The Price Of Darkness

by Hurley, Graham

  He waved Faraday into a chair beside his desk. He was a tall man, quietly spoken.

  ‘I’ve just talked to Martin Barrie.’ He nodded at the phone. ‘You can assume I know the background.’

  Faraday went quickly through the meagre evidence that had led to Freeth’s arrest. Secretan wasn’t impressed.

  ‘That’s on the thin side, Joe. What else have you got?’

  ‘Freeth had access to Frank Greetham’s file of correspondence on the Gullifant’s collapse. I just checked with SOC. D/C Suttle’s up at the house now. He’s telling me that the minister’s name is ringed and underlined. At the time he was with the Department of Work and Pensions.’

  ‘You think Freeth did that? Rather than Frank Greetham?’

  ‘It’s possible. We have a witness who says that Freeth was familiar with the file. Either way, it still gives Freeth a motive for killing the minister. He’s nothing if not thorough.’

  ‘But can you prove it?’

  ‘Not yet, sir. We’ve seized the PC in the house but it’s still awaiting hard-disk analysis. There may be Google searches, e-mails, all kinds of stuff.’

  ‘That’s in hand?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Then there’s the lad, Dermott O’Keefe.’

  Faraday outlined the operation under way in Fishguard. So far, he admitted, there’d been no further reports from the two D/Cs.

  ‘But you think another twelve hours might see you through?’

  ‘I do, sir, yes. The last interview gave us indications that Freeth isn’t as sure of himself as he thought. It’s reasonable to suppose that he was en route to Fishguard when we nicked him. He was carrying a passport. You can get a ferry to Ireland from Fishguard. Even if we bail him, I’m not sure we’ll see him again.’

  ‘This is an ex-copper, am I right? A D/C?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’re telling me he did the firearms course before he left us?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Secretan nodded. His face was grey with exhaustion. Pompey was his beat, his responsibility, and since Goldsmith Avenue he’d been working eighteen-hour days.

  ‘OK.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’ve got Freeth’s brief in the outer office. Give me a ring in ten minutes.’

  Bill Prosper was one of three Coroner’s Officers working out of a cluttered office in the wing of the city’s Guildhall. Jimmy Suttle had never had dealings with the man but knew of his lifelong antipathy to Paul Winter. Now, early afternoon, he asked to see the file on Frank Greetham’s suicide.

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Major Crimes inquiry. Operation Billhook. My guvnor’s D/I Faraday. Phone him if you need to.’

  Prosper ignored the invitation. He was a big, ponderous man, exactly the type, thought Suttle, to hold a grudge.

  ‘How is he then?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Winter. I hear they drummed him out. Not before fucking time, son. I always said that man was a disgrace.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I know so. I served with him in the early days. Bent as you like. Even then. What’s the bloke’s name again?’

  ‘Greetham. Frank Arthur. He committed suicide seven weeks ago.’

  Still grumbling to himself, Prosper made his way to a filing cabinet in the storeroom next door. Suttle was eyeing a spare desk beside the window. By the time Prosper returned he’d also spotted a curl of steam from the office kettle and was trying to figure out where they kept the Nescafe.

  ‘Help yourself, son.’ Prosper wasn’t good at irony. ‘That’s exactly the kind of liberty Winter would have taken.’

  Suttle carried the coffee to the spare desk and settled down with the file. What interested him most was the attending P/C’s account of the morning he’d been dispatched to Westbourne Road. The call had come in at 07.32. Charlie Freeth and a distraught Julie Greetham had been waiting at the house.

  The lock-up was a couple of streets away. All three of them had gone to the scene. Freeth had already broken a window at the back of the lock up to gain entry and managed to turn off the engine before beating a retreat. The lock-up was thick with carbon monoxide and he’d broken a second window and waited for the fumes to clear before climbing in again.

  He’d found Frank Greetham slumped over the wheel. His flesh was cold to the touch and in Freeth’s opinion he’d been dead some time. Freeth had tried to open the front doors to the garage but Greetham had secured them with a chain and padlock. Unable to lay hands on a key, Freeth had finally managed to get the doors open. With the draught the fumes had cleared in minutes.

