Relentless: A Novel

by Simon Kernick

  In Bolt’s mind, there were two reasons for Lambden’s reticence. One, the DCI was a bit of a plodder and had been caught out by the violence of this case. The second was professional rivalry. Bolt, this NCS big boy, had waltzed in, been on the scene for five minutes, and had made a potentially major discovery. And like most people, Lambden didn’t like it.

  Fair enough. Bolt could see his point. He wouldn’t have much liked it either.

  ‘My guess,’ he told Lambden and the other assembled officers, ‘is that we’ll find evidence in the house that he was tortured. The marks on his wrists suggest he was tied up recently. The suspects overpowered him inside the house and then subjected him to some sort of torture, presumably to get information. He escaped, they chased him up here, and, because they were unable to continue the interrogation out in the open, they finished him off.’

  ‘And if he was tortured, what do you think it has to do with your case?’

  This was a good question, and one that Bolt had been thinking about ever since he’d got up here. ‘Maybe nothing, but we have to remember he was the solicitor of the Lord Chief Justice, who committed suicide in unusual circumstances less than forty-eight hours ago. Now, suddenly, he’s been killed by at least two men and it looks like a professional job. This wasn’t a robbery, we can be sure of that, and it’s very unlikely to be a case of mistaken identity. The killers spent time with this man; they knew who he was. Which means he was targeted specifically. It may well be he’s got lots of enemies, I don’t know. Like you, I know nothing about him, but I don’t like the timing, coming so close after our man’s topped himself.’

  Lambden didn’t say anything for a moment, then nodded slowly. ‘We’re going to be checking Calley’s background and movements very thoroughly, and obviously we’ll let you know our findings if there’s any relevance to your own investigation.’ He turned to one of the other overalled officers. ‘Do you want to empty his pockets, Bill? Put everything in an evidence bag.’ Bill, an older detective with a bushy moustache, did as instructed while Lambden turned back to Bolt. ‘Is there anything else you need to see?’ he asked.

  ‘We’d like to take a look in the house if we can.’

  The DCI didn’t look too pleased at this, but knew better than to make a fuss. ‘Of course, but please don’t get in the way of my men down there.’

  Bolt didn’t rise to the bait. ‘We’ll be on our best behaviour,’ he said.

  As he turned to head back to the house, he saw Mo watching Bill intently as he emptied the front pockets of Jack Calley’s jeans. Bill removed a credit card wallet, a set of keys, a crumpled ten-pound note and some loose change.

  ‘Did you find a mobile near the body, sir?’ Mo asked Lambden.

  The DCI shook his head. ‘There wasn’t one here. If it’s not in his pockets, I’m sure it’ll be back at the house.’

  ‘It’ll be very useful to find out who he’s been calling these past few days,’ said Mo, with as much as diplomacy as he could muster, ‘and who’s been calling him.’

  ‘We’ll be dealing with that in due course.’

  Once the two NCS men were on the way back to the house, Mo gave a concise description of DCI Keith Lambden. ‘The guy has no vision,’ he said. And then, as an afterthought, ‘He’s also a stuck-up arsehole.’

  Bolt sighed in agreement. ‘There’s never any shortage of them. I reckon we need to take matters into our hands and get on to Jean.’

  DC Jean Riley was the youngest of Bolt’s team at only twenty-four, and his most recent recruit. She had excellent contacts with the liaison people at the UK’s various phone companies and network providers, and was therefore always given the task of chasing up the phone records of suspects. She’d been supplied with the dead judge’s landline and mobile numbers earlier that morning and told to get details of the calls logged to and from them. However, because their team was small, she’d also had to travel to Suffolk to interview the politician’s sister, so it wasn’t a surprise that she hadn’t come back to him yet. The events here, however, meant that she was now going to have to redouble her efforts. Phone records can be difficult to get hold of. They take time and, thanks to Britain’s Data Protection Act, they usually involve paperwork and high-level authorization. But in reality, if you’re willing to push hard enough, you can usually get results.

