He Knows Your Secrets
Page 32
This room was brightly lit. A young woman stood in the middle in just her underwear. She was sobbing quietly. She looked over at him with mascara smeared down her cheeks. Her feet were pushed into black boots that looked far too big.
‘You Libby?’ Harry demanded, his throat tight, the words squeezed out.
She jerked a nod.
‘Anyone else in here with you?’
She shook her head.
‘Where did they go?’
She nodded over towards a window. A long radiator ran underneath a net curtain that fluttered in the lightest of breezes. He moved further into the room, his gaze swinging left then right, his baton still raised and ready. He could see no one else. He paced to the window. It was sufficiently wide open for anyone to climb out. He snapped a radio from his belt, pressing his emergency button to interrupt whoever else was talking on the airwaves.
‘Whisky Alpha one-one, this is a call for assistance. We have persons making off on the Canterbury University grounds. We are just short of the Gulbenkian Theatre in accommodation block J. I need search officers, a dog and a helicopter.’ Harry lowered his radio. The girl was staring at him with eyes so wide it didn’t look like she would ever blink again.
‘Did Freddie do this?’ he said. ‘Was he here?’ She jerked another nod. Harry was back on the radio. ‘Male is believed to be Freddie Rickman. Please circulate his last custody image to all attending officers. And, Control, we’re going to need ambulances on the hurry up.’ He looked back over at the girl as excited voices were already streaming back through his handset. He twisted to turn them down.
‘Come with me.’
* * *
Maddie pulled her finger away from the man’s neck. She had lingered longer than she needed. She already knew he was dead. His mate was faring better. She could tell that from the moaning. She had handcuffed him to a thick, metal pipe that fed the radiator. She had needed to drag him a metre or so to manage it. There had been no blood on the carpet when she had secured him. Now it was pooling round his hip. He was lying on his side and facing away. She squatted down over him.
‘Can you hear me?’ She only got a moan in response. He didn’t resist when she rolled him onto his back. It was easy enough to survey him for injuries, given that he was naked. There was an obvious puncture wound in his gut but nothing else that she could see. She had picked the knife up off the floor when Harry had forced Kelly to drop it. It had a four-inch blade, more than enough to kill someone if you knew where to aim, or if you got lucky. This man would certainly die if he was left for long enough but sadly that wasn’t an option. The blood still oozed from the wound and his skin was pale. She pushed his free hand over the wound.
‘Press down as hard as you can. You need to stem the bleeding or you’ll die.’ The man’s eyes told her he had understood. Maddie stood up to look over at where Kelly was pushed up against the wall on the opposite side of the room. She jerked suddenly as Harry bowled through the door.
‘Libby!’ Kelly exclaimed as a young woman stepped in behind him. She had her head bent, her bare legs sticking out from a waxed jacket that Maddie recognised as Harry’s.
‘She’s okay.’ His growl filled the space. The young woman fell onto the seated Kelly and they hugged each other tightly, both sobbing openly. Harry walked over to where Maddie stood. ‘What about them?’
‘One’s gone. This one’s going to be okay. He’s got a nasty nick but it looks to me like a flesh wound. His mate’s a bit of a pin cushion. I think the one in the back of the neck did it.’
‘She did all this?’ Harry peered around. There didn’t seem to be a surface that wasn’t splattered in claret.
Maddie shrugged. ‘You saw what she was like when we opened that door. She was fighting for her life, Harry.’
‘We know why?’
Maddie looked over to where the two girls were still embracing. ‘No idea what happened. Not yet. But maybe someone will talk to me now.’
‘Rickman was here. The girl told me that much at least. I think he went out through the window. I have every search resource on the way but he’s got quite a head start.’
‘He has. But we’ll get him now. He messed up.’
Chapter 35
Thursday
Maddie pushed through the door to the women’s toilet on the first floor and sucked in air that reeked of strong bleach and spent perfume. No one else was in there; she was so glad of that. She moved into a cubicle and bent forward so her face was hanging over the toilet bowl, stretching her arms out to rest her palms flat against the wall behind. The feeling of nausea had been sudden but seemed to have gone away just as quickly. She moved out to where three sinks lined up under a smeared mirror and again let her palms take her weight, this time via a damp counter. One of the taps dripped. It was the only sound.
She raised her eyes to take in her reflection. She looked pale — gaunt, even. Despite it being close to the middle of the day, the lighting was poor. The window to her right was frosted to the point where it was verging on opaque. It was still light enough for her to see that she looked like shit. She pressed the tap and cupped her hands under it. It stopped almost immediately. She got just enough to rub it on her face, concentrating on under her eyes, hoping the cold sensation on her skin might take away the knot of rage that only seemed to subside when her nagging exhaustion crept in.
She hadn’t slept the previous night. She had dozed, maybe, but only for fifteen minutes at a time when she had managed to get her breathing under control. Even then she had been disturbed constantly by the words she had come to dread: sorry to bother you, sarge, but someone else has just called in asking to speak to you.
