Mercy Killing

by Lisa Cutts

  Even though Monday should have been DC Sophia Ireland’s day off, she chose to work. She was tired and fancied a lie-in but not only would the money come in handy, but also she felt guilty about taking her day off when there was so much to do.

  She also wanted to keep an eye on Gabrielle.

  It wasn’t her responsibility to do so, that fell to the sergeants and ranks above, but they weren’t always aware of what was going on in their incident room, and some decided to ignore it. Doing nothing was always the easy way out of a problem. It didn’t make it go away.

  Sophia had promised Tom that she would go with him to track down Jonathan Tey whom they had been unable to find on the previous day. Several trips to his house and attempts to call him had failed, so it was their priority today.

  Before they went out on their enquiry, Sophia had one or two other things to take care of but she didn’t want anyone to see what she was up to.

  She bided her time until everyone was either out on enquiries or had left the incident room to grab a last-minute late breakfast at the canteen. Once she was satisfied she was alone, she made her way over to Gabrielle’s desk amongst the banks of other empty workspaces.

  Seated, she started to feel foolish and that her snooping around another officer’s paperwork was a really low thing to do. She hadn’t got very far when she heard the sound of someone walking along the corridor to the incident room. Doing the only thing she could think of, she picked the phone up and held the receiver to her ear.

  Tom appeared in the doorway and stopped short when he saw where she was sitting.

  ‘Really?’ was all he said.

  She put the phone down and brushed her skirt, her eyes following her hands so she could avoid looking at him.

  ‘The phone was ringing,’ she said as she walked in the direction of her own desk.

  ‘I’m not sure whether to find your behaviour amusing or worrying. It’s certainly not normal.’

  ‘Enough of the psychoanalysing. Shall we find Jonathan Tey?’

  They left in silence, Tom wondering if his colleague should have taken the day off and put some distance between herself and the problems that seemed to only exist in her head.

  ‘It’s not healthy,’ he said to her when they were in the car.

  ‘I know it’s not, but I can’t sit and do nothing if I feel something’s wrong.’

  ‘I’ve told you what you should do, speak to someone about it.’

  ‘I tried to talk to Harry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want him to think that I was telling tales on a colleague, so I told him half of what I feel. I’ve got no proof of anything.’

  ‘That’s the thing, Soph, you’ve got no proof of anything, so leave it alone.’

  ‘You’re right, let’s go and see the elusive Tey.’

  Within twenty minutes they pulled up outside a semi-detached house, far enough away from the seafront that parking wasn’t a problem, but close enough for a walk to the restaurants and bars dotted along the front.

  A dark-haired woman in her late thirties was heading from the car on the driveway towards the front door. She glanced round at the diesel car as it came to a stop in front of her house but walked on towards the property.

  It was only as she put the key in the door that she realized the occupants of the green Skoda were following her down her driveway.

  With a puzzled look, she stopped and turned towards them.

  ‘Mrs Tey,’ said Sophia as she held her ID out for inspection. ‘We’re from Major Crime and wondered if we could come in for a minute.’

  Elaine Tey’s face had a kind of fascinated horror creeping across it, but all she said was, ‘Is everything all right? I’m not sure what this is about.’

  ‘It’s really your husband, Jonathan, we wanted to see,’ said Tom. ‘Can we come in and speak to him?’

  Her face brightened momentarily as she realized that their business wasn’t with her. She then added, ‘He should be working from home today. Come in and I’ll get him from his office.’

  Many minutes later, the three of them sat at the kitchen table, notepads in front of Tom and Sophia, and her husband’s mobile phone in front of a worried Mrs Tey.

  ‘I don’t know where he would have gone without his phone,’ she said. ‘It’s very unlike him. I hope everything’s OK. He would have left a note if it was an emergency. I only went out an hour ago.’

  For the fourth time since taking a seat opposite Sophia, Elaine Tey glanced up at the kitchen clock on the wall above the officer’s head.

