No One Will Hear (Sam Williams Book 2)

by Joel Hames

  Half an hour later I’d given up practicing and the angry thoughts were back with friends. I’d told the greasy-haired young man at the desk behind the main door who I was and who I wanted to see, and he’d asked me to take a seat and he’d let Detective Inspector Martins know as soon as possible. Then he’d disappeared down a narrow corridor, leaving me in a tiny anteroom with no chairs in it apart from the one he’d just vacated.

  I took his chair and waited, and waited, and waited some more, and thirty minutes went by and I started to entertain myself by imagining the damage Martins and Brooks-Powell could do to each other if they were locked up in that room, with Willoughby and the caviar, but also a variety of sharp implements and a motive. Any motive would do. As the thirty-fifth minute clicked past, the front door opened and Detective Constable Colman walked in, saw me, frowned, turned to look behind her, turned back and gave me a stare and a grin.

  “What the hell are you doing here, Williams?” she asked. “Things got so desperate you’re moonlighting for CID?”

  I explained the situation, skipping over the bits about kindergarten and how much I detested David Brooks-Powell, and focussing on how important it was that she and her colleagues be allowed to proceed with their work unimpeded by a pair of lawyers and a bereaved poet. The frown was back on her face – I couldn’t be sure, I didn’t know the woman well enough to judge her mood from her expression, but if I’d been forced to guess I’d have said she was disappointed. And then the disappointment cleared, if that was what it had been, and she smiled again and told me to follow her.

  There was something else. Another look, a flash of something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, between the disappointment and the smile. Shrewd. Calculating. Not what I’d have expected of Detective Constable Colman, with her button nose and her tender years. But I’d been wrong about people before, I remembered. Just last month I’d spent hour after hour for nearly a week with Serena Hawkes, a brilliant and beautiful solicitor who turned out to be helping the very people who’d just framed my client for murder. She’d died, that brilliant solicitor, she’d put a bullet in her own head, and after she died it emerged that she’d been threatened and forced into everything she’d done, and I’d spent a good part of every day since going back over my conversations with her and spotting the signs I hadn’t noticed at the time.

  It might not have hit me as hard as it had done if it weren’t for the fact that getting under a person’s skin was supposed to be the one thing I was good at.

  I followed Colman down the corridor her greasy-haired colleague had taken, up a flight of stairs and round a corner, and suddenly I could hear it. Phones ringing, phones falling back into their cradles with a smash, chairs dragging, and the voices: the questions, the insinuations, the guesses and pleas and angry shouts. The hum of a police station in full working order.

  There were more people in here than I’d expected, twenty, twenty-five detectives crammed in between desks and files and a printer so old it probably had a setting for papyrus. I heard Martins before I saw her, a high-pitch full-volume stream of expletives, the sort of thing my acquaintance with Roarkes had taught me to expect of DIs. Whoever she was shouting at, they had the good fortune to be at the other end of a phone instead of in the room with her, but that didn’t stop her pointing with her free hand, gesturing as if she were preparing to stab that finger into her hapless victim’s eye.

  Behind Martins was a board, and on the board were four photographs.

  Each photograph was of a body.

  Above and to either side of each photograph was a series of words – names, dates, locations, body parts.

  And below each photograph was a short sentence.

  It took me a moment to spot Elizabeth Maurier, lying in a pool of her own blood in her own bedroom, a knife beside her, and beside the knife a small red thing that could only, I realised, be her tongue.

  So these were photographs of murder victims at the scene. Murder scenes undisturbed. The root of any investigation.

  There was her name. The location. Elizabeth Maurier. Holland Park. Tongue. The date. 25 November 2016. Below that, the sentence. no one will hear.

  All this I knew already. But there were other photographs. Other bodies in other pools of blood. Other words, places, dates.

  Paul Simmons. Sutton. Eyes. 25 November 2016. no one will see.

  Alina Singh. Epping. Nose. 26 November 2016. no one will smell.

  Marcy Granger. Tooting Bec. Fingers. 26 November 2016. no one will touch.

  Two days. Four bodies. Four pools of blood.

  6: The Collateral Damage

  I COUGHED AND started to gag. Detective Inspector Martins looked up from her phone and saw me, and her expression shifted from furious to volcanic in the blink of an eye. She slammed down the phone and took three steps towards me, and if I’d been thinking straight I’d have turned and run right then.

  I wasn’t thinking straight. I was drowning in pools of blood and flailing through severed organs. I found myself focussing on the green and gold strands of tinsel that flanked the boards as if death were just the final Christmas present. Martins was approaching like the angel of death herself, and for one crazy moment our eyes met and I found myself thinking she was the killer and I was moments away from a very bad ending. Then she was standing in front of me and shouting, and it wasn’t me she was shouting at.

  “What the FUCK is HE doing in HERE?” she bellowed. Colman, who’d asked a very similar question just minutes earlier in a far friendlier tone, took a step back. Martins didn’t give her a chance to answer. “Get him OUT!” she bellowed. “Get him the fuck OUT of my office. Get him OUT of my life! I don’t want to see his face again!”

