Kathy ordered the team at Wood Green to detain Jarrod for questioning at the nearby police custody centre and it was there, an hour later, that she finally came face to face with the elder of the two Causley brothers. She didn’t expect to get much more from him than one or two statements that she might later use against him, as well as a first impression of his personality. For a few minutes before going in she watched him on a monitor, seated with arms folded, staring unblinking at the door.
‘Jarrod.’ She smiled at him as she came into the room. ‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Kathy Kolla and this is Detective Sergeant Andrew Alfarsi.’
She took a seat and looked around the room. ‘They’ve done this place up since I was last here. Sorry to break into your evening, but I need your urgent assistance. We’re anxious to contact your brother Dean and we’re hoping you can help us.’
She gave him another smile and he just stared back at her.
‘Can you tell us how to contact him?’
He took his time to answer with one word, ‘Why?’, loading the word with contempt.
‘There was a fire in a flat in Islington earlier this evening where we understand he was staying, and we’re concerned for his safety. So how do we contact him?’
‘I can’t help you.’
‘But surely you’ve been in touch with him, haven’t you?’
Jarrod didn’t open his mouth, his eyes fixed on Kathy’s.
‘When did you last speak to Dean?’
Again no response.
‘Why are you being so obstructive? I asked you a simple question—when did you last speak to your brother? Why don’t you want to give me an answer? Have you two been up to something?’
Jarrod didn’t appear to move a muscle, but his gaze underwent a subtle malignant transformation.
Kathy said, ‘I’ll have to remind you that you’re still on probation, Jarrod. This uncooperative attitude will not go down well with your probation board.’
He finally unfolded his arms and leaned forward across the table towards Kathy, who sensed Alfarsi shift at her side. ‘I have no idea where my brother is,’ Jarrod said. ‘I know nothing of any fire. I can’t help you.’
‘Very well. I have a warrant here to search your home. You’ll remain here while we do that. It may take some time.’
It was almost midnight when they finished, and it would have taken longer in any other apartment. But Jarrod had retained a prison inmate’s economy of possessions; he would have been able to pack almost everything into a single suitcase. All but the clothes, which seemed to have been his one indulgence, along with the huge TV screen. Strangely, for a librarian who had recently gone through an arts degree program, there were no books and hardly any paper at all. The construction of the modern building left little room for concealed places, and these—the backs of fitted cupboards, skirting boards, architraves, plumbing cavities—were quickly checked. They found nothing. Their only satisfaction was to leave a number of electronic bugs inside the wall sockets. Kathy phoned the Wood Green custody centre and told them to let Jarrod go.
20
The week passed in a kind of suspended frenzy as Kathy tried without success to break into Jarrod’s silence. She interviewed him a second and a third time, now in the presence of his solicitor, who advised him to answer none of her questions. She also interviewed the Belmarsh prison librarian, Bryan, whom she suspected of having a closer relationship with Jarrod than he claimed. Bryan protested that he had given him no more than prison gossip about Brock, with whom Jarrod seemed to be obsessed, although he had never heard Jarrod utter threats against Brock or hint in any way that he might be responsible for Brock being in prison.
Meanwhile, forensics examined every charred fragment from the Islington fire and were unable to find anything significant, or extract anything of value from the molten lumps of electronic equipment found there. A general alert was put out for Dean Causley and Kathy’s team interviewed dozens of people in the neighbourhood, trying to build up a picture of his life. He came across as an isolated, friendless hermit who only went out into the immediate area for supplies. His close neighbours complained about his loud music late at night and his electronic equipment tripping fuses in the ancient wiring in the block.
When these more direct approaches yielded nothing, Kathy widened the searches, pulling in more people to help. Dozens of calls from the public of sightings of Dean had to be followed up and people who might have been on friendly terms with him while he was in prison were interviewed. Original witnesses from the time of the first two Heath murders were also spoken to again and shown pictures of the Causley boys and asked if they remembered seeing them back then. Nobody did.
