‘But only under orders from his boss.’
‘You think that would stop him?’
‘Well, also, it could cause problems for my boss, Mr Morrison.’
Mikayel weighed it. ‘But we know people’s lives are at risk if you do not find Vahrig in time. Do you think the Jamie Carver you first met would stay shut up in an office when he knows he might prevent such a thing happening?’
After several seconds she said, ‘No.’
‘And nor do I.’
‘So why is he?’
‘Guilt. And fear.’
‘About what?’
‘You have already said. His last few cases, people close to him died. His girlfriend nearly lost her life. I would think that could cause anyone to wonder if they were to blame. And I can well imagine they would worry about such things happening again, in the future.’
‘Which is why you think he isn’t pushing to be involved in the hunt for Danelian?’
‘Yes. I suspect he does want to, but fears doing so, for the reasons I mention.’
After another short silence, Jess heaved a sigh. ‘So what would you advise, Doctor? From what you are saying, it seems to me that unless something happens to break him out of it, things will only get worse.’
‘I have to agree,’ Mikayel said. ‘As to what can you do? I can only say that if he were a patient of mine, I would start by encouraging him to confront his fears. Only when he realises what drives them can he deal with it. In the end, it comes down to the old analogy. After falling off a horse, the thing to do is to get right back in the saddle.’ Seeing her doubtful look, he shrugged. ‘I am sorry, that probably sounds… over-simple? But I see it many times in those whose profession brings them close to danger.’
His questions concerning Carver answered - at least for now - Mikayel sensed he’d already drifted further than he’d intended into murkily-unethical waters. A few minutes later she too seemed grateful when he steered conversation to how some of the better East-European wines compared with those from the New World.
‘I wasn’t aware East-Europe had any, ‘better wines’,’ she laughed.
Sensing an opportunity of an altogether different kind, Mikayel hailed a waiter and asked for the wine list.
‘Then let me educate you,’ he said. ‘I doubt this place will have anything from my part of the world, but I am sure there will be others we can consider.’
It was past midnight by the time Jess watched the taxi that dropped her off depart to take the cheerfully-sozzled psychiatrist back to his hotel. Wine had won out, and she had decided to pick her car up on the way in the next morning. She hadn’t intended to stay out late, but after the wine tasting, Mikayel had insisted on her demonstrating some of the niftier features of her new Samsung mobile. More advanced than anything he’d ever had access to, and being something of a gadget freak it turned out, he’d seemed fascinated with it.
As she turned towards her apartment block, her thoughts went back to their conversation about Jamie. Since then, part of her brain had been mulling over it, trying to digest what the psychiatrist had said. What he had said certainly seemed to make sense. In truth, if confirmed much of what her instincts had been telling her. But until she gave it further thought, she wasn’t sure there was anything she could, or even should, do. And by the time she stepped out of the lift, the clear night air having hit her, she knew there was no point trying to go over it right now.
As she entered her flat she saw the flashing red light that told her she had messages.
The first was from Howard Leather.
‘Please forgive me for leaving a message, Jess. I was ringing to see if you might be free for, erm, dinner, in the next couple of weeks? I rang a couple of times earlier this week, but it seems I wasn’t able to catch you. You have my number if you’d care to come back to me.’
She smiled as she imagined his dilemma. Worried in case he incurred her ‘displeasure’. She would have to let him know it might be a while before they got together again. He wouldn’t argue. The second message was from her mother, speaking in her usual faux-posh telephone sing-song.
‘Just ringing to ask if you will be coming down any time soon, Jessica. Only Derek and Marjorie are back in the country for a few weeks. They are staying with Alistair. You remember Alistair don’t you, dear? Apparently he has moved to new chambers in the city, and is doing very well for himself. I was wondering whether to invite him to-.’
Jess’s finger hit the ‘stop’ button.
‘Oh bugger off Mother.’
