It was a relief. But a more intense relief was that Roxanne herself had been absolved. Only now could Grace fully admit the horrible fear that had been eating away at her: that her friend had sold her down the river in exchange for a few coveted shifts on a London daily. Ivo would never know it, but he’d finally freed her to think well of the dead.
All the same, that still left the burning question of who had told Roxanne about the bottle? How? When? Why? Grace considered Pawel Zawodny too clever and controlled to slip up like that. Unless he had deliberately chosen to feed Roxanne that morsel of information. But why? For what possible reason?
Grace tried to recall what it was Lance had said to her the morning Rachel Moston’s body was found, about the bottle of Fire’n’Ice being a message for the police, a way for the killer to engage his pursuers in some game. Lance also reckoned that Roxanne’s murder had been a kind of challenge. Was her killer’s decision to reveal to a journalist a secret so far known only to himself and the police a move in some game he imagined he was playing?
If so, what was the game about? Control and domination? Or, as Lance had said, being the centre of attention? What was he trying to communicate? And at what point would he decide he’d won? Grace’s brain was too tired from lack of sleep to do more than go around and around in circles, but it all kept coming back to one simple question: who was their opponent? Who had Roxanne been speaking to? Was it Pawel Zawodny?
Reaching the main MIT office, Grace asked Duncan if they had a transcript yet of the shorthand notebook they’d found in Roxanne’s handbag.
He shook his head. ‘She’d adapted her own style of shorthand. One of the PAs upstairs was able to make out the odd word, but most of it’s indecipherable.’
‘Shit!’
‘We can’t hang on to it much longer, either. The boss had a call from the Mercury’s lawyers demanding we return all unpublished journalistic material. We’ve no choice but to comply.’
‘Yes, I know. Any names at least?’
‘Some girls’ names, a few initials. No PZ.’
‘Maybe Gareth Sullivan will be able to translate it,’ she said. ‘What about her phone?’
Duncan brightened up. ‘She received a call from the payphone at Colchester Town railway station at six-fifteen on Monday.’
Grace prayed that Duncan would assume she’d flushed not from guilt but with pleasure at such a promising lead.
‘Why would anyone use a payphone except to hide their identity?’ Duncan asked eagerly. ‘Someone’s down there now retrieving all available CCTV.’
‘That was the day the Courier published its story about the bottle, wasn’t it?’ asked Grace. The fear gripping her vocal chords made her voice sound unnaturally shrill.
‘Yes.’
‘Where’s the boss?’ she asked, swallowing hard. ‘Is he here?’
Duncan looked towards heaven. ‘Upstairs. Big pow-wow. The university vice chancellor’s not at all happy about a fatality right in their backyard and is out for blood. I’d give Keith a wide berth when he comes back down if I were you.’
‘And Lance?’
‘Over at Roxanne’s flat.’ Duncan gave her a kindly smile. ‘Thought we’d spare you that.’
Grace wanted to run away, but she managed a smile. ‘Thanks.’
She went to her own desk and hid her face in front of her computer screen, scrolling through meaningless emails. She would have to own up that she’d made that call. Even for such a narrow time frame, she couldn’t possibly allow them to waste the man-hours it would take to trawl through the CCTV footage from the railway station and perhaps miss other opportunities to catch Roxanne’s killer.
But a craven little voice whispered in her head: why rush to own up? No one would believe she hadn’t leaked details of the investigation, and she’d never be able to prove her innocence. Ivo couldn’t confirm where Roxanne had got her information, and Roxanne, the only person who could exonerate her, was dead. The chief constable had vowed to treat any unauthorised contact with the media as a serious disciplinary offence. Given the reputation that had travelled with Grace from Kent, she’d be out on her ear by the end of the day. For good this time.
Yet what if there was no CCTV of her making the call? Why not wait to find out?
But she knew she could never forgive herself if she allowed a false lead to divert attention from what was really important. It was no good: she would have to confess to Keith and take her chances.