  Bolt pulled out his mobile and called Jean’s number.

  She answered on the second ring. ‘How’s everything going, sir?’

  ‘We’ve had a few developments,’ he said, telling her what had happened to Calley. ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘Back at HQ. I didn’t get much out of our victim’s sister in Lowestoft. She was quite a friendly old girl, married with four grown-up kids, but she only saw him once a year at Christmas, and it doesn’t sound like she was very close to him. She said he was a bit pompous.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me. He always seemed it on the telly. Any joy on the phone records?’

  ‘I’ve got them here in front of me,’ she said. ‘Landline and mobile. He seemed to mainly use the landline. I’ve been going through them for the last twenty minutes and there doesn’t seem to be anything untoward.’

  ‘How about calls to or from Jack Calley?’

  ‘Hold on a minute, let me have a look.’ Bolt waited a few moments while she checked. She hummed a tune – it sounded vaguely like ‘Diamonds are Forever’ – while she worked. ‘There are three calls to the Renfrew, Calley and Partners office number made from the landline in the last six weeks. Two were about ten minutes long, the last one four minutes nine seconds. Made on Monday afternoon.’

  ‘Nothing untoward there. What about the mobile?’

  ‘I’m checking again, but . . .’ She paused. ‘No, nothing.’

  So, there was no hurried series of calls between the Lord Chief Justice and his solicitor, no lengthy conversations. Bolt should have been pleased as it supported his theory that the politician had committed suicide. If this was so, he could go home, get his takeaway, crack open a nice bottle of Shiraz and settle down to watch the great Miss Marple at work. See how it was really done. Yet he was oddly disappointed. Two killers had brutally murdered a young man in the prime of his life. The young man in question might have been a lawyer (a profession for the most part made up of conmen and charlatans, in Bolt’s opinion), but that wasn’t the point. The type of person who can torture a man and then string him up to die deserves to be put away for life, and Bolt wasn’t entirely sure that DCI Keith Lambden was the best person to make this state of affairs come about.

  ‘Can you do me a favour, Jean?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course, sir. What is it?’

  ‘Can you get the records for Calley’s office and home numbers, and his mobile?’

  ‘Have you got his mobile number?’

  ‘Not yet, but you can get hold of it, can’t you?’

  ‘If it’s registered in his name, yes, but it’ll take a while.’

  For the first time, he thought he detected disappointment in her voice. He knew she had a boyfriend, a guy her own age in the civil service, and wondered if they had plans tonight. Probably, and he doubted if they involved watching Miss Marple. He thought about letting it go. Jean was a good, enthusiastic worker and he didn’t want to take advantage, but he also wanted answers and it was still only twenty to six. If she worked fast, she could still get a good night out.

  ‘If you can see what you can do, that’d be great.’

  ‘Do you think there’s a link between our case and this, then?’

  ‘If there is, I want to make sure we find it,’ he said, and hung up.

  By now, they were back at the front of the house. More police vehicles had arrived, including a dog unit which would be used to ascertain what route the killers had used in making their escape – something Bolt hadn’t asked about. The tracks on the path had all been going up so it seemed likely that they’d fled into the woodland after finishing off Calley. The front door of the dead lawyer’s house
was guarded by a uniformed copper, and SOCO officers moved in and out of it, carrying their paraphernalia.

  They showed their warrant cards to the uniform and stepped inside.

  The interior of Jack Calley’s place was less spacious than it looked from the outside but still impressively done in a minimalist style that was all the rage these days but made it appear virtually unlived in. The floors were varnished wood; the walls cream; the occasional rugs alternated between black and white; the hall and dining-room furniture expensive combinations of mahogany and cast iron. The whole thing seemed to Bolt to belong to a man with a phobia about dirt. A plasma TV that was bigger and flashier than the one in the team’s HQ hung on the living-room wall like a futuristic ornament, facing a pair of linen sofas that had been symmetrically positioned in a perfect yet rather pointless V-shape.

