by Cara Hunter
PW: I didn’t lie.
GQ: A witness has come forward who saw you on the night of June 23rd. You were with two young lads at a bus stop on the Banbury Road. At the same time as Hannah and Rob Gardiner were enjoying a peaceful and entirely row-free evening in their home.
PW: [silence]
I was scared of him – he hit me –
CG: So you’re admitting it – nothing happened at the flat?
PW: [silence]
CG: For the tape, Miss Walker, was there, or was there not, a violent argument at 81 Crescent Square such as you describe in your statement dated 7th May 2017?
PW: [silence]
No.
CG: Did Hannah Gardiner come home that evening and find you in bed with her husband?
PW: No.
GQ: So you lied. Worse than that, you attempted to frame an innocent man for his wife’s murder.
PW: He’s not innocent – he’s a bastard -
GQ: Do you realize how serious that is? The trouble you’re in?
PW: [turning to DS Quinn]
Do you realize the trouble you’re in? When I tell them what you did – letting me in your flat, having sex with me –
GQ: You know that’s not what happened –
PW: Yeah, well, that’s going to be your word against mine, isn’t it?
CG: I think a jury will be rather more inclined to believe Detective Sergeant Quinn, don’t you?
PW: [pulls out her mobile phone and shows DS Quinn a photo]
That’s my underwear in your bed. Who are they going to believe now?
GQ: You staged that – it must have been while I was out –
[turning to DC Gislingham]
She’s lying – all of it –
PW: I want a lawyer. I can have one if I want – yeah?
CG: Yes, as we have already –
PW: In that case I want one. Right now. And I’m not talking any more until I do.
CG: Pippa Walker, I am arresting you on suspicion of perverting the course of justice. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you fail to mention when questioned, something you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. You will now be taken to the cells, to await the arrival of your legal representative. You will also be required to hand over your mobile phone.
Interview suspended at 12.32.
* * *
* * *
‘I still have reservations about this, Inspector.’
I’m standing in the kitchen doorway at Frampton Road with William Harper’s lawyer. Looking down the hallway, I can see Harper’s doctor helping him out of a police car. He looks shrunken. Shrivelled somehow. He stares around in terror at two or three passers-by who’ve stopped to watch from the other side of the road. We’ve done this to him. I know that. We didn’t mean to, and we did it for the right reasons. But it’s down to us all the same.
Erica Somer gets out of the driver’s door and comes round, and she and Lynda Pearson support Harper slowly into the house. He stumbles on the step, bent half double, his hands outstretched before him as if he no longer trusts his eyes.
I turn to the lawyer. She knows what we’re trying to prove by this exercise, but not why we’re suddenly doing it now. ‘This is in your client’s interests. I’m sorry it has to be like this, but we need physical proof. I’m sure you understand.’
‘What I understand, Inspector,’ she says acidly, as Somer and Pearson ease Harper stiffly on to one of the kitchen chairs, ‘is that you could have obtained this so-called “proof” right at the start, and saved a sick and vulnerable old man from enormous unnecessary stress, not to mention incarceration. I fully intend to make an official complaint.’
I see Somer glance at me but I’m not going to lose my rag with this woman. She’s right. Or at least, partly so.
‘You are free to do that, of course. But I’m sure you understand that we had no choice but to arrest Dr Harper when we did. Indeed, we would have been in derogation of our duty had we not done so, given the evidence we had at the time. And whatever the results of this experiment, it has no bearing at all on your client’s physical state three years ago, at the time of the alleged abduction.’
She gives a little huffy sniff and reaches into her pocket for her mobile phone. ‘Let’s get this over with, shall we?’
I turn to Baxter, who’s standing behind me with a video camera; the lawyer isn’t the only one who’s going to film this.
‘OK, Dr Harper, are you ready now?’
He looks up at me, then lifts a shaking hand to shield his face, as if he fears a blow.
‘There’s nothing to be frightened of, Bill,’ says the doctor. ‘This is a police officer. He’s not going to hurt you.’
Harper’s watery eyes stare into mine. He shows no sign of recognizing me.
Pearson crouches down and puts her hand on Harper’s arm. ‘We just need to go down into the cellar for a minute –’
The old man’s eyes widen. ‘No – there’s something down there –’
‘It’s OK, Bill. There’s nothing down there now, I promise. And I’ll be with you the whole time. As well as this nice police lady.’
She straightens up and exchanges a glance with Somer, who smiles weakly.
Baxter goes over to the door and pulls the bolt across, then leans in and flicks on the overhead light. Somer helps Harper to his feet and, between them, she and Pearson get Harper to the top of the flight of stairs.
‘I’ll go first,’ says Somer. ‘Just in case.’
‘He has to go down unaided,’ I say quietly. ‘That’s the whole point.’
‘I know, sir,’ she says, flushing. ‘I just –’
Her voice trails off, but I know what she means.
‘The video’s running,’ says Baxter behind me.
‘Go on, Bill,’ says Pearson gently. ‘Take your time. Hold on to the handrail if you need to.’