  ‘I’m starting to get worried now. Can’t you tell me what you want to see him about?’

  Sophia opened her mouth to answer the question but was interrupted by the sound of the front door opening.

  Six foot two Jonathan Tey walked into his own kitchen and didn’t look especially pleased to see any of the three people waiting to talk to him.

  Chapter 42

  No sooner had Elaine Tey shown Detective Constable Sophia Ireland and Detective Constable Tom Delayhoyde out of the front door, she turned to her husband with a look that he knew meant she wasn’t about to be fobbed off with any answer he cared to give.

  ‘Explain,’ was all she said.

  She might have been a foot shorter than him and a slight, petite woman who was normally so placid she bordered on boring, but today she recognized the look of a guilty husband when she saw it.

  ‘Laine,’ he said, all open-palmed gestures and head held high, ‘I’ve—’

  ‘Cut the crap and tell me where you were this morning. I’m not the police. I won’t fall for your lies. What have you been up to?’

  ‘We need to sit down.’

  In truth, he was stalling for time. Jonathan might not always portray the most dedicated husband and father but he knew that his family was the reason he got out of bed in the morning and kept on going throughout the week, despite what he might have put his wife through in the past.

  He walked towards the kitchen table where the police officers had sat for the last three hours, asking all sorts of questions about his whereabouts since Friday, the woman scribbling his answers down by hand, the other one taking his DNA and fingerprints. All the while, his wife had looked on and said nothing.

  By the time he reached the table and pulled out a chair, Jonathan had managed to adopt a neutral expression, or so he thought. He wasn’t kidding his wife of fifteen years.

  ‘And you can wipe that look off your face too,’ she said as she pulled out a chair for herself in full interrogation mode.

  He opened his mouth to say something but she silenced him with a withering look.

  ‘Talk, Jonathan. Start with why the police were here asking about a murdered sex offender.’

  His eyes tried to search out anything in the room that wasn’t his wife’s expression. He was used to being the one in charge, although he recognized that he was only the figurehead until something went wrong. That was the moment he would claim he shouldn’t be expected to deal with so much on top of his work. Often, it was a mess he had created, such as the time he insisted it was a good idea to de-ice the back of the fridge-freezer with a carving knife and wouldn’t hear of any other plan. As soon as he pierced the refrigeration unit, he remembered he had to drop some accounts off at a client’s house and returned home a little after midnight.

  By this time, his father-in-law had been round, removed the contents of the freezer, taken the busted unit into the front garden, arranged for its safe collection and ordered a new one to arrive within twenty-four hours.

  Sometimes he failed to plan. It was his only downfall. That and the plan he had hatched with his new ally, Jude Watson.

  Perhaps his wife would see a way out onto the other side.

  The issue was never going to be as simple as the council coming to take away the problem. If it was that simple, he would have made the call himself. That was how desperate he was; he was even prepared to clear up his own mess on this occasion.

  ‘Do you remember that
night I came back from the East Rise Players’ emergency meeting?’ he said, chancing a look up into the eyes of a furious woman.

  ‘The one that you and Jude walked out on?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said with a sigh. ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘If I remember rightly,’ Elaine said, ‘you both walked out and went straight into the pub.’

  ‘OK, OK. Are you going to let me tell you what happened?’

  She reached down to her handbag which she’d dropped to the floor, pulled out a packet of cigarettes and put one in her mouth.

  ‘What?’ she said, the lighter held to her face. ‘You can bring the police to my door asking questions about a murdered paedophile that you pranced about on stage with, have your fingerprints taken, but I can’t have a smoke? Don’t make me out to be the bad guy here.’

  He recognized that it probably wasn’t the best time to mention that he thought they’d given up smoking together six years ago, so Jonathan continued.

