He’d been sent once by his then editor to see some swanky hypnotist in Harley Street who ‘addressed addiction issues’ (so that if his liver packed up he couldn’t later sue his employers for failing to address his ‘problem’) and the guy had asked him to go in his imagination to a place where he’d feel totally relaxed and content. Immediately he was standing in the yawning mouth of a delivery bay at one in the morning as the last load of newspapers went out, and some gaffer wearing an old coat and fingerless mittens, no doubt knitted by his old lady back in Southend, cut the string on a damaged bale to hand young Ivo a copy of next day’s news. He thought then he’d been inducted into the most glamorous and seductive club in the world. And he had. Not even a Maxwell or a Murdoch had since stained the purity of his love.
And now here he was, on a Thursday morning, sitting on a red plush and fake gilt ballroom chair, crammed in beside the crack troops of the world’s media, waiting for Chief Constable Irene Brown, no less, to take to the stage. Now there was a second body it was standing room only, and he’d arrived well over half an hour ago to make sure he bagged a place near the front. A seat in the middle of the front row had been reserved for the editor of the Mercury. Their headline this morning had been KILLED FOR DOING HER JOB, and no doubt Sullivan was now making a killing out of syndication rights. Ivo himself, having scooped everyone yesterday with his own first-hand report of discovering the body, had been under some considerable pressure to maintain momentum. In the end, while everyone else was kindly setting the scene for him by extolling the virtues of the cream of the nation’s young womanhood, praising the three girls’ youth, beauty and accomplishments, and demanding greater protection for all students in the face of still-nameless danger, Ivo had found a way to set the Courier up as their champion.
Nothing the readers liked better when facing a slaughter of the innocents than a healthy dose of outrage. Blaming a university for poor security, as the Mercury had done, was by now a bit limp, so Ivo had been thrilled to come across some hideously misogynistic messages and tweets amongst the tributes to ‘our’ Polly, ‘tragic’ Rachel and ‘brave’ Roxanne. Talk about disrespecting the dead! His editor had lapped it up, and it made the perfect smokescreen for the absence of any actual news.
But now he’d have to find a story to top that, and unless the police were about to set a new agenda, finding a fresh angle was going to be a struggle. These press conferences were fast turning into a variety show as compère Hilary Burnett attempted to ring the changes with the same few tired acts, and Ivo wondered what juggling, dancing dogs she’d roll out for them today.
As the communications director led the way punctually onto the stage, Ivo was pleased at least to see that DS Fisher was back in the line-up; she’d been absent yesterday, no doubt out of respect to her friend. He’d thought about her quite a bit since their meeting yesterday morning. If truth be told, she was probably responsible for the desperation that had had him pouring good money down the khazi in the wee small hours – there was no way he’d be able to wing that tab onto expenses. If he tried it, they’d probably send him back to the hypnotist, and he’d rather slit his wrists. Still, never mind: he had a blank sheet of paper called a front page to fill and nothing as yet to put on it. The same went for every bum on every seat in here. With two murder victims, a young woman now missing for twelve days, and at least two known suspects walking around free, Hilary had better bloody well throw a decent bone to this hungry pack of wolves before she had a massacre on her hands.
FORTY
Grace was exhausted. She had come under increasing pressure from Hilary to be at today’s media conference before her absence itself became a story. And she’d had to spend twenty minutes with Hilary and the chief con beforehand, rehearsing how best to answer the inevitable questions from the Courier’s chief crime reporter about her friendship with the murder victim. In the event, most of the questions had come not from Ivo Sweatman but from the Mercury’s acting news editor, a sign that the local paper was eager to retain ownership of the personal angle for as long as it could. But the Mercury opened the door to the rest of the world, and although Irene Brown fielded many of the questions, Grace had been bombarded by reporters from TV stations she’d never even heard of. At the end, once the chief con had congratulated her and been escorted away, Hilary had insisted Grace remain behind to record individual segments to camera so that every news programme had their own unique package. As a result, Hilary was ecstatic, but Grace just wanted to get back to the office and find out what was happening with Matt Beeston.