CHAPTER 25
The man who opened the door of the well-kept bungalow on the outskirts of Stockport was in his late fifties. Paunchy and with thinning grey hair, Carver thought he had the comfortable retired look he’d seen many of his former colleagues attain once they started drawing their index-linked pensions.
‘Ron Gover? Jamie Carver. We spoke on the telephone.’
Carver put a hand out and the man took it. His grip was firm, warm, but slightly damp.
Gover invited Carver in and led him through to a back living room that was too chintzy for Carver’s tastes. A picture window, so big it made Carver wonder about heat loss in winter, looked out onto a well-stocked garden with an immaculately manicured lawn. Somehow, the ordered regimentation of the flowers and shrubs was just as Carver would have expected from an ex-Scenes Of Crime Officer. Gover offered coffee but Carver declined. Four in one morning would be too much for even his caffeine-acclimatised system.
‘You sounded rather mysterious on the ‘phone Mr Carver,’ Gover said as he indicated Carver to take a comfortable-looking armchair facing the window. ‘Mind telling me what this is all about?’
Carver told how he was reviewing some old cases in which Gover had had some involvement, but had come across some anomalies he hoped he may be able to help him with. As he spoke Carver dug himself out of the cushions he had sunk into and perched on the seat-edge. He didn’t want to be too comfortable to discuss the matters that had brought him.
‘I’ll help any way I can,’ Gover said, sitting forward to receive the folder with papers Carver took from his briefcase and passed across. As he glanced at the covering, Investigating Officer’s Report, with the name of the SIO and the case reference at the top, Carver thought his features darkened, just a little.
‘Do you remember?’ Carver said. ‘It was back in the late eighties. A spate of rapes and bad indecent assaults around Salford and Eccles. They were never cleared up. You were Exhibits Officer.’
Gover spent some time leafing through the papers before nodding. ‘Yes. I remember them, vaguely. What’s the problem?’
‘Some of the exhibits are missing.’
Gover straightened in his chair. ‘Well it was a long time ago. You know what it’s like. Things tend to go astray over the years.’
Carver nodded. ‘That’s true. But I’ve spoken to a few people at Salford nick. Many of them remember you. They all say you were the most meticulous SOCO around at that time. And I’ve been through your exhibit books and indexes. They’re the most thorough I’ve ever seen. All the movement logs showing stuff going to and from the lab are complete right up to the time you boxed everything up when the enquiry was wound down. Everything’s accounted for up to that point. I’m wondering if you have any idea how things could have gone missing since.’
Gover shrugged and spread his hands. ‘I’m sorry. I retired some ten years ago. I don’t remember anything about it since I put everything in the SOCO store.’
‘Do you recall anyone taking an interest in the case after?’
Gover shook his head, looking regretful. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘No problem. Can you remember if there were ever any suspects?’
‘Doesn’t it say in the IO report?’
‘I’m asking you.’
Carver knew it was the sort of come-back he would more usually put to a suspect and for a moment Gover looked as if he might challenge it. Instead he got up and crossed to a sideboa
rd where he took a small cigar from an ornately decorated box. He lit it and blew smoke into the air before returning to his chair. ‘No. I can’t say I ever remember there being any suspects.’
Carver nodded slowly. ‘What about Paul Murphy, the SIO? Did he ever contact you about it afterwards?’
‘Not that I recall. But as I say, it was all a long time ago.’
For several minutes Carver questioned the retired SOCO further about the procedures he and his then colleagues followed to ensure the exhibits were safe-guarded once they were in storage. As Carver expected, the system was rigorous. Anyone trying to access old case exhibits needed to go through the SOCOs themselves, who kept the keys for the store. And if the relevant SOCO wasn’t around at the time, his or her colleagues would only grant access after checking with them first. Unauthorised handling of exhibits could sound the death-knell of a case in court and SOCOs always took their Exhibits Officer roles most seriously. Gover apologised again for not being able to account for the missing items. ‘But if anything’s gone astray it must have happened after I retired.’