It takes nearly twenty minutes, in the end, and he has to go down backwards, clinging to the banister with both hands, muttering and trembling with each step. Once or twice he nearly slips, but eventually we’re all standing in the empty cellar. In the damp and the smell and the bleak, flickering light.
The lawyer turns to me. ‘So what does this prove, Inspector?’
‘It proves that Dr Harper is physically capable of accessing this area on his own, despite the fact that his arthritis has clearly deteriorated in the last few months.’
I catch Baxter’s eye, and I know what he’s thinking: Harper came down here and slipped the bolt on Vicky out of fear and confusion, condemning a young woman and a small child to a dreadful lingering death that only a chance coincidence prevented. But he’d had no idea that’s what he was doing. He probably thought it was rats. It’s not even attempted manslaughter, far less murder.
‘Can we take Bill upstairs again now, Inspector?’ asks Pearson. ‘He’s starting to get distressed.’
I nod. ‘But he needs to do it on his own again, please.’
‘Hold on a minute, sir.’
It’s Somer, on the other side of the room, by the inner door. She looks up at the bolt at the top and reaches up to it.
She swivels round and looks at me. ‘I can’t get enough purchase on this to move it. Not without standing on something.’
The inference is obvious and the lawyer is on it at once. ‘How tall are you, Constable?’
‘Five foot six.’
‘And my client can’t be more than five foot seven even if he was standing up straight, and he has very limited mobility and hands crippled by arthritis.’
‘Crippled’ is a bit histrionic, in my book, but I appreciate that she’s trying to make a point.
I turn to Baxter. ‘Do you have the crime-scene photos on that thing?�
��
He shakes his head. ‘Not on this camera. But I do have some on my phone.’
‘OK, let’s have a look.’
He scrolls back through. The inner room, the filthy bedding, the bag of empty tins, the repellent toilet. And then the room we’re standing in. Broken furniture, cardboard boxes, black plastic sacks, an old tin bath full of junk. Nothing remotely robust enough to climb on.
‘What about that stepladder?’ I say in an undertone. ‘The one in the conservatory?’
He shakes his head. ‘No way. It was covered in spiders’ webs and crap. No one had moved it for months. And Vicky can’t have been in that cellar more than three weeks tops.’
And he’s right. Of course he is. It would have been a miracle if the food and water we found had lasted even that long.
‘Could you bring a chair down from the kitchen?’
He slides a glance at Harper. ‘Well, I could, boss, but I don’t think he could, if you catch my drift.’
‘I don’t think we need to submit my client to further humiliation by videotape, do you?’ says the lawyer loudly. ‘Assuming you have no objection, I’m going to take him back to the Council care home your actions have condemned him to.’
We stand and watch as she and the doctor help Harper back up the stairs, and then listen as their footsteps retreat down the hall and the door bangs behind them.
‘I keep telling myself he was about to go into a home anyway,’ says Somer, biting her lip. I know what she means.
‘If it wasn’t Harper who locked her in,’ says Baxter eventually, ‘the only other possibility is Walsh. OK, we know he didn’t rape Vicky, but he could easily have sussed she was here. He admitted hearing that noise upstairs, didn’t he – and yes, he claims he thought it was a cat but what if that was just a lie? What if he realized what Vicky was up to and decided to get rid of her – permanently? And he’d probably have got away with it too – what with the DNA from the kid and the old man in the state he’s in. Everything would have pointed to Harper.’
‘What do you think, Somer?’
She pulls a tissue from her pocket and starts to wipe her hands free of grime. ‘If Walsh really did work out what Vicky was up to, he had one hell of a motive to get rid of her. Her and the child. Walsh said as much: he and his sister expect to get Harper’s money when he dies. I can’t see him wanting to share it with some grubby little teenage con artist.’ She makes a face. ‘Which is exactly how he would describe her, incidentally.’
‘And you think he’s capable of locking them in? Knowing full well what that would mean?’
She sticks the tissue back in her pocket. ‘Yes, sir, I do. There’s something cold-blooded about him. I don’t think it’s an accident he lives alone.’
Baxter’s clearly chuffed she agrees with him so conclusively. ‘And Walsh is deffo devious enough to remember to wipe the bolt afterwards.’
I’m not about to argue with that one, either.
‘In any case,’ says Baxter, ‘if it wasn’t Walsh, then who? There isn’t anyone else. No one else has anything remotely close to a motive. Never mind opportunity.’
I take a deep breath. ‘OK. Go to Vine Lodge and arrest Vicky. Attempted fraud.’
Baxter nods. ‘And Walsh?’
‘We know when Vicky was found and we know she can’t have been there much more than three weeks. Let’s find out where Walsh was in that time.’
* * *
* * *
‘Where’s Fawley?’
Somer looks up from her desk, surprised that Quinn should choose her to ask, given how many other people he could have picked on.
‘In with the Super. I think he was wondering where you were.’ Because you’ve been AWOL most of the last two days. And because you look like shit. But she doesn’t actually say that bit.
Quinn rubs the back of his neck. ‘Yeah, well, you know. Tough case.’
