One Last Lesson

by Iain Cameron

  ‘True, but you seemed to know Sarah well, you singled her out.’

  ‘I object to that comment, Detective Sergeant,’ his brief said. ‘That is your interpretation of what took place.’

  ‘I apologise Mr Conner. I’ll rephrase. From the CCTV pictures, the facts are that as Sarah came closer to the club entrance,’ she said pointing at one picture, ‘you walked away from your station and spoke directly to her, which you can see on this picture.’

  Ferris turned and whispered something to his brief.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Yeah, I knew her name, but only her first name. I’ve spoken to her a few times outside and inside the club and sure I fancied her, who wouldn’t, but no, I’ve never gone out with her or kissed her or anything of that.’

  There in that comment, was the nub of the case against him. Did they believe he knew Sarah well or not? If he knew her intimately, it was possible that a lover’s tiff had ended tragically and Ferris would have a hard job wriggling out of that one. It was now up to Walters to probe and poke and find out if there were any inconsistencies in his story and to her credit, she spent the next fifteen minutes doing exactly that.

  ‘So,’ she said in summary, ‘we seem to have moved from the point where you told us that you didn’t know Sarah very well, to now admitting that you did know her and in fact, you were really quite good mates.’

  ‘I object to your implication, Sergeant Walters my client did not say that, he barely knows her.’

  ‘Barely, knows her?’ she said rounding on him. ‘Where were you these last few minutes? Mr Ferris told us, and we have it on tape, that Sarah Robson approached him one night when she had lost her handbag and after a search, he found it. She was very grateful, he said and later that night, they sat down for a drink together. He also said that every time she came into the club she made a point of seeking him out to say hello. I don’t call that hardly knowing her, do you?’

  ‘Even still, it does not establish a strong relationship between my client and Miss Robson,’ Conner said, his face a mess of emotions as he tried not to lose it.

  ‘Mr Ferris, why didn’t you tell us all this before?’

  ‘Oh, I dunno. I was gutted when I realised it was her that was killed. I liked her, I did but I didn’t want to get involved, you know?’

  ‘Do you know any of her flatmates?’

  ‘Yeah, I know them. Jo and Nicole come clubbing as often as Sarah does.’

  ‘What about Francine?’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve met her.’

  Walters leaned forward. ‘How do you know her then Mr Ferris, Francine doesn’t like to go clubbing?’

  Henderson’s concentration was broken when his phone rang and when returning to the interview observation room ten minutes later, the mood had changed. Ferris looked defeated and he knew by that look on Walters’s face that she believed she’d now got her man.

  Conner called for a comfort break and a few minutes later, Walters made her way into the observation room.

  ‘Well done Carol, you really blew a hole through a wall of lies and ambiguity.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. What do think?’

  ‘A few things still bother me. It was Ferris who discovered the body and we’re still not sure where he was when Louisa was murdered. But don’t forget, even though he lied about knowing Sarah and they might even have been regular sex partners, it still doesn’t mean he killed her. We need to move it to the next level; why would he kill her, what’s his motivation?’

  ‘For the first one, I’m sure we can get a criminal psychologist to testify that its normal behaviour for people like him to report the killings they’ve done and in any case, if the body was found by someone else, we would have knocked on the door of his cottage eventually, living so close to the golf course and all. Maybe he was just trying in a dopey sort of way to put a little spanner in the works to try and deflect us.’

  ‘He’s certainly done that but look, if he did it, why did he pick her up in Brighton and then dump her body two hundred yards away from his house? It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Maybe he was taking her back to his place for a night of sex and something went wrong.’

  ‘That’s plausible but we’ve searched his house and found nothing there belonging to Sarah.’

  ‘Maybe they were doing it in his car.’

  ‘We haven’t searched his car, have we?’

  ‘No, he’s been away in Yorkshire all this time.’

  ‘Damn.’

  ‘On your second point, about where he was when Louisa was killed, we’ve asked him for receipts but he said he chucks them away. Like a lot of builders I know, he doesn’t use a credit card only cash.’

