by Ryan Casey
Brian felt something smack against his head. He fell down to the ground, wincing as blood seeped through his fingers.
He looked up.
Bobby was on the roof of the public toilets. He was holding a brick. He looked fucking terrified about what he’d just done.
“You’re gonna regret that,” Brian said. “Seriously.”
Bobby went to swing the brick again.
Brian grabbed his leg and yanked him from the top of that public toilet roof.
He heard a crack when Bobby fell. Bobby squealed and winced as he clutched his shoulder.
Brian crouched over him and pulled out his handcuffs. “My friends’ll be joining us soon. But until then, thanks. Thanks a bunch for giving me a valid reason to arrest you.”
He pulled out Bobby’s hands, which made him scream. His shoulder was clearly causing him some pain. He snapped the cuffs around his wrists and took a deep breath.
“Eye for an eye, shoulder for a shoulder,” Brian said. He lifted his phone and dialled the police. “Yeah. McDone. I’ve got Bobby Wisdom. The creepy little shit’s not running anywhere. Not this time.”
Twenty-Two
If Brian were going to miss one thing when he retired, it’d be the buzz of sitting in an interview room opposite a nailed-on suspect and knowing you were about to interrogate the absolute shit out of them.
The interview room was gloomy and the blinds were turned up, which always seemed to unsettle those being interrogated even more. Being in here was like being detached from the outside world, which was cool when you were sitting where Brian was sitting.
But when you were sitting where Bobby Wisdom was sitting right now, well. It could be a very painful experience.
Bobby Wisdom clutched onto his arm, which was in a brace. Tears filled his eyes. He looked weaker and more broken down than he had when he’d hurt his arm, which said a lot about his guilt. By his side, one of the lawyers, Steffi Hurst, sat, looking incredibly bored more than anything.
“So Bobby,” Brian said. “Sorry about the shoulder, first off. A dislocation’s not pleasant, hmm?”
Bobby shook his head. He didn’t say a thing.
Brian touched the top of his head. Bobby had given him a fair crack with that brick, but it’d barely cut him. His head wasn’t even aching so he would be fine. “I guess I’m the lucky one really. Any harder hit with that brick and you could be in that chair for murdering a police officer, never mind assaulting one.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“Bobby,” Steffi cut in.
“Did you not mean to hurt Elaine Schumer, either?”
“I think that’s a wholly inappropriate question, Detective,” Steffi said. “Don’t you?”
Brian wasn’t meaning to push that line of enquiry too hard just yet. He just wanted to unsettle Bobby from the off. He already looked broken down. If he could mentally break him even more, then maybe they could get this interview wrapped up sooner than planned. “So, Bobby. How long have you worked at Baker’s Inn?”
“Four years.”
“And before then?”
He shrugged.
“Hmm. That’s interesting. See, I have you down on here for a sexual harassment six years prior.”
“That was a mistake. Nothing—nothing happened.”
“And then three years prior to that, indecent exposure in a primary school yard.”
“I was high. It—it was a dark time. I didn’t mean… I didn’t mean any of it.”
Brian smiled at Bobby. “Seems like there’s a pattern though, doesn’t it? A pattern of you saying you did something bad, but you didn’t mean to. How about Elaine? Where does she fall into things?”
Bobby shook his head, his eyes closed. He didn’t say a word. He was well within his rights not to at this stage, but it only pinned him into more of a corner.
“See I know you were following Elaine,” Brian said. He didn’t want to tell Bobby exactly what he had. Sometimes, what you didn’t tell a suspect in questioning played a larger role than what you did tell them. If you could give off that feeling that you knew more than you actually did, it could psychologically snap even the hardest of criminals. “I know you’ve been following her for a long, long time.”
“I never met her.”
Steffi rolled her eyes. Brian saw how annoyed she was that Bobby had broken the “no comment” safety barrier right off the bat.
“You never met her?”
Bobby shook his head. “I never met her. Don’t even know who she is.”
