by Penny Grubb
It had been when Ahmed had pushed on both the name and the car that he’d had a reaction. Larry’s face had paled. Suddenly he’d been remembering the real events not his later embellishments.
Larry’s scrap of a statement at the time had been ascribed to one petty criminal trying to put the boot in another, which implied that the name had been run through whatever systems existed in the mid-80s and unearthed the eldest brother and his record, though not at that point his role in the post office raid.
The topics Ahmed had battled through with Larry were those passing mentions of an overheard phone call and a car.
He had Larry on tape declaiming, ‘That’s what I said!’
There had been a measure of triumph as the real memory had surfaced.
‘His exact words. “That’s what I said!” There was a crowd, see, lots of noise, but he raised his voice when he said that … excited by spotting this car, he was. That’s what made me take notice. Then he said “pulling it” and I thought he meant the car, but then he says, “a week”. I think it was a week; might have been a month. It was time. It made me see he wasn’t talking about pulling a car. Different sort of pulling.’
Larry had been in full flow, delighted to have someone show interest in his old tales. ‘I can see his face now,’ he’d said. ‘Smile as wide as the Frome. That’s why I had a good dekko, the way he jumped when he saw it. I thought I was going to see something special.’
When Ahmed asked him to look at photographs of cars the vibe had changed. As he’d put a photograph of a Ford Tempo in front of him, Larry had tensed and shivered, saying, ‘After all this time? How can I remember anything about how it looked on a dark road?’
‘Dark road?’ Ahmed had said. ‘Surely it was in a well-lit pub car park.’
Larry Scott had nursed a key piece of information, but he had no credibility as a witness after all these years.
Ahmed pulled his thoughts back to the briefing that was happening around him. All eyes were focussed on Davis and Webber at the far end of the room. He allowed himself to stretch and surrender to an extravagant yawn, familiar patterns running past him as he tipped his head – the busy office walls with their notices thumbtacked haphazardly, the flaking paint of the ceiling, down again as the yawn subsided, catching sight of a whole new set of pictures on the big board, the gravel pits from the air – what was that about?
Through the crowd, he met the narrowed eyes of Suzie Harmer giving him a hard stare. He pulled himself upright with a mouthed, ‘Sorry.’
He’d returned to find Suzie on her own with the heap of old files. That was fine because it meant the other enquiry, the real enquiry, was soaking up resources as it closed on Tom’s killer.
He tried to concentrate on what they were saying. No solid suspects, but useful work on reconstructing Tom’s last days … last weeks … his whole time in York. Computer files had a brief mention but someone said something about analysis and changed tack. It depressed him to listen. Tom hadn’t turned a corner. He’d used his opportunity to open the wrong doors. His gaze tracked up and down those aerial shots, the scrubland, the trees, the muddy expanse by the walkway foundation. He waited for Davis or Webber to refer to them, to explain what they were doing there.
‘What do you think, Ayaan?’
Davis’s voice jerked his attention back to the briefing. Suzie was standing now, in the cramped corner that was all they’d been able to carve out for the cold case. They’d moved on from Tom’s murder, the new photographs ignored. Someone had asked Suzie about Morgan. She was going through their suspects list.
‘Uh … yes … no …’ He struggled upright.
Suzie had him pinned with that hard stare but she was helping him out. Her index finger lay across Pamela Morgan’s name.
‘Pamela Morgan’s obviously in the frame.’ He played for time as his brain caught up. ‘But we don’t fancy her for it. No one was looking for alibis at the time, but hers looks pretty solid. She wasn’t in Dorset.’
‘Doesn’t mean she didn’t get someone else to do it,’ Davis said.
‘There’s the suicide,’ Ahmed added. ‘That was odd. Fifteen years later. Could have been bad conscience. But she’s still an outsider.’
‘Will Jones is a better bet,’ Suzie put in. She gave Ahmed a brief glare, then drew attention back to her list ‘And we’ve added big brother post office now we know he was in Dorset at the time.’
Ahmed thought back to Larry’s face when he’d shown him the image on the small screen. It hadn’t been easy to find a picture of a Ford Tempo at all, never mind one that showed up well enough on his phone, but Larry had reacted.