Her exhaustion was so much more than physical. She felt like she had been chipped away at through the night as she had listened to stories that seemed to be repeating themselves, each time probing for the sort of detail that had her almost living the horror herself. Now it was done, she felt largely empty, but the rage still came, together with a sudden anxiety to do something — and then went away, leaving her feeling sick.
Rickman was still at large. And now she knew what he had done.
She didn’t feel that anyone was safe while he was still out there and they had been so close, she had been so close. She reckoned he must have been running out the building as they had stepped into it.
There was a knock at the door.
‘Maddie . . . you in there?’ Harry’s growl leaked through a door pushed open a few inches.
‘I’m nearly done.’
‘You coming out?’
‘In a minute, Harry. Jesus.’ The door was still pushed open. She knew he wasn’t finished.
‘He’s in.’
‘Rickman?’ She was aware that her voice now had a squeak.
‘Yeah. They just got him at one of the addresses. It wasn’t Vince that got him. I only had a quick update, but it went fine.’
She snatched at the sheets of paper towel and dabbed her face as she strode for the door. She pulled it open hard. Harry was just the other side. ‘I want to speak to him.’
‘I know that. And we will.’
‘Now.’
Harry stepped back to put a little more distance between them. ‘He hasn’t even made it to custody yet. Then he needs to be booked in and then we have twenty-four hours. We’ve a team downstairs full of fresh detectives who want to speak to us, with a full list of witnesses. We still need to go through the accounts we took overnight and we’ll be adding more as the day goes on. We should use this time well. I’m here to send you home for a few hours. Then we can come back in after some rest and see what we have to prep our interview. I’ve already started the ball rolling in case we need the extra twelve hours. Anyone can see this is already a big case with a lot of material.’
‘I want to speak to him now, Harry.’ She was aware her teeth were gritted as she spoke. There was nothing she could do about that. She tried to keep the emotion from falling out of her but the knot in her stomach had
tightened its grip. She considered she might have to go back and lean over the toilet bowl again.
Harry sighed. ‘It’s been a tough night, I know that. But if we—’
‘Don’t patronise me! Even before you start going down that line, Harry. I’m ready to talk to him now. I know enough. I’ve been listening to it all night. We can still talk to him again later.’
Harry took a moment. Maddie was expecting him to come back angry. He surprised her with a softened tone.
‘You need sleep. That’s not patronising you. I do too. I’ve just spent most of the night at the hospital getting my chest glued shut. They had to work around the phone I was holding to my ear the whole time. I’m exhausted and we’re both tied up in the emotion of the whole thing. Neither of us is in the right frame of mind to do this now. We can come back fresh and it still happens today.’
‘We can make it happen now. I’m ready.’
‘Maddie, think about it. If I pull his solicitor in now to give him disclosure when we’re still talking to potential victims and witnesses and we’re still putting our case together, we’ll get nothing more than a no comment. Any brief would advise that. For Rickman to answer any questions now would be idiotic.’
‘I know that.’
‘So why waste your time and energy?’
‘Because right after I talk to him, I take him back to his cell and I close that door. And then all he has to do is to sit there and think about what we know and what more we might be finding out. He sits and he stews.’
‘You don’t think he’s doing that already?’
‘No.’
‘Okay, or he has time to come up with excuses — a defence even, for everything we’ve talked to him about. Or, as is even more likely, we then have to get him out again and we get a second no comment interview and waste our time on two interviews rather than one. Come on, Maddie . . . Go home and get some rest. You still get to sit in a room with him later today.’ Harry left a gap for Maddie to respond. When she didn’t, his tone was noticeably firmer. ‘Ultimately this decision lies with me anyway. We need to work together on this. We both need to be ready, there’ll be a lot of new material that neither of us can have foreseen.’
‘Work together?’ She couldn’t help but rear up. ‘I know the decision is yours. I know you’re in charge — goodness knows I do! You’ve been quick to remind me at every opportunity. Now you want to work together? I’ve had to resort to sneaking around, trying to make sense of what I could all week behind your back and now you want to step up and remind me that you’re leading the investigation? It took a dead woman for us to get to this point and, who knows, maybe we could have avoided that!’
Harry took a breath. Even through her growing rage, Maddie knew she had overstepped the mark. She couldn’t back down now, however. She stared him out instead. His face was a mask of fury. She waited for it to bellow at her. He was far more controlled. ‘You’re exhausted and you’re not angry with me. Remember that.’
‘Please, Harry, just trust me on this. I’m ready. He needs to start accounting for what he has done. Help me with this bit at least.’
Harry’s face shifted to one of anger again. ‘Okay then. We run this your way. I’ll make arrangements in custody and see if his solicitor is available. I suggest you use the short time we have to get yourself ready.’
‘I’ve just spent the last two hours listening to what Kelly Dale and Libby Battle had to tell me. I’ve never felt more ready.’
‘And that’s exactly why you’re not.’ Harry moved away. Maddie detected a flinch of discomfort as he lifted his arm to push open the door. Her mind flashed with something to say — not an apology, but a step down maybe. She suddenly realised that she hadn’t even asked him about his injuries. No words made her lips and the doors fell roughly shut behind him. She moved back in the toilet as the feeling of nausea swept through her again.
