‘I think it’s the edge of the inside of a bag. An accidental photograph while she was pulling it out in a hurry, maybe?’
‘Looks like it,’ he said.
Black placed the next photo face up on the table. The image was blurred, but it was definitely a shot of the windows of the school from the same vantage point Black had viewed them from the roof. He could make out three of the rooms he had peered at, including the library, the drama room, Keech’s room and the punishment block. There were shadowy figures in each of them. It proved nothing by itself, but it meant they were definitely on the right track. Alice had been up on the scaffolding to take these pictures.
‘I can’t make anything out,’ said Black. He was beginning to fear the pictures had been taken from too far away and the images would reveal nothing of any substance.
The next picture cured him of that fear. He placed it on the table and it was clear that Alice had managed to focus more clearly by zooming in on the relevant window. Beth could make out two figures.
‘That’s the headteacher,’ she said. ‘But who is he speaking to?’
Black didn’t reply, because the second figure was obscured by the window pane.
Beth didn’t have to wait long for an answer. The next picture revealed the identity of the second figure.
‘That’s Keech,’ she said.
‘What’s he doing in there with the head?’
‘Another dressing-down?’ asked Beth. ‘In the punishment block?’
‘Which is usually reserved for children,’ said Black, just as the next image was placed on the table to reveal a third figure. It was young Jennifer.
‘There’s our proof she was with them in the room. That’s what Alice was trying to photograph.’
The last three photographs revealed the truth. Neither of them spoke as Black placed the images on the table one at a time and the reason for Jenny’s presence in the room became self-evident. There was absolute silence for a while until Beth, her voice cracking, said what they were both thinking. ‘That’s abuse.’
Black did not contradict her, because the images were plain enough. ‘Keech is abusing that young girl,’ she went on, ‘right in front of the headteacher, and he’s doing nothing, which means they’re both in it together.’
‘They always have been,’ concluded Lucas. ‘And they’ve been doing it for years.’
51
When they had finished examining the final photographs Black instinctively turned them over, as if banishing the damning images. Then he looked at Beth, who was in a state close to shock.
‘This isn’t going to be easy,’ he told her, and she could tell he was shaken, too, ‘but we owe it to Jenny … and to Alice … to make sure we do the right thing from now on, every step of the way, so we don’t let these two evil bastards off the hook. Can you do that?’
‘Of course,’ she assured him. ‘I’ll stay professional.’
‘Good. So now let’s go over what we know,’ he said. ‘Alice took these photos, then she must have put the camera in her bag. At some point, Keech and Morgan realized she had seen them, so they killed her and took her body away from the school. They dressed Jenny in Alice’s green parka then pulled the hood up over her head, knowing someone was bound to see her leave the school and they could throw everyone off the scent while they got Alice’s body away from there.’
‘And they put Alice’s big floppy bag on Jenny’s shoulder to complete the look,’ said Beth. ‘Not knowing that the camera, with the evidence Alice needed, was in the bottom of that bag.’
‘Jenny played the part of Alice, but not for long,’ added Black. ‘As soon as she was clear of the school and thought no one was looking, she took the bag and the parka and stuffed them into the bin. Maybe she panicked. They would have been found when the uniforms first searched the area, but Harry came along and got to them first. He took the coat and the bag, found the camera in it then sold it for beer money. That’s what we know – but what we don’t know is just as important.’
‘Like what exactly happened to Alice,’ said Beth, ‘and who killed her.’
‘It has to be one of three people.’
‘Three?’
‘Keech, Morgan or Jenny.’ And before Beth could protest, he assured her, ‘I don’t think it was Jenny. My money is obviously on the men, but which one? They both had a lot to lose if they were exposed.’
‘Why would Jenny help them cover this up, though?’ asked Beth. ‘Why help your abusers at all?’
‘It’s complicated,’ said Black. ‘She was being abused, yes, but she probably didn’t see it that way. I’ve seen this before.’
‘You’re not going to tell me she was willing,’ said Beth accusingly, ‘and so that makes it different?’
