by Gwyn GB
The man stared back at Harrison as he was propelled towards the desk to be checked in. As he got closer, Harrison could see the dilated pupils and needle tracks in his arms. He was still tripping. They’d have to put him in a cell on watch until he’d sobered up enough for them to be able to charge him. A waste of police time and money, but at least he wasn’t on the streets to abuse other people for a while.
The man didn’t take his eyes off Harrison who continued to stare back until he’d been booked in and carted off.
‘Thanks,’ the young black officer said as they disappeared off to the cells with him.
The custody suite had just returned to peace and quiet when the door to the briefing room opened and Gavin’s solicitor came out.
‘My client is now ready to clear up this misunderstanding,’ he said, starting as Gavin’s defence clearly intended to go on.
Gavin wasn’t the same man he’d been back on his home turf. He looked beat and avoided eye contact with both Jack and DC Potter. He said nothing until he had to confirm his name for the tape. Harrison sat in the far corner of the room, watching proceedings. Gavin clearly wasn’t happy about the position he found himself in. The luck of the Irish had well and truly deserted him.
‘Why don’t you tell us what happened on Friday, Mr Simons,’ Jack started.
‘I wanted to speak to Paul, somewhere in private because I was sure I was being tailed by a newspaper reporter after the ketamine ruling. I knew about The Horsemen, his private group. I’d read about the horsehair thing and some of the lads talked about how someone they knew had received one of the invites. All I had to do was send it, follow him, and he’d lead me to where they met. I know he fitted me up for the ketamine. He’d threatened that he was going to report me to race authorities two weeks before, but he had no evidence I’d done anything wrong. So instead, he gave one of my horses the ketamine. I’d already contacted my solicitor about it, but I wanted to confront him.’
‘Why not just talk to him at his cottage?’
‘Because it was his own turf. I wanted to surprise him, show I could find his so-called secret hiding place.’
‘You wanted to scare him? Intimidate him?’ Jack pushed.
‘A little–’ Gavin looked to his solicitor who had shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘I didn’t go there intending to hurt him. Just spook him.’
‘Go on. You sent the invite, then what?
‘I followed him from his cottage. I knew roughly what time he was going to leave so it wasn’t hard.’
‘What happened when you got to the barn?’
‘As soon as we got close, I figured out where he was going and held back so he didn’t realise I’d followed him. By the time I pulled up to the barn, he was already inside. So I went in. He was shocked, course he was, so I confronted him about the ketamine. He denied it, but I knew he wasn’t telling me the truth. Now I’m not going to lie. Things did get a bit heated, and he got spooked. Ran up the ladder to the hayloft. I think his idea was to pull the ladder up so I couldn’t reach him, but he wasn’t strong enough and I stopped him and went up too. I had him trapped then. But I never touched him. He was begging me not to hurt him. Said it hadn’t been him. I said a few words and left.’
‘You left?’
‘Yeah, there was no point carrying it on. He wasn’t going to own up to it. I’d achieved what I wanted to do, which was to scare him. I’m no killer and I didn’t want a GBH charge, so I told him I had his card marked and left. He was alive when I walked out that barn. I swear, I didn’t kill him.’
‘Mr Simons, are you saying that you didn’t lay a finger on Paul Lester? Why would he have run away from you unless he thought you were going to hurt him?’
‘I didn’t kill him. He was alive when I left.’
‘Did you attack Mr Lester?’
Gavin Simons looked to his solicitor.
‘My client has told you what happened, DS Salter. I understand you’re looking for the killer of Paul Lester, that is not my client.’
‘I’m asking if Mr Simons attacked Paul Lester while at the barn?’
‘I’ve told you what happened.’
‘Did you physically attack Mr Lester in any way?’
‘No comment,’ Gavin said, looking defiantly at Jack.
‘Did you try to strangle, Mr Lester?’
‘No comment.’
‘Was anyone else with you at the barn, apart from Paul?’
‘No.’
‘Do you know Sam Brown?’