By Friday she was running out of inspiration and becoming reconciled to the idea that this wasn’t going to be easy. Under pressure from Torrens over the lack of hard evidence, she was forced to return detectives to other jobs and wind down the Causley investigation.
That evening she phoned John, now back in Montreal. He had no more information about The Promised Land, and had heard nothing further of Sir Mortimer Hartley. Listening to his voice, Kathy realised how much she missed him, and after she rang off, and to avoid dwelling on this, she forced herself to take a closer look at Donna Priest’s book Psychopaths, in the hope that it might give her some new insight into the Causleys. She reached the end without learning anything new and, disappointed, put it down and got up to go to bed. In the shower, her mind still preoccupied with the two brothers, she remembered Priest’s claim to have found out more about them than she had been able to put in the book. She wrapped a towel around herself and checked her phone for the author’s number.
Donna seemed delighted to hear that Kathy had been reading her book.
‘I thought it was very interesting,’ Kathy said, trying to sound enthusiastic.
‘But? It sounds like you’ve got a missing “but” in that sentence, Kathy.’
‘Well, your research was very thorough, and I just wondered what you might have left out, maybe from shortage of space.’
‘Ah yes. Not so much because of space, more to do with Charlie’s lawyers—they were nervous about some of the things I couldn’t prove, such as the possible link to the drowning of the girl in Majorca. Anything special you’re after?’
‘We’d like to talk to Dean, but he’s disappeared. Any ideas?’
‘Interesting. Any particular reason you want to talk to him? Or shouldn’t I ask?’
‘Best not.’
‘Well … there was the aunt and uncle in Devon. Have you checked with them?’
Kathy took a note of their names. ‘Anything else?’
Donna hummed. ‘Not really. There was one thing, but I shouldn’t really tell you. I promised their mother …’
Kathy waited while she made up her mind. Then, ‘Long after I wrote the book, about three years ago, I got a call from their mother, Linda Causley. I was surprised, because she’d been pretty hostile towards me when I was interviewing people for the book, insisting the boys were innocent right to the end. But now her husband had recently died, and she was in poor health herself and probably knew she didn’t have long either. She asked if I’d call and see her in Purley, so I agreed and got a train down there. She gave me tea and cake and we talked about this and that until finally she came to the point. When he died, she’d gone through her husband’s papers and come across an envelope addressed to her. Inside was a note from him telling her he’d found the enclosed packet of Polaroid snapshots. The pictures had been taken by her boys, showing them taking turns to hurt and finally drown little Chloe. She felt it was discovering these photographs that had finished her husband off. “He couldn’t live with it,” she said, “and neither can I.”’
Donna took a deep breath, then went on, ‘She asked me to take them. If the boys came out of jail reformed characters, then I should burn them. But if they hadn’t changed I should use them to have them locked away forever.’
Kathy said, ‘You�
��ve got them, these photographs?’
‘No. They were horrible. I didn’t want to touch them. I told her it was too great a responsibility and I couldn’t do it. I told her to give them to the police, but I don’t think she did. She asked me not to tell anyone else about the pictures, and she died a few months later. I don’t know what happened to them.’
Kathy said, ‘But the police searched the house during the original investigation, didn’t they? Why didn’t they find the photos then?’
‘They weren’t in the house. They were in the garden. Linda took me out there and showed me—all that shrubbery and herbaceous borders. An old azalea bush had died and when her husband dug it up he found the packet, wrapped up in plastic and tape, buried in its roots.’
Sunday afternoon and the prison was quiet, a busy day for visitors. Brock remembered his early childhood, when his grandfather had insisted on taking the whole family on Sunday afternoons to the cemetery to look at the graves of their departed relatives. Now they come to the jail, he thought. Progress.
He noticed Charlie Pettigrew come out into the exercise yard to stretch his legs. He seemed different, Brock thought, his stride more confident.
‘Hello, Brock,’ he called, and gave him a wave. ‘Can I join you?’
‘Be my guest.’ Brock shifted over on the bench. ‘You’re looking brighter today.’
