Bright Spark

by Gavin Smith

  “With him being dead and crispy, yeah, you can’t charge me over smacking him, yeah?”

  “Your knowledge of the law does your immense credit,” replied Slowey, nodding fervently. “Pray continue.”

  Braxton had left the pub a few minutes after Murphy, keen to escape his father’s clutches for an hour or two and teach a troublesome punter a lesson in manners. He’d been under strict instructions to come home when he’d had his fun; there was work to be done, work that didn’t involve jailbait.

  He’d caught up with Firth on the estate, knocked him about the head a few times, said his piece and didn’t feel like chasing when he ran. He hadn’t come across Murphy and hadn’t been anywhere near the bridge over the bypass.

  He’d been to Kelly’s house to kill time and get his oats, crouching in the bushes near the back of her posh house. But she’d ignored his texts and he couldn’t have knocked on the door as that risked attention and a leathering from his dad if he got pinched. By the time he got home, the street was crawling with cops and firemen. Naturally enough, the burglary at the Friars’ Vaults had been Keith’s idea; while Kevin had protested, he couldn’t refuse for fear of violence.

  “You was just in the wrong place, an’ all,” he offered, matter of fact, finally acknowledging the blows he’d traded with Slowey those few long weeks ago. “Your own fault though. You had no business there. Sorry an’ all that shite, but you gave me a few good digs an’ I had to give a few back.”

  Slowey found himself tired to the point of indifference, having scraped into the heart of this canker in search of resolution or revelation and finding only callousness and banality. He needed to remember the point of the process; to unspool the rope he’d need to hang this ordinary monster. Would he feel differently if the literal truth of a tarred noose and a long drop awaited this youth at the end of the judicial merry-go-round?

  “Fuckin’ stupid to keep it.” Braxton had seen only polite but expectant silence in Slowey’s demeanour. “The video box thing. He told me to burn it or drown it. Said it could cost him. That’s why I kept it. Needed something over him. Didn’t even know what were on it. Didn’t know if it worked.”

  “Oh, it works, Kevin, don’t worry about that,” said Harkness, momentarily breaking his silence. He’d yet to hear from the technicians but that was scarcely the point.

  “So, Kevin, let’s sum up.” Slowey stacked the growing collection of interview tapes, glanced at his watch and smoothed down a new page with an air of finality.

  “You’ve told us about your relationship with Kelly. You’ve told us about your dad’s business and your humble role in it. You’ve told us about your shenanigans in and around the Friars’ Vaults public house. You’ve told us about your contretemps with Nigel Firth. Have you missed anything? Have I?”

  Braxton shrugged and shook his head. Slowey pointed at the tape recorder with an even smile.

  “Erm, no. No, ain’t nothing else.”

  “And you agreed right at the start, Kevin, that this would be your chance to unburden yourself, make a new start and stop hiding?”

  “Erm, yes.”

  “Great. Well, Kevin, while we’re summing up, I should apologise.”

  Braxton sweated and twitched in the silence that Slowey had allowed to fill the cramped chamber.

  “I’m sorry that I got you all wrong. I thought you had courage. I thought you could stop hiding and tell it all straight like a man. I thought you could be better than your old man. I thought I’d be sitting here preparing a submission to the judge, explaining how misunderstood you were, how tough your life has been, how you had little choice in some of the things you did, how you lived in fear of violence and were forced to defend yourself. I’ve even got this form for offences to be taken into consideration, to get you a bit of a discount at sentencing time.”

  “Yeah, well, let’s do that, still.”

  “I may as well tear this up now.”

  “No, don’t, you don’t have to….”

  “You see, Kevin, you haven’t told me anything I didn’t already know.” He tore the blank form in two and let its pieces drop to the floor, gratified to see Braxton almost reaching out for them. “I know you’re a player. A proper hard-man. But you’re only telling me about the juvenile stuff. A bit of drug-running. A bit of underage sex. A bit of ABH. Pieces of other people’s conversations. I think I’ve overestimated…..”

