For Reasons Unknown

by Michael Wood

  ‘Why didn’t you get on? Surely it wasn’t just the age thing. You’re blood relatives; you must have had something in common.’

  ‘My brother wasn’t a very nice person. He was a bully. We were poles apart.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘He was confident, outgoing, very popular and I…well I’m not any of those things am I? You see it at school don’t you, all the good-looking, popular, confident boys picking on the weak. I was a very easy target.’

  Matilda noticed he was scratching his left hand vigorously. It was red and it wouldn’t be long before he broke the skin. ‘Did your parents know what was going on?’

  Jonathan scoffed. ‘It would have been hard for them not to. He did get into trouble once. He pushed me down the stairs and I broke my left arm.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘My dad actually saw him do it. There was no way he could allow him to go unpunished. He was grounded for a weekend while I spent the whole summer struggling to wash with my arm in a plastic bag.’

  ‘Why did he push you down the stairs?’ Rory asked. The first time he had spoken since the questioning began.

  ‘Because I was there,’ he replied as if it was obvious.

  ‘What else did he do?’

  ‘How long have you got?’ Jonathan adjusted himself in his armchair. He was clearly uncomfortable with these questions regarding his brother. ‘Actually, no offence, but I thought you wanted to talk about my parents?’

  ‘We’re trying to establish a motive for the murders. Having read the reports and witness statements nobody stands out as having a reason to kill your parents.’

  ‘So you’re looking at my brother?’ he frowned.

  ‘Do you think it’s possible?’

  ‘I don’t know. He bullied me but does that make him a killer?’

  ‘You tell me,’ Matilda said with a hint of a smile. ‘You read a lot of crime fiction. Do bullies usually go on to murder people, especially if they think they can get away with it?’

  ‘I suppose it depends on the kind of bullying.’

  ‘And what kind of bully was your brother?’

  ‘It was both physical and mental. After the broken arm incident he made sure my parents never saw the bruises. He became more inventive, sneaky.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘He used to spit in my breakfast and make me eat it. He’d steal things from around the house and hide them in my room so when they were found I’d get into trouble. One time I woke up in the middle of the night to find him standing next to my bed and urinating all over me.’

  ‘Oh my God. Surely that constitutes abuse?’ Rory asked.

  ‘Well I thought so.’

  ‘Did you ever tell your parents?’

  ‘What was the point? They always took his side. I wasn’t wanted. My mother didn’t find out she was pregnant with me until it was too late to do anything about it. Even if she had known she could hardly have had an abortion. How would it look for a GP who specialized in family planning to kill her own unborn baby?’

  Matilda leaned forward. ‘Jonathan,’ she said, using his first name for the first time. ‘Do you think your brother killed your parents?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ he said eventually after a long silence.

  ‘You must have thought about it once or twice in twenty years.’

  ‘What would his motive have been? They doted on him. They gave him everything he wanted and more. Why would he ruin all that? If he was the murdering type surely he would have killed me; got me out of the way so he could have our parents all to himself?’

  ‘Does Matthew know you’re back in Sheffield?’

  ‘I very much doubt it.’

  ‘Do you know how to contact him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you think he would have attended the demolition?’

  ‘To be honest I was petrified of going myself in case I saw him. I’m not sure I want to see him again.’

  ‘But he’s your brother.’

  ‘In blood only. Look, I don’t mean to be rude but is there anything else? I should have been at work by now.’

  ‘No. I think we’ve covered most things. We may need to talk to you again if that’s all right?’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  Matilda turned off the recorder and slipped it carefully into her inside pocket. She stood up. ‘May I use your toilet before we go?’