‘Yes, well, I’m feeling brighter. I had a revelation last night.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. My new cellmate woke me—very green he is, very anxious. He was having a nightmare, calling out in his sleep.’ Charlie did a vivid imitation of the terrified voice: ‘Oh no! Don’t, please! No, no, no!’
‘Disturbing for you,’ Brock said.
‘Strangely not. I remembered how I’d been when I first arrived, just like that, frightened of every sudden movement, every raised voice. And then it occurred to me that I’d been like that ever since I was a boy. Oh, of course I learned to hide it, to put on adult manners and pretend I was on top of everything. But I wasn’t, not really. I knew I was a failure, a fraud hiding in the intimidating shadows of my father and grandfather, pretending to be proudly continuing their great tradition at Golden Press, but in reality watching it slowly die around me.
‘Then disaster struck. In my panic to achieve just one real success I got myself caught up with The Promised Land, and landed myself in here. And I lay there in the dark and I thought, “All your life, Charlie boy, you’ve been terrified of this, of being exposed as a total failure. And now you’ve reached the bottom. It doesn’t get any worse than this, and you know what? You can handle it. Yes, you can. From now on, for what’s left of your miserable life, you can hold your head up and say, I can handle it.”’
‘Well,’ Brock said, ‘that’s the spirit, Charlie.’ He held out his hand. ‘Congratulations. I admire you for that.’
Charlie ducked his head, embarrassed, but took Brock’s hand. ‘Thanks. I just have to keep remembering that things can’t get any worse. From now on it’s only got to get better.’
As soon as she got to work on Monday morning, Kathy retrieved the scene of crime team’s report on the Islington fire. They had checked the top-floor apartment thoroughly, worked painstakingly through all the sodden debris and ashes to confirm that accelerants had been used to cause the intense fire, and made up a probable list of all the equipment that had been packed into the small rooms. They’d searched the small garden at the back of the block but hadn’t dug it up, and neither had her own people. She set about organising it, and accompanied the team out there.
They set to work with a backhoe and shovels beneath the dark ruin of the end terrace, its walls blackened, its shattered roof and chimney like a rotted tooth against the sky, its lower floors abandoned from water and debris damage. Kathy directed them to uproot the shrubs and break up the small area of paving. They uncovered the foundations of a wartime air-raid shelter beneath what passed for a rockery. But no hidden evidence.
The team leader, checking his watch, came to her. ‘There’s nothing here, boss.’
Kathy hesitated. Just because they’d buried incriminating material in a garden once didn’t make it an MO. Yet without hard evidence the police case was circumstantial. ‘One more sweep,’ she said.
And finally, crawling over every inch of the place, they found what she was looking for, a tiny Toshiba 32-gigabyte SD card from a digital camera in its protective plastic case, hidden inside a slot cut into the side of a timber post in the back fence.
When she returned to the Box, Kathy waited while forensic technicians scanned and checked the card for DNA and prints before giving it to her. She inserted it into a computer and saw that it contained five video files. Word had gone around the office and everyone had abandoned their desks and were clustered beside her as she opened the first file.
The camera panned across a parkland scene lit by a silvery morning light, and came to rest on the figure of Jarrod Causley, standing beside a small lake. He glowered at the camera, breath condensing in the cold air, and rubbed his hands before pulling on a pair of latex gloves. He was wearing dark blue overalls and a cap. There was a bag at his feet, and from it he pulled out a hammer which he brandished at the camera, then pulled a document from the bag, a folded map.
There was a break to another scene, a copse of trees from which a figure emerged, running down a path towards the camera. Kathy recognised Andrea Giannopoulos, dressed in the track pants and singlet in which she was later found. She slowed as she approached Jarrod, who was standing in the middle of the path, studying the map. They exchanged a few words. The sound was muffled, the words hard to make out. Then Andrea turned towards the camera, seeing the other person for the first time. She looked puzzled, her feet still taking little steps as she jogged on the spot. Jarrod moved behind her, dropped the map to the ground, revealing the hammer in his hand. As Andrea began to move off he swung it in an arc to hit the side of her head. She staggered but didn’t fall and he pounced on her, bringing her down and starting to pound her face, again and again. The camera moved in, observing his savage attack. At one point he jerked back as a jet of blood squirted into his eyes. He looked angry as he wiped at it with his sleeve, then returned to his work. When he was finally satisfied, he sat back on his haunches, breath steaming from his nostrils like smoke.