  Bolt and Mo spent the next half an hour inspecting the house while trying not to get in the way of the dozen or so SOCO officers who swarmed over it looking for tiny clues – traces of DNA, strands of clothing, anything, in fact, that would help to identify the two killers. A search of a house like this would take anything up to three days, and if there were leads here, they would be found. The technology available to the police was getting more advanced every year and it was getting to the point where only the most intelligent of criminals could operate successfully. This was, of course, a good thing. It was nice to see the bad guys getting caught, and with such incriminating evidence implicating them that any denial was rendered pointless, but something of the job of detective had been lost too. The crime was no longer such a puzzle, the detective no longer such an important part of the process. Often, their job was done for them, by the CCTV operators and the guys from SOCO. Sometimes, Bolt had to admit, it wasn’t so much fun as it used to be.

  In the master bedroom, where Calley’s kingsize futon took up much of the floorspace, they found what they were looking for. A pair of neckties had been knotted through the wooden frame on each side of the bed’s head. These had obviously been used to restrain him, and the several small black marks on the brilliant white sheets in the middle of the bed confirmed their suspicions that it was here that a naked flame had been applied to Jack Calley’s groin. Two SOCO guys were on their hands and knees examining the floor around the bed, and it was clear there wasn’t much else the NCS men could do.

  ‘So, what do you think happened, boss?’ asked Mo as they stood well back looking down at the futon, the SOCO guys studiously ignoring their presence.

  ‘My guess is that when Calley let his killers in, they dragged him up here. Used his own ties to secure him and then went to work with the lighter, or whatever they were using to extract their information.’

  ‘But somehow he manages to escape, get down the stairs and out the back door, even though there are two of them and they’ve tied him to the bed?’ Mo sounded sceptical.

  ‘You think he had some help?’

  He shrugged. ‘They were torturing him here and he ended up dying two hundred yards away. So something’s not right.’

  Bolt looked down at the futon again. He imagined Jack Calley helpless and screaming on it while his killers went to work, and was inclined to agree.

  9

  As they moved out of Calley’s front door back into the open air, Bolt’s mobile rang again. It was Jean, and she wasn’t hanging about.

  ‘I’ve got hold of the liaison officer at O2, dragged him away from a corporate do at the football,’ she said. ‘O2 are Calley’s network provider, and he was making calls on his phone today. Nine in all, to seven different numbers. The last one was recorded only three hours ago, at one minute past three. It lasted thirty-three seconds.’

  ‘What about incoming?’

  ‘The last incoming call was a lot earlier. One sixteen, and it was from a Michael Calley, so I’m assuming a family member.’

  ‘OK, that’s fair enough. Can you tell me who the recipient of Calley’s last call was?’

  ‘Yes, it was to a residential landline in the name of a Tom and Katherine Meron.’

  Bolt pulled a notebook from his pocket and wrote this information down, taking Meron’s number and address from Jean. He told her she’d done a good job, and rang off.

  Mo lit a cigarette while Bolt filled him in on what Jean had told him.

  ‘Do we know anything about this guy Meron?’ he asked when Bolt had finished.

  ‘Nothing at the moment.’

  ‘Do you think we should see what we can find out?’

  Bolt looked at his watch. It was quarter past six, and there was a chill in the air. The sky was overcast with dark clouds on the horizon, and it looked like rain. At that moment, his apartment in the heart of the city seemed like a very inviting place to be.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, letting curiosity get the better of him. ‘Why not?’

  10

  The door to the interview room opened and two men in dark suits stepped inside, moving slowly like they were actors trying to maximize the effect of their entrance. The older one, who was mid-forties or thereabouts, with hair that was a mixture of red and grey and a moustache that was just red, introduced himself as DCI Rory Caplin. His colleague, DC Ben Sullivan, was a taller, well-built man of about thirty with a neat head of short black hair and a deliberately imposing manner. He looked at me with barely concealed contempt, an expression that seemed to come naturally to the cold, tight features of his meticulously barbered face. There was, of course, no shaking of hands.