  ‘Sure. It’s the next door on the left.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Matilda locked the bathroom door behind her but had no intention of using the facilities. She opened the bathroom cabinet. Among the usual items of toothpaste, face wash, and indigestion remedies, of which he seemed to have an abundance, Matilda wasn’t entirely surprised to find a prescription of antidepressants. He was taking the same type she was on, Venlafaxine. However, where she took just 25 mg twice a day, morning and evening, Jonathan was taking a total of 300 mg every day. Surely his dark past and his abusive brother two decades ago didn’t warrant such a heavy dosage? Realistically the only person she knew who she could ask about depression and the medicinal cures was her therapist Dr Warminster, but she would rather not involve her in her working life any more than she had to. She wondered if Adele had any knowledge of prescription drugs.

  She pulled the flush on the toilet and washed her hands before leaving the bathroom. She had plenty of work to be getting on with but, for some reason, she didn’t want to leave Jonathan alone with his thoughts. Her visit had obviously opened a Pandora’s Box of memories and she dreaded to think of the fallout when he was cocooned in his self-imposed isolation.

  Chapter 12

  Matilda and Rory didn’t exchange a single word when they left Jonathan’s apartment. They both felt shattered, exhausted, and physically drained. They made their way to the car and Matilda climbed in behind the wheel. Closing the door, putting on the seatbelt, and starting the engine seemed to occur in slow motion. She sat in silence with her hands gripping the steering wheel, ready to drive off but not actually moving. Eventually, she turned off the engine.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ Rory asked.

  ‘What did you think about Jonathan and his story?’

  Rory let out a loud sigh. ‘I’ve no idea. He’s had a bloody rotten life, hasn’t he?’

  ‘You could say that. What do you think of his brother?’

  ‘Apart from the fact that he’s a complete bastard? Did you notice how Jonathan referred to him as “my brother”? He never used his name and when you did he physically recoiled.’

  ‘I know. His parents were complete shits too by the sound of it.’

  ‘They shouldn’t have been allowed to keep him.’

  ‘But if nobody knew what was going on, who was there to take him away? It looks like they wanted to come across as a family unit rather than just a power couple. When Jonathan came along, Matthew had been palmed off on a nanny and they could concentrate on their careers. Jonathan really was a spanner in the works.’

  ‘So they just left him to bring himself up.’ Rory completed Matilda’s thought.

  ‘Or maybe they expected Matthew to look after him, which is why he bullied him so much. He could have resented having to be the permanent babysitter when he should have been out with friends.’

  ‘That’s true. I hated having to look after my little brother sometimes during the school holidays.’

  ‘As most kids do, but what has to happen to go from a teenage tantrum into a double murderer?’ Matilda asked, more or less thinking aloud.

  ‘I suppose it depends on how often Matthew was made to look after Jonathan. If it was literally every single day then maybe he started to hate his parents for making him look after Jonathan all the time and one night he just snaps and goes berserk with a carving knife.’

  ‘That’s one possibility,’ Matilda mused.

  ‘Any others?’

  ‘Not off the top of my head.’

  Without warning, tears started to f
low down Matilda’s face. She cursed under her breath and dug into her jacket pockets for a tissue, eventually finding a crumpled up one.

  This is not what Matilda wanted. She knew she was an emotional mess but thought she had a handle on it at work. With the exercises from Dr Warminster and her medication, surely she should be able to control her tears. Obviously not. She hoped Rory wouldn’t repeat this episode back at the station. The last thing she needed were rumours circulating of her instability.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Rory asked.

  ‘I’m really sorry Rory,’ she said between sobs, wiping her eyes. ‘I’m not crying for anything specific. Well I suppose I am. I’m just thinking of Jonathan aged five being in bed fast asleep, all tucked up without a care in the world, then he opens his eyes and his brother, his protector, is pissing all over him. I just find that incredibly sad.’

  ‘I can’t believe someone would do that. My younger brother was a real shit growing up at times but it never entered my head to do anything like that. I mean, what was wrong inside his head that made him want to torture his brother so much?’

  ‘That’s what we’re going to have to find out.’ Matilda wiped her eyes, the worst of her emotional outburst was over. ‘Come on, let’s go and have a stiff drink. I think we’ve earned it.’