‘No, I am not,’ he shot back. ‘With a girl that age, it’s always abuse, but men like that are sly. They don’t just take. I’ve seen it, Beth. They pay compliments and give out rewards in return for compliance: money, sweets, alcohol, drugs. Sometimes the victims get confused and think they’re actually in love with their abusers, particularly if their home life is terrible. Her mother is in Spain, remember?’ he said cynically. ‘If no one has shown them any affection or given them anything before, then the abuse can look a lot like love to a confused and damaged young mind.
‘It’s how pimps recruit runaway girls straight off the bus to London. They don’t offer them work as a prostitute, because they know most girls would turn that down. Instead they take them somewhere and buy them a burger and a Coke, offer them a place to crash for the night, listen to their sad stories and introduce them to other girls like them, make them feel loved and wanted. It’s only later, when they’re happy and settled, that they tell them they have to earn their keep by having sex with strangers. Often they don’t realize they’re being exploited until it’s too late.’
‘It would explain Jenny’s complete lack of cooperation,’ said Beth, ‘but how do we get her to tell the truth?’
‘I want you to try.’ He spread his palms in a gesture of surrender. ‘I have to recognize that you are likely to appear less threatening than me in her eyes.’
Beth was torn between her agreement on that and her confusion as to how best to get the truth out of Jenny. ‘How do you think I should play this? What can I say to her that you haven’t already tried?’
‘I think you should show her the photographs.’ And when Beth looked shaken by that he said, ‘Tell her you know everything but you don’t think any of it is her fault. If you lead her in the right direction, perhaps she’ll implicate Keech, Morgan or both of them.’
‘And if she doesn’t?’
‘I hate to say it, but there’s one more tactic you could try.’ He seemed reluctant to reveal it to her. ‘It’s a last resort.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘Tell her that I think she might have done it.’
‘What?’ Beth was shocked.
‘Jenny has had dealings with the police before. Her default position will always be to lie or evade. You have to get her to feel she has something to lose if she won’t tell us what happened. It’s the carrot and the stick,’ he explained. ‘The carrot is that she’ll be treated leniently, as a minor who was groomed and abused by adults. If she tells us what happened to Alice, the courts will likely treat her as a victim, not a conspirator, but that might not be enough.’
‘You want me to tell an abused girl that my colleague thinks she might be a murderer?’ Beth was genuinely shocked. ‘What textbook told you to go down that route?’
‘If it gets her to break free from her abusers and put them both behind bars, then I’ll happily accuse her of the Hatton Garden heist.’
‘We’ll be slaughtered if this gets out.’
‘Maybe.’
‘But the end justifies the means, is that it?’
‘If it’s a choice between this and those two bastards walking free to abuse more young girls, then yes.’
‘And you’ll be able to live w
ith that? You could sleep at night?’
‘I don’t really sleep anyway,’ he told her.
Jenny was back in the police station, her appropriate adult by her side. Beth was about to walk into the room to conduct an interrogation that would make or break the case against Keech and Morgan. She was nervous, tense and terrified of adding any more demons to the number already undoubtedly swirling inside Jenny’s young head.
‘Just be strong,’ Black told her. ‘It’s the only way.’
‘I don’t like this idea,’ said Beth. ‘She’s the victim here.’
‘She absolutely is,’ agreed Lucas. ‘She just doesn’t know it. We have to find a way to get her to realize the truth, and that might involve shocking her. I’m certain she didn’t kill Alice Teale, but she’ll be able to tell us who did.’
‘Maybe they both did,’ said Beth.
‘It’s likely,’ agreed Black. ‘And our best bet with Keech and Morgan is to turn one against the other to see if they break.’
‘At least we can agree on that.’
In the end, and to her immense relief, Beth didn’t need to follow Lucas’s suggestion about threatening Jenny with the status of prime suspect in the murder of Alice Teale so she would break ranks with her abusers.
