COVER THE LIES: A TREGUNNA CORNISH CRIME NOVEL

by Carla Vermaat

  Marisa Poole is in her late twenties, thin as a willow, with dark hair that is cut too short to be flattering. Her cheeks and jaws are pronounced, and her eyes are set too far apart from her nose. What she lacks in beauty, however, is made up for by charisma and a certain sex-appeal that might attract some men, but not me. She is originally from Poland. Her grandparents lived in England after the war, but one of their three sons, her father, moved to Poland when he finished school. Marisa came to visit her grandparents and eventually stayed in the UK when she met Christopher Poole.

  She isn’t a warm and motherly figure and I see immediately that she isn’t very good with Briony.

  ‘Briony, this policeman would like to talk to you about your mother,’ Marisa says insensitively. ‘If you don’t feel like talking to him, at any stage, please say so and we will stop this meeting immediately.’

  The girl nods, looking at me with a mixture of suspicion and caution. It isn’t a good start and I wish that I had at least taken Sally Walker with me. Kenneth hasn’t emerged from his study yet, but I know he will rush in if Marisa calls him.

  ‘That’s right, Briony,’ I say gently. ‘As soon as you want to stop this interview, or conversation, you only have to raise your right hand. Okay?’

  ‘Yes.’ The girl’s voice is barely a whisper. ‘Yes sir. Inspector.’

  ‘First of all, you can call me Andy,’ I say, which makes Marisa frown in disapproval.

  ‘Briony,’ I continue. ‘I know this is all very difficult for you. I understand that. But I believe that you can help me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know for sure, but I have that feeling.’

  ‘I thought the police relied on facts not feelings,’ Marisa blurts out.

  ‘True.’ I try to hide my growing annoyance. ‘But we can’t afford to ignore our instincts either.’

  She smiles cynically but, fortunately, she keeps quiet.

  ‘Briony, I would like you to look at a few photos and tell me if you know these people and, if you do, who they are and how you know them.’

  Clearly, this isn’t what she or Marisa expected. They look at each other with the same question written on their faces: Why? Neither has the answer and I certainly don’t give it to them.

  I have brought with me a good collection of different photos. Some are copies of the ones that are on the board in the incident room, some are randomly copied photos from adverts in magazines. And some are of colleagues.

  The first photo I show her is of Gillian, her step-sister, using the same technique as we use with a lie detector: ask a simple question which won’t produce a lie, like ‘what’s your date of birth’ or ‘what did you have for breakfast this morning?’. It relaxes people and makes them less wary of the trickier questions and they respond more spontaneously. Any hesitation associated with making up a lie, can be picked up.

  ‘That’s Gillian,’ Briony says with no hesitation, a fond smile crossing her face. I see Marisa’s eyebrows rise, and a look on her face suggesting why I would think that Gillian could possibly be involved, which is too crazy an idea for words and, as the question begins to form on her lips, I shake my head and, surprisingly, she shuts her mouth.

  ‘She’s my sister,’ Briony says with pride. ‘And Alfie is my brother. They live with my Dad and Auntie Maureen.’

  ‘I understand you and Gillian are going horse riding?’ It is meant as an innocent question, but it has the wrong effect.

  ‘Mum doesn’t want me to go on a horse! She says I will fall off and break an arm or a leg.’

  ‘That doesn’t happen very often,’ Marisa says sarcastically.

  Briony starts sobbing. ‘Mum! I want my mum!’

  Marisa tries to take the girl in her arms, but she is pushed away almost violently. ‘Leave me alone! You never liked my mum!’

  ‘I have never said that, darling.’

  ‘Mum told me herself!’ Her grief is replaced by a mixture of anger and spite. At least it stops her tears and Marisa is a bit taken aback by the outburst.

  ‘Perhaps you can ask your father or Ken,’ she says diplomatically.

  Before she can say any more, I place a photo of Josh Warren on top of Gillian’s.

  ‘Have you ever seen this man, Briony?’

  She studies the photo as if she is supposed to recognise the man in the picture but can’t remember him. ‘No. Did he kill my mum?’

  ‘I can’t tell you anything about the investigation right now, Briony, but I promise I will do my best to find the person who did kill your mother.’

