Bitter Fruits: DI Erica Martin Book 1 (Erica Martin Thriller)

by Clark-Platts, Alice

  ‘All of them.’

  ‘Simon Rush?’

  Annabel narrowed her eyes. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Do you like Simon?’

  Annabel gave a small sigh. ‘The whole thing’s toppling down, isn’t it?’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The whole fucking thing. It’s hit the fan.’ She shook her head, giving a short laugh.

  Martin waited a while. ‘What’s that got to do with Simon Rush?’

  Annabel looked sidelong at Martin. ‘Everyone knew he had something going with Mason. He was on a trip.’

  ‘A trip?’

  ‘A power trip. He’d got the presidency. He …’ She stopped again, uncertain.

  ‘Tell me, Annabel. Please. You know this is really important.’ Martin put her hand on the girl’s shoulder, her breath fogging the air in front of them. ‘You can trust me,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know, really,’ Annabel said eventually. ‘I never went in there. I’m only a Fresher. But Simon would have parties in his room. Members only.’

  ‘Members of what?’

  The girl shrugged. ‘Of their stupid gang. I don’t know the details, really I don’t. We just knew.’

  ‘Who knew?’

  ‘Everyone. Everyone in my year. Nick and Emily, Shorty. We used to laugh about it. It seemed crazy.’

  ‘What would happen at these parties? Did you know about that?’

  Annabel rubbed her lips together, shaking her head.

  ‘So what was wrong with it, then? Why did anyone care? It’s not unusual for students to have parties in their room.’

  Annabel stopped walking and looked down at her feet. ‘I’m not sure, I don’t want to get anyone into trouble.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter now, Annabel. We need to work out the truth of it. Whatever happened in Simon’s room – maybe it’s relevant, maybe not. But we need to know about it.’

  Annabel was silent for a long moment, then she exhaled, as if making a decision. ‘It was the principal. We saw him once, at one of the parties.’

  ‘Who saw him?’ Martin’s heart thumped loudly in her chest at this.

  Annabel nodded. ‘Me and Emily. He left Simon’s room at about four in the morning. We were going to her room, just coming home from Sixes.’ She blinked rapidly at Martin. ‘Please don’t tell him I told you, though.’

  ‘You’re sure it was Principal Mason?’

  Annabel nodded firmly.

  ‘Did Emily tell Simon she knew about this?’

  ‘I think so. I’m not sure. Simon …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He had a bit of a thing for Emily, I think. Who didn’t, right? Emily knew so many people. Especially after the photos. It was hard to keep up sometimes.’

  ‘Did she reciprocate with Rush?’

  ‘I think she was flattered. He turned up to see her in London once, she thought it was funny. But, you know, she was so obsessed with Nick.’

  ‘Does anyone else know about Mason going to that party?’ Martin asked after a short while.

  ‘I don’t think so. I haven’t said anything.’ Annabel paused. ‘I don’t think he liked it. Simon, I mean. I saw the way he looked. He looked trapped sometimes, I could tell. I felt sorry for him. But …’

  ‘But, what?’

  ‘But he got something out of it,’ she shrugged.

  Martin looked up at the sky for a moment, her mind whirring as raindrops began to spatter down, hitting her face. They began walking again, reaching the other side of the track, continuing to trace it round to where they had started. Rush and Mason. How stupid of the principal to have been caught out, though.

  ‘And what about Daniel Shepherd?’ Martin asked as they rounded the last bend, the rain coming down heavier now.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Daniel Shepherd? He’s another one of Emily’s Facebook friends.’

  Annabel pulled the sleeves of her tracksuit top down as the rain began to pelt. ‘I don’t know him,’ she shrugged.

  Martin frowned. ‘Are you sure, Annabel? This is really important. Are you saying you don’t know of a friend of Emily’s called Daniel Shepherd?’

  Annabel jumped up and down on the spot. ‘Yes, that’s what I’m saying. Can I go now? I’m getting fucking freezing here.’

  Martin nodded, distractedly. She watched Annabel as she jogged away. Annabel was Emily’s closest friend, whatever she said. So if she didn’t know who Daniel Shepherd was, who did?