  I’d been on the receiving end of similar opinions before, but usually with more reason. The blood had drained from Colman’s face – clearly she hadn’t been expecting an onslaught of quite this severity. It wasn’t her fault, I remembered. It wasn’t really mine, either. I was here to apologise and to step aside, to make Martins’ life easier. I opened my mouth to explain, and she turned to me and held out a hand to shut me up.

  “Seriously, Williams. Are you going to be under my feet the whole way through this investigation? Can I expect you in my living room when I get home tonight?”

  “Look,” I began. “I don’t want to get in your way. I just want to help.”

  “Help? How the hell are you supposed to help me?”

  She wasn’t the angel of death any more. She was a rude bitch who needed a little cutting down to size. I reached for the knife.

  “I’ve done this sort of thing before, you know. I’m not just one of those bloody lawyers who makes you want to tear your hair out. I’ve helped the police crack cases that were a lot harder than this one, and they’ve been grateful for it.”

  Now she was smiling at me, a thin strip of white tooth on blood-red lips that was somehow nastier than the abuse. I didn’t know where that harder than this one had come from, I had no idea how hard this case was, but it was out there now and I had the feeling she’d home in on it.

  “They’ve been grateful, have they? Do go on. Please.”

  “Roarkes. Detective Inspector Roarkes. Last month, up in Manchester. You must have heard about it.”

  She laughed. The laugh was even worse than the smile, a knowing little hoot that had me glancing around for the nearest way out.

  “Oh yes. I heard about that. Arrested the wrong man, let him nearly kill himself, all the suspects dead, the bloke’s lawyer, too, and a police officer stabbed to death in the police station while Roarkes was supposed to be protecting him. I’m sure everyone was very grateful for your help. I’m sure it’s done Roarkes the world of good, not that he was exactly flying anyway. Roarkes was yesterday’s man before Manchester. Now he’s last century’s. If that’s the kind of help you’re here to offer, I think I can do without it.”

  I gave up. I wouldn’t have helped Martins now if she’d got down on her knees and begged me. And she h
adn’t finished, either.

  “So, DC Colman, I want this man out. Take him away. I’m going to make a call. If he’s still here when I’ve finished you’ll be putting your uniform back on and cursing the day you ever heard my name.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry, ma’am. I just didn’t think,” muttered Colman. I had the feeling she was cursing that day already. It wouldn’t have surprised me if most of the officers in the room cursed the day they’d first heard Martins’ name on a weekly basis. But that didn’t make her any easier to swallow.

  Colman took me by one arm, gently, and led me back the way we’d come.

  We went for a coffee. There was a café three doors down, a dingy little place with steamed up windows and bored cabbies at every table. We drank our coffees in silence, and then Colman went back to the counter. I picked up my phone; there was a voicemail from Maloney, asking how it had gone. As I put my phone down I glanced up and saw a face I recognised, sitting a couple of tables away and staring right at me.

  Rich Hanover. Real World News.

  He saw me register him and walked over, standing above me with a sheepish grin on his face.

  “Sam Williams, isn’t it?” he asked. I didn’t bother wondering how he’d found out. I picked up my coffee and took a sip.

  “Anything to say? To our readers? Ex-colleague of Elizabeth Maurier. Golden years. Big cases. Don’t want to rock any boats. Come on, mate. Nothing difficult. Just a bit of puff.”

  “Sorry,” I said, putting my mug down slowly and deliberately. “I have nothing to say.”

  He shook his head and walked away, picking up a coat as he passed his table, letting the door slam shut behind him.

  Colman was back a minute later with a bacon sandwich.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I can’t think straight until I’ve eaten.”

  I looked at the clock above the counter, and then back at Colman. It was nearly eleven. A little late for breakfast. She wiped a smear of brown sauce off her lower lip.

  “Big night last night. Needed some bacon.”

  “Right. Did you see that?”

  “See what?”

  “That journalist. He was there outside Willoughby’s office.”

  “Hold on,” she said, mouth still full of bacon. “Who the fuck’s Willoughby?”

  “The lawyer. One who read the will. And he was outside Elizabeth’s house, too, when I met you and your boss.”

  She frowned, then nodded.

  “Yeah, I remember. So what?”

  “So I think he might be following me.”

  She tried to laugh, found herself starting to choke on a lump of meat, swallowed it down. “Following you?”

  I nodded.

  “This place is three doors down from a major CID unit. Half the customers here are journalists. They’ll be waiting for us at the George by lunchtime. You’re just the collateral damage.”

  I hoped she was right. It made sense. She took another bite of her sandwich, chewed and swallowed it down.

  “So what do you reckon?” she asked.

  “I reckon your boss is an A-grade bitch.”

  She nodded and took another bite.

  “That’s not in dispute. I mean, what do you think about the case.”