  ‘Jude and me sat at the meeting, thinking it was going to be about raising extra funds or selling tickets or something. We had no idea that Eric Samuels, prick of the parish, was going to drop a bombshell about one of the members being a sex pest.’ He glanced up at the smoke as it curled towards the white ceiling. He thought about reaching out and taking a cigarette himself. Instead he carried on.

  ‘You know that I only went along because Jude’s wife made him go and he didn’t want to go by himself. At first, when Jude got so angry at what Samuels said, I wondered if it was because he only wanted a reason to storm out, something to tell his wife that she couldn’t argue with. Well, once we left the Cressy Arms, we walked to the Hake and Billet. Jude didn’t say a word the whole way.

  ‘Once we sat down, he started ranting about Woodville and what he’d like to do to him. We drew a few looks in the pub, I can tell you. I had to shut him up cos we were on the verge of getting barred.’

  He watched his wife tap her cigarette ash into an empty coffee mug on the table, something he had never seen her do in all the years of knowing her. Even when they were students and couldn’t afford an ashtray, it wasn’t a level he’d ever seen her sink to. That action more than anything struck a chord in him – he was reducing his wife to pitiful.

  He knew he couldn’t tell her the truth. Even if their marriage survived, he wasn’t sure she was up to it.

  ‘Elaine,’ he said, putting his hands on top of her left hand, idle on the table. He felt the gold wedding band touch his palm. ‘We didn’t kill Woodville. Could I look you in the eye and tell you such a bare-faced lie? Could I? After all the years we’ve been married, known each other, loved each other? You do believe me, don’t you?’

  ‘Then why were the police here?’

  It was said without feeling, without accusation, with a cold detachment.

  He put his hands up to his temples and leaned on his elbows.

  ‘Because we were the only two blokes at the amateur dramatic society who weren’t over sixty and actually had a backbone. Everyone sat and tutted at that meeting; a few people, including Samuels, said that the police had it wrong and hadn’t given us all of the facts.

  ‘I don’t have much time for the filth but they don’t tell you someone’s a nonce when they really mean that he forgot to pay his bloody television licence. They don’t work like that. Me and Jude were horrified that someone like that was walking amongst us. We reacted; the rest of them didn’t. I can’t help that. What’s done is done.’

  He waited for his wife to say something, even if it was another accusation.

  More worrying than that was that now she said nothing.

  Elaine ground out her cigarette on the side of the I love Cyprus mug, picked up her handbag and walked out of the front door.

  Jonathan sat at the kitchen table and heard the sound of his wife’s car start as she drove away from him.

  His stomach lurched. He was certain she’d be back soon. Certain that she would be back this time.

  He tried to think in terms of the momentary reprieve he had before Elaine came back and started asking him more questions. She’d driven away from him when he’d lied to her. He didn’t want to think what she would do to him when she learnt the truth.

  Chapter 43

  It was taking a little longer than expected for DC Hazel Hamilton and DC Pierre Rainer to reach their final destination. It was only a couple of hours’ drive from East Rise to the small Sussex town where Dean Stillbrook had lived, but Hazel suggested that they make another stop.

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right to carry on driving?’ she asked for the third time. ‘I thought we were going to swap over when we stopped for a coffee.’

  She couldn’t continually ask him as it sounded to her own ears as if she was nagging him.

  ‘I know you’ve only just flown back from your holiday and that’s the fourth time you’ve stifled a yawn. And I know it’s not because I’m anything other than fascinating company.’

  Pierre laughed and said, ‘OK. Let’s have breakfast. I am pretty hungry and that’ll give us a chance to plan how we tackle this enquiry.’

  A few minutes later, they were sitting opposite one another, steaming mugs of coffee and a silver serviette container partially filling the gap between them.

  While they waited for their food to arrive, Pierre said, ‘I’m not entirely sure that we need to stay overnight. I got the impression that Harry wanted it sorted out in one go, less chance of us going back to the incident room and being bombarded with questions from the others until we’ve got as much from the young girl as possible.’