‘Sam? Yeah, we rent boxes off him occasionally, and he moves our horses around. Why?’
‘Where were you between the hours of 4 p.m. on Sunday afternoon and Monday at 4 p.m.?’
‘Why? What’s this about?’
‘Please, just answer the question, Mr Simons.’
‘At a guess I’d say at the yard. I don’t think I went anywhere.’
‘And can anyone verify that you were there?’
‘Yeah, the staff. I’ll have to double check my diary, but with the race ban thanks to Paul Lester, I’m pretty grounded.’
‘I need you to tell us your whereabouts in those twenty-four hours please and give us names of those who we can ask for confirmation.’
Gavin’s face changed as the reason for the questions dawned on him.
‘Has something happened to Sam?’
‘I’m now terminating this interview. We can reconvene in a few hours after we’ve carried out the basic search of your property and checked your alibi. I expect to have initial results around lunchtime.’
‘No, wait. Has Sam been killed?’
Jack turned off the tape recorder.
‘You’ll be escorted back to your cell, Mr Simons, and we’ll let your solicitor know when we can reconvene this interview.’
Jack had purposely been brusque with Gavin Simons. He wanted to make him sweat, and now that he realised there could potentially be two murder charges coming his way, the stakes were even higher.
After their prisoner had been escorted back to a cell, Harrison, Jack and DC Potter, had a quick debrief.
‘So, what do you reckon?’ Jack asked Harrison, ‘Do you think he could have done it? Is Gavin our murderer?’
‘Well, I don’t think he just had a nice little chat with him, like he’s trying to make out.’
‘No. For sure. Five minutes with him and you can see he’s studied at the school of hard knocks. I’ve sent Gavin’s fingerprints to Dr Marshall, the pathologist, see if he can get any kind of match on the marks around Paul’s neck.’
‘I think we should be looking for more than one man,’ Harrison said.
‘But wasn’t there only one set of footprints at the Fen?’ DC Potter chipped in.
‘Yes, there was. Only one person took Paul’s body there, but I don’t think that’s the same person who strangled him. Fen man, or woman, wasn’t big enough to have overwhelmed him, he certainly wasn’t Gavin’s size. Whoever tried to manually strangle Paul was quite a bit bigger than him. The person who took his body to the Fen was a little heavier than Paul, but not by much, and judging by the length of their strides and the height of the hole in the barn wall, they weren’t all that tall either. All the way along something has not seemed straightforward about this, and I think that’s it. What if Gavin isn’t totally lying? What if he argued with Paul and tried to strangle him, then stopped himself and left him alive? Then after he’d gone, someone else—the peeping Tom—went in there and finished the job, and cut out Paul’s heart? The more I’ve seen of this case, the more I’m convinced we’re looking for two people. We’ve got an attacker, but the killer is still out there.’
27
Harrison, Jack and DC Potter, arrived back in the incident room, just as the first officers returned from the search of Gavin Simons’ house and yard. There was a lot of chatter and joking, spirits were high with the hopes that the enquiry was starting to make some real progress. DS O’Neil was the only man in the room not looking cheerful. His face was
pinched and Harrison could see the tension in his shoulders and neck. He could almost feel sorry for him if it wasn’t for the fiery looks he kept throwing in his and Jack’s direction.
With a good chunk of the team back at their desks, DS O’Neil called a briefing. All those who were there gathered around the incident board for an update. He led.
‘DS Salter has just interviewed Gavin Simons, whose DNA was found on the invite which lured Paul to the location of his murder. Would you give us an update?’
‘Sure. He’s admitted that he sent the invite and followed Paul to the barn where he confronted him, but he claims that he didn’t hurt him and is adamant Paul was alive when he left.’
‘What evidence do we have to bring a charge?’ DS O’Neil questioned.
Jack thought that was the wrong question to be asking. O’Neil seemed to be more concerned about bringing charges than he was about finding the truth—but he didn’t voice that fact.
