by Louisa Scarr
‘If your evidence is as strong as you think it is, then there shouldn’t be a problem, should there?’ Robin retorts.
‘My evidence is fine. You’ve got the file, haven’t you?’
Robin is aware that Craig has been extraordinarily accommodating of him throughout this investigation, polite despite the pressure she must have been under and her senior rank. But he also knows that this is his friend’s freedom at stake. Her desire for results cannot be what’s important here, especially when the evidence is not as cut and dried as it should be.
‘Yes,’ Robin replies. ‘And both you and I know there are holes.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like the fact that the knife only has Sharp’s prints on it? How did Finn kill him without touching the murder weapon?’
‘Perhaps he was wearing gloves.’
‘Gloves you’ve not been able to find? And while we’re on the subject of missing evidence, how about that camera footage?’
‘We’re still working on that.’
‘Not very hard, by the sounds of it.’
‘Okay, fine. Then who killed him, Butler?’ Craig is furious, her face red and blotchy. ‘Who?’
Robin is silent. He has no way to answer that question and she knows it.
‘It’s easy to question someone else’s investigation,’ Craig continues. ‘But harder to find a solution when it’s your neck on the line.’ She winces slightly at her turn of phrase. ‘That man in there,’ Craig says, regaining her composure with an angry finger towards the door, ‘was the only person in the van with Sharp. He had motive. He had opportunity. And the alcohol and drug abuse only show a man falling apart under the pressure from his significantly more successful, popular colleague. And you’re saying he didn’t kill him? Come on! Even you must admit you’re being swayed by your personal relationship.’
A gentle knock on the door interrupts her and they all turn.
‘What?’ Craig shouts.
The door opens and Sophie’s standing there. Robin feels his jaw clench.
‘DI Craig,’ Sophie begins. ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you.’
‘I know. I got your messages. We can speak later.’
‘No.’ Sophie walks decisively into the room and shuts the door behind her. ‘We need to talk now. It’s about the footage from the night of the storm.’
All four police officers turn towards Sophie. She nervously digs in her bag and pulls out a sheet of paper. She holds it towards Craig.
‘What’s this?’ Craig asks.
Robin cranes his neck to try and see. It looks like a computer printout from a spreadsheet. Lines of text in columns.
‘It’s the event log from the BBC server at the university,’ Sophie says, and Robin feels a ripple of apprehension. ‘Where the video was stored.’
‘Why do you have this?’ Robin asks Sophie. ‘And, more to the point,’ he turns to Craig, ‘why don’t you?’
‘Our digital team checked that server,’ she snaps. ‘There was nothing there of use. The video files have gone.’
‘Yes,’ Sophie says, waggling the page in her face. ‘But this says who logged on and when. Don’t you want to know who deleted them?’
Craig snatches the page from Sophie’s hand.
‘And?’ Robin asks impatiently.
Craig looks up from the paper. She hands it to Robin, who scans the text. A login for CALLOI occurs first thing Wednesday morning. Then nobody else until WHITEJ logs on, on Wednesday night.
‘Ian Calloway,’ Sophie says smugly. ‘Have you spoken to him?’
‘Not since his statement last week,’ Craig replies. ‘But it makes sense he would delete the files. He’s Finn’s friend. He’s got rid of proof of the murder.’
‘That’s one theory,’ Robin says. ‘Sophie,’ he asks, turning to her. ‘With Sharp dead and Finn in prison, who would get proprietary rights to the Doppler?’
‘Well, the university, essentially. They own everything.’
‘So there’s no money as motive—’ Craig begins, but Sophie interrupts her.
‘That doesn’t matter. You don’t work in academia for money. You do it for professional recognition, to be at the top of your field. And someone would have to publish the findings. Take the glory. And that would probably be Ian now.’
Sophie frowns. ‘I’ve never liked Ian. I thought he was jealous of Finn, but Finn always said I was being silly. But when I saw him last week, it felt like he was enjoying all this. Enjoying the fact that, with Finn out of the way, he was in charge.’