As Hilary finally allowed Grace to escape, Colin Pitman materialised beside them outside the conference room. ‘So you knew Roxanne Carson?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Grace replied wearily. A display of sympathy and concern from Colin was the last thing she needed right now.
‘She acquitted herself well, didn’t she?’ Hilary appealed happily to Colin. ‘It’s not easy, managing to sound so authentic in front of such a mass of people and cameras, but you’re a natural,’ she told Grace. ‘The chief constable will be delighted with all the positive coverage.’
‘Brilliant,’ Colin said, with an ironic glance at Grace that she was almost too tired to resist. It had been easy once to like this man. And it was pointless to waste energy fending off every meaningless encounter.
‘Well done,’ said Hilary, squeezing her arm affectionately. ‘And thank you.’
As Hilary tapped off along the corridor on her high heels, Grace sighed in relief, letting her shoulders drop. ‘That was all a bit much,’ she admitted.
‘Hilary’s right, though. You did do well.’ Colin came an inch closer. ‘I’m so glad the move here was the right decision. I knew it would be.’
Grace bit back the angry words; what was the point?
‘You’ll make it back up to DI in no time. And I’d be happy to put in a good word for you with Superintendent Stalgood, if you’d like.’
Colin assumed her assent, so she didn’t bother answering and merely stared at him. He, however, took her incredulity for pain, and shook his head in sorrow. ‘I wish I’d seen what was coming with Trev. We all do. I blame myself, I really do.’
She almost laughed in his face. So far as she knew, Jeff, Margie and no doubt Colin, too, were still best pals with Trev.
‘Thanks.’ She managed to keep a straight face: maybe her twenty minutes of media training was paying off. But Colin continued to hold her gaze.
‘I know what you went through,’ he said, clearly striving to sound wise. ‘But look, it’s over now. Fresh start. I couldn’t have been more sorry to let you go, except I knew it was the best thing for you.’
She realised that he’d convinced himself to believe this tosh. She’d seen such delusion many times when interviewing suspects, or with the parents or partners of perpetrators who’d committed monstrous acts. People had an uncanny ability in the face of unbearable truth to weave their own narrative and stick to it through thick and thin, she thought. She saw now how Colin, since her departure, had told himself this story to escape his own cowardice, and could now without a glimmer of irony pat himself on the back for his foresight and compassion. It was impossible to imagine anything she could say that would pierce the cloak of fiction he’d wrapped around himself. So she let it go.
Falling into step together, they made their way slowly upstairs. When they reached the MIT office, Colin held open the door, letting her go first, an instinctive courtesy that she used to think was quite sweet and now would have preferred to flatly reject.
They sensed the electricity in the room immediately. Duncan, nearest the door, swung around in his chair. ‘Matt Beeston was on campus on Tuesday night! A couple of his former students who were at the vigil reported seeing him. We’re checking back with them now.’
Keith came out of his office. ‘Lance. Grace. Go pick him up.’
It did not take them long to reach Matt’s town-centre flat. When he opened the door to them, he looked even worse tha
n the last time Grace had seen him. He’d cut his hair short and dyed it blonde, a cheap yellowish shade that didn’t suit his skin and certainly didn’t enhance either his stubble or the dark rings under his eyes.
‘Bit of a disguise,’ he mumbled when they failed to hide their reactions to his altered appearance. ‘So I can buy some milk without being papped. Probably a mistake, in retrospect.’
His flat seemed orderly enough – his cleaner must still be doing her stuff – but there was a pile of pizza boxes on the floor that wouldn’t fit in the over-crammed kitchen bin and Grace caught a distinct aroma of stale takeaway curry.
‘What is it you want?’ he asked.
‘We are arresting you on suspicion of sending by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character,’ Lance told him. ‘You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence –’
‘Yeah, I know,’ Matt interrupted.