‘With regard to the murder itself, nothing. I’ve sent his fingerprints over to pathology to take a look at the manual strangulation marks around Paul’s neck. He claims he was at home at the time that Sam was killed and so we’re just getting that checked out now with staff. Do we have a narrower time of death yet?’
‘Yes. Dr Marshall is still in with Sam, but he’s told me that he believes it’s the same killer, and that estimated time of death was between midday and 6 p.m. on the Monday.’
‘Simons seemed genuinely surprised at the mention of Sam’s name, and Harrison thinks we should be looking for a second man in relation to the deaths.’
‘Whoa, second man? But, Dr Lane, you were always adamant that there was just one man.’ DS O’Neil couldn’t hold back the jubilant sarcasm in his voice.
Harrison stood up from the desk he’d been leaning on in order to address O’Neil’s question.
‘I said that there was one man who took Paul’s body to the Fen, and I believe that same man cut out his heart, and murdered Sam Brown. I think he took advantage of a situation caused by Gavin Simons, which left Paul Lester incapacitated. We’ve found evidence that someone has been spying on The Horsemen rituals. We know that the initiation involved various rites and culminated with a mock hanging. After viewing what that person would have seen, I believe the killer thinks members of the group are swearing an allegiance to Satan and are then being hanged. From his viewpoint, he couldn’t see that the hangings were fake. All he saw was the men, in effect, coming back to life.’
‘Are you telling me he thinks they’re zombies?’ DS O’Neil scoffed.
‘Similar. Revenants, the undead. They don’t eat peoples’ brains.’ Harrison replied matter-of-factly and without rising to O’Neil’s tone.
A few of the officers sniggered at that remark, and Jack was impressed that Harrison had managed to crack a joke, although he wasn’t sure it was intentional.
‘OK, but why would Gavin Simons go to these great lengths to lure Paul Lester to the barn?’
Jack spoke now. He could see O’Neil was gunning for Harrison, and so he brought it back to standard police procedure.
‘Paul found out that Gavin Simons is using, what he considered to be, dangerous methods to get the racehorses to perform at their best. He threatened to tell the race authorities if Simons didn’t stop. Next thing Gavin knows, he’s being hauled up after officials found ketamine in one of his horses. He swears that was nothing to do with him and he thinks Paul framed him. He wanted to confront him about it, and almost certainly wanted to scare the living daylights out of him so needed to do it somewhere secluded. Gavin’s the type who would take an argument outside and sort it the old school way.’ Jack said.
‘Gavin reasoned that by humiliating Paul in a place that he thought nobody knew about, it would belittle him.’ Harrison added, ‘Make his secret society a mockery, invade his privacy. He’d already intimated what he thought about The Horsemen to us in a previous conversation.’
O’Neil scowled.
‘Sir, I might be able to help with the ketamine,’ a female detective spoke up. ‘I’ve just come back from searching Simons’ house. We had to return because we arrested one of his staff, a stable lad, for possession of ketamine. I think he’s a heavy user, showing signs of bladder damage, could barely make it to the station he needed a pee so bad.’
‘Sir, there was that case last year where a stable lad peed in a horse’s stall after taking cocaine the day before.’ One of the uniformed officers said. ‘It soaked into its hay bedding, the horse ate it, and then tested positive for cocaine at its next meet. It’s not just happened the once either.’
‘So, Gavin Simons was probably angry at the wrong man,’ DS O’Neil said, his brain finally catching up with the facts.
‘I presume you didn’t find the hearts?’ Harrison asked the female detective. She shook her head.
‘If you’re right, then we’re no closer to finding the killer.’ DS O’Neil looked at Harrison, almost triumphantly.
‘I have some ideas,’ Harrison replied.
‘Ideas don’t make convictions. We have Gavin Simons’ DNA on the invite, that’s evidence he was involved somehow.’
‘Yes, physical evidence can’t be wrong DS O’Neil, but the interpretation of it is what leads to misunderstanding and an incorrect summation.’