Robin smiles weakly at Sophie. He was wrong about her. She is passionate and impulsive, but that has worked in their favour in this case. She came through for Finn, which was more than he’s achieved.
But it’s too late. ‘So Calloway deleted the videos,’ Robin sighs.
‘No,’ Sophie says, frustrated. ‘This is what I’ve been trying to tell you. This shows he didn’t just delete the files.’
She leans over and points to a line on the piece of paper, the server log that Robin’s still holding.
19/05/21 09:25:54, Copied, it says, then a letter: an external drive.
And below it: 19/05/21 09:25:58, Deleted.
Sophie looks up at Robin. ‘He copied them first,’ she says. ‘He might still have them.’
Robin turns quickly to Craig. The look on her face is something between humiliation and anger. She’s screwed up, and she knows it.
But she turns to her DC, galvanised into action.
‘Grey,’ she shouts. ‘Get hold of Calloway. Arrest him. Now!’
56
The hospital ward is noisy and overheated. Liv’s body feels broken – the incision across the bottom of her belly throbs with pain whenever she moves – but Liv has never been happier. Her baby lies next to her in the plastic wheeled cot, wrapped up tightly in a blue blanket. Every now and again she leans over and looks at him, to check he’s still there and this is real.
He screams, of course. He cries all the time, his eyes screwed shut, his mouth open, tiny fists pumping in anger. And when he does, she awkwardly picks him up, wincing from the pain in her tummy, and pushes him against her breast. It didn’t work at first, but the midwife showed her how to latch him on and now he has the hang of it, feeding happily as her milk starts to come in.
The nurses come round occasionally, but for the most part she’s alone. She watches the other mothers in their beds, as visitors arrive. The dads, the proud grandparents, bringing presents and cooing over the newborns. They seem like a different species, these families, but Liv doesn’t allow herself the luxury of self-pity; she never has.
But she does let herself think about Robin.
She’s had a message from him. A simple: How are you? She hasn’t replied; she doesn’t know what to say. She feels bad for misleading him about the baby. But when he turned up that day, she couldn’t resist implying they’d slept together. That tiny bit of control was too much of a temptation.
And now she feels embarrassed, letting her guard down when she was in labour, letting him see her at her most vulnerable. She doesn’t like it. She feels beholden to him, like she owes him something, and that’s the feeling she dislikes more than anything.
But she’d liked daydreaming about Robin as the father. A nice man. A decent man. Unlike the real father: one of the bouncers at the club, a married dickhead with kids of his own that she slept with once without a condom when she needed the extra cash. Robin is nothing like him. Instinctively she knows Robin is someone that can be relied on to do the right thing, although the memory stick and the CCTV footage come back into her mind.
What was he doing there, that day with Trevor Stevens? Why was her sister so keen for her to have a copy? But after everything that has happened over the last few days, she doesn’t like the idea of holding onto it. She hates the thought that she could be responsible for something bad happening to Robin.
Liv hears a small snuffle from the cot next to her, and she looks over. He�
�s stirring, her boy’s arms and legs moving in the blanket. His face changes to the already familiar disgruntled expression. She still hasn’t decided on a name; nothing seems right for this tiny miracle at her side.
She’s not sure what will happen from here. They’ve said that they can go home soon. Maybe tomorrow. It worries her slightly. She hasn’t the foggiest idea how to look after a baby, and she has no fallback if things go wrong. But in her heart, she knows she’ll be okay. She always is.
She doesn’t want a man in her life; she doesn’t want Robin Butler. She’s happy with the way things are. Her and her baby boy.
Just them.
57
Ian Calloway is not a man used to the inside of police cells. Freya can already see the rings of sweat under his arms, his hands visibly shaking, as he sits opposite DI Craig and DC Grey in the police interview room.
Craig acted quickly, sending Grey to the lab and getting straight on the phone to her DCS. The arrest was swift, charges of perverting the course of justice and wasting police time more than enough to search the lab and his computer. The digital team are working hard now, trying to locate the missing videos.