  ‘That’s an important point. If he can’t produce them we’ll need to analyse the cameras on the M1 or A1 and see if we can spot his car and interview people in Scarborough and check the town cameras to make sure he was there.’ He sighed. Why couldn’t these things ever be simple and straightforward?

  ‘Ok but does that mean…’

  ‘Hold on. It would be easy to say ‘yes’, go ahead and charge him and after that last phone call, even Harris believes it was him, but I’m going to need more than circumstantial evidence and gut-feel before I’ll feel confident it’ll stand up in court.’

  ‘I thought you might say that.’

  ‘Let me sum up my reservations for you. You’re suggesting that Mike Ferris left Havana Bay at three in the morning and headed home and Sarah, who left almost an hour before, was waiting for him somewhere. He stops and gives her a lift and they drive back to Mannings Heath. On the way there, they stop at a lay-by beside the golf course and have sex and either because it was premeditated or something goes wrong, he turns violent and kills her.’

  ‘Yep, that’s about the sum of it.’

  ‘Oh, and I forgot to say, the next morning he has a pang of conscience or something and so he rings up and tells us where to find her body. So his motive is what?’

  ‘That he can’t control his temper and he wants rough sex but she doesn’t.’

  He paused, thinking. ‘It sounds plausible but it’s all so…so circumstantial.’ An idea suddenly popped into his head. ‘We’ve spent all of our time looking for Sarah on CCTV footage, but what we should be looking for is Ferris’s car. What does he drive?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘Ask him when you go back in, the make, model and colour and if he went home alone or if he was giving someone else a lift. If we can find his car in that area, if he indeed went home the same way as Sarah, and not through Hove or along the seafront, maybe we can also identify how many people were in the car. If that doesn’t square with what he’s already told us, that’ll be yet another lie and a good reason to hold him in the cells.’

  ‘She could have lying down in the back seat, her head full of drink or drugs.’

  ‘Carol, you’re highlighting a problem that hasn’t surfaced yet. After you’ve taken a look at these CCTV pictures, let’s see what we know and what we don’t.’

  ‘Ok.’

  ‘It’s a bit late to have his car checked, I suppose.’

  ‘It’s been nearly a month.’

  ‘Nevertheless, we will need more than we have already to take him to court. Pull it in and have it checked and if we find the slightest sliver of Sarah’s DNA, I’ll be a happier man. Do the CCTV check, re-interview his colleagues at Havana Bay and delve more into his relationship with Sarah by talking to her flatmates.’

  ‘Right sir.’

  He paused for a moment, thinking. It was one of the oldest conundrums in the detective manual and one faced by dozens of coppers every week. Was it better to let a man like Ferris run free, safeguarding his human rights while the police gathered evidence against him, running a risk that he would do a runner or kill again; or to charge him with the crime and continue gathering evidence and face the possibility of public humiliation in the press and a likely damages claim for wrongful imprisonment if they had arrested the wrong man
. It was a difficult decision but his mind was already made up.

  ‘Your ten-minute coffee break is well and truly up, DS Walters. Go back in there and find out what we want to know and if you don’t get satisfactory answers, charge him.’

  ‘Right sir.’

  He returned to his office surprisingly subdued for a man who had just arrested someone for the rape and murder of two women, but the nagging doubts would not go away. After first trying to inject a little spark of enthusiasm into his voice, he called up various members of the team out in the field and his boss and told them the news and then began to work on compiling a profile of Dominic Green.

  He walked into the Murder Suite for the de-briefing meeting at six, holding a pile of papers. There was loud cheering, clapping and self-congratulation from everyone as he walked across the floor, but they could tell by the look on his face that he wasn’t happy and the celebration didn’t last long.

  ‘As you know,’ he said to the happy campers, ‘we now have Mike Ferris in custody but I must tell you, and this is not to be leaked to the press from this room under any circumstances, I am not one hundred per cent sure of his guilt.’