  “I’m a killer! A stone killer! Look in my eyes. I’ll rip your heart out. Smash your brains out.” Braxton rocked and slavered, laughed and cried, clutching at his hair with one hand while the other gripped the seat of the chair as if it were bucking beneath him.

  “Kevin!” shouted Harkness, propping himself on his elbows, sensing that Slowey was about to suspend the interview and unwilling to let Braxton retreat into mania. “Why did you set fire to Murphy’s house at Marne Close?”

  “I’m a killer, you pricks, I am the daddy!”

  “Did your father tell you to do it?”

  “He told me but he don’t tell me nothin’ no more.”

  “Kevin, focus.” Harkness pounded the table with a fist. “Did your father tell you to set fire to 13 Marne Close? Say it!”

  “He told me…..always telling me….”

  “Did you set fire to 13 Marne Close?”

  “I’m a killer. That’s what I am. That’s what I do…”

  “Did you set fire to 13 Marne Close?”

  “At Kelly’s,” Braxton muttered, rocking and smirking. “At Kelly’s trying to get shagged….”

  “We’ve got your phone. We’ve got her phone. We’ve got her statement.” Harkness thrust a pile of documents towards Braxton and stared into his rolling eyes. “You didn’t go there. You didn’t call her. You went to 13 Marne Close, poured petrol through the letterbox and set a fire. You killed two innocent children.”

  “No. No, no, no!”

  “Don’t you look at the floor, Kevin, look at me!”

  Harkness flicked open a document folder, riffled through it noisily, drew out a handful of colour images of the post mortem and spread them in front of Braxton. He stood, looming over Braxton, one hand on the back of his chair, fighting the temptation to seize him by the scruff of his neck and drive his face into the images, into the reality of the deed, the life and hope reduced to charred bronchi, splayed ribs and unpacked viscera.

  “Get an eyeful of that, Kevin. You brave enough for that? You man enough?”

  “Not me.”

  “You admit this now, or this and this and this,” Harkness said, jabbing a finger at different images of the Murphy children dismembered on the mortuary slab, “will be with you forever. I’ll see to it. No amount of rubbing will get these pictures out of your eyes.”

  “Not me. Not me.”

  “Either you admit that your old man told you to do it, to burn Murphy’s house, or it’s all getting hung around your neck. Come on, Kevin. Choose!”

  “No. Not me.”

  “Could be you didn’t think about what would happen after you lit that rag. Could be you were too scared of the old man to say no. If you just keep lying to me, I can’t help you.”

  “Stop.” Braxton’s spine seemed to buckle as he wedged his fists between his knees and intoned the invocation he hoped would crack open the earth and see him dragged straight to the hell he deserved without all this noise and fuss. “He told me to do it. He told me to do all of it. It were all him. He told me to do it”

  “Come on then. Why did you do it?” Harkness leaned against the wall of the cycle shed behind the cell block and passed the lit cigarette back to Slowey.

  “You know why,” said Slowey, shouting over the flailing of summer rain on the iron roof over their heads and contemplating the ‘no smoking’ sign on the rear of the rusting diesel pump a few feet away.

  “I don’t. Tell me.”

  “Or what? Will you show me some snuff pictures? Try to intimidate me with your big orang-utan arms?” Slowey swallowed the rest of h
is diatribe and stared at his shoelaces. “I turned the tape off because the interview was over.”

  “I had him talking. I had him confessing.”

  “You had him gibbering. I had a plan.”

  “Which had gone as far as it could.”

  “So you hijacked my interview.” Slowey stifled a cough, felt the world wobble on its axis as the nicotine hit his bloodstream and knew he’d never be a fully-fledged smoker. He couldn’t really hold his drink either; perhaps he just wasn’t cut out for CID. He handed back the cigarette.

  “Don’t get territorial, Ken.” Harkness accepted the smoke with an unthinking gesture of thanks.

  “I was right on the line with that kid and you just crashed right over it. Do you know what you got from him? No, shut up, I’ll tell you. You had a vague confession obtained by coercion. That’s how it will play out. It won’t get past the prosecutor, never mind the court.”

