by Ed James
Hunter started off across the garage, limping like an old man, every yard feeling like a mile.
Williams got between them, blocking their path to the ambulance as Tulloch’s lumbering shape was helped out. ‘My client has been violently assaulted and requires urgent medical assistance. I would greatly appreciate if you could see your way to releasing him from custody forthwith.’
Hunter got in his face and grinned as wide as his aching face would let him. ‘Not going to happen.’
‘Then I must insist that any interview be postponed until tomorrow morning.’
Cullen shrugged at Hunter. ‘I’ll process him, you go home and get yourself some shut eye.’
EIGHTY-SEVEN
Chantal
Chantal leaned against the wall in the corridor, her fingers numb around the mobile. ‘An iron?’
‘That’s what I said.’ Hunter’s voice sounded like he was thousands of miles away.
Chantal felt sick. Acid burned in her gut. ‘But you got him?’
‘We got him.’ A hiss of white noise down the line. ‘He’s not in a good way. Even too injured to interview.’
‘What did you do to him?’
‘Restrained and arrested him. Took a bit of effort, though.’ Hunter sucked in air. ‘You okay?’
‘I don’t think they’ve invented a swearword strong enough for how bad this is.’
Hunter laughed. ‘I need to use it when you’ve invented it.’
‘That bad?’
‘Aye. But are you going to be fine?’
‘I’m just . . . Glad you caught him.’
‘Me too.’
Chantal swapped the phone to her other hand. ‘Look, Craig, I’m going to be here another few hours interviewing and . . .’ She yawned into her free hand. Felt like her jaw was going to crack open.
‘Right, well, I’m back at my flat. The cats haven’t killed each other, so it’s looking positive.’
She cry-laughed, a lump catching in her throat.
Hunter’s yawn rattled the speaker.
Chantal swallowed down bile. ‘Look, Sharon told me they’re charging Gordon Brownlee with Finlay’s death.’
‘Three days of hell in the Algarve and God knows how many PTSD flashbacks just so Matty Ibbetson and Keith Brannigan can walk free?’
‘Tell me about it.’ Footsteps rang off the metal from below as some cops climbed the stairs. Chantal moved over to look down. Colin “Crystal” Methven and a local uniform. ‘Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll let myself in if you’re already asleep.’
* * *
Bruce was waiting outside the interview room. ‘That was some good work back there.’
‘It’s not over yet.’ Chantal took a deep breath. ‘We need to put them away for what they’ve done.’
‘Oh, we will.’ Bruce glanced round at Chantal. ‘Can’t believe Petra’s been lying to us for all this time.’ He huffed out a sigh. ‘Under our bloody noses, Chantal. My mother lives down the road from that house.’
‘Glib as it sounds, Jon, we’ve got them now. That’s what matters.’
‘What matters is putting that sex pest away.’ Bruce stabbed a finger at the door, thudding the wood. He straightened up and did up the buttons on his suit jacket. ‘Your boss and I had a conference call with our friend Quaresma.’
‘And?’
‘He wants extradition.’
‘You going to give it to him?’
‘Maybe. Not my decision. But he was gambling and I’ve got a full house.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Ask Craig.’ Bruce thumbed at the interview room door. ‘Anyway, see our friend Petra in there? Her sister is none other than Luisa Oliveira.’
‘What?’ Chantal tried to process it, her brain struggling for lack of sleep and the residual alcohol coursing through her exhausted body. The barmaid at Cheap and Cheerful. Sean Tulloch’s possibly consensual partner. The woman who phoned in the sighting of Harry, dragging them to Portugal. ‘So that’s why Matty was speaking to her on the CCTV?’
‘Correct.’ Bruce entered the room and went straight into interview proceedings.
Chantal checked her watch. Half two. Two hour drive back to Edinburgh. She blinked away her tiredness and pushed into the interview room.
Matty Ibbetson slouched on the other side of the table, rocking from side to side, eyes shut. His face was puffed up, thick and purple, his right eye bandaged up, the left focused on the table top. He kept clenching his jaw then letting go. Didn’t look up as Chantal sat down opposite him.