  She looks up, lips trembling and blue eyes filling with tears, but somehow she manages to keep them from rolling down her rather chubby cheeks. ‘You promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  I see Marisa looking up sharply, clearly wanting to ask how on earth I can make such a promise, but once more, the words die on her lips.

  ‘How about this man?’ This time it’s a photo of Ollie Reed, dressed in plain clothes, smiling at the camera. When I asked his permission to take the photo, he warned me that the girl might have seen him when he came to their house. Which is exactly the intention.

  ‘Yes. I have seen him.’ Briony’s face flushes as she takes the photo in her hand. Then she shakes her head and puts it back on the small pile. ‘He had a uniform when I saw him. He’s a policeman.’

  ‘That’s right. His name is Ollie.’

  ‘Now that you have established that Briony is not stupid, can you get on with the real detective work, please?’ Marisa snaps. ‘You’re wasting your time showing us trick photos.’

  Briony is now grinning from ear to ear, and says, ‘Next one, Andy?’

  But I know Marisa is right. I am not doing the girl any favours by letting this interview last longer than necessary, although, she seems to enjoy looking at the photos and sees it as a game.

  ‘What about this one?’

  It is Chris Eyre. I don’t think Alicia ever took him home, but you never know.

  ‘Oh yes, that is Chris,’ she says promptly, without any hesitation.

  I can’t hide my surprise. ‘You know him?’

  ‘Yes. He came to our house once, when Dad Ken was away for a few days. He had a meal with us and he played a computer game with me.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘I don’t know. A long time ago.’ This isn’t very helpful, as children of that age can’t really be relied on when they have to establish time. Like when they think someone in their forties is really ancient.

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘Dunno. He brought a present for me, but it wasn’t my birthday. He said he didn’t know when my birthday was, so he’d bought something anyway.’ She giggles. ‘It was a box with beads to make jewellery. Mum … helped me and we made a bracelet for me and for her.’ Her lip starts to tremble again and quickly I place the last photo on the pile.

  ‘Have you ever seen this man?’

  It’s the photo from the CCTV images in Angelo’s bar, where, according to Denise, Alicia was harassed by a man, which caused them to leave the bar and go to Barrie’s Bar.

  ‘Yes.’ She grins again. ‘He was in our street.’

  ‘Do you mean that this man lives in your street?’ I ask incredulously.

  ‘No. He was there, at the playground. We were playing football, me and my friends, and he helped us get the ball when Jamie shot it over the wall into Mr Hopkins’ garden. Mr Hopkins always keeps the ball, you see, and we wouldn’t get it back until the next day. But this man offered to get it and we had it back.’

  ‘Did he speak to you?’

  She shakes her head. ‘First I thought he knew Jamie, but that wasn’t true. Jamie told me.’

  ‘Did he speak to you?’

  ‘Oh yes. He made me laugh. I said, ‘thank you, mister,’ to him, because he got the ball back, and he said I didn’t have to say mister to him. I could call him Daddy.’

  I feel the hairs on my neck stand on end and a shiver runs down my spine. I dread
to think why he would say that.

  ‘Daddy? Did he want you to call him Daddy?’ Marisa cries. ‘That is …’

  ‘Briony,’ I quickly interrupt, ‘what happened then?’

  ‘I laughed and I said that I already have two Daddies, my real Dad and Dad Ken. I didn’t want a third Dad.’

  ‘You said that to him?’

  ‘Yes. And he said that I was right. If I didn’t want to call him Daddy, I could call him Godfather.’

  ‘Godfather?’ Marisa echoes.

  Briony starts to look worried, especially as she looks from Marisa to me and back.

  ‘What is a godfather?’ she asks, tentatively.

  ‘It’s … a bit like a grandfather, but different,’ Marisa says vaguely. For once I am grateful that she is here, because it is now my turn to be speechless. Godfather. This can’t be a coincidence.

  32

  Maloney has been away for most of the day to pick up his wife. He told me that she’s returned from Weymouth where she left her parents after many failed attempts to get them back together again. She sobbed during the journey home and he confided in me that he was relieved to be working on a time-consuming investigation. Even if Guthrie won’t allow him to, and he won’t get paid for it, he’d gladly do some extra overtime for nothing.

