Liam cut in. “So you’re saying that Leonards specified that you should go there at three a.m.?”
“Well, no. They left the timing up to me. But Brian Tanner said it was the only time he could make it, and he said that he wanted to be there. On behalf of the government, like.”
Craig covered his eyes with his hand. Could the man really have been that thick? But Kelly didn’t have a criminal record so he was beginning to believe that they were dealing with an innocent man.
Liam pushed on.
“OK. So you met Mister Tanner at the site at three o’clock that morning?”
“Two-thirty, but he’d already been there for a while. He’d got the mixer going and already dumped about three feet’s worth into the hole.”
Just enough to bury the cannabis plants?
Craig cut in.
“Didn’t that strike you as odd, Mister Kelly? You were the builder.”
Kelly shrugged.
“I suppose. But I was really just there to cover health and safety. Anyone can mix up a bit of concrete and start filling, so I didn’t mind. Anyway, we did the rest together and then I smoothed off the top nice and neat with a spreader...”
Jessica Chambers’ rake.
“...and posted a barrier round it, so people wouldn’t walk on it till it had set.”
Liam made a rewind motion with his hand.
“Go back a bit. You said ‘The hole’. What hole?”
They already knew what the hole had been, but he wanted to find out exactly what Kelly had known.
“The hole in the roof of the cellar. It was covered by a trap-door. I’m not sure why it was there, but maybe there’d been a coal chute in it at some point.”
It was a good point; if the underground cellar had been part of one of Ash’s historical buildings and survived, then its original use might well have been as a coal store.
Liam returned to the cement.
“How much concrete did it take to fill the cellar?”
Kelly puffed out his cheeks. “A lot. It had to spread out to fill the full space. We were there for bloody ages.” He stopped and glanced at the tape. “Can I say that? Bloody? On a police tape like?”
Craig had to stop himself from laughing at his naiveté; if Kelly had only heard some of the swearing that had gone on it the room...
Liam continued without missing a beat.
“Swearing’s fine. Now, how long would the concrete have taken to set?”
Craig held his breath, bracing himself for an answer that might give them even more work.
The foreman thought for a moment. “Depends on the cement you use and the time of year, but I always like to give it seventy-two hours to dry. It stops cracking. That’s why we had to warn people not to walk on it; the surface could have been smudged for up to maybe sixty-five.”
Craig exhaled slowly. It wasn’t as bad as he’d feared; the killer had only had a window of seventy-two hours from three a.m. on third of July in which to hide the bones.
Liam read his mind and then asked another question.
“Aye, but how much of that time would it have been liquid enough for things to sink out of sight?”
Good point.
Kelly screwed up his face, considering at length before he finally answered. “Completely out of sight? Without using force, twenty-four hours at most. Forty-eight with real time and effort, and I mean real hard graft. After that you’d have needed two men to get stuff even an inch into it, and like I said, it would’ve been rock hard by seventy-two.”
The killers had had two days from three a.m. on the third in which to stand a chance of concealing the bones in the concrete. It took them to the early hours of the fifth of July.
The D.C.I. changed direction.
“Did you see any solid objects in the cellar as you were filling it?”
“Aye, well, there were the pipes and wires running along its walls, but nothing loose if that’s what you mean. The place would have been cleared out before we started.”
“By whom?”
“Well, the DoE were the ones leaving, so their staff I suppose. Tanner would know better exactly who cleared it. I was just asked to fill it in.”
“Did you notice any plants, flowers or vegetation of any sort as you poured?”
Kelly looked at the D.C.I. as if he’d lost the plot.
“It was a basement not a garden!”
Liam would have laughed but they needed to get on.
“Instruct your client just to answer the question, Ms Reynolds.”
The solicitor nodded and turned to Kelly with a weak smile.
“No jokes, please, Dean. These officers appear not to have a sense of humour.”
As Craig had done stand-up in the law-school revue he shot her a sceptical look.
“So that was a no to seeing any plants then?”
Kelly nodded. “There were no plants that I saw.”
Liam was almost at the end of his questions.
“One last thing, Mister Kelly. Did you at any time see bones in the hole that you were filling?”
The builder lurched forward in his chair.“No, of course I didn’t see any bloody bones! I was as shocked as you were when Rory found them.”
Craig asked an add-on. “Why did you deliberately tell your men not to dig down this week?”
“What?”
“It would have made sense if you hadn’t wanted them to dig and discover the bones.”
Kelly gawped at him. “I told them not to dig down because the new owners’ survey said the cellar was solid, and they didn’t want us to disturb it in case it started flooding again. You can ask the surveyors.”
“Xavier Ross?”
The foreman looked confused. “What? No. Ross was the surveyor for the Barrs’ purchase of the site back in oh-seven, but the new owners, The Monmouth Consortium, used a different firm this time.” He shook his head. “I can’t remember their name, but Leonards would know. They instructed me as foreman again this time because I already knew the site, and just told me that we weren’t to dig the cellar out. I have to say I was surprised. That cellar should have dried out long ago, and it would have given extra square footage to the new owners.”
Another surveyor. More people to interview. It made Craig feel tired.
