‘We now know that Jimmy had come into some cash – enough to start repaying money to his father that he borrowed years ago. It’s my guess that there was plenty more – Jimmy likes nice clothes, iPhones and things, and would not have given all of it away. We know that he liked a flutter and possibly that he enjoyed female company. The first thing Waters found was an opened packet of condoms, and now he’s discovered this adult dating thing on the laptop. This could be the area that Chris is going to specialize in future, he’s heading for Vice. Any questions or comments?’
John Murray said, ‘Sex and money.’
‘I said any questions, not any requests, John.’
‘I’ve heard you say it often enough – ninety percent of the time, the motive is one or the other. We’ve got both here.’
It was an obvious statement, but none the less true for all that. He looked around at the others. Alison Reeve would certainly have questions but was probably holding back, waiting to see what Waters and Serena Butler in particular might have to say.
Waters said, ‘Betting shops pay out in cash. He might have won it on the horses or something. You found some receipts or slips or whatever they are, so…’
‘So another job is to get round the Lake shops – we’re going to need plenty of those photos. It would have been a big win, if it was one, so they won’t have forgotten it. He gave Lucy the money on Friday she said, so – sometime in the day or two before he went to see his dad, the Monday or the Tuesday. Good. Anything else?’
Reeve was seated next to Serena. Smith saw her looking down at the bank statements in front of the new DC and frowning. Then she looked up at Smith and spoke.
‘DC – you said Bell called in sick on the Sunday afternoon. But he didn’t, did he – he sent a text?’
‘Yes, from the number we think must be the missing iPhone.’
Reeve took out her own iPhone and held it up to make her point.
‘Everyone who gets a text from this phone assumes it’s from me, but it isn’t necessarily so. If I haven’t set keypad security, anyone who has my phone can send texts from it. Even if I have set security, I might have told it to someone close to me or they might have guessed it - there are people out there who are very good at that.’
Serena Butler had turned and was watching Reeve intently. Smith saw the look that passed between them and knew that something odd had just taken place. The idea that Reeve had just put forward had occurred to him at about two o’clock last Thursday afternoon as the communications girl on Elizabeth showed them the message, but experience had taught him the value of not trying to chase too many hares at once – deal with the most likely scenarios first. However, if the blood that had pooled on the bathroom floor was Jimmy Bell’s, he would have been feeling more than a little under the weather come Sunday afternoon – someone else might just have sent that text message on his behalf.
‘Agreed. And that means, if that’s what happened, that either someone else was in the flat on Sunday afternoon, or the phone was somewhere else. This is where it gets interesting – can we get a what’s-it-called on that text? Is it a triangulation from the phone masts? Can we find out where that phone has been for the past few days? Can we find out where it is now?’
That job went to Waters – find out who would know the answers. One by one, Smith re-allocated tasks to his team of three. They were now in spinning plates territory but he was not yet ready to ask for help from another DS.
Reeve said, ‘I’ll go and see Lucy Bell’s brother, and hear what he has to say. I’ll ring him – there might be time to get that done this afternoon. Can I take Serena with me? It will help her getting to know her way around.’
And help sort out whatever else is going on, thought Smith. Reeve stayed behind to talk to him. He didn’t need to ask the question.
She said, ‘It was written on her copy of the bank statement – “He didn’t call, he (?) sent a text”. As soon as I said it, she knew I’d read it there. I don’t think she knew what to say! I felt like the class cheat!’
‘She’s a bit of an odd one. But she was good on the knocker at The Towers.’
‘You’ve read her file?’
‘No, but I spoke to Paul Harrington. I imagine that she thinks the Chief Constable is asking for daily reports on her progress.’
Reeve stood up.
‘We’ll have a chat on the way out to Wetton. I’ll tell her that I told you what she’d written down and that she has a clean slate as far as we’re concerned.’