  Chapter 13

  DC Faith Easter was panicking. She had spent the last hour trying to obtain CCTV footage from the City Hall, the nightclub, and the car park, all of which overlooked Holly Lane. Unfortunately, the range from the camera at the City Hall didn’t go that far, the ones from the nightclub only covered the entrances, and the cameras on all four corners of the car park were dummies.

  ‘Shit.’ She slammed down the phone and ran her fingers through her long hair.

  ‘Problem?’ Sian asked without looking up from her computer. She had no idea why, but Sian couldn’t seem to get on with Faith. It had nothing to do with her unblemished coffee-coloured skin, her shiny, long, dark hair or natural pout, nor was it her ridiculously long legs and size eight figure.

  ‘Holly Lane is a complete no man’s land.’

  ‘No footage?’

  ‘None whatsoever. Hales is going to kill me.’

  ‘It’s not your fault. You didn’t install the cameras.’

  Hales entered the room with a spring in his step. An active murder case had elevated his mood. He took a swig of coffee from his chipped mug and reluctantly swallowed the cold beverage.

  ‘Are you making a fresh coffee Sian?’

  ‘I wasn’t planning to.’ Again Sian didn’t look up. Since when was I the office junior?

  ‘Would you like to?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘Sir, I’ve got some bad news,’ Faith began. She took a deep breath and let the words trip over themselves as they fell out. ‘There’s no CCTV footage from anywhere looking onto Holly Lane.’

  ‘What?’ He raised his voice and slammed his mug down. ‘How is that possible? It’s the city centre. It leads on to West Street. We live in a nation where cameras are on every corner, Big Brother is watching and all that bollocks.’

  ‘I’ve spoken to the manager of the nightclub,’ Faith said. She picked up her notebook and flicked back a few pages. ‘He said they had a problem with drugs about a year or so ago and he did look into putting up a camera looking onto the alleyway but he couldn’t afford it. He’s got dummy ones up instead and that seems to do the trick.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ He cursed through gritted teeth. ‘Are you seriously telling me that not one camera has Holly Lane in its sights?’

  ‘That’s right sir.’ She looked at Sian who was watching the proceedings out of the corner of her eye. Sian raised her eyebrows and gave a sympathetic smile.

  Hales was just about to scream more abuse at the young DC when his phone rang. He snatched up the receiver and shouted an angry greeting before lowering his voice and sitting down. ‘Oh, sorry about that ma’am.’ It was ACC Masterson. ‘Yes, of course. I’ll come right away.’ He hung up, cleared his throat, took a couple of deep breaths then stood up. ‘The ACC wants to see me.’ He almost sounded pleased.

  ‘I thought you were going to the PM?’ Sian asked.

  ‘You go on ahead. Take Connolly with you,’ he said over his shoulder as he bounded out of the room.

  ‘Dickhead,’ Sian said quietly under her breath.

  Sian Mills and DS Aaron Connolly arrived ten minutes late for the post-mortem, something which Adele Kean chastised them for. She was a punctual person and found it the height of bad manners for others to be late, especially when it came to attending a PM. The dead deserved respect. Adele was also none too happy about Acting DCI Hales’s absence either. Hales didn’t have a professional obligation to be there, but he had stated he would be.

  The body of the dead man lay naked on the stainless-steel table. His face was swollen with bruises, as were his chest and stomach. Adele’s Anatomical Pathology Technologist was photographing the body from different angles and Adele was indicating particular points of interest where she wanted close-up pictures taken.

  The hands of the dead man were wrapped in paper bags to avoid the loss of any fibres or skin samples from underneath his fingernails.

  ‘How’s the investigation going?’ Adele asked.

  ‘Slowly,’ Aaron was not good with post-mortems. He had attended many in his time but it didn’t get any easier. He found it an unnatural act to desecrate another human being in such a way. He understood the purpose of it and the usefulness in making his job easier but he could not bring himself to look down on a cold dead person and watch them being cut open. He always kept his eyeline a few inches from where he was supposed to be looking.