His lawyer gave her a glance. An old Indian man, or so it seemed. Skin much darker than hers, so not from Pakistan. Tamil or Sri Lanka, maybe. He didn’t say anything, just jotted something on his notepad.
Chantal sat back, the words washing over her like a foreign language. The seat was warm, but the legs were cold against her bare skin. She stared at Matty, trying to catch his one open eye, but it was dead. Nothing there, no emotion, no evil or any other convenient cliché, just emptiness.
Murdering bastard.
Raping bastard.
Bruce jostled her elbow. ‘DS Jain?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Chantal cleared her throat. Still no reaction from Matty. ‘Mr Ibbetson, we need you to outline your movements yesterday evening.’
Matty’s good eye peered around the room, homing in on Chantal. ‘Go to hell.’
‘Unfortunately, you have some questions to answer here first.’
‘You smashed my fucking balls!’ Matty reached under the table. ‘It hurts like you wouldn’t believe.’ A tear slid down from the side of his eye. Looked like a weeping wound rather than a human emotion, though. He jabbed a finger towards his bandaged eye. ‘And you fucking stabbed me in the fucking eye with a fucking cigar!’
‘I was defending myself from your vicious assault and attempted rape.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘You almost penetrated me, sir.’ Chantal drummed her thumbs on the table. ‘Might be facing even graver charges if you had a normal-sized cock.’
Matty rubbed at the bandage, wincing. Eyes shut, rocking. Like he had headphones in.
Bruce cleared his throat. ‘We’ve got a tough decision to make, matey boy.’ He got to his feet and walked around the room, tugging on his suit jacket like a Victorian schoolmaster. ‘We’re going to extradite you to Portugal where you’ll face a murder charge. Portuguese prisons are worse than British ones. No Sky or Xbox over there, I’m afraid.’ He flashed him a grin. ‘The decision comes down to whether we extradite you after you’ve faced justice for raping DS Jain. And, of course, for the other thing.’ He kept his silence until Matty opened his good eye. ‘I mean Harry.’
Matty folded his arms. ‘You’re wasting your time.’
‘We found him. Him and Petra in your spare room. Fancy that. Who would’ve thought that Harry is safe and well in sunny Alnwick. Not in the Algarve.’ Bruce shrugged his shoulders and sat down again. ‘Luisa called in the sightings, didn’t she?’
Matty’s eye bulged. He glanced over at his lawyer Who was quick to reply before his client could make his job impossible. ‘No comment.’
Bruce ignored the man. ‘We know that the girl Sean was raping is your soon-to-be sister-in-law.’
‘He wasn’t raping her!’
‘Let’s cut the foreplay, sweetheart. What’s it to be — murder charge in Portugal, or rape and child abduction here?’ Bruce was nodding his head slowly, trying to match Matty’s tempo. ‘You get to choose. Anytime you’re ready to—’
Matty held up his fingers, covered in blood. ‘I’m bleeding again!’
The lawyer helped Matty to his feet. ‘We need to get this man urgent medical attention!’
Bruce hit the recorder and reached over to grab Matty by the wrists. ‘You’re not getting out of this.’
‘Fuck off!’
‘You’re going to prison for a very long time, wee man.’
Matty leaned his white knuckles on the table, a mad rage twitching his
arms. ‘When I get out, I’m going to hunt you down and fucking kill the pair of you!’
* * *
‘You lied to me, Petra.’ Bruce was sitting opposite Petra Jack in another cramped interview room. He glanced at her, his face twisted into a grimace of rage. Couldn’t stand looking at her for more than a second at a time. ‘You lied to the whole world.’
Chantal stood. Hurt too much to sit.
Petra stared at the table. Her lawyer stroked her shoulders. Gentle touch, probably to avoid cutting himself on her sharp bones. The woman looked more like a victim than—
‘All that time, Petra, all that fucking time he was in Alnwick. You sat in this very room, telling us how you hadn’t seen your boy for days. You lied your face off to us. “No, officer, I don’t know where my son is. When you find the people who did this, I will kill them myself.” Yadda, yadda, yadda. Well, we’ve found the people who took your boy, so are you going to kill yourself and Matthew Ibbetson?’