  “Ken, we got him. We got the cough. Christ, man, we solved this. We’ll iron out the wrinkles later.”

  “Then why aren’t you doing cartwheels through the office?”

  Harkness shrugged and stamped the fire out of the half-finished cigarette.

  “Boss wants to see us.”

  “I’ll bet he does. So, go on then. What’s wrong with the confession that I supposedly cut short?”

  “Don’t get smug, Ken. You win, copper! You’ve got me bang to rights. I wanted this to be over so badly. I wanted to have a face and a name I could blame. I wanted the result so I fed him the answer I wanted to hear. Now I don’t know whether he’s behind it or not. And you haven’t called me ‘Sarge’ for minutes.”

  “He’s going down for murder one way or another. Sarge. Hold on to that. But we’ve got to finish this interview. Try to recover something.”

  “I’ll let you lead this time.” Harkness swiped the electronic key-card against the back door’s access pad.

  “Yes, you will,” replied Slowey, shouldering Harkness aside to move out of the pelting rain.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Zoe Stewart had framed her thinking space with glass, open space and darkness. The expensively built conservatory abutted the drawing room of what had once been a village rectory and looked out over gently rippling wheat fields during the day and unlit absence at night. Once she had brewed a large cafetiere, closed the connecting doors behind her and curled her legs underneath her, she could give her work the concentration it deserved without the white noise of office life or the inane banter of home life to distract her.

  Having been nominated to handle the abortive case against the late Nigel Firth, it had been deemed logical that she should inherit the case against a new suspect in the same messy imbroglio. More importantly, the bundle of papers gleamed with the possibility of a solid and illustrious prosecution, once the scurf of unprovable allegations had been chiselled away. It could carry her one more rung up the ladder.

  So with her laptop humming, her red and black pens lined up correctly and her bare feet outstretched on the wicker lounger, she set aside the plastic sleeves containing DVDs and photographic prints and delved into the thick wedge of the case summary. Kevin Braxton still languished in custody, an early decision was needed and she couldn’t rest until she’d unpicked this new conundrum.

  Two hours of reading, annotating, scribbling, cross-referring and re-reading had acquainted her with the case and given her the beginnings of a decision. She made another pot of coffee and spent the deathly hours between midnight and three a.m. inspecting photographs, reading forensic paperwork and reviewing the DVD of the suspect interview on her laptop.

  Afterwards, she flipped the machine’s lid shut, listened to the hot fuss of its cooling fans fading and stepped into the garden to taste cooler and cleaner air. Yesterday’s moisture had seeped from the earth and coalesced into ground mist, muffling and obscuring everything. Somewhere far above, the drone of a high-flying aircraft throbbed and ebbed away, like a once clear thought slipping from her mind. She lingered, trying to discern the fidgeting life of small mammals in the shrubs and hedgerows, but only hearing the shriek of an owl, somewhere nearby, watching and evaluating, staking a claim on its killing ground. She smiled to herself; she could be persuaded that at least one lone, merciless killer still quartered the land, even if that prospect need only alarm voles and dormice.

  She shivered, returned to the warmth of the laptop and began to sketch out her analysis. On paper, Braxton’s murder of his father couldn’t have been more clear-cut. He’d been very nearly caught in the act, the forensic evidence would almost certainly marry up and he’d repeatedly, indeed proudly, confessed to it without bidding. He’d left himself scope for a defence of provocation – a sudden and involuntary loss of control based on long-term psychological or physical abuse – and the detectives hadn’t managed to seal off that bolthole; but that wasn’t greatly troubling and she could live with a conviction for manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility if it gave her a quick result.

  Several other noteworthy offences were equally clear, with or without the interview. Seen through the prism of that torrid interview however, matters quickly lost their clear focus. Constable Slowey had plainly provoked an agitated suspect into a state of crisis, the better to pacify and exploit him on his own terms.