  There were murmurs of dissent as they saw a celebratory booze-up down the pub evaporate like warm breath on a cold night. He raised a hand to quieten them. ‘Even if it is subsequently proved that Ferris is guilty and I am forced to hang my head in shame and eat one of DS Hobbs’s hats as penance, we would be remiss and unprofessional if we didn’t tie up all the loose ends.’ In comparison with an unfunny comedian at the Edinburgh Festival, he was ‘dying’ as the response he was getting from his audience was zilch but like a true pro, he ploughed on regardless.

  ‘I am distributing amongst you a list of names, which I want two-man teams to interview. These are either people that have voiced their displeasure at Dominic Green in the past and may still hold a grudge against him or a subscriber to his academic-babes web site with a serious criminal record.’

  ‘Are there any names on both lists?’ asked DC Bentley.

  ‘An interesting point Phil, yes there are two.’

  ‘Surely,’ DS Wallop said, ‘all we need to do is compare the names on these lists with the register of members at the West Hove or Mannings Heath Golf clubs and we would be home and dry?’

  ‘The guy we’re looking for may be a former member or possibly not even a member at all, but someone that likes golf courses or,’ he said thinking of Mike Ferris, ‘someone that lives beside one. But no, there are no quick fixes. We’re doing this the old-fashioned way and in any case, face-to-face interviews usually throw up little gems of their own.’

  After the meeting, they crowded into cars and headed down to a pub in the centre of Brighton called the King and Queen. Uncharacteristically, as he liked nights like these when everyone was intent on having a big blowout, whether they had the right man in custody or not, he took the car as he was only staying for one drink as it didn’t feel right to be celebrating when in his view, the investigation wasn’t over and he wanted to go over to Hove and check on Rachel.

  With a cool pint of Sussex Best in his hand, he was standing with Gerry Hobbs and Harry Wallop and listening to their banter about Brighton and Hove Albion. While he was a copper with Strathclyde Police, he spent eighteen months in the Football Intelligence Unit, scanning CCTV pictures of fans at Ibrox Park, Parkhead and Hampden, trying to identify trouble hot-spots and see if he could spot well-know troublemakers that were banned from attending matches by the courts. Even though he could claim attendance at many big matches, cup games, league deciders and internationals, he often didn’t have a clue how the game ended or how well or badly the teams played, as invariably he didn’t get much chance to watch the game.

  Before leaving the pub, he received a call from Chief Inspector Harris. Details of Ferris’s arrest were passed up the line and the Assistant Chief Constable and Chief Constable were delighted and sent their congratulations. However, their mood would change in an instant if they knew over twenty officers were still working on the case, as he had been instructed to dismantle the team and allow everyone to move back to other duties. He wouldn’t do that, couldn’t do that and at the risk of being severely censured or fired, he needed to keep them together to find the person he really believed in his heart, was responsible for both killings.

  THIRTY

  At Beddingham, they turned off the A27 and headed south towards the sea. From a distance, the waters of the English Channel sparkled and danced invitingly in the morning sunlight, the tops of waves looking like tiny water nymphs diving in and out of the water but alas it was an illusion. When they moved closer, they could see it was grey, choppy and cold with a biting wind that rocked the car as much as the boats at anchor they could see in the distance.

  ‘I didn’t know passenger ferries ran from here,’ Walters said as they passed a road sign bearing the symbol of a boat.

  ‘Carol, how long have you lived in Sussex?’ Henderson said.

  ‘Five, no six years but I rarely come down to this neck of the woods.’

  ‘You mean, you can never get out of bed in time to join any operations down here because in the last couple of years, I can tell you there’s been plenty.’

  ‘I was wondering when you were going to get around to that. You managed to hold your piece for at least fifteen minutes. A woman could never do that.’

  ‘Why do I always have to wait for you? Your neighbours all wave in sympathy as they think I’m your ex-husband, waiting in the car until you send down the kids. Don’t you own a bloody alarm clock?’