Eventually, thanking him for his time, Carver rose to leave and Gover held out the case-folder to him. But as Carver reached for it, Gover suddenly pulled it back as if something had occurred to him. He re-checked one of the papers.
‘I’ve just realised. One of the victims was a Sarah Carver.’ He looked up at his visitor. ‘Is she….?’
‘My sister.’
Gover looked stunned. ‘I… I’m sorry. I didn’t realise.’
‘No reason why you should.’
The older man’s eyes seemed to glaze over. ‘That’s why you’re reviewing it?’
Carver nodded. ‘She’s had a few problems.’ He delved into his wallet and took out a photograph, showed it to the man in the chair. ‘They’re her kids. Ten and seven. Things are rough for them. I’m trying to put some things right.’
Gover gazed at the young faces. ‘I’ve a couple of grandkids about the same age.’ He handed the photograph back. ‘I’m sorry I can’t help.’
‘So am I,’ Carver said.
As Carver’s Golf passed out of sight, Gover let the net curtain fall back in place and sighed. For several minutes he stared out through the gauze, seeing nothing. Eventually he turned and walked back over to the sideboard. He was about to take another cigar when his eyes lit on the framed photograph next to it. It showed the happy faces of two young children, smiling into the camera. He picked it up, gazing at it lovingly, the way grandparents do. Forgetting about his smoke he returned to his chair and sat down, cradling the photograph in front of him. But he was remembering two other faces, the ones in the photograph Carver had shown him. He stayed that way for several minutes then, slowly, he lifted his head and gazed towards the window again. After a while his shoulders hunched as he doubled up and buried his face in his hands.
Of the several voice-mails waiting when Carver got back to the office, he responded to Jess’s first. Her, ‘Call me soon as you get this,’ sounded urgent, though she’d been fine when he’d rung her first thing to find out how she got on with Kahramanyan. A cryptic, ‘It was an interesting evening,’ was all he could get out of her at the time, leaving him wondering what - or who - the main topic of conversation was.
‘Have you heard from The Duke?’ she said when she realised it was him.
‘No. Why?’
‘It’s Cathy. The hospice rang just after he got in work and he’s rushed off to be with her. Looks like nature may be shaping up to take its course a bit earlier than expected.’
‘Oh God,’ Carver sighed as the sadness he had been keeping in check until the time was right broke through. His free hand went to his forehead and he hunched over the phone. ‘God,’ he repeated. After a lengthy silence he became conscious neither of them was speaking – not that there was anything to say.
‘I’ll give him some time then ring him.’
After sharing commiserations for the The Duke and his dying wife, Carver mused aloud on what the Head of SMIU’s plans might be.
‘Let’s put it this way,’ Jess said. ‘I don’t think we’ll see him back here for a while.’
Carver agreed. The Duke had spoken about staying with Cathy once the end was in sight. He wondered how long it would be and how it would affect the man he respected above all others. Despite his, ‘Man’s man,’ persona, The Duke was a romantic at heart and loved his wife, deeply.
‘It’s going to hit him bad,’ he told Jess.
‘I know.’
Eventually talk turned back to work and Carver voiced the question that was next uppermost in his mind after concerns for his ex-boss.
‘Has anyone said who’ll take over while he’s away?’
‘Looks like Terry West,’ Jess said. ‘That was always the plan. We’re just waiting for ACPO confirmation.’
‘What about the Danelian thing?’ Carver asked.
‘As far as I know he’ll be running that as well.’
