A Journal of Sin (24 page)

‘Look, like the Sergeant said, it's best we don’t talk about it until you go through the proper procedure and have access to legal advice.’ It wasn’t the answer she wanted to give. She wanted to slam his head through the coffee table and ask him if he broke into her mother’s house.

‘Oh fuck you, we’re both adults. I’ll talk if I want to talk. I’m tired of keeping it all inside. I don’t need a lawyer to tell me what to say and when to say it.’ Everyone had a different reaction to being arrested. Some stayed absolutely quiet, so much so the custody sergeant had trouble getting their name out of them. Others started to gush. Gush about anything from a complete rundown of their current gripes and groans to full and frank confessions of the offence in question, and sometimes of others too. ‘Have you looked in that bag? The one in the hall?’

‘I have. Planning on going somewhere?’

‘You haven’t looked hard enough, have you?’

‘It’ll be searched, along with this whole house, once you’ve been taken to the police station.’

‘Bring it in here. I want you to see something.’

Dales appeared at the door and beckoned her into the hall.

‘I’ve got to pop out. They’re having trouble finding the place. Our mapping system isn’t too great with these old villages. You’ll be alright with him, won’t you?’

‘Yeah, he’s no trouble. A bit of verbals, nothing more.’

Dales left, leaving her his cuff keys in case she needed them for any medical emergencies. She brought the bag into the living room with her and dropped it on the floor.

‘Open the front pocket. Not that one, the zipped one. That’s it, unzip it.’ Sarah did so and looked inside before putting her hand in. It was full of sheets of paper. ‘Go on, read them.’

She didn’t like being told what to do by a suspect in cuffs. Whatever was in the bag would be found as part of the investigation, but she felt he didn’t want that. He wanted to show her in his own way, to see her reaction, to be in control of the process. There were printouts of emails, online shopping receipts and train ticket itineraries, all in the name of Jenny Horscroft.

‘You hacked her accounts.’ She looked at the email address: [email protected] ‘I take it she liked Niagara Falls?’

‘I thought that one was a given. You looked straight at that and it didn’t even click.’

‘You packed this bag to go and find her? Planning to meet her at the station? Funny idea, seeing as you can’t leave town. The water’s subsided, but you certainly couldn’t do it in that old thing.’ She nodded to his old silver Nissan parked outside. ‘John, this has to stop. It’s all gone too far.’

‘I want it to stop. You don’t know what I was going to do. What I was thinking about. She took my child away and I let her do it. That’s the worst part of it all. When it came to it, I walked out like Dad did.’

‘We’ve been through this. You told me you’d come so far and now, a few days later, you’re sitting here in cuffs under arrest for some very serious offences, with possibly one more to come.’ She held the emails and train e-tickets in her hand. ‘You planned to meet her on the station?’

‘I don’t know her address, do I? I’ll admit to this murder. I want to go away. I need help,’ John cried. For all the years he’d struggled with his past, for all the steps he believed he’d made, he’d always been attached to a piece of elastic, a piece of elastic that had just snapped him from within an inch of emotional freedom right back through a jail cell door.

‘Don’t admit to anything you didn’t do.’

‘I will. I’ll tell that friend of yours. He’ll take the admission with no questions. He’s not one of you new cops. Jenny needs protecting from me. Josh too.’

That she agreed with. ‘Josh? Your son? Have you lost all sense of perspective?’ She’d felt sorry for him when they’d met. A nice guy, down on his luck, with no friends or family for support. He sat before her now a dangerous man, obsessed with finding a woman who wanted little to do with him, a suspect for a murder and with the potential to commit another.

‘Open the main pocket. Reach in below the towel. Not too far, I wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself.’ Her welfare was an odd thing for him to care about. She unzipped the main pocket of the bag, moved the wash kit and took out three t-shirts, tossing them on the floor. The folded blue bathing towel was rolled tightly at the bottom of the bag. ‘Unravel it.’

It was nine inches long with a black handle. It wouldn’t have looked out of place in any kitchen, aside from the name Jenny scratched into one side of the blade and ‘her lover’ into the other.

‘See? I was going to kill them both. I need help. I kept some of the books. They’re in there too. They show just what a whore she was, like I said they would. Do you remember me saying that? I was right. I told you.’