Smith was reshuffling his slips of scrap paper into some sort of order – some went to the front, others to the back of the batch. Eventually he looked up to see why Alison Reeve was still standing there.
She said, ‘I didn’t know you had any friends who are psychologists.’
‘I move in far more exalted circles than people realise.’
‘Would this psychologist also happen to be a writer?’
Already? Had Charlie Hills sent round an email? Had Waters put something on Facebook?
‘More to the point, she’s an ex DI. And our meeting was a professional one, at least from her point of view. Talking of which, there’s something I need to mention to you about it.’
‘That she’s planning a book about Andretti? It’s already come down from above – Superintendent Allen notified me this morning.’
‘And how the hell did he know?’
‘From an ACC in Norwich, who has already been approached. You’ll need to have a short meeting with someone about it but Allen had the feeling that it has already been OKd.’
Smith looked genuinely surprised, and for once had no response ready.
‘She seems to be pretty well-connected, then.’
Still nothing.
‘So I’ll be off to see Lucy Bell’s brother. I’ll get the details from Chris…’
She left him sitting there facing the display stand and its A1 pad, still only the one word written at the top. Timeline. So easy to map out that of another’s life, so difficult to know what will be the next key event on one’s own. But Superintendent Allen had the feeling that it had been OKd, that it had been approved.
Chapter Ten
If pushed, he would have to describe the pain in his knee as mildly agonizing. Down on the lawn, in the growing darkness, he had tried the sprinting and turning again, rotating first to the left and then to right to see if that made any difference. It didn’t – the pain appeared to be politically impartial. Indoors, he opened the medicine cupboard and took out the ibuprofen, aware of what lay towards the back behind them without needing to look again; he would need to push the idea to the back of his mind as well.
Still no email and no text. He could phone her himself, of course, and had the perfect reason to do so now that news of the forthcoming book – no, surely it could not be thought of in those terms yet – had broken. Had he been taken for granted – was that how he felt? Taken for granted? It sounded like a disappointed woman on one of those daytime TV shows – tell us all about your failed relationship, Tracey, after the break for the ads… But she was probably still in Germany, in Berlin, meeting with serious academics in serious jazz bars, discussing what was it – the changing perceptions of crime in an age of moral relativism? And he felt a little angry at that, felt a little righteous anger. Where did Andretti fit into the notion of moral relativism, that the degree of wrong we see in any act is dependent on our own moral history, our individual moral perspective? How could any civilized person see what the man had done as anything other than purely evil? Smith was aware of the potential oxymoron; Sheila had once given him a tutorial on the possibilities of loving hate in Shakespeare, but he, Smith, had been there in person; he had knelt on beaches beside the abused and frozen bodies of dead girls, and he had looked into the eyes of the man who had done that, not once but four times. Whatever else he was, Nicolas Andretti was no relativist - he had made a clear choice. And a little of the anger was because the approach to the county’s most senior office
rs could not have happened today, not that quickly; she must have known about it as they were talking and eating on Saturday, and she had made no mention of it.
Ultimately, of course, he could still decide that he wanted nothing to do with it, and the thought consoled him a little. She could write the book without the input of the detective who led the team that investigated those murders. At the end she could add a footnote explaining that some of the officers concerned had been invited to contribute but had exercised their right not to do so. That’s how she would explain it, in polite and concise terms, skilled as she undoubtedly was with words. There would be no hint of annoyance – just an empty space where Smith’s own account might have been. She had said to him that it could not be written without his cooperation, that she would not do that, but now events had taken on a momentum of their own; Assistant Chief Constables were involved, and Detective Superintendents would be having a word with him shortly. After all, they had met only twice; a walk through the snow to an old crime scene, and she had bought him dinner. She had heard him play and then she had whispered and laughed into her phone in the bedroom next to his in the wee small hours. That was it, and that was all. He would not phone her.
He turned his thoughts to the case, and had laid out his two notebooks side by side when his mobile vibrated and then rang. For half a second he mistook Alison Reeve’s voice for another.