  36

  I stood outside in the corridor for a long time before I finally plucked up the courage to knock at the door. I had been listening to them from my position there, the grumble of their voices within, speared occasionally by an aggressive laugh which jolted me, cemented my fear of entering. I had my dad’s old hip flask with me, which I’d filled with the Jack Daniel’s I’d found in Zack’s cupboard at the end of his bed. I took a few swallows, felt the buzz warming my insides and tapped lightly at the same time as pushing the door open.

  They sat by the window in the circular room, the Oval Office, as it was called. Simon Rush had invited me. He was wearing a black undergraduate gown, the kind the Joyce students would wear to the weekly formal dinner in the refectory. The low table in front of him was covered in candles, wax dripping on to the Formica top. Bottles of wine were stacked together along with overfilled ashtrays and half-used Rizla packets. The candlelight shone upwards, bathing his face in a soft glow. He smiled at me as I came in, the circle around him shifting their eyes in order to follow his lead. They all grinned then, a pack of drunken wolves.

  There were no girls. Simon patted the seat next to him, and I shuffled in, past the knees and feet of the others as they budged along to let me squeeze beside him. He threw his arm around my shoulders, as was his way. ‘Darlings, this is the gorgeous Daniel. Isn’t he a treat?’

  The wolves nodded. I didn’t recognize any of them by name, although I’d seen them around the bar in Joyce, grouped together always, a solidity in numbers. I must have been wide-eyed, my sobriety at that moment outplaying my desire to fit in. Someone handed me a glass filled with red wine and another put a rolled-up cigarette in my hand. I inhaled deeply from it, knowing what it contained. I needed it. I needed to be shielded from this assault on my nerves, my senses.

  One of the wolves at the other end of the circle had a computer in his lap. The cool blue light of the screen shone into his face, hitting his glasses, hiding his eyes from me. I couldn’t see what he was silently watching but I could tell that the person next to him had his hand underneath the computer, in the boy’s lap. He was moving his hand up and down, as the boy blinked slowly, shapes on the computer flickering in front of his hidden eyes.

  Simon sighed as if sated by a feast, rubbing his thumb along my collar bone. ‘Daniel, it’s so good to have you finally come.’

  I heard a snigger from somewhere else in the room.

  He leaned back a little, his shirt opening further. I could see the white skin of his chest, a silver dagger dangling from a chain around his neck. He took a drag of his cigarette and turned to me, his face close to mine. ‘How do you like my party?’ he asked.

  I nodded, taking another sip of wine. ‘I like it,’ I answered.

  He breathed softly, the smell of wine reaching into my nostrils. I could feel every part of my body at that moment, every hair on my arm, every joint in my bones. I licked my lips, and his eyes watched me do it. The energy was shifting in the room. It mounted like a rising breeze, touching us all as it passed. The gowns of the boys rustled as they huddled closer together like blackened birds.

  It was as if I was lurching over a cliff top. After what had happened with Emily, there was no turning back for me. I was kamikaze. Maybe it was the booze and the puff or maybe I wanted to destroy something, or tempt it – God, I don’t know. Right then, I just felt that I could press the button. The one that would blast us entirely to smithereens. And I would be part of it all. At last.

  I would be shattered into tiny pieces of
refracted glass, fragments of the clear skies of my old self caught up by, and spinning through, the dancing wind. Those countless pieces, as they separated in the cold column of the approaching Mistral, would become some new kind of wonderful whole. Good-fucking-bye. The wind was changing. The Mistral would come.

  I pulled again on the cigarette I had been given. As the grass hit my brain, I succumbed. Simon took my hand, and, I am ashamed to say this now, I let him.

  37

  Wednesday 24 May, 5.35 p.m.

  Michael Brabents would have been attractive, Martin thought. Very attractive, if it weren’t for the thinness of his lips and the closeness of the tip of his nose to his mouth. It changed his face from open and engaging to something rat-like, something hard-bitten and scrunched up, resentful of the world. He was again in jeans with a pale-blue checked shirt, the top few buttons opened; a layer of brown stubble grazed across his face. Dark circles rimmed his eyes, and his left eye seemed barely open; a greasy film of green gunk travelled along his eyelashes. He gestured to it as Martin walked in.

