by Mark Roberts
He turned onto Edge Lane and pressed his foot down on the accelerator. The wind howled across the body of the car and the windscreen wipers flew back and forth at speed, throwing rain from the glass.
‘Maybe you’re not responding no more because somehow or other you’re a bit offended because I’ve got your name all wrong.’
On the back seat, Hawkins bowed his head and covered his face with his hands.
‘I said, do you know it round here, Christopher?’
‘I’m not called Christopher no more. I like to be called by my middle name, Edward.’
‘I can understand that. Look to your right, Botanic Gardens.’
‘I – I don’t know.’
‘And the Littlewoods Building. Isn’t it wonderful, all that investment from abroad, all that money pumped in by a Mexican entrepreneur to bring it back to life? I completely understand that you don’t want to be addressed by the name you were charged with. Twelve years for raping an eight-year-old autistic girl. You got off lightly, don’t you think?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Making friends with the single mother downstairs, the woman with learning difficulties, and her kid who had no verbal language or way of communicating with the world outside her head.’
‘Shush. No more.’
‘You must have thought, She’s not going to be much use as a witness. Hey? Are you not talking to me no more?’
Silence.
‘If it’s silence you want, silence is what you’ll get.’
A seagull, fooled into thinking night was day by the bright street lights along the length of Edge Lane, flew ahead of them, crying.
He pulled up at the lights, at the entrance to the Hollywood Bowl Park. ‘Get your fingers off the lock. I’ve told you. You can’t open it from the inside.’
When the lights turned to green, he performed a U-turn and drove back the way he had come onto the city-centre-bound carriageway of Edge Lane.
‘Calm down, Christopher. Look, I’m driving back in the general direction of the police station where you expect to be given protective custody. You never were the brightest, were you, Christopher?’
‘You’re not... a policeman, are you?’
‘I am. I policed the likes of you in 2007 and 2008.’
‘Who are you?’
‘You’re going to listen carefully. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in Liverpool and I’ve spent a lot of money bringing the Littlewoods Building back to life and do you know why I did that? I did it for you, Christopher.’
He turned up a lane at the right hand side of the Littlewoods Building. ‘Fancy having a little sneak preview of what’s inside the sleeping giant?’
‘Let me out!’
‘That was a rhetorical question!’
He pulled up beside a padlocked gate, three feet wide, and showed Hawkins a key.
Hawkins pointed at a sign on the fence. ‘Look, it’s got twenty-four-hour round-the-clock security!’
‘Yes. But not tonight. I gave all the security guards twenty-four hours off. I’m a nice guy, see. Not like some I could mention, Christopher Hawkins.’
‘Do I know you?’
‘I’m like an onion, I have many layers. Do you know what I mean? I mean, I am different things to different people. Not altogether one thing or another.’
‘Let me go. I haven’t hurt anyone for a long, long time. Please have mercy on me.’
‘Look at the storm. It’s growing stronger.’
‘Let me go. I promise you I won’t go to the police. I won’t tell anyone.’
After a well-timed pause, he said, ‘You’re so persuasive, Christopher.’ The wind howled like a massed chorus of hysterical mournful voices. ‘All right, I’ll let you go.’
‘Thank you, thank you so much, thank you, thank you...’
‘So long, Christopher.’
On Edge Lane, cars zipped towards the city centre, their headlights like the eyes of mythical beasts.
Hawkins turned his back on him, took the first few speculative steps from the shadows and towards Edge Lane.
‘Christopher? You want to know who I am?’
Hawkins stopped and turned.
‘My name is Justin Truman. People know me as Vindici. This is what’s going to happen to you.’
Hawkins started to walk backwards, fell over on to his backside.
Truman grabbed his collar, pulled him back to his feet, held on to his collar and pressed his face close to Hawkins. ‘You’re going to die tonight, Christopher, but as you’ve inflicted suffering on others, you’re not going to die without suffering yourself – and I mean suffering.’