‘– if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’
‘OK. So what happens now?’
‘We need to take every electronic device you have here.’
Matt pointed to his laptop. ‘Help yourself.’
He sat listlessly in the back of the car on the short journey to the police station, staring silently out of the window. His passivity continued as he was booked in and taken to an interview room. When asked, he waived his right to a lawyer, saying that it would only mean a bigger bill for his parents to pay. ‘I’m not going to argue with you,’ he said, as soon as they had finished the formal preliminaries. Even when they reminded him that he was still under caution for suspected murder and suspected rape, he just shrugged. ‘You do what you gotta do.’
‘This isn’t a game, Dr Beeston,’ Grace reminded him sharply. His attitude was more than unhelpful: she’d read of cases where such fatalism had led to false confessions.
‘I’m not stupid,’ he retaliated. ‘I’ve been waiting for the knock on the door. I realised after it was too late that you’d track everything back to me eventually.’
She was itching to say a sarcastic ‘Poor you’ but stopped herself in time. However provoking his air of victimhood, she must curb her desire to give him a good hard slap. He was like a toddler pushing his limit to get attention, however negative the consequences.
Grace’s temper wasn’t improved by Lance reading aloud the stream of violent abuse and threats of sexual mutilation that Matt had spewed out into cyberspace, though she was glad to see that even Matt seemed cowed by the sheer nastiness of what he’d written.
‘Did you send these electronic messages?’ asked Lance.
‘Yes.’
‘And would you agree that they are grossly offensive, given that all of them relate to young women who are either dead or missing?’
‘If that’s what you need me to say.’
‘Yes or no?’
‘Yes.’
‘So why did you do it?’
‘It seemed like a good idea at the time. I was rat-arsed. And very pissed off.’
‘What were you angry about?’
‘It seemed like everything was their fault.’
‘Whose fault? How?’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’
‘For the tape,’ Lance replied.
Matt shook his head in misery. ‘Why don’t you go out and arrest the cretins who sent me their turds, or the middle-aged ladies who wrote on Basildon Bond notepaper with second-class stamps to tell me they ought to bring back hanging? They’re the ones who gave me the idea in the first place.’
Lance ignored Matt’s self-pity. ‘Did you go to the candlelit vigil on campus on Tuesday evening?’
Matt voice rose in indignation. ‘Yeah. So what? I didn’t murder anyone!’
‘But you are suspended from your job at the university.’
‘So? Doesn’t give them the right to tell me where I can and can’t go.’
‘Everyone at the vigil wanted to pay their respects to Polly and Rachel.’ Grace took over, speaking softly, testing to see if his anger would still encompass the real victims in the case. ‘You knew both Polly and Rachel, knew them better than the majority of people there. Is that why you went?’
‘No.’ He stared at her with a mixture of contempt and distress.
‘So why were you there?’
He looked away again, his jaw working as if he were grinding his teeth. ‘They ruined my life. If nothing had happened to them, if they hadn’t got themselves killed, I’d still have job, a future.’ He muttered another word under his breath, but Grace couldn’t catch it. She looked at Lance, but he shook his head.
‘What did you say?’ she asked.
Matt raised his head and looked at her full in the face. ‘All those fucking bitches,’ he said again, loudly and clearly.
FORTY-ONE
‘Being a total arsehole doesn’t automatically make him a killer,’ said Lance, as he and Grace made their way back upstairs after the interview. ‘I’m still not convinced he’s together enough to be our guy. Our guy is smart.’
‘True.’ Grace shared some of Lance’s doubts, yet all the same she’d been deeply shocked by Matt’s undisguised hatred of blameless young women. Had his anger and resentment erupted only in response to recent events, or had a capacity for lethal violence always been there, lying deep, expressed in the sexual exploitation and humiliation of his students? Matt might not be very shrewd or cunning, but he was well educated and intelligent. Surely his response to not getting his own way couldn’t simply be rooted in some warped sense of privilege and entitlement? But then it was his position that had protected him: either not a single one of his academic colleagues had picked up strongly enough on his misogyny to demonstrate any practical concern for his female students or they had simply and expediently chosen to look the other way.