Freya and Robin have been confined to the room next door, watching the scene via a computer screen. Freya heard the exchange between Craig and Robin – the latter annoyed to be kept at a distance – but now, as she sees the expression on her boss’s face, she knows Craig was right. There is no way Robin could control his anger sat in front of this man.
Freya herself feels the frustration. The knowledge that this man had willingly made a difficult situation worse. Hiding the evidence that showed what happened that night in the van.
Calloway’s asked for a lawyer, and the duty solicitor is sitting by his side. But, looking on, Freya knows how this interview’s going to go.
‘Mr Calloway,’ Craig begins. ‘I’m not going to keep you long.’
Freya sees Ian’s head tilt up, a hopeful expression on his face.
‘We have all the evidence we need to charge you,’ Craig continues, and Freya enjoys watching his optimism fade. ‘We just need to clear a few things up first.’
‘I’m so sorry, I… I didn’t think…’ Ian starts, until his solicitor silences him.
A faint smile appears on Craig’s face. ‘What did you do, Mr Calloway?’ she asks.
‘I’m so sorry.’ The solicitor goes to stop Calloway again, but he shakes his head. ‘I need to tell them,’ he mumbles, and the solicitor sits back in his seat, defeated. Ian turns to Craig. ‘I worked so hard for those guys,’ he says. ‘For Finn and Dr Sharp. I put my whole life on hold, getting that sodding radar up and running. And then, the night of the storm, as we’re having a glass of champagne before we all head out to the van, Finn pulls me to one side and says that my name’s not going on the paper. Says that there was a potential problem with the authorship, but he and Simon have had a chat, and it would be just the two of them now. Something to do with diluting the credit if there were more names listed.’
‘And you were angry?’
‘I was furious. I had an argument with Finn and he made me stay behind at the university. I should have been out there, in the van with them. Making a name for myself. I should have been on TV!’ he exclaims loudly. ‘But Finn wouldn’t let me, even after everything I’ve done for him.’
‘Craig’s not having to work hard on this one,’ Freya whispers to Robin. ‘He’s going to confess to murdering his granny, if she’s not careful.’
Robin smiles tightly and turns back to the screen. Freya can see Robin is stressed – she would be, too. She knows he’s keen to get eyes on the tape, but half of her is worried about what the video might show. What if it’s exactly as Craig believes – Finn murdering Sharp? What then?
‘So you saw your opportunity,’ Craig prompts Calloway.
‘You had your man,’ Ian says. ‘You knew what he’d done – he was locked in the van with the body. And I thought that with Sharp dead and Finn in prison, I could finish analysing the output from the storm and publish it myself. With Sharp’s name, too, of course.’
‘Of course,’ Craig says sarcastically. ‘So why steal the video? You could have done that anyway.’
Ian pauses. ‘I didn’t want anything to muddy the waters.’
‘Muddy the waters? How?’
Robin and Freya lean closer to the screen, as Ian continues talking. ‘The film – it’s not what you’d expect. It’s…’ He shakes his head. ‘Watch it for yourself, you’ll see.’
And, as if on cue, there’s a knock on the door. Grey opens it and pokes his head round into the corridor.
‘We have it,’ Grey says, coming back into the room, breathless and eager. ‘We have the video.’
58
The four of them crowd round the monitor in an empty interview room, as the harassed techie gets the video running.
‘So, I’ll scroll to after Justin White leaves, when something actually happens,’ he says, and Robin watches as the video fast-forwards. ‘I’m sorry to say,’ he continues, ‘but the camera angle isn’t great. It was positioned at the back of the van, facing forward, so you have quite a big black spot.’
‘But you see the murder?’ Craig asks him.
The techie hesitates. ‘See for yourself,’ he replies, stepping backwards.
The video plays. He’s right: the camera captures the monitors and equipment at the front of the van, but the entire back third is out of shot. The table, where Sharp was found, can only just be seen. But the quality is good and in colour: Finn and Sharp clear as they go about their work.