“That’s interesting,” Brian said. “Because Elaine seems pretty certain you met one another. Once at the hotel. Another time when she was at Starbucks a few weeks later. And when she was shopping in Sainsbury’s with her parents, too. Sainsbury’s way, way over in Longridge. What would you be doing over there, Bobby?”
His cheeks started to flush. “I… I…”
“You see, we’ve got evidence that you were following Elaine. And we’ve got evidence that you were following her for a long time. Three months, in fact.”
“You’ve got nothing,” Bobby said.
His tone was nastier now. It had a bite to it.
“You really think we’ve got nothing?” Brian asked.
“All you’ve got is coincidences. All you’ve got is times we bumped into one another. You ain’t got nothing else.”
Brian sighed. “See, that’s where you’re wrong, Bobby.”
He stood up and walked to the other side of the room. He lifted the DVD from the side of the desk and slipped it inside the player.
“Nice job trying to get rid of this,” he said. “You did a damned good job of getting rid of the rest of the CCTV at Baker’s Inn. Just a pity you left this one lying around.”
The colour had drifted from Bobby’s cheeks completely. “No,” he said. “That can’t… It can’t be…”
“Why don’t we just watch and enjoy?” Brian said, pulling over another chair and sitting right beside the television.
The footage was grainy at first, just as they’d found it, in those old abandoned public toilets where Bobby disappeared to. Then it clicked a few times and Brian saw a shadow. Following that shadow and that stuttering, he saw the footage playing in front of him.
“Looking familiar?” Brian asked.
Bobby sat there and shook his head, tears rolling down his face. “Not possible. Not possible.”
Brian turned back to the screen. He watched the empty corridor and waited for the key moment. “This is the night Elaine went missing, by the way. You know, the girl you never met.”
“This can’t be happening.”
“Well it is. And… Oh, would you look at that?”
On the footage, Bobby stood outside the door of Room 479.
“Elaine’s room, apparently. The one she checked into. The last bed she ever lay in.”
On the footage, Bobby looked either side. His hand reached down between his legs, and his teeth sank into his lips. Then he looked up at the camera, as if he knew it was watching.
“Guessing you planned right then to remove the footage, hmm? Probably wise. Although I’d advise you not to scratch your cock in future. Kind of makes your intentions pretty obvious.”
Bobby was as white as a sheet.
On the footage, he looked left and right again a few seconds. Then, after another few looks, he lowered the handle to Elaine’s room and started to creep inside.
“Oh look. That’s you going into the room of the woman you never met. The one who died hours later on this same property. And what’s that in your hand?”
Brian paused the video. He double tapped on the screen, wonderful was technology these days.
“I think that looks like a little bag of LSD, don’t you? Only I just got results back from forensics. We’ve looked a little further into those LSD tabs. They aren’t LSD tabs at all. They’re date-rape drugs.”
Bobby sobbed as he watched himself walk inside Elaine’s room. The door closed, an
d the footage flickered.
Brian fast-forwarded. “Not a lot to see for a while. Fifteen minutes, in fact. And then… Ah. There.”
Bobby walked back out of Elaine’s room. He was sweating. Hell, it even looked like he was crying.
He glanced up at the camera, then he very visibly took a sharp breath, before walking off down the corridor.
In his back pocket, there was a pair of Elaine’s green thongs, which he held on to tightly.
Brian hit the pause button on the footage.
He turned around and walked back over to Bobby. Stood over him.
“So if you’d never met this girl before, why the hell were you in her room with date-rape drugs, and why the hell were you walking out of that room with her underwear, and why the hell was that same girl dead in the water tank just hours later?”
Twenty-Three
“So, Bobby? You got anything to say at all?”
The interview room was totally silent. Outside, Brian could hear the footsteps of fellow officers, but there were no noises at all in here, aside from the occasional snivel. The air was ripe with the smell of sweat, a by-product of all in-depth cross-examinations. Brian’s heart raced, as the adrenaline of what he’d just watched, and what he’d just shown to Bobby Wisdom, coursed through his bloodstream.