Suzie was outlining it. He made himself concentrate. ‘What we’re thinking,’ she said, ‘is that the overheard phone call was big brother post office pulling the date of the raid forward by a week. It’s a bit of a leap but it fits with what we have.’ Ahmed contemplated their sparse information base. They had so little, it wasn’t hard to fit any theory to it.
‘It’s the timing,’ Suzie went on. ‘The big money in that post office was on a fortnightly cycle. To make sense of hitting it, they should have gone for the week before or the week after. It’s clear from the investigation that the brothers had watched the place. So why hit it when they did? Why go for the wrong week unless something else cropped up, say like the chance of grabbing the perfect getaway car? I know it’s a stretch but now we have this guy in Dorset saying that the brother spotted a car and got excited over it, and it sounds like it was Tippet’s car. That’s right, isn’t it, Ayaan?’
‘He’s hopeless as a witness,’ Ahmed said. ‘He can’t tell what really happened from stories he’s made up over the years, but the car thing was new, something that came back to him when I got him down to the hard facts of what he’d said at the time.’
‘It puts the car in Dorset,’ said Suzie. ‘All we had to start with was the car stolen from Tippet’s drive, then at the post office, then 30 years later in the gravel pit. All within a fairly small radius. This puts it several hundred miles south at the time Morgan was killed. On paper, that car had the best part of three decades to have stuff shoved in its boot. Well … obviously it didn’t. It was dumped soon after the robbery, but without Larry Scott’s story, the brothers could have killed Morgan in Dorset, come back in their own car, nicked Tippet’s to do the raid and shoved the evidence from the murder in the boot.’
As he listened, Ahmed’s eye was drawn again to the aerial photographs of the fishing lakes and surrounding scrubland. The gravel pit where they’d found the car looked smaller from the high angle, picture-postcard pretty, the reflective surface taking away the cold feeling of depth, of darkness. It was a vile place. He shuddered, repelled at the thought of anyone choosing to relax by that stretch of water.
‘… be in later to pick it up. You and Ayaan need to catch her for a word …’
Ahmed’s gaze snapped back to the briefing. Catch who? It wasn’t Suzie who had him under close scrutiny this time. It was Webber. He swallowed against a dry throat. Concentrate.
The briefing was all but over. The real enquiry was revving up to get to work. He and Suzie would be on their own again soon. Someone had asked about Gary Yeatman, the newest name on their list.
‘Turns out he knew Will Jones.’ Webber answered the speaker, but his glance flicked to Ahmed. ‘And he was at school with Pamela Morgan. It gives us a link between Morgan and the animal rights group.’
People stood up to leave. General conversation broke out. Ahmed, staying put, didn’t realise at first that Webber had remained behind. He looked up to meet an unsmiling stare. Webber signalled him across with a jerk of his head.
‘What did you see there, Ayaan?’ Webber pointed at the aerial photographs.
‘Uh … nothing. I was just having a look. I hadn’t seen them before.’
‘You were engrossed in them. Why?’
Ahmed could only shrug. ‘They give me the creeps. There’s something not right about them.’
‘What? What’s not right?’ Webber’s stare bored into him.
Ahmed cleared his throat and struggled to articulate the unease with which the pictures filled him. ‘They look so … so peaceful, so quiet. But some bastard buried Tom alive in the middle of that lot. I was wondering how anyone could think of fishing where something like that had happened.’
‘Hmm.’ Webber fixed him with a look as though checking that he was hiding nothing, then he seemed to lose interest, his stare turning to the photographs.
Ahmed watched the movement of Webber’s eyes as they tracked up and down, back and forth. He glanced again himself. He’d heard about the letter from the psychic. Vortex of evil. It would make a good label for this collection.