Grace knew which answer she favoured.
‘You OK?’ asked Lance. ‘You’re shivering.’
She stopped on the stairs, unable to catch her breath enough to continue.
‘Grace? What’s the matter?’ Lance took hold of her shoulders and guided her gently downwards. ‘Here, sit on the step. Can I get you anything?’
She shook her head, unable to speak, her heart pounding against her ribcage.
Lance sat down beside her. ‘It’s OK. Keep breathing. It’ll be OK.’
Slowly his warmth began to seep into her, and the darkness receded enough for her to take a breath. ‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t be. He really got to you, didn’t he?’
She concentrated on breathing through her mouth, waiting for her heartbeat to return to normal. ‘Having my old DCI here doesn’t exactly help.’
‘Is this about what happened in Maidstone?’
Grace nodded reluctantly.
‘Want to tell me about it?’
She waited until she could keep her voice steady. ‘They turned on me, all of them, even my husband. I think Trev believes it when he says he did it for them. No one spoke up for me. Colin never said a word. Not a word. I was completely on my own.’
Lance rubbed her shoulder gently. ‘You’re here now.’
‘Matt’s students. Someone should have listened to them.’
‘I know.’
They sat in silence for a few moments. ‘Can I ask you something?’ she said.
‘Sure.’
‘I told you about the officer in Kent, Lee Roberts, who got busted.’
‘Yes.’
‘He was a liability. Dangerous. A very, very short fuse. And no one was prepared to do anything about it. It was me who called in the tip-off about his dealer. If I’m honest, I suppose I did kind of hope Lee would get taken down, too, but I never gave his name. I wouldn’t have done that.’
‘OK.’
Grace wasn’t sure from Lance’s tone what he was thinking. ‘What would you have done?’ she asked.<
br />
‘Would I have made the call?’
‘What would you have done to me if you knew I had? If Lee was your fellow officer?’
‘And I’d known what state he was in?’
‘Yes. Do you think I had it coming? What they did to me?’
Lance shrugged. ‘Lee pops pills and then gets busted, that’s his problem.’
‘You wouldn’t have sent me to Coventry? Put dog shit in my desk drawer?’
‘Jesus, is that what they did?’
Grace nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
‘Bastards. And that creep Colin Pitman was your DCI?’
‘Yes. He refused to take any official action. Said it wouldn’t be in my best interests.’
Lance shook his head in disbelief. ‘I don’t know if I’d have made the call. But I would never have treated you like that. Never.’
Grace sighed. ‘Thanks.’
Lance put an arm around her shoulder, tugging her closer. A couple of community support officers came up the stairs towards them, awkward in their bulky vests, belts and hooked-on radios. Grace and Lance remained where they were, making the two young women pick their way around them. They turned, curious, and glanced back at them.
‘Kiss and make up,’ Lance called after them. ‘It’s just the best, isn’t it?’
Grace meant to laugh but it came out as half sob, half hiccup, making Lance laugh as well. The two support officers snatched a second look, and Grace turned to smile at their discomposure. ‘Ignore him,’ she told them, digging Lance in the ribs with her elbow. She stood up, dusting off the seat of her skirt, then kissed Lance lightly on the top of his head. ‘I mean it. Thanks.’
‘Any time.’
Keith was waiting for them impatiently. They weren’t sure how much of their interview with Matt he would have observed as Hilary had been eager for Keith personally to inform the victims’ families that the Internet troll had been arrested, and also then to field their difficult questions about why Matt Beeston had not been kept in custody since his initial arrest. But Grace discovered, as soon as he’d closed his door behind them, that he had something else to tell them.
Good Girls Don't Die Page 24