At first the film is boring. Both scientists sit in front of screens, watching an array of data. Occasionally, they talk; there’s no audio, but they seem to be smiling, their manner relaxed. The timestamp clicks round and Robin notices the camera start to shake slightly. It’s 01:10, the time the eye of the storm hit. The lights flicker; flashes of lightning burst outside the window. Both men seem happy – big grins on their faces, hands waving excitedly. At one point Sharp reaches over and enthusiastically hugs a smiling Finn.
Robin glances at Craig. She’s concentrating hard, her elbows on the desk, her chin resting on her hands. Robin knows this could be it. The moment that could free Finn – or put him away for good.
On screen, Finn has moved out of shot to the back of the van. He re-emerges a few minutes later, two plates with sandwiches in hand, and he passes one to Sharp. The two men sit back down in front of the monitors; the storm continues to thunder around them.
But then things start to change. Sharp stands up; his hands go to his throat. He seems to be choking, and Finn stands up next to him, thumping him twice on the back. Sharp’s shaking his head, and then he moves forward, ducking out of shot. Time ticks by. Only Finn can be seen, his face shocked, his eyes wide behind his glasses. He’s clearly panicking.
The two men have to crouch slightly in the small van; Robin remembers the cramped space, the feeling of claustrophobia that must have only worsened under stress. Robin watches as Finn’s hands flap; he walks to the monitors, then back again. He picks his mobile phone up, tries to make a call, throwing it down in frustration. Then he runs forward quickly, going out of shot.
‘Where have they gone?’ Robin snaps to the digital technician. ‘Why can’t we see them?’
The techie looks apologetic. ‘That’s what I meant, Sarge. The black spot.’
‘And there’s no other camera?’
‘No. There was a little Sony they used for filming earlier, but nothing else that captures this.’
‘Butler,’ Craig says. ‘Look.’
The two men are still out of shot, but occasionally something comes into view at the edge of the screen. The top of a head. An arm. And then, at one point, the two men together, seemingly fighting. They tussle together in the restricted space, then disappear.
Robin can only guess at what’s going on. Something happened to Simon and the two men got into a fight. But it’s not murder, Robin thinks.
It’s not—
His hands go to his mouth. He stares at the screen, shocked. Robin has seen some things in his time – horrific, scary, violent acts – but this scene renders him speechless.
Sharp has come back into the main part of the van. And the video shows the sickening action in high-resolution, full-colour definition.
Sharp’s staggering, his hands clamped to his neck. He’s flailing about, twisting and turning in panic, head, limbs, hands bumping against the sides of the vehicle. And the blood. The blood is everywhere.
It pushes out from between his fingers, spurts erupting in a fountain of red, hitting the walls and the window. He turns, his mouth open, gasping, his face puce, eyes bulging. And still the blood flows.
Sharp drops to his knees on the metal floor. The blood has completely soaked his shirt now; his hands and arms are covered with it. He looks back, to where Finn must have been standing. His mouth opens and closes a few times, and then he falls. His body lies where Robin remembers it, half under the table, legs bent under him.
Robin looks at Freya, stunned. Her mouth is open, her eyes unblinking: an expression he knows must be echoed on his own face.
They look back to the video. A blood pool expands around the body. Finn walks back into shot. One step, then another. Slowly, his gaze fixed on the motionless Simon Sharp on the floor, Finn shuffles past, his back to the wall, keeping as far away from the body as possible. He paces for a moment, bloody footprints in his wake. Then he sits down. His knees go up to his chest, his arms wrap around them. Still staring.
‘He stays like that until about half three,’ the techie says.
‘Then what?’ Craig asks, her voice no more than a whisper.
‘Then he panics. He gets up and locks the door. Starts screaming and shouting. Until you guys arrive.’
‘Shit,’ Robin mutters.
Craig looks at him. Her voice is faint. ‘I’m sorry, Butler.’
And he nods. There is nothing else to say. The video is clear. There was nobody else in that van.