Truman threw three swift, hard punches just above Hawkins’s nose, and turning him round, ordered, ‘Walk this way, Hawkins!’
89
9.01 pm
‘There’s a real IT naivety about Christine Green,’ said Poppy Waters to Clay and Hendricks. ‘I put the hard drive from her smashed laptop into a comparable model and opened it from there. I entered System-Out-of-Box Experience and once Sysprep started running it took thirty seconds for Christine’s hard drive to move house and be up and running on the new laptop. Her website’s nowhere near as sophisticated as Lucien Burns’s but, so far, and it is early days, it looks like she’s never even heard of the deep web or the dark web. She uses Google to search for everything. Her history’s endless, as in it appears she hasn’t ever bothered to wipe it. She hasn’t even got the new Justin Truman picture on her computer, unlike hundreds of thousands of others who’ve already shared it and liked it.’
‘I’ve got another iPhone for you to look at,’ said Clay as the door opened and Cole entered. She handed the phone to Poppy and explained, ‘It belongs to Steven Jamieson’s solicitor Daniel Campbell.’
‘Who came in here threatening us with the full force of the law and now looks like a lump of desiccated shit,’ observed Hendricks.
‘Christine Green’s laptop?’ said Poppy. ‘Apart from a pretty creaky website, there’s nothing I’ve seen on here so far to directly implicate her.’
‘You say she’s technically naive,’ said Clay. ‘Which goes a long way to explaining why she thought she could destroy evidence on the hard drive by smashing the laptop. All the physical evidence points to her. It’s like a mirror image of Lucien’s position. Nothing from him rubs off from the physical evidence but his computer says he’s up to his eyes in this. Lucien Burns and Christine Green? My money says you can’t have one without the other.’
‘What do you want me to do next?’
‘At some point as soon as you can, have a look at Christine Green’s phone. See if she made or received calls between eight fifty-five and nine ten this morning. If she did, let me know what the number or numbers are, please. Campbell’s got enough to worry about as it is before we find whatever’s lurking on his device. Tell me what you found on Lucien’s iPhone, please.’
‘Lucien’s thought of pretty much everything to keep his phone secure,’ said Poppy. He didn’t save any passwords to his phone, he’s used screenlock and encryption to keep his data secure. Public Wi-Fi he’s kept well away from and he’s used Hideninja VPN to encrypt his outgoing data. But the really clever thing he’s done that makes me think he’s got something worth hiding is that he’s used 3CX Mobile Device Manager.’
‘What does that do?’ asked Clay.
‘It allows him to wipe his data remotely.’
Poppy Waters connected Lucien Burns’s iPhone to her laptop. She enabled USB debugging and asked Clay, ‘What do you want me to trawl up first? You could choose texts, Facebook messages...?’
‘Call History please, Poppy. I want to know who he’s been talking to.’
Standing behind Poppy and looking over her shoulder, Cole asked, ‘Isn’t it hard to retrieve data that’s been deleted from mobiles?’ Clay saw he had the rapt intensity of a onlooker at a shamanic ritual.
‘If he’s been super smart, he’ll have cut the SIM card into as man
y small pieces as he can and scattered them into the Mersey from the side of the ferry.’
‘But he’s been a cocky little get and kept the SIM card in the device, right?’ said Cole.
Poppy previewed Recovered Files from Lucien’s phone’s internal memory and the lost contents of his deleted calls appeared on Poppy’s laptop screen.
‘Oh, Lucien, you lying little toad,’ said Cole.
‘Is this good news?’ asked Clay.
‘I think you’re going to be rather happy, Eve,’ said Cole.
She looked at Poppy’s laptop screen and felt her open palms come together.
‘He was a cocky little get when it came to the SIM card,’ said Clay, drinking in the information on Poppy’s laptop. ‘How long will it take you to open up his deleted texts, Facebook messages, the works?’
‘Not that long,’ replied Poppy.
‘Print this off for me. We’ll leave him sweating in the interview suite until we’ve got an overview of who he’s been communicating with and when he’s been doing it.’