The door swings open and Woods, the custody sergeant, appears, scanning the room until he catches sight of Quinn and beckons him over. Somer sees the two of them confer, and then watches Quinn go quickly over to Gislingham. She can tell from their faces something’s up. Whatever mess you’ve got yourself into, she thinks, I hope you’re not dragging Gislingham down with you. She likes Gislingham, and he doesn’t deserve to pay for Quinn’s mistakes.
She gets up and walks over towards them, then pretends to be looking for something on the desk two bays down. Their voices are low, but she can hear what they’re saying.
‘She must have something,’ says Gislingham. ‘Credit card? Passport? Driving licence, then – we know she drives.’
‘Woods says not,’ says Quinn. ‘He ought to know.’
Gislingham turns to his computer. ‘OK, let’s do a driving licence check.’
He types, then stares at the screen, chewing the end of his pen. Then he frowns and tries something else.
Then he turns to look up at Quinn.
‘Shit,’ he says.
* * *
* * *
Having briefed Harrison on where we’ve got to, I head back to the incident room. The place is humming with activity. Baxter is at the front, talking while he writes on a whiteboard.
DONALD WALSH
VICKY NEALE
Motive
Money – Harper’s estate, sexual?
Means
Fit enough to commit crime / reach bolt
Opportunity
Known visitor to house with access to cellar
Alibi ??
HANNAH GARDINER
Motive
Sexual Predator ? ? ?
Means
Access To:
Car cover etc
Possible murder weapons
Fit enough to move body/climb into loft unaided
Opportunity
Known visitor to house with access to loft/shed
Could have met Hannah on the street
Alibi ??
‘Any luck on his whereabouts for the three weeks in question?’ Baxter is saying.
‘We’re checking CCTV and traffic cams on the route between Frampton Road and Banbury,’ says one of the DCs. ‘But it’s a big job. It’s going to take time.’
‘What about for 24th June 2015?’
‘I’m still waiting to hear,’ says Somer from her desk. ‘The timetable has him teaching from 10.30 that morning, which would make getting to Wittenham and back virtually impossible. I did ask them to check if he could have been off sick that day, but when we started homing in on Gardiner I didn’t chase it up. Sorry.’
‘But Banbury CID are keeping an eye on him?’
‘Yes – they’re on the case. They know we’ll be heading up there as soon as we have enough evidence to bring him in.’
Baxter turns from the board now and sees me. ‘OK, boss?’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Working up the case on Walsh. Like you said.’
‘I said to check his alibi for Vicky. I didn’t say anything about Hannah.’
Somer glances at Baxter, then at me. ‘It seemed the next logical step, sir. If Harper couldn’t get on to a chair to open the cellar door there’s no way on earth he could have got that car cover up into the loft, even if it was two years ago. You had enough trouble and you’re thirty years younger and someone was holding the steps.’ She’s blushing slightly.
‘And like I said,’ interjects Baxter, ‘who else is there? Walsh is the only one with both means and opportunity.’
I walk up to the board and stare at what Baxter’s written under ‘Motive’.
‘We talked about it before, sir,’ he says. ‘How Walsh could have been using that house to prey on women. There’s the stash of porn – no one’s explained that, have they?’
‘He’s rig
ht, boss,’ says Everett. ‘If it’s not Harper’s, it has to be Walsh’s.’
‘Hannah’s murder could easily have been sexually motivated, sir.’ Somer again. ‘We’ve no way of knowing how long she was in the house. He could have kept her there for days. And she was naked, as well as tied up.’
I turn to look at them. ‘And all that time, Vicky was upstairs on the top floor, completely oblivious?’
Part of me wants to believe it, but we’d be in such wild regions of coincidence there’d be signs up saying ‘Here be dragons’.
They’re looking at each other. Not sure where this is heading.
‘Look,’ I say. ‘I buy Walsh as the one who locked Vicky in. That adds up. And from his point of view it’s the perfect crime: no blood, no contact – he doesn’t even have to look at his victims. Just slip the bolt and walk away, with virtually no chance of ever getting caught. But Hannah – no. That’s different. That’s brutal and messy. Not to mention incredibly risky.’
‘So what are you saying?’
I turn to look at the pinboard again. The maps, the timeline, the photos. There’s a picture in my mind that’s trying to come into focus.
‘I think this crime was premeditated,’ I say slowly. ‘Planned down to the smallest detail by someone Hannah knew. Someone who tricked her to a place they’d prepared with everything they needed to get away with murder. The weapon, the packing tape, the blanket, the car cover. Someone who’d even worked out where they were going to hide that car cover afterwards. Someone, in other words, who didn’t just want her dead, but knew that house.’
* * *
*
Somer’s face is pale. ‘But to do something like that – they’d have to be –’
‘A psychopath? You’re right. I think the person who killed Hannah Gardiner is a psychopath.’
‘Boss?’
It’s Quinn. At the door. With Gislingham.
‘How nice of you both to pop in.’ And yes, it did sound that sarcastic. ‘Are you two finally going to come clean about what the hell’s been going on these last few days?’