Grace tried to control her panicky breathing. She longed to escape, if only to the toilets for a moment’s privacy, but she didn’t trust her legs to carry her. Was her career about to end? She had a sense of a net tightening around her. She had no friends. No spare money. She’d signed a short lease on her horrible flat. With no job, no prospects, nowhere to go, what on earth was she going to do with herself?
Keith came through the door looking grimmer than she’d ever seen him and shut the door of his own office behind him. Grace got to her feet: she knew that if she delayed for a second she’d lose her nerve. When Duncan saw where she was heading, he frowned and shook his head but, ignoring him, she tapped on the door and went straight in.
‘Not now!’ Keith spoke without looking up from his desk where he was gathering papers into one big untidy bunch.
‘Sir, I need to tell you something.’
‘Not me. They’re sending in a team from the Murder Review Group.’
‘What? Why do we need an external review? Why so soon?’
‘It’s pass-the-parcel upstairs. Everyone shifting the blame.’ He sighed heavily. ‘Sorry. What did you want to tell me?’
Grace hesitated. ‘It’s going to cause more trouble.’
Keith looked at her keenly, and must have seen how shaken she was. ‘Do I need to know?’
‘I think you do. It affects an operational decision.’
He nodded. ‘Well, they’ll be glad of a final nail in my coffin. Might as well get it over with. Go on.’
Grace had no idea what to say. How could an innocuous phone call put two careers at risk when the only priority, surely, was that they were in the middle of a major inquiry? ‘Could we have done anything differently?’ she asked.
Keith sighed heavily and leaned back in his chair, his hands resting on the arms. ‘Not made the university look bad when it might negatively affect student applications for next year. Not embarrassed the chief constable when she’s a close friend of the vice-chancellor. Not allowed the Courier to make us look like idiots. All I want is to find Polly Sinclair and to put a killer behind bars before anyone else gets hurt. What about you?’
Keith’s stare held more than mere rhetoric, and Grace hoped that she was interpreting it correctly. ‘A call was made to Roxanne Carson’s mobile from a payphone at Colchester Town station,’ she said carefully, holding his gaze. She paused, waiting for his affirmative nod before continuing. ‘I’m suggesting we don’t need to spend too much time on it, sir.’
‘You know that for certain?’
‘One hundred per cent, sir. We were friends, if you remember.’ Grace could see him take on board what she meant and then struggle with his fury. He had every right to be angry: she’d disobeyed a direct order and now the fall-out would be serious.
He thought through his options and then let his chair bounce forward again. ‘How do we convince the incoming review team of that?’
‘That’s the trouble.’
‘Anything else that I’ll end up being sorry I didn’t know?’
‘Not in terms of the investigation.’
He nodded. ‘Right now I need to buy time.’
‘I understand. And I’m sorry, sir. I’m ready to take the consequences.’
‘Yes. And you probably will. But I’m not handing Irene Brown an opportunity to sack both of us until I absolutely have to.’
‘OK.’
‘Though if push comes to shove, DS Fisher, then you haven’t told me anything about this phone call, right? This conversation never
took place.’
‘Understood, sir. And thank you.’
‘Get out.’
Grace went, almost colliding with Lance as he hurried into the main office. ‘There’s a team from the Murder Review Group downstairs.’ He leaned in to speak confidentially. ‘Any idea what’s going on?’
‘External oversight, courtesy of the chief con.’
‘Nice of her to have such confidence in us.’ Lance nodded towards the SIO’s office. ‘How’s he taking it?’
‘You know.’ She shrugged, then looked at him anxiously. ‘We are going to close this case, aren’t we?’
He smiled. ‘You bet.’
She let him propel her back to her desk, glad of the touch of his hand on her shoulder.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Nick Warleigh, a slight, taut man with a shaved head and smooth dark skin, was the head of the Serious Crime Division unit assigned to the surveillance of Pawel Zawodny. Grace had invited him to grab a coffee with her and Lance in the busy cafe round the corner from the police station, and now he greeted them with an understandable defensiveness: his team had, after all, lost sight of a suspect for a full twenty-six minutes during which Roxanne had been murdered. Warleigh must also have heard on the grapevine that Grace had been a friend of the victim, for his next words were to offer his condolences.