The printer on Stone’s desk came to life.
Clay walked to it. She wanted to drag the paper from the machine but watched, with rising impatience, as the missing data from Lucien Burns’s phone came back from the shadows in plain black and white print.
The top line read: CALL HISTORY (8) / CONTENT / DATE / TYPE / DURATION OF CALL. Tiredness deserted Clay as she retrieved the sheet and studied it hard to double-check that she was not lost in a futile daydream. It was all real and she felt refreshed and ready to continue the battle for truth.
The landline phone on her desk rang.
She picked up the receiver and heard voices riding over each other.
‘Eve?’
‘Is there a problem with Lucien, Sergeant Harris?’
‘No. I’ve got Aaron Brierley with me right now. I was about to go and get Lucien from his cell when Daniel Campbell’s solicitor asked me if his client could be called for interview. He wants to make a statement, answer questions and contextualise the evidence that was presented to him earlier. He wants to cooperate.’
She thought about it for almost a second and said, ‘Yes, I bet he does. He can have a second interview. When I’m ready to call him. He’s not the only fish in the pond at the moment and he certainly isn’t the biggest. Let him swim after his own tail and get dizzy in the process. I want Lucien Burns in interview suite one, please.’
She paused as she went to put the receiver down, and heard Harris telling Brierly, ‘DCI Clay will call your client at her convenience.’
‘Barney, do me a favour. Give Lesley Reid and her colleagues a call. We’re going to need them at some point soon. Gina Riley can lead the interview.’
She looked to Poppy and asked, ‘Anything else?’
‘Come and have a look at this,’ said Poppy with a smile that filled her whole face. ‘Text messages. Deleted by him. Retrieved by me.’
90
9.11 pm
DCI Eve Clay held eye contact with Lucien Burns and said, ‘Last time we were sitting in this room together, you asked me if I knew how many types of paedophiles there are?’
‘Yeah, and you’re the worst kind, Clay. I said that. And it’s true.’
‘As in Lucien Burns speaks the truth?’ Clay placed her hands down on two pieces of paper, face down on the table. Her iPhone sat dead centre between Lucien Burns and herself. ‘Hours ago, you acknowledged that there was no point in lying to us, that our IT people would find everything on your computer. How did you think it was going to be any different with your phone?’
‘I didn’t think it was going to be any different with my phone. When I used the word computer, I was using it as a blanket term to cover all my communication devices – phone, iPad...’
‘You were bluffing when you bigged up our IT experts. The truth is you’re arrogant. You thought you were better than us. You thought you’d buried some things so deeply we’d never find them. I’m going to ask you again. Have you been in direct touch with Justin Truman?’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure about that, Lucien?’
‘I’m certain.’
She turned over one of the pieces of paper. ‘We’ve retrieved a log of the phone calls you deleted from your phone.’ She turned the paper round so that Lucien could see it head on, pushed it towards him. He made no effort to look at the page.
His solicitor tapped the page. ‘Lucien, you should look at this,’ she advised.
The young social worker on his other side looked and gave an involuntary gasp.
‘Lucien, look at the page!’ said Clay. ‘You know, our IT specialist said if you’d been smart, you’d have cut your SIM card up and ditched it in the Mersey, swiped in a new one. And I thought, No, he’s sixteen, he knows it all, he’s an internet star, he thinks he’s never going to get caught. He didn’t think this morning, What if this is the day when the police come calling? He woke up this morning and thought, I’ve just got away with murder, not once but twice. Look what our IT specialist managed to call up on her laptop from your phone: Deleted Calls.’
Clay leaned forward. ‘I think you couldn’t bear to get rid of that SIM card because it was a direct link to your contact with Justin Truman. Getting rid of it would have been like getting rid of the one photograph you had of a lost loved one.’
Lucien looked away at the wall behind her back.