‘What’s that mean? That you can ignore police procedure because you’ve got a gut feeling about something?’ O’Neil was getting angry now at being challenged publicly by Harrison. He’d already got egg on his face from Alex Michaels, now the outsider from London, who wasn’t even a trained police officer, was questioning him in front of his colleagues again.
Harrison saw the large vein in DS O’Neil’s neck bulge and twitch as his blood pressure rose.
‘No. Intuition transfers your own biases and prejudices onto the situation. It’s based on your own experiences which might have no relation whatsoever to the killer’s or the victim’s.’
‘Thanks for the psychiatry lesson, but what exactly are you trying to say here?’ O’Neil planted his feet wider, a man positioning himself for confrontation.
‘I’m saying that we need to put ourselves into the mind of the killer and work out why he’s behaving in this way.’
‘So you’re going to be a shrink to an invisible man. Surely he’s doing it because he wants to. Simple. What’s the point of trying to work out why he’s behaving the way he is?’
‘No, DS O’Neil, psychiatrists are probably the only medical experts who never actually look at the organ they’re trying to treat. Cardiologists and orthopaedic doctors do, but psychiatrists can’t see the root cause of a problem. It’s the behaviour of somebody that leads them towards understanding what’s happening inside the brain and finding the why. This man is obsessive-compulsive. He is highly suggestive to ritualistic and religious stimuli. He’s scared. He probably believes he’s protecting himself and those around him. Chances are there’s something in his past which has created this kind of behaviour. Occasionally, but very rarely, it’s because of a physical brain abnormality such as a tumour. So, you see, we can’t perceive the issue. He could be standing in this room right now and you wouldn’t know, but his behaviour would eventually give him away.’
‘You’ll be arresting one of us next then! Well, we have a police investigation to undertake.’ DS O’Neil almost spat through clenched jaws, ‘We don’t need any more head doctor talk. Back to work everyone. What we do need is more hard evidence so that we can catch a killer, or charge the man we already have locked up.’
DS O’Neil shot a look of disdain at both Jack and Harrison before walking back to his desk.
‘That went down well,’ Jack muttered to Harrison. ‘Maybe hold back on the psychiatry lesson next time?’
Harrison ignored his last remark.
‘We need a quick word with Gavin, and then I’d like to go back to Paul’s cottage. When I was last there, it was difficult for me to concentrate. That’s where the trail starts.’
28
Gavin Simons didn’t look overly pleased to see Harrison and Jack. He’d been lying on the metal bed—if you could call the steel shelf of the holding cell that—eyes closed and arms clasped across his chest like a mausoleum carving. As they entered his cell, he turned his head to give them a look of contempt and then resumed the same sleeping position.
‘Mr Simons, we wanted to inform you about a development following the search of your property,’ Jack started.
‘Development?’ Gavin sat up and spun his legs round to face them, seated. ‘Does that mean you’re letting me out? Come to your bloody senses?’
‘No Mr Simons, you are still a person of interest in our enquiry.’
Gavin growled.
‘If someone has planted evidence…’
‘It’s related to the reason you’re here,’ Jack continued. ‘And it’s connected to one of your staff.’
The angry attitude was instantly replaced with an attentive one.
‘My staff? You’re not saying one of them…’
‘Lewis Moffat has been arrested for possession of a sizeable amount of ketamine, which he said is for personal use.’
‘Lewis! Ketamine.’ Gavin’s mouth hung open.
‘We think that Lewis may have been the cause of your recent racing ban. He has issues with his bladder because of ketamine abuse, he can’t go for long periods without needing a toilet. He has admitted to relieving himself in the horse stables at times, and we think this could have then been transferred to the animal via its bedding.’
Gavin swore and jumped up from his seat, thumped the wall, and then swore again. He paced up and down the small cell before spinning back round to face the two men who had stood silently watching him.
‘So, it wasn’t Paul who drugged the horse?’
‘We can’t say that for sure, but based on what Lewis has told my colleagues, it doesn’t look likely, no.’