‘Thank you,’ she replied, touched by his consideration. ‘We wanted a chance to get some direct feedback on your observation of Zawodny.’ She didn’t add that she’d worked occasionally with a covert operations specialist in Kent whose gut instinct about a suspect’s pattern and style of behaviour had proved even more invaluable than his hi-tech vans, cameras and listening devices. ‘What do you make of him?’
‘We’ve hardly been on him forty-eight hours,’ Warleigh pointed out. ‘And most of that he’s either been working on the house he’s renovating or at home in his flat. One trip to the supermarket for newspapers and food, one stop at the florist en route to the campus vigil last night. Calls have been work-related or we think to his mother. Recordings have gone to a Polish translator.’
‘First impressions?’ she prompted.
‘Well, he obviously knows now that we’re there. But my guess is that he’s been aware of us right from the off.’
‘Whatever gives you that idea?’ Lance asked sarcastically.
‘Not because he gave us the slip, if that’s what you mean.’
‘We were the ones who released him from custody,’ Grace reminded them both, wishing that for once Lance wouldn’t come out of his corner fighting. ‘Not that we had much choice about it.’
‘Yeah, I’d never have known that if yesterday’s Courier hadn’t reminded me.’ Warleigh gave her a wry smile and she returned it: now that both sides had scored a point, maybe they could get on with business.
Warleigh spooned aside the froth on his cappuccino, thinking for a moment before continuing. ‘Zawodny’s been meticulous,’ he said. ‘Drives bang on the speed limit. Stops for orange lights. Even parks precisely within the bay markings outside his flat.’
‘So he’s organised and law-abiding?’ said Grace. ‘He likes routine?’
Warleigh shook his head. ‘Feels like it’s too much. Over the top.’
Lance leaned forward over the little round table. ‘A performance?’
‘As I say, we’ve only been on him forty-eight hours. Give me a little longer, and I might have an opinion on whether his patterns are natural or contrived.’ Warleigh sipped his coffee. ‘He could just be a bit OCD.’
‘But you don’t think he is?’ urged Lance.
‘He seems hyper-vigilant. And he has an unusually light data footprint, too. Pays cash for everything, even petrol. Has a smartphone, but no computer or wi-fi.’
‘See? He has something to hide,’ declared Lance, looking to Grace for endorsement.
‘He could just be keeping his costs down. Or he’s worried about being caught not paying his tax.’ She was as pleased as Lance that Zawodny’s behaviour had provoked suspicion in such an experienced surveillance officer, but she wanted to prevent Lance railroading Warleigh into seeing only what they wanted him to see. That kind of tunnel vision tended to lead to bad consequences.
‘It’s probably best we don’t share our theories yet,’ she told Warleigh, hoping that Lance might also take the hint. ‘Not until they’re more than theories.’
‘Fair enough,’ Warleigh said, finishing his coffee. He pushed his chair back and looked at the door. ‘If you don’t mind, I need to get back to work.’
‘Please, go,’ she told him. ‘We appreciate you making the time.’ She saw him reach into his pocket. ‘No worries, we’ll get this.’
‘Thanks.’
Lance shuffled his chair out of the cramped corner into which he’d been forced so the three of them could fit around the table. ‘You getting cold feet about Zawodny being our man?’ he asked crossly.
‘Not at all. He is organised and meticulous and probably keeps an eye on costs, but then his ambition when he came here was to do well, make some money, go back to Poland and watch his Catholic mother shed tears of pride. So you can imagine his reaction when he saw what the Courier had written about him. My guess is he could well have felt pretty murderous.’
‘So we let him go on Monday,’ said Lance. ‘He went to the railway station to make an untraceable call to Roxanne and arranged to meet up with her at the campus vigil.’
Grace winced: there was no way she could keep her part in this buried for much longer.
‘He was angry and resentful. That’s why nothing soft was placed under her head.’
‘We’re pretty certain the bottle of wine was bought at the campus shop, by the way,’ said Lance. ‘Did Duncan tell you?’
‘No. Any prints?’