“You went into her room and you raped her, didn’t you?”
The community solicitor, Steffi, put a hand on Bobby’s arm. “You don’t have to say a word, Bobby.”
“You went in there and you took her pills out of that container and you replaced them with date rape drugs. Do you realise how foolish a move that is? Did you not think for one moment that she might just realise her pills had changed a little?”
“It’s not how it happened,” Bobby sobbed, ignoring the community lawyer’s requests to keep his silence.
“No? It’s not how it happened is it? Then you tell me how it happened, Bobby. You tell me how it happened right now. Because you’d better believe me when I tell you what’s going to happen. You’re going to go down for the sexual assault of Elaine Schumer.”
“I didn’t touch her!”
“And then you’re going to go down for the murder of Elaine Schumer.”
“I swear to God I didn’t touch her!”
“Then what the hell were you doing in her room all that time?”
“I just… I just went in there ’cause I loved her.”
Brian smiled. He felt himself laughing. “You loved her?”
Bobby looked up at Brian. A totally pitiful expression was pasted across his face. “I loved her. I… I loved her since I first ever saw her. And I just wanted her to know I loved her.”
“So what happened? You kill her in the room?”
“I didn’t kill her.”
“You rape her and it went wrong?”
“I said I didn’t touch her!”
“See at first, I was starting to think the footage we saw from the lift, which wasn’t timestamped by the way, must’ve been after your little encounter. But now I’m not so sure. Now, I’m starting to think Elaine was scared of you all along. That the scene outside the lift, the lift door not closing properly, all that was you fucking with her. And then she went back to her room and you went right in after her.”
Bobby shook his head, but he didn’t look like he had the energy or spirit to fight anymore. “It didn’t happen like that. I swear it didn’t happen like that.”
“Then tell me what happened!”
“Detective,” Steffi said.
Brian’s fists were tensed. He realised he’d shouted a little louder than he’d intended. He couldn’t help it, though. This sicko had raped and murdered Elaine Schumer. An innocent twenty-one-year-old. Then he’d covered up the evidence and had the gall to actually return to work like everything was normal. “Tell me what happened, Bobby. Or it’s all over for you. I swear to God I’ll do everything I can to put you down for this.”
Bobby sobbed some more. After another few moments of sobbing, he wiped his eyes, sniffed up and looked warily up at Brian. “I—I went past her room because I knew she was in there.”
“So you were stalking her?”
“I wasn’t stalking her.”
“You admit you knew Elaine Schumer, and you’d been… well, you’d been keeping a close eye on her for three months?”
Bobby didn’t nod or shake his head. “I liked her since I first met her. I just wanted to get close to her. Just wanted to get close to someone.”
Brian resisted the urge to lay into Bobby and tell him what a sick fucker he was. He needed answers from Bobby’s mouth, and as much as his solicitor insisted otherwise, Bobby was giving him them right now. “So what happened?”
“I heard she was in the hotel. I—I went to her room and I heard the… I heard the shower on. And I guess I just got these images in my head. These images of her I just couldn’t get away.”
Brian tasted sick. “Go on.”
“So I… I went in there.”
“With date rape tabs.”
“I didn’t want to use them.”
“No. You carry them by accident too?”
“I just wanted to see her sleep. That’s all. Nothing nasty. I just… I just wanted to lie beside her and see her sleep.”
Brian’s skin crawled. Steffi, Bobby’s lawyer, looked totally defeated, so she just sat back and listened too, not wasting any of her efforts on defending Bobby right now.
“So I went in there and I guess I planned on saying I’d heard about a dodgy window or something. And then we’d get chatting and have a drink and…”
“You’d poison her.”
Bobby squeezed his eyes shut and grabbed the sides of his head. “Stop saying that!”