A solicitor was also present, but things went fairly smoothly when he realized that Beth wanted the same thing he did, the release of his new client, who none of them actually suspected of murder. The photographic images left no one in the interview room in any doubt about the truth of the situation. Jennifer was a victim, not a criminal. She just had to be convinced to tell the truth, which she started to do once the evidence was placed in front of her.
‘It’s not what it looks like.’ Her teak-hard veneer had been stripped away now. She was crying while she tried to defend the two men. ‘I let them do it. They didn’t force me. I let them do what they wanted.’
Beth had to fight the anger and nausea she was feeling as she addressed the young girl in the calmest, gentlest voice she could muster. ‘Okay, Jenny, I believe you, and you’re certainly not in any trouble whatsoever, but it would be very helpful for me if I could understand what happened.’
‘They said I was special,’ sobbed the girl. ‘They told me I was their special girl.’
Beth felt her own heart break a little then. Was that really all it took?
She spent an hour with Jenny before emerging to brief Black. By then, she felt completely exhausted.
‘How did it go?’
‘I didn’t have to do it,’ she said, and he knew she meant the accusation of murder.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘What did she tell you?’
‘Everything.’
Beth went through all the admissions that had seemed to flow from the girl once she had seen the photographs, the most shocking of which concerned the fate of Alice Teale.
‘You were right,’ she told Lucas. ‘They saw Alice watching them from the scaffolding and they panicked. The men both ran out to try and stop her from talking about what she had seen, but Alice had to go back along that wobbly scaffolding, so they moved quicker than she did.’
‘What happened?’
Beth’s ashen face showed him she was coming to that, and he remained quiet so he could listen to her.
‘Jenny says that Keech went up the staircase to the roof first, Morgan followed and she went up last. As she got to the top, she saw Keech sprinting towards Alice to try and grab her. She swears he was just trying to stop her from climbing down and exposing what had been going on, but she was running, he was running, and they came together at speed right on the edge of the building. He grabbed at her, but not strongly enough to hold on to her. She struggled to break free and, instead of restraining her’ – Beth’s mouth had gone dry and she struggled to complete the sentence – ‘he somehow knocked her off the edge. She went over head first.’
Even though they both knew Alice Teale was dead and that she had to have been killed somehow, it was still a shock to hear it described like this. Now they were both able to fully visualize her fate and understand the blunt trauma to her head which had happened before her death. It sickened them.
‘She’s saying it was an accident,’ he asked, ‘or at least that Keech didn’t intend to push her off the edge?’
Beth nodded. ‘Jenny says she knew Alice had to be dead, even without seeing where she landed, because it was so high up there. She says she collapsed then and doesn’t remember what was said to her at first, but Morgan ran around the back of the building.’
‘His car was there,’ said Black. ‘How convenient.’
‘Keech stayed with Jenny and somehow convinced her it was as much her fault as his. They were all in it together and she was still his special girl, so he would protect her from this. That’s why she agreed to wear Alice’s coat when Morgan came back with it and the shoulder bag. She walked off down the path and they all hoped someone would see her leave. Jessica Pearce did see her, but Jenny only saw Rob coming down the path. When he got a close look at her, she panicked. That’s why she stuffed the coat and bag into the bin.’
‘Until it was found by a grateful Harry,’ said Black, ‘complete with the camera and the film with the last pictures Alice took.’
‘It’s heartbreaking,’ said Beth, ‘to think that a young girl could die for that.’
‘And another, even younger one would end up blaming herself. I’ve seen a lot of things in my time and I’ve questioned a lot of bad people, but what these men did ranks very high up with the worst of them. I know you must be exhausted …’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Then are you ready to question Keech now?’ he asked her. ‘Because I am.’
‘Yes.’
‘Let’s nail the bastard.’
52
Keech caved in as soon as he was confronted with the photographic evidence. His shock helped. Until that moment, he hadn’t even known of its existence. Jennifer’s eyewitness testimony, that he had knocked Alice Teale from the roof, opened the flood gates and he admitted it all, but this was far from a complete confession to murder. It had all been an accident, apparently. As Black watched him spill the story, he knew what Keech was doing. The teacher understood he was in big trouble – his career over, his reputation ruined and jail time inevitable for the abuse of that young girl – but now he had entered a different world with even higher stakes, one in which he was trying to avoid the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.