  ‘Sorry about the eye. Conjunctivitis.’ He shrugged. ‘Doc says brought on by stress.’

  Martin sat down opposite him. She was alone other than the tape recorder. This interview would be tricky. With nothing to charge him with yet, Martin didn’t want a harassment charge on a man currently grieving for his wife and child. But she wanted the formality of the interview room and the protection of a taped interview. Jones and Butterworth were watching them both via the closed-circuit video feed. Martin had to play this exactly by the book – particularly given the maverick nature of her shed investigation. As she looked at Emily’s father, though, he seemed a broken man. She was finding it hard to reconcile that image with the violent, obsessive father she suspected Michael Brabents actually was.

  ‘I can only imagine, sir,’ she said, turning on the tape recorder. ‘Now, I’m just going to use this as a precaution.’ She smiled. ‘Protection for us both. For the benefit of the tape, I will state that you have declined to instruct a lawyer for this meeting.’

  Brabents didn’t look as though he was listening. He was staring off into the middle distance at something behind Martin. ‘I can’t believe they’re gone,’ he said eventually. ‘That I’ll never see them again. Either of them.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘I think it’s more than I can bear actually.’

  Martin looked down at her hands, giving a pause to this statement. Judging the moment had passed, she spoke.

  ‘You may not be aware but I travelled across to Great Whittington yesterday. I went to your house. Spoke to your cleaner and some others in the village.’

  He looked up, surprised. ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘This is a murder investigation, Mr Brabents. I wanted to see where Emily had lived. What environment she came from. I need to know who she was. Then, I hope, I can work out what happened to her.’

  He nodded. ‘And what did you find?’

  She leaned forwards, frowning. ‘I found a beautiful, idyllic house. A family who were slightly on the outside of the village. A family that had its rows …’ She paused again.

  ‘It’s no secret Rebecca and I were going through a rough patch.’

  ‘How rough?’

  ‘It wouldn’t have led to anything. We weren’t splitting up. We were just arguing a lot.’

  ‘Enough that Emily hadn’t been staying with you before she started here at Durham?’

  He shrugged. ‘She wanted to stay for a while with a cousin of hers in London. More fun down there. We saw no harm in it.’

  She cleared her throat. This was the difficult bit. ‘Was there anything that would have led you to suspect your wife wanted to commit suicide?’

  He shook his head forcefully. ‘Absolutely not. Well – apart from Emily obviously …’ His voice trailed off.

  ‘Of course. But, before that. The arguments? The fights? Was Rebecca depressed by it?’

  ‘No. Not at all. We were just like any normal couple. I can’t understand it. I can only think that Emily’s murder tipped her over the edge …’

  She nodded. ‘I’m sure. It must be unimaginably stressful.’ She waited a beat. ‘Are you a violent man, Mr Brabents?’

  ‘Me?’

  She looked at him.

  He leaned back in his chair and gently fingered his bad eye. ‘No,’ he said finally, shaking his head again. ‘I would never hit my children.’

  ‘What about your wife?’

  ‘No,’ he answered again. Too quickly, Martin thought.

  ‘What kind of father were you? Are you?’ Martin grimaced a touch, acknowledging the faux pas.

  ‘A good one, I think. I’m always there for them, they can talk to me about anything.’

  ‘And do they?’

  ‘Sometimes, it depends. I saw less of Emily since she moved here, obviously. Kit and I have always been close. They’re good kids.’

  She shifted in her chair, crossing her legs. ‘Would you say you got on better with Emily?’

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe. She was, perhaps, a daddy’s girl.’ He rubbed his nose. A tell? Martin wondered. He fiddled with his face a great deal, it was annoying.

  ‘A daddy’s girl. So, would you be strict with her? With boyfriends?’