Carver gave an acknowledging, ‘Uh-huh,’ but avoided further comment. He’d worked with the former Merseyside Crime Squad DCI on a series of armed, cash-delivery robberies around the region a couple of years before. West was an excellent thief-taker and it was largely thanks to his sources within the Merseyside underworld that seven of the gang responsible eventually received lengthy prison sentences. But Carver knew Terry worked best as a street detective, dealing with criminals, carrying out surveillance and evidence-gathering operations. Carver had witnessed his running of a Major Enquiry and thought it wasn’t where his strengths lay. He would come good in time, Carver was sure. But it was a big ask to expect someone to take charge of the new unit, work with staff he hardly knew, and run an Operation like Aslan - the designation given to the hunt for Danelian after Alec Duncan kept referring to Armenia as, ‘Narnia’. To Carver’s mind, Jess would have been the safer pair of hands. But whatever her abilities, she was still too junior and, on paper at least, could not demonstrate she possessed the levels of experience SMIU’s Chief Officer overseers would look for in a temporary Unit leader. As he mused on it, Jess must have heard him sucking air between his teeth.
‘Don’t say anything. I said you should have accepted The Duke’s offer.’
Not wanting to go there, Carver told her he would catch up with her later and rang off. But another minute passed before he realised he was still musing on Terry West’s likely appointment as The Duke’s stand–in.
‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ he reminded himself. ‘Just forget it.’
He turned his attention to his growing in-tray. But after spending fifteen minutes reading and re-reading an analysis on the burgeoning East European Sex-Trade problem, he closed the file, returning it to the pile with an annoyed grunt of frustration.
Apart from not being in the right mood for the Intelligence-Assessor work that was the other side to his ‘Organisation Transition Management’ role, his interview with Gover and Jess’s news about The Duke kept intruding.
After getting up to refill his coffee mug – he decided to suffer the jag - Carver returned to his desk. Picking up his document case, he took out the papers he had showed Gover that morning and spread them in front of him, letting their graphic contents focus his mind on something he might at least be able to do something about.
It hadn’t required any conscious mental effort on Carver’s part for him to conclude that Ron Gover had lied. Carver’s wizarding instincts kicked in the moment he felt the man’s damp palm. And Gover’s attempts to stifle the instinctive physical responses to the act of telling a lie – altering his posture, getting up to light a cigar, trying to keep his face from reacting the way it should have done – were tell-signs any half-decent detective would have spotted, never mind one who’s lie-detection capabilities put him within reach of the percentile of those sometimes labelled, ‘wizards’.
It was Professor Maureen O’Sullivan of the University of San Francisco who first ascribed the term ‘wizard’ to those one-in-twenty-th
ousand people who possess the innate ability to tell when someone is lying. Her pioneering late-nineties research into the psychology of lie detection and facial analysis demonstrated how ‘wizards’ are adept at reading the involuntary micro-expressions - invisible to most of the population - that invariably accompany the act. O’Sullivan also showed that the most gifted wizards are more than capable of consistently outperforming polygraph machines. And it was during a National Crime Faculty-sponsored exchange-trip to the FBI’s famed Behavioural Analysis Unit at Quantico when Carver first discovered that his ability to ‘read’ people placed him within the top twenty percentile of identified ‘wizards’ worldwide – according to O’Sullivan’s strict criteria.
But far from being the boon most people assumed such an attribute was for someone in Carver’s position, he had long ago realised it was nothing of the sort. Most experienced detectives can tell when someone is lying, the difficulty, usually, is proving it. Following his back-slapping return from the US and after the first wave of ‘parlour-trick-curiosity’ died down, Carver soon discovered the drawbacks. Many people, especially those with secrets – which means most - are suspicious to the point of avoiding once they realise that the person they are talking to really can tell when their words don’t quite fit with the reality they are purporting to describe. Social and, in particular, work gatherings were a nightmare. It explained why Carver’s attendance record at the sort of events senior officers were sometimes expected to be seen at was so poor as to occasionally draw comment. Nevertheless he always made a point of showing up at the retirement functions of those he respected.
But even without the behaviours that had evidenced Gover’s discomfort, the ex-SOCO’s failure to mention that there had in fact been talk of a suspect – a couple of still-serving officers around at the time remembered as much though there was no mention of it in the IO Report – together with his apparent lack of interest in which exhibits were missing would, in any case, have raised Carver’s suspicions.
Family Reunion Page 13