  By now, my lawyer, Douglas McFee, was sitting next to me, and he gave the detectives the sort of friendly, paternal smile that he’d been using on me all evening. I didn’t feel this was a very good sign. Whenever I see defence lawyers in interviews on the TV they’re invariably ruthlessly confrontational in their dealings with the forces of law and order, not grinning at them. Given my luck so far today, I suppose I should have been thankful they didn’t all jump up and high-five each other. DCI Caplin gave McFee little more than a curt nod before pointing a remote control at a tape machine built into the wall. A red light came on and it immediately clicked into life.

  ‘Interview of Thomas David Meron on suspicion of murder of Vanessa Charlotte Blake,’ said DCI Caplin in a surprisingly soft Northern Irish accent, ‘commencing six twenty-one p.m. on Saturday May twenty-first.’ He mentioned the names of the other people present, then fixed me with a gaze that was in equal parts sympathetic and untrusting. It was an impressive combination. ‘What were you doing at the university today?’ he asked me.

  I didn’t answer for a moment. I was still thinking about what McFee had told me only a matter of minutes ago: that my wife’s fingerprints had been found on a knife used to murder one of her colleagues. I didn’t even know she’d ever been fingerprinted. It was one more worrying thing to take in on a day that had been full of them.

  McFee nodded, to let me know I could answer the question, and I told the truth: I’d been looking for my wife.

  ‘Do you often go and see your wife at work?’ It was DC Sullivan speaking now. He leaned forward as he spoke, his expression now mixing puzzlement with the contempt.

  ‘No,’ I answered.

  ‘When was the last time you visited her there?’

  I looked at McFee, and he nodded again, allowing me to answer. ‘I can’t remember,’ I said. ‘Months ago.’

  ‘This year?’

  ‘I don’t know. Probably not.’ I was conscious that I sounded nervous, which was because I was. And I wasn’t stupid. I could tell where they were going with these questions. ‘There’s a good reason why I went today.’

  ‘Is there a good reason why you sustained two knife cuts to your face and body, Tom?’ asked DCI Caplin.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, willing myself to remain calm. ‘There is.’ And I told them how I came to be attacked, noting the sceptical look on Caplin’s ruddy face and the frankly incredulous one on Sullivan’s, as if I was telling them that I’d been attacked by a marauding band of goblins led by Harry Potter. Mind you
, the more times I told it, the stranger a story it became, even to my ears, and I remembered that McFee hadn’t looked entirely convinced either when I’d told him earlier.

  Caplin nodded slowly. ‘So, this masked man who assaulted you, he was the only person you saw. You didn’t see the victim, Miss Blake, or your wife when you were at the university?’

  I shook my head. ‘No.’

  ‘Where do you think your wife’ll be now?’

  The $64,000 question. ‘I really don’t know. I’ve tried to call her on her mobile phone but she’s not answering.’ I knew that this didn’t sound good for Kathy, but it wouldn’t take long for the police to find out about my attempts to contact her. ‘But one thing I do know is that she’s innocent. I was attacked by a man with a filleting knife with a yellow handle, and he must have been the person who killed Vanessa.’

  They didn’t argue with this version of events. Instead, they started questioning me about Vanessa. My relationship with her. My wife’s relationship with her. I was vague. I said I didn’t really know her that well, which was true. I said my wife got on fine with her as far as I knew. Their technique followed a pattern. Caplin would try to draw information out of me slowly and with comparative gentleness, while now and again Sullivan would chip in with a series of aggressive questions. It was the classic good cop/bad cop technique, and it surprised me because, unlike the ruthless lawyer business, I only thought they did that sort of thing in the movies and on TV shows. It wasn’t very effective either, mainly because I was telling the truth.