Chapter 26
It was mid-afternoon. The monochrome gloom from outside let in a premature dusk on which the overhead lights could make no dent. Ahmed screwed up his eyes and fought a series of yawns. Trying to pull sense from a set of documents had never felt such an uphill struggle. He’d given up trying to skim the text for general meaning. His brain simply wasn’t taking anything in. But he was determined to get another piece of the Morgan jigsaw in place. There were pearls buried in this avalanche; there had to be. But not only had he to find them, he had to avoid missing them. Swimming into focus in front of his eyes, he saw yet another account from someone who had been caught in the 30-year-old net following the release of the tigers.
Before he could fix his concentration on it, the sound of footsteps caught his attention. Voices approached from down the corridor. He sat upright. Any interruption was welcome.
It was DI Davis and Suzie with a tall blonde woman he’d never seen before. Her tailored suit marked her as an outsider, but she had an air of someone in familiar surroundings. Davis peeled off, and it was just Suzie and the woman who entered.
‘Since you’re here anyway,’ Suzie was saying, ‘we thought we’d grab a word.’ She led the woman to a table stacked with photographs; 30-year-old crime scene shots and the newer ones of the Dorset warehouse taken by the woman from forensics who’d gone down there without Webber’s permission. This must be her. Ahmed stood up and offered his hand. ‘Ayaan Ahmed. I was in Dorset myself yesterday.’
She returned the handshake but all her attention was on the pictures as Suzie spread them out. ‘I doubt there’s anything I can tell you that wasn’t in my report,’ she said.
There will be, thought Ahmed, there always is, and sure enough it popped out almost at once. In response to Suzie saying, ‘Contemporary photos don’t go that far towards the rear of the space, presumably because they thought everyone had come in through the front, but we’re now assuming they backed the car through that entrance and dumped the body.’
‘Well, no, they couldn’t have,’ the woman said. ‘It wasn’t there. There’d have been no access back then.’
‘Are you sure? It doesn’t look new.’
‘No, it’s not new, but it wasn’t there 30 years ago.’
Ahmed flicked through the paperwork and pulled out the floor plan of the warehouse. ‘This is what we have.’ He pointed to the boundary lines. ‘That’s the original and the blue lines are where it’s had extra walls put in over the years.’
The woman looked at the plan, then reached for one of the photographs. ‘That’s the wall there. You can see where it was knocked through. Look at that RSJ. That’s no more than 25 years old, tops.’
Ahmed exchanged a glance with Suzie. Her fixity of expression matched his own annoyance. He hated wasting time over other people’s carelessness. Why couldn’t the woman have said this in her report? Why wasn’t it obvious from the floor plan? Why hadn’t the case notes been explicit? Were they all supposed to be specialists in building materials now?
‘Let’s run through it again,’ Suzie said. ‘We want to be clear. They found tracks from the lorry with the tiger cage round the front. The tigers were released into that small annexe. And they reckoned everyone bar Robert Morgan had arrived in the lorry.’
‘How was he supposed to have got there?’ the woman asked.
Suzie rolled her eyes. ‘If only someone had really thought that through at the time. It seems certain he was in Wetherby earlier in the day. He could have caught a train down there. He didn’t take his car. Who knows? The assumption was that he’d climbed in through the other side, but couldn’t get back that way because the tigers trapped him.’
‘But of course we now know he didn’t get in there under his own steam,’ Ahmed put in. ‘There were car tracks round the back.’ He pointed to the plan. ‘That was the off road parking for the place when it was in use.’
Suzie tapped her finger on the floor plan where the woman had identified the likely starting point for the gruesome feeding frenzy. ‘Now we know he didn’t walk in, we’re working on the theory that he was dumped right there, but if they didn’t back a car in and tip him out of it, how did they get his body to that spot?’
Ahmed looked at the drawing, trying to see it in 3-D. ‘If there was no vehicle access, then either he came on the lorry with the rest of them or he was taken round the back.’ He paused as he thought of the reams of statements and reports. ‘Simplest scenario seems to be that he was with the gang on the lorry. Did they kill him? Was there some kind of accident and they left him to the tigers? It was a very basic tractor unit. They were all crammed in the cab. There wasn’t anywhere else.’
‘What are you getting at?’ asked Suzie.
‘If he was on the lorry, alive or dead, then they all knew about it.’