  Suttle finished his coffee, reading carefully through the rest of the file, noting other witness statements - from Julie, from Freeth, from colleagues at work, from Greetham’s GP - all of them testifying to a man whose faith in a decent life, decently led, had been tested to destruction by the events of the spring and early summer.

  Somewhere amongst these bare, shocked accounts of Frank Greetham’s death, Suttle had hoped to find a clue or two, some tiny morsel of evidence that might pin Charlie Freeth against the wall, but picturing the scene in the lock-up, tasting the fumes in the back of his throat, all he could summon was the conviction that no life should end like this. At the inquest the Coroner had recorded a verdict of Death by Suicide, adding a personal note of sympathy for those who had loved and cared for Frank Greetham. A good man, he’d written. Sorely missed. Too right, Suttle thought, getting to his feet.

  Prosper’s bulk occupied a desk on the other side of the office. He looked up at Suttle’s approach. Suttle wanted to know what remained from the inquest in terms of hard evidence.

  ‘Nothing.’ Prosper nodded towards the property cupboard. ‘Except the padlock and chain from the garage. You want a copy of that report?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘The machine’s over there. Help yourself.’

  Faraday was in conference with Yates and Ellis when the call from the Billhook incident room found him at the Bridewell. It was D/S Glen Thatcher. He had a mobile number for one of the D/Cs in Fishguard. He needed to have a word with the guvnor. Urgently. Faraday wanted to know what it was about.

  ‘It’s complicated, boss. Best to talk to him yourself.’

  Faraday rang the number. On the other end, in seconds, was D/C Phelps. At twenty-four, he was the youngest detective on the squad.

  ‘We’ve got the nipper, boss. I’m looking at him now.’

  ‘What?’ Faraday got to his feet, turned his back on Yates and Ellis.

  ‘He turned up just after lunch. He’d texted Freeth’s mobile earlier and mentioned taking a boat for Ireland. We moved the Toyota down by the ferry port. Kid couldn’t miss it.’

  ‘He’s secure?’

  ‘Sure.’ Phelps was laughing. ‘He’s sitting in the back. We’ve got the child locks on.’

  ‘And what’s he saying?’

  ‘Not much so far. Except he’s been in France for ten days.’

  ‘France?’

  ‘That’s a roger, boss. I’m looking at his passport and tickets. He did the Poole-Cherbourg crossing on Saturday the ninth. Took the return trip last night, then caught an early train to Fishguard this morning, via Bristol. The paperwork’s all here.’

  Faraday shook his head. Couldn’t be, he thought. Just couldn’t be. The hit on the minister had been on Monday the eleventh. No way could Dermott O’Keefe have been on the back of the Kawasaki.

  ‘Have you searched him at all? The boy?’

  ‘Certainly have, boss. We’ve got an address and a phone number in County Kilkenny. You want to have a guess at the name?’

  ‘O’Keefe?’

  ‘Spot-on. And guess what else we found. This one’s for the jackpot.’

  ‘Pass.’

  ‘Nearly three thousand quid.’ The laughter again. ‘In notes.’

  Martin Barrie called the conference for six o’clock. Willard had driven down from Winchester. Jerry Proctor, the Crime Scene Co-ordinator, had spent the afternoon reviewing the fore
nsic harvest from both major inquiries. The D/S in charge of Polygon Outside Enquiries was sitting beside D/S Glen Thatcher, who’d come over from the Fareham MCT, while Faraday occupied a chair near the end of the table. This shotgun marriage of Billhook and Polygon, an event Barrie had privately likened to the moment when two atoms triggered a chain reaction, was the last thing any of these men had expected, and even now Faraday sensed a deep reluctance to accept that the terrorist fantasy might be over.

  Willard was the first to put this thought into words. Not that he didn’t want to believe it but because he knew the strength of the case they’d have to make. A great deal of political weight lay behind MI5’s conviction that the minister had been killed by a new strain of the al-Qaeda virus. The news that he had in fact been shot at the hands of an avenging ex-cop would come as a bit of a shock.