It was almost one o’clock, so he signalled Liam that he was going to wrap things up.
“Right. I just have one last question, Mister Kelly.”
The builder’s eyes lit up. “Then I can go home?”
“Yes, I think you can. But we may need to speak to you again, so don’t leave the country.”
“Fair enough. What’s the question?”
Craig sat forward in his chair, his eyes fixed firmly on the other man’s.
“Do you know anything about growing cannabis?”
Kelly and his brief both looked astounded and Hanna Reynolds gave a weak laugh.
“That was a bit left of field.”
“Instruct your client to answer, please.”
The builder was happy to, although he still looked confused.
“Only what I’ve seen on those reality cop shows. The plants need a lot of light or something, don’t they?”
Craig didn’t delve into the horticultural points.
“Have you ever grown cannabis yourself or smoked it? Personal use carries a low penalty.”
Kelly shook his head emphatically. “Don’t smoke anything, never did. And I... I even managed to kill the wife’s pot plants.”
The fleeting hesitation said that there was something else, and Craig seized on it.
“But you know someone who does grow it, don’t you?”
The foreman’s immediately averted gaze said that they were about to hear a lie.
“No.” And then like all liars he hung himself with his elaboration. “I wouldn’t know where to find drugs.”
Liam’s response was caustic; he’d spotted the signs of lying as well.
“Well now, aren’t you the boy
scout.”
Before Hanna Reynolds could object Kelly blurted out.
“I’m not getting someone else into trouble!”
Craig hit back swiftly.
“Withholding evidence is trouble as well, Mister Kelly, so answer the question.”
The builder glanced at his solicitor and on her nod he gave a reluctant sigh.
“It was only a rumour I heard, from some of the young lads on the site back when we were renovating The Howard Tower.”
“About?”
Kelly’s eyes dropped to the table and he answered in a whisper.
“One of the security-guards at the DoE was supposed to be able to get you stuff... weed... that’s all... weed, if you wanted it.” His eyes lifted again to meet Craig’s. “But I never heard his name, honest.”
“You mean you won’t say it.”
It didn’t matter. It didn’t take Einstein to work it out. Their next interviewee would be Brian Tanner, but first they needed to speak to The Monmouth Consortium’s surveyor and find out who specifically had issued the instruction not to dig down at the site that week.
As Craig ended the interview and rose to leave he noticed the solicitor staring straight at him, and as a small, knowing smirk appeared on her face his heart plummeted towards the floor. Hanna had seen everything that he’d got up to at the reunion, and her expression said that she didn’t intend to keep it to herself.
****
The Police Intelligence Section. Malone Road.
Kyle was even more annoyed than he had been half-an-hour before, but this time with his old boss. Contrary to all the D.I.’s boasting and hopes, Roy Barrett had waved them all into his office, not just him, and then set them down in the adjoining Board Room with three copies of the now-unsealed, sealed file. Why Barrett was being so free with information that rightly belonged to him and him alone, Kyle would ask him later, but he had a sneaking suspicion that one of the two D.C.I.s across the table had made a call behind his back. The thought made him indignant, as if he had the right to dictate their actions, and it slowly dawned on the ex-spy that he needed to acquire more power.
Power can come from many things in life: position, money, intelligence, beauty, and although it doesn’t always require others to lord over to make it real, some people being content to wield power only over their own lives, Kyle Thomas Spence was not one of those. His power came from hoarding information and storing it for a time when it might prove of use, but it appeared that in order to do that in the police force he would have to rise in rank. As the next rung up in Craig’s team was already multiply occupied that might mean joining a squad elsewhere, preferably an elsewhere that didn’t require too much manual labour and he could already think of a few of those.
He parked the idea for the time being and turned over the cardboard cover of the red file in front of him, immediately disappointed by what he saw. The name inside the sealed file wasn’t, as he’d been hoping, D.C.S. Terry ‘Teflon’ Harrison, a snobbish lecher that no-one liked, but an Assistant Chief Constable whose name he’d only seen in email lists before: A.C.C. Christopher Price.
Kyle’s eyes shot up to meet the others and he said exactly what was on Aidan’s mind.
“Who? I’ve never heard of the man!”
Aidan shook his head slowly, looking equally blank. “Me neither. Which department is he in?”
Andy answered him in a dull tone. “Fraud, or at least he was. He’s probably in something woolly like Logistics now that he’s an A.C.C.”
His glum expression made Kyle’s antennae twitch. “Didn’t you mention at the briefing that you’d worked in Fraud once?”
Aidan gave a smirk. “You mean you were actually awake?”
The D.I. ignored him, waiting for an answer, and when Andy finally obliged it was in a glum voice.
“For two years as a sergeant, and Price was my boss the whole time.” He shook his head disbelievingly. “But I really can’t believe that he would-”
Aidan cut him off, already on the file’s second page. “I’d wait until you read what he did before you defend him.” He gave a soft whistle. “It’s creepy stuff.”
The normally placid Andy bristled. “There were no charges brought, so nothing was prov-”
Aidan wasn’t persuaded. “Read page three. They settled out of court.”
Andy gawped at him. “Price paid the woman off?”