Not a word of reply.
‘Didn’t think so.’ Bruce reached into his pocket for his cigarettes and rested the pack on the table. Petra’s gaze swarmed all over it like a plague of cockroaches. ‘Here’s what happened. Someone abducted Harry on his walk home from school. That someone was Matty Ibbetson, your lover, wasn’t it? Then he took him to his house and hid him there. Meanwhile, you pretended to be the distraught mother.’
Petra rubbed her clammy hands together.
‘Of course, you needed some misdirection, so you got your sister to call in a couple of sightings in Portugal, didn’t you?’
Petra’s nervous eyes shifted over to her lawyer.
‘My client doesn’t have to say anything.’ Fresh out of law school, not yet tarnished by the crud of a career’s worth of representing scumbags. The woman was short with mousy hair, her fitted blouse seemed to squish her torso, since every word was delivered with a breathless gasp. ‘I suggest you allow her to leave and we can maybe reconvene when you have something concrete to put to her.’
‘I don’t think you two realise how serious this case is.’ Bruce switched from aggressive to bemused, knocking both of them off balance with the oldest trick in the book. ‘The fact of the matter, and one every jury in the land will condemn unanimously, is that you, Ms Oliveira, or Mrs Jack, or whatever your name is this week, you kidnapped your son. And you covered it up. And you triggered an international manhunt. And not a single judge or jury member will look kindly on that, not since Madeleine McCann. Not sure what’s worse — what happened that poor girl, or vermin like you copying it.’
The lawyer swallowed hard. ‘That . . . That my client had anything to do with her son’s disappearance and subsequent reappearance remains to be proven.’
Bruce did a double take. ‘Are you serious? We found them together.’
‘Coincidence.’
Chantal stared around the dirty walls of the room. This wasn’t working. She eased herself into the spare seat and smiled at Petra. ‘You love Matty, don’t you?’
Petra’s eyes closed to narrow slits.
Chantal poured the last of her energy into that smile, so much artificial syrup, her teeth hurt. ‘I understand, Petra. I really do.’ She sighed, gently nodding at the bony wreck of a woman. Time to wrong-foot her. ‘You know that Matty is a murderer, don’t you?’
Petra’s eyes bulged. ‘He is my man.’
Chantal took a photo from the file on the table and slid it across to the stunned woman. ‘This is Finlay Sinclair. He was a police officer in Edinburgh.’ She waited until Petra focused on the gurning face, sunshine glinting off his bald head. ‘Matty murdered him earlier today. Pushed him off a rock. He broke a rib and died from his injuries.’
Petra nudged the photo away.
‘Matty pushed Finlay. Deliberately. And then bragged about it to his friend.’
The lawyer pushed the picture back towards the file. ‘That happened in Portugal, not here. I don’t see anyone from the Polícia de Segurança Pública in here, do you?’ Spoken like a native.
Chantal narrowed her eyes at Petra. ‘Matty pushed that man off a cliff. Then he ran to the airport. Finlay died just as the plane took off. That’s very cowardly for a big man like him, don’t you think?’
Petra huffed back in her seat, arms tight around her torso.
Another dead end.
What other cards do we have left?
Chantal gritted her teeth. ‘Do you know what I was doing in Portugal? How I came in contact with Mr Ibbetson?’
A shrug.
‘I work for Police Scotland’s Sexual Offences Unit. We’re investigating one of Matty’s best friends. Private Sean Tulloch of the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland. We’ve got five cases of domestic abuse against him over the last five years, all involving serious sexual assaults.’
Another shrug.
‘Sean Tulloch meets damaged women, charms them, moves in with them, then exploits them. Beats them up. Rapes them. Treats them like a slave.’ She let it hang in the air. This time the lawyer’s eyes bulged. ‘Five women. That we know of.’
‘I don’t believe this.’ Petra blinked hard. ‘Sean is a nice man.’
‘So you know him?’
Petra shrugged again, less defiance in the gesture, though.
Chantal caught her eye and persisted. ‘Mr Tulloch’s latest victim is a woman called Paisley Sanderson. She lives in Galashiels, not too far from here. Before he flew out to Portugal, Mr Tulloch abused her so badly that he put her in hospital.’
