workshop, where she encountered Robyn, but she was determined never to reveal Ivo’s involvement nor, if at all possible, that she had gone against Colin’s direct orders in telling Lance the truth about Peter.

  ‘Think about it,’ she told Lance now. ‘If I give Curtis grounds to make a complaint of bullying or harassment against me, who’s the first person he’s going to speak to?’

  Lance sighed. ‘His Fed
rep.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Grace. ‘Who, for all we know, has enjoyed many a lovely family holiday in Leonard Ingold’s villa. Or if the rep hasn’t, then his local committee members have. It’s enough to tie Professional Standards up in knots for years to come.’

  ‘You’re saying we let it go?’

  ‘No!’ said Grace. ‘Look, I don’t know what kind of rats’ nest we’ve stirred up here, or how far or high it reaches, but what if Ingold does start talking? What if he does confirm that Mark Kirkby had possession of the rifle used by Russell Fewell, and it all comes to court, then what? If the defence can show that I’ve pursued some kind of personal vendetta against Mark’s alleged co-conspirator, then it’s all going to blow up in our faces and get thrown out of court, isn’t it?’

  Lance nodded reluctantly, but she could see that only half of him was attending to what she was really saying.

  ‘Lance, please,’ she begged. ‘I’d bet my house that the repriming tool Ingold threw in the creek will give us the crowbar we need to lever this case wide open. Just wait until we can interview him. See what he has to say.’

  Lance shook his head. ‘It’ll be “No comment” all the way. His solicitor will tell him we don’t have enough to charge. The bag with the repriming tool was found near a public footpath. He’ll say there are dozens of local amateur reloaders who could have dumped it there.’

  Grace feared he was right and was trying to come up with a better argument to convince him when Duncan tapped on her cubicle partition. He was holding a sheet of paper and smiling.