  Still, the process might have escaped taint until the hulking Sergeant Harkness lost his composure and practically cudgelled Braxton into confessing to setting the lethal fire at 13 Marne Close, presumably in reprisal for Murphy’s reneging on a drugs debt. Even taken in isolation, Braxton’s confession to Harkness was weak and ambiguous; monosyllabic, affirmatory answers to leading questions, without any corroborative narrative of his own.

  Had Slowey allowed it to continue and if Harkness had composed himself, they might have salvaged the confession. As it was, the fact that Slowey himself had seen the need to intervene could tend to confirm that the whole process was tainted in the eyes of the court.

  A calmer interview session had ensued an hour later and lasted into the late afternoon. Whatever spell Slowey had cast had been dispelled. Braxton confessed in clear and businesslike terms to the murder of his father then answered ‘no comment’ to every other question, spending the entire session staring into the camera and, unknowingly, into the tired eyes of Zoe Stewart.

  Braxton did not therefore elaborate on his confession to the arson at 13 Marne Close and shed no light on Murphy’s fall from the bridge over the bypass. Nor would he comment on the drugs stash he’d inherited in the hostile corporate takeover he’d effected with a spade.

  In conference with Brennan after Firth’s spectacular demise, she had tacitly supported the notion that the case be put before the Coroner and dispensed with. The obvious culprits for the fire, Firth and Murphy, had neatly put themselves beyond prosecution. The evidence, circumstantially and forensically, suggested a highly personal motive rather than a random act of murderous lunacy.

  Nevertheless, Murphy seemed by far the least likely suspect of the two. After all, why would he attack his own home from the outside and then dispatch himself elsewhere in such a haphazard manner? A rational view might not afford the greatest insight into the irrational mind, but she’d have been far happier had either one of the men been forensically linked to the fire. Perhaps a line had to be drawn.

  The police had wishfully linked every sordid act into one coherent story, as if the force of that story’s logic all by itself could prove that Kevin Braxton killed Murphy and his family. Corrupt and unhinged as Murphy had been at the time of his death, he just might have been on the verge of a breakdown and capable of killing his family and then himself.

  The evidence strongly supported the view that he fell from the bridge by his own hand; the bridge didn’t lie on his route home from the pub and the evidence of his last telephone call, equivocal as it was, suggested idiocy more than foul play.

  She must clarify the issues, and promptly, she resolved as the time display on her laptop regis
tered four a.m. Patricide, burglary, unlawful intercourse and police assault had been well evidenced and should be charged and put before the court promptly. Drugs and other charges might follow subject to searches and forensic work still underway.

  As for the other murders, she was not about to launch a prosecution based on tenuous and dubiously obtained evidence purely because of one officer’s signal and desperate need to find closure for three terrible deaths he could not have foreseen, and one terrible death he could have prevented.

  He wouldn’t like it but he really must learn to take his medicine.

  Sharon dared to glance at her reflection in the kitchen mirror and reproached herself for her decisions that morning. Black eye-liner, dark lip gloss, tightly tied-back hair and fitted, charcoal-grey business suit set the right note of severity for the workplace; but in her mother’s kitchen, on this grim day, a day she’d known would come soon but couldn’t acknowledge, she looked and felt like an undertaker’s assistant.

  Mother busied herself in the front room, fussing and bustling, partly because bags needed to be packed, medication administered and corners smoothed down, but mostly because inactivity led to thought and thought wondered into tar pits of misery. The private ambulance would be threading its way through unknowing and uncaring city streets, its mission as plodding and inevitable as any other delivery service. It would carry her dying father away on a cushion of diesel fumes and practised compassion to the hospice, his place of dying. He’d be carried out of the house barely alive and hoisted into a shared, open coffin disguised as a mini-bus.

  She banished the thoughts, knowing them as morbid and unhelpful. Perhaps Harkness’s bleak view of the world had infected her. She’d visited the hospice with her mother and had been impressed by its staff and its setting. Barely three miles from home and well removed from the A57 trunk road by its own long, narrow access road, the complex sat on the banks of the Witham with only meadow-grass, the open sky, the still water and the odd canal boat for company.