  ‘We have to be a thousand per cent on this if D/I Faraday’s to be proved right.’ Willard was looking from face to face. ‘Joe?’

  Faraday summarised the afternoon’s developments in Fishguard. The efforts of the two D/Cs, coupled with Faraday’s shrewdness in anticipating O’Keefe’s reappearance, earned a modest round of applause. Faraday himself, while flattered, knew exactly what was coming next.

  ‘So O’Keefe’s off the plot.’ It was Willard again. ‘Passport and tickets? Alibis don’t come better than that.’

  Faraday conceded that O’Keefe couldn’t have been riding pillion. In a way, he said, the news had come as a bit of a relief.

  ‘I know things are bad,’ he said. ‘I know there are kids in Brixton running round with point forty-five Magnums. But the thought that a fifteen-year-old might have killed a government minister …’ He shook his head.

  ‘Quite.’ Jerry Proctor was studying his hands. ‘And the kid’s not even voting age.’

  A ripple of laughter ran round the table. It didn’t extend as far as Willard.

  ‘So what’s Plan B, Joe? Who else would you put on the back of that bike?’

  ‘Julie Greetham.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Julie Greetham. She’s Frank’s daughter. She and Freeth are partners. They live in Frank’s old house. She’s small, thin, exactly the right build.’

  ‘I thought she was a teacher, Joe?’ It was Martin Barrie this time.

  ‘She is.’

  ‘So how come she’s got time to fit all this in?’

  ‘She wasn’t at school on the Monday. We checked this afternoon. She’s got a pretty dodgy attendance record as it is and Monday she logged as another sickie. If we’re talking opportunity, she had all day to sort herself out. Freeth wasn’t at Positivo, either. He had the whole of last week off. Julie’s motive? She’s just lost her dad. Her partner’s put together this cast-iron case against the minister. He has a file full of correspondence. He has findings from the Parliamentary Ombudsman. Accusations of maladministration. Plus promises of compensation that turn out to be completely empty. From her point of view, or maybe the minister’s, it couldn’t be worse. Freeth does some research. Finds out the bloke’s due down here. Gets himself a bike. Sets up the hit. This is the guy they think killed her dad. So who better to pull the trigger?’

  It sounded, Faraday thought, entirely plausible. Willard was more interested in evidence. He looked down the table at the Crime Scene Co-ordinator.

  ‘Jerry?’

  ‘I think it’s a great theory.’ He smiled at Faraday. ‘From where I’m sitting, I just wish I could stand it up.’

  Mallinder’s place at Port Solent, he said, had yielded nothing of any forensic value. Only the missing Mercedes keys had helped inch Billhook forward. As for Westbourne Road, his blokes were nearly through. They’d crawled over every room, subjected countless items to painstaking analysis, lifted floorboards, turned out the roof space, even dredged the waste trap beneath the washing machine and the pipe that ran to the main sewer in case it might yield anything worthwhile. This afternoon, aware that time was tight, he’d put in extra bodies to dig out the back garden, but again there’d been no sign of recent disturbance or hidden goodies. There was a box or two of seized paperwork to go through, but if it ever came to a court case, he said, he’d be making the briefest ever appearance in the witness box.

  ‘Joe?’ Willard wanted a reaction.

  ‘It’s a question of MO, sir. Both scenes were cleaned up. Not just cleaned up but virtually clue-free. My betting is we’ll find the same with the PC hard disk and probably the billings information. Freeth is a man who doesn’t make mistakes and both scenes prove it. This is the dog that didn’t bark in the night.’

  ‘Terrific, Joe.’ Willard mimed applause. ‘So how do we put that to a jury?’

  ‘We don’t, sir. We wait. We attack him with today’s developments. We tell him we’ve got a couple of hostages. O’Keefe for one. His girlfriend for another. For my money she’s on a nicking, and this time we’ve got her for twenty-four hours. That woman’s unstable. You can feel it. More importantly, Freeth knows it too. That means he can’t be sure anymore. He doesn’t know what we’re up to. He’s no longer in control.’