  She’d put the sandwich down and fixed me with that same shrewd gaze I’d thought I’d seen earlier, and suddenly it hit me. All that yes, ma’am, I’m sorry, ma’am, I just didn’t think was just a front. Colman had been thinking from the moment she’d seen me sitting there waiting at the front desk, and she hadn’t stopped thinking for a second, even while she’d been walking me into a room full of sensitive information that hadn’t been made public, even while she’d been cowering – or pretending to cower – under her boss’s brutal onslaught.

  “You let me see all that on purpose, didn’t you?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer.

  She nodded and took another bite from her sandwich, but didn’t say anything.

  “Why?”

  She smiled at me.

  “Because Martins pisses me off, and I thought this would be a good chance to piss her off back.”

  “Really?” It didn’t seem likely. There must have been easier ways of getting at Martins without putting her own career in jeopardy.

  She shrugged.

  “Well, I don’t like the way she’s doing things. I don’t agree with keeping all this quiet. There’s a serial killer out there and no one knows. We should be out there making this public, getting information, building up links between the victims and the locations, but if we can’t let on there are any links it makes our job a hell of a lot harder.”

  I nodded. I could see that. Knowing precisely when and what information to release was one of the hardest parts of the job, Roarkes had told me, getting the balance right between the flood of useless shit that would come in the moment the story hit the airwaves, and the fragment of gold that might be buried in all that shit. Martins had a good-sized team, by the look of it, but when the press got hold of a serial killer line every single officer in that room would be fielding calls round the clock from the drunk and the short-sighted and the forgetful, the confused and the malicious, and, if they were lucky, the man or woman with the fragment of gold.

  But four people had died, and fifteen days had gone by without an arrest. I wondered, briefly, whether it was just four, whether there had been more in the intervening days, but if there had been then surely they’d have been up on that board leaking their blood onto the floor. Four dead, and nothing since. Martins needed help. The taxi driver who’d driven the killer from Epping to Tooting Bec. The passer-by who’d asked him for a light and noticed something strange about his face or his clothes. The hardware store clerk who’d sold him knives and ropes and wondered what he was planning to do with them. The public might be a pain in the arse, but Martins needed them.

  I realised I’d been sitting in silence, nodding, for close to a minute. Colman had that look trained on my face, sharp, entirely aware of everything that was going on and probably most of what I was thinking. I could see how she’d managed the jump into CID so young.

  “OK,” I said. “But you know I’m not going to go running to the newspapers, right?”

  “Not even your girlfriend?”

  I smiled. She smiled back.

  “But yeah, I know,” she continued. “I don’t expect you to leak this, and if you did I’d probably end up losing my job, but I think you might be able to help anyway.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “I don’t know, to be honest. Whatever you did for Roarkes. Seems you’re quite an unusual lawyer, Sam Williams. One who finds answers instead of trying to hide them. I thought we could do with someone like you on our team.”

  I didn’t like where this was going. I took a deep breath and prepared to disappoint her.

  “Look,” I said. “I’m sorry. But this isn’t my thing. I’m not a cop, as Roarkes is always trying to tell me. I’m just a lawyer.”

  “Not exactly sinking under your caseload, are you?” she replied, quick as lightning.

  “How do you know that?”

  She shrugged again.

  “Martins had us looking into you. Digging stuff up. Said she wanted some dirt in case you got in her way. She really doesn’t like you, Sam. Thinks you’re a loose cannon.”

  I didn’t need Colman to tell me that. And I didn’t need to be any deeper in Elizabeth Maurier’s death than I already was. I was about to tell her Martins was right, to tell her to steer clear of me and anything I’ve touched or looked at or been near if she wanted a decent career and a long life, I was forming the words when the door chimed and a man walked in. Colman looked up and frowned.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  I turned to follow her gaze. He was young – younger than me. Better looking, too. Three days’ stubble, I reckoned, dark under his dirty blonde hair. Sharp suit. Police, I thought. He looked around the café for a couple of seconds until his eyes fell on C
olman, then on me, then back on her. He didn’t look happy. He beckoned her over, a single eyebrow conveying both the instruction and the disappointment that he’d found her there, with me.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Won’t be a minute.”

  They stood there by the door, whispering together. She nodded a bit, shrugged a lot, looked like she was agreeing, but not completely. He shook his head at her. She shrugged again. He turned and headed out, glancing back at her as he went, and even though she wasn’t looking in my direction, I could have sworn she winked at him. He was grinning as he disappeared onto the street.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “He’s giving us ten minutes.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “That’s Larkin.”

  “Super. Tell him I hate his poetry.”

  She didn’t laugh. “Tommy Larkin. DS. One of the good guys.”

  “So good he’s giving us ten minutes? What’s that all about?”

  “Martins’ orders. If you’re seen anywhere near the station or anywhere near one of her officers, you’re to be pulled in. Arrested. For interfering with the investigation.”

  I snorted, but she wasn’t smiling.

  “She means it, you know. Larkin would have pulled you in just now, but, well.”