‘DC, it’s me. We’ve been to see David Carter.’
She had something, he could hear it immediately.
‘Go on. Where did he bury the body?’
‘He does not like Jimmy Bell and he makes no secret of the fact. He said that the worst day of his sister’s life was the one on which she met him.’
‘I might have come to that conclusion myself, to be honest. What about that weekend?’
‘His account matches his sister’s. He left her at his place at around five o’clock and drove off to a competition where some of his students were fighting. This is a regular thing as far as I could make out. It was held at a leisure centre in Market Deeping which would be not quite an hour’s drive.’
‘On his own? He didn’t give them a lift?’
‘No – I asked that. Because he gets paid for tuition, it’s a business and he’s not insured for that. These are mostly kids and their parents take them.’
Smith rotated the red propelling pencil through all the fingers of his right hand and back again – Leroy Danes had shown him that exercise with a plectrum thirty years ago after they had played together in the Basement Blues Bar. She would get there eventually.
‘So I asked if he drove straight there and he said that he did. We left and talked about it in the car on the way – we both thought he’d been straight. Serena was OK by the way – I think it’s just older men she has a problem with.’
‘I’m not dignifying that with a response.’
‘But – and I don’t really know why – when we got back I put his car details into the system and – well, I’ll have to go back and explain. Traffic are using a new ANPR. One option is a complete data-logger, and two of them had that switched on, on Saturday night.’
He stopped rolling the pencil.
‘Where were they parked?’
‘On North Lake Road.’
Two miles north of the southern bypass, the route that anyone would take on their way to Lincolnshire – and the main road into The Towers estate.
‘And they’ve got a record of it on this data-logger?
‘They have him going in but not out. He might have gone another way but they were still experimenting with it. It’s a new piece of kit and they had it turned off some of the time. I spoke to John Waring in traffic, and he’ll send us a print-out. It gives us David Carter heading towards the Bells’ flat early on Saturday evening.’
‘Knowing that his sister was safely out of the way… We should pull him in.’
‘Tomorrow first thing, already arranged. I’m going to phone him and invite him first.’
Smith closed his eyes – he would have done this part differently.
He said, ‘Is he clean? Any history?’
‘Nothing. House owner, electoral roll and from what I could see in his living room, he does a lot for local charities.’
‘Oh well, in that case I’d say he’s innocent.’
‘I know you don’t approve but this is lower profile policing – you’ve read the memos.’
After a short silence, she added, ‘On second thoughts, you probably haven’t. But I’d like you to sit in, and see what you make of him.’
If she had not asked, Smith would have done so; this trail was nearly ten days old and they had done nothing but gather intelligence so far. Talking to an actual person who was in some way involved, whether or not he was a suspect, would feel like a step forward.
Reeve said then, ‘So, that’s the good news.’
Smith sighed and sagged a little, running through the list of possibilities. He had not yet responded to the official invitation that was really an order to attend the Officer Fitness session next week – it must be that.
He said, ‘Go on.’
‘I’m pulling a couple of Wilson’s team across for a day or two, just to get some of the routine things out of the way. They can take on the visits to the bars and betting shops after you’ve briefed them.’
She waited for his response. He knew that if he insisted, he could make her have second thoughts at the very least, but he could only do that so many times. She was the senior officer and it was unfair to use the fact that their roles had once been the reverse of that to sway her judgement now. He remembered too that soon she would begin the process that might take her to DCI – kicking up over a trivial issue like this would be somewhat churlish.
‘OK. Just tell me it isn’t O’Leary.’
‘O’Leary and Mike Dunn.’
Smith muttered something unprintable half under his breath.
Reeve said, ‘What exactly have you got against O’Leary?’
‘Me? It’s nothing personal but my phone hates him – it starts vibrating when he gets within ten yards. I think it knows what he did to its predecessor.’
‘You’ve no proof that O’Leary was involved in that, DC.’