  He seemed to think about this. ‘Emily didn’t really have any boyfriends. I’m not sure about here but at home – she was a good girl, you know? Concentrated on her studies. She was bright. We had high expectations for her, her mother and me.’ His voice cracked slightly.

  Martin looked up at the ceiling, let the silence continue after Brabents had stopped speaking. It went on uncomfortably until he took the bait. ‘I mean, sometimes I was a bit strict. What father isn’t with his only daughter?’

  Plenty, thought Martin.

  ‘Sometimes, you know, I would get angry if Emily was out too late on a school night or wasn’t concentrating.’

  She raised her eyebrows at him. Go on.

  ‘Sometimes Emily could be …’ he searched for the words, ‘flighty. Maybe. She could get a little distracted. I often felt I had to rein her in a bit. Corral her.’

  ‘She could be a bit wild?’

  ‘No, not wild. Just beyond the realms of what I thought …’

  ‘What you thought acceptable?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And how would you demonstrate this to Emily?’

  ‘We’d have rows, I suppose. Her mother would always take her side.’ He paused. ‘But that was Rebecca. She was always a girl’s girl.’ He smiled to himself.

  It was time, thought Martin.

  ‘When I visited your house, Mr Brabents, I saw something out of the ordinary there.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Perhaps not so much out of the ordinary as strange because of where I saw it.’

  He looked puzzled.

  ‘Do you own a shed, Mr Brabents?’

  He looked at her steadily. She could see a vague flush spreading underneath the stubble as the realization grew. He blinked slowly and then narrowed his eyes. ‘Did you enter my shed, Detective Martin?’

  ‘Detective Inspector. Yes I did, Mr Brabents.’

  ‘And did you have a warrant to do so?’

  Not an idiot then, Martin thought. She punted. Once his lawyer got wind that there was no warrant, he would answer nothing.

  ‘Yes I did.’

  A startled flicker spun across his eyes for a millisecond before disappearing. He ran his hand through his hair, the epitome of casualness.

  ‘And what did you find?’

  She smiled. ‘I found photos, Mr Brabents. Hundreds of photos, I would say. And all of them of your daughter – none of your son. Or your wife.’ She continued to look at him, still smiling. The silence mustered in the room, the air fusty. Martin could smell Brabents’ body odour as he began to spark a sweat.

  ‘The strange thing about those photos, though,’ she leaned forwards towards him, ‘the strange thing is that you had locked those photos in a drawer in a shed at t
he bottom of the garden.’ She sat back. ‘A shed. Dad’s shed. A sign said so on the wall. A place you could be by yourself.’ She spread her hands out to him in an entreaty. ‘Why would you want to look at photos of your daughter alone, Mr Brabents?’

  ‘Storage …’ he answered quickly.

  ‘But why locked up, Mr Brabents? In a place where you would go to be alone?’

  He stared at her, saying nothing. His eyes wavered, but he seemed unable to blink.

  She sat forwards and folded her hands on the desk. ‘I’ll tell you what I think, Michael,’ she said conspiratorially. ‘I think you were obsessed with your little girl.’

  He remained silent.

  ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’ She looked at him. ‘Your little girl. Daddy’s little girl.’ She gave him another quick smile. ‘But little girls grow up, don’t they? They get bigger, more attractive. Problem is, though,’ she snapped the smile off her face, ‘other people find them attractive too, don’t they? And that you couldn’t bear.’

  Tears began to stream from Brabents’ good eye as the gunk in the other one seeped more. He wiped his hands over his face as he spoke. ‘Stop it. Stop talking.’

  ‘You couldn’t touch her, have her in the way you wanted,’ she said. ‘But you didn’t want anyone else to either, did you? You couldn’t stomach it. People looking at her. At her body. Feasting their eyes.’

  He gave a moan and moved back and forth in his chair. When he finally raised his head, his face was one of absolute disgust.

  ‘It’s true, isn’t it? You wanted to keep her in a bell jar like a beautiful bird. You would never let her go, would you? You stashed the photos away in a drawer so nobody else could see them. Where only you had the key. Where she could be yours for ever. What did you do when you looked at the photos, Michael? What were you thinking as you looked at them one after another?’