‘Wiped clean. We know he never went there, so it may have been rubbish that he picked up.’
‘Rubbish,’ Grace echoed, a sob of horror for her friend rising in her throat.
‘Sorry.’ Lance touched her arm. ‘But every bit of meaning shows he’s talking to us. He wants a conversation, even if it’s to punish us, to demonstrate his contempt.’
She nodded miserably, aware of his friendly scrutiny. ‘Did you look at the Facebook page the Mercury set up for Roxanne?’ she asked.
‘No. Why?’
She shook her head, wishing now that she hadn’t brought it up, but words like ‘rubbish’ and ‘contempt’ were painful to hear.
‘Go on,’ he said.
‘I know every website gets them,’ she said, ‘but there are a few horrible comments. Stuff like: “She got what she deserved.” “Strangling too good for her.” And one or two pretty explicit suggestions about what else should have been done to her body.’
‘Have you told the SIO?’
She shook her head again. ‘No. What’s wrong with people?’
‘Tell Keith,’ he said, his urgency betraying his excitement. ‘Could be that some of them at least were left by our guy.’
‘You think Zawodny would write that kind of stuff?’
‘Abuse is about power. He’s taunting us, daring us to stop him, proving how far he can go, how much he can get away with.’
It struck Grace that if Lance was right then the killer would probably be pleased with the effects of his nasty game: he’d certainly upset her and got Lance all riled up. But she kept that thought to herself.
‘So where does Polly Sinclair fit in?’ she asked instead. ‘If the conversation’s so important to the killer, why wasn’t she displayed? Why doesn’t he produce her body? Why the silence?’
Lance shrugged. ‘Something went wrong, or he got spooked or realised he’d left evidence on the body he couldn’t get rid of, so he dumped her at sea. Then, when maybe it began to piss him off that no one would know what he’d done, he went after Rachel so we’d get the message.’
‘But he was sorry about Rachel,’ Grace pointed out. ‘He put her jacket under her head.’
‘Wants us to t
hink he’s a nice guy really. It’s these ungrateful women who take advantage, don’t show proper respect, and need to be taught a lesson. They’re to blame. They make him do it.’
‘We still need something to tie him directly to Roxanne.’
‘We’ll get him on the CCTV from the railway station,’ Lance said confidently.
‘And if we don’t?’ she asked, feeling sick and shivery.
‘Then we do it the old-fashioned way,’ he said. ‘We’ve got hundreds of statements to plough through. The switchboard has been overloaded with calls since the Courier posted its reward. Someone will have noticed something, even if it takes us weeks to find it.’
‘I feel like we’re drowning, Lance.’
‘You need a good night’s sleep.’
‘Yes.’ She smiled at him. ‘Thanks for last night, by the way. Don’t know what I would have done without you.’
‘No problem.’ He put a ten-pound note on the table, waving aside her objection. ‘I’m off home. See you tomorrow.’
‘Sure. Bye.’
Grace was in no hurry to return to her poky, sterile flat, so signalled to the waitress and asked for a glass of water and a toasted panini. Better stay off the coffee or she’d be too wired to sleep, but if she ate here, she wouldn’t have to bother about what wasn’t in her fridge, plus she could put off the evil hour when she’d have to go back to the flat. Unthinkingly, she reached for the newspaper discarded by a departing customer at a nearby table, only to drop it again as if the touch of newsprint on her fingers were a deadly poison.
Leaving the cafe half an hour later, Grace decided to loop through Castle Park before it closed for the night. It was a melting June evening and the wide lawns, cafe and play area were still busy. Nevertheless, as she skirted the impregnable Norman ramparts, she had a fleeting sensation that someone was dogging her footsteps, weaving from path to path between the flower beds and the steep earthworks. She knew where the feeling originated: though she told herself she was glad that Pawel Zawodny was under close observation by Warleigh’s team, the truth was that Trev’s text this morning, followed by two missed call alerts from him during the day, had spooked her. She checked her phone again now as she walked, just to make sure there’d been no further calls, and hoped she wouldn’t find him waiting for her outside her flat again.
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