‘I can’t force you to look, Lucien. But I can read upside down. Calls History Eight. First call in this cluster, duration eight minutes. Type, incoming. That must have been really exciting for you, Lucien. Date, seventh of September 2019. So, it’s been going on for over a whole month. Two calls a week. Content, who’s been calling you? Vindici. That’s what it says on your Calls History.’
‘Do you know—’ he began.
‘—how many people contact me and claim to be Justin Truman?’ Clay finished his thought. ‘You see, Lucien, I’ve got your number. I know what you’re going to say next even though I’ve only known you for a few hours.’
‘You know nothing about what I’m really like.’
‘Would you like to explain what you mean by that?’ asked Clay.
‘I’m nothing like what you think I am.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Nothing is as it seems on the surface.’
‘Are you hiding something? Do you want to share something with me? No? Let’s talk about your transatlantic telephone conversations with Justin Truman. Of the eight, there are two conversations on two dates I’m particularly interested in. The fourteenth of October 2019, last Monday week. The day David Wilson was murdered. You had a call from Justin Truman that afternoon that went on for an hour and three minutes. Pretty big pep talk that?’
‘No comment.’
‘I hate to steal your thunder but I had a call from him myself the following day at just after three in the morning.’
‘As if.’
She picked up her iPhone, pressed play and watched his face.
‘Hello, Eve.’
‘Who is this?’
‘Who am I? I know who you are, Eve, and it’s good to know you.’
‘I’ll tell you what I am. I’m dead tired and I haven’t got time to play games or untangle meaningless riddles when I’ve got so many real problems to solve. So, please tell me who you are or I’ll have to hang up.’
‘I don’t mean to vex you or waste your time, Eve. I’ll send you a picture via a third party. It should iron out one idea that’s running around your brain as we speak. Would you like that?’
‘Yes I would. But who are you?
‘I’ll tell you who I am. Are you ready? I am Vindici.’
Without taking her eyes away from Lucien, she pressed stop.
‘Vindici,’ said Clay. ‘I am Vindici.’
‘You’ve been had,’ said Lucien. ‘That’s not Vindici. And before you ask, I saw a documentary and there was footage of the police interviewing him, that’s how I know.’
‘So the voice on my device isn’t the Vindici you’ve been speaking to?’
‘Your Vindici’s a fake. Mine’s the real deal.’
‘In which case, Lucien, you’ve been had. We analysed the voice on my phone against the Metropolitan Police’s tapes of their interviews with Justin Truman and the voices were identical.’
Clay moved the page a little closer to Lucien and pointed to a specific place. ‘You made a phone call to him that same day, the fourteenth of October at nine fifty-nine pm. Outgoing. Duration of call? One minute fifty-three seconds. That was when you informed him that you’d done the hit on David Wilson and that I was Senior Investigating Officer on the case. That’s when you gave him my landline number here at Trinity Road police station. That’s how he knew how and when to call me.’
‘No comment.’
Clay turned over the second sheet of paper. ‘This is a different set of communications to and from another individual.’ She pushed the page towards him.
‘No comment.’
‘Who has a mobile phone number, 07701 788654? The information related to this number was a text correspondence. Whose number, Lucien?’
‘No comment.’
‘This person texted you at nine forty-nine on the evening of Monday the fourteenth of October when I was in David Wilson’s house in Dundonald Road. This person knew at this time that I was SIO on the case and they told you it was me and they gave you my direct landline number at this police station.’
‘No comment.’
‘You telephoned Justin Truman ten minutes later and in a brief call passed that information on to him.’
‘No comment.’
‘Do you know the time difference between Puebla City, Mexico and Liverpool?’
‘No comment.’
‘Puebla City is six hours behind Liverpool, so he phoned me at three minutes past nine on what was still Monday the fourteenth of October where he was.’
‘No comment.’
‘Guess what, Lucien? When I went to store this second number into my phone, I already had it.’ She showed him her phone. ‘Shall we call this person?’
‘No comment.’
Clay waited in the silence that followed and looked at Lucien’s Adam’s apple as he stared up at the ceiling, and was reminded of a large rodent stuck in a snake’s belly.