Of course, he blamed Jennifer, who was no innocent in his eyes, even at her tender age. ‘You don’t imagine I was the first, do you?’ he asked at one point, and Black had to forcibly restrain himself from smashing the man’s face into the table, even in front of his solicitor.
Their relationship had been entirely consensual, he explained. Black had to remind him that, at Jennifer’s age, it was irrelevant. ‘Statutory rape is still rape,’ he told Keech. Black also accused him of pushing Alice from the roof deliberately, murdering her, in effect, but he strongly denied this. It had been an accident. A tragedy. He had been trying to grab her and talk some sense into her but they collided and she fell. He had the nerve to tell the detective sergeant that he wished it had been him instead.
He admitted to persuading Jenny to wear Alice’s coat when Morgan brought it back from her body. Jenny was tall for her age. She was virtually the same height as Alice, with similar-coloured hair, but Jenny shouldn’t have panicked and ditched the coat. They didn’t find out she had done that till much later, when it had already been retrieved by Harry, causing them all to panic, though that lessened as time passed and no one mentioned it.
Beth and Black listened to Keech’s outpouring of regret, recrimination, remorse and self-justification. They recorded every word and allowed him to keep on burying himself and implicate Morgan, who he seemed to think had done the decent thing by helping him to dispose of the body of a girl who had been the victim of a tragic accident.
‘Owning up to everythin
g then,’ he said, ‘well, it wouldn’t have brought poor Alice back.’ He explained this as if he had recovered from the shock of the girl’s death almost instantly, before rapidly going into self-preservation mode.
When he had finally finished, Black said, ‘Thank you for that story, about Alice Teale and her unfortunate accident. There’s just one problem with it.’ And when Keech clearly didn’t understand what he meant, Black explained, ‘Alice Teale was still alive after she hit the ground. Her death wasn’t caused by the fall. She might have lived if you had just called an ambulance.’
‘No, that’s not right,’ protested Keech. ‘She was dead.’
‘You saw her?’ asked Black. ‘You checked her vital signs, just to be sure?’
‘No,’ he admitted, ‘but Morgan did. He told us she was dead. He was certain.’
‘Still alive,’ countered Black, ‘according to the pathologist. He confirmed that she didn’t die in the fall.’
‘But I don’t understand …’ sputtered Keech.
‘I do. She was strangled, and that makes this a murder.’
Keech lost it then. He went on rambling his assurance that he didn’t know anything about Alice surviving the fall, how he would have definitely called for an ambulance if he had only known she was still breathing, how he couldn’t have seen the body because Morgan had scooped it up and placed it in the boot of his car then driven it away to Craster so he could throw it into the sea.
Finally, Keech must have realized what had really happened, and he turned on the headteacher completely.
‘He must have been the one who killed her. It was Morgan,’ he said, as if he had only just worked it out now. ‘He must have done it. He killed Alice.’
‘Thanks for that, Mr Keech,’ said Black placidly, ‘but I bet you a pound to a penny that he says it was you.’
In a way, Black was correct about Morgan and his likely denials of murder, but he would have lost his bet. When they interviewed the headteacher he did not try to claim that Keech had strangled Alice or that her fall from the rooftop was fatal or an accident. He tried an entirely different tactic, one that required a staggering amount of nerve. He denied any involvement in it whatsoever and told the detectives that if they thought he was even capable of such a thing, then they were completely deluded. Beth and Black were left with an impression of a man who had anticipated being dragged in for questioning one day, if anything went wrong. He must have practised his rebuttals until he could deliver them word-perfect, with just the right amount of incredulity and indignation to lend them authenticity. Even when confronted with the new photographic evidence, the testimony of Jenny and the partial confession of Keech, he didn’t waver, not even for a second. It was a masterful performance.
Alice Teale is Missing Page 30