  ‘And you really think that’s enough?’

  ‘No. Hand on heart of course I’m not sure. But there’s another question you haven’t asked me yet.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘Do I think he did it? Do I think he killed Mallinder? And do I think he drove the bike in Goldsmith Avenue? In every case, sir …’ he reached for his pen and clipped it inside his jacket. ‘… the answer is yes.’

  Julie Greetham was arrested at the Travelodge at six thirty-five. On the point of returning home to Westbourne Road, she found herself in the back of an unmarked CID Skoda, furious at this latest assault on her liberty. At the Bridewell, after registration by the Custody Sergeant, Faraday arranged for her to be walked past Freeth, on the way to a holding cell of her own. The turnkey reported that neither party said a word to each other.

  Forty minutes later she was led to the interview suite. For continuity’s sake Faraday had decided that he and D/C Suttle would be asking the questions. Suttle had done well in the previous interview and his performance since then had left Faraday deeply impressed. Not for the first time it occurred to him that this young D/C had learned most of his tradecraft from Paul Winter.

  Hillary Denton, once again, was sitting beside Julie Greetham. Before he’d even finished the preliminaries, he sensed the strategy she was going to run. She’s seen what I’ve seen, he thought. She’s realised that this client of hers is liable to self-destruct.

  Faraday invited Julie to go back to Monday the eleventh of September. Monday was a school day. According to the secretary, Julie had phoned in sick. How did she account for that?

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Were you really sick?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Julie … Ms Greetham, suspicion of murder is a very serious allegation. It might help you to answer these questions.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Denton shot her a warning look. There was a script here, just two words long, and this was no time to rip it up.

  Faraday glanced at Suttle, gestured for him to take over.

  ‘Julie …’ Suttle leaned forward, lowering his voice ‘… I don’t think anyone’s blaming you here.’

  ‘They’re not?’

  ‘No. You loved your dad. That’s not a crime.’

  ‘I know. So why am I here?’

  ‘Because we need to find out what happened.’

  ‘What happened when?’

  ‘On that Monday. When you didn’t go to school.’ He paused, waiting for an answer. When nothing happened, he leaned forward again. ‘Charlie was off as well, wasn’t he?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘It’s a fact, Julie. We’ve checked.’

  ‘Then you know.’

  ‘Was he in the house with you?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Did you spend the day together?’

  ‘No comment.’


  ‘Did you love your dad?’

  ‘That’s unfair.’

  The interview hit the buffers. Hoping to lower her defences, Suttle had simply hardened her faltering resolve. She was angry now, refusing point-blank to help them in any way, and after twenty minutes Faraday called a halt to the pantomime. If these twin investigations ever ended up in court then Julie’s silence would do her no favours whatsoever, but Faraday could tell from Hillary Denton’s smile that she believed this prospect to be remote. A day’s absence from the chalk face was hardly proof of political assassination.

  It was now ten minutes past eight. Superintendent Secretan had authorised a further twelve hours of custody as far as Charlie Freeth was concerned but the PACE extension expired at 04.07 in the morning. To make a double murder charge stick with the CPS, Faraday knew he needed some form of confession and he only had one interview session to do it. So far, despite a wobble over Frank Greetham’s stay in St James’, Freeth showed no signs of caving in.

  He was readying Yates and Ellis for the coming session. Suttle had organised more coffees. They sat around the table in the bare interview room beneath the cold gaze of the video cameras, aware of the ticking of the clock.

  Faraday had been in touch with D/C Phelps again. They were bringing O’Keefe back from Fishguard, arrested on suspicion of vehicle theft. With luck, they should be back at Fareham within a couple of hours. Given O’Keefe’s age, interviews would have to be handled by specialist officers from the Child Protection Unit. It was a cumbersome process and nothing in the lad’s behaviour to date had led Faraday to expect any kind of easy breakthrough. His only concession to the D/Cs in Fishguard had been an acknowledgement that he’d texted Freeth’s mobile. Beyond that, he was refusing to say anything.