  His brief outburst that she should stop sobbing like a spoiled child and stop interfering in her parent’s lives, only caused her more distress and, obviously, didn’t help their own relationship.

  By the time he arrived at the station, the wheels had already been set in motion. As I quickly fill him in on the latest developments, I see his face redden and his eyes shining with hope and expectation. After the trauma with his wife’s family, this must be like some sort of a treat for him.

  ‘Right!’ He rubs his hands together as if he has been presented with a five-course meal of all the things he loves. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Ollie is fetching pizzas,’ someone says. ‘Ten minutes.’

  ‘Okay, we’ll wait a few minutes,’ Maloney says generously, grabbing his mobile from his pocket to check his messages. At the same time, the door opens and DCI Guthrie emerges, folding his arms across his chest and positioning himself in front of the door, blocking the way in or out to anyone who would like to escape to the washrooms.

  ‘What are you waiting for, Philip?’ he asks frostily.

  ‘Uhm … we’re just about to start.’ Instinctively, Maloney knows that this is not the time to tell his superior that we’re waiting for the arrival of DS Ollie Reed with soft drinks and a pile of pizza boxes.

  ‘Good.’ Guthrie now sounds sarcastic, his eyes coldly locked on Maloney. His presence is demoralising and I seriously doubt that he can add anything useful to the meeting. Confusion, more likely.

  ‘I’ve come at the right time then,’ he continues, not leaving his position at the door. On the contrary, he spreads his legs and raises his shoulders and he looks like a bull entering an arena. In his hand is a tightly rolled up newspaper. And as if to make sure that we all know what this is about, he taps it on the knuckles of his free hand impatiently.

  It was Gerald Hill from West Country News who wrote the disastrous article that suggested that the police wouldn’t get anywhere near catching a double murderer without the help of the pretty clairvoyant. Hill has been busy again. He has used whatever little material he had to feed his fertile imagination and has drawn up a sensational headline: ‘Murderer makes police dance like marionettes’.

  I am pretty certain that this is the real reason why Guthrie has joined the meeting. I’m not the only one who is of the opinion that Hill is the proverbial nail in any policeman’s coffin. Hill must once have been an old-fashioned Fleet Street reporter competing for stories on a daily basis. The fact that he has been transferred to the South West, where life is generally much less exciting from a reporter’s point of view, has made him into a journalist who is led by so much frustration and anger that he can’t see anything wrong with exercising in print his vivid imagination. Clearly, Gerald Hill has rubbed up Guthrie’s feathers the wrong way.

  ‘Right.’ The DCI begins in an almost friendly manner, which is always dangerous. ‘Have we all seen the paper?’

  A faint murmur. Nobody wants to attract Guthrie’s attention.

  ‘I have only one simple question,’ he continues, in the same, soft voice. ‘Who has been leaking to the press?’

  Silence. I see several heads duck behind computer screens or behind hands. PC Ally Poldeen pulls the elastic band from her hair and bows her head. I notice that Penrose seems to be letting her hair grow a bit longer these days.

  ‘Well?’ There’s thunder in his voice now. His eyes scrutinise our faces for any sign of what can remotely be seen as guilt.

  We all know that someone is telling a lie when they avoid eye contact or go red in the face or get fidgety. But innocent people can also get nervous and sometimes blush or look away, or start clearing their throat when they are confronted with an awkward situation. This means they can easily be mistaken for liars.

  Whether Guthrie is aware of this or not, he is searching for the person avoiding his gaze or with the reddest face.

  ‘I know one of you talked to the press. And I have an idea who it may be. But I don’t like working with cowards. So if you are guilty, just be a man, or a woman, and stand up before I get really angry about this.’

  I remember from similar situations at school that it isn’t always the real culprit who raises his hand. Sometimes, it is someone who is fed up with the situation or is willing to take the punishment to protect his mates. I was never that brave but I knew a few schoolmates who were and I always wondered how they could take being punished for something they didn’t do.

  Guthrie’s eyes are still darting across our faces. PC Ally Poldeen’s face is the colour of ripe cherries. She shakes her head vigorously and murmurs, ‘It wasn’t me, sir. Honestly.’