‘I remember you taking whatever small amount of information you could and twisting it to say what you wanted to hear.’ Sarah pulled out six books from the bag. ‘Where are the rest?’

‘Never you mind. Take the first one, that one there and turn to the top of the second page.’

‘She’s been cheating on her partner for years. Partner and their son; neither are any the wiser,’
read Sarah.

‘Does that sound familiar to you? Last page of that book, halfway down.’

‘She simply has no respect for the sanctity of marriage. I can only hope she sees the error of her ways.’

‘Now you can’t say that isn’t about Jenny?’ He stood up, teeth clenched and sweat flying from his forehead. She shoved him back down with both her hands.

‘Stay where you are.’ He crumpled into the armchair. Her strike was certain to leave a bruise on his flat, bony chest. ‘Calm down.’ He screamed in pain, still suffering from Sean’s beating.

‘I’d be on my way there now, bag in the boot and ready to end it all for good. If that blade had three sides, one would have my name on it too.’

She made sure the knife was well out of reach. ‘You were going to orphan your son? That was your plan?’ Dales needed to get here soon. Being here wasn’t helping John’s mood or his mental health. ‘Those entries could be about anybody. The journals go back nineteen years. Think of all the relationships Father Michael counselled over that time. This paranoia has led you here, sitting in cuffs, and it started before you moved away, didn’t it? You and Father Michael weren’t exactly the friends you say you were, were you?’

‘I didn’t kill him,’ he shouted. ‘He stuck his nose in and I went to talk it over. He started arguing with me. I followed her one night, thinking she was having an affair. Turned out she was going to see him.’

‘What about?’

‘What do you think? She wanted to leave me.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘He wouldn’t tell me anything. What else could it have been about? A few months afterwards, she left me. So I was right, wasn’t I?’ He was certain of so many unfounded things. Rather than seek clarity, he’d filled in the gaps himself, using his own mind-set to make assumptions about the actions of others.

‘Did you ask her?’

‘Said the same thing he did. What wife secretly scurries off to a priest behind her partner’s back?’

‘One that doesn’t feel she can talk to her husband. Maybe Father Michael didn’t tell her to leave you; maybe he told her to stick it out. It’s possible he didn’t tell you, because he couldn’t. He’d taken a vow not to. You even considered that?’ He looked at her as if she was talking bullshit, but was too tired to call her on it. Her words wouldn’t convince him, but a long sentence for burglary and assault, stalking, possibly more, would give him ample time to think about it. The knife and his intentions showed he was capable of murder, and the premeditation involved ruled out a crime of passion, casting the man she so easily trusted in a far darker light. ‘How were you planning on leaving town?’

‘By car.’

‘You’d have drowned trying to drive that old thing through it.’

‘I wouldn’t be in that old thing. I’d be in Sean’s Land Rover.’

‘Sean? Sean who gave you a beating only the other day? I doubt he’d lend you his car and they’re pretty tough to steal, if that’s what you were planning.’ Happy that he wasn’t likely to move in a while, she put everything back in the bag and slung it into the far corner of the room.

‘I had something he wanted. He thought the journals would mention something that happened to his brother. Give him some clue as to who’d hurt him or something. Didn’t have the balls to do it himself.’

‘So, you did his dirty work?’

‘I was going to do it anyway. I’d asked you so many times, if you’d just let me read them, none of this would have happened. I said I’d do it, if he’d lend me his car. I got some money for it too. To be honest, I didn’t think the big dickhead would go for it, but he wanted them so much, he gave me the keys.’

‘Don’t blame anyone else. You made your own choices.’ The idea still stung. Not letting him read them was the right thing to do, but she couldn’t help think that in some way it’d led to her mother currently in the air on her way to hospital. ‘Didn’t you think there was an elderly woman in the house, someone who could have died from the shock of a break-in?’ Sticking to nouns made it less personal; she’d stay calmer that way and was less likely to suffer an emotional outburst or cave his face in with the nearest blunt object. The more time she spent with him, the more the pendulum swung.

‘No, I didn’t. I didn’t owe her anything, and I don’t owe you. You think I jumped at the chance to play deputy? To be along for the ride? Was what you did for me a privilege? Allowing me the chance to house a dead fucking body?’