  He stopped stirring sugar into his drink and glanced up, catching the look on Hazel’s face.

  ‘Perhaps it’s because I’m new,’ she said as she picked up her coffee mug, ‘but looking at it impartially, I think it’s because if it’s a planned overnight enquiry, they don’t have to pay us an overnight allowance for being away from home. If the DI plans ahead and we don’t need to stay over, he can cancel the hotel, the department gets its money back and the cost is nil.’

  For a few seconds, Hazel wasn’t sure if she had spoken out of turn. She didn’t want her new team to dislike her, although she wasn’t about to hide her forthright attitude. She bit her tongue, not wanting to say anything unpleasant about her new detective inspector before she got the lie of the land and had sounded out Pierre’s thoughts.

  ‘Harry’s one of the good guys,’ he said.

  She felt herself raise her eyebrows at him. ‘I know he is. He’s the sort of bloke that everyone likes, even those who don’t agree with him. I did my homework before I came here. It’s just that’s what I’d do if it was down to me – I’d plan ahead and save money. It makes good business sense.’

  She glanced in the direction of the kitchen, wanting their food to appear. Right at that moment, she felt she needed the distraction. She wanted to make a good impression on her new work colleague and desperately churned her mind over to find something neutral to talk about.

  She was grateful when Pierre came to her rescue.

  ‘So when you’re not at work, leaving disastrous relationships out of the equation, what else do you get up to?’

  Hazel smiled and felt her shoulders relax. ‘I foster dogs,’ she said. ‘Usually only for a day or two because of work but I love helping out.’

  Pierre picked up his coffee mug and studied her face. He didn’t take a sip, simply continued to look at her. She took it as her cue to continue and for the first time that morning she was happy to talk, to tell him about the many dogs over the years she had cuddled up to, walked, fed, sat on the sofa with at night, their heads in her lap.

  ‘It started when I was on the domestic violence unit.’ She turned her gaze to the window, not really seeing what was the other side of the glass and not really caring.

  ‘Vanessa Meaden went back to her violent husband three times in as many years. He used to beat her for a period of weeks and eventually, when he’d put her in the hospital, we�
��d get involved, he’d get arrested and go to court. He always got a ridiculously short sentence, if he got one at all.

  ‘Anyway, she always went back to him, whatever he did to her. I’d ask her over and over again why she didn’t leave him.’

  Hazel sat at the Formica table retelling the tale she had told herself so often, knowing that she couldn’t have prevented what happened, but accepting that it was possible for such situations to have a different outcome. Of all the things she stressed about, this was one she never gave herself a difficult time over. There’d been a problem she hadn’t been aware of, and all she could do now was play her tiny part in making things easier in the future for victims of domestic abuse, such as Vanessa Meaden.

  ‘She used to tell me that she couldn’t leave because she had nowhere to go.’ Hazel looked at Pierre, saw him open his mouth to say something, pause and sit back in his plastic seat. ‘I’d guess that you were about to say a refuge. The thing is, refuges take women and children, but they don’t take pets, especially not Great Danes. She wouldn’t leave because she had nowhere to go where she could keep the dog.

  ‘Her lowlife, piece-of-crap husband gave the dog a kicking too on a couple of occasions. I put people who are cruel to children, animals, the elderly, the disabled, wife-beaters and paedophiles in the same category – worthless human beings. They pick on the weak and those who won’t or can’t tell.’

  She swirled the remains of her coffee around the bottom of the mug.

  ‘What happened?’ said Pierre. ‘Although I have a pretty good idea.’

  ‘He beat her again, pushed her down the stairs and she lay behind the front door until the postman called the next day, looked through the letterbox and saw the dog sitting beside her dead body. According to the neighbours, who had stopped calling the police because of the abuse they got from him when he inevitably got released from custody, the row started about midnight so the dog probably sat there for something like eight or nine hours.’

  ‘So you foster dogs so that women like Vanessa can make a fresh start?’