Suzie frowned. ‘But they didn’t. I’m sure they didn’t know about him, not all of them. Does that mean they weren’t all on the lorry? Did some of them get to the warehouse some other way? In a car that parked round the back maybe.’
‘So was Morgan in the car or on the lorry?’
‘If you wanted to dump a body in that place, where would you go?’
‘Round the back, for sure,’ said Ahmed. ‘Much more discreet. And you know what else, I’d have dumped him right there in that car park. It’s out of the way, deserted, no one’s going to find him for ages.’
‘Or you might carry him inside the offices at the back,’ put in Suzie. ‘Then it’ll be even longer before he’s found.’
‘They checked the office space,’ the woman said. ‘There was no forensic trace. He hadn’t been in there.’
‘No, but there were tracks,’ Ahmed said. ‘And marks across the floor inside. The place was criss-crossed with tracks. It had been a warehouse not so long before. Stuff carted back and forth. They thought Morgan had been alive so they weren’t looking for signs of a body being carried in.’
‘But how can you know?’ the woman said.
‘Balance of probabilities,’ said Suzie. ‘We have to look at what fits and what doesn’t. There are several reasons to think he wasn’t brought in on the lorry, so that leaves a car, and of course a car could get round the back. What do you think? They’ve got him wrapped up in the boot. They get a wheelbarrow or something and take him through the offices at the back and to the point where the tigers found him soon after.’
‘How about he’s alive in the car,’ said Ahmed. ‘They kill him in the car park and wrap him in the sheet to avoid leaving traces while they wheel him inside.’ The woman looked from one to the other of them. Ahmed could see she thought the debate pointless. They would never find hard evidence for any of this, but they’d known from the start there would be no smoking guns to find or confessions to hear at this distance in time. ‘The point is,’ he told her. ‘They didn’t leave him in the office, they carted him all the way through. If that vehicle access wasn’t there, that’s a really odd place to leave the body.’
‘So why would they do it?’
‘Because there were three doors between those offices and the warehouse,’ Suzie told her. ‘If they’d left him in the back, the tigers couldn’t get at him. They knew.’
‘Knew about the tigers?’ the woman queried. ‘Was
n’t that clear anyway?’
‘It was always a possibility, but it’s good to see it supported by a scenario that stands up.’
‘Does that mean it was deliberate on the part of the group who released the animals?’
‘It’s starting to look that way. Whoever dumped the body knew the detail of the scheme. Morgan was killed down there or very nearby. Someone went into the heart of that warehouse to dump the body and they did it just before the tigers arrived. You wouldn’t want to get that timing wrong and find yourself face to face with a big cat.’
‘Best way to be sure,’ Ahmed said, ‘is to have your mates hold off with the tiger cage until you’re safely out again. The car boot was protected by that sheet. They drag him out and into some kind of barrow, wheel him through leaving no forensic trace in the office space. They’ll have tipped him out, and run for it.’
‘If they’d dumped him still wrapped in the sheet,’ the woman said, ‘we’d have had no evidence at all.’
Ahmed exchanged the ghost of a raised-eyebrows glance with Suzie. Take these techie types outside their comfort zone and they hadn’t a clue. ‘I’m no zoologist,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think tigers eat thick plastic sheeting.’
The exchange invigorated Ahmed. Pieces were falling into place. The lab woman wandered away to look at the aerial photographs of the gravel pits as he and Suzie batted scenarios back and forth; scenarios that had begun to lean towards Will Jones and Gary Yeatman.
It was Suzie’s glance that alerted Ahmed. He turned to follow the line of her gaze and saw Webber in the doorway. Webber’s face wore the same intent stare he’d turned on Ahmed following the morning’s briefing. The focus of his attention this time was the lab woman who was leaning forward to peer at the same pictures. They watched as her finger reached out to trace a line across two interlocking images.
‘What is it?’ Webber had stepped behind her.
She didn’t answer at once, but kept her contact with the surface of the print. When she spoke, her tone was hesitant. ‘It’s odd. Isn’t that …? I’m not sure. Do you have this in close-up?’