  ‘Have you identified him yet?’

  ‘Not yet. He had no wallet on him. Let’s hope his fingerprints are in the database when you give us a set.’

  ‘I don’t think identification should be too much of an issue,’ Adele said.

  Sian and Aaron exchanged curious glances. ‘What makes you say that?’ Sian asked.

  ‘He’s missing two toes from his left foot.’

  She stood back from the body and revealed her find. The two smallest toes on his left foot were missing.

  ‘Bloody hell. How did that happen?’ Aaron asked.

  ‘Well it’s not recent. It’s also a very neat cut. I’m guessing it’s from surgery from when he was younger. There’ll be a record of it somewhere.’

  ‘Why do people have toes removed?’

  ‘Any number of reasons; he could have been involved in an accident and they were beyond repair, maybe they were infected, or he could have lost them due to hypothermia.’

  ‘I’m all done here, Adele, if you want to get started,’ the young technologist said stepping away from the table.

  ‘Right then, are we all ready to take a look inside and see what killed this poor young man?’

  ‘Hang on.’

  All eyes turned to Aaron whose skin had gone so pale he was almost an X-ray of himself. ‘I think I’m going to have to sit down for a bit.’

  Chapter 14

  The temperature seemed to keep dropping on an hourly basis. During the demolition this morning it was cold, but nothing a brisk walk couldn’t chase away. By the time Jonathan arrived at Waterstones in Orchard Square he was shaking with cold. He was wrapped in a thick winter coat, hat, leather gloves, and a knitted scarf long enough to go around his neck twice, yet he was still shivering.

  The day before he had told his boss Stephen Egan that he would only be an hour late for work at the most; as he looked at his watch he saw that it was almost lunchtime.

  Stephen was busy serving a customer so Jonathan just mouthed ‘sorry’ then went upstairs to the staffroom to store his bag and coat before returning to the shop floor. He was warming himself up on the radiator when Stephen entered.

  ‘How did it go? Are you all right?’

  ‘It went…well, it went as well as could be expected, I suppose.’

 
‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine.’

  ‘Come here.’ Stephen stepped closer to Jonathan and folded down the collar on his polo shirt, which was creased due to the heaviness of his coat. As he wrapped his hands around his neck to straighten the shirt he looked Jonathan in the eye and gave him a smile. ‘There you go, all neat and tidy.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Now, are you sure you’re OK? You didn’t have to come back into work.’

  ‘I’m sure. Thanks. I didn’t stay long; just long enough to see it get started. I had no idea how easy it was. The thing almost fell apart as soon as the digger broke into it.’

  ‘Were there many sightseers?’

  ‘The usual ghouls and a journalist from The Star.’

  ‘Jonathan, if you want to talk…’

  ‘Well I can’t stand around here for much longer,’ he interrupted, eager to miss another conversation about how was he feeling and if he needed a shoulder to cry on. ‘I’ll work through my lunch seeing I was so late.’ He strode towards the door. Stephen had to quickly sidestep to allow him to pass.

  Stephen sighed and rubbed his hands over his face. The large bookshop had many staff, all of them polite and friendly in their own way, but Jonathan was different.

  There was something about him that Stephen couldn’t quite put his finger on. He was very intelligent and well read but he gave off an aura of sadness. He knew his parents had been killed, and he had read the book by Charlie Johnson, but he felt there was something else beneath the surface that was bothering Jonathan; another tragedy he was allowing to eat away at him instead of releasing the burden.

  Stephen left the overheated staffroom and went in pursuit of Jonathan. He found him at the downstairs tills. He was serving an elderly lady who was buying four paperbacks. He couldn’t hear what their conversation was about, but Jonathan looked relaxed and had a genuine smile on his face. He guessed Jonathan had read a couple of the books she was buying and was telling her how much he’d enjoyed them. Jonathan really was the perfect member of staff. When the customer left, Stephen approached the counter.