‘Settle down. What’s done is done.’ She put her weight on her back foot, ready to deliver another shove.

‘You know I didn’t do it, don’t you? You know I didn’t kill him.’

‘Everything will be discussed at the station.’

‘Drop the formalities. You know it’s bullshit. Just another case of you cunts not being able to find the right person and sticking it on anyone. Your mum’s one thing; she got in the way. I asked you about the books, you could have just given them to me.’

‘You broke into an elderly lady’s home and shoved her to the ground pursuing your crazy fantasies.’

‘Fuck you. You don’t know what it’s been like.’

‘Save it. Nothing justifies this.’ He looked down, still angry, but with nothing to say in reply.

Dales knocked on the window. She picked up the bag and carried it out into the hallway. He stood on the doorstep with four uniformed and four forensic officers.

‘Emmit managed to blag two helicopters. Borrowed one from Essex. Won’t be able to do that when three forces have to share one helicopter, two horses and half a SOCO,’ said Dales. ‘Times they are a-changing. Good news though, the roads look to be clearing. They reckon we’ll be able to get the Rover through one of the access roads.’

‘He’s been talking. Practically coughed to the burglary and implicated Sean as well. Can we spare two of these guys to go and lift him? He’s got six notebooks here and Sean’s got the rest.’ Dales agreed, and she gave two of the officers Sean’s address and the circumstances of arrest. She made sure they searched for a book with January 2009 on the cover. She wanted to nick him herself, but this one would have to get away. ‘There’s more. He’d hacked his ex’s accounts and was planning on murdering her and his son. There’s a knife in that bag with her name on it. Literally, scratched on it.’

‘Bloody hell.’

The SOCOs and the search team put their bags down and their gloves on. Dales and Sarah walked into the living room with the remaining two officers closely behind.

‘Ah, Sergeant. I want to admit to Father Michael’s murder. Please lock me up and throw away the key.’

‘Bloody hell, Gladstone, what did you do to him? Jot that down, would you?’ Sarah opened her notebook.

‘I’m not sure he’s really admitting to anything, Sarge.’

‘It all needs to be recorded. Now, if you would just sign this.’ Dales turned him on his side, placed a pen in his cuffed hands and lined up the page. ‘Yep, go ahead.’ The resulting scribble hardly resembled a name at all.

‘He’s not really in the right frame of mind for admissions,’ said Sarah.

‘Anything said before he sees a solicitor can hold weight with a jury.’ He was talking like it was an open and closed case. ‘As long as we get a decent judge.’

‘So, we’re done? What am I going to get? Life, I expect?’ said John, looking back and forth between them.

Dales waved the arrest team through. ‘You’re going to go with these two officers back to the police station and the process will start there. Nick him for fraud, too, will you?’ The younger officer arrested him and swapped Dales’ cuffs for his own. ‘Have fun. You know, they think it may be a first, transporting a prisoner by helicopter.’

‘I can’t imagine it’s in the policy books.’

‘Good work getting those coughs out of him. I’m impressed. We’ll make a detective of you yet.’ He handed her a kit belt, complete with pepper spray, cuffs and a baton. ‘They brought this over in case you need it.’

‘Little late for that now,’ she said, rubbing her chin. ‘Let’s not get carried away on his admission. He denied it at first, and only once he showed me the knife did he start talking about wanting to be inside for everyone’s safety.’ Becoming a detective wasn’t the best idea after the week she’d had. The only thing she had planned for her career was to rethink it from the ground up.

‘He showed you the knife?’

‘Directed me straight to it. I got the impression he didn’t want me to just find it either, he wanted to be the one to point it out; he wanted to be the one to tell the story. Came clean about the burglary too, I didn’t pressure him in any way. Father Michael’s murder? I’m not so convinced.’ Her words fell on deaf ears.

‘Even after seeing the knife? The premeditation involved in that? We’re not talking about a rage-driven crime of passion; he etched her name into the side of a blade. After seeing that, you’re still not convinced he’s capable of murder?’

‘He’s capable of murder. We’re all capable of murder. I just don’t think he committed this one.’

‘I’ll update the gov’nor. He’ll want to know the prisoner is en route.’