‘I saw his face when I put it to him, when I gave him the bill. That’s the only proof I need in this case. He took it so someone else could clone it – and lest we forget, that ended up with two unarmed detectives confronting armed thugs while MI5 or whatever they like to call themselves now were waiting in the wings. Waters got hurt. I can’t trust him, Alison.’
Smith rarely used her Christian name. She thought it over for a moment – his judgement she respected completely but he was not refusing to work with O’Leary, only refusing to trust him, and that was enough.
‘I hear what you’re saying, DC. But as a department we’re going to have to get past this at some point. Brief them in the morning. And Mike Dunn is sound as far as I’m concerned. Look at him when you talk to them.’
The dull ache in his knee woke him at a little after one o’clock in the morning. He shifted position two or three times but that made no difference. Slowly his mind woke up – the time was significant, but why? Almost a quarter past one now… The time that Jimmy Bell went walkabout on Elizabeth.
Downstairs, he made a small pot of weak black tea and sat at the breakfast bar as it brewed. He had written the sequence of events out on pieces of paper several times now, and didn’t need to do so again. There was something wrong with it. And if the blood on the bathroom floor turned out to be Jimmy Bell’s, there was even more wrong with it. “Anything up to a pint,” Sally Lonsdale had said when he asked how much blood there might have been, followed by all the usual caveats these days about her estimate not being used as evidence – good professionals like her had become frightened of their own shadows in the new world of procedural correctness. But if Jimmy Bell had lost a pint of blood, he should have been in A and E, not climbing on board a helicopter a day
or two later. Mentally he gave himself a slap on the forehead; Bell might have done just that. Lake General needed a visit too, along with any outlying treatment centres – another job for O’Leary and Dunn.
He took the cup of tea upstairs – a china cup and saucer for the best black tea – and stood with it in front of his desk. His notebook lay there, ready for the morning, which was getting closer by the minute. He resisted the temptation to pick it up, and went instead to the bedroom window and opened it. The padlock was still there, a dull gleam in the light of a bright and waxing moon. He held it up, close to his face, thinking that it had lost a little of its shininess. There had been rain on and off, blustery showers, so it had got wet and dried out several times. Not the same as salt spray, though… He put it back, stared up at the moon for half a minute or so and then closed the window.
‘Thank you for coming in at such short notice, David. This is Detective Sergeant Smith, who has been involved in the search for your brother-in-law. We have a few more questions that we were not in a position to ask you yesterday.’
Carter stiffened slightly at the words “brother-in-law” and Smith saw it. He looked down at the man’s hands but the knuckles were unmarked – which didn’t prove much as this chap could probably knock you down with most bits of his body. No bruises around the head either, though, and the hair was cropped short – they would show if they were there.
Reeve said, ‘Could you, for my colleague’s benefit, just go over the events of the weekend before last, from the time that you picked up Lucy from her flat? Was James there when you did, by the way?’
‘I didn’t go in – I waited in the car.’
‘Best bet in that area, or your wheels would have been for sale on eBay in an hour. Shocking place to live, isn’t it?’
Carter looked at Smith for the first time. Smith had expected the brother to be older but that was not the case – three or four years younger but very protective, and annoyed at Smith for stating the painfully obvious. He ignored the sergeant’s remark and repeated what he had already told them about his movements from the 15th to the 17th of March. Controlled, disciplined even, but lots going on under the surface – the body a little too rigid for comfort, the eyes a little too fixed on those of Detective Inspector Reeve. Smith remembered his own instructor, Major D Agassiz – you never forget the man who teaches you that sort of thing. Loose-limbed and laconic, a most un-major-like major who told them in their first lesson as special operations hopefuls that he would teach them a bit of self-defence as it might come in useful. Within twenty minutes they all knew how to disable and if necessary to kill a man with their bare hands. Major Agassiz would have had some concerns about David Carter.
Luck and Judgement Page 13