  ‘If I still had all the alarm clocks I’ve owned over the years, I could start a shop. At present, I own three and I must have gone through another ten in the last year.’

  ‘Three? Do any of them still work.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What have you done to the others?’

  ‘They were all smashed into a thousand pieces by an irate non-morning woman who objects to being woken up at an ungodly hour by an infuriating alarm noise or some prat of a happy-clappy dj going on about the great programme he watched on telly last night.’

  ‘There must be a positive use for all that energy and anger but I just can’t think of it as yet.’

  ‘Where do the ferries go?’

  ‘To Dieppe, in northern France.’

  ‘I suppose you know all that from sailing.’

  ‘It's certainly something you need to know if you’re sailing around here as it’s not a good idea to bump into one of these things when you’re out for a leisurely sail as one whack from one of their big propellers and my little boat would be smashed into a million pieces.’

  She was just about to say something when the lady in the sat-nav unit piped up and ordered them to go left. He made the turn and seconds later the electronic voice said: ‘you have reached your destination.’

  ‘Is this where he lives, this retired rapist of little girls, among the bungalows and chalets of the retired and less affluent residents of Newhaven?’

  ‘It wasn’t what I was expecting either to be honest,’ he said as he pulled up outside number twenty-seven, ‘it looks too normal, too suburban somehow.’

  After parking the car close to the house, there were no restrictions here, unlike Brighton where they were growing like mushrooms and making residents feel the local council hated cars, they walked to the front door and rang the bell. Unlike many of the houses nearby which were fitted with wooden-framed doors with large areas of glass, the door of Gregor Lewinski’s house was made of thick oak and looked substantial enough to withstand a siege of Visigoths when they were finished sacking Rome.

  A few seconds later, the curtains twitched and Henderson held up his ID card close to the glass for him to see. If he was being mean, he could have shouted, ‘Police’ loud enough to be heard through the double-glazing, but they wanted this man’s cooperation, not to piss him off and have his neighbours coming round tonight with flaming torches and pitchforks.

&n
bsp; A bolt unlatched, then a dead lock and then a Yale lock before the door finally opened. Small, balding, bespectacled and below average weight, he was Henderson’s idea of a science teacher or the officious council official that occasionally showed up at the shops in the Seven Dials area where he lived to warn the Turkish grocer about littering the pavement with his fruit and vegetable boxes. This innocuous attribute was used to good effect, in what they all hoped was a former life, to lure young schoolgirls into his car before raping them.

  He was called The Rover Rapist, not because he moved around the country but because he drove that particular make of car. He was active for five years and was caught when the story was splashed all over the nationals, his photograph was stuck up on every police station wall and a large manhunt was launched to find him. Naturally, he had aged in the ten years since that infamous mug shot but despite the fading hairline and a multitude of little wrinkles, he was still easily recognisable.

  ‘Good morning Mr Lewinski, I am Detective Inspector Henderson and this is Detective Sergeant Walters of Sussex Police. We’d like to talk to you.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘I’m sure you would rather we have this discussion inside the house rather than out here on the doorstep as you never know who’s listening,’ he said, nodding towards the house next door where he could see an old lady watching them through the window.

  ‘I suppose so. Come in.’

  He pointed the way into the lounge and they heard the door being closed and bolts and locks being applied. In contrast with the staid, strait-laced look of the road outside, the room was bright and modern with light coloured IKEA-style furniture, wooden flooring and a large LCD television hanging on the wall. The officers parked themselves on the grey, corded settee while Lewinski sat down on a straight-backed chair, ignoring the more comfortable-looking padded armchair that was covered in the same material as the settee.

  ‘Having problems with your back Gregor? I noticed you winced when you sat down.’

  ‘Didn’t you read my file? I was attacked in Wakefield Prison by two evil bastards who said they wanted to kill me, they damaged three vertebrae and gave me this,’ he said pointing to an ugly scar on the left side of his cheek.