The clip came to an abrupt end. The room was silent, everyone staring at the blank screen.
Kathy didn’t feel shock; just disgust, and a helpless pity for Andrea.
She took a deep breath and clicked on the second file.
It began with a long-distance shot of a woman striding alone up a grassy slope—Parliament Hill, Kathy guessed. At the top, she stopped to chat for a moment to a dog-walker, then moved on. The scene changed to an area of thick bushes where a gloved and hooded figure was pulling on a surgical mask and plastic goggles. Kathy caught a glimpse of his face, Dean Causley this time, and she registered his care with the preparations, learning from the first murder, insulating himself against what was to follow. He bent to a bag to get the hammer and a green towel.
The attack happened in a sudden flurry of movement, but it seemed to go wrong. Caroline Jarvis was more heavily built than Andrea Giannopoulos, and she managed to swing an arm to knock Dean off balance before he could hit her with the hammer. Once again the poor sound quality, rather as if it had been recorded underwater, gave the scene a sinister eeriness. Caroline turned and began to run and the image became chaotic as Jarrod must have joined in to bring her down. Then her face filled the screen, and her mouth formed an inaudible scream that was abruptly cut off as the hammer slammed down on her nose.
She was dragged into the bushes beside the pond and Dean hit her a couple more times, then looked up, breathing heavily, and Jarrod urged him to do more, do it properly.
When it was over, there was a further scene of Dean arranging the crime scene, several times corrected by impatient instructions from his older brother. He tugged the necklace f
rom Caroline’s neck and slipped it into a plastic pouch. From another pouch he took out a wad of tissue and wiped it carefully on her bag. And from a third pouch he took something barely visible and placed it in the bloody pulp of her face.
Kathy froze the picture and reran the scene. Someone said, ‘What’s he doing?’ and she answered, ‘The dog’s hair. I think he’s planting the dog’s hair.’ And thought, So how did they get hold of that?
The third file began with the Causleys waiting at the back door of Charles Pettigrew’s house. Jarrod, wearing a backpack, knocked on the door. It was opened by Uzma Jamali, who waved them in, making some comment about their overalls. Kathy wondered if the tech people would be able to do something with the sound, which was almost inaudible. Uzma led them inside to the study and showed them Pettigrew sitting asleep in the armchair, a thick manuscript on his lap. They returned to the hall and climbed the stairs, Uzma leading, while Jarrod slipped off his backpack and drew out the hammer.
The murder of the judge, Sir Roger Walcott, took up the fourth video: Jarrod pulling on a mask and gloves outside the judge’s hotel room, barging in when he responded to the knock and a blur of action as they subdued him. Finally the camera panned around the bathroom, with Walcott now slumped, strangled, on the marble tiles. Dean was on his knees nearby, tapping on the judge’s laptop, while the head and shoulders of a teddy bear were visible in a bag lying on the floor nearby.
‘Now Elena and Brock,’ Kathy said at last, and reluctantly clicked the final file, knowing what they were about to see. The only surprise was the spirited way in which Elena challenged Jarrod when he told her to make the call to Brock to cancel their meeting, as if she already didn’t trust him. They were standing in the car park next to Suzanne’s red Merc, and when she noticed Dean filming them she turned and began gesturing at him. That was her mistake, for behind her Jarrod had drawn out Brock’s knife. He reached forward and took hold of her hair and rammed the knife into her back. Her mouth opened in astonishment, her body arching out as Jarrod stabbed her twice more, then let her drop to the ground.
The Promised Land Page 22