Kyle nodded. “Looks like it. But we’d find out a lot more if you two stopped talking and read the sodding file.”
It was the perfect excuse to pull rank on him but Andy was too diverted and Aidan just couldn’t be arsed, so the men fell quiet and kept reading. Two minutes later Kyle sat back with a smirk and Andy was looking even more depressed.
“I honestly can’t believe that he did that... I thought Chris Price was a decent man... It would be like...” He grappled for someone he admired to compare with. “...like the chief doing it.”
Aidan shook his head. “Nah, he would just have taken the pics on his phone.” When he saw Andy looking aghast he held up his hands in defence. “Just kidding. Marc isn’t a perv. But Price obviously is.”
Kyle was still thinking about Christopher Price’s alleged offence, and more to the point how the hell he had planned to get away with it. On the first of July two-thousand-and-seven, the A.C.C., then a married man in his late forties, had picked up a twenty-two-year-old woman that he’d never met before in a nightclub and taken her to The Pierrot Hotel on Howard Street, across the road from the then DoE building, now their crime site.
OK, it was sleazy, but so far so predictable; men’s delusion that they grew more attractive as they aged was well known and the only thing that puzzled Kyle was why young women went along with it, although he was grateful from the bottom of his fortyish heart that some did.
This woman obviously had found the aging Price attractive, going willingly with him to the hotel, something that wasn’t in dispute. The sexual encounter that occurred next was by her account pedestrian, and if it had ended there it would just have been one more brief encounter amongst the many that had probably happened in the city that night. Except that it hadn’t ended there. Price had decided to go artistic.
The image it conjured brought a smirk to the inspector’s thin lips.
“Was he an arty sort, your old boss?”
Andy’s only response was a mournful sigh that was Aidan’s cue to air his incredulity at what he’d just read.
“So… Price waits until this woman, who so far was probably just thinking that she’d had a good time, so he, the big perv, waits till she’s asleep and then starts taking photographs of her? Nude? In different poses? And with a camera he’s brought along specially?”
Andy sprang to his ex-boss’ defence. “Maybe he’d had the camera with him for a case?” Even he could hear that the excuse sounded weak.
Aidan gawped at him. “A full-sized camera and lens?”
Kyle leapt in. “And Price wasn’t a scene of the crime photographer so why would he have been carrying one at all?”
Andy tried one last time, struggling to reconcile the man that he’d known and respected with the voyeuristic creep outlined in the file.
“Maybe the file’s wrong. Maybe it was just his smart-phone?”
Aidan shook his head. “A smart-phone eleven years ago? I don’t think so. Anyway, I don’t care if he used a bloody pinhole camera, there was no excuse!”
He took a deep breath and restarted more calmly. “OK, so, Price is taking these photos, posing her in different positions and without her permission because she’s asleep it says here, and she wakes up and catches him.” The D.C.I. shook his head. “This was definitely a sexual assault. Voyeurism at least. What the hell was the man thinking of?”
Kyle was still trying to visualise the tableau. “This is my favourite bit. She screams at him so Price bolts out onto the balcony, and then he’s surprised when she locks the fricking doors?”
Even Andy’s lips twitched at the
image of the potbellied man he’d worked for standing naked on a balcony over a city centre street, hammering on the glass doors to get back in.
“Good for her.”
Kyle read on. “She left him standing out there while she called the cops, so officers who knew him and might even have worked for him found him like that!”
“Serves him right, the dirty old bugger!”
Their ability to resist finally broken, the three men descended into peals of laughter that brought Roy Barrett in from the next room.
“What’s so funny?”
Kyle gazed at him sceptically. “Have you read this file?”
“No. It was sealed when I received it and I have to reseal it right away. You three are the only eyes-on that it’s had since oh-seven. Have you finished with it?”
Kyle quickly scribbled both parties’ details in his notebook and then closed his copy, followed by the others, still shaking their heads. Barrett gathered up the files and left again, leaving the detectives to formulate a plan of attack. Andy spoke first.
“I’ll interview the woman. I can’t face Price.”
Aidan nodded. “Neither can I. He’s a disgrace. Can you take him, Kyle and I’ll go with Andy?”
The spook shrugged. “I could, but we might not need to interview either of them. Surely it depends on whether this woman,” he tapped his notebook, “is still alive, and when the concrete would have dried as to whether he’s a suspect in the murders? Anyway, how could Price have buried anyone? He was on a balcony fifty feet up, and after that he’d have been in custody under arrest, and I doubt he’d have been released by the third, which is when Jessica Chambers saw people on the site.”
Andy felt a wave of relief flood over him. “You’re right!” Even if his ex-boss was a pervert there was some comfort in knowing he wasn’t a murderer. Then he had another thought. “Did anyone check his release date in the file?”
Kyle shook his head and then headed for the door. “I’ll do it now.”
Andy glanced at his watch. “OK, the chief must have asked the foreman about the concrete drying by now. I’ll make the call.”
One minute later they knew that the longest the concrete would have taken to dry at that time of year was three days, making it rock-hard a whole two days before Christopher Price had made a financial arrangement with his victim and been released from house arrest.
The Property Page 25