  ‘Who has been leaking to the press?’ Guthrie repeats bluntly, but his words don’t have the effect he hoped for. At that moment, Ollie Reed arrives with the pizzas and a plastic bag with cans and bottles of soft drinks. Guthrie turns his head incredulously, as if it has never occurred to him that police officers need to eat and drink.

  I sigh inwardly, gathering my papers to make room for our improvised meal. Others do the same. Guthrie hasn’t finished. He just won’t give up. Nobody has come forward to admit any connection with the press and Gerald Hill in particular, and he is looking for a scapegoat.

  Squeezing his eyes almost shut, he scrutinizes the incident board and immediately picks out the two names that Maloney has circled with a red marker pen: the ‘godfather’ and Trevor Bennett.

  Ignoring the fact that most of the officers are grabbing pizza slices and soft drinks, Guthrie demands to be updated, his anger about the press forgotten for a moment. Despite his earlier scepticism when I explained to him about the ‘godfather’, Maloney now shares my optimism that the person using the nickname could open up the investigation in a new direction, if not lead us to the identity of the murderer. Glancing at the pizzas momentarily, he quickly looks away and reads the messages on Alicia Poole’s iPad out loud.

  ‘What’s the significance of this so-called ‘godfather’?’ Guthrie demands.

  Exchanging a glance with Maloney, I explain that it is too much of a coincidence that Alicia received emails from someone calling themselves ‘godfather’ and then a man who approached her daughter in a playground told her to call him ‘godfather’.

  ‘The bottom line is,’ Maloney resumes, ‘that we believe that this is the man who spoke briefly to Alicia Poole at Angelo’s on Saturday evening, which upset her enough that she mentioned it to her friend Denise Shaw and suggested they use the back door to slip out and go to another bar. We have images of the two women leaving Angelo’s by a back alley, and we have two images of the man. Sadly, not as clear and sharp as we would want. He could have followed Alicia to Barrie’s Bar, and then followed her
and Chris Eyre to the lake. In his statement, Eyre told us that it was Alicia who knew about the dogging meeting, but it’s possible she hadn’t really planned to go there because she hadn’t mentioned it to her friend Mrs Shaw. So someone, and it could be this ‘godfather’, may have followed her from Barrie’s Bar to the lake and killed her there.’

  Although initially, Maloney was sceptical about the importance of the godfather, he now seems more optimistic. This could be a breakthrough in the case and in all fairness, it’s the only lead we’ve got.

  ‘We need to find this man,’ Guthrie announces as though we haven’t already worked that out for ourselves. ‘Go over each of the statements from everyone in those bars. Angelo’s, Barrie’s Bar. All of them. See if he visited other bars in the area. Someone must have seen him. Someone must know who he is.’ He gestures at Maloney, who obligingly calls out several officer’s names who nod and grab their coats and jackets; half-eaten pizzas forgotten.

  ‘Tregunna?’ Maloney looks at me, narrowing his eyes. ‘You look like you have something else on your mind.’

  I hesitate. I called Maureen Bennett again when I reached the station to get the latest update about her husband. She was in tears and told me that Trevor hadn’t returned yet nor called her. All the more concerning is the fact that it has started raining and she realises that her husband must have left the house without a coat. She remembered he wore his navy blue jacket in the morning and now it was hanging on the coat rack.

  ‘Trevor Bennett, Alicia’s first husband and the father of her daughter, is missing.’

  ‘Since when?’ Maloney looks doubtful, unsure if he needs to do something about it. Perhaps he wishes that he hadn’t given me the opportunity to mention this to him

  I shrug. ‘Not long enough to start searching, but his wife is worried, and, to be honest, I am too. He was last seen today at about 1.20 am, when he got out of his car in front of their house. He’d bought a bottle of milk and he left it on the counter in the kitchen. Since then, we don’t know what he did or were he went.’ I pause briefly to make sure that I have the attention of everyone who is left in the room. ‘We know that Bennett spoke to someone on the phone several times and that he was upset afterwards. We can’t rule out the possibility that he was speaking to the man who called himself godfather. Or to the man who killed Alicia Poole and Torrington. If he did, then Bennett’s life might also be in danger. We must therefore take his disappearance seriously.’