Petra flinched and averted her eyes, eventually focusing on her shaking fingers.
‘Tonight, Sean Tulloch came back here and put an iron to her face.’ She let the image do the talking for a moment. The lawyer looked like she was going to be sick. ‘Paisley’s back in hospital. I suspect she’ll be deformed for life. All because she decided to talk to us about what Mr Tulloch has put her through.’
Petra reached over and picked up her cup of water. It splashed out the sides as she sipped from it.
Just want to reach across and . . . She sighed. ‘Mr Tulloch raped two women in Portugal. Kirsten Latimer. Nice Irish girl. On a hen weekend with her pals and family. Then she gets her drinks spiked. Next thing she knows, she wakes up with Tulloch thrusting away at her. Gordon Brownlee was watching. Another of Matty’s friends. And not only was he watching the rape, he was masturbating as the poor woman lay—’
‘Shut up.’
‘And, of course, the other rape. . . Mr Tulloch took Luisa Oliveira to her room above the bar and raped her.’
Petra glanced back up. ‘That wasn’t rape.’
Chantal looked her dead in the eye. ‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘We know she’s your sister.’
Petra shifted in her chair. ‘I’m not saying anything.’
‘You should, Petra. We might be able to have a word with our colleagues over in Portugal. See what they can do about. . . Nah, you’re screwed. Matty’s going away for a very long time.’
Petra folded her arms.
‘Your boyfriend was with Sean Tulloch while he plied your sister with enough absinthe that he could take her upstairs and rape her.’
Petra shook her head.
‘What sort of woman lets that happen to her own sister?’
‘She loves Sean.’
Bingo . . .
Chantal leaned low, managing to lock eyes with Petra again. ‘How do you know that?’
‘Luisa called me this morning. She was upset. Police broke down the door in her apartment.’ Petra bit her lip, took a deep breath, held it, dropped her eyes to the table and gasped, the words pouring out of her all at once. ‘These men came in to the bar with Matty. They had breakfast. Then Sean started chatting to Luisa. She had a drink with them. And she asked him if he wanted to go to her apartment. Her shift was over, so she was free.’
‘And then he raped her?’
‘He didn’t rape her!’ Petra smacked a fist off the table. ‘Don’t y
ou understand? Matty introduced Sean to Luisa. She liked him. Get over it.’
‘Was it like that with you and Matty?’
‘What?’
‘Did you meet him in a bar?’
‘I met him at Catterick when he was based there. I worked as a cleaner. Matty was different from the rest of them.’ Petra patted her cheek, almost like a lover’s caress. ‘We started sleeping together.’
‘And then you got divorced to be with him?’
Petra nodded, little trails of tears sliding down both cheeks. ‘My husband found out. He tried to get custody of Harry.’ Her face twisted up. ‘The judge, this pig, he gave him temporary custody! He took Harry away from me! My own son!’
‘So you and Matty kidnapped your son?’
Petra inspected her nails. ‘It’s just until my divorce comes through. Then we can be together as a real family.’
‘Let me get this right, you abducted Harry?’
‘Harry should be with his mother!’ Another thump on the table. ‘Do you know why I love Matty? Because my husband, the bastard, he used to hit me. He beat me up. Every night. I told Matty and . . . Matty took me away from him. But we had to leave Harry! There was nothing we could do.’
‘You could’ve spoken to the police.’
‘The police wouldn’t have believed me.’
‘You could’ve tried. Instead, you created this situation, an international tragedy with collateral damage of enormous personal cost to this department, a former policeman’s life and—’
‘Matty saved Harry from my ex-husband! He brought him back to his mother!’ Petra banged the table again, tipping her water over. ‘You should give him a medal!’
The lawyer folded her hands, then started kneading her fingers. ‘My client was in a desperate situation. I expect some leniency here.’
Bruce cleared his throat. ‘She’s going away for a long time.’ He gave her a grave nod, then leaned over to Chantal. ‘That’s nailed it. Do you want to get yourself home?’
Day 4
Sunday, 15th May, 2016
EIGHTY-EIGHT