* * *
‘Good afternoon,’ Maddie said.
Harry had seated Rickman in the largest of the interview rooms but it was still an oppressive place. There were no windows for natural light and the walls and ceiling were different shades of mottled white, giving the overall impression of a padded cell. Rickman sat on a solid wooden chair that was bolted to the floor — all of the furniture was. He was leaned forward over the table, his head down enough for Maddie to see a partially healed cut on the back of his head. He wasn’t wearing his flat cap today; it had been taken off him when he was booked into custody. He took his time to sit up and stretched out a yawn. Darren Harvey, his defence solicitor, had answered Harry’s call promptly and now filed in behind him. Rickman stood up to shake his hand and muttered, ‘Sorry to waste your time,’ before taking up his seat again. Harvey sat on a long bench that ran along the wall closest to the door where Maddie had entered. Harry had a seat on the door side of the table with the recording facilities behind him. Her seat was next to his and she moved to hover over it.
‘I have to say, this is all rather extraordinary,’ Harvey said. ‘An early call for my assistance today. I appreciate your desire for an expeditious investigation, of course, but I do not get the usual feeling of readiness that accompanies a major crime investigation.’ He was staring over at the inspector. Maddie didn’t know if it was Harry’s gender or his rank that meant Harvey seemed insistent on addressing him. She decided it was probably a little of both.
‘You have had disclosure Mr Harvey, is that correct?’ Harry said, ignoring the point made completely.
‘I have. Detective Sergeant Ives, here, was diligent and succinct. I did not feel the need to write anything down, however, and I quickly formed the opinion that this may be a rather short conversation this afternoon.’
‘Okay, then,’ Harry said.
Maddie felt like the silence that followed was for her to break. ‘Can I get anyone a drink?’ There were shaking heads around the room. ‘I’ll get some water then, if you don’t mind.’
When she came back, it wasn’t water she was dragging behind her but a large plastic box of exhibits. Rickman leaned forward to peer down at the floor then exclaimed as he sat back, ‘Fucking joke!’
Maddie ignored him to go back into the corridor. Rickman slapped the table and chuckled as she dragged the second box over the lip of the door. She also put a laptop onto the desk and then she went back for the water.
‘Finished?’ Rickman said when she finally settled in the seat opposite him. Harvey had taken out the same notepad and ornate fountain pen from the last time they had all met and was now occupied with wiping his glasses. There was a distinct atmosphere of disinterest in the room. She would have to do something to puncture that.
‘I have all I need,’ Maddie said. ‘Shall we make a start?’
Harvey balanced his glasses back on his nose then looked down it to speak. ‘Good idea, I think. I would like to remind you that my client is a very busy man and of course self-employed, hence his time is highly valuable. And as I explained to him immediately after your disclosure, this is now the last requirement before we can process his release. He does not want to miss any more of his working day than is strictly necessary.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Maddie said.
The interview commenced at 13:20 hours. Maddie stated as such as soon as the recording equipment had finished its long beep to confirm that sound and vision were now being captured from a couple of angles. Maddie moved through the rest of the formal bits, ensuring every point was covered in detail and checking Rickman’s understanding each time. He was still rolling his eyes, still stretching and yawning. He didn’t look like a man under any pressure at all. His attitude fed her anger.
Finished with the formal elements, she took a swig of her drink while Rickman complained again to Harvey about the time it was taking. Her drink allowed her to take a moment to silence the voices in her mind. Her first question was designed to silence the voices in the room.
‘Marlie Towers is dead. She was murdered. Did you kill her?’
‘Do you know how she died?’
‘I didn’t even know she was dead. No one tells me nothing, it seems.’
Harvey shuffled along his bench to get closer to his client, close enough to rest his hand on Rickman’s shoulder in mild restraint. When he spoke he watched Maddie the whole time.
‘Mr Rickman, you will remember the advice we discussed prior to your interview? You’re confused and troubled that you have been brought in here under arrest for no apparent reason for a very serious offence and as such you will not be making any comment at this time.’
Rickman nodded. ‘Ah yeah. Like the man here, says . . . I won’t be making any comment at this time. Which is a bit of a shame, ’cause we could have some fun!’
Maddie seized on him. ‘You think the murder of a woman is fun?’
‘No comment.’ Rickman threw his hands out and tutted as if he was disappointed he couldn’t engage.
‘Did you know Marlie Towers?’
‘No comment.’
‘Did she work for you?’
‘No comment.’
‘People are telling me that she did, that she worked for you and that you knew her well. Very well, too. Is that right?’
‘Are you saying these allegations have been submitted as statements?’ Harvey interjected. ‘As part of evidence of an offence, I mean, or is this just rumour and hearsay?’
‘They will be,’ Maddie said.
‘But they haven’t yet?’ Harvey pushed.
‘How long have you known her for?’ Maddie’s questioning was back at Rickman.
‘You have a beautiful mouth, Detective Sergeant. Not all women are blessed with that. Maybe you missed your calling?’