“Hey. You’re the one who took the drugs in there. But go on. Anyway.”
“So I… I waited. I looked around her room a bit. And yeah, I took her underwear, but I would’ve given it back.”
“Such a charmer.”
“I was in there a while and it really hit me that the shower had been on ages. And that’s when I heard giggling. And I realised there was someone in there with her.”
Brian narrowed his forehead. “There was… Hang on, what’s this about there being someone else in there?”
“I didn’t see ’em. I mean she could be on the phone to someone, but it made me mad. I was just starting to leave when Elaine came out. She didn’t even have a towel round her. I couldn’t move then. She screamed. I think I made her jump. She told me to get out so I did. I went. Then that’s it. I didn’t see her again. I guess I must’ve taken her panties along with me too. I just wanted to get out there so bad.”
The scream. That matched up with Patricia’s story. “So what happened then?”
“Nothing else happened. I left work early. Figured if anything went wrong, I don’t live far away. Decent job like that.”
“Bullshit.”
“I’m serious. I didn’t do a thing. I didn’t touch her.”
“Then why destroy the CCTV? Why withhold evidence?”
“I destroyed the CCTV ’cause I knew how it’d look. I knew I was doing a bad thing, but I got scared. I just… I just panicked. I couldn’t spend any more time inside. Shit. Shit. I’m gonna go to prison, aren’t I? I’m gonna go to prison?”
For the first time in this entire exchange, Brian actually started to sympathise with Bobby. He was a creep, but weirdly, his story added up. He didn’t want to accept it, but it did. “The other person. The one you say you saw in the bathroom.”
“I didn’t see ’em. I just heard ’em. She was talking to someone for sure.”
Brian gritted his teeth. “If you hadn’t destroyed all the fucking CCTV evidence, we’d know for sure if anyone was in there. Don’t you think it’s awfully suspicious that the only person we have a record of stepping into that room other than Elaine is you?”
“And why the hell would I not destroy that DVD? Why would it be the only one there’s a backup of? Of all
the DVDs I’d destroy, why the hell wouldn’t I destroy that one if I was trying to cover something up?”
Brian wanted to argue with Bobby but he couldn’t. Bobby had a point. Why had that final DVD been preserved? Had Bobby kept it as some kind of sick memoriam of what he’d done? Or was there something else going on here?
Brian was about to ask Bobby more about what he saw in Elaine’s room when the interview room door opened.
DC Annie Sanders stood there with a blushed face. DS Finch was behind her with a smug grin.
“Detectives,” Brian said. “I won’t be long. We’re just—”
“Looks like you were right, Brian,” Annie said. “I take it all back.”
Brian narrowed his eyes. “What about?”
DS Finch slammed down a plastic evidence bag on the table.
In that bag, a pair of green thongs.
Unmistakably Elaine Schumer’s thongs.
“We found these. Only something interesting about them.”
“They’re caked in Bobby boy’s spunk,” Finch said.
Brian grimaced. He glanced up at Bobby. “This true?”
Bobby shook his head. More tears rolled down his face. “I—I might’ve. I might’ve. But I swear I didn’t mean to—”
“What’s more interesting is where we found these beauties,” Finch said.
A bitter taste filled Brian’s mouth as he looked at the underwear, as Bobby Wisdom cried some more. “Where did you find them?”
“On the roof,” Annie said. “Right beside the water tank. The one where Elaine’s body was found.”
She looked around at Bobby. Everyone looked at Bobby.
Bobby’s eyes widened. He glared right at Brian. “Please. This isn’t true. I didn’t put them there. I didn’t—”
Annie snapped the cuffs back around his wrists. “Robert Wisdom, you are arrested on suspicion of murder.”
“No!”
“You do not have to say anything—”
“Please, Detective!” Bobby shouted as he was pushed out of the interview room. “The other person. The other person!”
Brian listened to Bobby’s screams as his fellow officers took him out of the interview room, away to the cells.
